KENNEDY FAMILY MEMBERS ENDORSE BIDEN IN REBUKE OF RFK JR.
The move comes amid fears that third-party candidates could siphon critical votes from Biden
By Dylan Wells and Cleve R. Wootson Jr., The Washington Post
PHILADELPHIA — More than a dozen Kennedy family members endorsed President Biden for reelection at a campaign event on Thursday, saying he reflects the values and “moral leadership” of their clan’s most celebrated members, a move intended in part to counter the independent campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The family members — including siblings of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — were on hand during Biden’s remarks. The event came at the end of the president’s three-day sprint through the battleground state of Pennsylvania, where he has tried to paint himself as a champion of the American middle class in the Kennedy mold.
The endorsement from members of America’s most famous political family was intended to showcase Biden as the torchbearer of the legacy of President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1963, and of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.), who was killed as he sought the presidency in 1968. It was an unusually personal rebuke of the senator’s son, who is portraying himself as the true heir to the Kennedy tradition, and it reflects the Biden campaign’s concern that he could siphon at least a small number of votes from the president.
Kerry Kennedy, a sister of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., delivered the endorsement, flanked by five of her siblings.
“We want to make crystal clear our feeling that the best way forward for America is to reelect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for four more years,” Kerry Kennedy said. “President Biden has been a champion for all the rights and freedoms that my father and uncle stood for.”
She also said there was a stark choice between Biden and former president Donald Trump, the likely Republican nominee, that was both political and moral.
“A vote for Joe Biden is a vote to save our democracy and our decency,” Kerry Kennedy said. “It is a vote for what my father called, in his own presidential announcement in 1968, ‘our right to the moral leadership of this planet.’ ”
Biden’s campaign hopes Thursday’s endorsement gives the president a boost in Pennsylvania — a state he sorely needs to win in November — and beyond.
The candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has thrown an unexpected twist into this year’s presidential battle. He is the son and namesake of a legendary figure in the Democratic Party, one who spoke passionately about injustice, was brother to an idealized president and was martyred by an assassin’s bullet.
the presidential race remains unclear, including whether he will draw more votes from Biden or Trump, but his candidacy makes many Biden supporters nervous. He has embraced unorthodox and even conspiratorial ideas, for example, questioning the efficacy of vaccines and the role of those involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Thursday was not the first time Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s effort has run afoul of his liberal Democratic relatives. During the Super Bowl in February, a pro-Kennedy PAC aired an ad comparing RFK Jr. to former president Kennedy, prompting angry responses from some family members.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. apologized at the time, noting that the PAC was independent of his campaign and saying he was “sorry if the Super Bowl advertisement caused anyone in my family pain.”
On Thursday, however, the Kennedys did not focus on the dissenting member of their family. Rather, they aimed their fire at Trump, who Kerry Kennedy said is “attacking the most basic rights and freedoms that are core to who we are as Americans.”
“I can only imagine how Donald Trump’s outrageous lies and behavior would have horrified my father, Robert F. Kennedy, who proudly served as attorney general of the United States and honored his pledge to uphold the law and protect the country,” she added.
Among those who attended Thursday’s event were Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, a former lieutenant governor of Maryland; Rory Kennedy, a documentary filmmaker; and former congressman Joseph P. Kennedy II (D-Mass.) — all children of the elder Robert F. Kennedy and siblings of the current candidate. Another former congressman, Joe Kennedy III (D-Mass.), was also there.
Although the Kennedy family has faded from its former political glory, it retains a powerful hold on the imagination of some voters, especially older ones, who remember the days of “Camelot” and the glamour of John F. Kennedy. His brother “Bobby,” with his mix of passion, idealism and tragedy, still embodies martyred American hope to a segment of the population.
Edward M. Kennedy took a different path, sponsoring numerous Senate bills over more than four decades in Congress. He had good friends among his colleagues of both parties until his death in 2009. Like other members of the family, however, the senator’s career was marked by sexual scandal.
While several members of the next generation of Kennedys — including some of those onstage Thursday — have held political office, they have not risen to the same level of political and cultural power as their parents.
The move comes amid fears that third-party candidates could siphon critical votes from Biden
By Dylan Wells and Cleve R. Wootson Jr., The Washington Post
PHILADELPHIA — More than a dozen Kennedy family members endorsed President Biden for reelection at a campaign event on Thursday, saying he reflects the values and “moral leadership” of their clan’s most celebrated members, a move intended in part to counter the independent campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The family members — including siblings of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — were on hand during Biden’s remarks. The event came at the end of the president’s three-day sprint through the battleground state of Pennsylvania, where he has tried to paint himself as a champion of the American middle class in the Kennedy mold.
The endorsement from members of America’s most famous political family was intended to showcase Biden as the torchbearer of the legacy of President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1963, and of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.), who was killed as he sought the presidency in 1968. It was an unusually personal rebuke of the senator’s son, who is portraying himself as the true heir to the Kennedy tradition, and it reflects the Biden campaign’s concern that he could siphon at least a small number of votes from the president.
Kerry Kennedy, a sister of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., delivered the endorsement, flanked by five of her siblings.
“We want to make crystal clear our feeling that the best way forward for America is to reelect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for four more years,” Kerry Kennedy said. “President Biden has been a champion for all the rights and freedoms that my father and uncle stood for.”
She also said there was a stark choice between Biden and former president Donald Trump, the likely Republican nominee, that was both political and moral.
“A vote for Joe Biden is a vote to save our democracy and our decency,” Kerry Kennedy said. “It is a vote for what my father called, in his own presidential announcement in 1968, ‘our right to the moral leadership of this planet.’ ”
Biden’s campaign hopes Thursday’s endorsement gives the president a boost in Pennsylvania — a state he sorely needs to win in November — and beyond.
The candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has thrown an unexpected twist into this year’s presidential battle. He is the son and namesake of a legendary figure in the Democratic Party, one who spoke passionately about injustice, was brother to an idealized president and was martyred by an assassin’s bullet.
the presidential race remains unclear, including whether he will draw more votes from Biden or Trump, but his candidacy makes many Biden supporters nervous. He has embraced unorthodox and even conspiratorial ideas, for example, questioning the efficacy of vaccines and the role of those involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Thursday was not the first time Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s effort has run afoul of his liberal Democratic relatives. During the Super Bowl in February, a pro-Kennedy PAC aired an ad comparing RFK Jr. to former president Kennedy, prompting angry responses from some family members.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. apologized at the time, noting that the PAC was independent of his campaign and saying he was “sorry if the Super Bowl advertisement caused anyone in my family pain.”
On Thursday, however, the Kennedys did not focus on the dissenting member of their family. Rather, they aimed their fire at Trump, who Kerry Kennedy said is “attacking the most basic rights and freedoms that are core to who we are as Americans.”
“I can only imagine how Donald Trump’s outrageous lies and behavior would have horrified my father, Robert F. Kennedy, who proudly served as attorney general of the United States and honored his pledge to uphold the law and protect the country,” she added.
Among those who attended Thursday’s event were Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, a former lieutenant governor of Maryland; Rory Kennedy, a documentary filmmaker; and former congressman Joseph P. Kennedy II (D-Mass.) — all children of the elder Robert F. Kennedy and siblings of the current candidate. Another former congressman, Joe Kennedy III (D-Mass.), was also there.
Although the Kennedy family has faded from its former political glory, it retains a powerful hold on the imagination of some voters, especially older ones, who remember the days of “Camelot” and the glamour of John F. Kennedy. His brother “Bobby,” with his mix of passion, idealism and tragedy, still embodies martyred American hope to a segment of the population.
Edward M. Kennedy took a different path, sponsoring numerous Senate bills over more than four decades in Congress. He had good friends among his colleagues of both parties until his death in 2009. Like other members of the family, however, the senator’s career was marked by sexual scandal.
While several members of the next generation of Kennedys — including some of those onstage Thursday — have held political office, they have not risen to the same level of political and cultural power as their parents.
SECRET RUSSIAN FOREIGN POLICY DOCUMENT URGES ACTION TO WEAKEN THE U.S.
By Catherine Belton, The Washington Post
Russia’s Foreign Ministry has been drawing up plans to try to weaken its Western adversaries, including the United States, and leverage the Ukraine war to forge a global order free from what it sees as American dominance, according to a secret Foreign Ministry document.
In a classified addendum to Russia’s official — and public — “Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation,” the ministry calls for an “offensive information campaign” and other measures spanning “the military-political, economic and trade and informational psychological spheres” against a “coalition of unfriendly countries” led by the United States.
“We need to continue adjusting our approach to relations with unfriendly states,” states the 2023 document, which was provided to The Washington Post by a European intelligence service. “It’s important to create a mechanism for finding the vulnerable points of their external and internal policies with the aim of developing practical steps to weaken Russia’s opponents.”
The document for the first time provides official confirmation and codification of what many in the Moscow elite say has become a hybrid war against the West. Russia is seeking to subvert Western support for Ukraine and disrupt the domestic politics of the United States and European countries, through propaganda campaigns supporting isolationist and extremist policies, according to Kremlin documents previously reported on by The Post. It is also seeking to refashion geopolitics, drawing closer to China, Iran and North Korea in an attempt to shift the current balance of power.
Using much tougher and blunter language than the public foreign policy document, the secret addendum, dated April 11, 2023, claims that the United States is leading a coalition of “unfriendly countries” aimed at weakening Russia because Moscow is “a threat to Western global hegemony.” The document says the outcome of Russia’s war in Ukraine will “to a great degree determine the outlines of the future world order,” a clear indication that Moscow sees the result of its invasion as inextricably bound with its ability — and that of other authoritarian nations — to impose its will globally.
Russia hopes the West will “realize the lack of any future in its confrontational policy and hegemonistic ambitions, and will accept the complicated realities of the multipolar world,” the public document states.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that it did not comment “on the existence or nonexistence of internal ministry documents” and on the progress of work on them. “As we have stated several times on different levels, we can confirm the mood is to decisively combat the aggressive steps taken by the collective West as part of the hybrid war launched against Russia,” the ministry added.
Russia’s recent veto against extending U.N. monitoring of sanctions against North Korea over its nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles program, effectively ending 14 years of cooperation, was “a clear sign” that the work contemplated in the classified addendum is already underway, said a leading Russian academic with close ties to senior Russian diplomats. The academic spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive deliberations in Moscow.
“Russia can create difficulties for the U.S. in many different regions of the world,” the academic said. “This is about the Middle East, northeast Asia, the African continent and even Latin America.”
In the academic, Vladimir Zharikhin, called for Russia to “continue to facilitate the coming to power of isolationist right-wing forces in America,” “enable the destabilization of Latin American countries and the rise to power of extremist forces on the far left and far right there,” as well as facilitate “the restoration of European countries’ sovereignty by supporting parties dissatisfied with economic pressure from the U.S.”
Other points in the policy proposal, which was also provided to The Post, suggested that Moscow stoke conflict between the United States and China over Taiwan to bring Russia and China closer together, as well as “to escalate the situation in the Middle East around Israel, Iran and Syria to distract the U.S. with the problems of this region.” Zharikhin declined to discuss his proposal.
Western officials have warned that Russia has been escalating its propaganda and influence campaigns over the past two years as it seeks to undermine support for Ukraine. As part of that, it has sought to create a new global divide, with Russian propaganda efforts against the West resonating in many countries in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia.
“I think the U.S. was convinced that the rest of the world — North and South — would support the U.S. in the conflict with Russia and it turned out that this was not true,” Zharikhin told The Post in an earlier interview. “This demonstrates the single polar world is over, and the U.S. doesn’t want to come to terms with this.”
For Mikhail Khodorkovsky — the longtime Putin critic who was once Russia’s richest man until a clash with the Kremlin landed him 10 years in prison — it is not surprising that Russia is seeking to do everything it can to undermine the United States. “For Putin, it is absolutely natural that he should try to create the maximum number of problems for the U.S.,” he said. “The task is to take the U.S. out of the game, and then destroy NATO. This doesn’t mean dissolving it, but to create the feeling among people that NATO isn’t defending them.”
The long congressional standoff on providing more weapons to Ukraine was only making it easier for Russia to challenge Washington’s global power, he said.
“The Americans consider that insofar as they are not directly participating in the war [in Ukraine], then any loss is not their loss,” Khodorkovsky said. “This is an absolute misunderstanding.”
A defeat for Ukraine, he said, “means that many will stop fearing challenging the U.S.” and the costs for the United States will only increase.
By Catherine Belton, The Washington Post
Russia’s Foreign Ministry has been drawing up plans to try to weaken its Western adversaries, including the United States, and leverage the Ukraine war to forge a global order free from what it sees as American dominance, according to a secret Foreign Ministry document.
In a classified addendum to Russia’s official — and public — “Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation,” the ministry calls for an “offensive information campaign” and other measures spanning “the military-political, economic and trade and informational psychological spheres” against a “coalition of unfriendly countries” led by the United States.
“We need to continue adjusting our approach to relations with unfriendly states,” states the 2023 document, which was provided to The Washington Post by a European intelligence service. “It’s important to create a mechanism for finding the vulnerable points of their external and internal policies with the aim of developing practical steps to weaken Russia’s opponents.”
The document for the first time provides official confirmation and codification of what many in the Moscow elite say has become a hybrid war against the West. Russia is seeking to subvert Western support for Ukraine and disrupt the domestic politics of the United States and European countries, through propaganda campaigns supporting isolationist and extremist policies, according to Kremlin documents previously reported on by The Post. It is also seeking to refashion geopolitics, drawing closer to China, Iran and North Korea in an attempt to shift the current balance of power.
Using much tougher and blunter language than the public foreign policy document, the secret addendum, dated April 11, 2023, claims that the United States is leading a coalition of “unfriendly countries” aimed at weakening Russia because Moscow is “a threat to Western global hegemony.” The document says the outcome of Russia’s war in Ukraine will “to a great degree determine the outlines of the future world order,” a clear indication that Moscow sees the result of its invasion as inextricably bound with its ability — and that of other authoritarian nations — to impose its will globally.
Russia hopes the West will “realize the lack of any future in its confrontational policy and hegemonistic ambitions, and will accept the complicated realities of the multipolar world,” the public document states.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that it did not comment “on the existence or nonexistence of internal ministry documents” and on the progress of work on them. “As we have stated several times on different levels, we can confirm the mood is to decisively combat the aggressive steps taken by the collective West as part of the hybrid war launched against Russia,” the ministry added.
Russia’s recent veto against extending U.N. monitoring of sanctions against North Korea over its nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles program, effectively ending 14 years of cooperation, was “a clear sign” that the work contemplated in the classified addendum is already underway, said a leading Russian academic with close ties to senior Russian diplomats. The academic spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive deliberations in Moscow.
“Russia can create difficulties for the U.S. in many different regions of the world,” the academic said. “This is about the Middle East, northeast Asia, the African continent and even Latin America.”
In the academic, Vladimir Zharikhin, called for Russia to “continue to facilitate the coming to power of isolationist right-wing forces in America,” “enable the destabilization of Latin American countries and the rise to power of extremist forces on the far left and far right there,” as well as facilitate “the restoration of European countries’ sovereignty by supporting parties dissatisfied with economic pressure from the U.S.”
Other points in the policy proposal, which was also provided to The Post, suggested that Moscow stoke conflict between the United States and China over Taiwan to bring Russia and China closer together, as well as “to escalate the situation in the Middle East around Israel, Iran and Syria to distract the U.S. with the problems of this region.” Zharikhin declined to discuss his proposal.
Western officials have warned that Russia has been escalating its propaganda and influence campaigns over the past two years as it seeks to undermine support for Ukraine. As part of that, it has sought to create a new global divide, with Russian propaganda efforts against the West resonating in many countries in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia.
“I think the U.S. was convinced that the rest of the world — North and South — would support the U.S. in the conflict with Russia and it turned out that this was not true,” Zharikhin told The Post in an earlier interview. “This demonstrates the single polar world is over, and the U.S. doesn’t want to come to terms with this.”
For Mikhail Khodorkovsky — the longtime Putin critic who was once Russia’s richest man until a clash with the Kremlin landed him 10 years in prison — it is not surprising that Russia is seeking to do everything it can to undermine the United States. “For Putin, it is absolutely natural that he should try to create the maximum number of problems for the U.S.,” he said. “The task is to take the U.S. out of the game, and then destroy NATO. This doesn’t mean dissolving it, but to create the feeling among people that NATO isn’t defending them.”
The long congressional standoff on providing more weapons to Ukraine was only making it easier for Russia to challenge Washington’s global power, he said.
“The Americans consider that insofar as they are not directly participating in the war [in Ukraine], then any loss is not their loss,” Khodorkovsky said. “This is an absolute misunderstanding.”
A defeat for Ukraine, he said, “means that many will stop fearing challenging the U.S.” and the costs for the United States will only increase.
THE N.Y. CASE CONCERNS TRUMP’S ONLY SUCCESSFUL VOTER DECEPTION SCHEME
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
We made it.
The day has finally arrived for the historic trial in Manhattan of Donald Trump on charges of falsifying business documents. The case concerns Trump’s scheme to conceal embarrassing information from voters in the 2016 election. Derided as a “rump” case, or “trivial,” it actually might be the most consequential of the four criminal cases facing the former president.
“This is the case that reflects the efforts Trump went through to influence the 2016 election — and it worked. He won the election,” wrote Karen Friedman Agnifilo, who worked for decades in the Manhattan district attorney’s office. “And he only won by a slim margin of fewer than 80,000 votes in three swing states.” Trump sought to buy off two women who said they had sexual encounters with him (Trump denies that) because he not unreasonably feared he would lose if, in the wake of the “Access Hollywood” tape, these allegations came out. Agnifilo wrote:
“What if, on the heels of the release of the Access Hollywood tape right before the 2016 election, where Trump boasts of grabbing women’s genitals without their consent, that he was able suppress from voters the fact that he had extra marital affairs with both an adult film porn star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy Bunny Karen McDougal, was the key to his victory by this slim margin? ‘
You don’t have to believe Agnifilo. That’s also essentially how Judge Juan M. Merchan will summarize the case to prospective jurors:
The allegations are in substance, that Donald Trump falsified business records to conceal an agreement with others to unlawfully influence the 2016 presidential election. Specifically, it is alleged that Donald Trump made or caused false business records to hide the true nature of payments made to Michael Cohen, by characterizing them as payment for legal services rendered pursuant to a retainer agreement. The People allege that in fact, the payments were intended to reimburse Michael Cohen for money he paid to Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels, in the weeks before the presidential election to prevent her from publicly revealing details about a past sexual encounter with Donald Trump. Donald Trump has pleaded not guilty and denies the allegations.
“The money was given to influence the 2016 election,” Fred Wertheimer, founder and president of Democracy 21, told the Guardian. “In other words, the silence was purchased so [Daniels] would not provide damaging information in the closing weeks of his campaign.”
If you doubt the importance of this case, consider an alternate history: Trump never silenced these women, Hillary Clinton won, three right-wing justices did not get appointed, Roe v. Wade remained law, and Trump never had the chance to attempt a coup in the aftermath of the 2020 election. Much depended on the facts set out in the indictment.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has not changed his theory of the case. What has changed is the slow realization among commentators that the case revolves around allegations that, if proved true in court, would amount to Trump’s first — and only successful — attempt to use deception and illegal means to gain power.
Bragg’s theory of the case was set out in the second paragraph in the indictment’s statement of facts:
From August 2015 to December 2017, the Defendant orchestrated a scheme with others to influence the 2016 presidential election by identifying and purchasing negative information about him to suppress its publication and benefit the Defendant’s electoral prospects. In order to execute the unlawful scheme, the participants violated election laws and made and caused false entries in the business records of various entities in New York. The participants also took steps that mischaracterized, for tax purposes, the true nature of the payments made in furtherance of the scheme.
Bragg’s case has always been about this critical sequence of events. But several points are worth stressing.
To begin, we can never prove that “but for” the payoff scheme Trump would have lost. Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe told me, “It’s inherent in the nature of things and the limits of human knowledge that one can never demonstrate with certainty how history would have unfolded had one or another pivotal event, including an obviously crucial deception of tens of millions of people who hadn’t yet come to expect the worst of Mr. Trump, not occurred.”
But if any crime in pursuit of office would be deemed the decisive event in 2016 and beyond, Tribe said, “the felonies charged by Alvin Bragg in the New York prosecution that is about to unfold in real time qualify for that designation.”
Second, the notion that Bragg’s case is less important because it is brought in state court by a local district attorney misconceives how our federal system works. Although federal laws may preempt state laws, the federal government is not more important than state governments. The two systems operate in parallel, each performing their assigned tasks. Is a mass murder case in state court less important than a federal case about punching an Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspector? Certainly not.
A subsidiary argument for discounting Bragg’s case goes like this: If the payoff scheme was such a big deal, prosecutors in the federal Southern District of New York would have brought the case. That’s nonsensical as well. A nearly infinite set of considerations goes into a charging decision, including the availability of a relevant statute with provable elements, the quality of witnesses, the prosecutor’s adversity to risk and the pendency of other cases. Recall that the SDNY prosecuted former Trump attorney Michael Cohen for participation in the payoff scheme; after that, it may have decided it could not rehabilitate him sufficiently to testify against Trump. (State prosecutors who deal with shady witnesses have no problem with such a situation. Moreover, Bragg has a mound of documents that substantiate Cohen’s testimony.) If anything, this reminds us that it would be patently unjust to prosecute Cohen but not the man who directed and benefited from muzzling these women.
Finally, the tabloid phrase “hush money” is particularly inapt in describing the case. Paying hush money isn’t illegal; falsifying business records is. Here, the alleged sex really is incidental. As Tribe tweeted, “Saying Trump is on trial for paying hush money to a porn star is like saying John Wilkes Booth was tried for sneaking up behind Lincoln in Ford’s Theatre.”
In sum, the case that begins Monday is not frivolous, minor or particularly prurient. To the contrary, the first trial of a former president has grave importance as a means of holding Trump accountable for the scheme that lifted him to power. It marks the first instance of Trump maneuvering to win an election through deception. To boot, a multi-count felony conviction might result in prison time. That might explain why Trump has been so desperate to delay it.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
We made it.
The day has finally arrived for the historic trial in Manhattan of Donald Trump on charges of falsifying business documents. The case concerns Trump’s scheme to conceal embarrassing information from voters in the 2016 election. Derided as a “rump” case, or “trivial,” it actually might be the most consequential of the four criminal cases facing the former president.
“This is the case that reflects the efforts Trump went through to influence the 2016 election — and it worked. He won the election,” wrote Karen Friedman Agnifilo, who worked for decades in the Manhattan district attorney’s office. “And he only won by a slim margin of fewer than 80,000 votes in three swing states.” Trump sought to buy off two women who said they had sexual encounters with him (Trump denies that) because he not unreasonably feared he would lose if, in the wake of the “Access Hollywood” tape, these allegations came out. Agnifilo wrote:
“What if, on the heels of the release of the Access Hollywood tape right before the 2016 election, where Trump boasts of grabbing women’s genitals without their consent, that he was able suppress from voters the fact that he had extra marital affairs with both an adult film porn star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy Bunny Karen McDougal, was the key to his victory by this slim margin? ‘
You don’t have to believe Agnifilo. That’s also essentially how Judge Juan M. Merchan will summarize the case to prospective jurors:
The allegations are in substance, that Donald Trump falsified business records to conceal an agreement with others to unlawfully influence the 2016 presidential election. Specifically, it is alleged that Donald Trump made or caused false business records to hide the true nature of payments made to Michael Cohen, by characterizing them as payment for legal services rendered pursuant to a retainer agreement. The People allege that in fact, the payments were intended to reimburse Michael Cohen for money he paid to Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels, in the weeks before the presidential election to prevent her from publicly revealing details about a past sexual encounter with Donald Trump. Donald Trump has pleaded not guilty and denies the allegations.
“The money was given to influence the 2016 election,” Fred Wertheimer, founder and president of Democracy 21, told the Guardian. “In other words, the silence was purchased so [Daniels] would not provide damaging information in the closing weeks of his campaign.”
If you doubt the importance of this case, consider an alternate history: Trump never silenced these women, Hillary Clinton won, three right-wing justices did not get appointed, Roe v. Wade remained law, and Trump never had the chance to attempt a coup in the aftermath of the 2020 election. Much depended on the facts set out in the indictment.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has not changed his theory of the case. What has changed is the slow realization among commentators that the case revolves around allegations that, if proved true in court, would amount to Trump’s first — and only successful — attempt to use deception and illegal means to gain power.
Bragg’s theory of the case was set out in the second paragraph in the indictment’s statement of facts:
From August 2015 to December 2017, the Defendant orchestrated a scheme with others to influence the 2016 presidential election by identifying and purchasing negative information about him to suppress its publication and benefit the Defendant’s electoral prospects. In order to execute the unlawful scheme, the participants violated election laws and made and caused false entries in the business records of various entities in New York. The participants also took steps that mischaracterized, for tax purposes, the true nature of the payments made in furtherance of the scheme.
Bragg’s case has always been about this critical sequence of events. But several points are worth stressing.
To begin, we can never prove that “but for” the payoff scheme Trump would have lost. Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe told me, “It’s inherent in the nature of things and the limits of human knowledge that one can never demonstrate with certainty how history would have unfolded had one or another pivotal event, including an obviously crucial deception of tens of millions of people who hadn’t yet come to expect the worst of Mr. Trump, not occurred.”
But if any crime in pursuit of office would be deemed the decisive event in 2016 and beyond, Tribe said, “the felonies charged by Alvin Bragg in the New York prosecution that is about to unfold in real time qualify for that designation.”
Second, the notion that Bragg’s case is less important because it is brought in state court by a local district attorney misconceives how our federal system works. Although federal laws may preempt state laws, the federal government is not more important than state governments. The two systems operate in parallel, each performing their assigned tasks. Is a mass murder case in state court less important than a federal case about punching an Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspector? Certainly not.
A subsidiary argument for discounting Bragg’s case goes like this: If the payoff scheme was such a big deal, prosecutors in the federal Southern District of New York would have brought the case. That’s nonsensical as well. A nearly infinite set of considerations goes into a charging decision, including the availability of a relevant statute with provable elements, the quality of witnesses, the prosecutor’s adversity to risk and the pendency of other cases. Recall that the SDNY prosecuted former Trump attorney Michael Cohen for participation in the payoff scheme; after that, it may have decided it could not rehabilitate him sufficiently to testify against Trump. (State prosecutors who deal with shady witnesses have no problem with such a situation. Moreover, Bragg has a mound of documents that substantiate Cohen’s testimony.) If anything, this reminds us that it would be patently unjust to prosecute Cohen but not the man who directed and benefited from muzzling these women.
Finally, the tabloid phrase “hush money” is particularly inapt in describing the case. Paying hush money isn’t illegal; falsifying business records is. Here, the alleged sex really is incidental. As Tribe tweeted, “Saying Trump is on trial for paying hush money to a porn star is like saying John Wilkes Booth was tried for sneaking up behind Lincoln in Ford’s Theatre.”
In sum, the case that begins Monday is not frivolous, minor or particularly prurient. To the contrary, the first trial of a former president has grave importance as a means of holding Trump accountable for the scheme that lifted him to power. It marks the first instance of Trump maneuvering to win an election through deception. To boot, a multi-count felony conviction might result in prison time. That might explain why Trump has been so desperate to delay it.
DONALD TRUMP HAS CHEATED HIS WAY THROUGH LIFE. WILL THIS ELECTION BE ANY DIFFERENT?
As his first criminal trial gets underway, prosecutors are expected to show how the former president falsified business records to hide an affair with an adult film star.
By The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
Donald Trump cheats. In fact, he cheats at just about everything in life, business, and politics.
Trump cheated on his wives and on his company’s taxes. He cheated his donors and tried to cheat the majority of voters out of their choice for president in 2020. Trump’s niece said he cheated to get into college. He cheated to avoid serving in Vietnam.
The winner of the Trump International Golf Club’s Championship Trophy even cheats at golf.
As Trump’s first criminal trial gets underway on Monday (barring a last-minute delay), prosecutors are expected to show how he falsified business records to hide an affair with an adult film star on the eve of the 2016 election. The scheme underscores how Trump cheated voters by hiding his culpability in a scandal that could have altered the election and history.
Cheating has long been the method to Trump’s madness. He says and does whatever it takes to get whatever he wants, whenever he wants — facts and laws be damned. Trump’s willingness to break the rules and norms of civil society is yet another reason why his latest bid for the presidency is a threat to democracy.
Trump’s cheating has helped him evade accountability throughout his business and political career. Facing four indictments, Trump now aims to avoid justice by returning to the White House.
To help tilt the Nov. 5 election in his favor, Trump wants to change the way electoral votes are counted in Nebraska. Trump has been pressuring Republican lawmakers there to adopt a “winner takes all” system that could help him in a close race. That kind of edge could end up deciding the presidency.
Bending the rules has long been the Trump way.
Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, claimed her uncle paid someone to take the SAT for him to help gain admission to college. She wrote that Trump viewed “cheating as a way of life.”
Trump dodged the Vietnam War by obtaining five deferments for bone spurs. The diagnosis came from a podiatrist who rented office space from Trump’s father.
Trump’s cheating continued in his marriages. In 1990, he brought then-mistress Marla Maples on a family vacation with his first wife, Ivana. After Trump married Melania Knauss in 2005, he cheated on her months after she gave birth to their son, Barron, according to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
Trump allegedly paid Daniels $130,000 in hush money on the eve of the 2016 election, which led to his indictment in Manhattan. The payments hid the affair from the public. Yet another sex scandal — on the heels of the Access Hollywood tape where Trump bragged about grabbing women by their genitals — could have tipped the 2016 election, where he won three states by only 80,000 votes combined.
Indeed, the indictment alleges Trump attempted to “corrupt” a presidential election. “The core is not money for sex,” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said. “We would say it’s about conspiring to corrupt a presidential election and then lying in New York business records to cover it up.”
The corner-cutting continued throughout the campaign and Trump’s chaotic term in the White House.
In 2020, a Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee found that Trump associates had regular contact with Russian intelligence services that set out to interfere in the 2016 election and help Trump win.
Contrary to Trump’s repeated claims of a hoax, the nearly 1,000-page report found that the Russian government worked to disrupt the election. Trump’s top campaign officials were easily manipulated and welcomed the Kremlin’s help, the report said.
Bottom line: Trump worked with an adversary to cheat America. He later attempted to do the same with an ally.
In an effort to boost his 2020 reelection, Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate then-presidential candidate Joe Biden. That led to Trump’s first impeachment and was a harbinger of how far Trump will go to win.
After losing the 2020 election, Trump likewise pressured and threatened Georgia election official Brad Raffensperger to “find him” enough votes to overturn the results in that state. That led to Trump’s indictment in Georgia, where his efforts were part of a broader attempt to steal the election.
Trump’s cheating has filled at least two books. David Cay Johnston, a former Inquirer reporter, detailed many of Trump’s misdeeds in The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family. Rick Reilly, a former Sports Illustrated columnist, wrote Commander in Cheat, which details how Trump is a serial cheater at golf — a game that prides itself on honor and integrity.
Trump’s chicanery extends to years of dubious schemes to avoid paying taxes. While Trump claimed to be a billionaire, he only paid $750 in federal taxes the year he was elected president. Last year, the Trump Organization was convicted and fined for cheating on its taxes.
Trump also cheated donors. In 2019, a judge ordered Trump to pay $2 million to several charities after finding he misused his foundation to further his political and business interests. The judge found that, over many years, charitable dollars benefited Trump rather than the causes he claimed to support.
Undeterred by that scam, the Trump campaign ripped off donors after the 2020 election. Donors contributed $250 million to a legal defense fund to overturn the election. But the fund was never created.
Instead, the money was funneled to the Save America political action committee and then to several pro-Trump organizations, according to investigators from the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Behind the bluster, Trump mounted a sustained effort to cheat his way to reelection. Trump’s bogus claims of election fraud cut to the core of American democracy as he attempted to disenfranchise millions of voters, including many Black and brown voters in Pennsylvania.
Unlike Sophocles, Trump had no idea how to fail with honor and was willing to win by cheating. Even if it meant a deadly insurrection.
America deserves better than a congenital cheater.
As his first criminal trial gets underway, prosecutors are expected to show how the former president falsified business records to hide an affair with an adult film star.
By The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
Donald Trump cheats. In fact, he cheats at just about everything in life, business, and politics.
Trump cheated on his wives and on his company’s taxes. He cheated his donors and tried to cheat the majority of voters out of their choice for president in 2020. Trump’s niece said he cheated to get into college. He cheated to avoid serving in Vietnam.
The winner of the Trump International Golf Club’s Championship Trophy even cheats at golf.
As Trump’s first criminal trial gets underway on Monday (barring a last-minute delay), prosecutors are expected to show how he falsified business records to hide an affair with an adult film star on the eve of the 2016 election. The scheme underscores how Trump cheated voters by hiding his culpability in a scandal that could have altered the election and history.
Cheating has long been the method to Trump’s madness. He says and does whatever it takes to get whatever he wants, whenever he wants — facts and laws be damned. Trump’s willingness to break the rules and norms of civil society is yet another reason why his latest bid for the presidency is a threat to democracy.
Trump’s cheating has helped him evade accountability throughout his business and political career. Facing four indictments, Trump now aims to avoid justice by returning to the White House.
To help tilt the Nov. 5 election in his favor, Trump wants to change the way electoral votes are counted in Nebraska. Trump has been pressuring Republican lawmakers there to adopt a “winner takes all” system that could help him in a close race. That kind of edge could end up deciding the presidency.
Bending the rules has long been the Trump way.
Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, claimed her uncle paid someone to take the SAT for him to help gain admission to college. She wrote that Trump viewed “cheating as a way of life.”
Trump dodged the Vietnam War by obtaining five deferments for bone spurs. The diagnosis came from a podiatrist who rented office space from Trump’s father.
Trump’s cheating continued in his marriages. In 1990, he brought then-mistress Marla Maples on a family vacation with his first wife, Ivana. After Trump married Melania Knauss in 2005, he cheated on her months after she gave birth to their son, Barron, according to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
Trump allegedly paid Daniels $130,000 in hush money on the eve of the 2016 election, which led to his indictment in Manhattan. The payments hid the affair from the public. Yet another sex scandal — on the heels of the Access Hollywood tape where Trump bragged about grabbing women by their genitals — could have tipped the 2016 election, where he won three states by only 80,000 votes combined.
Indeed, the indictment alleges Trump attempted to “corrupt” a presidential election. “The core is not money for sex,” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said. “We would say it’s about conspiring to corrupt a presidential election and then lying in New York business records to cover it up.”
The corner-cutting continued throughout the campaign and Trump’s chaotic term in the White House.
In 2020, a Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee found that Trump associates had regular contact with Russian intelligence services that set out to interfere in the 2016 election and help Trump win.
Contrary to Trump’s repeated claims of a hoax, the nearly 1,000-page report found that the Russian government worked to disrupt the election. Trump’s top campaign officials were easily manipulated and welcomed the Kremlin’s help, the report said.
Bottom line: Trump worked with an adversary to cheat America. He later attempted to do the same with an ally.
In an effort to boost his 2020 reelection, Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate then-presidential candidate Joe Biden. That led to Trump’s first impeachment and was a harbinger of how far Trump will go to win.
After losing the 2020 election, Trump likewise pressured and threatened Georgia election official Brad Raffensperger to “find him” enough votes to overturn the results in that state. That led to Trump’s indictment in Georgia, where his efforts were part of a broader attempt to steal the election.
Trump’s cheating has filled at least two books. David Cay Johnston, a former Inquirer reporter, detailed many of Trump’s misdeeds in The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family. Rick Reilly, a former Sports Illustrated columnist, wrote Commander in Cheat, which details how Trump is a serial cheater at golf — a game that prides itself on honor and integrity.
Trump’s chicanery extends to years of dubious schemes to avoid paying taxes. While Trump claimed to be a billionaire, he only paid $750 in federal taxes the year he was elected president. Last year, the Trump Organization was convicted and fined for cheating on its taxes.
Trump also cheated donors. In 2019, a judge ordered Trump to pay $2 million to several charities after finding he misused his foundation to further his political and business interests. The judge found that, over many years, charitable dollars benefited Trump rather than the causes he claimed to support.
Undeterred by that scam, the Trump campaign ripped off donors after the 2020 election. Donors contributed $250 million to a legal defense fund to overturn the election. But the fund was never created.
Instead, the money was funneled to the Save America political action committee and then to several pro-Trump organizations, according to investigators from the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Behind the bluster, Trump mounted a sustained effort to cheat his way to reelection. Trump’s bogus claims of election fraud cut to the core of American democracy as he attempted to disenfranchise millions of voters, including many Black and brown voters in Pennsylvania.
Unlike Sophocles, Trump had no idea how to fail with honor and was willing to win by cheating. Even if it meant a deadly insurrection.
America deserves better than a congenital cheater.
REPUBLICAN DENIAL: THEY THINK TYRANTS WON’T COME AFTER THEM
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Many Republicans, including manybusiness leaders, downplay the threat posed from Trump’s potential return to the White House. Although his agenda includes radical protectionism and, as reported by the New York Times Magazine, reducing “the power of the Federal Reserve, limiting its ability to serve as a so-called lender of last resort for banks and other financial institutions facing cash crunches,” many Republicans arrogantly insist things would be fine in a second Trump term. They roll their eyes at the real potential for grotesque cronyism and corruption, use of the Justice Department against Trump’s enemies, demolition of the professional civil service, and international disorder.
Industry titans consistently — be it in 1930s Europe or in present-day Hungary or in Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s Chile or in Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil — imagine they can cut deals with autocrats or that persecution of disfavored groups will have no impact on the business environment. The economic and political upheaval an autocrat brings never fails to surprise those who insisted they could control him.
Big Business and other segments of the old-style Republican Party (including those who worked to stack the Supreme Court) who are sanguine about a Trump presidency should pay attention to three flashing red lights.
First, as The Post reports, Trump talks about how he would “end” Russia’s war in Ukraine “by pressuring Ukraine to give up some territory.” That would signal to Moscow and other aggressive regimes that it is open season on democratic neighbors. If aggressors believe that international borders are not inviolate, China would be emboldened to attack Taiwan and Russia to menace the rest of the former U.S.S.R. Dismantling America’s traditional alliances and receding into Fortress America would plunge the United States and our allies into a period of turmoil, conflict and uncertainty.
Second, as the nonpartisan United to Protect Democracy’s “Authoritarian Playbook for 2025” illustrates, MAGA’s “Project 2025” envisions, among other things, a second Trump term that uses “pardons to incite political violence,” incentivizes lawbreaking for Trump’s benefit, engages in “regulatory retaliation” and resorts to law enforcement overreach.
Anyone who thinks only they won’t suffer from an irrational and vengeful regime should consider how other countries fared when captured by autocrats. “Every culture is unprepared for an authoritarian assault, and ... even when one takes place, and certain groups are targeted, other groups think ‘they’ll never go after me,’” fascism expert and historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat said in an interview with George Takei. The disastrous economic results in Hungary, Brazil and India under autocrats demonstrate how misplaced this confidence is.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, whom Trump welcomed to Mar-a-Lago, “wrested control over the independent media, put the country’s universities and cultural institutions under his authority, used demonizing rhetoric to justify his immigration crackdowns, and leveraged his electoral wins to rewrite his country’s constitution to keep himself in power,” the playbook states.
Trump’s plan to destroy the career civil service alone would undermine evenhanded, rational government action. We would revert to a “spoils” system, as alleged by the playbook, in which federal jobs would be doled out to those who pledged personal fealty to Trump.
Third, we face the prospect that the U.S. military, obligated to abide by the Constitution, would be transformed into Trump’s private militia. The American Enterprise Institute’s Kori Schake reminded us in 2020 that Trump “considered invoking federal authority to enforce the law and putting the military on the streets to restore order.” Worse: “Riot police forcibly cleared protesters and the president paraded through Lafayette Square, near the White House, with the leaders of the agencies representing coercive force: the attorney general, the defense secretary, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was wearing combat fatigues.”
Trump, who pardoned war criminals and contemplated invoking the Insurrection Act, considers the military to be his Praetorian guard, obliged on his whim to disregard rules of war and crack down on domestic dissent. Last time, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper (subsequently fired) and Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (whom Trump said deserved to be executed), objected and defended the apolitical military. Next time, instead of such professionals, imagine conspiratorialist Michael Flynn (participant in the Jan. 6 war room) as defense secretary.
In sum, ignoring the consequences of a second Trump term amounts to whistling past the graveyard of democracy. It’s time to pay attention to the prospect of a MAGA autocracy.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Many Republicans, including many
Industry titans consistently — be it in 1930s Europe or in present-day Hungary or in Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s Chile or in Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil — imagine they can cut deals with autocrats or that persecution of disfavored groups will have no impact on the business environment. The economic and political upheaval an autocrat brings never fails to surprise those who insisted they could control him.
Big Business and other segments of the old-style Republican Party (including those who worked to stack the Supreme Court) who are sanguine about a Trump presidency should pay attention to three flashing red lights.
First, as The Post reports, Trump talks about how he would “end” Russia’s war in Ukraine “by pressuring Ukraine to give up some territory.” That would signal to Moscow and other aggressive regimes that it is open season on democratic neighbors. If aggressors believe that international borders are not inviolate, China would be emboldened to attack Taiwan and Russia to menace the rest of the former U.S.S.R. Dismantling America’s traditional alliances and receding into Fortress America would plunge the United States and our allies into a period of turmoil, conflict and uncertainty.
Second, as the nonpartisan United to Protect Democracy’s “Authoritarian Playbook for 2025” illustrates, MAGA’s “Project 2025” envisions, among other things, a second Trump term that uses “pardons to incite political violence,” incentivizes lawbreaking for Trump’s benefit, engages in “regulatory retaliation” and resorts to law enforcement overreach.
Anyone who thinks only they won’t suffer from an irrational and vengeful regime should consider how other countries fared when captured by autocrats. “Every culture is unprepared for an authoritarian assault, and ... even when one takes place, and certain groups are targeted, other groups think ‘they’ll never go after me,’” fascism expert and historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat said in an interview with George Takei. The disastrous economic results in Hungary, Brazil and India under autocrats demonstrate how misplaced this confidence is.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, whom Trump welcomed to Mar-a-Lago, “wrested control over the independent media, put the country’s universities and cultural institutions under his authority, used demonizing rhetoric to justify his immigration crackdowns, and leveraged his electoral wins to rewrite his country’s constitution to keep himself in power,” the playbook states.
Trump’s plan to destroy the career civil service alone would undermine evenhanded, rational government action. We would revert to a “spoils” system, as alleged by the playbook, in which federal jobs would be doled out to those who pledged personal fealty to Trump.
Third, we face the prospect that the U.S. military, obligated to abide by the Constitution, would be transformed into Trump’s private militia. The American Enterprise Institute’s Kori Schake reminded us in 2020 that Trump “considered invoking federal authority to enforce the law and putting the military on the streets to restore order.” Worse: “Riot police forcibly cleared protesters and the president paraded through Lafayette Square, near the White House, with the leaders of the agencies representing coercive force: the attorney general, the defense secretary, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was wearing combat fatigues.”
Trump, who pardoned war criminals and contemplated invoking the Insurrection Act, considers the military to be his Praetorian guard, obliged on his whim to disregard rules of war and crack down on domestic dissent. Last time, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper (subsequently fired) and Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (whom Trump said deserved to be executed), objected and defended the apolitical military. Next time, instead of such professionals, imagine conspiratorialist Michael Flynn (participant in the Jan. 6 war room) as defense secretary.
In sum, ignoring the consequences of a second Trump term amounts to whistling past the graveyard of democracy. It’s time to pay attention to the prospect of a MAGA autocracy.
TRUMP’S IMMUNITY CLAIMS TELL VOTERS ALL THEY NEED TO KNOW ABOUT HIM
By E.J. Dionne Jr., The Washington Post
When a nation allows the outlandish to become routine and accepts dangerous claims as normal, it loses its moral compass and its capacity to sustain liberty.
So do not shrug off how significant it is that the Supreme Court will soon hear Donald Trump’s claim that presidents should enjoy absolute immunity from prosecution for illegal acts performed in office. How the court handles this case involving the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election — and how the country responds — are tests of the nation’s capacity for self-government under the rule of law.
One temptation to resist: Denigrating the case as just another instance of Trump’s willingness to litigate anything to delay his various trials until after November’s election. This fails to take seriously what this case tells us about how he would govern if he returns to power.
Trump is saying something no other presidential candidate has ever said: That the only way to be an effective president is to be willing to break the law. “A denial of criminal immunity would incapacitate every future President with de facto blackmail and extortion while in office, and condemn him to years of post-office trauma at the hands of political opponents,” his lawyers wrote in their brief. “That would be the end of the Presidency as we know it and would irreparably damage our Republic.”
Well. Let’s leave it to psychiatrists to determine what “post-office trauma” might be. The breathless subtext echoing throughout their brief is that it takes a criminal to be a good president. This has implications voters should take very seriously, including for national security.
In one of the most powerful amicus briefs filed with the court, a group of retired generals and admirals and former service secretaries warned that absolute immunity would “severely undermine the Commander-in-Chief’s legal and moral authority to lead the military forces, as it would signal that they but not he must obey the rule of law.” Think about that. “Under this theory, the President could, with impunity, direct his national security appointees to, in turn, direct members of the military to execute plainly unlawful orders.”
This would threaten the proper functioning of our military and also constitutional democracy. “Particularly in times like the present, when anti-democratic, authoritarian regimes are on the rise worldwide,” they write, “such a threat is intolerable and dangerous.”
Trump’s startling desire for presidential dictatorship has been partly obscured by seemingly sober legal arguments over whether any presidential acts should be shielded from prosecution.
The Supreme Court signaled that this is the issue it wants to rule on when it explained why it took the case — as opposed to affirming, as it should have, a well-argued court of appeals decision denying Trump’s claims. It is seeking to determine “whether and if so to what extent does a former President enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.”
There are multiple problems with the Supreme Court’s decision-making so far. The justices could have accepted special counsel Jack Smith’s request last December to skip the appeals process and take the case immediately. This would have allowed plenty of time for the interference case to go to trial before this year’s election.
Instead, the court rejected Smith’s request, let the appeals process go forward and then, when it finally did take the case, scheduled its hearing on the last day of its term, April 25.
The court did not have to use this litigation to make a broad pronouncement on presidential immunity. My Post colleague Jason Willick recently argued that by including Trump’s effort to encourage the Justice Department to find nonexistent voter fraud as part of his indictment, Smith opened the way for the court to deal with the “official acts” question.
But a prosecutor should not have to resist charging a former president with abuse of power simply because he’s afraid the Supreme Court might delay his case.
Besides, as a group of historians of the founding period noted in a brief to the court, “the Framers never contemplated giving the President any role in the conduct of elections or transfer of power.” It’s a stretch to see Trump’s meddling as “official.”
And as former officials from five past Republican administrations argued in another brief, “even if one could hypothesize a circumstance in which immunity for a former President might be warranted, no tenable formulation of immunity could reach defendant’s machinations alleged here.” In “appropriate” future cases, they argued, the court could prevent unjustified federal prosecutions of presidents by respecting “the constitutional limitations on Congress’s power.” Congress can’t criminalize presidential activities in areas where the Constitution gives clear authority to the executive branch.
Having pushed this case so late, the Supreme Court has an obligation to rule as quickly as it did last February in restoring Trump to the ballot after multiple states attempted to disqualify him. And voters, who will have the final say, would do well to be wary of a candidate who tells them he believes a president’s powers are limitless.
By E.J. Dionne Jr., The Washington Post
When a nation allows the outlandish to become routine and accepts dangerous claims as normal, it loses its moral compass and its capacity to sustain liberty.
So do not shrug off how significant it is that the Supreme Court will soon hear Donald Trump’s claim that presidents should enjoy absolute immunity from prosecution for illegal acts performed in office. How the court handles this case involving the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election — and how the country responds — are tests of the nation’s capacity for self-government under the rule of law.
One temptation to resist: Denigrating the case as just another instance of Trump’s willingness to litigate anything to delay his various trials until after November’s election. This fails to take seriously what this case tells us about how he would govern if he returns to power.
Trump is saying something no other presidential candidate has ever said: That the only way to be an effective president is to be willing to break the law. “A denial of criminal immunity would incapacitate every future President with de facto blackmail and extortion while in office, and condemn him to years of post-office trauma at the hands of political opponents,” his lawyers wrote in their brief. “That would be the end of the Presidency as we know it and would irreparably damage our Republic.”
Well. Let’s leave it to psychiatrists to determine what “post-office trauma” might be. The breathless subtext echoing throughout their brief is that it takes a criminal to be a good president. This has implications voters should take very seriously, including for national security.
In one of the most powerful amicus briefs filed with the court, a group of retired generals and admirals and former service secretaries warned that absolute immunity would “severely undermine the Commander-in-Chief’s legal and moral authority to lead the military forces, as it would signal that they but not he must obey the rule of law.” Think about that. “Under this theory, the President could, with impunity, direct his national security appointees to, in turn, direct members of the military to execute plainly unlawful orders.”
This would threaten the proper functioning of our military and also constitutional democracy. “Particularly in times like the present, when anti-democratic, authoritarian regimes are on the rise worldwide,” they write, “such a threat is intolerable and dangerous.”
Trump’s startling desire for presidential dictatorship has been partly obscured by seemingly sober legal arguments over whether any presidential acts should be shielded from prosecution.
The Supreme Court signaled that this is the issue it wants to rule on when it explained why it took the case — as opposed to affirming, as it should have, a well-argued court of appeals decision denying Trump’s claims. It is seeking to determine “whether and if so to what extent does a former President enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.”
There are multiple problems with the Supreme Court’s decision-making so far. The justices could have accepted special counsel Jack Smith’s request last December to skip the appeals process and take the case immediately. This would have allowed plenty of time for the interference case to go to trial before this year’s election.
Instead, the court rejected Smith’s request, let the appeals process go forward and then, when it finally did take the case, scheduled its hearing on the last day of its term, April 25.
The court did not have to use this litigation to make a broad pronouncement on presidential immunity. My Post colleague Jason Willick recently argued that by including Trump’s effort to encourage the Justice Department to find nonexistent voter fraud as part of his indictment, Smith opened the way for the court to deal with the “official acts” question.
But a prosecutor should not have to resist charging a former president with abuse of power simply because he’s afraid the Supreme Court might delay his case.
Besides, as a group of historians of the founding period noted in a brief to the court, “the Framers never contemplated giving the President any role in the conduct of elections or transfer of power.” It’s a stretch to see Trump’s meddling as “official.”
And as former officials from five past Republican administrations argued in another brief, “even if one could hypothesize a circumstance in which immunity for a former President might be warranted, no tenable formulation of immunity could reach defendant’s machinations alleged here.” In “appropriate” future cases, they argued, the court could prevent unjustified federal prosecutions of presidents by respecting “the constitutional limitations on Congress’s power.” Congress can’t criminalize presidential activities in areas where the Constitution gives clear authority to the executive branch.
Having pushed this case so late, the Supreme Court has an obligation to rule as quickly as it did last February in restoring Trump to the ballot after multiple states attempted to disqualify him. And voters, who will have the final say, would do well to be wary of a candidate who tells them he believes a president’s powers are limitless.
ABORTION BANS CAN DOOM AUTOCRATS. LOOK AT POLAND.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
The United States is not alone in confronting a right-wing authoritarian movement that, in addition to undermining democratic institutions and lashing out at the news media (“enemy of the people”), makes curtailing women’s reproductive freedom central to its agenda. The experience of Poland, in which a right-wing government virtually eliminated access to abortion and later paid for it at the ballot box, is instructive as Republicans try to flee from the harsh implications of their antiabortion ideology.
Polish voters last year threw out the right-wing government after eight years of authoritarian rule. Women disproportionately carried pro-democracy forces to victory. “Almost 75% of eligible women voted — a 12% increase over 2019,” wrote political scientist Patrice McMahon for the Conversation. “The election also saw a record number of female candidates (44%) and the largest percentage of women (30%) voted into Poland’s Sejm.”
Their activism largely centered on abortion. When the right-wing Law and Justice party (PiS) took office in 2015, McMahon wrote, “Poland had one of the strictest abortion laws in Europe. After the ruling government tightened abortion restrictions further, Polish women took to the streets.” Lo and behold, “A breakdown of the women’s vote finds that many women voted for leftist and centrist parties that made women’s rights and liberalized abortion laws a priority.” The democratic coalition leader Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s party is now proposing loosening (albeit not eliminating) abortion restrictions. (Victories for the PiS in local and regional elections, announced Monday, show that the threat from the right has not been completely quelled.)
It’s not just in Poland or the United States where authoritarian regimes impose rules to control women. Right-wing regimes, which historically champion “traditional values,” including male power and privilege, inevitably wind up cajoling women to increase birthrates and restricting birth control and abortions.
“Democratic backsliding has gone hand in hand with a backlash against women’s rights. Scholars have labeled the assaults on gender equality, including abortion, as assaults on democracy and have suggested that the ‘assault on women’s rights has coincided with a broader assault on democracy,’” the International Center for Research on Women found. “Other experts have said the undermining of abortion rights is a key sign of a troubled democracy. Trends of de-democratization have gone in parallel with increased opposition to gender equality.”
Martha F. Davis and Risa E. Kaufman, writing for an American Constitution Society forum, note that “the rise in right wing populism and authoritarianism has fueled regression on women’s rights in countries such as Poland and Hungary.” They add:
It is no coincidence that restrictions on reproductive rights, including abortion rights, are high on the agenda of authoritarian regimes, since these restrictions reinforce democratic backsliding. Abortion restrictions undermine women’s autonomy, citizenship, and rights to equality and non-discrimination, along with the right to full political participation. Reproductive and bodily autonomy is a necessary component of full citizenship and a fully functioning democracy; all people, including those with the capacity for pregnancy, must be able to exercise control over their bodies in order to participate fully.
Put differently, if you want to establish an authoritarian society, women must be relegated to the home and deprived of self-determination. Conversely, pro-democracy movements, such as the victorious one in Poland, benefit by appealing to women and promising to secure reproductive rights. Democrats have done the latter since the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, in a series of wins in the midterms later that year and in contests concerning everything from abortion rights referendums to a critical swing state Supreme Court race to special House elections.
Vice President Harris has explicitly tied abortion to the “freedom” message, taking on Republicans for stripping women of dignity and personal rights. “Freedom is fundamental to the promise of America — to the promise of America,” she said in a speech in February marking the 51st anniversary of Roe v. Wade. “Freedom of speech. Freedom of worship. Freedom of assembly … In America, freedom is not to be given. It is not to be bestowed. It is ours by right.” She exhorted the crowd, “Women trust all of us to fight for their rights and to protect their most fundamental freedoms.”
No wonder Harris quickly scheduled a trip to Arizona on Friday to focus on that state’s Supreme Court decision reinstating an 1864 near-total abortion ban. (“The Biden campaign is showing that it can be nimble — and quick — in responding to court cases as it works to leverage its perceived advantage on abortion,” Axios reported.) Harris’s messaging is part of an overall strategy to remind voters that the authoritarian right wants to control their lives, even the most intimate decisions.
The Biden 2024 campaign has embraced progressive wins on abortion since Dobbs and the connection between the campaign’s democracy message and abortion. In the wake of the Florida state Supreme Court’s April 1 ruling making way for a six-week abortion ban, the campaign rolled out an emotionally charged television ad. The ad, featuring a woman who nearly died as a result of Texas’s draconian law, aired in key swing states, the New York Times reported.
After Arizona’s Supreme Court ruling, Biden cut an ad in which he declared, “Because of Donald Trump, millions of women lost the fundamental freedom to control their own bodies. Women’s lives are in danger.” Tying the authoritarian and his movement to loss of freedom is precisely the strategy pro-democracy forces followed in Poland.
Republicans’ panicked reaction to the Florida and Arizona decisions (“Trump, GOP scramble to contain abortion ‘earthquake,’” Politico’s headline blasted) suggests they too understand that the third rail in politics might no longer be Social Security but abortion. Trump’s recent announcement that he supported leaving abortion law to the states, and not a federal law, was widely portrayed as a change from his previously antiabortion position. But with both Florida and Arizona implementing draconian bans, it’s clear that, in many states, leaving it to them amounts to a thumbs up for forced-birth laws.
Unable to shed responsibility for abortion bans they sought, Republicans now are in a frenzy to avoid the sort of political disaster the authoritarian movement in Poland experienced. And if the Biden-Harris team is successful in tying Republicans’ war on women to the larger war on democracy, Americans, like the Poles last year, might rebel against the heavy hand of an authoritarian movement.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
The United States is not alone in confronting a right-wing authoritarian movement that, in addition to undermining democratic institutions and lashing out at the news media (“enemy of the people”), makes curtailing women’s reproductive freedom central to its agenda. The experience of Poland, in which a right-wing government virtually eliminated access to abortion and later paid for it at the ballot box, is instructive as Republicans try to flee from the harsh implications of their antiabortion ideology.
Polish voters last year threw out the right-wing government after eight years of authoritarian rule. Women disproportionately carried pro-democracy forces to victory. “Almost 75% of eligible women voted — a 12% increase over 2019,” wrote political scientist Patrice McMahon for the Conversation. “The election also saw a record number of female candidates (44%) and the largest percentage of women (30%) voted into Poland’s Sejm.”
Their activism largely centered on abortion. When the right-wing Law and Justice party (PiS) took office in 2015, McMahon wrote, “Poland had one of the strictest abortion laws in Europe. After the ruling government tightened abortion restrictions further, Polish women took to the streets.” Lo and behold, “A breakdown of the women’s vote finds that many women voted for leftist and centrist parties that made women’s rights and liberalized abortion laws a priority.” The democratic coalition leader Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s party is now proposing loosening (albeit not eliminating) abortion restrictions. (Victories for the PiS in local and regional elections, announced Monday, show that the threat from the right has not been completely quelled.)
It’s not just in Poland or the United States where authoritarian regimes impose rules to control women. Right-wing regimes, which historically champion “traditional values,” including male power and privilege, inevitably wind up cajoling women to increase birthrates and restricting birth control and abortions.
“Democratic backsliding has gone hand in hand with a backlash against women’s rights. Scholars have labeled the assaults on gender equality, including abortion, as assaults on democracy and have suggested that the ‘assault on women’s rights has coincided with a broader assault on democracy,’” the International Center for Research on Women found. “Other experts have said the undermining of abortion rights is a key sign of a troubled democracy. Trends of de-democratization have gone in parallel with increased opposition to gender equality.”
Martha F. Davis and Risa E. Kaufman, writing for an American Constitution Society forum, note that “the rise in right wing populism and authoritarianism has fueled regression on women’s rights in countries such as Poland and Hungary.” They add:
It is no coincidence that restrictions on reproductive rights, including abortion rights, are high on the agenda of authoritarian regimes, since these restrictions reinforce democratic backsliding. Abortion restrictions undermine women’s autonomy, citizenship, and rights to equality and non-discrimination, along with the right to full political participation. Reproductive and bodily autonomy is a necessary component of full citizenship and a fully functioning democracy; all people, including those with the capacity for pregnancy, must be able to exercise control over their bodies in order to participate fully.
Put differently, if you want to establish an authoritarian society, women must be relegated to the home and deprived of self-determination. Conversely, pro-democracy movements, such as the victorious one in Poland, benefit by appealing to women and promising to secure reproductive rights. Democrats have done the latter since the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, in a series of wins in the midterms later that year and in contests concerning everything from abortion rights referendums to a critical swing state Supreme Court race to special House elections.
Vice President Harris has explicitly tied abortion to the “freedom” message, taking on Republicans for stripping women of dignity and personal rights. “Freedom is fundamental to the promise of America — to the promise of America,” she said in a speech in February marking the 51st anniversary of Roe v. Wade. “Freedom of speech. Freedom of worship. Freedom of assembly … In America, freedom is not to be given. It is not to be bestowed. It is ours by right.” She exhorted the crowd, “Women trust all of us to fight for their rights and to protect their most fundamental freedoms.”
No wonder Harris quickly scheduled a trip to Arizona on Friday to focus on that state’s Supreme Court decision reinstating an 1864 near-total abortion ban. (“The Biden campaign is showing that it can be nimble — and quick — in responding to court cases as it works to leverage its perceived advantage on abortion,” Axios reported.) Harris’s messaging is part of an overall strategy to remind voters that the authoritarian right wants to control their lives, even the most intimate decisions.
The Biden 2024 campaign has embraced progressive wins on abortion since Dobbs and the connection between the campaign’s democracy message and abortion. In the wake of the Florida state Supreme Court’s April 1 ruling making way for a six-week abortion ban, the campaign rolled out an emotionally charged television ad. The ad, featuring a woman who nearly died as a result of Texas’s draconian law, aired in key swing states, the New York Times reported.
After Arizona’s Supreme Court ruling, Biden cut an ad in which he declared, “Because of Donald Trump, millions of women lost the fundamental freedom to control their own bodies. Women’s lives are in danger.” Tying the authoritarian and his movement to loss of freedom is precisely the strategy pro-democracy forces followed in Poland.
Republicans’ panicked reaction to the Florida and Arizona decisions (“Trump, GOP scramble to contain abortion ‘earthquake,’” Politico’s headline blasted) suggests they too understand that the third rail in politics might no longer be Social Security but abortion. Trump’s recent announcement that he supported leaving abortion law to the states, and not a federal law, was widely portrayed as a change from his previously antiabortion position. But with both Florida and Arizona implementing draconian bans, it’s clear that, in many states, leaving it to them amounts to a thumbs up for forced-birth laws.
Unable to shed responsibility for abortion bans they sought, Republicans now are in a frenzy to avoid the sort of political disaster the authoritarian movement in Poland experienced. And if the Biden-Harris team is successful in tying Republicans’ war on women to the larger war on democracy, Americans, like the Poles last year, might rebel against the heavy hand of an authoritarian movement.
WHAT WE LOSE IF WE LET PUTIN WIN
By Dan Coats, former senator from Indiana, served as the director of national intelligence from 2017 to 2019.
After Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, a rare consensus formed in Washington around the conviction that America must provide military support to Ukraine’s resistance. Three administrations and large majorities of both parties in Congress have consistently held that President Vladimir Putin’s aggression cannot be tolerated. When has such deep solidarity last occurred on any difficult subject?
Now members of Congress are arguing that we must turn away from spending more money to help Ukraine, choosing instead to focus on our own needs, pursuing our own interests. This is a false choice.
The choices facing America are always based on the same foundation: what best serves our nation. The choice is not America first or something else first. America is always first. The real question, in this complicated and uncertain world, is what course of action will most likely serve our core national interests — security and economic prosperity.
Those interests are inextricably linked to the strength of our global alliances and the international system of law and cooperation in which American democracy survives and prospers. And the strength of those networks, in turn, depends on our role as a trusted ally and friend, on our credibility and — frankly — on our virtue.
In the 80 years that the Soviet Union or Russia has been our strategic competitor, we have spent an incalculable amount to defend ourselves. We have spent trillions of dollars on America’s nuclear defense alone, with primarily one other nuclear-armed state in mind.
Ukraine’s effort to defend itself against Mr. Putin’s advance has degraded Russia’s military more than anyone thought possible when the full invasion of Ukraine began just over two years ago. In blunt dollar terms, helping Ukraine in that defense is, by far, the least expensive way to weaken Russia’s military and discourage Russian aggression, thereby protecting ourselves and our allies.
The opposite is also true. If Mr. Putin succeeds, the high anxiety in Europe over his next steps will justifiably continue to grow — and expensive imperatives will follow. Anticipating the next possible phase of Mr. Putin’s campaign to reimpose the Russian hegemony of the Cold War era will force NATO to greatly increase its defense budget, plunging the world into an arms race like those leading up to the world wars. Those who do not see the link between European security and our own are not living in the real world.
This is a moment that is heavy with potential consequences for America’s role in the world, for our power to shape future events and for our ability to live securely within our borders. It is by no means certain that the pending aid package for Ukraine passed by the Senate will even come to a vote in the House and, if it does, what its prospects will be. What happens next will determine whether our potential adversaries will be encouraged in their aggressive designs or intimidated by our collective resolve to resist them. It will determine whether our friends and allies will be strengthened by our determination or frightened by the collapse of American will.
The potential consequences of failing to help Ukraine resist Russia’s raw territorial aggression are not limited to Europe. China is watching closely to see how firmly America supports, or doesn't support, its friends these days. Our allies are watching, too, including Taiwan, Japan and South Korea. All three are nervous about China’s regional ambitions — and dependent on America as a security partner.
This is the context in which the Ukraine aid package that is before the House must be assessed. This isn’t about the money. It is about American steadfastness, something that is now in question because of another partisan contest. Ukraine and the tens of millions of people living there have become pawns for political maneuvering in Washington.
And while these maneuvers are not new to me or to the American public these days, usually the stakes are not so high. Our failure to help Ukraine resist, our complicity in allowing naked territorial aggression to succeed, our undermining of NATO security, our tacit encouragement for China to follow Russia’s lead and, most of all, our abandonment of people of courage and hope and who love America would, together, be a colossal strategic blunder.
This is not the time for political games. It is time for America to do what we all know is right.
By Dan Coats, former senator from Indiana, served as the director of national intelligence from 2017 to 2019.
After Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, a rare consensus formed in Washington around the conviction that America must provide military support to Ukraine’s resistance. Three administrations and large majorities of both parties in Congress have consistently held that President Vladimir Putin’s aggression cannot be tolerated. When has such deep solidarity last occurred on any difficult subject?
Now members of Congress are arguing that we must turn away from spending more money to help Ukraine, choosing instead to focus on our own needs, pursuing our own interests. This is a false choice.
The choices facing America are always based on the same foundation: what best serves our nation. The choice is not America first or something else first. America is always first. The real question, in this complicated and uncertain world, is what course of action will most likely serve our core national interests — security and economic prosperity.
Those interests are inextricably linked to the strength of our global alliances and the international system of law and cooperation in which American democracy survives and prospers. And the strength of those networks, in turn, depends on our role as a trusted ally and friend, on our credibility and — frankly — on our virtue.
In the 80 years that the Soviet Union or Russia has been our strategic competitor, we have spent an incalculable amount to defend ourselves. We have spent trillions of dollars on America’s nuclear defense alone, with primarily one other nuclear-armed state in mind.
Ukraine’s effort to defend itself against Mr. Putin’s advance has degraded Russia’s military more than anyone thought possible when the full invasion of Ukraine began just over two years ago. In blunt dollar terms, helping Ukraine in that defense is, by far, the least expensive way to weaken Russia’s military and discourage Russian aggression, thereby protecting ourselves and our allies.
The opposite is also true. If Mr. Putin succeeds, the high anxiety in Europe over his next steps will justifiably continue to grow — and expensive imperatives will follow. Anticipating the next possible phase of Mr. Putin’s campaign to reimpose the Russian hegemony of the Cold War era will force NATO to greatly increase its defense budget, plunging the world into an arms race like those leading up to the world wars. Those who do not see the link between European security and our own are not living in the real world.
This is a moment that is heavy with potential consequences for America’s role in the world, for our power to shape future events and for our ability to live securely within our borders. It is by no means certain that the pending aid package for Ukraine passed by the Senate will even come to a vote in the House and, if it does, what its prospects will be. What happens next will determine whether our potential adversaries will be encouraged in their aggressive designs or intimidated by our collective resolve to resist them. It will determine whether our friends and allies will be strengthened by our determination or frightened by the collapse of American will.
The potential consequences of failing to help Ukraine resist Russia’s raw territorial aggression are not limited to Europe. China is watching closely to see how firmly America supports, or doesn't support, its friends these days. Our allies are watching, too, including Taiwan, Japan and South Korea. All three are nervous about China’s regional ambitions — and dependent on America as a security partner.
This is the context in which the Ukraine aid package that is before the House must be assessed. This isn’t about the money. It is about American steadfastness, something that is now in question because of another partisan contest. Ukraine and the tens of millions of people living there have become pawns for political maneuvering in Washington.
And while these maneuvers are not new to me or to the American public these days, usually the stakes are not so high. Our failure to help Ukraine resist, our complicity in allowing naked territorial aggression to succeed, our undermining of NATO security, our tacit encouragement for China to follow Russia’s lead and, most of all, our abandonment of people of courage and hope and who love America would, together, be a colossal strategic blunder.
This is not the time for political games. It is time for America to do what we all know is right.
WHAT WORRIES ME MOST ABOUT A TRUMP PRESIDENCY
By Caroline Fredrickson, adviser at the Open Markets Institute, a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice and a visiting professor of law at Georgetown University.
There are almost daily headlines now describing what Donald Trump would do if elected: the mass deportations, the pardons handed out to his friends and golf buddies, the Justice Department settling scores and waging personal vendettas. The former president has even promised violence if the election goes against him, warning that it could be a “blood bath.”
But as worrying as these prospects are, they are far from the biggest threats he poses. What we should fear most is Mr. Trump transforming our government into a modern-day Tammany Hall, installing a kleptocratic leadership that will be difficult if not impossible to dislodge.
I do not discount the possibility of state-sponsored violence, and I worry deeply about the politicization of the civil service. But those are, for the most part, threats and theories, and while they need to be taken seriously, people should be paying more attention to a far more likely reality: that Mr. Trump would spend much of his time in office enriching himself. He failed spectacularly as an insurrectionist and as a disrupter of the civil service, and his clownish and chaotic style may well lead to failure again — but he has succeeded time and time again in the art of the steal. If his grift continues into a second term, it will not only contribute to the fraying trust Americans have in their institutions, but also impair our ability to lead the world through a series of escalating crises.
Recall how Mr. Trump operated in his first term. Not only did he keep his stake in more than a hundred businesses, he made it a practice to visit his properties around the country, forcing taxpayers to pay for rooms and amenities at Trump hotels for the Secret Service and other staff members who accompanied him — money that went straight into his bank accounts and those of his business partners. Those interested in currying favor with the president, from foreign governments to would-be government contractors, knew to spend money at his hotels and golf clubs. According to internal Trump hotel documents, T-Mobile executives spent over $195,000 at the Trump Washington Hotel after announcing a planned merger with Sprint in April 2018. Two years later, the merger was approved.
Government, like fish, rots from the head down. Mr. Trump’s example freed up cabinet members to award huge contracts to their friends, business associates and political allies, while others ran their departments like personal fiefs. After the State Department’s inspector general was fired, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s use of official trips for clandestine meetings with conservative donors and his family’s alleged misuse of staff members for tasks like walking his dog, picking up his wife from the airport and fetching his takeout came to light. And, in addition to being accused of improperly accepting gifts from those seeking influence, several other cabinet members were alleged to have used government funds for private travel. These may seem like banal infractions, but taken together, they are a reflection of who Mr. Trump is and how he governs.
Throughout his life, through Trump-branded wine, chocolate bars, sneakers, NFTs, ties, MAGA paraphernalia, a $59.99 Bible (of all things) and, most recently, his Truth Social meme stock ploy, he has shown an unstoppable drive to enrich himself at all costs. He sees politics, like business, as a zero-sum game in which he wins only if someone else loses. These are the instincts that drive corruption, kleptocracy and grift. And, if past is prologue, we’re looking at a much more damaging sequel.
In a second term, Mr. Trump will have more freedom and power to undertake grift. He has already vowed to use pardons to protect supporters and possibly even himself from efforts to curb corruption (which may explain the nonchalance with which his son-in-law Jared Kushner has greeted criticism about the conflicts of interest raised by his recent real estate investments in Serbia and Albania, as well as the Saudi, Qatari and Emirati investments in his wealth fund). And he and his political advisers are building a deep bench of committed and loyal employees who could corrode and potentially destroy mechanisms of accountability in government, paving the way for kleptocratic leaders to entrench themselves in the bureaucracy where many would be able to remain past Mr. Trump’s term. And the mere presence of a phalanx of unquestioning lieutenants in the civil service will ensure that other civil servants fear retribution for objecting to the self-enrichment.
Naturally, I worry about other things, too, particularly the possibility of political violence. Mr. Trump could well claim he has won the election no matter the vote count and call on his supporters to rise up to ensure his takeover. Even before the votes are cast, his supporters are threatening election officials, judicial officials and state legislators, trying to intimidate them into either helping Mr. Trump or stepping aside to be replaced by Trumpists.
But legal, law enforcement and security obstacles are still in place to slow down or stop these efforts. We must remember that this time around, President Biden will still be president, able to control the military and federal law enforcement, and Congress has amended the outdated and vague Electoral Count Act to make it much harder for Mr. Trump’s congressional allies to contest a Trump loss in the electoral college or on Capitol Hill.
No such guardrails exist to curb Trumpian corruption. The Supreme Court, itself corrupt, has made it virtually impossible to prosecute even the most blatant corruption by government officials.
In a kleptocracy, corruption is a feature, not a bug, where politicians apply the law inconsistently, favoring friends and punishing enemies. By controlling government assets and handing them out to friends and family — and dangling possibilities in front of would-be supporters — as well as using politically motivated prosecutions, kleptocrats cement their control of government and disempower opponents. We need only recall Russia’s erstwhile effort to create a democracy: It quickly drained away into the pockets of Vladimir Putin and his oligarchs, leading to the hopelessness and acquiescence of Russian citizens once they realized they could no longer change their situation through democratic means.
Now we face that danger at home. If Mr. Trump wins, America will have a leader invested in his own personal power, both financial and punitive, and supported by a much more capable team. When lucrative contracts are handed out to Trumpist loyalists regardless of merit and dissident voices are targeted and silenced, America’s leadership on the global stage will dissolve when it’s needed most.
The consequences will echo for generations if we lack the ability and the will to attack problems like climate change, mass migration, a new space race and multiple wars. Nothing of substance will be done, Mr. Trump’s cronies will continue to act with impunity, and millions of Americans — already worried that elites are held to a different standard than regular people are — will lose even more confidence in their government, convinced that everyone in Washington is out for himself.
This combination of passivity on the one hand and impunity on the other could be fatal for our democracy. This is the true danger Mr. Trump poses.
By Caroline Fredrickson, adviser at the Open Markets Institute, a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice and a visiting professor of law at Georgetown University.
There are almost daily headlines now describing what Donald Trump would do if elected: the mass deportations, the pardons handed out to his friends and golf buddies, the Justice Department settling scores and waging personal vendettas. The former president has even promised violence if the election goes against him, warning that it could be a “blood bath.”
But as worrying as these prospects are, they are far from the biggest threats he poses. What we should fear most is Mr. Trump transforming our government into a modern-day Tammany Hall, installing a kleptocratic leadership that will be difficult if not impossible to dislodge.
I do not discount the possibility of state-sponsored violence, and I worry deeply about the politicization of the civil service. But those are, for the most part, threats and theories, and while they need to be taken seriously, people should be paying more attention to a far more likely reality: that Mr. Trump would spend much of his time in office enriching himself. He failed spectacularly as an insurrectionist and as a disrupter of the civil service, and his clownish and chaotic style may well lead to failure again — but he has succeeded time and time again in the art of the steal. If his grift continues into a second term, it will not only contribute to the fraying trust Americans have in their institutions, but also impair our ability to lead the world through a series of escalating crises.
Recall how Mr. Trump operated in his first term. Not only did he keep his stake in more than a hundred businesses, he made it a practice to visit his properties around the country, forcing taxpayers to pay for rooms and amenities at Trump hotels for the Secret Service and other staff members who accompanied him — money that went straight into his bank accounts and those of his business partners. Those interested in currying favor with the president, from foreign governments to would-be government contractors, knew to spend money at his hotels and golf clubs. According to internal Trump hotel documents, T-Mobile executives spent over $195,000 at the Trump Washington Hotel after announcing a planned merger with Sprint in April 2018. Two years later, the merger was approved.
Government, like fish, rots from the head down. Mr. Trump’s example freed up cabinet members to award huge contracts to their friends, business associates and political allies, while others ran their departments like personal fiefs. After the State Department’s inspector general was fired, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s use of official trips for clandestine meetings with conservative donors and his family’s alleged misuse of staff members for tasks like walking his dog, picking up his wife from the airport and fetching his takeout came to light. And, in addition to being accused of improperly accepting gifts from those seeking influence, several other cabinet members were alleged to have used government funds for private travel. These may seem like banal infractions, but taken together, they are a reflection of who Mr. Trump is and how he governs.
Throughout his life, through Trump-branded wine, chocolate bars, sneakers, NFTs, ties, MAGA paraphernalia, a $59.99 Bible (of all things) and, most recently, his Truth Social meme stock ploy, he has shown an unstoppable drive to enrich himself at all costs. He sees politics, like business, as a zero-sum game in which he wins only if someone else loses. These are the instincts that drive corruption, kleptocracy and grift. And, if past is prologue, we’re looking at a much more damaging sequel.
In a second term, Mr. Trump will have more freedom and power to undertake grift. He has already vowed to use pardons to protect supporters and possibly even himself from efforts to curb corruption (which may explain the nonchalance with which his son-in-law Jared Kushner has greeted criticism about the conflicts of interest raised by his recent real estate investments in Serbia and Albania, as well as the Saudi, Qatari and Emirati investments in his wealth fund). And he and his political advisers are building a deep bench of committed and loyal employees who could corrode and potentially destroy mechanisms of accountability in government, paving the way for kleptocratic leaders to entrench themselves in the bureaucracy where many would be able to remain past Mr. Trump’s term. And the mere presence of a phalanx of unquestioning lieutenants in the civil service will ensure that other civil servants fear retribution for objecting to the self-enrichment.
Naturally, I worry about other things, too, particularly the possibility of political violence. Mr. Trump could well claim he has won the election no matter the vote count and call on his supporters to rise up to ensure his takeover. Even before the votes are cast, his supporters are threatening election officials, judicial officials and state legislators, trying to intimidate them into either helping Mr. Trump or stepping aside to be replaced by Trumpists.
But legal, law enforcement and security obstacles are still in place to slow down or stop these efforts. We must remember that this time around, President Biden will still be president, able to control the military and federal law enforcement, and Congress has amended the outdated and vague Electoral Count Act to make it much harder for Mr. Trump’s congressional allies to contest a Trump loss in the electoral college or on Capitol Hill.
No such guardrails exist to curb Trumpian corruption. The Supreme Court, itself corrupt, has made it virtually impossible to prosecute even the most blatant corruption by government officials.
In a kleptocracy, corruption is a feature, not a bug, where politicians apply the law inconsistently, favoring friends and punishing enemies. By controlling government assets and handing them out to friends and family — and dangling possibilities in front of would-be supporters — as well as using politically motivated prosecutions, kleptocrats cement their control of government and disempower opponents. We need only recall Russia’s erstwhile effort to create a democracy: It quickly drained away into the pockets of Vladimir Putin and his oligarchs, leading to the hopelessness and acquiescence of Russian citizens once they realized they could no longer change their situation through democratic means.
Now we face that danger at home. If Mr. Trump wins, America will have a leader invested in his own personal power, both financial and punitive, and supported by a much more capable team. When lucrative contracts are handed out to Trumpist loyalists regardless of merit and dissident voices are targeted and silenced, America’s leadership on the global stage will dissolve when it’s needed most.
The consequences will echo for generations if we lack the ability and the will to attack problems like climate change, mass migration, a new space race and multiple wars. Nothing of substance will be done, Mr. Trump’s cronies will continue to act with impunity, and millions of Americans — already worried that elites are held to a different standard than regular people are — will lose even more confidence in their government, convinced that everyone in Washington is out for himself.
This combination of passivity on the one hand and impunity on the other could be fatal for our democracy. This is the true danger Mr. Trump poses.
THIS IS WHAT YOU GET WHEN FEAR MIXES WITH MONEY
By Thomas B. Edsall, The New York Times
Donald Trump has added something new to the practice of extracting money from major donors: fear.
Traditionally, high-dollar contributors write big checks for a mix of reasons: to curry favor, to support their political party, to promote an agenda, to win favorable tax and regulatory policies, to defeat the opposition, to be seen as powerful — a blend of self-interest and principle.
This year, Trump’s own history in the White House, combined with the agenda for 2025 that he and his allies have been putting together, amounts to a warning to wavering supporters.
According to The Washington Post, Trump has candidly warned onlookers that he will turn the federal bureaucracy into an instrument to punish those who fail to toe the MAGA line:
He wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office, including his former chief of staff, John F. Kelly, and former attorney general William P. Barr, as well as his ex-attorney Ty Cobb and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley, according to people who have talked to him, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Trump has also talked of prosecuting officials at the F.B.I. and Justice Department, a person familiar with the matter said.
In public, Trump has vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” President Biden and his family.
The events described in the Post story
reflect Trump’s determination to harness the power of the presidency to exact revenge on those who have challenged or criticized him if he returns to the White House. The former president has frequently threatened to take punitive steps against his perceived enemies, arguing that doing so would be justified by the current prosecutions against him. Trump has claimed without evidence that the criminal charges he is facing — a total of 88 across four state and federal indictments — were made up to damage him politically.
Trump has made “retribution” a central theme of his campaign, seeking to intertwine his own legal defense with a call for payback against perceived slights and offenses to “forgotten” Americans.
Faced with the prospect of a chief executive prepared to abandon the rule of law for the rule of revenge, many affluent donors — for whom the machinations of government determine bankruptcy or wealth — seem to think they have little choice but to pony up to the self-proclaimed “dictator for a day.”
Trump’s campaign to reclaim the White House — armed with the bristling Heritage Foundation playbook, which conservatives are using as a tool to pressure Trump to remain true to the hard-right agenda, as well as long, revealing lists compiled by Axios and The Times of prospective MAGA appointees — is the embodiment of the politics of intimidation.
How so?
At the core of what both Trump and Heritage’s Project 2025 have proposed is an escalation of the power concentrated in the presidency and in the executive branch generally. This includes the politicization of the bureaucracy, whose mission would become, in part, to wreak revenge on Trump’s adversaries and the adoption, throughout federal departments and agencies, of policies rewarding ideological supporters and defunding ideological opponents.
Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor at Princeton of sociology and international affairs, summed up the Trump-driven changes in the politics of raising money in an email: “Most business leaders unfamiliar with autocratic government believe that when they support someone running for office, that person will owe them something if elected, tax cuts, deregulation, whatever the business leaders want.”
But, Scheppele continued, “autocrats turn the tables. Once elected, autocrats use the power of the state to squeeze business.”
In these circumstances, she added, political leaders “can threaten businesses with tax audits, more regulation, even criminal charges, unless they give in to the autocrats’ demands.”
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, Scheppele wrote in her email,
is a blueprint for autocracy. In fact, it’s a direct copy of the plan that Viktor Orban used to take over the Hungarian government in 2010. If it is carried out, Project 2025 will concentrate huge power in the hands of the president, giving him the power to control the whole federal government at his whim. If business leaders think that this will benefit them and that giving up the rule of law is good for business, they will quickly learn that they are wrong. But it will be too late.
The Trump campaign has made it clear that Trump is not committed to adopting all the policy and personnel proposals described in Project 2025 or other documents produced outside his campaign.
At the same time, nowhere is corporate acquiescence to Trump more evident than among Republican megadonors who swore after Jan. 6, 2021, that they would never again support Trump, but who are now swallowing their pride, trickling back in obeisance to the leader who betrayed them with his encouragement of the insurrection.
In February 2023, Eric Levine, one of the founders of the law firm Eiseman Levine and a prominent Republican fund-raiser, told Politico:
I don’t think it is fair to call Donald Trump a damaged candidate. He is a metastasizing cancer who if he is not stopped is going to destroy the party. Donald Trump is a loser. He is the first president since Hoover to lose the House, the Senate and the presidency in a single term.
As if that were not enough, Levine continued, Trump “is probably the only Republican in the country, if not the only person in the country, who can’t beat Joe Biden.”
Less than a month ago, however, Levine sent out a memo to fellow Republicans telling them he has had a change of heart:
The adage of “never say never” is a wise one. I repeatedly said, since the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, that I will never vote for Donald Trump. Today, however, due to a dramatic change in circumstances, albeit reluctantly and with reservations, I have decided I will vote for Trump in November.
Levine is not alone in his return to the Trump fold. On March 29, Josh Dawsey, Jeff Stein, Michael Scherer and Elizabeth Dwoskin, reporters for The Washington Post, published “Many G.O.P. Billionaires Balked at Jan. 6. They’re Coming Back to Trump.”
“As hopes of a Republican alternative have crumbled,” the four Post reporters wrote, “elite donors who once balked at Trump’s fueling of the Capitol insurrection, worried about his legal problems and decried what they saw as his chaotic presidency are rediscovering their affinity for the former president — even as he praises and vows to free Jan. 6 defendants, promises mass deportations and faces 88 felony charges.”
Some examples:
The day after a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, billionaire and G.O.P. megadonor Nelson Peltz called the insurrection a “disgrace” and expressed remorse for voting for Donald Trump: “I’m sorry I did that.” In early March, nonetheless, Peltz hosted a breakfast meeting at his Palm Beach mansion with Trump and such billionaire Trump backers as Steve Wynn and Isaac Perlmutter.
And similarly, “After Jan. 6, billionaire developer Robert Bigelow said Trump had ‘lost me as a supporter. … He showed that, in that particular hour, he was no commander.’” This year, “Bigelow has pledged $20 million to a pro-Trump campaign group and has given $1 million to cover the former president’s legal costs.”
Bigelow was on the host committee for a record-setting $50.5 million fund-raiser for Trump and the Republican National Committee in Palm Beach on Saturday night. The suggested price of admission: from $250,000 to $814,600.
Most of the commentary on the megadonors’ return to the Trump fold suggests that self-interest and greed are the primary motivators. In describing donors’ calculations, The Washington Post wrote: “The financial upside of going with the former president may win out. Trump has discussed further cutting the corporate tax rate, and he toyed in his administration with unilaterally lowering the capital gains rate paid by investors.”
Jonathan Chait, a columnist at New York magazine, is more explicit:
Joe Biden is running on a plan to increase taxes on the very wealthy, while Trump is promising to cut those taxes. In 2025, most of the Trump tax cuts will expire, as will Obamacare subsidies extended by the Inflation Reduction Act. The 2024 elections will therefore determine whether hundreds of billions of dollars remain in the pockets of wealthy people or instead fund things like health insurance for the middle class.
Similarly, Chris Cillizza told readers of his Substack newsletter, “I will now explain to you how these wealthy people overcame their principled stances against Trump as a threat to democracy.”
How?
The answer to all of your questions is money. Most rich people want to stay as rich as possible. Or get even richer. THAT is their main focus. So, when rubber meets road, that is their default setting. Principles go out the window.
The Post writers, Chait and Cillizza are right, up to a point. The about-face of these superrich donors is a mixture of greed and terror: terror of sparking the anger of a volatile politician who proudly declares “I am your retribution.”
Just as Trump has cowed congressional Republicans — many of whom privately voice strong criticism of him — with the threat of a MAGA-driven primary challenge, he has turned himself and his agenda into weapons of intimidation for businesses seeking to survive and thrive in a second Trump administration.
A primary goal of business is predictability, if not certainty, based in part on consistent rules, regulations and laws so that corporations can make plans and investments without worrying about arbitrary government interventions based on the revenge-seeking whims of a leader many see as a malignant narcissist.
American businesses are fully aware of Trump’s willingness to govern by caprice, a modus operandi he demonstrated repeatedly during his term in the White House.
In those years, however, he was held back by his own ineptitude, the incompetence of his most loyal advisers and the interventions of his more reasonable aides and key civil servants — a combination that kept him largely in check.
Catherine Rampell summed up some of the most egregious initiatives of the Trump White House in a November 2023 Washington Post column, “Take Trump at His Word When He Threatens to Punish His Enemies”:
Trump also frequently deployed economic and regulatory powers against businesses deemed insufficiently loyal.
For example, his administration launched a bogus antitrust investigation into some auto companies when they did not support his rollback of fuel-efficiency standards. He likewise reportedly instructed his top economic aide to interfere with the merger of AT&T and Time Warner, as punishment for critical coverage from CNN, which was then owned by Time Warner.
Trump also openly mused about revoking the licenses of broadcast news outlets for, among other things, reporting that his secretary of state had called him a “moron.” Again, his underlings did not go along with him.
Elsewhere, he tried to use the government procurement process to damage Amazon. According to a memoir by a top aide to then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Trump “called and directed Mattis to ‘screw Amazon’ by locking them out of a chance to bid’ on a defense contract.”
Trump’s allies, especially those working on the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, are working tirelessly to make sure that if Trump wins in November, he will not be restrained by aides or career civil servants and that instead of taking office unprepared, he will have a complete MAGA agenda from Day 1.
Separately from the report, Project 2025 has been assembling names of Trump loyalists who will take his commands seriously — and not deep-six them — to fill key spots in a second Trump administration, while simultaneously assembling an across-the-board agenda of legislative initiatives, executive orders and regulatory changes running the gamut from anti-abortion policies to a strategy “to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will,” in the words of one of the project’s authors.
Perhaps most important, Project 2025 asserts that “President Trump’s Schedule F proposal regarding accountability in hiring must be reinstituted.”
Schedule F, which Trump sought to initiate by executive order in 2020, would turn the top 50,000 or so civil servants, who are currently protected from arbitrary firing or demotion, into political appointees under the control of his administration. Trump lost the White House before Schedule F could be applied, and President Biden withdrew the executive order creating it.
For corporate America, application of Schedule F would radically escalate uncertainty. Federal officials making decisions ranging from penalties for failed occupational safety violations to initiation of antitrust proceedings, from I.R.S. rulings to the application of sanitary regulations in nursing homes would presumably have to prioritize loyalty to Trump to keep their jobs.
Fear of the consequences of Schedule F is the strongest weapon of intimidation in Trump’s fund-raising armament. A significant campaign contribution might well serve as a useful shield.
“One practical consequence of undermining the civil service is a rise in cronyism,” Vanessa Williamson, a senior fellow in governance studies at Brookings, wrote by email in response to my inquiry. “Usually we think of that in terms of the ‘winners,’ the insiders getting special deals, but it is equally true that cronyism creates ‘losers,’ the business elites that do not get favors or face punishment for their lack of loyalty to the ruling party.”
Trump and others on the American right, Williamson wrote,
have become enamored of Hungary’s Viktor Orban in recent years, and his regime provides a good example of how cronyism can be used to consolidate political power — not just in terms of the punitive use of regulations, but in licensing and government contracting as well. Whether Trump would be able to achieve these kinds of results is deeply debatable, of course. But the model is there.
Elaborating on this theme, Jasper Theodor Kauth, a political scientist at Nuffield College, Oxford, wrote by email: “Trump’s threats to use state coercion to go after perceived personal and political opponents is evidence of his agenda to disrupt democratic norms.”
Kauth noted that he and Desmond King, a political scientist at Oxford, describe these practices as “disruptive illiberalism” in their 2021 paper “Illiberalism”:
They keep up the appearance of honoring democratic procedures (elections) while eroding democracy through the back door — although in the case of Trump this erosion is now taking place in plain sight. These warnings need to be taken seriously regardless of their intention as they heighten the risk of a future transition to authoritarianism.
What drives the willingness of wealthy executives to abandon their principled concerns over Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 insurrection?
Rawi Abdelal, a professor of international management at Harvard Business School, argues that the combination of “fear and, frankly, naïveté are far more powerful influences than simple greed.”
Abdelal wrote by email:
What is most interesting to me is that this is not as much about Donald J. Trump, the individual, but about a moment in history. These sorts of anti-systemic challenges to democratic practice are emerging across the developed world and in developing countries as well. There exists in these societies — including ours — a deep frustration with the system. Many believe that the system is simply unfair, and often it is exactly that.
Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, noted that some of the conservative victories in campaign-finance law have had the unintended consequence of strengthening “the power of elected officials to coerce donations out of the donors.”
There has always been, Cain wrote by email, “an element of hostile dependency built into campaign fund-raising. Businesses have always given money to gain access or avoid bad things happening to them if the people in power feel that certain supporters let them down.”
Until recently, Cain argued, the potential for extortion
was limited by stricter campaign contribution laws before we loosened the system up post the Citizens United decision. The irony of inviting large donors and businesses to give large or unlimited donations is that the court strengthened the implicit hostile dependency relationship between donors and Trump.
Republican donors sought the elimination of restrictions on donors in the belief that such loosening of the law “would favor them,” Cain wrote. Instead, “the dog has caught the car just as it is backing up on it,” adding: “Trump’s mafia m.o. can be counted on to take this to the extreme.”
While greed and fear are powerful motivations behind the decision to make campaign contributions to a candidate, they are not antithetical. Rather, they reinforce each other, something Trump appears to be acutely aware of.
Samuel Issacharoff, a professor of constitutional law at N.Y.U., described this dynamic in an email to me, which I will leave as the last word:
Trump governs in a swirl of corruption and intimidation. Everyone knows this and understands that in such regimes, proximity to power is key to government largess. In oligarchic regimes we see this in the sheer population concentrations in the capital city. Here, aspirants flock to Mar-a-Lago.
Stable democracies rely on institutions. Fragile democracies have poorly formed institutions. Unfortunately, the new populist wave sees the unwinding of institutions in favor of personalist rule. One cannot afford to be distant from the heart of power when perks are doled out on a one-by-one basis by cronies of the top commander of the country.
The rush to Trump does not, in my view, represent policy agreements with the Trump tax cuts or anything of the like. Many of those rushing to Trump actually had their taxes go up because of his retaliation against blue states through the elimination of the local tax property deduction. They are eager to contribute, and to be seen as contributing, because power and privilege flow from proximity. Trump may view himself as a latter-day Louis XIV, including in his love of gilt. But in more recent times, this is the governance style of the banana republic dictators of the 20th century and the populist anti-democrats of the 21st.
By Thomas B. Edsall, The New York Times
Donald Trump has added something new to the practice of extracting money from major donors: fear.
Traditionally, high-dollar contributors write big checks for a mix of reasons: to curry favor, to support their political party, to promote an agenda, to win favorable tax and regulatory policies, to defeat the opposition, to be seen as powerful — a blend of self-interest and principle.
This year, Trump’s own history in the White House, combined with the agenda for 2025 that he and his allies have been putting together, amounts to a warning to wavering supporters.
According to The Washington Post, Trump has candidly warned onlookers that he will turn the federal bureaucracy into an instrument to punish those who fail to toe the MAGA line:
He wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office, including his former chief of staff, John F. Kelly, and former attorney general William P. Barr, as well as his ex-attorney Ty Cobb and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley, according to people who have talked to him, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Trump has also talked of prosecuting officials at the F.B.I. and Justice Department, a person familiar with the matter said.
In public, Trump has vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” President Biden and his family.
The events described in the Post story
reflect Trump’s determination to harness the power of the presidency to exact revenge on those who have challenged or criticized him if he returns to the White House. The former president has frequently threatened to take punitive steps against his perceived enemies, arguing that doing so would be justified by the current prosecutions against him. Trump has claimed without evidence that the criminal charges he is facing — a total of 88 across four state and federal indictments — were made up to damage him politically.
Trump has made “retribution” a central theme of his campaign, seeking to intertwine his own legal defense with a call for payback against perceived slights and offenses to “forgotten” Americans.
Faced with the prospect of a chief executive prepared to abandon the rule of law for the rule of revenge, many affluent donors — for whom the machinations of government determine bankruptcy or wealth — seem to think they have little choice but to pony up to the self-proclaimed “dictator for a day.”
Trump’s campaign to reclaim the White House — armed with the bristling Heritage Foundation playbook, which conservatives are using as a tool to pressure Trump to remain true to the hard-right agenda, as well as long, revealing lists compiled by Axios and The Times of prospective MAGA appointees — is the embodiment of the politics of intimidation.
How so?
At the core of what both Trump and Heritage’s Project 2025 have proposed is an escalation of the power concentrated in the presidency and in the executive branch generally. This includes the politicization of the bureaucracy, whose mission would become, in part, to wreak revenge on Trump’s adversaries and the adoption, throughout federal departments and agencies, of policies rewarding ideological supporters and defunding ideological opponents.
Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor at Princeton of sociology and international affairs, summed up the Trump-driven changes in the politics of raising money in an email: “Most business leaders unfamiliar with autocratic government believe that when they support someone running for office, that person will owe them something if elected, tax cuts, deregulation, whatever the business leaders want.”
But, Scheppele continued, “autocrats turn the tables. Once elected, autocrats use the power of the state to squeeze business.”
In these circumstances, she added, political leaders “can threaten businesses with tax audits, more regulation, even criminal charges, unless they give in to the autocrats’ demands.”
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, Scheppele wrote in her email,
is a blueprint for autocracy. In fact, it’s a direct copy of the plan that Viktor Orban used to take over the Hungarian government in 2010. If it is carried out, Project 2025 will concentrate huge power in the hands of the president, giving him the power to control the whole federal government at his whim. If business leaders think that this will benefit them and that giving up the rule of law is good for business, they will quickly learn that they are wrong. But it will be too late.
The Trump campaign has made it clear that Trump is not committed to adopting all the policy and personnel proposals described in Project 2025 or other documents produced outside his campaign.
At the same time, nowhere is corporate acquiescence to Trump more evident than among Republican megadonors who swore after Jan. 6, 2021, that they would never again support Trump, but who are now swallowing their pride, trickling back in obeisance to the leader who betrayed them with his encouragement of the insurrection.
In February 2023, Eric Levine, one of the founders of the law firm Eiseman Levine and a prominent Republican fund-raiser, told Politico:
I don’t think it is fair to call Donald Trump a damaged candidate. He is a metastasizing cancer who if he is not stopped is going to destroy the party. Donald Trump is a loser. He is the first president since Hoover to lose the House, the Senate and the presidency in a single term.
As if that were not enough, Levine continued, Trump “is probably the only Republican in the country, if not the only person in the country, who can’t beat Joe Biden.”
Less than a month ago, however, Levine sent out a memo to fellow Republicans telling them he has had a change of heart:
The adage of “never say never” is a wise one. I repeatedly said, since the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, that I will never vote for Donald Trump. Today, however, due to a dramatic change in circumstances, albeit reluctantly and with reservations, I have decided I will vote for Trump in November.
Levine is not alone in his return to the Trump fold. On March 29, Josh Dawsey, Jeff Stein, Michael Scherer and Elizabeth Dwoskin, reporters for The Washington Post, published “Many G.O.P. Billionaires Balked at Jan. 6. They’re Coming Back to Trump.”
“As hopes of a Republican alternative have crumbled,” the four Post reporters wrote, “elite donors who once balked at Trump’s fueling of the Capitol insurrection, worried about his legal problems and decried what they saw as his chaotic presidency are rediscovering their affinity for the former president — even as he praises and vows to free Jan. 6 defendants, promises mass deportations and faces 88 felony charges.”
Some examples:
The day after a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, billionaire and G.O.P. megadonor Nelson Peltz called the insurrection a “disgrace” and expressed remorse for voting for Donald Trump: “I’m sorry I did that.” In early March, nonetheless, Peltz hosted a breakfast meeting at his Palm Beach mansion with Trump and such billionaire Trump backers as Steve Wynn and Isaac Perlmutter.
And similarly, “After Jan. 6, billionaire developer Robert Bigelow said Trump had ‘lost me as a supporter. … He showed that, in that particular hour, he was no commander.’” This year, “Bigelow has pledged $20 million to a pro-Trump campaign group and has given $1 million to cover the former president’s legal costs.”
Bigelow was on the host committee for a record-setting $50.5 million fund-raiser for Trump and the Republican National Committee in Palm Beach on Saturday night. The suggested price of admission: from $250,000 to $814,600.
Most of the commentary on the megadonors’ return to the Trump fold suggests that self-interest and greed are the primary motivators. In describing donors’ calculations, The Washington Post wrote: “The financial upside of going with the former president may win out. Trump has discussed further cutting the corporate tax rate, and he toyed in his administration with unilaterally lowering the capital gains rate paid by investors.”
Jonathan Chait, a columnist at New York magazine, is more explicit:
Joe Biden is running on a plan to increase taxes on the very wealthy, while Trump is promising to cut those taxes. In 2025, most of the Trump tax cuts will expire, as will Obamacare subsidies extended by the Inflation Reduction Act. The 2024 elections will therefore determine whether hundreds of billions of dollars remain in the pockets of wealthy people or instead fund things like health insurance for the middle class.
Similarly, Chris Cillizza told readers of his Substack newsletter, “I will now explain to you how these wealthy people overcame their principled stances against Trump as a threat to democracy.”
How?
The answer to all of your questions is money. Most rich people want to stay as rich as possible. Or get even richer. THAT is their main focus. So, when rubber meets road, that is their default setting. Principles go out the window.
The Post writers, Chait and Cillizza are right, up to a point. The about-face of these superrich donors is a mixture of greed and terror: terror of sparking the anger of a volatile politician who proudly declares “I am your retribution.”
Just as Trump has cowed congressional Republicans — many of whom privately voice strong criticism of him — with the threat of a MAGA-driven primary challenge, he has turned himself and his agenda into weapons of intimidation for businesses seeking to survive and thrive in a second Trump administration.
A primary goal of business is predictability, if not certainty, based in part on consistent rules, regulations and laws so that corporations can make plans and investments without worrying about arbitrary government interventions based on the revenge-seeking whims of a leader many see as a malignant narcissist.
American businesses are fully aware of Trump’s willingness to govern by caprice, a modus operandi he demonstrated repeatedly during his term in the White House.
In those years, however, he was held back by his own ineptitude, the incompetence of his most loyal advisers and the interventions of his more reasonable aides and key civil servants — a combination that kept him largely in check.
Catherine Rampell summed up some of the most egregious initiatives of the Trump White House in a November 2023 Washington Post column, “Take Trump at His Word When He Threatens to Punish His Enemies”:
Trump also frequently deployed economic and regulatory powers against businesses deemed insufficiently loyal.
For example, his administration launched a bogus antitrust investigation into some auto companies when they did not support his rollback of fuel-efficiency standards. He likewise reportedly instructed his top economic aide to interfere with the merger of AT&T and Time Warner, as punishment for critical coverage from CNN, which was then owned by Time Warner.
Trump also openly mused about revoking the licenses of broadcast news outlets for, among other things, reporting that his secretary of state had called him a “moron.” Again, his underlings did not go along with him.
Elsewhere, he tried to use the government procurement process to damage Amazon. According to a memoir by a top aide to then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Trump “called and directed Mattis to ‘screw Amazon’ by locking them out of a chance to bid’ on a defense contract.”
Trump’s allies, especially those working on the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, are working tirelessly to make sure that if Trump wins in November, he will not be restrained by aides or career civil servants and that instead of taking office unprepared, he will have a complete MAGA agenda from Day 1.
Separately from the report, Project 2025 has been assembling names of Trump loyalists who will take his commands seriously — and not deep-six them — to fill key spots in a second Trump administration, while simultaneously assembling an across-the-board agenda of legislative initiatives, executive orders and regulatory changes running the gamut from anti-abortion policies to a strategy “to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will,” in the words of one of the project’s authors.
Perhaps most important, Project 2025 asserts that “President Trump’s Schedule F proposal regarding accountability in hiring must be reinstituted.”
Schedule F, which Trump sought to initiate by executive order in 2020, would turn the top 50,000 or so civil servants, who are currently protected from arbitrary firing or demotion, into political appointees under the control of his administration. Trump lost the White House before Schedule F could be applied, and President Biden withdrew the executive order creating it.
For corporate America, application of Schedule F would radically escalate uncertainty. Federal officials making decisions ranging from penalties for failed occupational safety violations to initiation of antitrust proceedings, from I.R.S. rulings to the application of sanitary regulations in nursing homes would presumably have to prioritize loyalty to Trump to keep their jobs.
Fear of the consequences of Schedule F is the strongest weapon of intimidation in Trump’s fund-raising armament. A significant campaign contribution might well serve as a useful shield.
“One practical consequence of undermining the civil service is a rise in cronyism,” Vanessa Williamson, a senior fellow in governance studies at Brookings, wrote by email in response to my inquiry. “Usually we think of that in terms of the ‘winners,’ the insiders getting special deals, but it is equally true that cronyism creates ‘losers,’ the business elites that do not get favors or face punishment for their lack of loyalty to the ruling party.”
Trump and others on the American right, Williamson wrote,
have become enamored of Hungary’s Viktor Orban in recent years, and his regime provides a good example of how cronyism can be used to consolidate political power — not just in terms of the punitive use of regulations, but in licensing and government contracting as well. Whether Trump would be able to achieve these kinds of results is deeply debatable, of course. But the model is there.
Elaborating on this theme, Jasper Theodor Kauth, a political scientist at Nuffield College, Oxford, wrote by email: “Trump’s threats to use state coercion to go after perceived personal and political opponents is evidence of his agenda to disrupt democratic norms.”
Kauth noted that he and Desmond King, a political scientist at Oxford, describe these practices as “disruptive illiberalism” in their 2021 paper “Illiberalism”:
They keep up the appearance of honoring democratic procedures (elections) while eroding democracy through the back door — although in the case of Trump this erosion is now taking place in plain sight. These warnings need to be taken seriously regardless of their intention as they heighten the risk of a future transition to authoritarianism.
What drives the willingness of wealthy executives to abandon their principled concerns over Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 insurrection?
Rawi Abdelal, a professor of international management at Harvard Business School, argues that the combination of “fear and, frankly, naïveté are far more powerful influences than simple greed.”
Abdelal wrote by email:
What is most interesting to me is that this is not as much about Donald J. Trump, the individual, but about a moment in history. These sorts of anti-systemic challenges to democratic practice are emerging across the developed world and in developing countries as well. There exists in these societies — including ours — a deep frustration with the system. Many believe that the system is simply unfair, and often it is exactly that.
Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, noted that some of the conservative victories in campaign-finance law have had the unintended consequence of strengthening “the power of elected officials to coerce donations out of the donors.”
There has always been, Cain wrote by email, “an element of hostile dependency built into campaign fund-raising. Businesses have always given money to gain access or avoid bad things happening to them if the people in power feel that certain supporters let them down.”
Until recently, Cain argued, the potential for extortion
was limited by stricter campaign contribution laws before we loosened the system up post the Citizens United decision. The irony of inviting large donors and businesses to give large or unlimited donations is that the court strengthened the implicit hostile dependency relationship between donors and Trump.
Republican donors sought the elimination of restrictions on donors in the belief that such loosening of the law “would favor them,” Cain wrote. Instead, “the dog has caught the car just as it is backing up on it,” adding: “Trump’s mafia m.o. can be counted on to take this to the extreme.”
While greed and fear are powerful motivations behind the decision to make campaign contributions to a candidate, they are not antithetical. Rather, they reinforce each other, something Trump appears to be acutely aware of.
Samuel Issacharoff, a professor of constitutional law at N.Y.U., described this dynamic in an email to me, which I will leave as the last word:
Trump governs in a swirl of corruption and intimidation. Everyone knows this and understands that in such regimes, proximity to power is key to government largess. In oligarchic regimes we see this in the sheer population concentrations in the capital city. Here, aspirants flock to Mar-a-Lago.
Stable democracies rely on institutions. Fragile democracies have poorly formed institutions. Unfortunately, the new populist wave sees the unwinding of institutions in favor of personalist rule. One cannot afford to be distant from the heart of power when perks are doled out on a one-by-one basis by cronies of the top commander of the country.
The rush to Trump does not, in my view, represent policy agreements with the Trump tax cuts or anything of the like. Many of those rushing to Trump actually had their taxes go up because of his retaliation against blue states through the elimination of the local tax property deduction. They are eager to contribute, and to be seen as contributing, because power and privilege flow from proximity. Trump may view himself as a latter-day Louis XIV, including in his love of gilt. But in more recent times, this is the governance style of the banana republic dictators of the 20th century and the populist anti-democrats of the 21st.
THE MAN WHO SNUFFED OUT ABORTION RIGHTS IS HERE TO TELL YOU HE IS A MODERATE
By Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times
Donald Trump does not speak from conviction. He does not speak from belief or at least any belief other than self-obsession. He certainly does not speak from anything we might recognize as reason; when he’s holding forth from a podium, even the most careful students of Trump the rhetorician will struggle to find the light of complex thought.
You should think of Trump instead as a purely instrumental speaker. It does not matter to him whether a statement is true or false. It does not matter if one statement contradicts another, in the same speech or in the same paragraph or in the same sentence. What matters to Trump is whether the words serve the purpose at hand. He will say anything if it’s what he feels an audience wants to hear or if it moves him one step closer to a personal or political goal.
Trump’s fundamental disinterest in the truth value of his words is the only context that matters for his comments on abortion Monday morning. In a direct-to-camera statement on Truth Social, the former president told his audience that he does not support a national ban on abortion. “My view is now that we have abortion where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint,” Trump said. “The states will determine by vote or legislation or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land. In this case, the law of the state.”
It should be said that this position is itself a strikingly conservative departure from mainstream thinking. Nearly two-thirds of Americans support legal abortion in most or all cases — the constitutional status quo under Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. To leave abortion rights up to the states is, as we’ve seen since the Supreme Court’s decision two years ago in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, to give state legislatures broad discretion to restrict and limit the bodily autonomy of anyone within their borders.
Compared with the mounting push from anti-abortion activists to ban the procedure nationwide, however, Trump’s stance is designed to look almost moderate. And if you were born yesterday, you could even say that Trump was beginning his pivot to the center, to blur the difference on abortion between himself and other Republicans. If he can persuade skeptical voters that he’s not a Mike Pence or a Ron DeSantis, then he’s one step closer to a second term.
But there’s no reason to take Trump’s rhetoric at face value. Trump is aware, like virtually everyone who follows American politics, that Republicans are dangerously vulnerable on abortion rights. The Biden campaign has already begun airing ads that blame Trump directly for abortion bans. He knows that he needs to neutralize this issue as much as possible, without alienating his anti-abortion followers. When it looked, for example, as though support for a 15-week ban would do the trick, Trump floated support for a 15-week ban.
It does not require any particular powers of political analysis to see that Monday’s statement is a ploy — and an obvious one at that. What does Trump say immediately before giving his states’ rights position on abortion? He praises himself for ending Roe: “Many people have asked me what my position is on abortion and abortion rights, especially since I was proudly the person responsible for the ending of something that all legal scholars, both sides, wanted and, in fact, demanded be ended: Roe v. Wade.” This claim, that all sides wanted an end to Roe, is a total fabrication, but it serves to give Trump cover as he tries to be all things to all people.
Later in the video, as if to emphasize his responsibility for the end of Roe, Trump applauds the Dobbs majority, by name no less: “I want to thank the six justices — Chief Justice John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch, incredible people — for having the courage to allow this long-term, hard-fought battle to finally end.”
Trump is saying what he thinks his audience — in the public and in the press — wants to hear. He’s trying to put abortion in the rearview mirror, to treat it as a settled fact that he wants a less strident approach to reproductive rights.
The truth of the matter is that given a second term in office, Trump and his allies will do everything in their power to ban abortion nationwide, with or without a Republican majority in Congress. Recall that in his 2016 campaign, Trump said that there had to be “some form” of punishment for women who had abortions. Later, as president, he backed a House bill that would have banned abortion after 20 weeks. Anti-abortion strategists have not been shy about their plan to use the 1873 Comstock Act, an anti-obscenity law, as legal authority for executive actions to limit abortions throughout the country, in blue states as well as red ones.
Opponents of abortion believe that under the act — whose enforcement produced a political and legal backlash so fierce that it made the law a dead letter for most of the 20th century — the president has the power to ban the mailing, sale, advertisement or distribution of any drug or instrument that could be used to cause or perform an abortion.
If you’re not inclined to put Trump’s abortion comments in the context of his habitual disregard for the truth, then you should at least put them in the context of his political coalition, which is dominated by forces and constituencies that want nothing less than the criminalization of abortion, the constitutional protection of fetal life and state regulation of bodily autonomy for the sake of patriarchal gender norms.
Trump embraced this movement and its demands as president, and there’s every reason to believe he’ll do the same with another four years in office. Put another way, when has Trump ever bucked anyone who defends him, supports him and showers him with praise?
We do not have to speculate about Trump’s relationship to abortion and reproductive rights as leader of the Republican Party. He is, after all, a former president of the United States. We already know what he wants, what he’ll do and what he’ll sign. Trump landed a major blow against legal abortion during his first term. If given a second, he will land another.
By Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times
Donald Trump does not speak from conviction. He does not speak from belief or at least any belief other than self-obsession. He certainly does not speak from anything we might recognize as reason; when he’s holding forth from a podium, even the most careful students of Trump the rhetorician will struggle to find the light of complex thought.
You should think of Trump instead as a purely instrumental speaker. It does not matter to him whether a statement is true or false. It does not matter if one statement contradicts another, in the same speech or in the same paragraph or in the same sentence. What matters to Trump is whether the words serve the purpose at hand. He will say anything if it’s what he feels an audience wants to hear or if it moves him one step closer to a personal or political goal.
Trump’s fundamental disinterest in the truth value of his words is the only context that matters for his comments on abortion Monday morning. In a direct-to-camera statement on Truth Social, the former president told his audience that he does not support a national ban on abortion. “My view is now that we have abortion where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint,” Trump said. “The states will determine by vote or legislation or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land. In this case, the law of the state.”
It should be said that this position is itself a strikingly conservative departure from mainstream thinking. Nearly two-thirds of Americans support legal abortion in most or all cases — the constitutional status quo under Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. To leave abortion rights up to the states is, as we’ve seen since the Supreme Court’s decision two years ago in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, to give state legislatures broad discretion to restrict and limit the bodily autonomy of anyone within their borders.
Compared with the mounting push from anti-abortion activists to ban the procedure nationwide, however, Trump’s stance is designed to look almost moderate. And if you were born yesterday, you could even say that Trump was beginning his pivot to the center, to blur the difference on abortion between himself and other Republicans. If he can persuade skeptical voters that he’s not a Mike Pence or a Ron DeSantis, then he’s one step closer to a second term.
But there’s no reason to take Trump’s rhetoric at face value. Trump is aware, like virtually everyone who follows American politics, that Republicans are dangerously vulnerable on abortion rights. The Biden campaign has already begun airing ads that blame Trump directly for abortion bans. He knows that he needs to neutralize this issue as much as possible, without alienating his anti-abortion followers. When it looked, for example, as though support for a 15-week ban would do the trick, Trump floated support for a 15-week ban.
It does not require any particular powers of political analysis to see that Monday’s statement is a ploy — and an obvious one at that. What does Trump say immediately before giving his states’ rights position on abortion? He praises himself for ending Roe: “Many people have asked me what my position is on abortion and abortion rights, especially since I was proudly the person responsible for the ending of something that all legal scholars, both sides, wanted and, in fact, demanded be ended: Roe v. Wade.” This claim, that all sides wanted an end to Roe, is a total fabrication, but it serves to give Trump cover as he tries to be all things to all people.
Later in the video, as if to emphasize his responsibility for the end of Roe, Trump applauds the Dobbs majority, by name no less: “I want to thank the six justices — Chief Justice John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch, incredible people — for having the courage to allow this long-term, hard-fought battle to finally end.”
Trump is saying what he thinks his audience — in the public and in the press — wants to hear. He’s trying to put abortion in the rearview mirror, to treat it as a settled fact that he wants a less strident approach to reproductive rights.
The truth of the matter is that given a second term in office, Trump and his allies will do everything in their power to ban abortion nationwide, with or without a Republican majority in Congress. Recall that in his 2016 campaign, Trump said that there had to be “some form” of punishment for women who had abortions. Later, as president, he backed a House bill that would have banned abortion after 20 weeks. Anti-abortion strategists have not been shy about their plan to use the 1873 Comstock Act, an anti-obscenity law, as legal authority for executive actions to limit abortions throughout the country, in blue states as well as red ones.
Opponents of abortion believe that under the act — whose enforcement produced a political and legal backlash so fierce that it made the law a dead letter for most of the 20th century — the president has the power to ban the mailing, sale, advertisement or distribution of any drug or instrument that could be used to cause or perform an abortion.
If you’re not inclined to put Trump’s abortion comments in the context of his habitual disregard for the truth, then you should at least put them in the context of his political coalition, which is dominated by forces and constituencies that want nothing less than the criminalization of abortion, the constitutional protection of fetal life and state regulation of bodily autonomy for the sake of patriarchal gender norms.
Trump embraced this movement and its demands as president, and there’s every reason to believe he’ll do the same with another four years in office. Put another way, when has Trump ever bucked anyone who defends him, supports him and showers him with praise?
We do not have to speculate about Trump’s relationship to abortion and reproductive rights as leader of the Republican Party. He is, after all, a former president of the United States. We already know what he wants, what he’ll do and what he’ll sign. Trump landed a major blow against legal abortion during his first term. If given a second, he will land another.
THE METHOD BEHIND TRUMP’S MISTRUTHS
A close examination of every public word from the former president during a crucial week of his campaign.
By Angelo Fichera, The New York Times
Since the beginning of his political career, Donald J. Trump has misled, mischaracterized, dissembled, exaggerated and, at times, flatly lied. His flawed statements about the border, the economy, the coronavirus pandemic and the 2020 election have formed the bedrock of his 2024 campaign.
Though his penchant for bending, and often breaking, the truth has been well documented, a close study of how he does so reveals a kind of technique to his dishonesty: a set of recurring rhetorical moves with which Mr. Trump fuels his popularity among his supporters.
In the week starting with Mr. Trump’s victory speech in Iowa through his win in the New Hampshire primary — the contests that put him on the path to becoming his party’s nominee for the third consecutive time — The New York Times analyzed all of his public statements, including speeches, interviews and social media posts.
His words focused heavily on attacking his political rivals, self-aggrandizing and stoking fear to make his case for 2024. In doing so, Mr. Trump often relied on repeated falsehoods and half-truths. He has yet to deviate from this approach in the general election.
Here’s a look at how he does it.
He grossly distorts his opponents’ records and proposals to make them sound unreasonable.
While Joe Biden is pushing the largest tax hike in American history — you know he wants to quadruple your taxes. I will make the Trump tax cuts permanent. Trump Presidential Campaign via C-span Atkinson, N.H., rally, Jan. 16, 2024
While Joe Biden is pushing the largest tax hike in American history – you know, he wants to quadruple your taxes.
President Biden has not proposed quadrupling taxes. In fact, he has consistently vowed not to raise taxes on anyone earning less than $400,000. Sean Hannity interview, Jan. 22, 2024
I mean, what he’s doing with energy with an all-electric mandate, where you won’t be able to buy any other form of car in a very short period of time.
Mr. Biden has not implemented an electric car mandate. The administration has announced rules that would limit tailpipe emissions from cars and light trucks, effectively requiring automakers to sell more electric vehicles and hybrids. It doesn’t ban gas cars. Truth Social, Jan. 16, 2024
He exaggerates and twists the facts to make his record sound better than it is.
And think of it, for four years we had no terror problem. I had the terror ban. I had bans on people coming in from areas where there’s going to be problem. You don’t have that anymore. Newsmax via Youtube Newsmax interview, Jan. 21, 2024
And think of it, for four years we had no terror problem.
There were in fact terrorist attacks in the United States during the Trump administration. In 2017, to name one, a native of Uzbekistan plowed a pickup truck down a bike path in Manhattan, killing eight people. The Justice Department said the driver, Sayfullo Saipov, carried out the terrorist attack in the name of ISIS. Atkinson, N.H., rally, Jan. 16, 2024
We had the best economy. We had no inflation.
The economy wasn’t the “best” under Mr. Trump. Even setting aside Covid, the average growth rate was lower under Mr. Trump than under former Presidents Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan. And inflation was low, but it wasn’t nonexistent. Hannity interview, Jan. 18, 2024
We had gasoline at $1.87.
The national average price of a gallon of gasoline dropped to that price during one week amid the Covid lockdown in 2020, when demand was extraordinarily low. But when Mr. Trump left office in January 2021, the national average was $2.42.
He relies on both well-worn and fresh claims of election rigging to suggest he can lose only if his opponents cheat.
Radical left Democrats rigged the presidential election of 2020, and we’re not going to allow them to rig the presidential election of 2024. We’re not going to allow it to happen. RSBN via Youtube Portsmouth, N.H., rally, Jan. 17, 2024
The radical-left Democrats rigged the presidential election of 2020, and we’re not going to allow them to rig the presidential election of 2024.
The 2020 election was not rigged. Mr. Trump has uttered hundreds of inaccurate claims to support the false claim that it was — mischaracterizing voting processes, citing baseless cases of supposed fraud and sharing conspiracy theories about voting machines. Atkinson, N.H., rally, Jan. 16, 2024
As you know, Nikki Haley in particular is counting on the Democrats and liberals to infiltrate your Republican primary.
Registered Democrats were not able to vote in the New Hampshire Republican primary. The contest was open to registered Republicans and independents. Any Democrats who switched parties or re-registered as independents to vote in the Republican primary — and some did — had to do so before an October 2023 deadline, months before the contest. Laconia, N.H., rally, Jan. 22, 2024
The Republicans went up to vote and none of the machines were working. This was not good. But of course, they said, Well, this was just the way it goes. You know, thousands of people were not allowed to vote. But she, uh, she’s a great person, and she’s going to be a U.S. senator very soon. Kari Lake.
The claim that “thousands” of voters were blocked from casting their ballots in Arizona’s 2022 gubernatorial election — at the expense of Mr. Trump’s preferred candidate, Ms. Lake — is false. There were some glitches in Maricopa County, but voters were largely able to cast their votes.
He has turned his criminal cases into a rallying cry, baselessly asserting that he is being persecuted by his successor.
“Your indictments, and for the people out there that say there’s another shoe that’s going to fall with all of this stuff, I know you say it’s all political.” “These are all Biden indictments. These aren’t indictments. These are Biden. This is a political opponent. He’s coming after a political opponent.” Fox News Fox interview with Bret Baier, Jan. 20, 2024
These are all Biden indictments.
Mr. Trump has not offered any evidence for his contention that Mr. Biden has orchestrated the criminal charges against him. Two of his four cases were brought at the state level. At the federal level, Mr. Trump’s criminal charges — in relation to his effort to remain in power after losing the 2020 election and, separately, over his retention of classified documents after leaving office — are handled by a special counsel and were put before grand juries. Atkinson, N.H., rally, Jan. 16, 2024
I’ve been indicted more than Alphonse Capone.
Mr. Trump has been indicted four times. Mr. Capone was indicted at least six times, according to A. Brad Schwartz, a historian and biographer of the infamous gangster.
He makes unverifiable claims about what the world would have been like had he secured a second term.
We wouldn’t have Russia attacking Ukraine. We wouldn’t have inflation, we wouldn’t have the attack on Israel. Kim Jong-un of north Korea wouldn’t be threatening us
with the nuclear missiles again. RSBN via Youtube Concord, N.H., rally, Jan. 19, 2024
We wouldn’t have Russia attacking Ukraine. We wouldn’t have inflation. We wouldn’t have the attack on Israel.
There is no evidence that these events wouldn’t or couldn’t have occurred had the 2020 election outcome been different — and it’s impossible to prove. But experts say the context surrounding those events render his claims highly questionable. Atkinson, N.H., rally, Jan. 16, 2024
China had a crash yesterday in their stock market. You know why? Because I won Iowa.
There is no proof that China’s stock market woes were related to Mr. Trump’s victory in the Iowa caucuses.
He describes the United States as a nation in ruins.
We are a nation that screens its citizens viciously at all ports. But if you’re an illegal alien, you’re allowed to flow through our country with no check, whatsoever. RSBN via Youtube Laconia, N.H., rally, Jan. 22, 2024
We are a nation that screens its citizens viciously at all ports. But if you are an illegal alien, you’re allowed to flow through our country with no check whatsoever.
Undocumented immigrants caught crossing the border are processed, whether they are returned to other countries or later released into the country awaiting future proceedings. Manchester, N.H., rally, Jan. 20, 2024
And now we are a nation that wants to make our revered and very powerful Army tanks – the best anywhere in the world – all electric.
There are no plans to make Army tanks all electric. Laconia, N.H., rally, Jan. 22, 2024
We are a third-world nation.
This is, of course, false. Laconia, N.H., rally, Jan. 22, 2024
We are no longer energy independent or energy dominant as we were just a few short years ago.
Energy production — including oil and gas — has boomed under President Biden. Under both administrations, the United States has been a net exporter of petroleum and natural gas, but it still relies on imports. Laconia, N.H., rally, Jan. 22, 2024
I don’t know what it is with Catholics, but the F.B.I. is going after Catholics.
Mr. Trump’s claim is most likely based on an F.B.I. field office memo that warned of the potential for extremism among adherents of a “radical-traditionalist Catholic” ideology. But the memo was withdrawn and repeatedly condemned by the nation’s top law enforcement officials.
A close examination of every public word from the former president during a crucial week of his campaign.
By Angelo Fichera, The New York Times
Since the beginning of his political career, Donald J. Trump has misled, mischaracterized, dissembled, exaggerated and, at times, flatly lied. His flawed statements about the border, the economy, the coronavirus pandemic and the 2020 election have formed the bedrock of his 2024 campaign.
Though his penchant for bending, and often breaking, the truth has been well documented, a close study of how he does so reveals a kind of technique to his dishonesty: a set of recurring rhetorical moves with which Mr. Trump fuels his popularity among his supporters.
In the week starting with Mr. Trump’s victory speech in Iowa through his win in the New Hampshire primary — the contests that put him on the path to becoming his party’s nominee for the third consecutive time — The New York Times analyzed all of his public statements, including speeches, interviews and social media posts.
His words focused heavily on attacking his political rivals, self-aggrandizing and stoking fear to make his case for 2024. In doing so, Mr. Trump often relied on repeated falsehoods and half-truths. He has yet to deviate from this approach in the general election.
Here’s a look at how he does it.
He grossly distorts his opponents’ records and proposals to make them sound unreasonable.
While Joe Biden is pushing the largest tax hike in American history — you know he wants to quadruple your taxes. I will make the Trump tax cuts permanent. Trump Presidential Campaign via C-span Atkinson, N.H., rally, Jan. 16, 2024
While Joe Biden is pushing the largest tax hike in American history – you know, he wants to quadruple your taxes.
President Biden has not proposed quadrupling taxes. In fact, he has consistently vowed not to raise taxes on anyone earning less than $400,000. Sean Hannity interview, Jan. 22, 2024
I mean, what he’s doing with energy with an all-electric mandate, where you won’t be able to buy any other form of car in a very short period of time.
Mr. Biden has not implemented an electric car mandate. The administration has announced rules that would limit tailpipe emissions from cars and light trucks, effectively requiring automakers to sell more electric vehicles and hybrids. It doesn’t ban gas cars. Truth Social, Jan. 16, 2024
He exaggerates and twists the facts to make his record sound better than it is.
And think of it, for four years we had no terror problem. I had the terror ban. I had bans on people coming in from areas where there’s going to be problem. You don’t have that anymore. Newsmax via Youtube Newsmax interview, Jan. 21, 2024
And think of it, for four years we had no terror problem.
There were in fact terrorist attacks in the United States during the Trump administration. In 2017, to name one, a native of Uzbekistan plowed a pickup truck down a bike path in Manhattan, killing eight people. The Justice Department said the driver, Sayfullo Saipov, carried out the terrorist attack in the name of ISIS. Atkinson, N.H., rally, Jan. 16, 2024
We had the best economy. We had no inflation.
The economy wasn’t the “best” under Mr. Trump. Even setting aside Covid, the average growth rate was lower under Mr. Trump than under former Presidents Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan. And inflation was low, but it wasn’t nonexistent. Hannity interview, Jan. 18, 2024
We had gasoline at $1.87.
The national average price of a gallon of gasoline dropped to that price during one week amid the Covid lockdown in 2020, when demand was extraordinarily low. But when Mr. Trump left office in January 2021, the national average was $2.42.
He relies on both well-worn and fresh claims of election rigging to suggest he can lose only if his opponents cheat.
Radical left Democrats rigged the presidential election of 2020, and we’re not going to allow them to rig the presidential election of 2024. We’re not going to allow it to happen. RSBN via Youtube Portsmouth, N.H., rally, Jan. 17, 2024
The radical-left Democrats rigged the presidential election of 2020, and we’re not going to allow them to rig the presidential election of 2024.
The 2020 election was not rigged. Mr. Trump has uttered hundreds of inaccurate claims to support the false claim that it was — mischaracterizing voting processes, citing baseless cases of supposed fraud and sharing conspiracy theories about voting machines. Atkinson, N.H., rally, Jan. 16, 2024
As you know, Nikki Haley in particular is counting on the Democrats and liberals to infiltrate your Republican primary.
Registered Democrats were not able to vote in the New Hampshire Republican primary. The contest was open to registered Republicans and independents. Any Democrats who switched parties or re-registered as independents to vote in the Republican primary — and some did — had to do so before an October 2023 deadline, months before the contest. Laconia, N.H., rally, Jan. 22, 2024
The Republicans went up to vote and none of the machines were working. This was not good. But of course, they said, Well, this was just the way it goes. You know, thousands of people were not allowed to vote. But she, uh, she’s a great person, and she’s going to be a U.S. senator very soon. Kari Lake.
The claim that “thousands” of voters were blocked from casting their ballots in Arizona’s 2022 gubernatorial election — at the expense of Mr. Trump’s preferred candidate, Ms. Lake — is false. There were some glitches in Maricopa County, but voters were largely able to cast their votes.
He has turned his criminal cases into a rallying cry, baselessly asserting that he is being persecuted by his successor.
“Your indictments, and for the people out there that say there’s another shoe that’s going to fall with all of this stuff, I know you say it’s all political.” “These are all Biden indictments. These aren’t indictments. These are Biden. This is a political opponent. He’s coming after a political opponent.” Fox News Fox interview with Bret Baier, Jan. 20, 2024
These are all Biden indictments.
Mr. Trump has not offered any evidence for his contention that Mr. Biden has orchestrated the criminal charges against him. Two of his four cases were brought at the state level. At the federal level, Mr. Trump’s criminal charges — in relation to his effort to remain in power after losing the 2020 election and, separately, over his retention of classified documents after leaving office — are handled by a special counsel and were put before grand juries. Atkinson, N.H., rally, Jan. 16, 2024
I’ve been indicted more than Alphonse Capone.
Mr. Trump has been indicted four times. Mr. Capone was indicted at least six times, according to A. Brad Schwartz, a historian and biographer of the infamous gangster.
He makes unverifiable claims about what the world would have been like had he secured a second term.
We wouldn’t have Russia attacking Ukraine. We wouldn’t have inflation, we wouldn’t have the attack on Israel. Kim Jong-un of north Korea wouldn’t be threatening us
with the nuclear missiles again. RSBN via Youtube Concord, N.H., rally, Jan. 19, 2024
We wouldn’t have Russia attacking Ukraine. We wouldn’t have inflation. We wouldn’t have the attack on Israel.
There is no evidence that these events wouldn’t or couldn’t have occurred had the 2020 election outcome been different — and it’s impossible to prove. But experts say the context surrounding those events render his claims highly questionable. Atkinson, N.H., rally, Jan. 16, 2024
China had a crash yesterday in their stock market. You know why? Because I won Iowa.
There is no proof that China’s stock market woes were related to Mr. Trump’s victory in the Iowa caucuses.
He describes the United States as a nation in ruins.
We are a nation that screens its citizens viciously at all ports. But if you’re an illegal alien, you’re allowed to flow through our country with no check, whatsoever. RSBN via Youtube Laconia, N.H., rally, Jan. 22, 2024
We are a nation that screens its citizens viciously at all ports. But if you are an illegal alien, you’re allowed to flow through our country with no check whatsoever.
Undocumented immigrants caught crossing the border are processed, whether they are returned to other countries or later released into the country awaiting future proceedings. Manchester, N.H., rally, Jan. 20, 2024
And now we are a nation that wants to make our revered and very powerful Army tanks – the best anywhere in the world – all electric.
There are no plans to make Army tanks all electric. Laconia, N.H., rally, Jan. 22, 2024
We are a third-world nation.
This is, of course, false. Laconia, N.H., rally, Jan. 22, 2024
We are no longer energy independent or energy dominant as we were just a few short years ago.
Energy production — including oil and gas — has boomed under President Biden. Under both administrations, the United States has been a net exporter of petroleum and natural gas, but it still relies on imports. Laconia, N.H., rally, Jan. 22, 2024
I don’t know what it is with Catholics, but the F.B.I. is going after Catholics.
Mr. Trump’s claim is most likely based on an F.B.I. field office memo that warned of the potential for extremism among adherents of a “radical-traditionalist Catholic” ideology. But the memo was withdrawn and repeatedly condemned by the nation’s top law enforcement officials.
WHEN A TOP REPUBLICAN SAYS RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA HAS INFECTED THE GOP
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul is the latest to point out such a problem in his party
By Aaron Blake, The Washington Post
During the first impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump in 2019, former Trump national security aide Fiona Hill made an extraordinary plea. Seated in front of congressional Republicans, she implored them not to spread Russian propaganda.
“In the course of this investigation, I would ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests,” she told them. She was referring to comments they had made during her earlier deposition breathing life into a baseless, Trump-backed suggestion that Ukraine, rather than Russia, interfered in the 2016 U.S. election.
“These fictions are harmful even if they’re deployed for purely domestic political purposes,” she added. Republicans on the committee blanched at the suggestion that they had served as conduits for Russian misinformation, but Hill refused to back down.
Five years later, Republicans are starting to grapple more publicly with the idea that this kind of thing is happening in their ranks.
The most striking example came this week. In an interview with Puck News’s Julia Ioffe, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.) — none other than the GOP chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee — flat-out said that Russian propaganda had “infected a good chunk of my party’s base.” McCaul suggested conservative media was to blame.
“There are some more nighttime entertainment shows that seem to spin, like, I see the Russian propaganda in some of it — and it’s almost identical [to what they’re saying on Russian state television] — on our airwaves,” McCaul said. He also cited “these people that read various conspiracy-theory outlets that are just not accurate, and they actually model Russian propaganda.”
Asked which Republicans specifically he was talking about, McCaul said it was “obvious,” before staff intervened and asked that the conversation go off the record. These comments are the most significant to date, but they’re not the only ones.
A GOP impasse over additional funding for Ukraine’s defense against Russia — combined recently with Tucker Carlson’s deeply weird promotion of Russia and Trump’s comments about not defending NATO allies from Moscow — has apparently occasioned some self-reflection among Republicans about their colleagues and allies:
Around the same time, former congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said there is now “a Putin wing of the Republican Party.”
In 2022, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) called the pro-Putin sentiments in some corners of his party “almost treasonous,” while allowing that perhaps his fellow Republicans were just attention-seekers. “It’s unthinkable to me, it’s almost treasonous and it just makes me ill to see some of these people do that,” Romney said. “But, of course, they do it because if they get shock value and it’s good to get more eyeballs and maybe make a little more money for them or their network. It’s disgusting.”
And then there is what may be the most famous example: when House GOP leaders in 2016 privately joked about Trump being compromised by Russia, as later reported by The Washington Post. The day after The Post broke the news that the Russians had hacked the Democratic National Committee, then-House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) quipped that perhaps Russia had gotten Democrats’ opposition research about Trump. “There’s two people, I think, Putin pays,” McCarthy added, “[Rep. Dana] Rohrabacher and Trump.” (Rohrabacher was an openly pro-Russian Republican from California.)
Then-House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) quickly tried to steer the conversation in another direction and urged people to be discreet. It appeared to be a joke, but perhaps a joke born of real concerns about Trump’s commentary on Russia.
Eight years later, such concerns clearly remain for some prominent Republicans about their colleagues and allies.
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul is the latest to point out such a problem in his party
By Aaron Blake, The Washington Post
During the first impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump in 2019, former Trump national security aide Fiona Hill made an extraordinary plea. Seated in front of congressional Republicans, she implored them not to spread Russian propaganda.
“In the course of this investigation, I would ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests,” she told them. She was referring to comments they had made during her earlier deposition breathing life into a baseless, Trump-backed suggestion that Ukraine, rather than Russia, interfered in the 2016 U.S. election.
“These fictions are harmful even if they’re deployed for purely domestic political purposes,” she added. Republicans on the committee blanched at the suggestion that they had served as conduits for Russian misinformation, but Hill refused to back down.
Five years later, Republicans are starting to grapple more publicly with the idea that this kind of thing is happening in their ranks.
The most striking example came this week. In an interview with Puck News’s Julia Ioffe, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.) — none other than the GOP chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee — flat-out said that Russian propaganda had “infected a good chunk of my party’s base.” McCaul suggested conservative media was to blame.
“There are some more nighttime entertainment shows that seem to spin, like, I see the Russian propaganda in some of it — and it’s almost identical [to what they’re saying on Russian state television] — on our airwaves,” McCaul said. He also cited “these people that read various conspiracy-theory outlets that are just not accurate, and they actually model Russian propaganda.”
Asked which Republicans specifically he was talking about, McCaul said it was “obvious,” before staff intervened and asked that the conversation go off the record. These comments are the most significant to date, but they’re not the only ones.
A GOP impasse over additional funding for Ukraine’s defense against Russia — combined recently with Tucker Carlson’s deeply weird promotion of Russia and Trump’s comments about not defending NATO allies from Moscow — has apparently occasioned some self-reflection among Republicans about their colleagues and allies:
- Former vice president Mike Pence, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and a top aide to Sen. Todd Young (R-Ill.) have warned their party against serving as apologists for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
- Recent presidential candidate Nikki Haley said Trump’s comments about not defending NATO allies, among others, “empower Putin.”
- And Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) shot back at criticism from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) about Cornyn’s support for Ukraine, urging Paxton to “spend less time pushing Russian propaganda.”
Around the same time, former congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said there is now “a Putin wing of the Republican Party.”
In 2022, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) called the pro-Putin sentiments in some corners of his party “almost treasonous,” while allowing that perhaps his fellow Republicans were just attention-seekers. “It’s unthinkable to me, it’s almost treasonous and it just makes me ill to see some of these people do that,” Romney said. “But, of course, they do it because if they get shock value and it’s good to get more eyeballs and maybe make a little more money for them or their network. It’s disgusting.”
And then there is what may be the most famous example: when House GOP leaders in 2016 privately joked about Trump being compromised by Russia, as later reported by The Washington Post. The day after The Post broke the news that the Russians had hacked the Democratic National Committee, then-House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) quipped that perhaps Russia had gotten Democrats’ opposition research about Trump. “There’s two people, I think, Putin pays,” McCarthy added, “[Rep. Dana] Rohrabacher and Trump.” (Rohrabacher was an openly pro-Russian Republican from California.)
Then-House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) quickly tried to steer the conversation in another direction and urged people to be discreet. It appeared to be a joke, but perhaps a joke born of real concerns about Trump’s commentary on Russia.
Eight years later, such concerns clearly remain for some prominent Republicans about their colleagues and allies.
DONALD TRUMP’S INSATIABLE BLOODLUST
By Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
An earthquake. An eclipse. A bridge collapse. A freak blizzard. A biblical flood. Donald Trump leading in battleground states. Apocalyptic vibes are stirred by Trump’s violent rhetoric and talk of blood baths.
If he’s not elected, he bellowed in Ohio, there will be a blood bath in the auto industry. At his Michigan rally on Tuesday, he said there would be a blood bath at the border, speaking from a podium with a banner reading, “Stop Biden’s border blood bath.” He has warned that, without him in the Oval, there will be an “Oppenheimer”-like doomsday; we will lose World War III and America will be devastated by “weapons, the likes of which nobody has ever seen before.” “And the only thing standing between you and its obliteration is me,” Trump has said.
An unspoken Trump threat is that there will be a blood bath again in Washington, like Jan. 6, if he doesn’t win. That is why he calls the criminals who stormed the Capitol “hostages” and “unbelievable patriots.” He starts some rallies with a dystopian remix of the national anthem, sung by the “J6 Prison Choir,” and his own reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance.
The bloody-minded Trump luxuriates in the language of tyrants.
In “Macbeth,” Shakespeare uses blood imagery to chart the creation of a tyrant. Those words echo in Washington as Ralph Fiennes stars in a thrilling Simon Godwin production of “MacBeth” for the Shakespeare Theater Company, opening Tuesday.
“The raw power grab that excites Lady Macbeth and incites her husband to regicide feels especially pertinent now, when the dangers of autocracy loom over political discussions,” Peter Marks wrote in The Washington Post about the production with Fiennes and Indira Varma (the lead sand snake in “Game of Thrones.”)
Trump’s raw power grab after his 2020 loss may have failed, but he’s inflaming his base with language straight out of Macbeth’s trip to hell. “Blood will have blood,” as Macbeth says. One of the witches, the weird sisters, urges him, “Be bloody, bold and resolute.”
Another weird sister, Marjorie Taylor Greene, is predicting end times. “God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent,” she tweeted on Friday. “Earthquakes and eclipses and many more things to come. I pray that our country listens.”
Like Macbeth, Trump crossed a line and won’t turn back. The Irish say, “You may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.” Macbeth killed his king, then said: “I am in blood. Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”
The Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey reported that since Trump put his daughter-in-law in charge of the Republican National Committee, prospective employees are asked if they think the election was stolen. Republicans once burbled on about patriotism and defending America. Now denying democracy is a litmus test for employment in the Formerly Grand Old Party.
But Trump embraces Hitleresque phrases to stir racial hatred. He has talked about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country.” Last month, he called migrants “animals,” saying, “I don’t know if you call them ‘people,’ in some cases. They’re not people, in my opinion.”
As Stephen Greenblatt writes in “Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics,” usurpers don’t ascend to the throne without complicity. Republican enablers do all they can to cozy up to their would-be dictator, even introducing a bill to rename Dulles airport for Trump. Democrats responded by introducing a bill to name a prison in Florida for Trump.
“Why, in some circumstances, does evidence of mendacity, crudeness or cruelty serve not as a fatal disadvantage but as an allure, attracting ardent followers?” Greenblatt asked. “Why do otherwise proud and self-respecting people submit to the sheer effrontery of the tyrant, his sense that he can get away with saying and doing anything he likes, his spectacular indecency?”
Like Macbeth’s castle, the Trump campaign has, as Lady Macbeth put it, “the smell of blood,” and “all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten” it.
By Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
An earthquake. An eclipse. A bridge collapse. A freak blizzard. A biblical flood. Donald Trump leading in battleground states. Apocalyptic vibes are stirred by Trump’s violent rhetoric and talk of blood baths.
If he’s not elected, he bellowed in Ohio, there will be a blood bath in the auto industry. At his Michigan rally on Tuesday, he said there would be a blood bath at the border, speaking from a podium with a banner reading, “Stop Biden’s border blood bath.” He has warned that, without him in the Oval, there will be an “Oppenheimer”-like doomsday; we will lose World War III and America will be devastated by “weapons, the likes of which nobody has ever seen before.” “And the only thing standing between you and its obliteration is me,” Trump has said.
An unspoken Trump threat is that there will be a blood bath again in Washington, like Jan. 6, if he doesn’t win. That is why he calls the criminals who stormed the Capitol “hostages” and “unbelievable patriots.” He starts some rallies with a dystopian remix of the national anthem, sung by the “J6 Prison Choir,” and his own reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance.
The bloody-minded Trump luxuriates in the language of tyrants.
In “Macbeth,” Shakespeare uses blood imagery to chart the creation of a tyrant. Those words echo in Washington as Ralph Fiennes stars in a thrilling Simon Godwin production of “MacBeth” for the Shakespeare Theater Company, opening Tuesday.
“The raw power grab that excites Lady Macbeth and incites her husband to regicide feels especially pertinent now, when the dangers of autocracy loom over political discussions,” Peter Marks wrote in The Washington Post about the production with Fiennes and Indira Varma (the lead sand snake in “Game of Thrones.”)
Trump’s raw power grab after his 2020 loss may have failed, but he’s inflaming his base with language straight out of Macbeth’s trip to hell. “Blood will have blood,” as Macbeth says. One of the witches, the weird sisters, urges him, “Be bloody, bold and resolute.”
Another weird sister, Marjorie Taylor Greene, is predicting end times. “God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent,” she tweeted on Friday. “Earthquakes and eclipses and many more things to come. I pray that our country listens.”
Like Macbeth, Trump crossed a line and won’t turn back. The Irish say, “You may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.” Macbeth killed his king, then said: “I am in blood. Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”
The Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey reported that since Trump put his daughter-in-law in charge of the Republican National Committee, prospective employees are asked if they think the election was stolen. Republicans once burbled on about patriotism and defending America. Now denying democracy is a litmus test for employment in the Formerly Grand Old Party.
But Trump embraces Hitleresque phrases to stir racial hatred. He has talked about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country.” Last month, he called migrants “animals,” saying, “I don’t know if you call them ‘people,’ in some cases. They’re not people, in my opinion.”
As Stephen Greenblatt writes in “Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics,” usurpers don’t ascend to the throne without complicity. Republican enablers do all they can to cozy up to their would-be dictator, even introducing a bill to rename Dulles airport for Trump. Democrats responded by introducing a bill to name a prison in Florida for Trump.
“Why, in some circumstances, does evidence of mendacity, crudeness or cruelty serve not as a fatal disadvantage but as an allure, attracting ardent followers?” Greenblatt asked. “Why do otherwise proud and self-respecting people submit to the sheer effrontery of the tyrant, his sense that he can get away with saying and doing anything he likes, his spectacular indecency?”
Like Macbeth’s castle, the Trump campaign has, as Lady Macbeth put it, “the smell of blood,” and “all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten” it.
TRUMP RELIES ON A DOCTOR WHO IS A MEMBER OF HIS GOLF CLUB TO VOUCH FOR HIS HEALTH
Former president has declined to release details about his own condition beyond a short letter from his physician, contrasting with Biden’s detailed report
By Michael Kranish, The Washington Post
BEDMINSTER, N.J. — As former president Donald Trump escalated his attacks on President Biden’s health and mental fitness last fall, Trump released the first updated report on his own condition in more than three years.
This assessment, however, stood in stark contrast to the relatively detailed reports released by the White House during his term. Instead of specifics like blood pressure and medications, the letter had just three paragraphs without specific numbers proclaiming that Trump was in “excellent health” and had “exceptional” cognitive ability. It did not disclose Trump’s weight.
And after relying on a longtime personal doctor and then two White House physicians who had attested to his well-being in office, Trump turned to an unknown on the national stage to provide this report: Bruce A. Aronwald, a 64-year-old osteopathic physician from New Jersey — and a longtime member of Trump’s Bedminster golf club.
Trump’s and Biden’s cognition and general health have emerged as one of the primary issues for a majority of voters in the presidential race. There’s no rule that candidates must be more forthcoming about their health, but the lead author of an academic study of medical reports issued by Trump and Biden in the last campaign said the lack of detail in the letter makes it difficult for voters to truly understand whether the 77-year-old Trump is truly in better health than his 81-year-old opponent, as he regularly proclaims on the trail.
Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee, began his political career in 2015 by releasing a vague and hyperbolic medical report declaring that he’d be the healthiest president in history, which his physician at the time later said Trump had dictated to him. The new letter also provides none of the usual details for the public to examine, such as the precise extent to which Trump has continued to battle obesity and high cholesterol, as he did in office.
Aronwald declined to meet with a Washington Post reporter who visited his office about 19 miles from Trump’s golf club, and — through Trump’s campaign — said in a statement that he saw no reason to release further details about Trump’s health before the election.
“There is no need for President Trump to release another medical report in addition to the one he recently made public,” Aronwald said, referring to his November letter. “The President is strong physically and sharp cognitively, and he’s in excellent health overall.”
When The Post asked the campaign if Trump dictated the November letter to Aronwald, a person authorized to speak about the matter only on the condition of anonymity responded, “No.”
While it is Trump’s prerogative to keep the information private, S. Jay Olshansky, the lead author of a 2020 report in the journal Active Aging that compared the projected life span and health of Biden and Trump, said Aronwald’s letter lacks the specifics necessary to discern much information about Trump’s health.
Biden has released a six-page letter that details his blood tests, conditions and medications, which the White House said gives voters a clearer picture of health. “Joe Biden is proud to have been transparent with his health records as Vice President, as a presidential candidate, and as President,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement. “He believes all leaders owe that level of honesty to the American people.”
Aronwald is a well-known figure at Trump’s Bedminster club, with members saying they had noticed he spent time with Trump and his family when they were all at their villas near the pool. “If you are sitting around the pool, you see him all the time,” a club member, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe what he saw at a private venue, said of Aronwald. “He is a fixture.”
‘I just made it up’
Trump has long relied on personal physicians and White House doctors to respond to — and sometimes insulate him from — questions about his health.
In 2015, he tweeted that “as a presidential candidate, I have instructed my longtime doctor to issue, within two weeks, a full medical report — it will show perfection.” A full medical report was not immediately forthcoming. Instead, the following day, Trump’s then-physician, Harold Bornstein, signed a four-paragraph letter that said Trump would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” It provided only a few metrics such as blood pressure and a PSA test for prostate screening.
Bornstein, a gastroenterologist who died in 2021, later told CNN that Trump “dictated that whole letter. I didn’t write that letter. I just made it up as I went along.”
As the 2016 campaign developed, Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, released a detailed medical report and challenged Trump to do the same. After pressure mounted on Trump to release more information, Bornstein conducted another examination and, in September 2016, Trump went on “The Dr. Oz Show” and, with a dramatic flourish, pulled out a new report for Oz to read. That letter included more information about blood tests and other metrics than the first letter, and said Trump was in “excellent physical health.”
In early 2017, Bornstein told the New York Times that Trump took drugs for hair loss, rosacea and high cholesterol. As a result of that revelation, he said he was told he was no longer under consideration to be White House physician. And two days after that article was published, Bornstein later told NBC News, a White House official and two others conducted a “raid” on his office to obtain the president’s medical records, which he said made him feel “raped, frightened and sad.” The White House responded at the time that it was “standard operating procedure” to obtain the documents and denied that it was a raid.
During his presidency, Trump’s first White House physician, Ronny Jackson, appeared in the White House briefing room in 2018 to announce that tests performed at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center found Trump to be in excellent health. The results were detailed, showing that Trump’s weight had increased from 236 to 239 pounds, which qualified him as borderline obese for a man of 6-3. Jackson also said that Trump had scored a 30 out of 30 on a basic cognitive test designed to detect early signs of cognitive impairment. Jackson said nothing was being withheld from the tests, and he said that Trump’s release was more than any president before him had done. Jackson recommended that Trump try to lose 10 to 15 pounds.
But some physicians and analysts at the time said the report also showed Trump had an increased risk of heart problems — underscoring why releasing detailed results can provide important information beyond a general statement. CNN’s chief medical correspondent, Sanjay Gupta, noted that a CT scan showed that Trump’s coronary calcium score was 133, up from 98 in 2013 and 34 in 2009. Gupta wrote that a score over 100 “indicates plaque is present and that the patient has heart disease,” and also noted Trump had increased cholesterol levels. Jackson said in releasing the report that he had increased Trump’s cholesterol-lowering medication, in addition to his recommendations about diet. (No numbers about cholesterol or calcium were released in the latest report.)
Jackson, who is now a GOP congressman representing Texas, has been an outspoken supporter of Trump and critic of Biden’s health. The Navy in 2022 demoted him from retired rear admiral to retired captain after a Pentagon’s inspector general’s report that substantiated allegations about his inappropriate behavior as White House physician, The Post recently reported.
In November 2019, Trump went on an unannounced trip to the Walter Reed facility, which his spokeswoman said was a two-hour visit to give him a head start on his annual physical.
Trumpreleased medical test results in 2019 and 2020 under the supervision of Sean Conley, who was then serving as his White House physician. They showed Trump had not lost weight in line with Jackson’s recommendation. Instead, his weight continued to increase, to 243 in 2019 and 244 in 2020, putting him in the obese range. He was being treated with a statin for high cholesterol levels.
Conley supported Trump’s usage of hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug, during the coronavirus pandemic. Conley wrote a May 18, 2020, memo in which he said he had discussed the evidence for and against the use of hydroxychloroquine and “concluded the potential benefit from treatment outweighed the relative risks.”
Then, after Trump contracted covid-19 in the fall of 2020, Conley made statements that played down the severity of Trump’s illness that were later contradicted by other White House officials and subsequent reporting. While Conley wrote in a memo that Trump was recovering and had “no symptoms,” then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows told reporters that Trump was doing worse than Conley had let on. Conley later said that “it came off that we were trying to hide something, which wasn’t necessarily true. ... The fact of the matter is that he’s doing really well.”
After Trump lost his reelection bid, it was more than three years until he updated his medical status with the letter written by Aronwald.
In his Nov. 23 letter about Trump’s health, Aronwald said he had conducted the most recent examination of Trump on Sept. 13, 2023. While not providing any specific numbers or names of prescription medication, Aronwald wrote that Trump’s “overall health is excellent,” that his physical exams were “well within the normal range and his cognitive exams were exceptional.” The letter also said that Trump’s cardiovascular studies were normal and cancer tests were negative.
The letter added that his laboratory analysis was well within the normal range and “even more favorable than prior testing in some of the most significant parameters, most likely secondary to weight reduction.”
The letter did not provide Trump’s blood test numbers or his weight, leaving it unclear if he would still be considered obese. Nonetheless, Aronwald wrote that Trump had “reduced his weight through an improved diet and continued daily activity, while maintaining a rigorous schedule.”
Olshansky, the researcher on aging, said Aronwald’s brief letter is not sufficient for his team of researchers to make an updated assessment later this year on Trump’s projected life span. Instead, the full “medical records are extraordinarily valuable,” he said. “They tell a story about health prospects for survival going forward. You can’t really do a thorough assessment of life span and health span without the medical records.”
Biden’s doctor, in his letter, gave a more detailed analysis, including metrics for cholesterol, blood pressure, weight and an electrocardiogram, providing more transparency but also information that might be cited by a political opponent. O’Connor wrote that the president is being treated with a variety of medications, has a “stiff” gait, and is being treated for conditions including obstructive sleep apnea, gastroesophageal reflux and sensory peripheral neuropathy of his feet. Nonetheless, these conditions were not considered impediments, and O’Connor concluded that Biden is “a healthy, active, robust 81-year-old” who is fit to be president.
Former president has declined to release details about his own condition beyond a short letter from his physician, contrasting with Biden’s detailed report
By Michael Kranish, The Washington Post
BEDMINSTER, N.J. — As former president Donald Trump escalated his attacks on President Biden’s health and mental fitness last fall, Trump released the first updated report on his own condition in more than three years.
This assessment, however, stood in stark contrast to the relatively detailed reports released by the White House during his term. Instead of specifics like blood pressure and medications, the letter had just three paragraphs without specific numbers proclaiming that Trump was in “excellent health” and had “exceptional” cognitive ability. It did not disclose Trump’s weight.
And after relying on a longtime personal doctor and then two White House physicians who had attested to his well-being in office, Trump turned to an unknown on the national stage to provide this report: Bruce A. Aronwald, a 64-year-old osteopathic physician from New Jersey — and a longtime member of Trump’s Bedminster golf club.
Trump’s and Biden’s cognition and general health have emerged as one of the primary issues for a majority of voters in the presidential race. There’s no rule that candidates must be more forthcoming about their health, but the lead author of an academic study of medical reports issued by Trump and Biden in the last campaign said the lack of detail in the letter makes it difficult for voters to truly understand whether the 77-year-old Trump is truly in better health than his 81-year-old opponent, as he regularly proclaims on the trail.
Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee, began his political career in 2015 by releasing a vague and hyperbolic medical report declaring that he’d be the healthiest president in history, which his physician at the time later said Trump had dictated to him. The new letter also provides none of the usual details for the public to examine, such as the precise extent to which Trump has continued to battle obesity and high cholesterol, as he did in office.
Aronwald declined to meet with a Washington Post reporter who visited his office about 19 miles from Trump’s golf club, and — through Trump’s campaign — said in a statement that he saw no reason to release further details about Trump’s health before the election.
“There is no need for President Trump to release another medical report in addition to the one he recently made public,” Aronwald said, referring to his November letter. “The President is strong physically and sharp cognitively, and he’s in excellent health overall.”
When The Post asked the campaign if Trump dictated the November letter to Aronwald, a person authorized to speak about the matter only on the condition of anonymity responded, “No.”
While it is Trump’s prerogative to keep the information private, S. Jay Olshansky, the lead author of a 2020 report in the journal Active Aging that compared the projected life span and health of Biden and Trump, said Aronwald’s letter lacks the specifics necessary to discern much information about Trump’s health.
Biden has released a six-page letter that details his blood tests, conditions and medications, which the White House said gives voters a clearer picture of health. “Joe Biden is proud to have been transparent with his health records as Vice President, as a presidential candidate, and as President,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement. “He believes all leaders owe that level of honesty to the American people.”
Aronwald is a well-known figure at Trump’s Bedminster club, with members saying they had noticed he spent time with Trump and his family when they were all at their villas near the pool. “If you are sitting around the pool, you see him all the time,” a club member, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe what he saw at a private venue, said of Aronwald. “He is a fixture.”
‘I just made it up’
Trump has long relied on personal physicians and White House doctors to respond to — and sometimes insulate him from — questions about his health.
In 2015, he tweeted that “as a presidential candidate, I have instructed my longtime doctor to issue, within two weeks, a full medical report — it will show perfection.” A full medical report was not immediately forthcoming. Instead, the following day, Trump’s then-physician, Harold Bornstein, signed a four-paragraph letter that said Trump would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” It provided only a few metrics such as blood pressure and a PSA test for prostate screening.
Bornstein, a gastroenterologist who died in 2021, later told CNN that Trump “dictated that whole letter. I didn’t write that letter. I just made it up as I went along.”
As the 2016 campaign developed, Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, released a detailed medical report and challenged Trump to do the same. After pressure mounted on Trump to release more information, Bornstein conducted another examination and, in September 2016, Trump went on “The Dr. Oz Show” and, with a dramatic flourish, pulled out a new report for Oz to read. That letter included more information about blood tests and other metrics than the first letter, and said Trump was in “excellent physical health.”
In early 2017, Bornstein told the New York Times that Trump took drugs for hair loss, rosacea and high cholesterol. As a result of that revelation, he said he was told he was no longer under consideration to be White House physician. And two days after that article was published, Bornstein later told NBC News, a White House official and two others conducted a “raid” on his office to obtain the president’s medical records, which he said made him feel “raped, frightened and sad.” The White House responded at the time that it was “standard operating procedure” to obtain the documents and denied that it was a raid.
During his presidency, Trump’s first White House physician, Ronny Jackson, appeared in the White House briefing room in 2018 to announce that tests performed at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center found Trump to be in excellent health. The results were detailed, showing that Trump’s weight had increased from 236 to 239 pounds, which qualified him as borderline obese for a man of 6-3. Jackson also said that Trump had scored a 30 out of 30 on a basic cognitive test designed to detect early signs of cognitive impairment. Jackson said nothing was being withheld from the tests, and he said that Trump’s release was more than any president before him had done. Jackson recommended that Trump try to lose 10 to 15 pounds.
But some physicians and analysts at the time said the report also showed Trump had an increased risk of heart problems — underscoring why releasing detailed results can provide important information beyond a general statement. CNN’s chief medical correspondent, Sanjay Gupta, noted that a CT scan showed that Trump’s coronary calcium score was 133, up from 98 in 2013 and 34 in 2009. Gupta wrote that a score over 100 “indicates plaque is present and that the patient has heart disease,” and also noted Trump had increased cholesterol levels. Jackson said in releasing the report that he had increased Trump’s cholesterol-lowering medication, in addition to his recommendations about diet. (No numbers about cholesterol or calcium were released in the latest report.)
Jackson, who is now a GOP congressman representing Texas, has been an outspoken supporter of Trump and critic of Biden’s health. The Navy in 2022 demoted him from retired rear admiral to retired captain after a Pentagon’s inspector general’s report that substantiated allegations about his inappropriate behavior as White House physician, The Post recently reported.
In November 2019, Trump went on an unannounced trip to the Walter Reed facility, which his spokeswoman said was a two-hour visit to give him a head start on his annual physical.
Trump
Conley supported Trump’s usage of hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug, during the coronavirus pandemic. Conley wrote a May 18, 2020, memo in which he said he had discussed the evidence for and against the use of hydroxychloroquine and “concluded the potential benefit from treatment outweighed the relative risks.”
Then, after Trump contracted covid-19 in the fall of 2020, Conley made statements that played down the severity of Trump’s illness that were later contradicted by other White House officials and subsequent reporting. While Conley wrote in a memo that Trump was recovering and had “no symptoms,” then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows told reporters that Trump was doing worse than Conley had let on. Conley later said that “it came off that we were trying to hide something, which wasn’t necessarily true. ... The fact of the matter is that he’s doing really well.”
After Trump lost his reelection bid, it was more than three years until he updated his medical status with the letter written by Aronwald.
In his Nov. 23 letter about Trump’s health, Aronwald said he had conducted the most recent examination of Trump on Sept. 13, 2023. While not providing any specific numbers or names of prescription medication, Aronwald wrote that Trump’s “overall health is excellent,” that his physical exams were “well within the normal range and his cognitive exams were exceptional.” The letter also said that Trump’s cardiovascular studies were normal and cancer tests were negative.
The letter added that his laboratory analysis was well within the normal range and “even more favorable than prior testing in some of the most significant parameters, most likely secondary to weight reduction.”
The letter did not provide Trump’s blood test numbers or his weight, leaving it unclear if he would still be considered obese. Nonetheless, Aronwald wrote that Trump had “reduced his weight through an improved diet and continued daily activity, while maintaining a rigorous schedule.”
Olshansky, the researcher on aging, said Aronwald’s brief letter is not sufficient for his team of researchers to make an updated assessment later this year on Trump’s projected life span. Instead, the full “medical records are extraordinarily valuable,” he said. “They tell a story about health prospects for survival going forward. You can’t really do a thorough assessment of life span and health span without the medical records.”
Biden’s doctor, in his letter, gave a more detailed analysis, including metrics for cholesterol, blood pressure, weight and an electrocardiogram, providing more transparency but also information that might be cited by a political opponent. O’Connor wrote that the president is being treated with a variety of medications, has a “stiff” gait, and is being treated for conditions including obstructive sleep apnea, gastroesophageal reflux and sensory peripheral neuropathy of his feet. Nonetheless, these conditions were not considered impediments, and O’Connor concluded that Biden is “a healthy, active, robust 81-year-old” who is fit to be president.
TRUMP SWINDLES HIS FOLLOWERS — AGAIN
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
GREEN BAY, Wis. — Let’s say you’re an ardent Donald Trump supporter and you decided to invest $100,000 of your retirement savings into Trump Media because your favorite former president says it’s a “highly successful” company.
Well, if you bought in during last week’s initial pubic offering at the peak of $79.38 a share, your $100,000 nest egg was worth only $57,000 this week when the stock hit a low of $45.26 after an April Fool’s Day crash — a 43 percent loss in just three trading days.
Not for the first time, Trump has played his supporters for suckers.
The skid came after Trump Media reported this week that it lost $58.2 million in 2023 on sales of just $4.1 million — which suggests that Trump Media is practically worthless. The shares are bound to collapse further unless some wealthy entity — Saudi Arabia? China? — buys shares to gain leverage over Trump, who can’t dump his own stake for six months.
Now comes word that, of course, Trump has filed a lawsuit against two of the company’s co-founders, both former contestants on “The Apprentice.” Trump Media’s lawsuit accuses them of “mismanagement,” saying they “failed spectacularly at every turn” and “made a series of reckless and wasteful decisions.”
Trump Media is sounding more and more like the Trump presidency.
I thought about the Trump stock bubble while watching the former president and presumptive GOP nominee address adoring supporters on Tuesday here in Green Bay, where he held his first rally in 17 days. In a sense, what he did with Trump Media was just a variation on what he does to his supporters every day, whether convincing them to buy Trump-endorsed Bibles and sneakers, or selling them on election lies and white nationalism.
Three thousand die-hard Trump fans had come to the convention center to see him in the teeth of a winter storm that dumped up to a foot of snow on northern Wisconsin. In their rapturous reception for the “real president,” as election-denying pillow magnate Mike Lindell called Trump during a warm-up speech, I saw the kind of unshakable faith in a man that could lead someone to invest hard-earned money in a worthless company.
And Trump was, as always, rewarding their adoration by selling them one self-interested swindle after another.
He announced that he had won his fraud case in New York: “The appellate division said, ‘You won the case, that’s it.’” (The court has not yet heard his appeal of the fraud judgment against him.)
He also announced that “it came out that we won this state” in 2020. (Trump lost Wisconsin by 20,682 votes.)
At the heart of the speech was his original swindle, and still his go-to scam: convincing his supporters that their lives were being destroyed by dark-skinned invaders. It was the story of how “Crooked Joe and his migrant armies of dangerous criminals” are producing a “bloodbath” among innocent, native-born Americans.
It’s not the least bit true. Homicide and violent crime, after rising during the pandemic, have dropped for two straight years and are lower than during Trump’s final year in office. There is scant evidence that immigrants — legal or undocumented — commit more than their share of crime, and a lot of evidence that migrants are more law-abiding, as The Post’s Glenn Kessler has detailed.
But that doesn’t stop Trump from talking about the “massive crime” brought by “[President] Biden’s flood of illegal aliens” — the theme of his Green Bay rally and an earlier event in Grand Rapids, Mich. “They’re not humans. They’re not humans. They’re animals,” Trump said. “I’ll use the word ‘animal’ because that’s what they are.”
If Trump wasn’t suggesting that all immigrants are animals, the nuance was easily lost. “Trump Calls Migrants ‘Animals’ in Michigan Stop,” was the headline on Trump-friendly Newsmax.
He blamed migrants for “coming into our country with contagious diseases.” He warned of “illegal alien criminals crawling through your windows and ransacking your drawers,” where they “loot the jewelry.” When migrants aren’t busy doing that, they’re fixing to “obliterate Medicare and Social Security” and fill schools with “new migrant students who don’t speak a word of English.”
To illustrate the fictitious wave of “migrant crime,” Trump, at his stops in Michigan and Wisconsin, cited violent crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. (“Last week, another illegal alien criminal was arrested in Alabama for raping a mentally incapacitated 14-year-old girl.”)
You could just as easily cherry-pick from police blotters to make it appear as though there’s a crime wave being perpetrated by evangelical Christians, or Trump supporters — and it would be just as dubious.
But it suits his purposes to frame migrants, because “they’re coming from places that you don’t want them to come from,” as Trump put it. “They’re coming from the Congo, Yemen, Somalia, Syria,” he said at another point. “They’re country-changing, country-threatening and they’re country-wrecking. They’re destroying our country.”
To reverse this “invasion,” he told the Green Bay crowd, which was almost entirely White, “we’re going to end up with the largest deportation in American history.” It was one of the biggest applause lines of the night.
Even before Trump took the stage, the audience had been primed to fear the invaders.
“In Joe Biden’s America, he has a VIP program, and it’s for illegal aliens,” Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.) told them. “And you are the second-class citizens in America now, aren’t you?”
Another Wisconsin Republican, Rep. Glenn Grothman, posed this question: “Who is the only man who has the ability to stop the United States from disappearing in November?”
“Trump!” people yelled. You’re absolutely right,” the congressman confirmed.
And, so, the fearful masses buy in. Watching Trump sell his swindle about migrants, it occurred to me that those suckered by the Trump Media IPO got a better deal, relatively speaking. Those who bought “DJT” shares lost only their shirts. But those who have been snookered into seeing migrants as diseased animals have lost part of their souls.
On Good Friday, Trump posted on social media an image showing Biden with his hands and feet tied in the bed of a pickup truck.
On Easter Sunday, he fired off a 168-word, run-on sentence attacking his perceived enemies, including “‘DERANGED’ JACK SMITH, WHO IS EVIL AND ‘SICK’” and “CROOKED JOE’S DOJ THUGS.”
Also in observance of Easter, Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt issued a statement attacking the White House for blocking “religious egg designs for their Easter Art Event.” But it turned out Trump did the same thing during his presidency, as did every other president for the last half-century.
Monday, the judge in Trump’s hush-money trial, Juan Merchan, expanded a gag order because of Trump’s repeated false attacks against Merchan’s daughter. Merchan said Trump’s attacks on “family members of presiding jurists and attorneys” were “a direct attack on the rule of law.” Trump responded by posting a Fox News clip of others attacking the judge’s daughter.
So much to be proud of! No wonder Rep. Guy Reschenthaler of Pennsylvania, a member of House GOP leadership, has sponsored H.R. 7845, “to designate the Washington Dulles International Airport in Virginia as the ‘Donald J. Trump International Airport.’” It has only six co-sponsors — none of them from Virginia – but there’s a certain logic to it. Now that Trump plans to surrender Ukraine to Russia, it seems inappropriate to have a major airport named after a fierce Cold Warrior such as John Foster Dulles, secretary of state in the Eisenhower administration. But couldn’t Reschenthaler cut out the middleman and just name the airport Putin International?
Someone finally found a way to silence Trump: Tell him that he might have to spend the night in Green Bay.
The snowstorm had already begun when Trump arrived here, and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), taking the stage before the former president, explained the worry: “The president does have to get up here and speak before he’s snowed in.”
Trump started precisely on time and told his fans he would “finish this thing real quick.”
“No!” came shouts from the audience.
He spoke for an hour — just a throat-clearing by the standard of most Trump rallies — and he stuck closely to the words fed to him on his teleprompter. He depended so completely on the prompter that he couldn’t seem to tell where one sentence ended and another began: “Together, we’re taking on some of the most menacing forces in conclusion,” he informed them. In another moment of confusion, he told his followers: “If you have illegal aliens invading your home, we will deport you.”
Still, the storm-condensed speech in Green Bay, if rather low-energy, was revealing. Shorn of most of the wandering asides, it was a distillation of Trump’s message as intended. And that message, beyond the central attack on immigrants, was an elaborate act of projection. As though playing a game of “I’m rubber and you’re glue,” Trump took each complaint leveled against him and directed it at Biden.
Trump foments violence? Actually, Biden is the one promoting a “border bloodbath,” Trump said, which “ends the day I take the oath of office.”
Trump, who recently floated raising the Social Security retirement age, would cut entitlements? Trump said Biden, who he said is “destroying your Social Security and “destroying your Medicare,” is the one who wants to raise the retirement age — “and we’re not doing any of that.”
Trump, author of the “big lie” about the 2020 election, spreads disinformation and conspiracy theories? “The only thing [Biden] is good at is cheating on elections and disinformation,” Trump said.
Trump threatens democracy? “If we don’t win, this may be the last election our country ever has ... because Joe Biden is a threat to democracy,” Trump said.
“Four more years!” the crowd chanted.
A quick glance at the first row of the TV camera risers at the rally showed why millions believe Trump’s nonsense: Along with spots for ABC, CBS and NBC were several spots for the organs of the MAGA right, which uncritically feed Trump’s absurdities to their viewers: Newsmax, Real America’s Voice, Right Side Broadcasting Network, Fox News. Lindell worked this part of the riser, as fans shouted up at him: “I love you, Mike!” “Hundred percent behind ya, buddy!” “I got a lot of pillows!”
Those in the room had to know, on some level, that Trump was making stuff up. When he boasted that “we have a room that’s sold out and people are standing outside in the snow” they could see with their own eyes that the room wasn’t full and people weren’t standing outside.
But I got the sense that most of them were there not to hear Trump’s words but to participate in the performance. Almost all wore variations of Trump hats, sweatshirts or T-shirts. One wore a Trump flag as a cape; another’s shirt showed Trump as a matador; a third hand-painted her shirt to say “Trump, Mt. Rushmore Bound, 2025.” They gleefully joined in the ritual chants: “Build that wall!” and “F--- Joe Biden.” Twice, hecklers tried to shout at Trump; the protesters were hardly audible, but the responding “boos” and chants of “USA!” from the crowd forced Trump to suspend his speech.
A minority identified themselves as extremists: the man in the Confederate-flag baseball cap, the guy flashing a white-power hand gesture at the stage, the woman holding up a wooden cross toward the press pen, as if we were vampires.
Alas, those on the stage appealed to the darker instincts of those in the crowd. Tiffany, the Wisconsin congressman, mocked the idea of civil rights and diversity. Ridiculing the Agriculture Department for having an Office of Civil Rights, Diversity and Inclusion, he said: “Diversity used to mean when we had Jerseys and Guernseys along with our Holsteins.”
Trump attacked Biden because the White House’s recognition of Transgender Visibility Day (it has been on March 31 for the last 15 years) fell on Easter this year. “Such total disrespect to Christians,” he said, promising to proclaim Nov. 5 — Election Day — as “Christian Visibility Day.”
And, of course, there were his attacks on “migrant crime.”
He displayed a chart for the crowd that announced “world-record illegal immigrants, many from prisons and mental institutions, also terrorists.”
“It’s a Border Patrol chart,” Trump told the crowd. (U.S. Customs and Border Protection has produced no such chart.)
In his recitation of violence by migrants, he spoke of the “illegal alien criminal ... charged with savagely murdering 25-year-old Ruby Garcia, a beautiful, perfect, beautiful, wonderful young girl, shooting her repeatedly with an illegally purchased handgun and dumping her body on the side of a highway to die.” At his previous stop in Grand Rapids, he said he had spoken with her family.
Police said it was a domestic-violence incident. And Garcia’s family told WOOD-TV in Grand Rapids that Trump never spoke with them. The victim’s sister, Mavi Garcia, accused Trump of “misinforming people on live TV,” saying “it’s kind of shocking why he would just bring up illegals. What about Americans who do heinous crimes like that?”
Those crimes don’t count — because they don’t fit Trump’s white-nationalist swindle.
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
GREEN BAY, Wis. — Let’s say you’re an ardent Donald Trump supporter and you decided to invest $100,000 of your retirement savings into Trump Media because your favorite former president says it’s a “highly successful” company.
Well, if you bought in during last week’s initial pubic offering at the peak of $79.38 a share, your $100,000 nest egg was worth only $57,000 this week when the stock hit a low of $45.26 after an April Fool’s Day crash — a 43 percent loss in just three trading days.
Not for the first time, Trump has played his supporters for suckers.
The skid came after Trump Media reported this week that it lost $58.2 million in 2023 on sales of just $4.1 million — which suggests that Trump Media is practically worthless. The shares are bound to collapse further unless some wealthy entity — Saudi Arabia? China? — buys shares to gain leverage over Trump, who can’t dump his own stake for six months.
Now comes word that, of course, Trump has filed a lawsuit against two of the company’s co-founders, both former contestants on “The Apprentice.” Trump Media’s lawsuit accuses them of “mismanagement,” saying they “failed spectacularly at every turn” and “made a series of reckless and wasteful decisions.”
Trump Media is sounding more and more like the Trump presidency.
I thought about the Trump stock bubble while watching the former president and presumptive GOP nominee address adoring supporters on Tuesday here in Green Bay, where he held his first rally in 17 days. In a sense, what he did with Trump Media was just a variation on what he does to his supporters every day, whether convincing them to buy Trump-endorsed Bibles and sneakers, or selling them on election lies and white nationalism.
Three thousand die-hard Trump fans had come to the convention center to see him in the teeth of a winter storm that dumped up to a foot of snow on northern Wisconsin. In their rapturous reception for the “real president,” as election-denying pillow magnate Mike Lindell called Trump during a warm-up speech, I saw the kind of unshakable faith in a man that could lead someone to invest hard-earned money in a worthless company.
And Trump was, as always, rewarding their adoration by selling them one self-interested swindle after another.
He announced that he had won his fraud case in New York: “The appellate division said, ‘You won the case, that’s it.’” (The court has not yet heard his appeal of the fraud judgment against him.)
He also announced that “it came out that we won this state” in 2020. (Trump lost Wisconsin by 20,682 votes.)
At the heart of the speech was his original swindle, and still his go-to scam: convincing his supporters that their lives were being destroyed by dark-skinned invaders. It was the story of how “Crooked Joe and his migrant armies of dangerous criminals” are producing a “bloodbath” among innocent, native-born Americans.
It’s not the least bit true. Homicide and violent crime, after rising during the pandemic, have dropped for two straight years and are lower than during Trump’s final year in office. There is scant evidence that immigrants — legal or undocumented — commit more than their share of crime, and a lot of evidence that migrants are more law-abiding, as The Post’s Glenn Kessler has detailed.
But that doesn’t stop Trump from talking about the “massive crime” brought by “[President] Biden’s flood of illegal aliens” — the theme of his Green Bay rally and an earlier event in Grand Rapids, Mich. “They’re not humans. They’re not humans. They’re animals,” Trump said. “I’ll use the word ‘animal’ because that’s what they are.”
If Trump wasn’t suggesting that all immigrants are animals, the nuance was easily lost. “Trump Calls Migrants ‘Animals’ in Michigan Stop,” was the headline on Trump-friendly Newsmax.
He blamed migrants for “coming into our country with contagious diseases.” He warned of “illegal alien criminals crawling through your windows and ransacking your drawers,” where they “loot the jewelry.” When migrants aren’t busy doing that, they’re fixing to “obliterate Medicare and Social Security” and fill schools with “new migrant students who don’t speak a word of English.”
To illustrate the fictitious wave of “migrant crime,” Trump, at his stops in Michigan and Wisconsin, cited violent crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. (“Last week, another illegal alien criminal was arrested in Alabama for raping a mentally incapacitated 14-year-old girl.”)
You could just as easily cherry-pick from police blotters to make it appear as though there’s a crime wave being perpetrated by evangelical Christians, or Trump supporters — and it would be just as dubious.
But it suits his purposes to frame migrants, because “they’re coming from places that you don’t want them to come from,” as Trump put it. “They’re coming from the Congo, Yemen, Somalia, Syria,” he said at another point. “They’re country-changing, country-threatening and they’re country-wrecking. They’re destroying our country.”
To reverse this “invasion,” he told the Green Bay crowd, which was almost entirely White, “we’re going to end up with the largest deportation in American history.” It was one of the biggest applause lines of the night.
Even before Trump took the stage, the audience had been primed to fear the invaders.
“In Joe Biden’s America, he has a VIP program, and it’s for illegal aliens,” Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.) told them. “And you are the second-class citizens in America now, aren’t you?”
Another Wisconsin Republican, Rep. Glenn Grothman, posed this question: “Who is the only man who has the ability to stop the United States from disappearing in November?”
“Trump!” people yelled. You’re absolutely right,” the congressman confirmed.
And, so, the fearful masses buy in. Watching Trump sell his swindle about migrants, it occurred to me that those suckered by the Trump Media IPO got a better deal, relatively speaking. Those who bought “DJT” shares lost only their shirts. But those who have been snookered into seeing migrants as diseased animals have lost part of their souls.
On Good Friday, Trump posted on social media an image showing Biden with his hands and feet tied in the bed of a pickup truck.
On Easter Sunday, he fired off a 168-word, run-on sentence attacking his perceived enemies, including “‘DERANGED’ JACK SMITH, WHO IS EVIL AND ‘SICK’” and “CROOKED JOE’S DOJ THUGS.”
Also in observance of Easter, Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt issued a statement attacking the White House for blocking “religious egg designs for their Easter Art Event.” But it turned out Trump did the same thing during his presidency, as did every other president for the last half-century.
Monday, the judge in Trump’s hush-money trial, Juan Merchan, expanded a gag order because of Trump’s repeated false attacks against Merchan’s daughter. Merchan said Trump’s attacks on “family members of presiding jurists and attorneys” were “a direct attack on the rule of law.” Trump responded by posting a Fox News clip of others attacking the judge’s daughter.
So much to be proud of! No wonder Rep. Guy Reschenthaler of Pennsylvania, a member of House GOP leadership, has sponsored H.R. 7845, “to designate the Washington Dulles International Airport in Virginia as the ‘Donald J. Trump International Airport.’” It has only six co-sponsors — none of them from Virginia – but there’s a certain logic to it. Now that Trump plans to surrender Ukraine to Russia, it seems inappropriate to have a major airport named after a fierce Cold Warrior such as John Foster Dulles, secretary of state in the Eisenhower administration. But couldn’t Reschenthaler cut out the middleman and just name the airport Putin International?
Someone finally found a way to silence Trump: Tell him that he might have to spend the night in Green Bay.
The snowstorm had already begun when Trump arrived here, and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), taking the stage before the former president, explained the worry: “The president does have to get up here and speak before he’s snowed in.”
Trump started precisely on time and told his fans he would “finish this thing real quick.”
“No!” came shouts from the audience.
He spoke for an hour — just a throat-clearing by the standard of most Trump rallies — and he stuck closely to the words fed to him on his teleprompter. He depended so completely on the prompter that he couldn’t seem to tell where one sentence ended and another began: “Together, we’re taking on some of the most menacing forces in conclusion,” he informed them. In another moment of confusion, he told his followers: “If you have illegal aliens invading your home, we will deport you.”
Still, the storm-condensed speech in Green Bay, if rather low-energy, was revealing. Shorn of most of the wandering asides, it was a distillation of Trump’s message as intended. And that message, beyond the central attack on immigrants, was an elaborate act of projection. As though playing a game of “I’m rubber and you’re glue,” Trump took each complaint leveled against him and directed it at Biden.
Trump foments violence? Actually, Biden is the one promoting a “border bloodbath,” Trump said, which “ends the day I take the oath of office.”
Trump, who recently floated raising the Social Security retirement age, would cut entitlements? Trump said Biden, who he said is “destroying your Social Security and “destroying your Medicare,” is the one who wants to raise the retirement age — “and we’re not doing any of that.”
Trump, author of the “big lie” about the 2020 election, spreads disinformation and conspiracy theories? “The only thing [Biden] is good at is cheating on elections and disinformation,” Trump said.
Trump threatens democracy? “If we don’t win, this may be the last election our country ever has ... because Joe Biden is a threat to democracy,” Trump said.
“Four more years!” the crowd chanted.
A quick glance at the first row of the TV camera risers at the rally showed why millions believe Trump’s nonsense: Along with spots for ABC, CBS and NBC were several spots for the organs of the MAGA right, which uncritically feed Trump’s absurdities to their viewers: Newsmax, Real America’s Voice, Right Side Broadcasting Network, Fox News. Lindell worked this part of the riser, as fans shouted up at him: “I love you, Mike!” “Hundred percent behind ya, buddy!” “I got a lot of pillows!”
Those in the room had to know, on some level, that Trump was making stuff up. When he boasted that “we have a room that’s sold out and people are standing outside in the snow” they could see with their own eyes that the room wasn’t full and people weren’t standing outside.
But I got the sense that most of them were there not to hear Trump’s words but to participate in the performance. Almost all wore variations of Trump hats, sweatshirts or T-shirts. One wore a Trump flag as a cape; another’s shirt showed Trump as a matador; a third hand-painted her shirt to say “Trump, Mt. Rushmore Bound, 2025.” They gleefully joined in the ritual chants: “Build that wall!” and “F--- Joe Biden.” Twice, hecklers tried to shout at Trump; the protesters were hardly audible, but the responding “boos” and chants of “USA!” from the crowd forced Trump to suspend his speech.
A minority identified themselves as extremists: the man in the Confederate-flag baseball cap, the guy flashing a white-power hand gesture at the stage, the woman holding up a wooden cross toward the press pen, as if we were vampires.
Alas, those on the stage appealed to the darker instincts of those in the crowd. Tiffany, the Wisconsin congressman, mocked the idea of civil rights and diversity. Ridiculing the Agriculture Department for having an Office of Civil Rights, Diversity and Inclusion, he said: “Diversity used to mean when we had Jerseys and Guernseys along with our Holsteins.”
Trump attacked Biden because the White House’s recognition of Transgender Visibility Day (it has been on March 31 for the last 15 years) fell on Easter this year. “Such total disrespect to Christians,” he said, promising to proclaim Nov. 5 — Election Day — as “Christian Visibility Day.”
And, of course, there were his attacks on “migrant crime.”
He displayed a chart for the crowd that announced “world-record illegal immigrants, many from prisons and mental institutions, also terrorists.”
“It’s a Border Patrol chart,” Trump told the crowd. (U.S. Customs and Border Protection has produced no such chart.)
In his recitation of violence by migrants, he spoke of the “illegal alien criminal ... charged with savagely murdering 25-year-old Ruby Garcia, a beautiful, perfect, beautiful, wonderful young girl, shooting her repeatedly with an illegally purchased handgun and dumping her body on the side of a highway to die.” At his previous stop in Grand Rapids, he said he had spoken with her family.
Police said it was a domestic-violence incident. And Garcia’s family told WOOD-TV in Grand Rapids that Trump never spoke with them. The victim’s sister, Mavi Garcia, accused Trump of “misinforming people on live TV,” saying “it’s kind of shocking why he would just bring up illegals. What about Americans who do heinous crimes like that?”
Those crimes don’t count — because they don’t fit Trump’s white-nationalist swindle.
NO, BIG PHARMA’S HIGH PRICES DON’T DRIVE INNOVATION
By Avik Roy, and Gregg Girvan (Avik Roy is president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity and a former policy adviser to Mitt Romney, Rick Perry and Marco Rubio. Gregg Girvan is a resident fellow at FREOPP.
This year, for the first time, a handful of prescription drug manufacturers will negotiate with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services over how much taxpayers will pay for their costly drugs. Big pharmaceutical companies have long argued that such price negotiations will lower their profits, reducing their ability to innovate. But is that true?
Not according to an analysis we published at our think tank, the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity. Our research shows that the biggest drug companies largely fail to turn their enormous profits into discoveries. Instead, most innovation is taking place at small, unprofitable start-ups, whose drugs are largely excluded from Medicare’s new price negotiation system. When it comes to pharmaceutical innovation, smaller is better.
For our analysis, we reviewed 428 recent drug approvals by the Food and Drug Administration and surveyed financial data from more than 4,000 pharmaceutical and biotech companies. We found that large companies, defined as those with more than $10 billion in annual sales, produced 86 percent of the industry’s revenue but that only 36 percent of the drugs approved by the FDA. By contrast, emerging start-ups with less than $500 million in annual sales or less than $200 million in annual R&D spending produced 3 percent of the industry’s revenue but discovered more than half of all newly approved drugs.
You’d think that the biggest drug companies with the biggest R&D budgets would have the most productive research labs. But it doesn’t work that way.
Large companies tend to be bureaucratic, risk-averse and much more focused on increasing profits from their existing drug product lines. That’s partly because their largest and most influential shareholders care more about quarterly returns than long-term success. As a result, big companies overinvest in low-quality but “safe” ideas and underinvest in better but risky ones.
By contrast, smaller companies are nimbler and can better attract top scientific talent. The most creative scientists work at start-ups where they often have more freedom. Start-ups also let them generate far more wealth through stock options rather than through modest year-end bonuses at behemoths like Eli Lilly or AstraZeneca.
If large companies’ labs are so unproductive, you might ask, why are so many of the world’s top-selling drugs manufactured by bigger companies? Because of the FDA’s high regulatory costs. Smaller companies can’t always afford to conduct the large billion-dollar clinical trials required for approval. As a result, big companies treat emerging start-ups like their farm team, buying off their best drugs, raising their prices and reaping the profits.
The good news is this is beginning to change. Emerging companies are increasingly taking their best drugs to market by themselves. In 2013, only 23 percent of successful drugs developed by emerging companies reached FDA approval under the original developer. By 2022, that share increased to 75 percent. If this trend continues, patients will benefit from a more competitive and diverse ecosystem of drug developers.
Opponents of drug-price negotiation on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley have no problem with large multinationals gobbling up smaller companies. Mergers and acquisitions, they argue, enable investors in those smaller companies to generate quicker returns, incentivizing further investment in start-ups.
But investors also make money if start-ups take their innovations all the way to market. In fact, over the long term, investors can make more money if start-ups become multibillion-dollar success stories rather than selling out at an earlier stage for lower acquisition prices. A more diverse ecosystem of successful, profitable biopharmaceutical companies will lead to more innovation, not less.
The drug negotiation provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act were designed with these considerations in mind. The law exempts from its process any drug representing more than 80 percent of a company’s sales to the Medicare program, effectively excluding emerging start-ups with one FDA-approved medicine.
And more affordable medicines benefit all Americans, not just seniors in Medicare, because all taxpayers fund the program through payroll taxes.
That’s why President Biden has proposed expanding Medicare price negotiations from 20 drugs a year to 50, a reasonable idea that would reduce the federal deficit and Medicare premiums. People often think the only way to make Medicare sustainable is to raise taxes or cut benefits. But reducing what Medicare must pay for the care seniors receive can also help accomplish this goal.
The real barrier to innovation in drug development isn’t manufacturers’ ability to charge extortionate prices; it’s the ever-increasing cost of navigating the FDA’s approval process. In the rest of the economy, innovation drives lower prices for valuable goods and services. The pharmaceutical industry — and its regulator — should follow suit.
By Avik Roy, and Gregg Girvan (Avik Roy is president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity and a former policy adviser to Mitt Romney, Rick Perry and Marco Rubio. Gregg Girvan is a resident fellow at FREOPP.
This year, for the first time, a handful of prescription drug manufacturers will negotiate with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services over how much taxpayers will pay for their costly drugs. Big pharmaceutical companies have long argued that such price negotiations will lower their profits, reducing their ability to innovate. But is that true?
Not according to an analysis we published at our think tank, the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity. Our research shows that the biggest drug companies largely fail to turn their enormous profits into discoveries. Instead, most innovation is taking place at small, unprofitable start-ups, whose drugs are largely excluded from Medicare’s new price negotiation system. When it comes to pharmaceutical innovation, smaller is better.
For our analysis, we reviewed 428 recent drug approvals by the Food and Drug Administration and surveyed financial data from more than 4,000 pharmaceutical and biotech companies. We found that large companies, defined as those with more than $10 billion in annual sales, produced 86 percent of the industry’s revenue but that only 36 percent of the drugs approved by the FDA. By contrast, emerging start-ups with less than $500 million in annual sales or less than $200 million in annual R&D spending produced 3 percent of the industry’s revenue but discovered more than half of all newly approved drugs.
You’d think that the biggest drug companies with the biggest R&D budgets would have the most productive research labs. But it doesn’t work that way.
Large companies tend to be bureaucratic, risk-averse and much more focused on increasing profits from their existing drug product lines. That’s partly because their largest and most influential shareholders care more about quarterly returns than long-term success. As a result, big companies overinvest in low-quality but “safe” ideas and underinvest in better but risky ones.
By contrast, smaller companies are nimbler and can better attract top scientific talent. The most creative scientists work at start-ups where they often have more freedom. Start-ups also let them generate far more wealth through stock options rather than through modest year-end bonuses at behemoths like Eli Lilly or AstraZeneca.
If large companies’ labs are so unproductive, you might ask, why are so many of the world’s top-selling drugs manufactured by bigger companies? Because of the FDA’s high regulatory costs. Smaller companies can’t always afford to conduct the large billion-dollar clinical trials required for approval. As a result, big companies treat emerging start-ups like their farm team, buying off their best drugs, raising their prices and reaping the profits.
The good news is this is beginning to change. Emerging companies are increasingly taking their best drugs to market by themselves. In 2013, only 23 percent of successful drugs developed by emerging companies reached FDA approval under the original developer. By 2022, that share increased to 75 percent. If this trend continues, patients will benefit from a more competitive and diverse ecosystem of drug developers.
Opponents of drug-price negotiation on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley have no problem with large multinationals gobbling up smaller companies. Mergers and acquisitions, they argue, enable investors in those smaller companies to generate quicker returns, incentivizing further investment in start-ups.
But investors also make money if start-ups take their innovations all the way to market. In fact, over the long term, investors can make more money if start-ups become multibillion-dollar success stories rather than selling out at an earlier stage for lower acquisition prices. A more diverse ecosystem of successful, profitable biopharmaceutical companies will lead to more innovation, not less.
The drug negotiation provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act were designed with these considerations in mind. The law exempts from its process any drug representing more than 80 percent of a company’s sales to the Medicare program, effectively excluding emerging start-ups with one FDA-approved medicine.
And more affordable medicines benefit all Americans, not just seniors in Medicare, because all taxpayers fund the program through payroll taxes.
That’s why President Biden has proposed expanding Medicare price negotiations from 20 drugs a year to 50, a reasonable idea that would reduce the federal deficit and Medicare premiums. People often think the only way to make Medicare sustainable is to raise taxes or cut benefits. But reducing what Medicare must pay for the care seniors receive can also help accomplish this goal.
The real barrier to innovation in drug development isn’t manufacturers’ ability to charge extortionate prices; it’s the ever-increasing cost of navigating the FDA’s approval process. In the rest of the economy, innovation drives lower prices for valuable goods and services. The pharmaceutical industry — and its regulator — should follow suit.
REJECT TRUMP’S MESSIANIC MESSAGE OF HATE
Donald Trump's enablers in the Republican Party and conservative media have turned the election into a crusade, amplifying his angry message of division and retribution.
by The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
Easter is a celebration of light over darkness. Yet, Donald Trump spent the day spewing lies, hate, and anger while likening himself to Christ.
Trump posted 77 times to his social media site, attacking perceived enemies in all caps with words like EVIL, SICK, DERANGED, CORRUPT, and CROOKED.
Trump’s Easter greeting lacked the Hallmark touch. “HAPPY EASTER TO ALL, INCLUDING CROOKED AND CORRUPT PROSECUTORS AND JUDGES THAT ARE DOING EVERYTHING POSSIBLE TO INTERFERE WITH THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2024, AND PUT ME IN PRISON, INCLUDING THOSE MANY PEOPLE THAT I COMPLETELY & TOTALLY DESPISE BECAUSE THEY WANT TO DESTROY AMERICA, A NOW FAILING NATION,” he wrote on Truth Social.
Trump’s vitriol contrasted with President Joe Biden’s message, which was short and sound. “To all those gathering in churches and homes around the world today: Happy Easter. May God bless and keep you,” Biden wrote on X, the site formerly known as Twitter.
While Biden went to Mass on Saturday and spent the weekend with his children and grandchildren, Trump went full huckster, selling Bibles for $59.99 and comparing himself to Jesus — as he gears up for a criminal trial involving hush-money payments to an adult film star days before the 2016 election.
The stark difference in style and substance between the two presidential candidates offered a window into what the next four years will be like depending on who wins the White House in November.
The choice between Biden’s steady hand or Trump’s radical plans should not be difficult. But Trump’s enablers in the Republican Party and conservative media have turned the election into a crusade, amplifying his angry message of division and retribution.
Led by Fox News, conservative and social media sites stoke the outrage, leaving a large segment of the population misinformed. The messaging campaign drove the misguided attacks on Biden over the weekend for acknowledging International Transgender Day of Visibility, which happened to fall on Easter Sunday. (The date of Easter changes from year to year, while International Transgender Day of Visibility has been held on March 31 since 2009.)
Fox News also promoted false claims that Biden prohibited children from submitting religious egg designs to a White House Easter art contest — even though the policy has existed for nearly 50 years and was followed by Republican and Democratic administrations.
But that did not stop Trump and his allies from feigning outrage. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) accused the White House of having “betrayed the central tenet of Easter — which is the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” Meanwhile, Fox News accused Biden of trying to “erase Easter.”
Lisa Boothe, a Fox News contributor, falsely claimed that celebrating International Transgender Day of Visibility on Easter was part of a “coordinated effort to remove God from our society.”
The hypocrisy of the attacks was apparently lost on Biden critics, as one Fox News headline blared: “White House doubles down on inclusiveness message amid backlash over Transgender Day of Visibility on Easter.”
Similar divisive attacks emerged shortly after a cargo ship crashed into a bridge in Baltimore last week. Within hours after the tragedy, social media posts began labeling Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott, who is Black, as the “DEI mayor.”
Attacking diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts has been a cornerstone of the GOP’s culture war playbook. Never mind that diversity has long been a core strength of America, spurring growth, innovation, and creativity. But in Trump’s MAGA world, the Golden Rule of loving your neighbor does not apply to everyone.
As Trump infuses his campaign with Christian imagery, voters should beware of false prophets.
Donald Trump's enablers in the Republican Party and conservative media have turned the election into a crusade, amplifying his angry message of division and retribution.
by The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
Easter is a celebration of light over darkness. Yet, Donald Trump spent the day spewing lies, hate, and anger while likening himself to Christ.
Trump posted 77 times to his social media site, attacking perceived enemies in all caps with words like EVIL, SICK, DERANGED, CORRUPT, and CROOKED.
Trump’s Easter greeting lacked the Hallmark touch. “HAPPY EASTER TO ALL, INCLUDING CROOKED AND CORRUPT PROSECUTORS AND JUDGES THAT ARE DOING EVERYTHING POSSIBLE TO INTERFERE WITH THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2024, AND PUT ME IN PRISON, INCLUDING THOSE MANY PEOPLE THAT I COMPLETELY & TOTALLY DESPISE BECAUSE THEY WANT TO DESTROY AMERICA, A NOW FAILING NATION,” he wrote on Truth Social.
Trump’s vitriol contrasted with President Joe Biden’s message, which was short and sound. “To all those gathering in churches and homes around the world today: Happy Easter. May God bless and keep you,” Biden wrote on X, the site formerly known as Twitter.
While Biden went to Mass on Saturday and spent the weekend with his children and grandchildren, Trump went full huckster, selling Bibles for $59.99 and comparing himself to Jesus — as he gears up for a criminal trial involving hush-money payments to an adult film star days before the 2016 election.
The stark difference in style and substance between the two presidential candidates offered a window into what the next four years will be like depending on who wins the White House in November.
The choice between Biden’s steady hand or Trump’s radical plans should not be difficult. But Trump’s enablers in the Republican Party and conservative media have turned the election into a crusade, amplifying his angry message of division and retribution.
Led by Fox News, conservative and social media sites stoke the outrage, leaving a large segment of the population misinformed. The messaging campaign drove the misguided attacks on Biden over the weekend for acknowledging International Transgender Day of Visibility, which happened to fall on Easter Sunday. (The date of Easter changes from year to year, while International Transgender Day of Visibility has been held on March 31 since 2009.)
Fox News also promoted false claims that Biden prohibited children from submitting religious egg designs to a White House Easter art contest — even though the policy has existed for nearly 50 years and was followed by Republican and Democratic administrations.
But that did not stop Trump and his allies from feigning outrage. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) accused the White House of having “betrayed the central tenet of Easter — which is the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” Meanwhile, Fox News accused Biden of trying to “erase Easter.”
Lisa Boothe, a Fox News contributor, falsely claimed that celebrating International Transgender Day of Visibility on Easter was part of a “coordinated effort to remove God from our society.”
The hypocrisy of the attacks was apparently lost on Biden critics, as one Fox News headline blared: “White House doubles down on inclusiveness message amid backlash over Transgender Day of Visibility on Easter.”
Similar divisive attacks emerged shortly after a cargo ship crashed into a bridge in Baltimore last week. Within hours after the tragedy, social media posts began labeling Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott, who is Black, as the “DEI mayor.”
Attacking diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts has been a cornerstone of the GOP’s culture war playbook. Never mind that diversity has long been a core strength of America, spurring growth, innovation, and creativity. But in Trump’s MAGA world, the Golden Rule of loving your neighbor does not apply to everyone.
As Trump infuses his campaign with Christian imagery, voters should beware of false prophets.
REPUBLICANS’ ABORTION WOES WORSEN
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Republicans’ zealotry for forced-birth laws might be the best thing ever to happen to the pro-choice movement. “A record 59 percent of surveyed Americans believe abortion should be legal, according to a new Fox News poll,” the Hill reported last week. “Support for abortion rights has increased by double digits since early 2022, just before the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.” The Supreme Court’s decision shredding Roe v. Wade “created a cascading effect of abortion restrictions in Republican-controlled states nationwide and sparked a new movement of abortion rights activism.”
The impact of abortion criminalization has been profound. The percentage of Americans who say abortion should always be legal rose from 27 percent in April 2022 to 35 percent. Moreover, a record number now consider this an important issue (41 percent) while voters believe President Biden (53 percent) would do a better job on abortion issues than his almost certain 2024 rival, Donald Trump (41 percent).
Many measures on the November state ballots might well drive Democratic turnout, helping the party’s candidates up and down the ballot. Moreover, they keep abortion uppermost in voters’ minds. The unbroken string of victories for pro-choice measures since Dobbs and the subsequent washout of the red wave in the 2022 midterms suggest abortion has changed the electoral landscape.
Political scientist D. Stephen Voss told Vox, “People talk about abortion as a mobilizer for upper-status professionals, and it is, it’s a part of what you’re seeing … a backlash against the culture war conservatism of the Republican Party.” Voss added: “If you only look at our very limited suburban counties, you’re missing that this trend among affluent professionals is having a wider impact than merely in places we call suburbs.”
Likewise, Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg (one of the few analysts to throw cold water on predictions of a 2022 red wave) has repeatedly warned that “Dobbs changed everything.” During an MSNBC interview in September, Rosenberg explained that there was a “huge heightened Democratic performance” after Dobbs in more than two dozen special election races.
A cottage industry — the same that predicted Dobbs would be a nonfactor — insisted that the abortion issue’s impact would diminish. However, if attention had drifted, certainly the recent Supreme Court case about banning the abortion drug mifepristone woke up many women. The Supreme Court justices sounded at oral argument ready to throw out the case on “standing” grounds. However, it reminded those concerned about abortion rights that Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas appear eager to embrace the latest right-wing antiabortion mechanism, the 1873 Comstock Act, to effectuate a nationwide ban on abortion.
“Conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation are already urging Trump to issue an executive order on Day 1 banning medication abortion,” Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern wrote last week. “Republican lawyers are preparing to use the Comstock Act to prohibit all abortions, not just pills.” In short, MAGA Republicans might try to apply this “zombie relic” law so widely that a Trump Justice Department could push to “make all abortion care a felony.” Democrats are bound to highlight that shocking prospect ahead of the November elections.
In sum, Republicans are likely to keep reminding voters that their party is not about to let public opinion stand in the way of extreme maneuvers to try to ban abortion in every state. Democrats would do well — as they did in 2022 — to lean into the abortion issue. Watch for more Democrats during this election cycle vowing to repeal the Comstock Act, to enshrine abortion rights in federal statute and to use the Justice Department aggressively to defend women’s right to choose. That’s how they can draw a sharp contrast with Republicans’ cruel, dangerous agenda.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Republicans’ zealotry for forced-birth laws might be the best thing ever to happen to the pro-choice movement. “A record 59 percent of surveyed Americans believe abortion should be legal, according to a new Fox News poll,” the Hill reported last week. “Support for abortion rights has increased by double digits since early 2022, just before the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.” The Supreme Court’s decision shredding Roe v. Wade “created a cascading effect of abortion restrictions in Republican-controlled states nationwide and sparked a new movement of abortion rights activism.”
The impact of abortion criminalization has been profound. The percentage of Americans who say abortion should always be legal rose from 27 percent in April 2022 to 35 percent. Moreover, a record number now consider this an important issue (41 percent) while voters believe President Biden (53 percent) would do a better job on abortion issues than his almost certain 2024 rival, Donald Trump (41 percent).
Many measures on the November state ballots might well drive Democratic turnout, helping the party’s candidates up and down the ballot. Moreover, they keep abortion uppermost in voters’ minds. The unbroken string of victories for pro-choice measures since Dobbs and the subsequent washout of the red wave in the 2022 midterms suggest abortion has changed the electoral landscape.
Political scientist D. Stephen Voss told Vox, “People talk about abortion as a mobilizer for upper-status professionals, and it is, it’s a part of what you’re seeing … a backlash against the culture war conservatism of the Republican Party.” Voss added: “If you only look at our very limited suburban counties, you’re missing that this trend among affluent professionals is having a wider impact than merely in places we call suburbs.”
Likewise, Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg (one of the few analysts to throw cold water on predictions of a 2022 red wave) has repeatedly warned that “Dobbs changed everything.” During an MSNBC interview in September, Rosenberg explained that there was a “huge heightened Democratic performance” after Dobbs in more than two dozen special election races.
A cottage industry — the same that predicted Dobbs would be a nonfactor — insisted that the abortion issue’s impact would diminish. However, if attention had drifted, certainly the recent Supreme Court case about banning the abortion drug mifepristone woke up many women. The Supreme Court justices sounded at oral argument ready to throw out the case on “standing” grounds. However, it reminded those concerned about abortion rights that Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas appear eager to embrace the latest right-wing antiabortion mechanism, the 1873 Comstock Act, to effectuate a nationwide ban on abortion.
“Conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation are already urging Trump to issue an executive order on Day 1 banning medication abortion,” Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern wrote last week. “Republican lawyers are preparing to use the Comstock Act to prohibit all abortions, not just pills.” In short, MAGA Republicans might try to apply this “zombie relic” law so widely that a Trump Justice Department could push to “make all abortion care a felony.” Democrats are bound to highlight that shocking prospect ahead of the November elections.
In sum, Republicans are likely to keep reminding voters that their party is not about to let public opinion stand in the way of extreme maneuvers to try to ban abortion in every state. Democrats would do well — as they did in 2022 — to lean into the abortion issue. Watch for more Democrats during this election cycle vowing to repeal the Comstock Act, to enshrine abortion rights in federal statute and to use the Justice Department aggressively to defend women’s right to choose. That’s how they can draw a sharp contrast with Republicans’ cruel, dangerous agenda.
CHINA, RUSSIA AND TRUMP
By David Leonhardt, The New York Times
America’s biggest adversaries evidently want Donald Trump to win the 2024 presidential election.
Vladimir Putin’s preference for Trump has long been clear. And now China’s government is taking steps to help Trump’s presidential campaign.
As my colleagues Tiffany Hsu and Steven Lee Myers report:
Covert Chinese accounts are masquerading online as American supporters of former President Donald J. Trump, promoting conspiracy theories, stoking domestic divisions and attacking President Biden ahead of the election in November, according to researchers and government officials.
The accounts signal a potential tactical shift in how Beijing aims to influence American politics, with more of a willingness to target specific candidates and parties, including Mr. Biden ….
Some of the Chinese accounts impersonate fervent Trump fans, including one on X that purported to be “a father, husband and son” who was “MAGA all the way!!” The accounts mocked Mr. Biden’s age and shared fake images of him in a prison jumpsuit, or claimed that Mr. Biden was a Satanist pedophile while promoting Mr. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan.
This effort has been modest so far, and it remains unclear whether it will grow — or whether Beijing-linked accounts will later try to balance their approach with anti-Trump posts. For now, though, at least parts of the Chinese government appear to have picked a side in the 2024 election. In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain what China and Russia hope to gain from a second Trump term.
Spheres of influence
Putin’s reasons to prefer Trump seem obvious (even if Putin claims otherwise). Biden leads an international coalition opposing Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and U.S. support has enabled Ukraine’s much smaller military to stall Russia’s advance. Trump has suggested that he will end this support. A central part of Putin’s war strategy, intelligence experts believe, is to wait for Ukraine’s Western allies to tire of the war.
China’s reasons to prefer Trump are less obvious. Trump, after all, took a more combative stance toward China than any U.S. president since Richard Nixon re-established ties with Beijing. The Associated Press and Washington Post have noted that Beijing seems unhappy with both Biden and Trump.
But there appear to be at least two major ways in which China’s leaders could benefit from a second Trump term.
The first involves America’s engagement with global politics. Biden believes that the world is in the midst of a struggle between autocracy and democracy, and he sees the U.S. as the leading democracy, much as past presidents from both parties did. In Biden’s view, the U.S. is “the indispensable nation” that must defend a democracy when an autocratic neighbor attacks, as Russia did in Ukraine and China may eventually do in Taiwan.
Putin and Xi take a less idealistic view toward global affairs. They instead believe that strong nations should be able to control their own regions. Under Xi, China has become more aggressive not only toward Taiwan but also toward other neighbors. China has also expanded its influence in Africa and Latin America, effectively challenging the U.S.’s status as the world’s lone superpower.
Trump has shown little interest in these issues. He is an isolationist who embraces the slogan “America First.” He prefers that the U.S. avoid international conflicts, and he is skeptical of treaties and alliances. He said at a recent campaign rally that Russia’s leaders should be able “to do whatever the hell they want” to some European countries.
For Moscow and Beijing, the benefits of an American president who holds these beliefs are large.
Potential chaos
The second major advantage of a new Trump term for China and Russia is the domestic chaos that could result in the U.S.
Trump governed as no previous American president did. His White House was often disorganized, and his positions could change quickly. A recent example involves China. As president, Trump favored forcing ByteDance, a Chinese company, to sell TikTok, and many congressional Republicans (as well as Democrats) continue to hold this view. But Trump recently reversed his position. One possible explanation is that a Republican donor whose firm owns a stake in ByteDance — and could lose money from a forced sale — lobbied Trump.
In a second term, the turmoil could increase. Trump has promised to use the government’s power to investigate and potentially jail his political opponents. He has encouraged his supporters to use violence to get their way. And he has so angered many Democrats that they became radicalized on several issues (including Covid lockdowns, immigration and policing) in ways that have divided the party.
A politically chaotic U.S. could allow other countries to assert more global influence.
I understand that Trump supporters will object to the idea that he could undermine the national interest. Many support him precisely because they believe he can protect the country in a way no other politician will. His central promise, of course, is to make America great again.
What’s striking, however, is that the country’s biggest global rivals believe that a Trump victory will serve their interests instead.
By David Leonhardt, The New York Times
America’s biggest adversaries evidently want Donald Trump to win the 2024 presidential election.
Vladimir Putin’s preference for Trump has long been clear. And now China’s government is taking steps to help Trump’s presidential campaign.
As my colleagues Tiffany Hsu and Steven Lee Myers report:
Covert Chinese accounts are masquerading online as American supporters of former President Donald J. Trump, promoting conspiracy theories, stoking domestic divisions and attacking President Biden ahead of the election in November, according to researchers and government officials.
The accounts signal a potential tactical shift in how Beijing aims to influence American politics, with more of a willingness to target specific candidates and parties, including Mr. Biden ….
Some of the Chinese accounts impersonate fervent Trump fans, including one on X that purported to be “a father, husband and son” who was “MAGA all the way!!” The accounts mocked Mr. Biden’s age and shared fake images of him in a prison jumpsuit, or claimed that Mr. Biden was a Satanist pedophile while promoting Mr. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan.
This effort has been modest so far, and it remains unclear whether it will grow — or whether Beijing-linked accounts will later try to balance their approach with anti-Trump posts. For now, though, at least parts of the Chinese government appear to have picked a side in the 2024 election. In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain what China and Russia hope to gain from a second Trump term.
Spheres of influence
Putin’s reasons to prefer Trump seem obvious (even if Putin claims otherwise). Biden leads an international coalition opposing Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and U.S. support has enabled Ukraine’s much smaller military to stall Russia’s advance. Trump has suggested that he will end this support. A central part of Putin’s war strategy, intelligence experts believe, is to wait for Ukraine’s Western allies to tire of the war.
China’s reasons to prefer Trump are less obvious. Trump, after all, took a more combative stance toward China than any U.S. president since Richard Nixon re-established ties with Beijing. The Associated Press and Washington Post have noted that Beijing seems unhappy with both Biden and Trump.
But there appear to be at least two major ways in which China’s leaders could benefit from a second Trump term.
The first involves America’s engagement with global politics. Biden believes that the world is in the midst of a struggle between autocracy and democracy, and he sees the U.S. as the leading democracy, much as past presidents from both parties did. In Biden’s view, the U.S. is “the indispensable nation” that must defend a democracy when an autocratic neighbor attacks, as Russia did in Ukraine and China may eventually do in Taiwan.
Putin and Xi take a less idealistic view toward global affairs. They instead believe that strong nations should be able to control their own regions. Under Xi, China has become more aggressive not only toward Taiwan but also toward other neighbors. China has also expanded its influence in Africa and Latin America, effectively challenging the U.S.’s status as the world’s lone superpower.
Trump has shown little interest in these issues. He is an isolationist who embraces the slogan “America First.” He prefers that the U.S. avoid international conflicts, and he is skeptical of treaties and alliances. He said at a recent campaign rally that Russia’s leaders should be able “to do whatever the hell they want” to some European countries.
For Moscow and Beijing, the benefits of an American president who holds these beliefs are large.
Potential chaos
The second major advantage of a new Trump term for China and Russia is the domestic chaos that could result in the U.S.
Trump governed as no previous American president did. His White House was often disorganized, and his positions could change quickly. A recent example involves China. As president, Trump favored forcing ByteDance, a Chinese company, to sell TikTok, and many congressional Republicans (as well as Democrats) continue to hold this view. But Trump recently reversed his position. One possible explanation is that a Republican donor whose firm owns a stake in ByteDance — and could lose money from a forced sale — lobbied Trump.
In a second term, the turmoil could increase. Trump has promised to use the government’s power to investigate and potentially jail his political opponents. He has encouraged his supporters to use violence to get their way. And he has so angered many Democrats that they became radicalized on several issues (including Covid lockdowns, immigration and policing) in ways that have divided the party.
A politically chaotic U.S. could allow other countries to assert more global influence.
I understand that Trump supporters will object to the idea that he could undermine the national interest. Many support him precisely because they believe he can protect the country in a way no other politician will. His central promise, of course, is to make America great again.
What’s striking, however, is that the country’s biggest global rivals believe that a Trump victory will serve their interests instead.
RFK JR. ARGUES BIDEN IS BIGGER THREAT TO DEMOCRACY THAN TRUMP, DRAWING CRITICISM
Several experts and historians rebuked the independent presidential candidate for his comments in a televised interview
By Meryl Kornfield, The Washington Post
Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. repeatedly advanced an argument Monday that President Biden poses a greater threat to democracy than Donald Trump, a comment that drew swift rebukes from several historians and experts.
Kennedy, speaking to CNN’s Erin Burnett on Monday night, criticized the Biden administration’s push for social media companies to monitor their platforms for medical misinformation. Kennedy was temporarily banned by Instagram for spreading misinformation online about vaccines. Kennedy claimed Biden was “censoring me” and is “weaponizing federal agencies.”
He added that Trump — who has alarmed some experts with rhetoric and stances they have compared to authoritarian leaders, plotted a more extreme second term and inspired his supporters to fight the results of an election he continues to falsely claim was stolen — is not as significant a threat to democracy.
“Him trying to overthrow the election clearly is a threat to democracy,” Kennedy said of Trump. “But the question was, who is a worse threat to democracy and what I would say is … I’m not going to answer that question, but I can argue that President Biden is.”
Earlier in the interview, Kennedy gave a lengthy defense of that argument, saying “the greatest threat to democracy is not someone who questions election returns,” but rather Biden, pointing to his administration’s exchanges with social media companies.
Daniel Ziblatt, a Harvard University political scientist and the co-author of “How Democracies Die,” said of Kennedy’s comment, “It’s a preposterous claim.” He added, “To be a politician committed to democracy, there are two cardinal rules: One must accept election outcomes, win or lose; one must not threaten or use violence to gain power. Donald Trump has clearly violated both rules, while President Biden never has.”
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a New York University historian, said Kennedy’s remarks and similar claims from some Republicans that Biden has infringed on their rights could further instigate fear and anger on the political right, which she said was a worrisome trend.
Kennedy said he does not consider himself a spoiler for either Biden or Trump. But Biden’s allies condemned Kennedy’s attack and said it was an indication he is a “spoiler candidate” who is spreading “MAGA talking points.”
“With a straight face Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that Joe Biden is a bigger threat to democracy than Donald Trump because he was barred from pushing conspiracy theories online,” Democratic National Committee senior adviser Mary Beth Cahill said in a statement. She went on to highlight the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob and pointed to Trump’s prior comments about being a dictator only on “Day One” of his second term, which he later claimed he said in jest.
Some experts have warned that Trump’s embrace of authoritarian rhetoric poses a threat to democracy, as the former president has attempted to deflect criticism and portray Biden as anti-democratic. Democrats previously warned that attacks on Biden — such as when former primary challenger Dean Phillips argued he was a threat to democracy because the Minnesota congressman could not get on the Democratic primary ballot in some states — distract from Trump’s greater danger.
Biden allies have grown increasingly concerned that Kennedy could threaten the president’s chances at reelection, casting the scion of the famous Democratic family as a stalking horse for Trump’s movement and stepping up efforts to counter third-party bids. Kennedy, who left the Democratic Party in October to run as an independent in the general election, has increasingly ramped up attacks on Biden after previously supporting him in 2020.
Kennedy sued the Biden administration last year, arguing he was censored, and won a preliminary injunction in a Louisiana federal court in February. But the injunction was delayed until a similar case is decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Last month, the high court seemed prepared to reject an argument by Republican-led states that the Biden administration had limited free speech during the coronavirus pandemic. Rather, Justices Elena Kagan and Brett M. Kavanaugh suggested that government exchanges with social media platforms and media outlets are routine occurrences and wouldn’t constitute censorship.
Several experts and historians rebuked the independent presidential candidate for his comments in a televised interview
By Meryl Kornfield, The Washington Post
Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. repeatedly advanced an argument Monday that President Biden poses a greater threat to democracy than Donald Trump, a comment that drew swift rebukes from several historians and experts.
Kennedy, speaking to CNN’s Erin Burnett on Monday night, criticized the Biden administration’s push for social media companies to monitor their platforms for medical misinformation. Kennedy was temporarily banned by Instagram for spreading misinformation online about vaccines. Kennedy claimed Biden was “censoring me” and is “weaponizing federal agencies.”
He added that Trump — who has alarmed some experts with rhetoric and stances they have compared to authoritarian leaders, plotted a more extreme second term and inspired his supporters to fight the results of an election he continues to falsely claim was stolen — is not as significant a threat to democracy.
“Him trying to overthrow the election clearly is a threat to democracy,” Kennedy said of Trump. “But the question was, who is a worse threat to democracy and what I would say is … I’m not going to answer that question, but I can argue that President Biden is.”
Earlier in the interview, Kennedy gave a lengthy defense of that argument, saying “the greatest threat to democracy is not someone who questions election returns,” but rather Biden, pointing to his administration’s exchanges with social media companies.
Daniel Ziblatt, a Harvard University political scientist and the co-author of “How Democracies Die,” said of Kennedy’s comment, “It’s a preposterous claim.” He added, “To be a politician committed to democracy, there are two cardinal rules: One must accept election outcomes, win or lose; one must not threaten or use violence to gain power. Donald Trump has clearly violated both rules, while President Biden never has.”
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a New York University historian, said Kennedy’s remarks and similar claims from some Republicans that Biden has infringed on their rights could further instigate fear and anger on the political right, which she said was a worrisome trend.
Kennedy said he does not consider himself a spoiler for either Biden or Trump. But Biden’s allies condemned Kennedy’s attack and said it was an indication he is a “spoiler candidate” who is spreading “MAGA talking points.”
“With a straight face Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that Joe Biden is a bigger threat to democracy than Donald Trump because he was barred from pushing conspiracy theories online,” Democratic National Committee senior adviser Mary Beth Cahill said in a statement. She went on to highlight the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob and pointed to Trump’s prior comments about being a dictator only on “Day One” of his second term, which he later claimed he said in jest.
Some experts have warned that Trump’s embrace of authoritarian rhetoric poses a threat to democracy, as the former president has attempted to deflect criticism and portray Biden as anti-democratic. Democrats previously warned that attacks on Biden — such as when former primary challenger Dean Phillips argued he was a threat to democracy because the Minnesota congressman could not get on the Democratic primary ballot in some states — distract from Trump’s greater danger.
Biden allies have grown increasingly concerned that Kennedy could threaten the president’s chances at reelection, casting the scion of the famous Democratic family as a stalking horse for Trump’s movement and stepping up efforts to counter third-party bids. Kennedy, who left the Democratic Party in October to run as an independent in the general election, has increasingly ramped up attacks on Biden after previously supporting him in 2020.
Kennedy sued the Biden administration last year, arguing he was censored, and won a preliminary injunction in a Louisiana federal court in February. But the injunction was delayed until a similar case is decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Last month, the high court seemed prepared to reject an argument by Republican-led states that the Biden administration had limited free speech during the coronavirus pandemic. Rather, Justices Elena Kagan and Brett M. Kavanaugh suggested that government exchanges with social media platforms and media outlets are routine occurrences and wouldn’t constitute censorship.
HOW TRUMP MOVED MONEY TO PAY $100 MILLION IN LEGAL BILLS
By Molly Cook Escobar, Albert Sun and Shane Goldmacher, The Washington Post
Since leaving office in 2021, former President Donald J. Trump has spent more than $100 million on lawyers and other costs related to fending off various investigations, indictments and his coming criminal trials, according to a New York Times review of federal records.
The remarkable sum means that Mr. Trump has averaged more than $90,000 a day in legal-related costs for more than three years — none of it paid for with his own money. Instead, the former president has relied almost entirely on donations made in an attempt to fight the results of the 2020 election.
Now, those accounts are nearly drained, and Mr. Trump faces a choice: begin to pay his own substantial legal fees or find another way to finance them.
November 2020 to Early 2021
Mr. Trump raised a staggering $254 million online from Nov. 4, 2020, the day after the election, to President Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2021, as he urged supporters to fuel an “election defense fund.” The contributions came so quickly that on Nov. 9, Mr. Trump formed a new political action committee, Save America, to store all the cash. Only a fraction of the money, however, went toward recounts and other legal challenges to the election. Some went to Mr. Trump’s lawyers during his second impeachment, related to the Jan. 6 riot. But Mr. Trump banked much of the cash.
Rest of 2021
Mr. Trump started to use the money to fund his post-presidential political operation and what would eventually become his sprawling legal teams. In February, Trump renamed his 2020 committee to “MAGA PAC.” By the end of 2021, Save America, which continued to bring in new donations, held a substantial portion of Mr. Trump’s fund-raising: $105 million.
2022
Both Save America and MAGA PAC spent significantly in 2022 on legal bills and other related expenses. The House held its public Jan. 6 hearings. The F.B.I. searched Mar-a-Lago for missing classified documents in August. His legal fees rose. Mr. Trump spent about $27.2 million on legal-related costs for the year. As Mr. Trump prepared to announce his 2024 run late in 2022, he faced a quandary: His PAC could not directly spend money to elect him as president. So Save America transferred $60 million to a pro-Trump super PAC called MAGA Inc.
2023
Save America began 2023 with $18.3 million. But Mr. Trump’s legal expenses were about to soar. He was first indicted in March 2023 in New York. Three other indictments followed. Mr. Trump spent close to $60 million on legal and investigation-related costs — which included his lawyers, a document-production company and an expert witness in Trump’s New York civil fraud case.
Early last year, Mr. Trump made a change to bring more money into Save America, the PAC that was paying his legal expenses. At first, one cent of every dollar he raised online went to Save America; the rest went to his 2024 campaign. But with Save America short of cash to pay lawyers, he increased that to 10 percent.
It was still not enough. By June 2023, Save America had less than $4 million on hand. In an unusual move, Mr. Trump asked his super PAC for a refund of the $60 million he had given just months earlier, so that Save America could continue paying for his legal expenses. By the end of 2023, more than $42 million had been returned from his super PAC to Save America.
2024
With his first trial looming — in the New York case related to hush-money payments to a porn star in 2016 — Mr. Trump’s legal costs continued to rise. He spent at least $9.7 million in January and February. The more than $100 million in legal spending since leaving office does not include spending from Mr. Trump's 2024 campaign, which has not paid for his personal legal bills. The use of donations to pay for his personal lawyers has been allowed under federal rules.
To cover the ongoing legal costs, his super PAC refunded an additional $10 million in January and February. But there is now only $7.75 million left to refund. Save America had less than $4 million at the end of February, when accounting for unpaid debts.
The Trump team has said the Republican National Committee won’t pay his legal bills. But his new shared fund-raising agreement with the party directs a portion of donations to his Save America PAC before the party itself. Still, the account paying Mr. Trump’s legal bills will most likely be out of money by summer at the current spending pace.
Then, Mr. Trump will have to decide: Whose money will he use to pay his lawyers?
By Molly Cook Escobar, Albert Sun and Shane Goldmacher, The Washington Post
Since leaving office in 2021, former President Donald J. Trump has spent more than $100 million on lawyers and other costs related to fending off various investigations, indictments and his coming criminal trials, according to a New York Times review of federal records.
The remarkable sum means that Mr. Trump has averaged more than $90,000 a day in legal-related costs for more than three years — none of it paid for with his own money. Instead, the former president has relied almost entirely on donations made in an attempt to fight the results of the 2020 election.
Now, those accounts are nearly drained, and Mr. Trump faces a choice: begin to pay his own substantial legal fees or find another way to finance them.
November 2020 to Early 2021
Mr. Trump raised a staggering $254 million online from Nov. 4, 2020, the day after the election, to President Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2021, as he urged supporters to fuel an “election defense fund.” The contributions came so quickly that on Nov. 9, Mr. Trump formed a new political action committee, Save America, to store all the cash. Only a fraction of the money, however, went toward recounts and other legal challenges to the election. Some went to Mr. Trump’s lawyers during his second impeachment, related to the Jan. 6 riot. But Mr. Trump banked much of the cash.
Rest of 2021
Mr. Trump started to use the money to fund his post-presidential political operation and what would eventually become his sprawling legal teams. In February, Trump renamed his 2020 committee to “MAGA PAC.” By the end of 2021, Save America, which continued to bring in new donations, held a substantial portion of Mr. Trump’s fund-raising: $105 million.
2022
Both Save America and MAGA PAC spent significantly in 2022 on legal bills and other related expenses. The House held its public Jan. 6 hearings. The F.B.I. searched Mar-a-Lago for missing classified documents in August. His legal fees rose. Mr. Trump spent about $27.2 million on legal-related costs for the year. As Mr. Trump prepared to announce his 2024 run late in 2022, he faced a quandary: His PAC could not directly spend money to elect him as president. So Save America transferred $60 million to a pro-Trump super PAC called MAGA Inc.
2023
Save America began 2023 with $18.3 million. But Mr. Trump’s legal expenses were about to soar. He was first indicted in March 2023 in New York. Three other indictments followed. Mr. Trump spent close to $60 million on legal and investigation-related costs — which included his lawyers, a document-production company and an expert witness in Trump’s New York civil fraud case.
Early last year, Mr. Trump made a change to bring more money into Save America, the PAC that was paying his legal expenses. At first, one cent of every dollar he raised online went to Save America; the rest went to his 2024 campaign. But with Save America short of cash to pay lawyers, he increased that to 10 percent.
It was still not enough. By June 2023, Save America had less than $4 million on hand. In an unusual move, Mr. Trump asked his super PAC for a refund of the $60 million he had given just months earlier, so that Save America could continue paying for his legal expenses. By the end of 2023, more than $42 million had been returned from his super PAC to Save America.
2024
With his first trial looming — in the New York case related to hush-money payments to a porn star in 2016 — Mr. Trump’s legal costs continued to rise. He spent at least $9.7 million in January and February. The more than $100 million in legal spending since leaving office does not include spending from Mr. Trump's 2024 campaign, which has not paid for his personal legal bills. The use of donations to pay for his personal lawyers has been allowed under federal rules.
To cover the ongoing legal costs, his super PAC refunded an additional $10 million in January and February. But there is now only $7.75 million left to refund. Save America had less than $4 million at the end of February, when accounting for unpaid debts.
The Trump team has said the Republican National Committee won’t pay his legal bills. But his new shared fund-raising agreement with the party directs a portion of donations to his Save America PAC before the party itself. Still, the account paying Mr. Trump’s legal bills will most likely be out of money by summer at the current spending pace.
Then, Mr. Trump will have to decide: Whose money will he use to pay his lawyers?
THE PEOPLE WHO KNOW TRUMP BEST HAVE SPOKEN: HE IS UNFIT TO LEAD
Many conservative Republicans who worked with the former president have strong words for why he shouldn’t return to the White House.
By The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
Despite two impeachments, four criminal indictments, a civil fraud judgment, a sexual abuse finding, a mismanaged pandemic, an attempted coup, a deadly insurrection, 30,573 lies, unending chaos, and incompetence, many voters continue to stand by Donald Trump.
But some Republican leaders who know Trump best no longer support him. The Inquirer Editorial Board has deemed a second Trump presidency a clear and present danger, but some dyed-in-the-wool Republicans who worked with Trump make an even stronger case.
Former Vice President Mike Pence stood beside Trump until his final days in office, when he refused to help overturn the election. Some Trump supporters wanted to hang Pence, and Trump sided with the mob. The ever-loyal Pence now says he cannot “in good conscience” endorse Trump for president in 2024.
Bill Barr is a lifelong Republican who served as attorney general under Trump and soft-pedaled the probe into Russia’s 2020 election interference. He now calls Trump “a consummate narcissist” and refused to endorse him. Barr added, “I don’t think he’s going to move the country forward.”
Other Trump cabinet officials have also sounded the alarm.
John Kelly, a retired four-star general who served in Vietnam, was Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff. After the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, Kelly said he would have voted to remove Trump from the White House.
Kelly remains dumbfounded by the continued support for Trump. “What’s going on in the country that a single person thinks this guy would still be a good president?” he wondered.
James Mattis, another retired four-star general, was Trump’s first defense secretary. He issued a lengthy statement after Trump threatened to use the military to quell protests following the 2020 murder of George Floyd.
“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us,” he wrote.
Mattis later accused Trump of inciting the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. He said Trump used the government to “destroy trust in our election and to poison our respect for fellow citizens.”
Mark Esper, another former defense secretary under Trump, said the former president is “unfit for office.” Esper explained why he would not vote for Trump: “Any elected official needs to meet some basic criteria: They need to be able to put country over self. They need to have a certain level of integrity and principle. They need to be able to reach across the aisle and bring people together and unite the country. Donald Trump doesn’t meet those marks.”
A number of other Trump administration officials refuse to support him in November, including former national security adviser John Bolton, deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews, and the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley.
Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former assistant to Trump and White House director of strategic communications, fears what would happen if Trump were elected in November. “A second Trump term could mean the end of American democracy as we know it,” she said. “And I don’t say that lightly.”
Ty Cobb, the former White House lawyer who defended Trump during the Russian election interference probe, urged voting against Trump. “He has never cared about America, its citizens, its future or anything but himself,” Cobb wrote.
Cobb called Trump “the gravest threat to democracy that we’ve ever seen.”
Sen. Lisa Murkowski is a lifelong Republican whose father served as governor and senator in Alaska before her. Murkowski said she “absolutely” would not vote for Trump in November. She lamented how Trump has perverted the GOP: “I just regret that our party is seemingly becoming a party of Donald Trump.”
Liz Cheney, a former top-ranking Republican congresswoman, was voted out of office after she voted to impeach Trump for his role in inciting the insurrection. She has called Trump a “liar” and a “con man” and vowed to do everything she can to ensure he is not elected.
Cheney, a conservative and daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, said reelecting President Joe Biden — as opposed to voting for a third party or a write-in candidate — is the only way to save the country from a potential dictatorship.
Most elected Republican officials lack Cheney’s courage. Even worse, they know Trump is a danger, but still support him.
House Speaker Mike Johnson wrote in 2015 that Trump is “unfit” and “dangerous.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called Trump’s actions on Jan. 6 a “dereliction of duty.”
Sen. Ted Cruz called Trump a “bully,” a “sniveling coward,” a “pathological liar,” and “utterly amoral.” That was before the impeachments, indictments, and insurrection. In January, Texas’ junior senator endorsed the former president.
Fortunately, some GOP leaders refuse to enable Trump or the Republicans who support him.
Jennifer Horn, the former chair of the New Hampshire GOP and cofounder of the Lincoln Project, said she would not vote for Trump or any Republican who refuses to denounce him. “He is a grotesque, narcissistic, emotionally ill criminal who has already made it clear he is willing to toss aside the Constitution and incite an insurrection,” Horn said.
Horn and some Republican officials who know Trump best have put the country ahead of their party. Will enough voters heed their warning?
Many conservative Republicans who worked with the former president have strong words for why he shouldn’t return to the White House.
By The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
Despite two impeachments, four criminal indictments, a civil fraud judgment, a sexual abuse finding, a mismanaged pandemic, an attempted coup, a deadly insurrection, 30,573 lies, unending chaos, and incompetence, many voters continue to stand by Donald Trump.
But some Republican leaders who know Trump best no longer support him. The Inquirer Editorial Board has deemed a second Trump presidency a clear and present danger, but some dyed-in-the-wool Republicans who worked with Trump make an even stronger case.
Former Vice President Mike Pence stood beside Trump until his final days in office, when he refused to help overturn the election. Some Trump supporters wanted to hang Pence, and Trump sided with the mob. The ever-loyal Pence now says he cannot “in good conscience” endorse Trump for president in 2024.
Bill Barr is a lifelong Republican who served as attorney general under Trump and soft-pedaled the probe into Russia’s 2020 election interference. He now calls Trump “a consummate narcissist” and refused to endorse him. Barr added, “I don’t think he’s going to move the country forward.”
Other Trump cabinet officials have also sounded the alarm.
John Kelly, a retired four-star general who served in Vietnam, was Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff. After the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, Kelly said he would have voted to remove Trump from the White House.
Kelly remains dumbfounded by the continued support for Trump. “What’s going on in the country that a single person thinks this guy would still be a good president?” he wondered.
James Mattis, another retired four-star general, was Trump’s first defense secretary. He issued a lengthy statement after Trump threatened to use the military to quell protests following the 2020 murder of George Floyd.
“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us,” he wrote.
Mattis later accused Trump of inciting the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. He said Trump used the government to “destroy trust in our election and to poison our respect for fellow citizens.”
Mark Esper, another former defense secretary under Trump, said the former president is “unfit for office.” Esper explained why he would not vote for Trump: “Any elected official needs to meet some basic criteria: They need to be able to put country over self. They need to have a certain level of integrity and principle. They need to be able to reach across the aisle and bring people together and unite the country. Donald Trump doesn’t meet those marks.”
A number of other Trump administration officials refuse to support him in November, including former national security adviser John Bolton, deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews, and the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley.
Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former assistant to Trump and White House director of strategic communications, fears what would happen if Trump were elected in November. “A second Trump term could mean the end of American democracy as we know it,” she said. “And I don’t say that lightly.”
Ty Cobb, the former White House lawyer who defended Trump during the Russian election interference probe, urged voting against Trump. “He has never cared about America, its citizens, its future or anything but himself,” Cobb wrote.
Cobb called Trump “the gravest threat to democracy that we’ve ever seen.”
Sen. Lisa Murkowski is a lifelong Republican whose father served as governor and senator in Alaska before her. Murkowski said she “absolutely” would not vote for Trump in November. She lamented how Trump has perverted the GOP: “I just regret that our party is seemingly becoming a party of Donald Trump.”
Liz Cheney, a former top-ranking Republican congresswoman, was voted out of office after she voted to impeach Trump for his role in inciting the insurrection. She has called Trump a “liar” and a “con man” and vowed to do everything she can to ensure he is not elected.
Cheney, a conservative and daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, said reelecting President Joe Biden — as opposed to voting for a third party or a write-in candidate — is the only way to save the country from a potential dictatorship.
Most elected Republican officials lack Cheney’s courage. Even worse, they know Trump is a danger, but still support him.
House Speaker Mike Johnson wrote in 2015 that Trump is “unfit” and “dangerous.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called Trump’s actions on Jan. 6 a “dereliction of duty.”
Sen. Ted Cruz called Trump a “bully,” a “sniveling coward,” a “pathological liar,” and “utterly amoral.” That was before the impeachments, indictments, and insurrection. In January, Texas’ junior senator endorsed the former president.
Fortunately, some GOP leaders refuse to enable Trump or the Republicans who support him.
Jennifer Horn, the former chair of the New Hampshire GOP and cofounder of the Lincoln Project, said she would not vote for Trump or any Republican who refuses to denounce him. “He is a grotesque, narcissistic, emotionally ill criminal who has already made it clear he is willing to toss aside the Constitution and incite an insurrection,” Horn said.
Horn and some Republican officials who know Trump best have put the country ahead of their party. Will enough voters heed their warning?
DONALD TRUMP, BLASPHEMOUS BIBLE THUMPER
By Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
On this holy weekend, one man is taking the Resurrection personally.
Donald Trump is presenting himself as the Man on the Cross, tortured for our sins. “I consider it a great badge of courage,” he tells crowds. “I am being indicted for you.” Instead of Christ-like redemption, he promises Lucifer-like retribution if resurrected.
In January, he put up a video on Truth Social about how he is a messenger from God, “a shepherd to mankind.”
Trump is, as the nuns who taught me used to say, “a bold, brazen piece.” He is a miserable human who cheated on his wives, cheats at golf, cheats at politics, incites violence, targets judges and their families and looked on, pleased, as thugs threatened to hang his actually pious vice president.
Yet, more and more, Trump is wallowing in his Messiah complex.
Two-Corinthians Trump wouldn’t know the difference between Old and New Testaments. So he may not realize that, rather than a sacrificial lamb, he is the Golden Calf, the false god worshiped by Israelites when Moses went up to Mount Sinai to get the Ten Commandments.
Just as the Israelites melted their ornaments and jewelry to make the calf, Trump is trading tacky products for gilt to pay gazillions in obligations. After his $399 golden “Never Surrender High-Top Sneaker,” Trump is selling a $99 “Victory” cologne for “movers, shakers and history makers” with “a crisp opening of citrus blends into a cedar heart, underpinned by a rich base of leather and amber, crafting a commanding presence.” A gold bust of Trump tops the bottle. (“Victory” perfume for women comes in a Miss Universe-shape bottle.)
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Weaponizing his martyrdom, Trump is selling $59.99 “God Bless the USA” Bibles adorned with a flag and the chorus of Lee Greenwood’s song handwritten by the singer, plus the Constitution, Declaration of Independence and Pledge of Allegiance.
“Happy Holy Week!” he wrote on Truth Social. “Let’s Make America Pray Again. As we lead into Good Friday and Easter, I encourage you to get a copy of the God Bless The USA Bible.”
David Axelrod says that, even as a secular Jew, he’s offended: “This is a guy who has violated 11 of the Ten Commandments.”
Trump posted a promotional video claiming “Christians are under siege” and vowing to “protect content that is pro-God.” He held up the Bible — recalling the appalling moment in 2020 when Ivanka handed him a Bible from her designer bag and he clutched it in front of St. John’s Church, opposite the White House, moments after the police tear-gassed protesters and journalists in adjacent Lafayette Square at a demonstration about George Floyd’s murder.
“All Americans need a Bible in their home, and I have many,” Trump barked. “It’s my favorite book.” Maybe the Bible has replaced that Hitler book Trump’s ex-wife said he kept by his bed. But it’s all a scam. Running for president is about enriching himself, just as when he peddled NFTs, steaks, ties, suits, bath towels, vodka, water, office chairs, Trump University and mug-shot mugs. He even sold pieces of the suit he was wearing when he took the mug shot.
“I want to have a lot of people have it,” Trump said of his Bible. “You have to have it for your heart, for your soul.”
Just what the world needs: a soul cleanse with a grifter Bible, where the profits could well be going to pay legal costs in trials about breaking commandments — bearing false witness to try to steal democracy, coveting a porn star, then paying the star hush money to keep quiet about the sex.
What could be more Elmer Gantry than that? As Sinclair Lewis wrote about his corrupt, power-hungry, narcissistic, womanizing preacher, “He had, in fact, got everything from the church and Sunday school, except, perhaps, any longing whatever for decency and kindness and reason.”
Religious snake-oil salesmen have a storied history in American literature and films, from Flannery O’Connor’s “Wise Blood” to Peter Bogdanovich’s beloved movie “Paper Moon,” about a conniving Bible salesman and his small helper. But it’s shocking when the charlatan might be in the Oval.
In her 2016 book, “The Confidence Game,” Maria Konnikova explained that we’re easy prey for faux Nigerian princes because of all the chaos in our world. “The whirlwind advance of technology heralds a new golden age of the grift,” she wrote. “Cons thrive in times of transition and fast change.”
If there is one thing Trump knows how to do, it’s exploit chaos he creates.
There has to be a yearning in the populace that the con man can channel; and, at a time when religion and patriotism are waning, people are searching for more. Unfortunately, these days that search often takes the form of conspiracy theories.
As Donie O’Sullivan reported for CNN, no sooner had the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed in Baltimore than a bunch of crazy conspiracy tales blossomed about terrorism, D.E.I., Obama, Israel and Ukraine.
Declining faith in religion and rising faith in conspiracies create fertile ground for a faker like Trump. If the profane pol is re-elected, we’ll all reap the whirlwind.
By Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
On this holy weekend, one man is taking the Resurrection personally.
Donald Trump is presenting himself as the Man on the Cross, tortured for our sins. “I consider it a great badge of courage,” he tells crowds. “I am being indicted for you.” Instead of Christ-like redemption, he promises Lucifer-like retribution if resurrected.
In January, he put up a video on Truth Social about how he is a messenger from God, “a shepherd to mankind.”
Trump is, as the nuns who taught me used to say, “a bold, brazen piece.” He is a miserable human who cheated on his wives, cheats at golf, cheats at politics, incites violence, targets judges and their families and looked on, pleased, as thugs threatened to hang his actually pious vice president.
Yet, more and more, Trump is wallowing in his Messiah complex.
Two-Corinthians Trump wouldn’t know the difference between Old and New Testaments. So he may not realize that, rather than a sacrificial lamb, he is the Golden Calf, the false god worshiped by Israelites when Moses went up to Mount Sinai to get the Ten Commandments.
Just as the Israelites melted their ornaments and jewelry to make the calf, Trump is trading tacky products for gilt to pay gazillions in obligations. After his $399 golden “Never Surrender High-Top Sneaker,” Trump is selling a $99 “Victory” cologne for “movers, shakers and history makers” with “a crisp opening of citrus blends into a cedar heart, underpinned by a rich base of leather and amber, crafting a commanding presence.” A gold bust of Trump tops the bottle. (“Victory” perfume for women comes in a Miss Universe-shape bottle.)
Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.
Weaponizing his martyrdom, Trump is selling $59.99 “God Bless the USA” Bibles adorned with a flag and the chorus of Lee Greenwood’s song handwritten by the singer, plus the Constitution, Declaration of Independence and Pledge of Allegiance.
“Happy Holy Week!” he wrote on Truth Social. “Let’s Make America Pray Again. As we lead into Good Friday and Easter, I encourage you to get a copy of the God Bless The USA Bible.”
David Axelrod says that, even as a secular Jew, he’s offended: “This is a guy who has violated 11 of the Ten Commandments.”
Trump posted a promotional video claiming “Christians are under siege” and vowing to “protect content that is pro-God.” He held up the Bible — recalling the appalling moment in 2020 when Ivanka handed him a Bible from her designer bag and he clutched it in front of St. John’s Church, opposite the White House, moments after the police tear-gassed protesters and journalists in adjacent Lafayette Square at a demonstration about George Floyd’s murder.
“All Americans need a Bible in their home, and I have many,” Trump barked. “It’s my favorite book.” Maybe the Bible has replaced that Hitler book Trump’s ex-wife said he kept by his bed. But it’s all a scam. Running for president is about enriching himself, just as when he peddled NFTs, steaks, ties, suits, bath towels, vodka, water, office chairs, Trump University and mug-shot mugs. He even sold pieces of the suit he was wearing when he took the mug shot.
“I want to have a lot of people have it,” Trump said of his Bible. “You have to have it for your heart, for your soul.”
Just what the world needs: a soul cleanse with a grifter Bible, where the profits could well be going to pay legal costs in trials about breaking commandments — bearing false witness to try to steal democracy, coveting a porn star, then paying the star hush money to keep quiet about the sex.
What could be more Elmer Gantry than that? As Sinclair Lewis wrote about his corrupt, power-hungry, narcissistic, womanizing preacher, “He had, in fact, got everything from the church and Sunday school, except, perhaps, any longing whatever for decency and kindness and reason.”
Religious snake-oil salesmen have a storied history in American literature and films, from Flannery O’Connor’s “Wise Blood” to Peter Bogdanovich’s beloved movie “Paper Moon,” about a conniving Bible salesman and his small helper. But it’s shocking when the charlatan might be in the Oval.
In her 2016 book, “The Confidence Game,” Maria Konnikova explained that we’re easy prey for faux Nigerian princes because of all the chaos in our world. “The whirlwind advance of technology heralds a new golden age of the grift,” she wrote. “Cons thrive in times of transition and fast change.”
If there is one thing Trump knows how to do, it’s exploit chaos he creates.
There has to be a yearning in the populace that the con man can channel; and, at a time when religion and patriotism are waning, people are searching for more. Unfortunately, these days that search often takes the form of conspiracy theories.
As Donie O’Sullivan reported for CNN, no sooner had the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed in Baltimore than a bunch of crazy conspiracy tales blossomed about terrorism, D.E.I., Obama, Israel and Ukraine.
Declining faith in religion and rising faith in conspiracies create fertile ground for a faker like Trump. If the profane pol is re-elected, we’ll all reap the whirlwind.
REPUBLICAN-APPOINTED JUDGES RAISE ALARM OVER TRUMP ATTACKS ON LAW
Federal D.C. Judge Reggie B. Walton warned Trump’s attacks on hush-money trial judge and others could lead to violence. Reagan, Bush-appointed judges decry Jan. 6 revisionism, threats.
By Spencer S. Hsu, The Washington Post
A Republican-appointed judge denounced Donald Trump’s social media attacks against the judge presiding over the former president’s hush money trial in Manhattan and his daughter, calling them assaults on the rule of law that could lead to violence and tyranny.
“When judges are threatened, and particularly when their family is threatened, it’s something that’s wrong and should not happen,” U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton, told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins in a live interview Thursday. He added, “It is very troubling because I think it is an attack on the rule of law.”
The unusual media statement by a sitting federal judge came after Trump blasted New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan and his daughter, Loren Merchan, criticizing her affiliation with a digital marketing company that works with Democratic candidates and erroneously attributing to her a social media post showing Trump behind bars.
Walton, who was appointed by presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush to courts in Washington in 1981 and 1991, said “any reasonable, thinking person” would appreciate the impact of Trump’s rhetoric on some followers, intentional or not. The judge recalled how a disgruntled litigant killed the son and wounded the husband of New Jersey federal Judge Esther Salas at her home in a 2020 shooting.
Since late 2020, as Trump began escalating his attacks on the judiciary, serious investigated threats against federal judges have more than doubled, from 224 in 2021 to 457 in 2023, according to the U.S. Marshals Service, as first reported by Reuters. Federal judges in Washington say at least half of trial judges handling cases arising from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol have received a surge in threats and harassment, including death threats to their homes, with Trump’s election obstruction trial judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, placed under 24-hour protection.
“The rule of rule of law can only be maintained if we have independent judicial officers who are able to do their job and ensure that the laws are in fact enforced and that the laws are applied equally to everybody who appears in our courthouse,” Walton told CNN. He was prompted to speak out of concern for the “future of our country and the future of democracy in our country,” Walton said, “because if we don’t have a viable court system that’s able to function efficiently, then we have tyranny.”
Walton’s remarks came as several federal judges in Washington appointed by Republican presidents have spoken with increasing urgency about Trump’s disregard for historical facts and alarmed at his increasingly graphic and at times violent description of defendants prosecuted in the Jan. 6 riot as “political prisoners” and “hostages” who did nothing wrong.
“In my 37 years on the bench, I cannot recall a time when such meritless justifications of criminal activity have gone mainstream,” U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth said in a January sentencing. “I have been dismayed to see distortions and outright falsehoods seep into the public consciousness.”
U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan similarly told a group of Georgetown Law School students in January that false claims that riot defendants were acting like tourists or patriots were destructive rewriting of reality. “There’s a danger that is embedded now in our communities across the country,” Hogan said.
“And we have to wonder where this is going to end up if that’s part of our history, this fraudulent story” by Trump that the 2020 election was stolen. Hogan spoke shortly after his retirement after completing 40 years on the bench and sentencing 26 Jan. 6 riot defendants.
Hogan and Lamberth were both appointed by Reagan, and both served as chief judges of the U.S. District Court in Washington, where judges have presided over more than 1,350 prosecutions for the riot that resulted after Trump urged his supporters to march to the Capitol where Congress was certifying the results of the 2020 election.
Five people died in the Jan. 6 attack or in the immediate aftermath, as pro-Trump rioters injured more than 100 police officers, ransacked Capitol offices, and forced lawmakers to evacuate. About 486 defendants have been charged with assaulting or impeding officers or employees, including 127 charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury.
Trump has claimed he is a victim of political persecution by the Biden administration as the two men face a 2024 rematch of the 2020 election, and continues to maintain he won the last time, despite repudiation of his arguments by nearly 40 courts, his own White House counsel, attorney general and members of his campaign. He faces a $450 million civil fraud verdict against his businesses, and four separate criminal cases charging him with paying hush money to an adult film actress, mishandling classified documents, and interfering with the 2020 election results.
Several of the 23 D.C. federal judges who have sentenced Jan. 6 defendants have noted Trump’s role in events, including judges appointed by presidents of both parties. But the recent statements by appointees of Trump’s GOP predecessors is notable in breaking with partisan affiliation. After one Jan. 6 trial last year, Walton called Trump a “charlatan” who led followers into believing unfounded allegations and falsehoods, and who “doesn’t in my view really care about democracy but only about power. And as a result of that, it’s tearing this country apart.”
All three judges have warned of a significant increase in the number of threats they and other judges have faced since the Capitol attack, which Walton called “very, very very concerning.”
“I’ve been a judge for over 40 years. And, this is a new phenomenon. I’m not saying that it didn’t happen before, but it was very rare that I would ever receive any type of a threat,” Walton said. “And unfortunately, that is no longer, the case.”
Hogan told law students threats had increased, “no question about it, I think encouraged by the prior president, unfortunately.”
“I would say half our judges have been seriously threatened” regarding their handling of cases related to Trump, Hogan said in a Jan. 22 law school talk. “It makes you nervous.”
A Texas woman was charged with threatening to kill Chutkan shortly after she was assigned Trump’s case last August, leaving a voice-mail message in the judge’s chambers calling Chutkan a racial slur and saying, “If Trump doesn’t get elected in 2024, we are coming to kill you, so tread lightly, b----,” according to charging papers.
In January, New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron received a bomb threat to his Long Island home, hours before closing arguments were set to begin in Trump’s civil fraud case over which he was presiding.
Authorities are increasing security at the federal courthouse in Washington at a time when Attorney General Merrick Garland has said that law enforcement has seen a “deeply disturbing spike” in threats and attacks on public officials, including judges and prosecutors in Trump’s cases, even as the presumptive 2024 GOP presidential nominee has predicted “bedlam in the country” if his criminal cases damage his candidacy.
Lamberth has said he could not deny the facts after presiding over dozens of cases, listening to hundreds of hours of testimony, and receiving thousands of pages of briefing.
“The rioters interfered with a necessary step in the constitutional process, disrupted the lawful transfer of power and thus jeopardized the American constitutional order. Although the rioters failed in their ultimate goal, their actions nonetheless resulted in the deaths of multiple people, injury to over 140 members of law enforcement and lasting trauma for our entire nation,” Lamberth said in January. “This was not patriotism; it was the antithesis of patriotism.”
Federal D.C. Judge Reggie B. Walton warned Trump’s attacks on hush-money trial judge and others could lead to violence. Reagan, Bush-appointed judges decry Jan. 6 revisionism, threats.
By Spencer S. Hsu, The Washington Post
A Republican-appointed judge denounced Donald Trump’s social media attacks against the judge presiding over the former president’s hush money trial in Manhattan and his daughter, calling them assaults on the rule of law that could lead to violence and tyranny.
“When judges are threatened, and particularly when their family is threatened, it’s something that’s wrong and should not happen,” U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton, told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins in a live interview Thursday. He added, “It is very troubling because I think it is an attack on the rule of law.”
The unusual media statement by a sitting federal judge came after Trump blasted New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan and his daughter, Loren Merchan, criticizing her affiliation with a digital marketing company that works with Democratic candidates and erroneously attributing to her a social media post showing Trump behind bars.
Walton, who was appointed by presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush to courts in Washington in 1981 and 1991, said “any reasonable, thinking person” would appreciate the impact of Trump’s rhetoric on some followers, intentional or not. The judge recalled how a disgruntled litigant killed the son and wounded the husband of New Jersey federal Judge Esther Salas at her home in a 2020 shooting.
Since late 2020, as Trump began escalating his attacks on the judiciary, serious investigated threats against federal judges have more than doubled, from 224 in 2021 to 457 in 2023, according to the U.S. Marshals Service, as first reported by Reuters. Federal judges in Washington say at least half of trial judges handling cases arising from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol have received a surge in threats and harassment, including death threats to their homes, with Trump’s election obstruction trial judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, placed under 24-hour protection.
“The rule of rule of law can only be maintained if we have independent judicial officers who are able to do their job and ensure that the laws are in fact enforced and that the laws are applied equally to everybody who appears in our courthouse,” Walton told CNN. He was prompted to speak out of concern for the “future of our country and the future of democracy in our country,” Walton said, “because if we don’t have a viable court system that’s able to function efficiently, then we have tyranny.”
Walton’s remarks came as several federal judges in Washington appointed by Republican presidents have spoken with increasing urgency about Trump’s disregard for historical facts and alarmed at his increasingly graphic and at times violent description of defendants prosecuted in the Jan. 6 riot as “political prisoners” and “hostages” who did nothing wrong.
“In my 37 years on the bench, I cannot recall a time when such meritless justifications of criminal activity have gone mainstream,” U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth said in a January sentencing. “I have been dismayed to see distortions and outright falsehoods seep into the public consciousness.”
U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan similarly told a group of Georgetown Law School students in January that false claims that riot defendants were acting like tourists or patriots were destructive rewriting of reality. “There’s a danger that is embedded now in our communities across the country,” Hogan said.
“And we have to wonder where this is going to end up if that’s part of our history, this fraudulent story” by Trump that the 2020 election was stolen. Hogan spoke shortly after his retirement after completing 40 years on the bench and sentencing 26 Jan. 6 riot defendants.
Hogan and Lamberth were both appointed by Reagan, and both served as chief judges of the U.S. District Court in Washington, where judges have presided over more than 1,350 prosecutions for the riot that resulted after Trump urged his supporters to march to the Capitol where Congress was certifying the results of the 2020 election.
Five people died in the Jan. 6 attack or in the immediate aftermath, as pro-Trump rioters injured more than 100 police officers, ransacked Capitol offices, and forced lawmakers to evacuate. About 486 defendants have been charged with assaulting or impeding officers or employees, including 127 charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury.
Trump has claimed he is a victim of political persecution by the Biden administration as the two men face a 2024 rematch of the 2020 election, and continues to maintain he won the last time, despite repudiation of his arguments by nearly 40 courts, his own White House counsel, attorney general and members of his campaign. He faces a $450 million civil fraud verdict against his businesses, and four separate criminal cases charging him with paying hush money to an adult film actress, mishandling classified documents, and interfering with the 2020 election results.
Several of the 23 D.C. federal judges who have sentenced Jan. 6 defendants have noted Trump’s role in events, including judges appointed by presidents of both parties. But the recent statements by appointees of Trump’s GOP predecessors is notable in breaking with partisan affiliation. After one Jan. 6 trial last year, Walton called Trump a “charlatan” who led followers into believing unfounded allegations and falsehoods, and who “doesn’t in my view really care about democracy but only about power. And as a result of that, it’s tearing this country apart.”
All three judges have warned of a significant increase in the number of threats they and other judges have faced since the Capitol attack, which Walton called “very, very very concerning.”
“I’ve been a judge for over 40 years. And, this is a new phenomenon. I’m not saying that it didn’t happen before, but it was very rare that I would ever receive any type of a threat,” Walton said. “And unfortunately, that is no longer, the case.”
Hogan told law students threats had increased, “no question about it, I think encouraged by the prior president, unfortunately.”
“I would say half our judges have been seriously threatened” regarding their handling of cases related to Trump, Hogan said in a Jan. 22 law school talk. “It makes you nervous.”
A Texas woman was charged with threatening to kill Chutkan shortly after she was assigned Trump’s case last August, leaving a voice-mail message in the judge’s chambers calling Chutkan a racial slur and saying, “If Trump doesn’t get elected in 2024, we are coming to kill you, so tread lightly, b----,” according to charging papers.
In January, New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron received a bomb threat to his Long Island home, hours before closing arguments were set to begin in Trump’s civil fraud case over which he was presiding.
Authorities are increasing security at the federal courthouse in Washington at a time when Attorney General Merrick Garland has said that law enforcement has seen a “deeply disturbing spike” in threats and attacks on public officials, including judges and prosecutors in Trump’s cases, even as the presumptive 2024 GOP presidential nominee has predicted “bedlam in the country” if his criminal cases damage his candidacy.
Lamberth has said he could not deny the facts after presiding over dozens of cases, listening to hundreds of hours of testimony, and receiving thousands of pages of briefing.
“The rioters interfered with a necessary step in the constitutional process, disrupted the lawful transfer of power and thus jeopardized the American constitutional order. Although the rioters failed in their ultimate goal, their actions nonetheless resulted in the deaths of multiple people, injury to over 140 members of law enforcement and lasting trauma for our entire nation,” Lamberth said in January. “This was not patriotism; it was the antithesis of patriotism.”
TRUMP’S BIBLE GRIFT IS GOING TO BACKFIRE
By Eugene Robinson, The Washington Post
Donald Trump could be making a big mistake hawking the “God Bless the USA” Bible to his MAGA supporters. Some of them might actually read it.
This latest grift might well flop, like Trump Steaks and those hideous gold-colored “Never Surrender” sneakers he’s trying to sell for $399. For its opportunistic timing alone — the rollout is happening during Holy Week, the most sacred time on the Christian calendar — the Bible venture deserves to be smitten by a wrathful marketplace.
If the MAGA faithful do buy those Bibles and look inside, however, they will find myriad reasons to forsake their profoundly flawed political hero.
They need only read as far as Exodus 20, in which Moses comes down from the mountain and pronounces the Ten Commandments. “Thou shalt not commit adultery” is an injunction Trump has bragged about habitually violating, as heard on the “Access Hollywood” tape. In that same recording, he also boasted about violating another commandment — “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife” — by saying he “did try and f---” a married woman.
Trump is scheduled to be tried in a New York courtroom next month on felony charges that stem from a brief sexual liaison with adult-film star Stormy Daniels. At the same time, he is appealing an $83 million civil judgment against him for defaming writer E. Jean Carroll, whom he sexually abused in a department store dressing room, according to the court’s findings. I could go on and on.
“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor” is yet another commandment Trump routinely ignores. Of the tens of thousands of documented lies he has told, many have been falsehoods about his real or perceived enemies. Just this week, he has been telling lies about the daughter of the judge who presides in his impending criminal trial — and who angered Trump by issuing a gag order prohibiting him from lying about witnesses, prosecutors, jurors and court staff.
Of course, the commandments are found in the Old Testament, where God’s judgments can be harsh and definitive. The New Testament tells us that we all are sinners — and that we all can be saved.
That is the theological basis on which Trump’s unlikeliest loyal followers — evangelical Christians and their pastors — justify looking past the way Trump scoffs at so many of the Bible’s instructions. Yes, he is far from perfect, they tell themselves; but like all of us, he can find salvation through Jesus Christ. As we give him our campaign contributions and our votes, we can also pray for his redemption.
Anyone who forks over $59.99 for a “God Bless the USA” Bible and reads it, however, will see that Jesus — whose resurrection Christians celebrate this weekend, on Easter Sunday — gave detailed instructions for believers to obey. They are encapsulated in the Sermon on the Mount as related in Matthew 5-7.
“Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth,” Jesus said. “… Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.”
That’s pretty much the diametrical opposite of the MAGA creed, which is more like: “Just win, baby.”
Later in the sermon, Jesus says, “Agree with thine adversary quickly, while thou art in the way with him; lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison.” Had Trump followed this legal advice, he would be facing fewer criminal trials and civil fines.
On another occasion, described in Matthew 25:42-46, Jesus gives clear instructions about what a righteous immigration policy should be. “I was hungry and you gave me no food; I was thirsty and you gave me no drink; I was a stranger and you did not take me in, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me,” he says — and the dire consequence of behaving this way is to “go away into everlasting punishment.”
Evangelical voters — and their pastors, who presumably know in detail what the Bible says — have effectively suspended their belief in Jesus’ words. They cite Trump’s willingness to lead their crusade against abortion, although that is one issue Jesus never addressed.
Toward the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus does give a warning that could not be more relevant as Trump seeks to regain power: “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.”
By Eugene Robinson, The Washington Post
Donald Trump could be making a big mistake hawking the “God Bless the USA” Bible to his MAGA supporters. Some of them might actually read it.
This latest grift might well flop, like Trump Steaks and those hideous gold-colored “Never Surrender” sneakers he’s trying to sell for $399. For its opportunistic timing alone — the rollout is happening during Holy Week, the most sacred time on the Christian calendar — the Bible venture deserves to be smitten by a wrathful marketplace.
If the MAGA faithful do buy those Bibles and look inside, however, they will find myriad reasons to forsake their profoundly flawed political hero.
They need only read as far as Exodus 20, in which Moses comes down from the mountain and pronounces the Ten Commandments. “Thou shalt not commit adultery” is an injunction Trump has bragged about habitually violating, as heard on the “Access Hollywood” tape. In that same recording, he also boasted about violating another commandment — “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife” — by saying he “did try and f---” a married woman.
Trump is scheduled to be tried in a New York courtroom next month on felony charges that stem from a brief sexual liaison with adult-film star Stormy Daniels. At the same time, he is appealing an $83 million civil judgment against him for defaming writer E. Jean Carroll, whom he sexually abused in a department store dressing room, according to the court’s findings. I could go on and on.
“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor” is yet another commandment Trump routinely ignores. Of the tens of thousands of documented lies he has told, many have been falsehoods about his real or perceived enemies. Just this week, he has been telling lies about the daughter of the judge who presides in his impending criminal trial — and who angered Trump by issuing a gag order prohibiting him from lying about witnesses, prosecutors, jurors and court staff.
Of course, the commandments are found in the Old Testament, where God’s judgments can be harsh and definitive. The New Testament tells us that we all are sinners — and that we all can be saved.
That is the theological basis on which Trump’s unlikeliest loyal followers — evangelical Christians and their pastors — justify looking past the way Trump scoffs at so many of the Bible’s instructions. Yes, he is far from perfect, they tell themselves; but like all of us, he can find salvation through Jesus Christ. As we give him our campaign contributions and our votes, we can also pray for his redemption.
Anyone who forks over $59.99 for a “God Bless the USA” Bible and reads it, however, will see that Jesus — whose resurrection Christians celebrate this weekend, on Easter Sunday — gave detailed instructions for believers to obey. They are encapsulated in the Sermon on the Mount as related in Matthew 5-7.
“Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth,” Jesus said. “… Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.”
That’s pretty much the diametrical opposite of the MAGA creed, which is more like: “Just win, baby.”
Later in the sermon, Jesus says, “Agree with thine adversary quickly, while thou art in the way with him; lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison.” Had Trump followed this legal advice, he would be facing fewer criminal trials and civil fines.
On another occasion, described in Matthew 25:42-46, Jesus gives clear instructions about what a righteous immigration policy should be. “I was hungry and you gave me no food; I was thirsty and you gave me no drink; I was a stranger and you did not take me in, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me,” he says — and the dire consequence of behaving this way is to “go away into everlasting punishment.”
Evangelical voters — and their pastors, who presumably know in detail what the Bible says — have effectively suspended their belief in Jesus’ words. They cite Trump’s willingness to lead their crusade against abortion, although that is one issue Jesus never addressed.
Toward the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus does give a warning that could not be more relevant as Trump seeks to regain power: “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.”
TRUMP CAN’T REMEMBER MUCH. HE HOPES YOU WON’T BE ABLE TO, EITHER.
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
The Very Stable Genius is glitching again.
This week, he announced that he is not — repeat, NOT — planning to repeal the Affordable Care Act. He apparently forgot that he had vowed over and over again to do exactly that, saying as recently as a few months ago that Republicans “should never give up” on efforts to “terminate” Obamacare.
“I’m not running to terminate the ACA, AS CROOKED JOE BUDEN DISINFORMATES AND MISINFORMATES ALL THE TIME,” the Republican nominee wrote this week on his Truth Social platform. Rather, he said, he wants to make Obamacare better for “OUR GREST AMERICAN CITIZENS.”
Joe Buden disinformates and misinformates? For a guy trying to make an issue of his opponent’s mental acuity, this was not, shall we say, a grest look.
The previous day, Trump held a news conference where he nailed some equally puzzling planks onto his platform.
“We’ll bring crime back to law and order,” he announced.
Also: “We just had Super Tuesday, and we had a Tuesday after a Tuesday already.”
And, most peculiar of all: “You can’t have an election in the middle of a political season.”
If he can’t recall that elections frequently do overlap with political seasons, then he surely can’t be expected to remember what was happening at this point in 2020. “ARE YOU BETTER OFF THAN YOU WERE FOUR YEARS AGO?” he asked last week. The poor fellow must have forgotten all about the economic collapse and his administration’s catastrophic bungling of the pandemic.
Or maybe he didn’t forget. Maybe he’s just hoping the rest of us will forget. In a sense, Trump’s prospects for 2024 rely on Americans experiencing mass memory loss: Will we forget just how crazy things were when he was in the White House? And will we forget about the even crazier things he has said he would do if he gets back there?
This week, the Supreme Court heard arguments from antiabortion forces who want to ban mifepristone, the pill used in about 60 percent of abortions. But just as the justices were taking up the case, Trump’s own proposal to ban the abortion pill vanished.
The Heritage Foundation-run Project 2025, to which Trump has unofficially outsourced policymaking for a second term, said that a “glitch” had caused its policies — including those embracing a mifepristone ban — to disappear from its website. The Biden campaign said it was “calling BS on Trump and his allies’ shameless attempt to hide their agenda,” and the missing documents returned — including the language calling abortion pills “the single greatest threat to unborn children” and vowing to withdraw regulatory approval for the drugs.
About seven in 10 Americans believe the abortion pill should be legal. So it’s easy to see why Trump might wish to erase his plan to ban the pill — just as he would like to erase his calls for the repeal of Obamacare, which has the support of 6 in 10 Americans.
The extremism isn’t just at Project 2025, stocked with former Trump advisers. The House Republican Study Committee, which counts 80 percent of House Republicans as members, put out a budget last week that would rescind approval of mifepristone, dismantle the “failed Obamacare experiment” and embrace a nationwide abortion ban from the moment of conception.
Trump and some vulnerable congressional Republicans might wish that Americans will forget such things by November. But it’s all there in black and white.
Trump is a man of greatness. So says Trump. “It is my great honor to be at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach tonight, AWARDS NIGHT, to receive the CLUB CHAMPIONSHIP TROPHY & THE SENIOR CLUB CHAMPIONSHIP TROPHY,” he proclaimed over the weekend. “I WON BOTH!
Trump won a more significant victory on Monday, when an appellate panel reduced the bond he needs to post as he appeals a fraud verdict against him to $175 million from $454 million. Trump didn’t have enough cash to secure the larger bond. But at a news conference he assured reporters that he was still really, really rich: “I have a lot of money ... I don’t need to borrow money. I have a lot of money. … I have a lot of cash. … I have a lot of cash and a great company. … I have very low debt. … I built a phenomenal company that’s very low leverage, unbelievably low leverage with a lot of cash, a lot of everything else.”
Give that man another trophy.
Trump seemed particularly hurt that the judge in the fraud case valued Mar-a-Lago at $18 million, he said, when “half of the living room is worth more than that. So it’s worth anywhere from 50 to 100 times that amount.”
Give that man $1.8 billion for Mar-a-Lago, and another trophy.
Actually, Trump’s supporters have already given him about $5 billion this week — at least on paper — for doing nothing at all. His Truth Social went public, and even though it had a loss of $49 million in the first nine months of 2023 on revenue of just $3.4 million, it was valued at more than $8 billion. That’s because Trump’s fans, wanting a piece of the action, bid up the price. The stock in the company will almost certainly collapse. The only question is whether Trump can unload his shares before then (he’s supposed to keep them for six months) and leave his supporters once again holding the bag.
Trump uses Truth Social to post doctored articles about him that omit negative details, and now he’s making up stuff about Truth Social. He said he didn’t list the company on the New York Stock Exchange because it would be “treated too badly in New York” by Democratic officeholders. So he instead listed the company on Nasdaq, which is based in … New York. Trump said the “top person” at the NYSE “is mortified. … He said, ‘I’m losing business.’ ” As CNN pointed out, neither the president nor the chair of the exchange is a “he.”
Trump must not have a lot of faith that he’ll make off with his billions before the Truth Social bubble bursts, because he’s actively seeking other ways to grift. This week he started hawking bibles.
“Happy Holy Week! Let’s Make America Pray Again,” Trump posted. “As we lead into Good Friday and Easter, I encourage you to get a copy of the God Bless the USA Bible.” He directed his supporters to a website selling the Good Book for $59.99 a copy.
The website boasts: “Yes, this is the only Bible endorsed by President Trump!” Read on and you find out that the bible mongers are using Trump’s name and likeness “under paid license from CIC Ventures LLC,” a company owned by Trump.
Trump is getting kickbacks for selling the gospel — marketing God the same way he sold Trump-branded “Never Surrender High-Tops” sneakers last month for $399 a pair and, before that, digital trading cards showing Trump as a superhero.
“All Americans need a Bible in their home, and I have many. It’s my favorite book,” Trump said in the video promoting his new bible hustle.
Trump has an arms-length relationship with the Bible, which he brandished outside a church near Lafayette Square after protesters were dispersed with tear gas; he once referred to a passage from Second Corinthians as “Two Corinthians” and, at another point, couldn’t come up with a favorite Bible verse.
But the man does have a God complex. His campaign has promoted a video at rallies announcing that “God Gave us Trump.” He has called himself “the chosen one” and has shared a post calling him “the second greatest” after Jesus.
This week, Trump shared another post with a verse from Psalms, topped by a message likening Trump’s suffering in the fraud case to the Crucifixion: “It’s ironic that Christ walked through His greatest persecution the very week they are trying to steal your property from you,” the message said, along with Trump’s reply: “Beautiful, thank you!”
A crucial difference, however, is that Jesus was not facing a trial over hush money paid to a porn actress. The judge in that case, Juan Merchan, said the trial will begin on April 15. Trump responded to this news by attacking the judge because his daughter works for a Democratic consulting firm. The judge slapped a gag order on Trump blocking him from harassing jurors and people who work for the judge or for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and their families. Trump responded with another attack on the judge and his daughter (who weren’t included in the gag order). Merchan is “suffering from an acute case of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” Trump said of the judge, postulating that “maybe the Judge is such a hater because his daughter makes money by working to ‘Get Trump.’”
If there is a trophy for pretrial self-sabotage, Trump wins that one, too.
Trump’s stranglehold on the Republican Party grew yet tighter this week. The Post’s Josh Dawsey reported that those seeking employment at the Republican National Committee have been asked during job interviews whether they believe the 2020 election was stolen. (The correct answer, from the RNC’s perspective, is “Hell yes.”)
Trump daughter-in-law Lara Trump, installed as RNC co-chair this month as part of a pro-Trump purge, this week brought Scott Presler to party headquarters. “Exciting things to come!” she promised. No doubt: Presler was on the Capitol grounds on Jan. 6, 2021, promotes QAnon conspiracy ideas, planned “stop the steal” events, and organized “March Against Sharia” protests in his work for an anti-Islam group.
As for the Trump effort to win over disenchanted Nikki Haley voters, Shane Goldmacher and Maggie Haberman report in the New York Times that he has opted to “bypass any sort of reconciliation” with her. Said former Trump adviser Steve Bannon: “Screw Nikki Haley — we don’t need her endorsement.”
But the MAGA takeover goes far deeper than personnel. Consider the wild conspiracy theories that came from the Trump crowd right after a massive cargo ship lost power and struck Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, collapsing it. “Is this an intentional attack or an accident?” asked Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), demanding an investigation. Fox’s Maria Bartiromo invited speculation about the “potential for foul play given the wide-open border.” Others blamed racial-diversity policies.
Nothing shows the thoroughness of the MAGA takeover of the GOP as well as the House’s Republican Study Committee budget. The group is the GOP mainstream now, counting some 172 of the 218 House Republicans as members, including many from swing districts and five — Juan Ciscomani and David Schweikert (Ariz.), Mike Garcia (Calif.), Don Bacon (Neb.) and Brandon Williams (N.Y.) from districts Biden won.
Yet here the RSC is, embracing a nationwide abortion ban without exceptions; a ban on the abortion pill, an increase in the retirement age for Social Security; defunding the police (through cuts to the Community Oriented Policing Services program); ending Amtrak funding and selling it off; eliminating broadband provided by the Affordable Connectivity Program; and blocking the “red flag” provisions that keep guns from dangerous people.
This is what Republicans will do next year if Trump wins the White House and Republicans control Congress. Don’t forget it.
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
The Very Stable Genius is glitching again.
This week, he announced that he is not — repeat, NOT — planning to repeal the Affordable Care Act. He apparently forgot that he had vowed over and over again to do exactly that, saying as recently as a few months ago that Republicans “should never give up” on efforts to “terminate” Obamacare.
“I’m not running to terminate the ACA, AS CROOKED JOE BUDEN DISINFORMATES AND MISINFORMATES ALL THE TIME,” the Republican nominee wrote this week on his Truth Social platform. Rather, he said, he wants to make Obamacare better for “OUR GREST AMERICAN CITIZENS.”
Joe Buden disinformates and misinformates? For a guy trying to make an issue of his opponent’s mental acuity, this was not, shall we say, a grest look.
The previous day, Trump held a news conference where he nailed some equally puzzling planks onto his platform.
“We’ll bring crime back to law and order,” he announced.
Also: “We just had Super Tuesday, and we had a Tuesday after a Tuesday already.”
And, most peculiar of all: “You can’t have an election in the middle of a political season.”
If he can’t recall that elections frequently do overlap with political seasons, then he surely can’t be expected to remember what was happening at this point in 2020. “ARE YOU BETTER OFF THAN YOU WERE FOUR YEARS AGO?” he asked last week. The poor fellow must have forgotten all about the economic collapse and his administration’s catastrophic bungling of the pandemic.
Or maybe he didn’t forget. Maybe he’s just hoping the rest of us will forget. In a sense, Trump’s prospects for 2024 rely on Americans experiencing mass memory loss: Will we forget just how crazy things were when he was in the White House? And will we forget about the even crazier things he has said he would do if he gets back there?
This week, the Supreme Court heard arguments from antiabortion forces who want to ban mifepristone, the pill used in about 60 percent of abortions. But just as the justices were taking up the case, Trump’s own proposal to ban the abortion pill vanished.
The Heritage Foundation-run Project 2025, to which Trump has unofficially outsourced policymaking for a second term, said that a “glitch” had caused its policies — including those embracing a mifepristone ban — to disappear from its website. The Biden campaign said it was “calling BS on Trump and his allies’ shameless attempt to hide their agenda,” and the missing documents returned — including the language calling abortion pills “the single greatest threat to unborn children” and vowing to withdraw regulatory approval for the drugs.
About seven in 10 Americans believe the abortion pill should be legal. So it’s easy to see why Trump might wish to erase his plan to ban the pill — just as he would like to erase his calls for the repeal of Obamacare, which has the support of 6 in 10 Americans.
The extremism isn’t just at Project 2025, stocked with former Trump advisers. The House Republican Study Committee, which counts 80 percent of House Republicans as members, put out a budget last week that would rescind approval of mifepristone, dismantle the “failed Obamacare experiment” and embrace a nationwide abortion ban from the moment of conception.
Trump and some vulnerable congressional Republicans might wish that Americans will forget such things by November. But it’s all there in black and white.
Trump is a man of greatness. So says Trump. “It is my great honor to be at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach tonight, AWARDS NIGHT, to receive the CLUB CHAMPIONSHIP TROPHY & THE SENIOR CLUB CHAMPIONSHIP TROPHY,” he proclaimed over the weekend. “I WON BOTH!
Trump won a more significant victory on Monday, when an appellate panel reduced the bond he needs to post as he appeals a fraud verdict against him to $175 million from $454 million. Trump didn’t have enough cash to secure the larger bond. But at a news conference he assured reporters that he was still really, really rich: “I have a lot of money ... I don’t need to borrow money. I have a lot of money. … I have a lot of cash. … I have a lot of cash and a great company. … I have very low debt. … I built a phenomenal company that’s very low leverage, unbelievably low leverage with a lot of cash, a lot of everything else.”
Give that man another trophy.
Trump seemed particularly hurt that the judge in the fraud case valued Mar-a-Lago at $18 million, he said, when “half of the living room is worth more than that. So it’s worth anywhere from 50 to 100 times that amount.”
Give that man $1.8 billion for Mar-a-Lago, and another trophy.
Actually, Trump’s supporters have already given him about $5 billion this week — at least on paper — for doing nothing at all. His Truth Social went public, and even though it had a loss of $49 million in the first nine months of 2023 on revenue of just $3.4 million, it was valued at more than $8 billion. That’s because Trump’s fans, wanting a piece of the action, bid up the price. The stock in the company will almost certainly collapse. The only question is whether Trump can unload his shares before then (he’s supposed to keep them for six months) and leave his supporters once again holding the bag.
Trump uses Truth Social to post doctored articles about him that omit negative details, and now he’s making up stuff about Truth Social. He said he didn’t list the company on the New York Stock Exchange because it would be “treated too badly in New York” by Democratic officeholders. So he instead listed the company on Nasdaq, which is based in … New York. Trump said the “top person” at the NYSE “is mortified. … He said, ‘I’m losing business.’ ” As CNN pointed out, neither the president nor the chair of the exchange is a “he.”
Trump must not have a lot of faith that he’ll make off with his billions before the Truth Social bubble bursts, because he’s actively seeking other ways to grift. This week he started hawking bibles.
“Happy Holy Week! Let’s Make America Pray Again,” Trump posted. “As we lead into Good Friday and Easter, I encourage you to get a copy of the God Bless the USA Bible.” He directed his supporters to a website selling the Good Book for $59.99 a copy.
The website boasts: “Yes, this is the only Bible endorsed by President Trump!” Read on and you find out that the bible mongers are using Trump’s name and likeness “under paid license from CIC Ventures LLC,” a company owned by Trump.
Trump is getting kickbacks for selling the gospel — marketing God the same way he sold Trump-branded “Never Surrender High-Tops” sneakers last month for $399 a pair and, before that, digital trading cards showing Trump as a superhero.
“All Americans need a Bible in their home, and I have many. It’s my favorite book,” Trump said in the video promoting his new bible hustle.
Trump has an arms-length relationship with the Bible, which he brandished outside a church near Lafayette Square after protesters were dispersed with tear gas; he once referred to a passage from Second Corinthians as “Two Corinthians” and, at another point, couldn’t come up with a favorite Bible verse.
But the man does have a God complex. His campaign has promoted a video at rallies announcing that “God Gave us Trump.” He has called himself “the chosen one” and has shared a post calling him “the second greatest” after Jesus.
This week, Trump shared another post with a verse from Psalms, topped by a message likening Trump’s suffering in the fraud case to the Crucifixion: “It’s ironic that Christ walked through His greatest persecution the very week they are trying to steal your property from you,” the message said, along with Trump’s reply: “Beautiful, thank you!”
A crucial difference, however, is that Jesus was not facing a trial over hush money paid to a porn actress. The judge in that case, Juan Merchan, said the trial will begin on April 15. Trump responded to this news by attacking the judge because his daughter works for a Democratic consulting firm. The judge slapped a gag order on Trump blocking him from harassing jurors and people who work for the judge or for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and their families. Trump responded with another attack on the judge and his daughter (who weren’t included in the gag order). Merchan is “suffering from an acute case of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” Trump said of the judge, postulating that “maybe the Judge is such a hater because his daughter makes money by working to ‘Get Trump.’”
If there is a trophy for pretrial self-sabotage, Trump wins that one, too.
Trump’s stranglehold on the Republican Party grew yet tighter this week. The Post’s Josh Dawsey reported that those seeking employment at the Republican National Committee have been asked during job interviews whether they believe the 2020 election was stolen. (The correct answer, from the RNC’s perspective, is “Hell yes.”)
Trump daughter-in-law Lara Trump, installed as RNC co-chair this month as part of a pro-Trump purge, this week brought Scott Presler to party headquarters. “Exciting things to come!” she promised. No doubt: Presler was on the Capitol grounds on Jan. 6, 2021, promotes QAnon conspiracy ideas, planned “stop the steal” events, and organized “March Against Sharia” protests in his work for an anti-Islam group.
As for the Trump effort to win over disenchanted Nikki Haley voters, Shane Goldmacher and Maggie Haberman report in the New York Times that he has opted to “bypass any sort of reconciliation” with her. Said former Trump adviser Steve Bannon: “Screw Nikki Haley — we don’t need her endorsement.”
But the MAGA takeover goes far deeper than personnel. Consider the wild conspiracy theories that came from the Trump crowd right after a massive cargo ship lost power and struck Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, collapsing it. “Is this an intentional attack or an accident?” asked Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), demanding an investigation. Fox’s Maria Bartiromo invited speculation about the “potential for foul play given the wide-open border.” Others blamed racial-diversity policies.
Nothing shows the thoroughness of the MAGA takeover of the GOP as well as the House’s Republican Study Committee budget. The group is the GOP mainstream now, counting some 172 of the 218 House Republicans as members, including many from swing districts and five — Juan Ciscomani and David Schweikert (Ariz.), Mike Garcia (Calif.), Don Bacon (Neb.) and Brandon Williams (N.Y.) from districts Biden won.
Yet here the RSC is, embracing a nationwide abortion ban without exceptions; a ban on the abortion pill, an increase in the retirement age for Social Security; defunding the police (through cuts to the Community Oriented Policing Services program); ending Amtrak funding and selling it off; eliminating broadband provided by the Affordable Connectivity Program; and blocking the “red flag” provisions that keep guns from dangerous people.
This is what Republicans will do next year if Trump wins the White House and Republicans control Congress. Don’t forget it.
TRUMP BENEFITS FROM AN UNEQUAL SYSTEM. STILL, HE CAN’T OUTRUN JUSTICE.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Understandably, many Americans are frustrated by the interminable delays in four-times-indicted former president Donald Trump’s criminal trials and enforcement of New York’s massive civil judgment for fraudulent valuation of his properties. Trump can pay for a fleet of lawyers to file every imaginable defense and appeal. Certainly, the average criminal defendant would not enjoy “luxuries” such as the freedom to bad-mouth judges, prosecutors and court personnel practically without consequence, as Trump has.
The latest Trump break: The New York appellate court reduced from $464 million to $175 million the bond required while he appeals the New York civil case, although the judge-assigned monitor and ban on borrowing from New York banks stand. Trump was given 10 days to come up with the money. (He did not completely rule out accepting foreign funds.) Nevertheless, after he exhausts his appeals, Trump almost certainly will eventually be liable for a sizable judgment.
On the criminal side, Trump’s lawyers have thrown up one frivolous defense after another. In the federal classified documents case proceeding in Florida, Trump has been effective in slowing the wheels of justice almost to a halt, because Judge Aileen M. Cannon — who he appointed, remember — keeps entertaining frivolous arguments. Worse, she has demanded briefing, held oral arguments and then refused to rule. Unless the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit intervenes, the case might take months to reach trial. Worse, once a jury is impaneled, a misguided ruling from Cannon could result in acquittal, leaving prosecutors no recourse. In the end, it’s not impossible to imagine that Trump might avoid responsibility for an egregious national security breach and obstruction of the investigation. That would be the essence of a “two-tiered” justice system.
In the criminal election-subversion case in Fulton County, Ga., Trump and his cronies have had mixed success. District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D) survived a specious recusal claim, which nevertheless chewed up time. (Most defendants would not have had the resources or nerve to mount such an effort.) Willis will request an August trial date, but it is doubtful a case this sprawling would get to trial so soon. Sure, Trump could well face a jury in 2025 — provided he does not get elected.
On to the federal Jan. 6, 2021, case: Despite the Supreme Court’s leisurely pace, its decision on Trump’s claim of absolute immunity will come in June at the latest. Few legal observers expect the high court to give presidents carte blanche to commit crimes in office. Special counsel Jack Smith could then push to go to trial in the fall. Just Security co-founder Ryan Goodman and former prosecutor Andrew Weissmann argue that the trial court’s timetable “in a case whose facts and substantial evidence were already available to the defendant, was longer than deadlines set all around the country.” In the interests of an expeditious trial to ensure that the government, defendant and voters get a timely verdict, Smith could seek to press for a start date as early as practicable. (“Even when the accused is seeking to delay his day in court, that ‘does not alter the prosecutor’s obligation to see to it that the case is brought on for trial,’ as the Supreme Court has well articulated.”)
So to the surprise of many pundits, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s state prosecution alleging falsification of business records has withstood Trump’s antics better than the others. Justice Juan Merchan has demonstrated what equal justice under the law really means. He rejected Trump’s baseless immunity claims and attempt to block probative evidence; he disallowed Trump’s specious defenses such as “advice of counsel.” Likewise, he showed little patience with last-minute excuses and nongermane arguments during Monday’s hearing on thousands of documents that Southern District of New York federal prosecutors belatedly released, scolding Trump’s counsel for waiting so long to subpoena the documents. Merchan observed, “The People went so far above and beyond what they were required to do that it’s odd that we’re even here.” He then ordered the trial to proceed on April 15.
Then to top it off, Merchan “imposed a gag order Tuesday that prohibits [Trump] from attacking witnesses, prosecutors and jurors, the latest effort to rein in the former president’s wrathful rhetoric about his legal opponents,” the New York Times reported. Among the provisions of the order: “Any comments whatsoever about jurors are banned as well, the judge ruled, citing an array of hostile remarks Mr. Trump has made about grand jurors, prosecutors and others,” the Times report said.
In sum, some Trump cases will likely get pushed beyond the election. He might even wriggle out of the Mar-a-Lago documents charges. The New York civil judgment against him could get reduced. Less-wealthy defendants would not get such breaks. However, with tough-minded judges doing their jobs in the D.C. court and in Manhattan, plus major civil judgments (including two in E. Jean Carroll’s favor) already in the bag, Trump will not escape justice entirely. In less than three weeks, he will face a jury in a criminal case — something he has sought to avoid for so long.
Only voters can spare Trump the consequences of his conduct — by electing him president again in November. That would be the true miscarriage of justice.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Understandably, many Americans are frustrated by the interminable delays in four-times-indicted former president Donald Trump’s criminal trials and enforcement of New York’s massive civil judgment for fraudulent valuation of his properties. Trump can pay for a fleet of lawyers to file every imaginable defense and appeal. Certainly, the average criminal defendant would not enjoy “luxuries” such as the freedom to bad-mouth judges, prosecutors and court personnel practically without consequence, as Trump has.
The latest Trump break: The New York appellate court reduced from $464 million to $175 million the bond required while he appeals the New York civil case, although the judge-assigned monitor and ban on borrowing from New York banks stand. Trump was given 10 days to come up with the money. (He did not completely rule out accepting foreign funds.) Nevertheless, after he exhausts his appeals, Trump almost certainly will eventually be liable for a sizable judgment.
On the criminal side, Trump’s lawyers have thrown up one frivolous defense after another. In the federal classified documents case proceeding in Florida, Trump has been effective in slowing the wheels of justice almost to a halt, because Judge Aileen M. Cannon — who he appointed, remember — keeps entertaining frivolous arguments. Worse, she has demanded briefing, held oral arguments and then refused to rule. Unless the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit intervenes, the case might take months to reach trial. Worse, once a jury is impaneled, a misguided ruling from Cannon could result in acquittal, leaving prosecutors no recourse. In the end, it’s not impossible to imagine that Trump might avoid responsibility for an egregious national security breach and obstruction of the investigation. That would be the essence of a “two-tiered” justice system.
In the criminal election-subversion case in Fulton County, Ga., Trump and his cronies have had mixed success. District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D) survived a specious recusal claim, which nevertheless chewed up time. (Most defendants would not have had the resources or nerve to mount such an effort.) Willis will request an August trial date, but it is doubtful a case this sprawling would get to trial so soon. Sure, Trump could well face a jury in 2025 — provided he does not get elected.
On to the federal Jan. 6, 2021, case: Despite the Supreme Court’s leisurely pace, its decision on Trump’s claim of absolute immunity will come in June at the latest. Few legal observers expect the high court to give presidents carte blanche to commit crimes in office. Special counsel Jack Smith could then push to go to trial in the fall. Just Security co-founder Ryan Goodman and former prosecutor Andrew Weissmann argue that the trial court’s timetable “in a case whose facts and substantial evidence were already available to the defendant, was longer than deadlines set all around the country.” In the interests of an expeditious trial to ensure that the government, defendant and voters get a timely verdict, Smith could seek to press for a start date as early as practicable. (“Even when the accused is seeking to delay his day in court, that ‘does not alter the prosecutor’s obligation to see to it that the case is brought on for trial,’ as the Supreme Court has well articulated.”)
So to the surprise of many pundits, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s state prosecution alleging falsification of business records has withstood Trump’s antics better than the others. Justice Juan Merchan has demonstrated what equal justice under the law really means. He rejected Trump’s baseless immunity claims and attempt to block probative evidence; he disallowed Trump’s specious defenses such as “advice of counsel.” Likewise, he showed little patience with last-minute excuses and nongermane arguments during Monday’s hearing on thousands of documents that Southern District of New York federal prosecutors belatedly released, scolding Trump’s counsel for waiting so long to subpoena the documents. Merchan observed, “The People went so far above and beyond what they were required to do that it’s odd that we’re even here.” He then ordered the trial to proceed on April 15.
Then to top it off, Merchan “imposed a gag order Tuesday that prohibits [Trump] from attacking witnesses, prosecutors and jurors, the latest effort to rein in the former president’s wrathful rhetoric about his legal opponents,” the New York Times reported. Among the provisions of the order: “Any comments whatsoever about jurors are banned as well, the judge ruled, citing an array of hostile remarks Mr. Trump has made about grand jurors, prosecutors and others,” the Times report said.
In sum, some Trump cases will likely get pushed beyond the election. He might even wriggle out of the Mar-a-Lago documents charges. The New York civil judgment against him could get reduced. Less-wealthy defendants would not get such breaks. However, with tough-minded judges doing their jobs in the D.C. court and in Manhattan, plus major civil judgments (including two in E. Jean Carroll’s favor) already in the bag, Trump will not escape justice entirely. In less than three weeks, he will face a jury in a criminal case — something he has sought to avoid for so long.
Only voters can spare Trump the consequences of his conduct — by electing him president again in November. That would be the true miscarriage of justice.
TRUMP’S ANTI-UKRAINE VIEW DATES TO THE 1930S. AMERICA REJECTED IT THEN. WILL WE NOW?
By Robert Kagan, author of “The Ghost at the Feast: America and the Collapse of World Order, 1900-1941” as well as “Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart — Again,”.
Many Americans seem shocked that Republicans would oppose helping Ukraine at this critical juncture in history. Don’t Republican members of Congress see the consequences of a Russian victory, for America’s European allies, for its Asian allies and ultimately for the United States itself? What happened to the party of Ronald Reagan? Clearly, people have not been taking Donald Trump’s resurrection of America First seriously. It’s time they did.
The original America First Committee was founded in September 1940. Consider the global circumstances at the time. Two years earlier, Hitler had annexed Austria and invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia. One year earlier, he had invaded and conquered Poland. In the first months of 1940, he invaded and occupied Norway, Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands. In early June 1940, British troops evacuated from Dunkirk, and France was overrun by the Nazi blitzkrieg. In September, the very month of the committee’s formation, German troops were in Paris and Edward R. Murrow was reporting from London under bombardment by the Luftwaffe. That was the moment the America First movement launched itself into the battle to block aid to Britain.
Cutting off Ukraine seems like small beer by comparison, but behind it lies the same “America First” thinking. For Donald Trump and his followers, pulling the plug on Ukraine is part of a larger aim to end America’s broader commitment to European peace and security. America’s commitment to NATO, Trump believes, should be conditional, at best: Russia can do “whatever the hell they want” to allies who do not pay their fair share and meet certain defense-spending objectives.
Other Republicans don’t even mention conditions. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has called for the immediate reduction of U.S. force levels in Europe and the abrogation of America’s common-defense Article 5 commitments. He wants the United States to declare publicly that in the event of a “direct conflict” between Russia and a NATO ally, America will “withhold forces.” The Europeans need to know they can no longer “count on us like they used to.” Elbridge Colby, a former Trump Pentagon official praised by Hawley, has written widely (and wrongly) that United States cannot defend both East Asia and Europe and that Europeans must fend for themselves because, as he put it in a recent social media post, “Asia is more important than Europe.” He said, “If we have to leave Europe more exposed, so be it.”
Can Republicans really be returning to a 1930s worldview in our 21st-century world? The answer is yes. Trump’s Republican Party wants to take the United States back to the triad of interwar conservatism: high tariffs, anti-immigrant xenophobia, isolationism. According to Russ Vought, who is often touted as Trump’s likely chief of staff in a second term, it is precisely this “older definition of conservatism,” the conservatism of the interwar years, that they hope to impose on the nation when Trump regains power.
So it’s time to take a closer look at the 1930s conservative mentality and the America First movement it spawned.
Republican anti-interventionism of those interwar years — “isolationism” as critics called it — was less a carefully considered strategic doctrine than an extension of their battles against domestic opponents. Yes, there were self-proclaimed “realists” in the late 1930s assuring everyone that the United States was invulnerable and that events in Asia, where Japan was also on the rampage, and Europe need not endanger American security. Those “realists” chided their fellow Americans for a “giddy” moralism and emotionalism in response to Nazi and Japanese aggression that prevented them from dealing “with the world as it is,” as historian Charles Beard put it. George F. Kennan, an anti-liberal conservative who served in the American Embassy in Prague, at the time applauded the Munich settlement and praised the Czechs for eschewing the “romantic” course of resistance in favor of the “humiliating but truly heroic one of realism.”
This “realism” meshed well with anti-interventionism. Americans had to respect “the right of an able and virile nation [i.e. Nazi Germany] to expand,” aviator Charles Lindbergh argued. The leading Republican of his day, Ohio Sen. Robert Taft, ridiculed those who expressed fears of advancing fascism. The United States could not be ranging “over the world like a knight errant,” protecting “democracy and ideals of good faith” and tilting, “like Don Quixote, against the windmills of fascism.” The world was “big enough to contain all kinds of different ways of life.”
It was not fascism that conservative Republicans worried about. It was communism. For them, the foreign policy battle in the interwar years was but a subset of their larger war against Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, which Republicans insisted disguised an attempt to bring communism to the United States. Conservatives in both the United States and Great Britain had long seen Hitler and Mussolini as bulwarks against the spread of communism in Germany and elsewhere.
Nor were they especially troubled by the dramatic rise of official antisemitism in Germany. In the 1920s and ’30s, influential Republicans and conservatives put Jews at the center of various conspiracies against America. Some conservatives referred to the New Deal as the “Jew Deal” (there were Jews among FDR’s “brain trust”), and they opposed intervening in a war in which Jews were among the prominent victims. Lindbergh, among the most admired men in the United States, claimed Jews were pushing the United States into war “for reasons which are not American.”
Conservative Republicans also warned against the creation of an American “liberal empire” no less oppressive than the one Hitler was trying to create. The result, Taft claimed, would be the “establishment of a dictatorship in this country.” In May 1940, as the British army faced annihilation at Dunkirk, Taft insisted it was “no time for the people to be wholly absorbed in foreign battles.” It was “the New Deal which may leave us weak and unprepared for attack.”
America’s entry into World War II was, among other things, the triumph of a contrary view of the world. Even before Pearl Harbor, a majority of Americans, prodded by Roosevelt, came to view the advancing power of European fascism and Japanese authoritarian militarism as a threat not just to U.S. security but also to liberal democracy in general. While Roosevelt did warn (implausibly) of the Luftwaffe bombing the United States from bases in Latin America, his broader argument was less about immediate physical security than about the kind of world Americans wanted to live in.
Even if the United States faced no immediate threat of military attack, Roosevelt insisted, in his January 1940 State of the Union address, the world would be a “shabby and dangerous place to live in — yes, even for Americans to live in” if it were ruled “by force in the hands of a few.” To live as a lone island in such a world would be a nightmare. There were times Americans needed to defend not just their homeland, he told Congress in 1939, “but the tenets of faith and humanity on which their churches, their governments and their very civilization are founded. ... To save one we must now make up our minds to save all.”
The Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, formed in May 1940 by progressive Kansas newspaper editor William Allen White and including such prominent Democrats as Dean Acheson, declared the war in Europe was a “life and death struggle for every principle we cherish in America” and urged the United States to “throw its economic and moral weight on the side of the nations of Western Europe, great and small, that are struggling in battle for a civilized way of life.”
This was exactly what the men who formed the America First Committee opposed — and not because they spoke for some mass groundswell of working-class Americans. The poor and working class in these years were with FDR. The America First Committee was founded by a group of Yale students. (Kingman Brewster Jr., a future president of Yale, was a member, as was Potter Stewart, a future Supreme Court justice.) But it soon boasted an impressive list of wealthy and influential supporters that included textile magnate Henry Regnery; chairman of the board of Sears, retired Gen. Robert E. Wood; president of Vick Chemical Co., H. Smith Richardson; and diplomat and future governor of Connecticut Chester B. Bowles. Although they railed at “elites” and claimed to speak for real Americans, they were chiefly business executives who represented the nation’s commercial and industrial elites.
Unfortunately for the original America Firsters, most Americans rejected their arguments and embraced FDR’s liberal worldview. Especially after the fall of France, polling showed a majority of Americans wanted to send aid to Britain even at the risk of the United States being dragged into war. The America First Committee, despite its well-funded nationwide lobbying effort — it boasted 800,000 members in 400 chapters across the nation — lost the battle against Lend-Lease and all subsequent attempts to prevent the United States from becoming the world’s “arsenal of democracy.”
When the United States was finally drawn into the war, partly because of Pearl Harbor but also because of FDR’s increasingly belligerent approach to what he called the “bandit nations,” anti-interventionist Republican critics called it “the New Dealers’ War.” We like to think that great accomplishments in American history are the result of broad national consensus. More often they are the triumph of one worldview over another. American entry into World War II was the victory of a liberal worldview over an anti-interventionism rooted in a conservative anti-liberalism.
That victory remained largely intact throughout the Cold War and after. Although many conservatives eventually hopped on the internationalist bandwagon for the sake of fighting communism (and many on the left dissented from the liberal consensus), it was FDR’s worldview that guided Republican presidents from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Richard M. Nixon to Reagan to the two Bushes. It was the belief that the United States had both an interest and an obligation to support a liberal democratic, capitalist order and to do so by committing to alliances and deploying hundreds of thousands of GIs thousands of miles from American shores. Reagan’s foreign policy was in many ways simply a resumption of the muscular internationalism of FDR, his onetime hero, and the liberal anti-communism of Harry S. Truman and Acheson.
Not all Republicans have forgotten this legacy. Today, when people like Mitch McConnell, the GOP Senate leader, insist that what happens to Ukraine has “a direct and vital bearing on America’s national security and vital interests,” they are articulating this liberal worldview, the assumption that the United States has an interest in the peace and security of a predominantly liberal democratic Europe. If Americans care about what happens in Europe, then they must care about what happens in Ukraine. For should Ukraine fall to Russian control, it would move the line of confrontation between Russia and NATO hundreds of miles westward and allow Vladimir Putin to pursue his unconcealed ambition to restore Moscow’s hegemony in Eastern and Central Europe. Should Ukraine fall, the cost and risk of stopping Russia later will be much higher, including the risk of the United States having to confront Russia as it did during the Cold War. My Post colleague Marc Thiessen has thus advised Republicans to give Ukraine the weapons it needs now, lest they come to “own Ukraine’s military collapse” and leave a reelected Trump “with a weak hand.” Yet that sensible advice also rests on the assumption that at some point the United States may have to come to Europe’s defense against an aggressive Putin.
But what of those Republicans who don’t share that basic assumption? When Sen. J.D. Vance (Ohio) tells Stephen K. Bannon that “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” that statement rests on a different assumption, namely, that a liberal democratic Europe is of no value to the United States and that Americans should not be willing to fight for Germany and France any more than they should fight for Ukraine. It is the original America First position.
Like those of their 1930s forbears, today’s Republicans’ views of foreign policy are heavily shaped by what they consider the more important domestic battle against liberalism. Foreign policy issues are primarily weapons to be wielded against domestic enemies. Today’s Republicans depict their domestic opponents as, among other things, “communists” who are taking their orders from communist China. Republicans insist that Biden is a communist, that his election was a “communist takeover,” that his administration is a “communist regime.” It follows, then, that Biden must have a “pro-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) agenda,” as the powerful Republican chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Cathy McMorris Rodgers , has put it. “Communist China has their President ... China Joe,” Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted on Biden’s Inauguration Day in 2021. Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) has called the President “Beijing Biden.”
And just as World War II was the “New Dealers’ War,” so Ukraine is the war of “globalists.” Hawley, killing many birds with one stone, warns, like his America First forebears, that a cabal of “liberal globalists on the left” and “neoconservatives on the right”is trying to impose a “liberal empire” on the world to make “the world over in the image of New York and Silicon Valley.” What makes these “liberal globalists” and “neoconservatives” dangerous, Hawley insists, is that they are not pursuing a “truly nationalist foreign policy” because they themselves are not true Americans.
The GOP devotion to America First is merely the flip side of Trump’s “poison the blood” campaign. It is about the ascendancy of White Christian America and the various un-American ethnic and racial groups allegedly conspiring against it.
This has long been evident in Republican veneration of anti-liberal dictators such as Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orban. Conservatives applauded when Putin warned in 2013 that the “Euro-Atlantic countries” were “rejecting” the “Christian values” that were the “basis of Western civilization,” “denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious, and even sexual.” Patrick J. Buchanan put it best when he called Putin “one of us,” the voice of “conservatives, traditionalists and nationalists of all continents and countries,” and praised him for standing up against “the cultural and ideological imperialism of ... a decadent west.” The New York Times’ Christopher Caldwell has called Putin a “hero to populist conservatives around the world” because he refuses to submit to the U.S.-dominated liberal world order: “Vladimir Vladimirovich is not the president of a feminist NGO. He is not a transgender-rights activist.” He is “the pre-eminent statesman of our time.”
And what about Trump himself? Does Trump have such a fully formed ideological and strategic agenda? The answer may well be no. As his own former attorney general pointed out, Trump “is a consummate narcissist … who will always put his interests ahead of the country’s.” But Trump’s narcissism meshes well with the aims of those yearning to extricate the United States from its commitments in Europe. In his personal life, as people who know him tend to agree, Trump has no allies. As one Republican told the Wall Street Journal, “All relationships with Trump are one-way transactional and the day he decides that it’s no longer beneficial to him, folks are out the door.” It is hardly surprising that he takes the same approach in foreign policy. Trump does not value America’s allies any more than he values any other relationship, including his relationships with Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un. Trump does not see the world as divided between America’s friends and enemies but only between those who can help him, or hurt him, and those who can’t.
Trump has none of the reverence for America’s commitments overseas that Republican political leaders have shared since the 1940s, when even Michigan Republican Sen. Arthur Vandenberg, a true isolationist before Pearl Harbor, threw his support behind NATO. Ronald Reagan was famous for his close relationships with Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, Germany’s Helmut Kohl, Japan’s Yasuhiro Nakasone and even France’s François Mitterrand, a socialist.
If anything, it has been Democratic presidents who have raised the most concern about American commitments. In the late 1970s, Jimmy Carter openly toyed with pulling U.S. troops out of South Korea, and, more recently, Barack Obama’s feelings for the European allies were noticeably cooler than his predecessors’ — and he was very clear in his view that Ukraine was not a “vital” interest of the United States. But none has gone as far as Trump, Vance, Hawley and Colby in insisting that America should no longer be bound by its European alliance.
It doesn’t really matter what Trump believes, therefore. More important is what he doesn’t believe. Nor does he need to withdraw formally from NATO to introduce massive instability. It will be enough that he and his advisers cast significant doubt on the reliability of America’s Article 5 obligations. There is no such thing as a conditional guarantee. Once other nations realize that America’s commitment to defend treaty allies can no longer be relied upon, the whole configuration of power in the international system will change. All powers, whether friendly or hostile to the United States, will adjust accordingly.
In this respect, those Trump Republicans who wish to sever American commitments to allies are not only bringing back a 1930s worldview. If they take power, they will bring us back to a 1930s world.
Imagine that Kyiv falls a year or two into a second Trump presidency and that instead of responding by rushing to bolster the alliance’s defenses with a more substantial American commitment, Trump expresses relative indifference. How will the nations of Europe respond? Russian troops will be hundreds of miles closer to NATO countries and will share a nearly 700-mile border with Poland, but if Republicans have their way, the United States will do nothing. It will be a historic geopolitical revolution.
Under those circumstances, Europeans will have to make a choice. They must either adjust to the expanding hegemony of a militarized Russia led by a proven aggressor — accepting the world “as it is” in prescribed “realist” fashion. Or they must prepare themselves to stand up to it — without the United States.
The stakes will be highest and most immediate for the Baltic nations, which in the eyes of traditional Russian nationalists such as Putin are mere appendages of Russia, with significant Russian-speaking populations that may at any time demand “protection” from Moscow, as the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia demanded protection from Berlin in the 1930s. The Baltic states have never enjoyed sovereign independence in periods of Russian hegemony and owe their independence today entirely to American and NATO guarantees.
Then there is Poland, which during the Cold War and repeatedly in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries was either subjugated or partitioned by Moscow. Will the Poles again go quietly into that good Russian night once they have been left deliberately “exposed,” as Colby put it, to the full weight of Russian power without the United States or NATO to back them up?
The most important nation in this transformed Europe will be Germany. Germans will quickly find themselves faced with a terrible choice. Either they try to remain in a fundamentally pacifist mode, as they have been since 1945, or they once again become a great military power. To defend themselves in the absence of an American guarantee, Germans will face a staggering uphill climb to match Russia’s conventional-weapons capabilities. But they will also have to address Russia’s overwhelming nuclear superiority, which Putin has not been shy about threatening to use even against the nuclear-armed United States. Will the Germans rely on British and French nuclear capacities to deter Russia, since they can no longer count on the American nuclear umbrella? Or will they choose to become a nuclear power themselves?
Indeed, should the United States make clear that it is no longer bound by its security guarantees, the likelihood is that other industrialized nations will quickly turn to nuclear weapons to try to make up for the sudden gap in their defenses. Japan could build hundreds of nuclear weapons in a very short time if it chose — or do the new America Firsters believe that the Japanese will find reassuring America’s abandonment of the similar treaty commitments in Europe? We will be living in a world of many heavily armed powers engaged in a multipolar arms race, ever poised for conflict — in short, the world that existed in the 1930s, only this time with nuclear weapons. But yes, they will be spending more than 2 percent of their GDP on defense.
Who can say when all this will come a cropper for the United States? Putin’s first act of aggression was in Georgia in 2008; his second was in 2014, when he invaded Crimea and eastern Ukraine; his third was in 2022 when, contrary to almost everyone’s expectations, he invaded all of Ukraine. But his cautious probing, if you can call it that, was in the context of a continuing American commitment to European security.
And how long before China, watching America abandon its allies in Europe, asks whether Americans still plan to live up to any of their commitments anywhere? Even if one believes that “Asia is more important than Europe,” does it strengthen the Asian allies to abandon the European allies? Hitler also hoped the United States would focus exclusively on Asia and leave Europe to him. It is no surprise that among those most frightened by Trump’s talk of abandoning NATO is Taiwan.
An older generation of Americans, many of whom may vote for Trump this year, may not live to see the consequences — those crises will fall on their children and grandchildren. But they can be sure of this: If they vote for a return to the 1930s, posterity is not going to mistake them for America’s “greatest generation.”
By Robert Kagan, author of “The Ghost at the Feast: America and the Collapse of World Order, 1900-1941” as well as “Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart — Again,”.
Many Americans seem shocked that Republicans would oppose helping Ukraine at this critical juncture in history. Don’t Republican members of Congress see the consequences of a Russian victory, for America’s European allies, for its Asian allies and ultimately for the United States itself? What happened to the party of Ronald Reagan? Clearly, people have not been taking Donald Trump’s resurrection of America First seriously. It’s time they did.
The original America First Committee was founded in September 1940. Consider the global circumstances at the time. Two years earlier, Hitler had annexed Austria and invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia. One year earlier, he had invaded and conquered Poland. In the first months of 1940, he invaded and occupied Norway, Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands. In early June 1940, British troops evacuated from Dunkirk, and France was overrun by the Nazi blitzkrieg. In September, the very month of the committee’s formation, German troops were in Paris and Edward R. Murrow was reporting from London under bombardment by the Luftwaffe. That was the moment the America First movement launched itself into the battle to block aid to Britain.
Cutting off Ukraine seems like small beer by comparison, but behind it lies the same “America First” thinking. For Donald Trump and his followers, pulling the plug on Ukraine is part of a larger aim to end America’s broader commitment to European peace and security. America’s commitment to NATO, Trump believes, should be conditional, at best: Russia can do “whatever the hell they want” to allies who do not pay their fair share and meet certain defense-spending objectives.
Other Republicans don’t even mention conditions. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has called for the immediate reduction of U.S. force levels in Europe and the abrogation of America’s common-defense Article 5 commitments. He wants the United States to declare publicly that in the event of a “direct conflict” between Russia and a NATO ally, America will “withhold forces.” The Europeans need to know they can no longer “count on us like they used to.” Elbridge Colby, a former Trump Pentagon official praised by Hawley, has written widely (and wrongly) that United States cannot defend both East Asia and Europe and that Europeans must fend for themselves because, as he put it in a recent social media post, “Asia is more important than Europe.” He said, “If we have to leave Europe more exposed, so be it.”
Can Republicans really be returning to a 1930s worldview in our 21st-century world? The answer is yes. Trump’s Republican Party wants to take the United States back to the triad of interwar conservatism: high tariffs, anti-immigrant xenophobia, isolationism. According to Russ Vought, who is often touted as Trump’s likely chief of staff in a second term, it is precisely this “older definition of conservatism,” the conservatism of the interwar years, that they hope to impose on the nation when Trump regains power.
So it’s time to take a closer look at the 1930s conservative mentality and the America First movement it spawned.
Republican anti-interventionism of those interwar years — “isolationism” as critics called it — was less a carefully considered strategic doctrine than an extension of their battles against domestic opponents. Yes, there were self-proclaimed “realists” in the late 1930s assuring everyone that the United States was invulnerable and that events in Asia, where Japan was also on the rampage, and Europe need not endanger American security. Those “realists” chided their fellow Americans for a “giddy” moralism and emotionalism in response to Nazi and Japanese aggression that prevented them from dealing “with the world as it is,” as historian Charles Beard put it. George F. Kennan, an anti-liberal conservative who served in the American Embassy in Prague, at the time applauded the Munich settlement and praised the Czechs for eschewing the “romantic” course of resistance in favor of the “humiliating but truly heroic one of realism.”
This “realism” meshed well with anti-interventionism. Americans had to respect “the right of an able and virile nation [i.e. Nazi Germany] to expand,” aviator Charles Lindbergh argued. The leading Republican of his day, Ohio Sen. Robert Taft, ridiculed those who expressed fears of advancing fascism. The United States could not be ranging “over the world like a knight errant,” protecting “democracy and ideals of good faith” and tilting, “like Don Quixote, against the windmills of fascism.” The world was “big enough to contain all kinds of different ways of life.”
It was not fascism that conservative Republicans worried about. It was communism. For them, the foreign policy battle in the interwar years was but a subset of their larger war against Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, which Republicans insisted disguised an attempt to bring communism to the United States. Conservatives in both the United States and Great Britain had long seen Hitler and Mussolini as bulwarks against the spread of communism in Germany and elsewhere.
Nor were they especially troubled by the dramatic rise of official antisemitism in Germany. In the 1920s and ’30s, influential Republicans and conservatives put Jews at the center of various conspiracies against America. Some conservatives referred to the New Deal as the “Jew Deal” (there were Jews among FDR’s “brain trust”), and they opposed intervening in a war in which Jews were among the prominent victims. Lindbergh, among the most admired men in the United States, claimed Jews were pushing the United States into war “for reasons which are not American.”
Conservative Republicans also warned against the creation of an American “liberal empire” no less oppressive than the one Hitler was trying to create. The result, Taft claimed, would be the “establishment of a dictatorship in this country.” In May 1940, as the British army faced annihilation at Dunkirk, Taft insisted it was “no time for the people to be wholly absorbed in foreign battles.” It was “the New Deal which may leave us weak and unprepared for attack.”
America’s entry into World War II was, among other things, the triumph of a contrary view of the world. Even before Pearl Harbor, a majority of Americans, prodded by Roosevelt, came to view the advancing power of European fascism and Japanese authoritarian militarism as a threat not just to U.S. security but also to liberal democracy in general. While Roosevelt did warn (implausibly) of the Luftwaffe bombing the United States from bases in Latin America, his broader argument was less about immediate physical security than about the kind of world Americans wanted to live in.
Even if the United States faced no immediate threat of military attack, Roosevelt insisted, in his January 1940 State of the Union address, the world would be a “shabby and dangerous place to live in — yes, even for Americans to live in” if it were ruled “by force in the hands of a few.” To live as a lone island in such a world would be a nightmare. There were times Americans needed to defend not just their homeland, he told Congress in 1939, “but the tenets of faith and humanity on which their churches, their governments and their very civilization are founded. ... To save one we must now make up our minds to save all.”
The Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, formed in May 1940 by progressive Kansas newspaper editor William Allen White and including such prominent Democrats as Dean Acheson, declared the war in Europe was a “life and death struggle for every principle we cherish in America” and urged the United States to “throw its economic and moral weight on the side of the nations of Western Europe, great and small, that are struggling in battle for a civilized way of life.”
This was exactly what the men who formed the America First Committee opposed — and not because they spoke for some mass groundswell of working-class Americans. The poor and working class in these years were with FDR. The America First Committee was founded by a group of Yale students. (Kingman Brewster Jr., a future president of Yale, was a member, as was Potter Stewart, a future Supreme Court justice.) But it soon boasted an impressive list of wealthy and influential supporters that included textile magnate Henry Regnery; chairman of the board of Sears, retired Gen. Robert E. Wood; president of Vick Chemical Co., H. Smith Richardson; and diplomat and future governor of Connecticut Chester B. Bowles. Although they railed at “elites” and claimed to speak for real Americans, they were chiefly business executives who represented the nation’s commercial and industrial elites.
Unfortunately for the original America Firsters, most Americans rejected their arguments and embraced FDR’s liberal worldview. Especially after the fall of France, polling showed a majority of Americans wanted to send aid to Britain even at the risk of the United States being dragged into war. The America First Committee, despite its well-funded nationwide lobbying effort — it boasted 800,000 members in 400 chapters across the nation — lost the battle against Lend-Lease and all subsequent attempts to prevent the United States from becoming the world’s “arsenal of democracy.”
When the United States was finally drawn into the war, partly because of Pearl Harbor but also because of FDR’s increasingly belligerent approach to what he called the “bandit nations,” anti-interventionist Republican critics called it “the New Dealers’ War.” We like to think that great accomplishments in American history are the result of broad national consensus. More often they are the triumph of one worldview over another. American entry into World War II was the victory of a liberal worldview over an anti-interventionism rooted in a conservative anti-liberalism.
That victory remained largely intact throughout the Cold War and after. Although many conservatives eventually hopped on the internationalist bandwagon for the sake of fighting communism (and many on the left dissented from the liberal consensus), it was FDR’s worldview that guided Republican presidents from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Richard M. Nixon to Reagan to the two Bushes. It was the belief that the United States had both an interest and an obligation to support a liberal democratic, capitalist order and to do so by committing to alliances and deploying hundreds of thousands of GIs thousands of miles from American shores. Reagan’s foreign policy was in many ways simply a resumption of the muscular internationalism of FDR, his onetime hero, and the liberal anti-communism of Harry S. Truman and Acheson.
Not all Republicans have forgotten this legacy. Today, when people like Mitch McConnell, the GOP Senate leader, insist that what happens to Ukraine has “a direct and vital bearing on America’s national security and vital interests,” they are articulating this liberal worldview, the assumption that the United States has an interest in the peace and security of a predominantly liberal democratic Europe. If Americans care about what happens in Europe, then they must care about what happens in Ukraine. For should Ukraine fall to Russian control, it would move the line of confrontation between Russia and NATO hundreds of miles westward and allow Vladimir Putin to pursue his unconcealed ambition to restore Moscow’s hegemony in Eastern and Central Europe. Should Ukraine fall, the cost and risk of stopping Russia later will be much higher, including the risk of the United States having to confront Russia as it did during the Cold War. My Post colleague Marc Thiessen has thus advised Republicans to give Ukraine the weapons it needs now, lest they come to “own Ukraine’s military collapse” and leave a reelected Trump “with a weak hand.” Yet that sensible advice also rests on the assumption that at some point the United States may have to come to Europe’s defense against an aggressive Putin.
But what of those Republicans who don’t share that basic assumption? When Sen. J.D. Vance (Ohio) tells Stephen K. Bannon that “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” that statement rests on a different assumption, namely, that a liberal democratic Europe is of no value to the United States and that Americans should not be willing to fight for Germany and France any more than they should fight for Ukraine. It is the original America First position.
Like those of their 1930s forbears, today’s Republicans’ views of foreign policy are heavily shaped by what they consider the more important domestic battle against liberalism. Foreign policy issues are primarily weapons to be wielded against domestic enemies. Today’s Republicans depict their domestic opponents as, among other things, “communists” who are taking their orders from communist China. Republicans insist that Biden is a communist, that his election was a “communist takeover,” that his administration is a “communist regime.” It follows, then, that Biden must have a “pro-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) agenda,” as the powerful Republican chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Cathy McMorris Rodgers , has put it. “Communist China has their President ... China Joe,” Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted on Biden’s Inauguration Day in 2021. Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) has called the President “Beijing Biden.”
And just as World War II was the “New Dealers’ War,” so Ukraine is the war of “globalists.” Hawley, killing many birds with one stone, warns, like his America First forebears, that a cabal of “liberal globalists on the left” and “neoconservatives on the right”is trying to impose a “liberal empire” on the world to make “the world over in the image of New York and Silicon Valley.” What makes these “liberal globalists” and “neoconservatives” dangerous, Hawley insists, is that they are not pursuing a “truly nationalist foreign policy” because they themselves are not true Americans.
The GOP devotion to America First is merely the flip side of Trump’s “poison the blood” campaign. It is about the ascendancy of White Christian America and the various un-American ethnic and racial groups allegedly conspiring against it.
This has long been evident in Republican veneration of anti-liberal dictators such as Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orban. Conservatives applauded when Putin warned in 2013 that the “Euro-Atlantic countries” were “rejecting” the “Christian values” that were the “basis of Western civilization,” “denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious, and even sexual.” Patrick J. Buchanan put it best when he called Putin “one of us,” the voice of “conservatives, traditionalists and nationalists of all continents and countries,” and praised him for standing up against “the cultural and ideological imperialism of ... a decadent west.” The New York Times’ Christopher Caldwell has called Putin a “hero to populist conservatives around the world” because he refuses to submit to the U.S.-dominated liberal world order: “Vladimir Vladimirovich is not the president of a feminist NGO. He is not a transgender-rights activist.” He is “the pre-eminent statesman of our time.”
And what about Trump himself? Does Trump have such a fully formed ideological and strategic agenda? The answer may well be no. As his own former attorney general pointed out, Trump “is a consummate narcissist … who will always put his interests ahead of the country’s.” But Trump’s narcissism meshes well with the aims of those yearning to extricate the United States from its commitments in Europe. In his personal life, as people who know him tend to agree, Trump has no allies. As one Republican told the Wall Street Journal, “All relationships with Trump are one-way transactional and the day he decides that it’s no longer beneficial to him, folks are out the door.” It is hardly surprising that he takes the same approach in foreign policy. Trump does not value America’s allies any more than he values any other relationship, including his relationships with Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un. Trump does not see the world as divided between America’s friends and enemies but only between those who can help him, or hurt him, and those who can’t.
Trump has none of the reverence for America’s commitments overseas that Republican political leaders have shared since the 1940s, when even Michigan Republican Sen. Arthur Vandenberg, a true isolationist before Pearl Harbor, threw his support behind NATO. Ronald Reagan was famous for his close relationships with Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, Germany’s Helmut Kohl, Japan’s Yasuhiro Nakasone and even France’s François Mitterrand, a socialist.
If anything, it has been Democratic presidents who have raised the most concern about American commitments. In the late 1970s, Jimmy Carter openly toyed with pulling U.S. troops out of South Korea, and, more recently, Barack Obama’s feelings for the European allies were noticeably cooler than his predecessors’ — and he was very clear in his view that Ukraine was not a “vital” interest of the United States. But none has gone as far as Trump, Vance, Hawley and Colby in insisting that America should no longer be bound by its European alliance.
It doesn’t really matter what Trump believes, therefore. More important is what he doesn’t believe. Nor does he need to withdraw formally from NATO to introduce massive instability. It will be enough that he and his advisers cast significant doubt on the reliability of America’s Article 5 obligations. There is no such thing as a conditional guarantee. Once other nations realize that America’s commitment to defend treaty allies can no longer be relied upon, the whole configuration of power in the international system will change. All powers, whether friendly or hostile to the United States, will adjust accordingly.
In this respect, those Trump Republicans who wish to sever American commitments to allies are not only bringing back a 1930s worldview. If they take power, they will bring us back to a 1930s world.
Imagine that Kyiv falls a year or two into a second Trump presidency and that instead of responding by rushing to bolster the alliance’s defenses with a more substantial American commitment, Trump expresses relative indifference. How will the nations of Europe respond? Russian troops will be hundreds of miles closer to NATO countries and will share a nearly 700-mile border with Poland, but if Republicans have their way, the United States will do nothing. It will be a historic geopolitical revolution.
Under those circumstances, Europeans will have to make a choice. They must either adjust to the expanding hegemony of a militarized Russia led by a proven aggressor — accepting the world “as it is” in prescribed “realist” fashion. Or they must prepare themselves to stand up to it — without the United States.
The stakes will be highest and most immediate for the Baltic nations, which in the eyes of traditional Russian nationalists such as Putin are mere appendages of Russia, with significant Russian-speaking populations that may at any time demand “protection” from Moscow, as the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia demanded protection from Berlin in the 1930s. The Baltic states have never enjoyed sovereign independence in periods of Russian hegemony and owe their independence today entirely to American and NATO guarantees.
Then there is Poland, which during the Cold War and repeatedly in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries was either subjugated or partitioned by Moscow. Will the Poles again go quietly into that good Russian night once they have been left deliberately “exposed,” as Colby put it, to the full weight of Russian power without the United States or NATO to back them up?
The most important nation in this transformed Europe will be Germany. Germans will quickly find themselves faced with a terrible choice. Either they try to remain in a fundamentally pacifist mode, as they have been since 1945, or they once again become a great military power. To defend themselves in the absence of an American guarantee, Germans will face a staggering uphill climb to match Russia’s conventional-weapons capabilities. But they will also have to address Russia’s overwhelming nuclear superiority, which Putin has not been shy about threatening to use even against the nuclear-armed United States. Will the Germans rely on British and French nuclear capacities to deter Russia, since they can no longer count on the American nuclear umbrella? Or will they choose to become a nuclear power themselves?
Indeed, should the United States make clear that it is no longer bound by its security guarantees, the likelihood is that other industrialized nations will quickly turn to nuclear weapons to try to make up for the sudden gap in their defenses. Japan could build hundreds of nuclear weapons in a very short time if it chose — or do the new America Firsters believe that the Japanese will find reassuring America’s abandonment of the similar treaty commitments in Europe? We will be living in a world of many heavily armed powers engaged in a multipolar arms race, ever poised for conflict — in short, the world that existed in the 1930s, only this time with nuclear weapons. But yes, they will be spending more than 2 percent of their GDP on defense.
Who can say when all this will come a cropper for the United States? Putin’s first act of aggression was in Georgia in 2008; his second was in 2014, when he invaded Crimea and eastern Ukraine; his third was in 2022 when, contrary to almost everyone’s expectations, he invaded all of Ukraine. But his cautious probing, if you can call it that, was in the context of a continuing American commitment to European security.
And how long before China, watching America abandon its allies in Europe, asks whether Americans still plan to live up to any of their commitments anywhere? Even if one believes that “Asia is more important than Europe,” does it strengthen the Asian allies to abandon the European allies? Hitler also hoped the United States would focus exclusively on Asia and leave Europe to him. It is no surprise that among those most frightened by Trump’s talk of abandoning NATO is Taiwan.
An older generation of Americans, many of whom may vote for Trump this year, may not live to see the consequences — those crises will fall on their children and grandchildren. But they can be sure of this: If they vote for a return to the 1930s, posterity is not going to mistake them for America’s “greatest generation.”
THE FALSE PROMISE — AND HIDDEN COSTS — OF SCHOOL VOUCHERS
Vouchers are the education equivalent of predatory lending. There's a sharp difference between what’s promised in the rhetoric vs. what actually happens when the cost of reality sets in.
By Joshua M. Cowen, The Philadelphia Inquirer
If you’ve ever run a small business or talked to a business owner, you might have heard the phrase “under promise, over deliver” as a strategy for customer service.
Unfortunately, when it comes to school voucher plans like those being considered by Pennsylvania lawmakers this spring, what happens is the opposite of a sound investment: a lot of overpromising ahead of woeful under-delivery.
As an expert on school vouchers, I think about the idea of what’s promised in the rhetoric vs. what actually happens when the real cost sets in. To hear voucher lobbyists tell it — usually working for billionaires like Betsy DeVos, or Pennsylvania’s own Jeff Yass — all that’s needed to move American education forward is a fully privatized market of school choice, where parents are customers and education is the product.
As I testified to Pennsylvania lawmakers last fall, however, vouchers are the education equivalent of predatory lending.
One promise that never holds up is the idea that states can afford to create voucher systems that underwrite private tuition for some children, while still keeping public school spending strong.
Other states that have passed or expanded voucher systems have rarely been able to sustain new investments in public schools. Even when those voucher bills also came with initial increases in public education funding. Six out of the last seven states to pass such bills have failed to keep up with just the national average in public school investment.
But for children and families — especially those who have been traditionally underserved by schools at different points in U.S. history — the cost of school vouchers goes beyond the price for taxpayers.
Although most voucher users in other states (about 70%) were, in fact, in private schools first, the academic results for the kids who transfer are disastrous. Statewide vouchers have led to some of the largest academic declines in the history of education research — drops in performance that were on par with how COVID-19 or Hurricane Katrina affected student learning.
Although school vouchers have enjoyed fits and starts of bipartisan support from time to time, today’s push for universal voucher systems across the country is almost entirely the product of conservative politics. All 12 states that created or expanded some form of a voucher system in 2023 voted for Donald Trump in 2020. Of those that passed voucher laws since the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, only two (Arizona and New Hampshire) voted for Joe Biden that election year.
In states like Arkansas and Iowa, voucher laws either immediately followed or immediately preceded extreme new restrictions on reproductive care, a weakening of child labor laws, and other conservative policy priorities.
And this isn’t just about electoral politics. The right-wing origins of school vouchers have real day-to-day implications for who gets to use them and who is left out. We know from states like Florida, Indiana, and Wisconsin that the latest voucher bills allow schools to discriminate against certain children if schools can claim they do so for religious reasons.
Today’s push for universal voucher systems across the country is almost entirely the product of conservative politics.
Who pays that particular price? Examples include students with disabilities and children and parents from LGBTQ families, who may be asked to leave or not even admitted at all. And that’s because when it comes to vouchers, it’s not really school choice at all. Families don’t get their choice of schools; instead, schools get their choice of which families to admit.
And the price tag for all of this usually comes in wildly over budget anyway. The big culprit for those cost overruns goes back to who actually gets a voucher. Because most voucher users were in private schools first— paid by the private sector before — voucher costs are actually new expenditures taxpayers have to make. In the worst-case scenario, Arizona, vouchers cost more than 1,000% beyond what their advocates first promised.
Despite claims some supporters make that vouchers are part of an efficient education market, the result is really the opposite of any strategy a successful business would recognize.
To put it plainly: The promises rarely pan out, and eventually, the check comes due.
Vouchers are the education equivalent of predatory lending. There's a sharp difference between what’s promised in the rhetoric vs. what actually happens when the cost of reality sets in.
By Joshua M. Cowen, The Philadelphia Inquirer
If you’ve ever run a small business or talked to a business owner, you might have heard the phrase “under promise, over deliver” as a strategy for customer service.
Unfortunately, when it comes to school voucher plans like those being considered by Pennsylvania lawmakers this spring, what happens is the opposite of a sound investment: a lot of overpromising ahead of woeful under-delivery.
As an expert on school vouchers, I think about the idea of what’s promised in the rhetoric vs. what actually happens when the real cost sets in. To hear voucher lobbyists tell it — usually working for billionaires like Betsy DeVos, or Pennsylvania’s own Jeff Yass — all that’s needed to move American education forward is a fully privatized market of school choice, where parents are customers and education is the product.
As I testified to Pennsylvania lawmakers last fall, however, vouchers are the education equivalent of predatory lending.
One promise that never holds up is the idea that states can afford to create voucher systems that underwrite private tuition for some children, while still keeping public school spending strong.
Other states that have passed or expanded voucher systems have rarely been able to sustain new investments in public schools. Even when those voucher bills also came with initial increases in public education funding. Six out of the last seven states to pass such bills have failed to keep up with just the national average in public school investment.
But for children and families — especially those who have been traditionally underserved by schools at different points in U.S. history — the cost of school vouchers goes beyond the price for taxpayers.
Although most voucher users in other states (about 70%) were, in fact, in private schools first, the academic results for the kids who transfer are disastrous. Statewide vouchers have led to some of the largest academic declines in the history of education research — drops in performance that were on par with how COVID-19 or Hurricane Katrina affected student learning.
Although school vouchers have enjoyed fits and starts of bipartisan support from time to time, today’s push for universal voucher systems across the country is almost entirely the product of conservative politics. All 12 states that created or expanded some form of a voucher system in 2023 voted for Donald Trump in 2020. Of those that passed voucher laws since the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, only two (Arizona and New Hampshire) voted for Joe Biden that election year.
In states like Arkansas and Iowa, voucher laws either immediately followed or immediately preceded extreme new restrictions on reproductive care, a weakening of child labor laws, and other conservative policy priorities.
And this isn’t just about electoral politics. The right-wing origins of school vouchers have real day-to-day implications for who gets to use them and who is left out. We know from states like Florida, Indiana, and Wisconsin that the latest voucher bills allow schools to discriminate against certain children if schools can claim they do so for religious reasons.
Today’s push for universal voucher systems across the country is almost entirely the product of conservative politics.
Who pays that particular price? Examples include students with disabilities and children and parents from LGBTQ families, who may be asked to leave or not even admitted at all. And that’s because when it comes to vouchers, it’s not really school choice at all. Families don’t get their choice of schools; instead, schools get their choice of which families to admit.
And the price tag for all of this usually comes in wildly over budget anyway. The big culprit for those cost overruns goes back to who actually gets a voucher. Because most voucher users were in private schools first— paid by the private sector before — voucher costs are actually new expenditures taxpayers have to make. In the worst-case scenario, Arizona, vouchers cost more than 1,000% beyond what their advocates first promised.
Despite claims some supporters make that vouchers are part of an efficient education market, the result is really the opposite of any strategy a successful business would recognize.
To put it plainly: The promises rarely pan out, and eventually, the check comes due.
WAS THE 2020 ELECTION STOLEN? JOB INTERVIEWS AT RNC TAKE AN UNUSUAL TURN.
Prospective hires say agreeing with Trump’s false election claim appears to be a new litmus test for being hired by the party
By Josh Dawsey, The Washington Post
Those seeking employment at the Republican National Committee after a Trump-backed purge of the committee this month have been asked in job interviews if they believe the 2020 election was stolen, according to people familiar with the interviews, making the false claim a litmus test of sorts for hiring.
In recent days, Trump advisers have quizzed multiple employees who had worked in key 2024 states about their views on the last presidential election, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private interviews and discussions. The interviews have been conducted mostly virtually, as the prospective future employees are based in key swing states.
“Was the 2020 election stolen?” one prospective employee recalled being asked in a room with two top Trump advisers.
The question about the 2020 election has startled some of the potential employees, who viewed it as questioning their loyalty to Trump and as an unusual job interview question, according to the people familiar with the interviews. A group of senior Trump advisers have been in the RNC building in recent days conducting the interviews.
The questions about the 2020 election were open-ended, two people familiar with the questioning said.
“But if you say the election wasn’t stolen, do you really think you’re going to get hired?” one former RNC employee asked.
“Candidates who worked on the front line in battleground states or are currently in states where fraud allegations have been prevalent were asked about their work experience,” RNC and Trump spokeswoman Danielle Alvarez said in a statement Tuesday. “We want experienced staff with meaningful views on how elections are won and lost and real experience-based opinions about what happens in the trenches.”
The Biden campaign on Wednesday sharply criticized the RNC’s practice of asking prospective employees whether the 2020 election was stolen.
“In Donald Trump’s America, elections are only fair when he wins and nothing is off the table to stay in power — including violence like on January 6th and being a dictator on day one,” Biden spokesperson Ammar Moussa said in a statement. “And, now, Donald Trump is demanding fealty to his extreme, anti-democratic beliefs to be part of his Republican Party.”
RNC staffers were told en masse in early March that they were being let go but could reapply for jobs, and the application process has included an interview with the Trump advisers. The Trump advisers this week are vetting both former employees and some laid-off employees — whose last day is Friday — to decide how many can either return or stay with the RNC.
Doug Heye, a longtime GOP strategist who worked as communications director at the RNC, said the party had long expected staffers to mimic the positions of its presidential candidates. “You’re there for that specific reason,” he said, “to back the candidate up and go along with the worldview.”
But nominees other than Trump wouldn’t make such outlandish claims, he said, or put employees in such an uncomfortable spot.
“The problem with Trumpism is that despite bringing in very smart and very capable people, if you want to play Trump’s game, you have to back him up on everything he says. Claims about the election being stolen is kind of the last frontier of that,” Heye said.
Other questions have included what they believe should be done on “election integrity” in 2024, along with basic questions about their job responsibilities, their previous employers and their opinions on how things are going at the RNC.
Instead of having employees based in Washington, Trump advisers have told prospective employees that many will be expected to move to Palm Beach, Fla., to be near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, hollowing out the RNC headquarters. RNC officials have said it is about combining the operations of the campaign and the committee for maximum use ahead of the general election.
The hiring process came after Trump grew disillusioned with the leadership of RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, who then stepped down in early March. One of his main gripes was that the RNC had not done enough to focus on “election integrity” or to boost his claims that the 2020 election was stolen. McDaniel, for her part, faced a widespread revolt this week at NBC News over her past comments questioning the validity of the election after she was hired as a contributor; NBC announced Tuesday that it was reversing its decision.
Trump installed Michael Whatley, a loyalist from North Carolina, as the chairman of the party, along with daughter-in-law Lara Trump as co-chair.
Trump has falsely maintained that the election was stolen since 2020 and has often endorsed candidates based on agreement with that belief. He is facing charges in federal court in Washington over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Some Trump advisers have urged him for years to stop talking about the election, but he has largely resisted those entreaties.
Prospective hires say agreeing with Trump’s false election claim appears to be a new litmus test for being hired by the party
By Josh Dawsey, The Washington Post
Those seeking employment at the Republican National Committee after a Trump-backed purge of the committee this month have been asked in job interviews if they believe the 2020 election was stolen, according to people familiar with the interviews, making the false claim a litmus test of sorts for hiring.
In recent days, Trump advisers have quizzed multiple employees who had worked in key 2024 states about their views on the last presidential election, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private interviews and discussions. The interviews have been conducted mostly virtually, as the prospective future employees are based in key swing states.
“Was the 2020 election stolen?” one prospective employee recalled being asked in a room with two top Trump advisers.
The question about the 2020 election has startled some of the potential employees, who viewed it as questioning their loyalty to Trump and as an unusual job interview question, according to the people familiar with the interviews. A group of senior Trump advisers have been in the RNC building in recent days conducting the interviews.
The questions about the 2020 election were open-ended, two people familiar with the questioning said.
“But if you say the election wasn’t stolen, do you really think you’re going to get hired?” one former RNC employee asked.
“Candidates who worked on the front line in battleground states or are currently in states where fraud allegations have been prevalent were asked about their work experience,” RNC and Trump spokeswoman Danielle Alvarez said in a statement Tuesday. “We want experienced staff with meaningful views on how elections are won and lost and real experience-based opinions about what happens in the trenches.”
The Biden campaign on Wednesday sharply criticized the RNC’s practice of asking prospective employees whether the 2020 election was stolen.
“In Donald Trump’s America, elections are only fair when he wins and nothing is off the table to stay in power — including violence like on January 6th and being a dictator on day one,” Biden spokesperson Ammar Moussa said in a statement. “And, now, Donald Trump is demanding fealty to his extreme, anti-democratic beliefs to be part of his Republican Party.”
RNC staffers were told en masse in early March that they were being let go but could reapply for jobs, and the application process has included an interview with the Trump advisers. The Trump advisers this week are vetting both former employees and some laid-off employees — whose last day is Friday — to decide how many can either return or stay with the RNC.
Doug Heye, a longtime GOP strategist who worked as communications director at the RNC, said the party had long expected staffers to mimic the positions of its presidential candidates. “You’re there for that specific reason,” he said, “to back the candidate up and go along with the worldview.”
But nominees other than Trump wouldn’t make such outlandish claims, he said, or put employees in such an uncomfortable spot.
“The problem with Trumpism is that despite bringing in very smart and very capable people, if you want to play Trump’s game, you have to back him up on everything he says. Claims about the election being stolen is kind of the last frontier of that,” Heye said.
Other questions have included what they believe should be done on “election integrity” in 2024, along with basic questions about their job responsibilities, their previous employers and their opinions on how things are going at the RNC.
Instead of having employees based in Washington, Trump advisers have told prospective employees that many will be expected to move to Palm Beach, Fla., to be near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, hollowing out the RNC headquarters. RNC officials have said it is about combining the operations of the campaign and the committee for maximum use ahead of the general election.
The hiring process came after Trump grew disillusioned with the leadership of RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, who then stepped down in early March. One of his main gripes was that the RNC had not done enough to focus on “election integrity” or to boost his claims that the 2020 election was stolen. McDaniel, for her part, faced a widespread revolt this week at NBC News over her past comments questioning the validity of the election after she was hired as a contributor; NBC announced Tuesday that it was reversing its decision.
Trump installed Michael Whatley, a loyalist from North Carolina, as the chairman of the party, along with daughter-in-law Lara Trump as co-chair.
Trump has falsely maintained that the election was stolen since 2020 and has often endorsed candidates based on agreement with that belief. He is facing charges in federal court in Washington over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Some Trump advisers have urged him for years to stop talking about the election, but he has largely resisted those entreaties.
OBAMACARE IS IN GRAVE DANGER, AGAIN
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
Are you better off than you would have been 14 years ago? If you’re one of the millions of Americans who have a preexisting medical condition and don’t have a job that comes with health benefits, the answer is, overwhelmingly, yes.
Why? Because before the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare — signed into law on March 23, 2010, although many of its provisions didn’t kick in until 2014 — you probably wouldn’t have been able to get health insurance. Today you can, thanks to provisions in the law that prevent insurers from discriminating based on medical history and that subsidize insurance premiums for many Americans. (These subsidies also provide healthy people with an incentive to purchase insurance, improving the risk pool.)
And President Biden strengthened the program, notably by extending provisions eliminating the “cliff” that cut off subsides for many middle-class Americans.
But in the near future, you may well lose that hard-won access. In 2017, Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress tried to eviscerate the A.C.A. and almost succeeded in passing a bill that the Congressional Budget Office estimated would have left 22 million more Americans uninsured by 2026. There’s every reason to believe that if the G.O.P. wins control of Congress and the White House in November, it will once again try to bring back the bad old days of health coverage. And it will probably succeed, since it failed in 2017 only thanks to a principled stand by John McCain — something unlikely to happen in today’s Republican Party, where slavish obedience to Trump has become almost universal.
Before I get to the politics, let’s talk about what Obamacare has achieved.
During the Obama era, voices on the right made many dire predictions about its effects. They claimed that the law wouldn’t really expand coverage, that it would be a fiscal disaster and a job killer.
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None of these predictions came true. The percentage of Americans without health insurance has fallen by almost half since 2010. Federal spending on health programs, far from exploding, has grown much more slowly than forecast. Back in 2010, the budget office expected outlays on major mandatory health programs to reach 10 percent of G.D.P. by the mid 2030s and “continue to increase thereafter”; it now expects that number to be less than 7 percent. As for jobs, the employment rate among Americans in their prime working years is at its highest level in more than two decades.
And Obamacare, initially a political liability for Democrats, is now quite popular. Indeed, the narrowly failed Republican attempt to gut the law probably played a large role in Democratic success in the 2018 midterm elections.
So why is this success story in grave danger?
First, it’s important to remember that Trump, aside from his venomous attitude toward immigrants and his protectionist instincts, has shown that he neither knows nor cares much about the details of policy. Last week, he posted a screed about how an “INVASION” of migrants is “KILLING SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE,” which is both the opposite of the truth and a demonstration that he has little idea how even the biggest, most important government programs work.
When he was in office, Trump was putty in the hands of right-wing economic ideologues, who actually know how to write legislation that serves their objectives; practically his only major budgetary initiatives were a tax cut for the wealthy and corporations, which passed, and the attempted gutting of Obamacare, which fell just short.
And what we know is that even though Trump likes to portray himself as a populist, right-wing economic ideology still rules among congressional Republicans, who are as eager as ever to effectively destroy Obamacare. Last week, the Republican Study Committee, which includes a majority of G.O.P. members of the House of Representatives, released a budget proposal that teed up many of the 2017 “reforms” that would have caused millions of Americans to lose health coverage. (It also called for down-the-road cuts in Social Security and Medicare.)
What I found striking about the budget proposal was how its authors deal with the fact that none of the dire predictions right-wingers made about Obamacare have come true. The answer is that they simply pretend that the bad things they predicted, which didn’t happen, did. I was struck, for example, by the assertion that Obamacare “dramatically escalated the unsustainable rise in American health care spending.” Indeed, in 2010, total U.S. health care spending was 17.2 percent of G.D.P. By 2022 that number had risen to … 17.3 percent of G.D.P.
So the reality of Obamacare’s success won’t deter Republicans who want to destroy it. If anything, the law’s success only increases their determination to kill it, because it shows that, contrary to their ideology, government actually can make Americans’ lives better.
And Trump will go along — he’ll egg them on — because making Americans’ lives better isn’t his primary objective.
Ultimately, right-wingers would like to rip up America’s whole safety net. But they’ll probably start with Obamacare; if they sweep this year, I won’t be surprised if the program is effectively gone by 2026.
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
Are you better off than you would have been 14 years ago? If you’re one of the millions of Americans who have a preexisting medical condition and don’t have a job that comes with health benefits, the answer is, overwhelmingly, yes.
Why? Because before the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare — signed into law on March 23, 2010, although many of its provisions didn’t kick in until 2014 — you probably wouldn’t have been able to get health insurance. Today you can, thanks to provisions in the law that prevent insurers from discriminating based on medical history and that subsidize insurance premiums for many Americans. (These subsidies also provide healthy people with an incentive to purchase insurance, improving the risk pool.)
And President Biden strengthened the program, notably by extending provisions eliminating the “cliff” that cut off subsides for many middle-class Americans.
But in the near future, you may well lose that hard-won access. In 2017, Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress tried to eviscerate the A.C.A. and almost succeeded in passing a bill that the Congressional Budget Office estimated would have left 22 million more Americans uninsured by 2026. There’s every reason to believe that if the G.O.P. wins control of Congress and the White House in November, it will once again try to bring back the bad old days of health coverage. And it will probably succeed, since it failed in 2017 only thanks to a principled stand by John McCain — something unlikely to happen in today’s Republican Party, where slavish obedience to Trump has become almost universal.
Before I get to the politics, let’s talk about what Obamacare has achieved.
During the Obama era, voices on the right made many dire predictions about its effects. They claimed that the law wouldn’t really expand coverage, that it would be a fiscal disaster and a job killer.
Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.
None of these predictions came true. The percentage of Americans without health insurance has fallen by almost half since 2010. Federal spending on health programs, far from exploding, has grown much more slowly than forecast. Back in 2010, the budget office expected outlays on major mandatory health programs to reach 10 percent of G.D.P. by the mid 2030s and “continue to increase thereafter”; it now expects that number to be less than 7 percent. As for jobs, the employment rate among Americans in their prime working years is at its highest level in more than two decades.
And Obamacare, initially a political liability for Democrats, is now quite popular. Indeed, the narrowly failed Republican attempt to gut the law probably played a large role in Democratic success in the 2018 midterm elections.
So why is this success story in grave danger?
First, it’s important to remember that Trump, aside from his venomous attitude toward immigrants and his protectionist instincts, has shown that he neither knows nor cares much about the details of policy. Last week, he posted a screed about how an “INVASION” of migrants is “KILLING SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE,” which is both the opposite of the truth and a demonstration that he has little idea how even the biggest, most important government programs work.
When he was in office, Trump was putty in the hands of right-wing economic ideologues, who actually know how to write legislation that serves their objectives; practically his only major budgetary initiatives were a tax cut for the wealthy and corporations, which passed, and the attempted gutting of Obamacare, which fell just short.
And what we know is that even though Trump likes to portray himself as a populist, right-wing economic ideology still rules among congressional Republicans, who are as eager as ever to effectively destroy Obamacare. Last week, the Republican Study Committee, which includes a majority of G.O.P. members of the House of Representatives, released a budget proposal that teed up many of the 2017 “reforms” that would have caused millions of Americans to lose health coverage. (It also called for down-the-road cuts in Social Security and Medicare.)
What I found striking about the budget proposal was how its authors deal with the fact that none of the dire predictions right-wingers made about Obamacare have come true. The answer is that they simply pretend that the bad things they predicted, which didn’t happen, did. I was struck, for example, by the assertion that Obamacare “dramatically escalated the unsustainable rise in American health care spending.” Indeed, in 2010, total U.S. health care spending was 17.2 percent of G.D.P. By 2022 that number had risen to … 17.3 percent of G.D.P.
So the reality of Obamacare’s success won’t deter Republicans who want to destroy it. If anything, the law’s success only increases their determination to kill it, because it shows that, contrary to their ideology, government actually can make Americans’ lives better.
And Trump will go along — he’ll egg them on — because making Americans’ lives better isn’t his primary objective.
Ultimately, right-wingers would like to rip up America’s whole safety net. But they’ll probably start with Obamacare; if they sweep this year, I won’t be surprised if the program is effectively gone by 2026.
OTHER THAN TRUMP, VIRTUALLY NO ONE WAS DOING BETTER FOUR YEARS AGO
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Donald Trump remains convinced he was the greatest president ever. That doesn’t mean voters should participate in collective amnesia. President Biden needs to refresh their memories on a daily basis, making the case: “Of course you’re better off now than four years ago!”
Crime
As Biden recently recalled: “In 2020, before I took office, the prior administration oversaw the largest increase in murders ever recorded.” By contrast, an FBI data report last week shows, as NBC News noted, “the new fourth-quarter numbers showed a 13% decline in murder in 2023 from 2022, a 6% decline in reported violent crime and a 4% decline in reported property crime.” Analysts suspect that “the biggest factor behind the drop in crime,” the NBC report said, “may simply be the resumption of anti-crime initiatives by local governments and courts that had stopped during the pandemic.” In large part, the American Rescue Plan made that possible with a massive $15 billion infusion to keep police on payroll and to fund a raft of safety initiatives.
“In May 2021, the Justice Department launched our violent crime reduction strategy aimed at addressing the spike in violent crime that occurred during the pandemic,” Attorney General Merrick Garland pointed out in a statement last week. He argued that the department worked “in close partnership with police departments and communities across the country to go after the recidivists and gangs that are responsible for the greatest violence; to seize illegal guns and deadly drugs; to make critical investments in hiring more law enforcement officers; and to fund evidence-based, community violence intervention initiatives.”
Trump’s “migrant crime” claim has been debunked repeatedly. In New York, for example, “police data indicate that there has been no surge in crime since April 2022, when Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas started sending buses of migrants to New York to protest the federal government’s border policy,” the New York Times reported last month. And “many major categories of crime — including rape, murder and shootings — have decreased, according to an analysis of the New York Police Department’s month-by-month statistics since April 2022.”
Nationwide, “the most common finding across all these different kinds of studies is that immigration to an area is either not associated with crime in that area, or is negatively associated with crime in that area,” criminologist Charis Kubrin told CNN last month. “Meaning more immigration equals less crime.”
Health care
If the comparison regarding crime is unfavorable for Trump, the comparison on health care is simply devastating. A couple of headlines from four years ago this month as a reminder: “At least 80% of Americans are under stay-at-home orders” (CNN, March 31, 2020); “Trump declares national emergency over coronavirus” (CNBC, March 13, 2020). In spring 2020, New York already had 200,000 reported cases. The Johns Hopkins covid-19 dashboard reported at the end of 2020: “There have been 19,228,424 confirmed covid-19 cases in the United States since the beginning of the pandemic, and 334,116 deaths.” (Biden’s 2024 campaign has cut an ad recalling a few of Trump’s self-congratulatory comments during the crisis.)
By the time Trump left office in January 2021, KFF reported, “the number of deaths from covid-19 increased so rapidly that it has clearly become the number one cause of death in the U.S., with an average of more than 3,000 people per day dying of covid-19.”
Meanwhile, Trump attempted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, a move that would have deprived 32 million Americans of coverage by 2026, according to the Congressional Budget Office, and allowed insurance companies to resume exclusion of preexisting conditions. Now, he periodically talks about cutting Medicare, only to later reverse himself when criticized.
By contrast, Biden revived ACA outreach, lowered the cost of coverage under the exchanges and thereby reached a record high of Americans with insurance coverage. In August, the Department of Health and Human Services reported that “the national uninsured rate reached an all-time low of 7.7 percent in early 2023. Approximately 6.3 million people have now gained coverage since 2020.”
In addition, the Inflation Reduction Act capped insulin prices for 4 million older Americans at $35 per month. The IRA also empowered HHS to negotiate drug prices for an expanding list of medications under Medicare, a measure that will save approximately $98.5 billion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Economy
In comparing economic records, one could look back four years, at the single month of March 2020. (“Total nonfarm employment fell by 1.4 million jobs in March 2020 and a staggering 20.5 million jobs in April, creating a 22 million jobs deficit since the start of the recession and largely erasing the gains from a decade of job growth,” the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted last month.) All those jobs have been restored and millions of others created.
Alternatively, consider the dramatic contrast between economic conditions when Trump left office (unemployment at 6.3 percent, with a 3.5 percent decrease in gross domestic product for 2020) and the current economy (unemployment at 3.9 percent in February 2023; a 2.5 percent increase in GDP for 2023). Biden comes out ahead as well on the manufacturing industry (more than 420,000 manufacturing jobs added since Biden took office) and the stock market, with all-time highs recently for both the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500. “The U.S. stock market’s strong start to the year has boosted its overall gain under President Biden, with the S&P 500 benchmark now up 34% since his inauguration in 2021,” MarketWatch reported last week, compared with only a 6 percent increase under Trump at this stage in his term. Biden also did what Trump never could: pass a massive infrastructure package and help shore up supply lines and chip manufacturing.
Inflation is a different story. Inflation spiked from a 1.4 percent annualized rate when Biden took office to more than 6 percent, but has settled back to 3.2 percent. And that shortcoming comes with a caveat: Real wages (those adjusted for inflation) are up, with particular gains at the low end of the income scale.
Certainly, American voters could consider other factors when assessing whether they’re better off today than they were during the Trump administration. The Trump-installed radical conservative Supreme Court majority inflicted incalculable harm on women and the entire medical field by overturning Roe v. Wade. Trump also incited violence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021; politicized the Justice Department; damaged U.S. alliances; and conducted a nonstop assault on objective truth and civility, while fostering a surge in hate speech and social media toxicity.
Put simply, Trump loses by every important measure in comparison with the president. Biden should be delighted to stack his record against Trump’s.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Donald Trump remains convinced he was the greatest president ever. That doesn’t mean voters should participate in collective amnesia. President Biden needs to refresh their memories on a daily basis, making the case: “Of course you’re better off now than four years ago!”
Crime
As Biden recently recalled: “In 2020, before I took office, the prior administration oversaw the largest increase in murders ever recorded.” By contrast, an FBI data report last week shows, as NBC News noted, “the new fourth-quarter numbers showed a 13% decline in murder in 2023 from 2022, a 6% decline in reported violent crime and a 4% decline in reported property crime.” Analysts suspect that “the biggest factor behind the drop in crime,” the NBC report said, “may simply be the resumption of anti-crime initiatives by local governments and courts that had stopped during the pandemic.” In large part, the American Rescue Plan made that possible with a massive $15 billion infusion to keep police on payroll and to fund a raft of safety initiatives.
“In May 2021, the Justice Department launched our violent crime reduction strategy aimed at addressing the spike in violent crime that occurred during the pandemic,” Attorney General Merrick Garland pointed out in a statement last week. He argued that the department worked “in close partnership with police departments and communities across the country to go after the recidivists and gangs that are responsible for the greatest violence; to seize illegal guns and deadly drugs; to make critical investments in hiring more law enforcement officers; and to fund evidence-based, community violence intervention initiatives.”
Trump’s “migrant crime” claim has been debunked repeatedly. In New York, for example, “police data indicate that there has been no surge in crime since April 2022, when Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas started sending buses of migrants to New York to protest the federal government’s border policy,” the New York Times reported last month. And “many major categories of crime — including rape, murder and shootings — have decreased, according to an analysis of the New York Police Department’s month-by-month statistics since April 2022.”
Nationwide, “the most common finding across all these different kinds of studies is that immigration to an area is either not associated with crime in that area, or is negatively associated with crime in that area,” criminologist Charis Kubrin told CNN last month. “Meaning more immigration equals less crime.”
Health care
If the comparison regarding crime is unfavorable for Trump, the comparison on health care is simply devastating. A couple of headlines from four years ago this month as a reminder: “At least 80% of Americans are under stay-at-home orders” (CNN, March 31, 2020); “Trump declares national emergency over coronavirus” (CNBC, March 13, 2020). In spring 2020, New York already had 200,000 reported cases. The Johns Hopkins covid-19 dashboard reported at the end of 2020: “There have been 19,228,424 confirmed covid-19 cases in the United States since the beginning of the pandemic, and 334,116 deaths.” (Biden’s 2024 campaign has cut an ad recalling a few of Trump’s self-congratulatory comments during the crisis.)
By the time Trump left office in January 2021, KFF reported, “the number of deaths from covid-19 increased so rapidly that it has clearly become the number one cause of death in the U.S., with an average of more than 3,000 people per day dying of covid-19.”
Meanwhile, Trump attempted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, a move that would have deprived 32 million Americans of coverage by 2026, according to the Congressional Budget Office, and allowed insurance companies to resume exclusion of preexisting conditions. Now, he periodically talks about cutting Medicare, only to later reverse himself when criticized.
By contrast, Biden revived ACA outreach, lowered the cost of coverage under the exchanges and thereby reached a record high of Americans with insurance coverage. In August, the Department of Health and Human Services reported that “the national uninsured rate reached an all-time low of 7.7 percent in early 2023. Approximately 6.3 million people have now gained coverage since 2020.”
In addition, the Inflation Reduction Act capped insulin prices for 4 million older Americans at $35 per month. The IRA also empowered HHS to negotiate drug prices for an expanding list of medications under Medicare, a measure that will save approximately $98.5 billion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Economy
In comparing economic records, one could look back four years, at the single month of March 2020. (“Total nonfarm employment fell by 1.4 million jobs in March 2020 and a staggering 20.5 million jobs in April, creating a 22 million jobs deficit since the start of the recession and largely erasing the gains from a decade of job growth,” the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted last month.) All those jobs have been restored and millions of others created.
Alternatively, consider the dramatic contrast between economic conditions when Trump left office (unemployment at 6.3 percent, with a 3.5 percent decrease in gross domestic product for 2020) and the current economy (unemployment at 3.9 percent in February 2023; a 2.5 percent increase in GDP for 2023). Biden comes out ahead as well on the manufacturing industry (more than 420,000 manufacturing jobs added since Biden took office) and the stock market, with all-time highs recently for both the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500. “The U.S. stock market’s strong start to the year has boosted its overall gain under President Biden, with the S&P 500 benchmark now up 34% since his inauguration in 2021,” MarketWatch reported last week, compared with only a 6 percent increase under Trump at this stage in his term. Biden also did what Trump never could: pass a massive infrastructure package and help shore up supply lines and chip manufacturing.
Inflation is a different story. Inflation spiked from a 1.4 percent annualized rate when Biden took office to more than 6 percent, but has settled back to 3.2 percent. And that shortcoming comes with a caveat: Real wages (those adjusted for inflation) are up, with particular gains at the low end of the income scale.
Certainly, American voters could consider other factors when assessing whether they’re better off today than they were during the Trump administration. The Trump-installed radical conservative Supreme Court majority inflicted incalculable harm on women and the entire medical field by overturning Roe v. Wade. Trump also incited violence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021; politicized the Justice Department; damaged U.S. alliances; and conducted a nonstop assault on objective truth and civility, while fostering a surge in hate speech and social media toxicity.
Put simply, Trump loses by every important measure in comparison with the president. Biden should be delighted to stack his record against Trump’s.
WHAT’S AT STAKE IN THE SUPREME COURT ABORTION PILL CASE
Tuesday’s oral argument is focused on whether to overrule FDA and reimpose some restrictions on getting medication to terminate pregnancy
By Ann E. Marimow and Caroline Kitchener, The Washington Post
Less than two years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the issue of reproductive rights is returning to the high court as the justices consider whether to limit access to a medication used as part of a two-drug regimen in more than 60 percent of U.S. abortions.
The Biden administration and the manufacturer of mifepristone are seeking to reverse a lower-court ruling that would make it more difficult to obtain the medication, first approved nearly 25 years ago and shown in multiple studies to be overwhelmingly safe.
The conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit said the Food and Drug Administration failed to follow proper procedures and thoroughly explain its reasoning when it began loosening regulations. The changes made in 2016 and again in 2021 allowed mifepristone to be taken up to 10 weeks into pregnancy, instead of seven weeks, prescribed by a medical professional other than a doctor, and mailed directly to patients without an in-person medical consultation.
The pharmaceutical industry has warned that second-guessing FDA’s determinations in this case will more broadly disrupt the nation’s drug-approval process and stymie private investments in research.
A decision should come by the end of June or early July, putting abortion front and center as Democrats campaign on the issue in the 2024 election.
Here’s a look at what’s at stake.
Abortion access
The case could make it harder to get medication abortions even in states where abortion is legal. Allowing medication abortions to proceed without an ultrasound or in-person medical visit has increased access, particularly for women in rural areas and others who struggle to go to a clinic in person, by allowing them to complete the entire process from home.
The Supreme Court could also further impede abortion access for those living in one of the more than a dozen states with strict abortion bans in place. A few telemedicine clinics have started allowing U.S.-based doctors to prescribe and mail pills into restricted states, relying on new “shield laws” passed in several blue states to protect them from prosecution. The largest of these clinics, Aid Access, now mails approximately 6,000 doses of medication abortion into antiabortion states every month, according to founder Rebecca Gomperts.
Many abortion rights advocates say they will continue to send abortion pills through the mail no matter how the Supreme Court rules. Some are ready to switch to a misoprostol-only protocol, a method of medication abortion that uses only the second drug in the current two-step regimen. That option is also highly effective, but causes significantly more cramping and bleeding.
A narrowed time window for accessing abortion pills would have major implications nationwide. In 2021, 56 percent of all abortions occurred beyond seven weeks of pregnancy. Just 20 percent occurred after 10 weeks, the FDA’s current mifepristone limit.
The drug-approval process
For the FDA and the pharmaceutical industry, the legal battle over mifepristone casts a shadow over all drugs, medical devices and diagnostics that the agency approves. If the 5th Circuit’s decision is upheld, industry and former government officials say, it would undercut the FDA’s stature as the global gold standard of regulating medicine – as well as the ability of drugmakers to raise money from investors. That, in turn, could deprive patients of innovative therapies.
Pharmaceutical companies denied approval for a drug could use the courts to reverse the agency’s scientific judgements – or challenge the approval of a competitor’s drug, former FDA commissioners said in a brief to the high court. Advocates for patients who suffer side effects from a drug could ask judges to bar other patients from taking an otherwise safe and effective medication.
A brief signed by hundreds of biotech executives said allowing a court to override FDA’s process for approving drugs “will create intolerable risks and undermine the incentives for investment regardless of the drug at issue.”
A ruling against the FDA also could broaden who can sue the agency. In the mifepristone case, the four doctors suing the FDA claimed they had legal standing not because their patients were directly harmed by the drug, but because women suffering adverse effects crowding into emergency rooms would take away resources needed to treat other patients.
“Basically, any physician could sue the agency over any drug approval they disagree with,” said Holly Fernandez Lynch, an attorney and assistant professor of health policy at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
The Supreme Court
When the court’s conservative majority overturned Roe in June 2022, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote that it was time to “return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.” Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote separately, saying questions about the basic legality of abortion “will be resolved by the people and their representatives in the democratic process in the states or Congress” — not by the nine members of the Supreme Court.
Instead, the court has two abortion-related cases before it this term, the mifepristone case and one involving whether emergency room physicians must terminate pregnancies in some cases even in states where abortion is banned.
This is not the first time the court has considered the FDA’s regulation of mifepristone. During the pandemic, doctors and abortion providers sued the FDA, trying to remove the requirement that patients obtain the drug in person. A lower court judge agreed, saying in-person visits imposed unnecessary health risks due to covid-19.
But the Trump administration appealed, and the Supreme Court’s conservative majority reversed the lower-court decision, reinstating the in-person pickup requirement even though most patients take the medication at home.
The majority has generally been skeptical of the power of federal agencies and is reviewing several other challenges this term to the so-called administrative state, long a target of conservative criticism. But back in 2021, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. sided with the Trump administration because, he said, courts should defer to public health experts.
Roberts’s position will be tested now that the court is being asked by FDA and the Biden administration to retain full access to mifepristone, including to allow the medication to be sent to patients by mail.
The Election
Whatever the Supreme Court decides will further inflame the election-year debate over abortion rights, with Democrats eager to campaign on the issue and Republicans struggling to craft a winning message since the fall of Roe.
President Biden has repeatedly vowed to defend access to mifepristone, part of his broader pledge to protect access to abortion. If the justices side with the White House and allow current regulations for mifepristone to stand, Biden and his allies can claim a legal victory; if the court limits access, Democrats will inevitably use the decision to mobilize voters.
Abortion rights arguably have been Democrats’ strongest advantage this political cycle, with voters repeatedly siding with the party on ballot measures and candidates in states such as Kansas, Kentucky and Ohio. Voters also say they trust Democrats to handle abortion more than Republicans by a 14-point margin, according to a February poll by KFF, a non-partisan health care research organization.
Voters also favor access to abortion medication. Two-thirds of Americans said that mifepristone should remain on the market, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll in May 2023. GOP leaders, meanwhile, have continued to stake out opposition to the medication. A proposal released last week by the Republican Study Committee, an influential congressional caucus that represents most House Republicans, called for rolling back access to mifepristone. Conservative policy groups such as the Heritage Foundation have also said that former president and current GOP candidate Donald Trump should use executive authority to crack down on the drug if he is elected again.
At stake for the pro-life movement
The abortion pill has in many ways thwarted the antiabortion movement’s vision for a post-Dobbs America, allowing tens of thousands of abortions to continue in states where abortion is illegal. And while antiabortion advocates have scrambled to imagine new laws that might crack down on the flow of pills through the mail system, any legislation of that kind would be very difficult to get through Congress and hard to enforce at the state level.
A large body of research shows mifepristone is safe and effective. The FDA points to published studies of tens of thousands of women showing that serious adverse events after mifepristone use occurs in fewer than 1 percent of cases.
Tuesday’s oral argument is focused on whether to overrule FDA and reimpose some restrictions on getting medication to terminate pregnancy
By Ann E. Marimow and Caroline Kitchener, The Washington Post
Less than two years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the issue of reproductive rights is returning to the high court as the justices consider whether to limit access to a medication used as part of a two-drug regimen in more than 60 percent of U.S. abortions.
The Biden administration and the manufacturer of mifepristone are seeking to reverse a lower-court ruling that would make it more difficult to obtain the medication, first approved nearly 25 years ago and shown in multiple studies to be overwhelmingly safe.
The conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit said the Food and Drug Administration failed to follow proper procedures and thoroughly explain its reasoning when it began loosening regulations. The changes made in 2016 and again in 2021 allowed mifepristone to be taken up to 10 weeks into pregnancy, instead of seven weeks, prescribed by a medical professional other than a doctor, and mailed directly to patients without an in-person medical consultation.
The pharmaceutical industry has warned that second-guessing FDA’s determinations in this case will more broadly disrupt the nation’s drug-approval process and stymie private investments in research.
A decision should come by the end of June or early July, putting abortion front and center as Democrats campaign on the issue in the 2024 election.
Here’s a look at what’s at stake.
Abortion access
The case could make it harder to get medication abortions even in states where abortion is legal. Allowing medication abortions to proceed without an ultrasound or in-person medical visit has increased access, particularly for women in rural areas and others who struggle to go to a clinic in person, by allowing them to complete the entire process from home.
The Supreme Court could also further impede abortion access for those living in one of the more than a dozen states with strict abortion bans in place. A few telemedicine clinics have started allowing U.S.-based doctors to prescribe and mail pills into restricted states, relying on new “shield laws” passed in several blue states to protect them from prosecution. The largest of these clinics, Aid Access, now mails approximately 6,000 doses of medication abortion into antiabortion states every month, according to founder Rebecca Gomperts.
Many abortion rights advocates say they will continue to send abortion pills through the mail no matter how the Supreme Court rules. Some are ready to switch to a misoprostol-only protocol, a method of medication abortion that uses only the second drug in the current two-step regimen. That option is also highly effective, but causes significantly more cramping and bleeding.
A narrowed time window for accessing abortion pills would have major implications nationwide. In 2021, 56 percent of all abortions occurred beyond seven weeks of pregnancy. Just 20 percent occurred after 10 weeks, the FDA’s current mifepristone limit.
The drug-approval process
For the FDA and the pharmaceutical industry, the legal battle over mifepristone casts a shadow over all drugs, medical devices and diagnostics that the agency approves. If the 5th Circuit’s decision is upheld, industry and former government officials say, it would undercut the FDA’s stature as the global gold standard of regulating medicine – as well as the ability of drugmakers to raise money from investors. That, in turn, could deprive patients of innovative therapies.
Pharmaceutical companies denied approval for a drug could use the courts to reverse the agency’s scientific judgements – or challenge the approval of a competitor’s drug, former FDA commissioners said in a brief to the high court. Advocates for patients who suffer side effects from a drug could ask judges to bar other patients from taking an otherwise safe and effective medication.
A brief signed by hundreds of biotech executives said allowing a court to override FDA’s process for approving drugs “will create intolerable risks and undermine the incentives for investment regardless of the drug at issue.”
A ruling against the FDA also could broaden who can sue the agency. In the mifepristone case, the four doctors suing the FDA claimed they had legal standing not because their patients were directly harmed by the drug, but because women suffering adverse effects crowding into emergency rooms would take away resources needed to treat other patients.
“Basically, any physician could sue the agency over any drug approval they disagree with,” said Holly Fernandez Lynch, an attorney and assistant professor of health policy at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
The Supreme Court
When the court’s conservative majority overturned Roe in June 2022, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote that it was time to “return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.” Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote separately, saying questions about the basic legality of abortion “will be resolved by the people and their representatives in the democratic process in the states or Congress” — not by the nine members of the Supreme Court.
Instead, the court has two abortion-related cases before it this term, the mifepristone case and one involving whether emergency room physicians must terminate pregnancies in some cases even in states where abortion is banned.
This is not the first time the court has considered the FDA’s regulation of mifepristone. During the pandemic, doctors and abortion providers sued the FDA, trying to remove the requirement that patients obtain the drug in person. A lower court judge agreed, saying in-person visits imposed unnecessary health risks due to covid-19.
But the Trump administration appealed, and the Supreme Court’s conservative majority reversed the lower-court decision, reinstating the in-person pickup requirement even though most patients take the medication at home.
The majority has generally been skeptical of the power of federal agencies and is reviewing several other challenges this term to the so-called administrative state, long a target of conservative criticism. But back in 2021, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. sided with the Trump administration because, he said, courts should defer to public health experts.
Roberts’s position will be tested now that the court is being asked by FDA and the Biden administration to retain full access to mifepristone, including to allow the medication to be sent to patients by mail.
The Election
Whatever the Supreme Court decides will further inflame the election-year debate over abortion rights, with Democrats eager to campaign on the issue and Republicans struggling to craft a winning message since the fall of Roe.
President Biden has repeatedly vowed to defend access to mifepristone, part of his broader pledge to protect access to abortion. If the justices side with the White House and allow current regulations for mifepristone to stand, Biden and his allies can claim a legal victory; if the court limits access, Democrats will inevitably use the decision to mobilize voters.
Abortion rights arguably have been Democrats’ strongest advantage this political cycle, with voters repeatedly siding with the party on ballot measures and candidates in states such as Kansas, Kentucky and Ohio. Voters also say they trust Democrats to handle abortion more than Republicans by a 14-point margin, according to a February poll by KFF, a non-partisan health care research organization.
Voters also favor access to abortion medication. Two-thirds of Americans said that mifepristone should remain on the market, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll in May 2023. GOP leaders, meanwhile, have continued to stake out opposition to the medication. A proposal released last week by the Republican Study Committee, an influential congressional caucus that represents most House Republicans, called for rolling back access to mifepristone. Conservative policy groups such as the Heritage Foundation have also said that former president and current GOP candidate Donald Trump should use executive authority to crack down on the drug if he is elected again.
At stake for the pro-life movement
The abortion pill has in many ways thwarted the antiabortion movement’s vision for a post-Dobbs America, allowing tens of thousands of abortions to continue in states where abortion is illegal. And while antiabortion advocates have scrambled to imagine new laws that might crack down on the flow of pills through the mail system, any legislation of that kind would be very difficult to get through Congress and hard to enforce at the state level.
A large body of research shows mifepristone is safe and effective. The FDA points to published studies of tens of thousands of women showing that serious adverse events after mifepristone use occurs in fewer than 1 percent of cases.
DEMOCRATS SEIZE ON A GOP BUDGET PROPOSAL THAT WOULD RAISE SOCIAL SECURITY RETIREMENT AGE
By Maegan Vazquez, The Washington Post
In a deeply polarized election year, President Biden and fellow Democrats wasted little time lambasting a budget proposal from a large group of House Republicans that would, among other things, raise the retirement age for Social Security and endorse a bill that would codify that life begins at conception.
The fiscal 2025 budget proposal was released Wednesday by the Republican Study Committee — a bloc that includes 80 percent of Republicans in the House, including every member of House leadership. RSC’s proposed budget was released weeks after House Republicans advanced the conference’s official budget plan out of committee.
While the proposal from the Republican faction is unlikely to become law, it offers insight into how Republicans could seek to govern if they win control of Congress and the White House in the 2024 elections. The White House, Democratic lawmakers and political groups hoping to elect more Democrats in November seized on the issue.
Biden called RSC’s proposal “extreme” in a statement Thursday and said it “shows what Republicans value.” “Let me be clear: I will stop them,” he added.
The White House also circulated a document among reporters about the RSC plan, saying it “cuts Medicare and Social Security while putting health care at risk for millions,” and “rigs the economy for the wealthy and large corporations against middle class families.”
On the Senate floor Thursday morning, Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said the RSC proposal “reads like a wish list for Donald Trump and the MAGA hard right.”
“The Republican Study Committee plan is cruel. It is fringe, way out of line with what most Americans want. But unfortunately it is what the House Republicans envision for our country,” he continued.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the official campaign arm for House Democrats, said in a statement from spokesman Viet Shelton that the RSC’s plan not only supports dangerous policies but also is deeply unpopular. “Voters can plainly see how little House Republicans actually care about them with this budget, and every single House Republican will have to answer for this extreme plan,” Shelton said.
The intense focus by Democrats on the plan is reminiscent of a dynamic that played out ahead of the 2022 midterms after the release of a wide-ranging “Rescue America” plan by Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), which originally included a provision requiring that all legislation be renewed every five years to stay on the books.
Biden seized on the provision, pointing out that Social Security and Medicare were created by law. The president repeatedly accused the senator of wanting to put the popular programs on the “chopping block,” even though Scott said that wasn’t his intent. In 2023, Scott amended the plan to exclude Medicare and Social Security from the sunset provision.
Rep. Brendan Boyle (Pa.), the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, characterized the proposed changes in a statement as an attack on seniors, veterans and the middle class that would end Medicare “as we know it” and make “devastating cuts that would raise the cost of living for working families.”
The RSC proposal also endorses several bills “designed to advance the cause of life,” such as the Life at Conception Act, which has 126 co-sponsors in the House. The legislation would provide legal protections “at all stages of life, including the moment of fertilization.” The endorsement of the bill from the committee comes weeks after Republicans attempted to quell concerns about whether the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade would lead to restrictions on reproductive treatments such as IVF.
After Alabama’s Supreme Court ruled last month that frozen embryos should be considered children and that people can be held liable for destroying them, conservatives running for office, including Trump, sought to distance themselves from the ruling and voiced support for IVF. Many repeated party talking points in support of the creation of families, and Alabama’s legislature voted to protect IVF providers and patients from criminal or civil liability if embryos they create are subsequently damaged or destroyed.
But Republicans supporting the Life at Conception Act have been under scrutiny. The House version of the bill does not designate an exception for IVF, meaning access to the procedure would not be protected if the bill is signed into law. The draft bill does, however, specify that it does not “authorize the prosecution of any woman for the death of her unborn child.”
Schumer, in his floor remarks Thursday, argued that the proposal “makes it clear they’re the same old anti-choice, anti-women party.” The Biden campaign’s rapid-response account on X similarly suggested that the proposal “endorses a ban on all abortions in every single state and ripping away access to IVF.”
By Maegan Vazquez, The Washington Post
In a deeply polarized election year, President Biden and fellow Democrats wasted little time lambasting a budget proposal from a large group of House Republicans that would, among other things, raise the retirement age for Social Security and endorse a bill that would codify that life begins at conception.
The fiscal 2025 budget proposal was released Wednesday by the Republican Study Committee — a bloc that includes 80 percent of Republicans in the House, including every member of House leadership. RSC’s proposed budget was released weeks after House Republicans advanced the conference’s official budget plan out of committee.
While the proposal from the Republican faction is unlikely to become law, it offers insight into how Republicans could seek to govern if they win control of Congress and the White House in the 2024 elections. The White House, Democratic lawmakers and political groups hoping to elect more Democrats in November seized on the issue.
Biden called RSC’s proposal “extreme” in a statement Thursday and said it “shows what Republicans value.” “Let me be clear: I will stop them,” he added.
The White House also circulated a document among reporters about the RSC plan, saying it “cuts Medicare and Social Security while putting health care at risk for millions,” and “rigs the economy for the wealthy and large corporations against middle class families.”
On the Senate floor Thursday morning, Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said the RSC proposal “reads like a wish list for Donald Trump and the MAGA hard right.”
“The Republican Study Committee plan is cruel. It is fringe, way out of line with what most Americans want. But unfortunately it is what the House Republicans envision for our country,” he continued.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the official campaign arm for House Democrats, said in a statement from spokesman Viet Shelton that the RSC’s plan not only supports dangerous policies but also is deeply unpopular. “Voters can plainly see how little House Republicans actually care about them with this budget, and every single House Republican will have to answer for this extreme plan,” Shelton said.
The intense focus by Democrats on the plan is reminiscent of a dynamic that played out ahead of the 2022 midterms after the release of a wide-ranging “Rescue America” plan by Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), which originally included a provision requiring that all legislation be renewed every five years to stay on the books.
Biden seized on the provision, pointing out that Social Security and Medicare were created by law. The president repeatedly accused the senator of wanting to put the popular programs on the “chopping block,” even though Scott said that wasn’t his intent. In 2023, Scott amended the plan to exclude Medicare and Social Security from the sunset provision.
Rep. Brendan Boyle (Pa.), the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, characterized the proposed changes in a statement as an attack on seniors, veterans and the middle class that would end Medicare “as we know it” and make “devastating cuts that would raise the cost of living for working families.”
The RSC proposal also endorses several bills “designed to advance the cause of life,” such as the Life at Conception Act, which has 126 co-sponsors in the House. The legislation would provide legal protections “at all stages of life, including the moment of fertilization.” The endorsement of the bill from the committee comes weeks after Republicans attempted to quell concerns about whether the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade would lead to restrictions on reproductive treatments such as IVF.
After Alabama’s Supreme Court ruled last month that frozen embryos should be considered children and that people can be held liable for destroying them, conservatives running for office, including Trump, sought to distance themselves from the ruling and voiced support for IVF. Many repeated party talking points in support of the creation of families, and Alabama’s legislature voted to protect IVF providers and patients from criminal or civil liability if embryos they create are subsequently damaged or destroyed.
But Republicans supporting the Life at Conception Act have been under scrutiny. The House version of the bill does not designate an exception for IVF, meaning access to the procedure would not be protected if the bill is signed into law. The draft bill does, however, specify that it does not “authorize the prosecution of any woman for the death of her unborn child.”
Schumer, in his floor remarks Thursday, argued that the proposal “makes it clear they’re the same old anti-choice, anti-women party.” The Biden campaign’s rapid-response account on X similarly suggested that the proposal “endorses a ban on all abortions in every single state and ripping away access to IVF.”
THE WAR ON PUBLIC SCHOOLS IS THE STEALTH ISSUE OF THE 2024 CAMPAIGN
Billionaires like Pennsylvania's Jeff Yass are accelerating the buying of politicians for "school choice," despite mounting evidence it doesn't work.
by Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
It became a big political story when presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump abruptly flip-flopped on TikTok, revealing that he no longer supports efforts to ban the popular app if its Chinese owners don’t divest from the company. Eyebrows were raised because Trump had just made peace at a Palm Beach, Fla., fundraiser with billionaire Jeff Yass — Pennsylvania’s richest man, TikTok’s biggest U.S. investor, and the nation’s largest political donor.
But Trump later told CNBC that when he met Yass and his wife, Janine, at the Club for Growth fundraiser, they talked about something completely different.
The ex-president insisted that Yass “never mentioned TikTok. She [Janine Yass] did mention her school choice and that’s what her whole ... in fact, she said, ‘My whole life is based around school choice.’ [It] was a very important thing to her, and I agree with it.”
Voters shouldn’t be reassured by Trump’s explanation. They should be very, very alarmed.
That’s because whatever you think about TikTok’s wild popularity with teenagers and its impact on their state of mind, the portfolio of education strategies that right-wingers brand as “school choice” — vouchers or tax credits to aid kids to attend private or even religious schools, or public charter school alternatives — is actually more dangerous for your child. Not to mention its impact on declining public schools in your community. Or on your rising taxes.
The mounting evidence that so-called school choice doesn’t lead to better student outcomes, even as these programs devastate the traditional public schools that — dare I say it — made America great well into the 20th century, hasn’t deterred the cartoon-villain alliance of the super-superrich like Yass from accelerating their effort to impose their will on U.S. education.
The latest salvo came this month in the blood-red state of Texas, where six incumbent Republican state lawmakers were ousted by primary voters and four others were forced into a runoff — almost all for the sin of opposing vouchers. At issue was a plan by their fellow GOP Gov. Greg Abbott for a universal voucher program that would have paid up to $10,000 per student to attend private schools. Some 21 GOP lawmakers ultimately bucked Abbott’s plan because they understood losing students and dollars could devastate their rural public schools. So Yass gave Abbott a whopping $6 million campaign donation to spend on crushing their political careers.
The Machiavellian hardball Yass and Abbott just played in Texas ought to be seen as a warning: Vouchers and other measures that proponents call school choice are the stealth issue of the 2024 campaign. While the electorate focuses on issues that range from the silly, like TikTok, to the deadly serious, like the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, there’s been too little focus on education policy — even though a Trump victory would bring major changes that would please the billionaire class.
A Trump spokesman recently told Reuters what the candidate presumedly told Janine Yass: that Trump wants to “liberate students from failing schools and raise the quality of education across the board.” You might not hear it at his grievance-filled rallies, but the would-be 47th president backs federal tax relief to corporations and individuals who provide scholarships to allow students to attend private and religious schools — similar to a program that’s been in place in Pennsylvania. He also wants federal tax credits for parents who homeschool their kids.
Trump and his divisive Education Secretary Betsy DeVos also backed the school-choice agenda when he was president, but the Project 2025 blueprint for a second term now calls for replacing career public servants with MAGA-movement loyalists to accomplish more of his goals. Project 2025 also endorses education savings accounts, a form of taxpayer-funded vouchers.
Here in Pennsylvania, we saw the power of big money and this combustible issue this summer when Republican lawmakers — who received the benefits of the bulk of at least $18 million in Yass donations to a web of political action committees that support school choice — balked at passing a state budget after Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro reversed course on signing Yass’ pet proposal: a voucher program called Lifeline Scholarships.
Yass may be leading this movement, but he is hardly an outlier. Throughout the 21st century, a rogues’ gallery of America’s super-wealthy — DeVos, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, the late Los Angeles billionaire Eli Broad, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Bloomberg, and more — have supported charter schools and other alternatives to traditional public schools. They insist that running schools like the businesses that made them so rich will benefit low-income kids stuck in struggling classrooms. Cynics say these billionaires just hate organized labor, like the teachers’ union, and want to keep their own taxes low.
Writer Harold Meyerson, in a Los Angeles Times op-ed, explained that the superrich share “a belief in individual betterment — but not only that. They also share a fierce opposition to collective betterment, manifested in their respective battles against unions and, in many cases, against governmentally established standards and services.”
That’s not a popular concept, but it has gained a lot of steam in the four years since the COVID-19 pandemic massively disrupted classrooms. The Yass crowd and right-wing politicians saw that anger over remote learning, which was compounded by conservative outrage over anti-racism or positive LGBTQ instruction and books after 2020’s George Floyd protests, could be leveraged to get public support for vouchers and similar programs. Critics stepped up their rhetoric against public schools, calling them “government-funded indoctrination centers.”
Last year, 20 states with GOP legislative majorities raced to approve education savings accounts or other programs that allow for more tax dollars to send kids to private or religious schools. Now, the bills are coming due.
In Arizona, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs has watched a voucher program approved by Republican lawmakers balloon in cost to some $900 million, the prime reason why the Grand Canyon State now faces a $400 million budget deficit. Critics say that the way the program is structured, a lot of those dollars go to families who already had kids in private schools — many of which have hiked their tuition to take advantage of the spending spree.
In Colorado, a state that has seen a significant amount of billionaire foundation funding for charter schools, enrollment in traditional public K-12 schools has plunged to the lowest level in a decade, likely to trigger state funding cuts; Denver has closed 48 neighborhood public schools and opened 70 charter schools since 2005.
But now, rural Republican lawmakers are concerned, with good reason, about the future of their local public schools — the only ladder up for children in their districts — which are getting swamped by this billionaire onslaught. It certainly smacks of gross hypocrisy from a political movement that claims to speak for “the forgotten Americans” in their heartland communities.
What’s worse, the billionaires spending so much on this project have been unable to produce the evidence that vouchers or other forms of school choice improve student outcomes — the supposed raison d’être for doing all of this. In 2017, the Brookings Institute reported four separate studies on vouchers in Louisiana, Indiana, Ohio, and the District of Columbia that all reached the same result: The students who switched schools with vouchers scored lower on tests than similar students.
But the superrich seem determined to seize the moment and buy the hearts and minds of the electorate. “It’s not enough to be right,” Tracy Gleason, heir to an industrial fortune who heads a foundation that funds National School Choice Week, told a recent gala. “We actually have to sell the notion of school choice … and bring everyone around to our way of thinking.”
Now, the leading billionaire funder of pro-voucher politicians has the ear of a man who’s dead even in the polls to become our next president, right at the moment when Trump desperately needs cash. Think about that — and the future of the public school in your neighborhood — when you go to the polls in November.
Billionaires like Pennsylvania's Jeff Yass are accelerating the buying of politicians for "school choice," despite mounting evidence it doesn't work.
by Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
It became a big political story when presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump abruptly flip-flopped on TikTok, revealing that he no longer supports efforts to ban the popular app if its Chinese owners don’t divest from the company. Eyebrows were raised because Trump had just made peace at a Palm Beach, Fla., fundraiser with billionaire Jeff Yass — Pennsylvania’s richest man, TikTok’s biggest U.S. investor, and the nation’s largest political donor.
But Trump later told CNBC that when he met Yass and his wife, Janine, at the Club for Growth fundraiser, they talked about something completely different.
The ex-president insisted that Yass “never mentioned TikTok. She [Janine Yass] did mention her school choice and that’s what her whole ... in fact, she said, ‘My whole life is based around school choice.’ [It] was a very important thing to her, and I agree with it.”
Voters shouldn’t be reassured by Trump’s explanation. They should be very, very alarmed.
That’s because whatever you think about TikTok’s wild popularity with teenagers and its impact on their state of mind, the portfolio of education strategies that right-wingers brand as “school choice” — vouchers or tax credits to aid kids to attend private or even religious schools, or public charter school alternatives — is actually more dangerous for your child. Not to mention its impact on declining public schools in your community. Or on your rising taxes.
The mounting evidence that so-called school choice doesn’t lead to better student outcomes, even as these programs devastate the traditional public schools that — dare I say it — made America great well into the 20th century, hasn’t deterred the cartoon-villain alliance of the super-superrich like Yass from accelerating their effort to impose their will on U.S. education.
The latest salvo came this month in the blood-red state of Texas, where six incumbent Republican state lawmakers were ousted by primary voters and four others were forced into a runoff — almost all for the sin of opposing vouchers. At issue was a plan by their fellow GOP Gov. Greg Abbott for a universal voucher program that would have paid up to $10,000 per student to attend private schools. Some 21 GOP lawmakers ultimately bucked Abbott’s plan because they understood losing students and dollars could devastate their rural public schools. So Yass gave Abbott a whopping $6 million campaign donation to spend on crushing their political careers.
The Machiavellian hardball Yass and Abbott just played in Texas ought to be seen as a warning: Vouchers and other measures that proponents call school choice are the stealth issue of the 2024 campaign. While the electorate focuses on issues that range from the silly, like TikTok, to the deadly serious, like the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, there’s been too little focus on education policy — even though a Trump victory would bring major changes that would please the billionaire class.
A Trump spokesman recently told Reuters what the candidate presumedly told Janine Yass: that Trump wants to “liberate students from failing schools and raise the quality of education across the board.” You might not hear it at his grievance-filled rallies, but the would-be 47th president backs federal tax relief to corporations and individuals who provide scholarships to allow students to attend private and religious schools — similar to a program that’s been in place in Pennsylvania. He also wants federal tax credits for parents who homeschool their kids.
Trump and his divisive Education Secretary Betsy DeVos also backed the school-choice agenda when he was president, but the Project 2025 blueprint for a second term now calls for replacing career public servants with MAGA-movement loyalists to accomplish more of his goals. Project 2025 also endorses education savings accounts, a form of taxpayer-funded vouchers.
Here in Pennsylvania, we saw the power of big money and this combustible issue this summer when Republican lawmakers — who received the benefits of the bulk of at least $18 million in Yass donations to a web of political action committees that support school choice — balked at passing a state budget after Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro reversed course on signing Yass’ pet proposal: a voucher program called Lifeline Scholarships.
Yass may be leading this movement, but he is hardly an outlier. Throughout the 21st century, a rogues’ gallery of America’s super-wealthy — DeVos, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, the late Los Angeles billionaire Eli Broad, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Bloomberg, and more — have supported charter schools and other alternatives to traditional public schools. They insist that running schools like the businesses that made them so rich will benefit low-income kids stuck in struggling classrooms. Cynics say these billionaires just hate organized labor, like the teachers’ union, and want to keep their own taxes low.
Writer Harold Meyerson, in a Los Angeles Times op-ed, explained that the superrich share “a belief in individual betterment — but not only that. They also share a fierce opposition to collective betterment, manifested in their respective battles against unions and, in many cases, against governmentally established standards and services.”
That’s not a popular concept, but it has gained a lot of steam in the four years since the COVID-19 pandemic massively disrupted classrooms. The Yass crowd and right-wing politicians saw that anger over remote learning, which was compounded by conservative outrage over anti-racism or positive LGBTQ instruction and books after 2020’s George Floyd protests, could be leveraged to get public support for vouchers and similar programs. Critics stepped up their rhetoric against public schools, calling them “government-funded indoctrination centers.”
Last year, 20 states with GOP legislative majorities raced to approve education savings accounts or other programs that allow for more tax dollars to send kids to private or religious schools. Now, the bills are coming due.
In Arizona, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs has watched a voucher program approved by Republican lawmakers balloon in cost to some $900 million, the prime reason why the Grand Canyon State now faces a $400 million budget deficit. Critics say that the way the program is structured, a lot of those dollars go to families who already had kids in private schools — many of which have hiked their tuition to take advantage of the spending spree.
In Colorado, a state that has seen a significant amount of billionaire foundation funding for charter schools, enrollment in traditional public K-12 schools has plunged to the lowest level in a decade, likely to trigger state funding cuts; Denver has closed 48 neighborhood public schools and opened 70 charter schools since 2005.
But now, rural Republican lawmakers are concerned, with good reason, about the future of their local public schools — the only ladder up for children in their districts — which are getting swamped by this billionaire onslaught. It certainly smacks of gross hypocrisy from a political movement that claims to speak for “the forgotten Americans” in their heartland communities.
What’s worse, the billionaires spending so much on this project have been unable to produce the evidence that vouchers or other forms of school choice improve student outcomes — the supposed raison d’être for doing all of this. In 2017, the Brookings Institute reported four separate studies on vouchers in Louisiana, Indiana, Ohio, and the District of Columbia that all reached the same result: The students who switched schools with vouchers scored lower on tests than similar students.
But the superrich seem determined to seize the moment and buy the hearts and minds of the electorate. “It’s not enough to be right,” Tracy Gleason, heir to an industrial fortune who heads a foundation that funds National School Choice Week, told a recent gala. “We actually have to sell the notion of school choice … and bring everyone around to our way of thinking.”
Now, the leading billionaire funder of pro-voucher politicians has the ear of a man who’s dead even in the polls to become our next president, right at the moment when Trump desperately needs cash. Think about that — and the future of the public school in your neighborhood — when you go to the polls in November.
TRUMP’S WORST ENEMY IS STILL TRUMP
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Legal peril: Former president Trump increasingly faces threats to his campaign stemming from his past actions and contempt for the law. While the wheels of justice turn slowly, four criminal cases against him remain. The New York trial on falsification of business records will likely begin in April, now that the judge issued a slew of devastating evidentiary rulings against Trump. New polling suggests a conviction in Manhattan could significantly hurt him in November.
Moreover, Trump has run out of financial entities willing to help him post bonds while he appeals his mammoth civil judgments. He finagled Chubb insurance company to meet the bond requirements on the E. Jean Carroll verdict. However, he has come up short on the gigantic $454 million verdict for his inflated real estate evaluations.
The Post reported that none of the 30 companies Trump and his organization approached would “accept property as collateral — stalling any efforts to obtain a bond with a week before the state might begin collecting.” Without appellate court relief, the state could begin seizing his assets. The legal consequences will inflict further financial and psychic strain on the self-described “billionaire” (now appearing a whole lot less liquid than he once claimed) and might further deplete campaign resources as he tries to fund his defense in multiple cases.
Campaign vulnerabilities: Trump’s most acute vulnerability remains his mouth. He continues to spew noxious views that provoke harsh media coverage and even draw rebukes from some Republicans.
His dehumanizing of immigrants (“I don’t know if you call them people … In some cases they’re not people, in my opinion”), saluting the traitorous Jan. 6, 2021, insurrectionists (before their “anthem” played), referencing Jan. 6 convicted criminals as “hostages” and invoking of violent imagery (“bloodbath”) in his speech in Ohio triggered some of his harshest coverage. Moreover, when given a chance to repudiate Nazi phrases (“poisoning our blood”), he refused.
Trump apologists claimed his reference to a “bloodbath” was merely a prediction of ruin for the car industry. That doesn’t fly, as many analysts noted. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on reactionary strongmen, explains, “To get people to embrace violence, fill them with existential dread- the fear that it’s the Leader or the abyss. This is an incitement to violence speech. Trump is a propaganda machine devoted to destroying America.” Ben-Ghiat provides the real “context” for his comments: “Each element of propaganda works with narratives and emotional cues already established by the Leader.” She continues, “Here Trump speaks about the auto industry but the emotion of ‘me, or a bloodbath’ echoes his Jan. 6 ‘If you don’t fight like hell [for him], you won’t have a country anymore.’”
The Biden campaign put out its own take on Trump’s constant flirtation with violence:
In addition to the “bloodbath” remark, Trump’s “hostages” comment provoked even former vice president Mike Pence, who has refused to endorse Trump (utterly unprecedented, but understandable since Trump egged on the mob seeking to hang Pence). On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Pence declared, “I think it’s very unfortunate at a time that there are American hostages being held in Gaza, that the president or any other leader will refer to people that are moving through our justice system as hostages. It’s just unacceptable.”
None of this — nor his call to imprison members of the Jan. 6 committee — is acceptable or characteristic of a stable, pro-democratic presidential nominee. It’s the stuff of fascist regimes that rely on intoxicating violence and retribution. Arguing that voters should put his words aside for his “policies” (Which ones? Using the military to quell dissent? Installing a national abortion ban?) beggars belief. Trump’s “policy” is authoritarian rule.
Trump’s words and actions finally might disrupt the too-prevalent habit of treating the 2024 race as an ordinary election between two normal parties. Sure, some outlets still cloak his disgusting rhetoric in obtuse language (“a caustic and discursive speech” is how the New York Times described his Ohio screed!), but the average voter will now see more coverage compelled to report on Trump’s warped character and twisted mind-set. They will understand that voting for him ratifies the views of a wannabe dictator who lionizes violence, dehumanizes non-Whites, celebrates traitors, disdains the rule of law and despises deeply held American values.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Legal peril: Former president Trump increasingly faces threats to his campaign stemming from his past actions and contempt for the law. While the wheels of justice turn slowly, four criminal cases against him remain. The New York trial on falsification of business records will likely begin in April, now that the judge issued a slew of devastating evidentiary rulings against Trump. New polling suggests a conviction in Manhattan could significantly hurt him in November.
Moreover, Trump has run out of financial entities willing to help him post bonds while he appeals his mammoth civil judgments. He finagled Chubb insurance company to meet the bond requirements on the E. Jean Carroll verdict. However, he has come up short on the gigantic $454 million verdict for his inflated real estate evaluations.
The Post reported that none of the 30 companies Trump and his organization approached would “accept property as collateral — stalling any efforts to obtain a bond with a week before the state might begin collecting.” Without appellate court relief, the state could begin seizing his assets. The legal consequences will inflict further financial and psychic strain on the self-described “billionaire” (now appearing a whole lot less liquid than he once claimed) and might further deplete campaign resources as he tries to fund his defense in multiple cases.
Campaign vulnerabilities: Trump’s most acute vulnerability remains his mouth. He continues to spew noxious views that provoke harsh media coverage and even draw rebukes from some Republicans.
His dehumanizing of immigrants (“I don’t know if you call them people … In some cases they’re not people, in my opinion”), saluting the traitorous Jan. 6, 2021, insurrectionists (before their “anthem” played), referencing Jan. 6 convicted criminals as “hostages” and invoking of violent imagery (“bloodbath”) in his speech in Ohio triggered some of his harshest coverage. Moreover, when given a chance to repudiate Nazi phrases (“poisoning our blood”), he refused.
Trump apologists claimed his reference to a “bloodbath” was merely a prediction of ruin for the car industry. That doesn’t fly, as many analysts noted. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on reactionary strongmen, explains, “To get people to embrace violence, fill them with existential dread- the fear that it’s the Leader or the abyss. This is an incitement to violence speech. Trump is a propaganda machine devoted to destroying America.” Ben-Ghiat provides the real “context” for his comments: “Each element of propaganda works with narratives and emotional cues already established by the Leader.” She continues, “Here Trump speaks about the auto industry but the emotion of ‘me, or a bloodbath’ echoes his Jan. 6 ‘If you don’t fight like hell [for him], you won’t have a country anymore.’”
The Biden campaign put out its own take on Trump’s constant flirtation with violence:
In addition to the “bloodbath” remark, Trump’s “hostages” comment provoked even former vice president Mike Pence, who has refused to endorse Trump (utterly unprecedented, but understandable since Trump egged on the mob seeking to hang Pence). On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Pence declared, “I think it’s very unfortunate at a time that there are American hostages being held in Gaza, that the president or any other leader will refer to people that are moving through our justice system as hostages. It’s just unacceptable.”
None of this — nor his call to imprison members of the Jan. 6 committee — is acceptable or characteristic of a stable, pro-democratic presidential nominee. It’s the stuff of fascist regimes that rely on intoxicating violence and retribution. Arguing that voters should put his words aside for his “policies” (Which ones? Using the military to quell dissent? Installing a national abortion ban?) beggars belief. Trump’s “policy” is authoritarian rule.
Trump’s words and actions finally might disrupt the too-prevalent habit of treating the 2024 race as an ordinary election between two normal parties. Sure, some outlets still cloak his disgusting rhetoric in obtuse language (“a caustic and discursive speech” is how the New York Times described his Ohio screed!), but the average voter will now see more coverage compelled to report on Trump’s warped character and twisted mind-set. They will understand that voting for him ratifies the views of a wannabe dictator who lionizes violence, dehumanizes non-Whites, celebrates traitors, disdains the rule of law and despises deeply held American values.
NEW YORK JUDGE’S RULING ON EVIDENCE COULDN’T HAVE GONE WORSE FOR TRUMP
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Four-time indicted former president Donald Trump suffered arguably his worst loss(es) in any criminal matter this week when, in his New York trial for alleged falsification of business records, Judge Juan M. Merchan ruled against him in virtually all of his motions to exclude evidence. By contrast, the judge largely granted Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s motions to exclude evidence for trial that Trump believed might be exculpatory. That does not bode well for Trump’s chances to avoid conviction when the case goes to trial, likely in a few weeks.
Trump, for example, moved to exclude testimony of former fixer Michael Cohen on the grounds Cohen is “a liar.” The court rebuked this desperate move: “This Court has been unable to locate any treatise, statute, or holding from courts in this jurisdiction, or others, that support Defendant’s rationale that a prosecution witness should be kept off the witness stand because his credibility has been previously called into question.” Trump’s lawyers can cross-examine Cohen at trial.
Trump also tried to keep back evidence of his intent to influence the 2016 election (a material part of Bragg’s case) and his intent to defraud. Having already ruled on these issues, Merchan scolded Trump’s counsel: “Rearguing this Court’s prior rulings in this manner is procedurally and professionally inappropriate and a waste of this Court’s valuable resources.” These motions were denied.
Trump also wanted to exclude evidence regarding a meeting in which Cohen, Trump and David Pecker (onetime head of American Media Inc.) discussed the “catch and kill” scheme to keep evidence of Trump’s sexual transgressions from voters. Since this evidence is directly germane to the issue of Trump’s intent to defraud, this motion also failed.
Merchan rebuffed Trump’s attempt to block the testimony of two people with damaging stories to tell about him. While excluding any of the lurid details of Trump’s interaction with them, Merchan nevertheless found: “The steps taken to secure the stories of [Dino] Sajudin and [Karen] McDougal complete the narrative of the agreement ... stemming the flow of negative information that could circulate about Defendant before it reaches the public eye.” He continued, “Locating and purchasing the information from [Stormy] Daniels not only completes the narrative of events that precipitated the falsification of business records but is also probative of the Defendant’s intent.” Evidence of Daniels’s polygraph test was excluded (although there is no indication Bragg intended to use it).
Likewise, the judge rejected Trump’s effort to exclude evidence including the “Access Hollywood” tape (the scandal that precipitated Trump’s effort to silence other women), Trump’s violation of federal campaign finance law (one rationale for elevating the crimes to felonies), Cohen’s guilty plea (although it cannot be used to prove Trump’s intent) and classification of the hush money as “promotional” expenses for AMI. Merchan also rejected Trump’s attempt to reargue that he and his organization were distinct entities.
Most important, Merchan refused to exclude more than 100 Trump statements since these can be classified as “admissions against interest.” Despite Trump’s plea, he will also allow in Allen Weisselberg’s notes, if the prosecutor shows they are business records.
In sum, the lion’s share of the evidence that Trump views as damaging will be heard by the jury. This underscores the quantity and strength of the facts that implicate Trump. It surely explains why he has been desperate to avoid trial.
Even worse for Trump, the judge granted the prosecutor’s key motions to exclude evidence and arguments that Trump hoped would sway the jury in his favor. Merchan knocked out most of Trump expert Bradley Smith’s potential testimony. “The People’s motion is granted to the extent that Smith may not testify as a lay (fact) witness; offer opinion testimony regarding the interpretation and application of federal campaign finance laws and how they relate to the facts in the instant matter, nor may Smith testify or offer an opinion as to whether the alleged conduct in this case does or does not constitute a violation of the Federal Election Campaign Act.” (He can testify generally about what the law does.)
In addition, Trump will not get to introduce evidence that the Southern District of New York prosecutors and the Federal Election Commission declined to bring charges against him. Nor will he get to air his complaint about “selective prosecution” (a favorite excuse from Trump, who whines he is singled out by left-wing prosecutors). He will be barred from offering hearsay evidence about federal prosecutors’ opinions about Cohen’s credibility and from presenting evidence in support of a “reliance on counsel” (or “presence of counsel”) defense. The judge reserved for later the determination as to whether to admit evidence of Trump’s efforts to intimidate and harass witnesses as “consciousness of guilt.”
It is hard to see how the proceedings could have gone any worse for Trump (although some issues regarding “prior bad acts” were reserved for trial). Although commentators critical of Bragg knocked his case as “novel” or doubted he could introduce evidence of violation of federal campaign, Merchan found otherwise. Merchan’s orders confirm that this in many ways is potentially a traditional white-collar crime, in which falsification in furtherance of other crimes elevates the charges to felonies. The upshot is that Bragg will get to put on his case with evidence he thinks will support a guilty verdict. The jury will not hear some of Trump’s familiar excuses.
Merchan showed himself to be a serious judge who will not indulge Trump’s antics nor allow the trial to devolve into a spectacle. The case will be tried on straightforward law, and on the mound of evidence Bragg has accumulated. Based on these rulings, Trump should be quaking in his boots.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Four-time indicted former president Donald Trump suffered arguably his worst loss(es) in any criminal matter this week when, in his New York trial for alleged falsification of business records, Judge Juan M. Merchan ruled against him in virtually all of his motions to exclude evidence. By contrast, the judge largely granted Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s motions to exclude evidence for trial that Trump believed might be exculpatory. That does not bode well for Trump’s chances to avoid conviction when the case goes to trial, likely in a few weeks.
Trump, for example, moved to exclude testimony of former fixer Michael Cohen on the grounds Cohen is “a liar.” The court rebuked this desperate move: “This Court has been unable to locate any treatise, statute, or holding from courts in this jurisdiction, or others, that support Defendant’s rationale that a prosecution witness should be kept off the witness stand because his credibility has been previously called into question.” Trump’s lawyers can cross-examine Cohen at trial.
Trump also tried to keep back evidence of his intent to influence the 2016 election (a material part of Bragg’s case) and his intent to defraud. Having already ruled on these issues, Merchan scolded Trump’s counsel: “Rearguing this Court’s prior rulings in this manner is procedurally and professionally inappropriate and a waste of this Court’s valuable resources.” These motions were denied.
Trump also wanted to exclude evidence regarding a meeting in which Cohen, Trump and David Pecker (onetime head of American Media Inc.) discussed the “catch and kill” scheme to keep evidence of Trump’s sexual transgressions from voters. Since this evidence is directly germane to the issue of Trump’s intent to defraud, this motion also failed.
Merchan rebuffed Trump’s attempt to block the testimony of two people with damaging stories to tell about him. While excluding any of the lurid details of Trump’s interaction with them, Merchan nevertheless found: “The steps taken to secure the stories of [Dino] Sajudin and [Karen] McDougal complete the narrative of the agreement ... stemming the flow of negative information that could circulate about Defendant before it reaches the public eye.” He continued, “Locating and purchasing the information from [Stormy] Daniels not only completes the narrative of events that precipitated the falsification of business records but is also probative of the Defendant’s intent.” Evidence of Daniels’s polygraph test was excluded (although there is no indication Bragg intended to use it).
Likewise, the judge rejected Trump’s effort to exclude evidence including the “Access Hollywood” tape (the scandal that precipitated Trump’s effort to silence other women), Trump’s violation of federal campaign finance law (one rationale for elevating the crimes to felonies), Cohen’s guilty plea (although it cannot be used to prove Trump’s intent) and classification of the hush money as “promotional” expenses for AMI. Merchan also rejected Trump’s attempt to reargue that he and his organization were distinct entities.
Most important, Merchan refused to exclude more than 100 Trump statements since these can be classified as “admissions against interest.” Despite Trump’s plea, he will also allow in Allen Weisselberg’s notes, if the prosecutor shows they are business records.
In sum, the lion’s share of the evidence that Trump views as damaging will be heard by the jury. This underscores the quantity and strength of the facts that implicate Trump. It surely explains why he has been desperate to avoid trial.
Even worse for Trump, the judge granted the prosecutor’s key motions to exclude evidence and arguments that Trump hoped would sway the jury in his favor. Merchan knocked out most of Trump expert Bradley Smith’s potential testimony. “The People’s motion is granted to the extent that Smith may not testify as a lay (fact) witness; offer opinion testimony regarding the interpretation and application of federal campaign finance laws and how they relate to the facts in the instant matter, nor may Smith testify or offer an opinion as to whether the alleged conduct in this case does or does not constitute a violation of the Federal Election Campaign Act.” (He can testify generally about what the law does.)
In addition, Trump will not get to introduce evidence that the Southern District of New York prosecutors and the Federal Election Commission declined to bring charges against him. Nor will he get to air his complaint about “selective prosecution” (a favorite excuse from Trump, who whines he is singled out by left-wing prosecutors). He will be barred from offering hearsay evidence about federal prosecutors’ opinions about Cohen’s credibility and from presenting evidence in support of a “reliance on counsel” (or “presence of counsel”) defense. The judge reserved for later the determination as to whether to admit evidence of Trump’s efforts to intimidate and harass witnesses as “consciousness of guilt.”
It is hard to see how the proceedings could have gone any worse for Trump (although some issues regarding “prior bad acts” were reserved for trial). Although commentators critical of Bragg knocked his case as “novel” or doubted he could introduce evidence of violation of federal campaign, Merchan found otherwise. Merchan’s orders confirm that this in many ways is potentially a traditional white-collar crime, in which falsification in furtherance of other crimes elevates the charges to felonies. The upshot is that Bragg will get to put on his case with evidence he thinks will support a guilty verdict. The jury will not hear some of Trump’s familiar excuses.
Merchan showed himself to be a serious judge who will not indulge Trump’s antics nor allow the trial to devolve into a spectacle. The case will be tried on straightforward law, and on the mound of evidence Bragg has accumulated. Based on these rulings, Trump should be quaking in his boots.
SHADOWING TRUMP’S ATTACKS ON MENTAL FITNESS — HIS OWN FATHER’S DEMENTIA
Trump avoids mention of his father’s Alzheimer’s disease as he lashes Biden for being ‘cognitively impaired’
By Michael Kranish, The Washington Post
Donald Trump invited his extended family to Mar-a-Lago in the mid-1990s. As the clan gathered at the palatial Florida estate, though, his father was badly struggling, according to Mary L. Trump, Donald’s niece.
Fred Trump Sr., the pugnacious developer then in his late 80s, didn’t recognize two of his children at the party, recalled Mary L. Trump, who attended the gathering. And when he did recognize Donald, the family patriarch approached his son with a picture of a Cadillac that he wanted to buy — as if he needed his son’s permission.
The incident, Mary L. Trump said, left Donald Trump visibly upset at his father’s descent into dementia, which medical records show had been diagnosed several years earlier. Trump reflected his anguish in an interview around that time, with Playboy in 1997 reporting that seeing his father “addled with Alzheimer’s” had left him wondering “out loud about the senselessness of life.”
“Turning 50 does make you think about mortality, or immortality, or whatever,” Trump, who had recently reached that milestone, told the magazine. “It does hit you.”
Today, as the 77-year-old Trump seeks to return to the White House, he is still focused on the ravages of dementia — but this time he is using the condition as a political weapon, alleging without medical proof that President Biden, 81, is “cognitively impaired.” Those attacks follow a long pattern for the former president, who for years has bashed enemies as mentally frail while boasting in public about “acing” the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a basic test that flags signs of early dementia.
Trump regularly claims to have passed the test twice, but through a spokesman, his campaign declined to release his test results or to specify when he most recently took it. Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Tex.), the former White House physician, said in an interview this month that he administered it to Trump once, in January 2018. Trump in November released a three-paragraph letter in which Bruce Aronwald, a doctor of osteopathy, said that Trump’s health was excellent and that “cognitive exams were exceptional” but provided no details. Aronwald did not respond to a request for comment.
Ziad Nasreddine, the neurologist who created the test, said in an interview that if an individual in their 70s had not taken the Montreal test since 2018, the results would not be valid to cite today.
Trump’s long fixation on mental fitness followed years of watching his father’s worsening dementia — a formative period that some associates said has been a defining and little-mentioned factor in his life, and which left him with an abiding concern that he might someday inherit the condition. While much remains unknown about Alzheimer’s, experts say there is an increased risk of inheriting a gene associated with the disease from a parent.
“Donald is no doubt fearful of Alzheimer’s,” said a former senior executive at the Trump Organization, who worked for years with Trump and saw him interact with Fred Trump Sr., and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a confidential relationship. “He’s not going to talk about and not going to admit to it. But it’s relevant because every day he is hitting Biden with whether or not he is capable mentally of doing the job.”
Trump’s father’s condition also drove a wedge into his family, which fell into years of lawsuits that alleged in part that Donald Trump sought to take advantage of his father’s dementia to wrest control of the family estate — litigation that introduced reams of medical records detailing Fred Trump Sr.’s condition.
The full story of Trump’s father’s illness, and the family turmoil it sparked, casts new light on his views of an issue that’s become central to the presidential campaign, with pollsters finding a majority of voters have concerns about the mental fitness of both Trump and Biden. Those concerns have sharpened as both candidates have had lapses on the trail, with Biden mixing up the names of the leaders of Mexico and Egypt and Trump confusing former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley with former speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and warning that the United States could face “World War II” under Biden.
Trump declined an interview request and did not respond to a list of questions about his experience with his father’s Alzheimer’s.
Instead, Jason Miller, the Trump campaign’s senior adviser, said that Trump would take another cognitive test if Biden does the same. “President Trump has aced this test twice and is willing to take a third test if Joe Biden sits in the same room and takes it at the same time,” he said in a statement. “In fact, President Trump believes all Presidents should take the test.”
The issue has also come to the fore after Robert K. Hur, the special counsel who investigated Biden’s handling of classified material, said the president is an “elderly man with a poor memory” — a claim strongly disputed by the White House. A White House spokeswoman, Karine Jean-Pierre, said at a press briefing on Feb. 28 that Biden’s doctors concluded during a physical that Biden “doesn’t need a cognitive test.”
A will in dispute
Trump idolized his father, a gruff taskmaster who had made a fortune in real estate and sought to instill in his son the idea that he could be a “king.” But Trump also struggled to live up to his father’s demands. As Donald, a lackluster student, was sent as a teenager to a military academy, his older brother, Fred Trump Jr., was widely expected to take over the family business.
Those succession plans were scrambled, though, after Fred Trump Jr. opted to pursue a career as a pilot and struggled with alcoholism, which contributed to his death at 42. (Donald Trump later told The Washington Post his death convinced him to never drink alcohol out of concern he was also at risk because of “the genetic effect.”)
In the early 1970s, as Donald took a leading role in the firm, Fred Trump Sr. told the New York Times that “Donald is the smartest person I know.”
By 1990, though, the claims of Trump’s business genius were being questioned as he fell into desperate financial condition. He eventually filed six corporate bankruptcies, and he faced the prospect of personal bankruptcy as his first wife, Ivana, sought $1 billion in a divorce settlement. His high-profile casinos in Atlantic City were badly faltering.
That’s when Trump sought to change his father’s will.
Trump arranged for a lawyer to write an amendment called a codicil giving him control over the estate and to protect his inheritance from creditors. He then had two of his father’s most trusted associates deliver it to Fred Trump Sr. as if it were a formality. But Trump’s mother, Mary MacLeod Trump, forbade Trump’s father from signing it immediately. Trump’s sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, later said in a deposition that her father didn’t like how the effort to change the will was being done “behind his back.”
Trump later admitted in a deposition that he hoped the gambit would rescue him from financial problems by giving him significant control over the estate. “It was a very bad period of time and if for any reason I was not able to come out of this well, then this would be giving me a trust to protect” his inheritance, Trump said.
That effort failed — but Trump’s actions would expose his father’s deteriorating mental state.
‘Obvious memory decline’
In October 1991, around the time Fred Trump Sr. turned 86 years old, he visited his doctor, C. Ronald MacKenzie. In a report about that visit, the physician wrote that he had “significant memory impairment” with “early signs of dementia” and “obvious memory decline in recent years,” according to records disclosed in the court case.
Months later, a second doctor wrote in a neuropsychological evaluation that Fred Trump Sr. “did not know his birth date, was unsure of his age, and turned to his son [Robert] for help in responding to questions.” The exam by Rajendra Jutagir found that Fred Trump Sr.’s cognitive ability was below the 15th percentile for a person in his age group. He could only recall three of the previous nine U.S. presidents and could not draw the hands of a clock to show the time.
Those detailed medical reports, later entered into court filings, paint an early picture of what would be a long decline for Fred Trump Sr. — one that his son claimed not to notice for years.
“Do you recall your father suffering from any memory lapses in 1991?” an attorney asked Trump in a deposition conducted in 2000.
“No,” Trump responded.
“Do you recall him being diagnosed as having senile dementia in 1991?” the attorney said.
“No, I don’t,” Trump said in the deposition. To the contrary, Trump said that his father was “very, very sharp.”
Mary L. Trump said those claims were contradicted by other family members. Robert Trump, Donald’s younger brother, said that their father was in “notable decline” by 1990, as recounted by Mary L. Trump in a lawsuit over the will. Trump’s sister, Maryanne Barry, later was secretly recorded by Mary L. Trump as saying that “it was basically taking the whole estate and giving it to Donald” at a time when “Dad was in dementia.” (Maryanne Barry, who died last year, did not respond to a request for comment when The Post first revealed the secret tapes in 2020; Robert died in 2020.)
Regardless, by the mid-’90s even Donald Trump was publicly acknowledging the truth: that his father’s dementia was rapidly advancing.
A few years after his father’s diagnosis, Trump was driving down Fifth Avenue with his father when they passed by the Empire State Building, the iconic 102-story office tower, a landmark known well by both men. As Trump later recalled to the New York Times, his father said, “That’s a tall building, isn’t it? How many apartments are in that building?” Trump thought his father was “kidding” but eventually realized this was a sign of Alzheimer’s, he told the newspaper.
Around the same time, Trump held the family gathering at Mar-a-Lago, where Mary L. Trump says Fred Trump Sr. did not recognize her or two of his children, Robert and Maryanne. After the incident in which Fred Trump Sr. seemed to ask permission to get a new Cadillac, Robert said it would be taken care of, but “Donald just walked away, like, ‘Oh, God, get him away from me. He’s so annoying.’ He had no patience, none whatsoever,” recalled Mary L. Trump, who has more recently become an outspoken political opponent of her uncle, including writing a book that called him “the world’s most dangerous man.”
The former senior executive at the Trump Organization recalled Trump bringing his father to a party in the mid-1990s when it was clear the elder Trump was suffering from dementia. He said Donald Trump had an abiding fear of germs and diseases.
“I remember distinctly he brought his father to the party and Donald was either holding his hand or close to him physically, and he introduced me to him and you could see his father wasn’t comprehending much of anything,” the former executive said. “Donald was not the type to show affection. It was just Donald being matter-of-fact that his father had Alzheimer’s.”
Trump later said in an appearance with television personality Mehmet Oz that his father in his last few years had developed what was “probably” Alzheimer’s, “which was very hard for us because he was such a smart guy, such a wonderful guy and, you know, that’s a rough thing.”
Trump’s father died at 93 years old in June 1999, eight years after the first formal diagnosis of dementia.
Shortly afterward, Mary L. Trump and some other family members sued Donald Trump and two of his siblings, accusing them and others of seeking to take advantage of Fred Trump Sr.’s declining mental abilities in the attempt to rewrite the will. The allegation came as part of a broader argument that she was owed more health-care coverage.
“Fred Sr.’s will is the product of undue influence and coercion by defendants upon Fred Sr., who clearly lacked the requisite mental capacity to make a will,” the lawsuit said. Donald Trump denied the allegation and later said that Mary L. Trump was “a seldom seen niece who knows little about me, says untruthful things about my wonderful parents (who couldn’t stand her!) and me.”
The case was settled under a nondisclosure agreement.
A genetic risk
In the lead-up to the 2020 elections, Trump’s preoccupation with mental acuity took center stage again — this time, because of a test similar to the one his father had taken three decades earlier.
The Montreal test was created by Nasreddine in 1996 to look for early signs of impairment, using some similar markers, including a clock face test, to the ones that doctors used to diagnose Fred Trump Sr. a few years earlier.
In the summer of 2020, Trump appeared on Fox News to boast of his “amazing” performance on the test — including a recitation of words he said he was asked to memorize and said in succession: “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.” (Those words would never have appeared in that order in the test, Nasreddine recently told The Post, noting that related words such as “man” and “woman” aren’t used in a sequence.)
Jackson, who had announced in a January 2018 press briefing that he had administered the Montreal test to Trump as White House physician, said in the interview that he no longer has a copy of Trump’s test.
Today, Trump continues to regularly refer to the Montreal test as he seeks to return to the White House. After making mistakes such as confusing Pelosi with Haley, he sought to quell questions by raising the Montreal Cognitive Assessment. “I took two of them, and ACED them both (no mistakes!). All Presidents, or people wanting to become President, should mandatorily take this test!” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Feb. 29.
It’s not a new suggestion in a presidential race. When Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980, the questions were so great about his assuming the presidency at 69 years old that he agreed to be tested regularly for dementia and said he would “step down” if his capabilities were diminished. Reagan served two terms, from 1981 to 1989, and said in a 1994 letter to the public that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
If Trump has not taken the test since 2018, Nasreddine said, it would be past time to do it again, given how cognitive capability can decline exponentially as one gets older. Then, if a test showed decline, it might make sense to get further tests that could indicate whether there are signs of Alzheimer’s or other dementia.
“I don’t think we can state a test six years ago is valid today,” Nasreddine said, speaking generally.
Nasreddine said a person in their 70s could retake the test every 18 months to two years, depending on how their cognition changes. “There’s higher risk as you get older, and it could turn into getting worse,” he said.
Trump has also misstated a number of things about it, such as claiming that by naming things in order that he got extra credit. Nasreddine said the test does not give extra credit. Last month, Trump claimed it included this question: “Multiply 3,293 times four, divide by three.” The actual question is easier, typically asking that seven be subtracted from 100, followed by several more such subtractions.
“That’s not on the test,” said Jackson, adding that Trump shouldn’t be taken “literally.” “He was making a joke about how difficult it was.”
Trump said he got a perfect score of 30 out of 30. In January 2018, he was 71 years old, so that would have put him in the top 10 percent of test-takers, Nasreddine said. The average score for a person that age was 27, the neurologist said.
Nasreddine said he believes a candidate or president at the age of Trump or Biden should take regular cognitive tests in the same way they take physicals, and release the information publicly. Such a test makes sense for older pilots, he said, and even more so for a president possessing the power to launch nuclear weapons.
“Candidates for the presidency should have all their capacity, physical and mental, checked by professionals,” he said. If Trump hasn’t taken the cognitive test in six years, “that is a long time.”
Trump has long emphasized his belief in the importance of genetics. He has said he is a “super genius” because of his “great genes.”
Trump’s niece, Mary L. Trump, said such beliefs are noteworthy. “If intelligence is a genetically inherited state” as Trump believes, she said, “then something like dementia, Alzheimer’s, which do have very strong genetic components, is more of a concern to somebody who is directly related to Fred Trump Sr. as Donald is. I’m not saying he has dementia, but you can’t say the one thing and not also acknowledge the other.”
Experts said much remains unknown about how people get Alzheimer’s, but research has shown that genetics may play a role.
In a 2020 article about the health of Biden and Trump in the journal Active Aging, the authors wrote that “Trump does face an elevated familial risk of late onset Alzheimer’s disease (AD) as this was a major contributor to his father’s death.” S. Jay Olshansky, the article’s lead author and professor of public health at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said that “the genetic risk hasn’t changed” and that he is awaiting a new medical report from Trump to update the analysis.
Jackson said he had never discussed genetic Alzheimer’s risks with the former president but said he would have told him “it’s nothing he should be worried about.” (A White House spokesman, Andrew Bates, told The Post via email that neither of Biden’s parents had dementia.)
Forty to 65 percent of people who have the disease inherited a gene particularly associated with increased risk, according to Allison Reiss, who studies the gene and is a member of the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America’s Medical Scientific and Memory Screening Advisory Board. That risk can further increase depending on whether an individual has the gene from one parent or from both, she said. (There is no indication that Trump’s mother had dementia.)
Reiss, who stressed she was speaking in general and not about any individual, said that a blood test can determine the presence of the gene. Experts said it is important to note that having the gene or other potential markers does not mean that a person will get the disease; nor does the absence of them mean a person won’t get Alzheimer’s.
Trump has not said whether he has taken a number of specialized tests for Alzheimer’s, including genetic testing. Such exams can also include brain scans, cerebrospinal fluid tests and blood tests, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.
Trump has not released a full medical report during the campaign, so far providing only the brief assessment from his physician, Aronwald.
Trump avoids mention of his father’s Alzheimer’s disease as he lashes Biden for being ‘cognitively impaired’
By Michael Kranish, The Washington Post
Donald Trump invited his extended family to Mar-a-Lago in the mid-1990s. As the clan gathered at the palatial Florida estate, though, his father was badly struggling, according to Mary L. Trump, Donald’s niece.
Fred Trump Sr., the pugnacious developer then in his late 80s, didn’t recognize two of his children at the party, recalled Mary L. Trump, who attended the gathering. And when he did recognize Donald, the family patriarch approached his son with a picture of a Cadillac that he wanted to buy — as if he needed his son’s permission.
The incident, Mary L. Trump said, left Donald Trump visibly upset at his father’s descent into dementia, which medical records show had been diagnosed several years earlier. Trump reflected his anguish in an interview around that time, with Playboy in 1997 reporting that seeing his father “addled with Alzheimer’s” had left him wondering “out loud about the senselessness of life.”
“Turning 50 does make you think about mortality, or immortality, or whatever,” Trump, who had recently reached that milestone, told the magazine. “It does hit you.”
Today, as the 77-year-old Trump seeks to return to the White House, he is still focused on the ravages of dementia — but this time he is using the condition as a political weapon, alleging without medical proof that President Biden, 81, is “cognitively impaired.” Those attacks follow a long pattern for the former president, who for years has bashed enemies as mentally frail while boasting in public about “acing” the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a basic test that flags signs of early dementia.
Trump regularly claims to have passed the test twice, but through a spokesman, his campaign declined to release his test results or to specify when he most recently took it. Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Tex.), the former White House physician, said in an interview this month that he administered it to Trump once, in January 2018. Trump in November released a three-paragraph letter in which Bruce Aronwald, a doctor of osteopathy, said that Trump’s health was excellent and that “cognitive exams were exceptional” but provided no details. Aronwald did not respond to a request for comment.
Ziad Nasreddine, the neurologist who created the test, said in an interview that if an individual in their 70s had not taken the Montreal test since 2018, the results would not be valid to cite today.
Trump’s long fixation on mental fitness followed years of watching his father’s worsening dementia — a formative period that some associates said has been a defining and little-mentioned factor in his life, and which left him with an abiding concern that he might someday inherit the condition. While much remains unknown about Alzheimer’s, experts say there is an increased risk of inheriting a gene associated with the disease from a parent.
“Donald is no doubt fearful of Alzheimer’s,” said a former senior executive at the Trump Organization, who worked for years with Trump and saw him interact with Fred Trump Sr., and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a confidential relationship. “He’s not going to talk about and not going to admit to it. But it’s relevant because every day he is hitting Biden with whether or not he is capable mentally of doing the job.”
Trump’s father’s condition also drove a wedge into his family, which fell into years of lawsuits that alleged in part that Donald Trump sought to take advantage of his father’s dementia to wrest control of the family estate — litigation that introduced reams of medical records detailing Fred Trump Sr.’s condition.
The full story of Trump’s father’s illness, and the family turmoil it sparked, casts new light on his views of an issue that’s become central to the presidential campaign, with pollsters finding a majority of voters have concerns about the mental fitness of both Trump and Biden. Those concerns have sharpened as both candidates have had lapses on the trail, with Biden mixing up the names of the leaders of Mexico and Egypt and Trump confusing former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley with former speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and warning that the United States could face “World War II” under Biden.
Trump declined an interview request and did not respond to a list of questions about his experience with his father’s Alzheimer’s.
Instead, Jason Miller, the Trump campaign’s senior adviser, said that Trump would take another cognitive test if Biden does the same. “President Trump has aced this test twice and is willing to take a third test if Joe Biden sits in the same room and takes it at the same time,” he said in a statement. “In fact, President Trump believes all Presidents should take the test.”
The issue has also come to the fore after Robert K. Hur, the special counsel who investigated Biden’s handling of classified material, said the president is an “elderly man with a poor memory” — a claim strongly disputed by the White House. A White House spokeswoman, Karine Jean-Pierre, said at a press briefing on Feb. 28 that Biden’s doctors concluded during a physical that Biden “doesn’t need a cognitive test.”
A will in dispute
Trump idolized his father, a gruff taskmaster who had made a fortune in real estate and sought to instill in his son the idea that he could be a “king.” But Trump also struggled to live up to his father’s demands. As Donald, a lackluster student, was sent as a teenager to a military academy, his older brother, Fred Trump Jr., was widely expected to take over the family business.
Those succession plans were scrambled, though, after Fred Trump Jr. opted to pursue a career as a pilot and struggled with alcoholism, which contributed to his death at 42. (Donald Trump later told The Washington Post his death convinced him to never drink alcohol out of concern he was also at risk because of “the genetic effect.”)
In the early 1970s, as Donald took a leading role in the firm, Fred Trump Sr. told the New York Times that “Donald is the smartest person I know.”
By 1990, though, the claims of Trump’s business genius were being questioned as he fell into desperate financial condition. He eventually filed six corporate bankruptcies, and he faced the prospect of personal bankruptcy as his first wife, Ivana, sought $1 billion in a divorce settlement. His high-profile casinos in Atlantic City were badly faltering.
That’s when Trump sought to change his father’s will.
Trump arranged for a lawyer to write an amendment called a codicil giving him control over the estate and to protect his inheritance from creditors. He then had two of his father’s most trusted associates deliver it to Fred Trump Sr. as if it were a formality. But Trump’s mother, Mary MacLeod Trump, forbade Trump’s father from signing it immediately. Trump’s sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, later said in a deposition that her father didn’t like how the effort to change the will was being done “behind his back.”
Trump later admitted in a deposition that he hoped the gambit would rescue him from financial problems by giving him significant control over the estate. “It was a very bad period of time and if for any reason I was not able to come out of this well, then this would be giving me a trust to protect” his inheritance, Trump said.
That effort failed — but Trump’s actions would expose his father’s deteriorating mental state.
‘Obvious memory decline’
In October 1991, around the time Fred Trump Sr. turned 86 years old, he visited his doctor, C. Ronald MacKenzie. In a report about that visit, the physician wrote that he had “significant memory impairment” with “early signs of dementia” and “obvious memory decline in recent years,” according to records disclosed in the court case.
Months later, a second doctor wrote in a neuropsychological evaluation that Fred Trump Sr. “did not know his birth date, was unsure of his age, and turned to his son [Robert] for help in responding to questions.” The exam by Rajendra Jutagir found that Fred Trump Sr.’s cognitive ability was below the 15th percentile for a person in his age group. He could only recall three of the previous nine U.S. presidents and could not draw the hands of a clock to show the time.
Those detailed medical reports, later entered into court filings, paint an early picture of what would be a long decline for Fred Trump Sr. — one that his son claimed not to notice for years.
“Do you recall your father suffering from any memory lapses in 1991?” an attorney asked Trump in a deposition conducted in 2000.
“No,” Trump responded.
“Do you recall him being diagnosed as having senile dementia in 1991?” the attorney said.
“No, I don’t,” Trump said in the deposition. To the contrary, Trump said that his father was “very, very sharp.”
Mary L. Trump said those claims were contradicted by other family members. Robert Trump, Donald’s younger brother, said that their father was in “notable decline” by 1990, as recounted by Mary L. Trump in a lawsuit over the will. Trump’s sister, Maryanne Barry, later was secretly recorded by Mary L. Trump as saying that “it was basically taking the whole estate and giving it to Donald” at a time when “Dad was in dementia.” (Maryanne Barry, who died last year, did not respond to a request for comment when The Post first revealed the secret tapes in 2020; Robert died in 2020.)
Regardless, by the mid-’90s even Donald Trump was publicly acknowledging the truth: that his father’s dementia was rapidly advancing.
A few years after his father’s diagnosis, Trump was driving down Fifth Avenue with his father when they passed by the Empire State Building, the iconic 102-story office tower, a landmark known well by both men. As Trump later recalled to the New York Times, his father said, “That’s a tall building, isn’t it? How many apartments are in that building?” Trump thought his father was “kidding” but eventually realized this was a sign of Alzheimer’s, he told the newspaper.
Around the same time, Trump held the family gathering at Mar-a-Lago, where Mary L. Trump says Fred Trump Sr. did not recognize her or two of his children, Robert and Maryanne. After the incident in which Fred Trump Sr. seemed to ask permission to get a new Cadillac, Robert said it would be taken care of, but “Donald just walked away, like, ‘Oh, God, get him away from me. He’s so annoying.’ He had no patience, none whatsoever,” recalled Mary L. Trump, who has more recently become an outspoken political opponent of her uncle, including writing a book that called him “the world’s most dangerous man.”
The former senior executive at the Trump Organization recalled Trump bringing his father to a party in the mid-1990s when it was clear the elder Trump was suffering from dementia. He said Donald Trump had an abiding fear of germs and diseases.
“I remember distinctly he brought his father to the party and Donald was either holding his hand or close to him physically, and he introduced me to him and you could see his father wasn’t comprehending much of anything,” the former executive said. “Donald was not the type to show affection. It was just Donald being matter-of-fact that his father had Alzheimer’s.”
Trump later said in an appearance with television personality Mehmet Oz that his father in his last few years had developed what was “probably” Alzheimer’s, “which was very hard for us because he was such a smart guy, such a wonderful guy and, you know, that’s a rough thing.”
Trump’s father died at 93 years old in June 1999, eight years after the first formal diagnosis of dementia.
Shortly afterward, Mary L. Trump and some other family members sued Donald Trump and two of his siblings, accusing them and others of seeking to take advantage of Fred Trump Sr.’s declining mental abilities in the attempt to rewrite the will. The allegation came as part of a broader argument that she was owed more health-care coverage.
“Fred Sr.’s will is the product of undue influence and coercion by defendants upon Fred Sr., who clearly lacked the requisite mental capacity to make a will,” the lawsuit said. Donald Trump denied the allegation and later said that Mary L. Trump was “a seldom seen niece who knows little about me, says untruthful things about my wonderful parents (who couldn’t stand her!) and me.”
The case was settled under a nondisclosure agreement.
A genetic risk
In the lead-up to the 2020 elections, Trump’s preoccupation with mental acuity took center stage again — this time, because of a test similar to the one his father had taken three decades earlier.
The Montreal test was created by Nasreddine in 1996 to look for early signs of impairment, using some similar markers, including a clock face test, to the ones that doctors used to diagnose Fred Trump Sr. a few years earlier.
In the summer of 2020, Trump appeared on Fox News to boast of his “amazing” performance on the test — including a recitation of words he said he was asked to memorize and said in succession: “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.” (Those words would never have appeared in that order in the test, Nasreddine recently told The Post, noting that related words such as “man” and “woman” aren’t used in a sequence.)
Jackson, who had announced in a January 2018 press briefing that he had administered the Montreal test to Trump as White House physician, said in the interview that he no longer has a copy of Trump’s test.
Today, Trump continues to regularly refer to the Montreal test as he seeks to return to the White House. After making mistakes such as confusing Pelosi with Haley, he sought to quell questions by raising the Montreal Cognitive Assessment. “I took two of them, and ACED them both (no mistakes!). All Presidents, or people wanting to become President, should mandatorily take this test!” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Feb. 29.
It’s not a new suggestion in a presidential race. When Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980, the questions were so great about his assuming the presidency at 69 years old that he agreed to be tested regularly for dementia and said he would “step down” if his capabilities were diminished. Reagan served two terms, from 1981 to 1989, and said in a 1994 letter to the public that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
If Trump has not taken the test since 2018, Nasreddine said, it would be past time to do it again, given how cognitive capability can decline exponentially as one gets older. Then, if a test showed decline, it might make sense to get further tests that could indicate whether there are signs of Alzheimer’s or other dementia.
“I don’t think we can state a test six years ago is valid today,” Nasreddine said, speaking generally.
Nasreddine said a person in their 70s could retake the test every 18 months to two years, depending on how their cognition changes. “There’s higher risk as you get older, and it could turn into getting worse,” he said.
Trump has also misstated a number of things about it, such as claiming that by naming things in order that he got extra credit. Nasreddine said the test does not give extra credit. Last month, Trump claimed it included this question: “Multiply 3,293 times four, divide by three.” The actual question is easier, typically asking that seven be subtracted from 100, followed by several more such subtractions.
“That’s not on the test,” said Jackson, adding that Trump shouldn’t be taken “literally.” “He was making a joke about how difficult it was.”
Trump said he got a perfect score of 30 out of 30. In January 2018, he was 71 years old, so that would have put him in the top 10 percent of test-takers, Nasreddine said. The average score for a person that age was 27, the neurologist said.
Nasreddine said he believes a candidate or president at the age of Trump or Biden should take regular cognitive tests in the same way they take physicals, and release the information publicly. Such a test makes sense for older pilots, he said, and even more so for a president possessing the power to launch nuclear weapons.
“Candidates for the presidency should have all their capacity, physical and mental, checked by professionals,” he said. If Trump hasn’t taken the cognitive test in six years, “that is a long time.”
Trump has long emphasized his belief in the importance of genetics. He has said he is a “super genius” because of his “great genes.”
Trump’s niece, Mary L. Trump, said such beliefs are noteworthy. “If intelligence is a genetically inherited state” as Trump believes, she said, “then something like dementia, Alzheimer’s, which do have very strong genetic components, is more of a concern to somebody who is directly related to Fred Trump Sr. as Donald is. I’m not saying he has dementia, but you can’t say the one thing and not also acknowledge the other.”
Experts said much remains unknown about how people get Alzheimer’s, but research has shown that genetics may play a role.
In a 2020 article about the health of Biden and Trump in the journal Active Aging, the authors wrote that “Trump does face an elevated familial risk of late onset Alzheimer’s disease (AD) as this was a major contributor to his father’s death.” S. Jay Olshansky, the article’s lead author and professor of public health at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said that “the genetic risk hasn’t changed” and that he is awaiting a new medical report from Trump to update the analysis.
Jackson said he had never discussed genetic Alzheimer’s risks with the former president but said he would have told him “it’s nothing he should be worried about.” (A White House spokesman, Andrew Bates, told The Post via email that neither of Biden’s parents had dementia.)
Forty to 65 percent of people who have the disease inherited a gene particularly associated with increased risk, according to Allison Reiss, who studies the gene and is a member of the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America’s Medical Scientific and Memory Screening Advisory Board. That risk can further increase depending on whether an individual has the gene from one parent or from both, she said. (There is no indication that Trump’s mother had dementia.)
Reiss, who stressed she was speaking in general and not about any individual, said that a blood test can determine the presence of the gene. Experts said it is important to note that having the gene or other potential markers does not mean that a person will get the disease; nor does the absence of them mean a person won’t get Alzheimer’s.
Trump has not said whether he has taken a number of specialized tests for Alzheimer’s, including genetic testing. Such exams can also include brain scans, cerebrospinal fluid tests and blood tests, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.
Trump has not released a full medical report during the campaign, so far providing only the brief assessment from his physician, Aronwald.
WANT TO KNOW WHAT TRUMP WILL DO? LISTEN TO WHAT HE SAYS.
By Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times
One of the most enduring bits of folk wisdom about American politics is the notion that a promise made on the campaign trail is almost never a promise kept. The only thing you can count on from a politician, and especially a presidential candidate, is that you can’t count on anything.
This isn’t actually true. There is, in fact, a strong connection between what a candidate says on the campaign trail and what a president does in office.
In his 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton stressed jobs, unemployment, taxes and health care — encapsulated in his campaign’s refrain: “It’s the economy, stupid.” He followed through, in the first two years of his administration, with a proposed economic stimulus bill, a proposed health-care-reform bill and an upper-income tax increase.
George W. Bush, in his 2000 campaign, emphasized educational reform and tax cuts, and followed through in the first months of his administration with No Child Left Behind and a large, upper-income tax cut.
Barack Obama, in his 2008 campaign, stressed health care, jobs and tax cuts for the middle-class. He followed through with an economic stimulus bill — which included, among many other things, a middle-class tax cut — and a large, ambitious health care bill that eventually became the Affordable Care Act.
Even Donald Trump, not principally known for telling the truth, acted on the promises of his 2016 campaign. He promised, for example, to build a wall on the border with Mexico and he tried to build a wall on the border with Mexico. He promised to ban Muslim immigrants from entering the United States and he tried to ban Muslim immigrants from the United States. Trump’s overt racism in office, his confrontational posture toward North Korea and Iran and even his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election were all also presaged by his rhetoric on the campaign trail.
What a candidate and a campaign say matters. How a candidate and a campaign say it also matters.
With these truths in hand, let’s look at the rhetoric of Trump’s current campaign for the White House. At rallies and in interviews, the former president rails against his political opponents as enemies of the nation.
“The threat from outside forces,” Trump said at a rally last year in New Hampshire, “is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within.” He said that one critic, Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, deserved to be executed for his actions during Trump’s final month in office. To Trump, any attempt to contain his authority was tantamount to treason.
Other critics, Trump has said, are “vermin” and “thugs.” He’s called for the “termination” of parts of the Constitution and has said that, if elected again, he would have “no choice” but to lock up his political opponents. He says that migrants from Central and South America “are poisoning the blood of our country.”
When told, outright, that he’s using the language of Hitler and Mussolini — the language of fascism — Trump embraces it.
“That’s what they say. I didn’t know that, but that’s what they say. Because our country is being poisoned,” Trump said in a recent interview with Howard Kurtz of Fox News. “Look, we can be nice about it — we can talk about, ‘Oh, I want to be politically correct’ — but we have people coming in from prisons and jails, long-term murderers … They’re all being released into our country. These are murderers, these are people at the highest level of crime, and then you have mental institutions and insane asylums … and then you have terrorists pouring in at a level we have never seen before.”
On one hand, there’s no way in which any of this represents a statement of policy or future plans. There are no proposals to glean from the former president’s attacks, his invective or his endless denunciations. You could say, if you were inclined to do so, that it was just rhetoric — full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
That would be a huge mistake. We may not be able to give an exact accounting of the consequences of Trump’s violent and fascistic rhetoric if he were granted a second term in office, but rest assured, there would be consequences. Given the power of the federal government and the total backing of the Republican Party, invested with the legitimacy granted by the Constitution, freed from the shackles of legal scrutiny and consumed with a thirst for vengeance — “I am your retribution,” he tells his supporters — there is no question that Trump would act on the desires he has expressed on the campaign trail.
As promised, he would free the Jan. 6 rioters who were prosecuted and imprisoned. As promised, he would unleash federal law enforcement on his political opponents. As promised, he would do something about the people he says are “poisoning the blood of our country.” He would try to be, as he has said to much applause from his supporters, a dictator “only on day one.”
Of course, if there’s one promise I do expect Trump to break if he gets back into the Oval Office, it’s that one. If Trump does want to be a dictator, I highly doubt it will be for just one day.
By Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times
One of the most enduring bits of folk wisdom about American politics is the notion that a promise made on the campaign trail is almost never a promise kept. The only thing you can count on from a politician, and especially a presidential candidate, is that you can’t count on anything.
This isn’t actually true. There is, in fact, a strong connection between what a candidate says on the campaign trail and what a president does in office.
In his 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton stressed jobs, unemployment, taxes and health care — encapsulated in his campaign’s refrain: “It’s the economy, stupid.” He followed through, in the first two years of his administration, with a proposed economic stimulus bill, a proposed health-care-reform bill and an upper-income tax increase.
George W. Bush, in his 2000 campaign, emphasized educational reform and tax cuts, and followed through in the first months of his administration with No Child Left Behind and a large, upper-income tax cut.
Barack Obama, in his 2008 campaign, stressed health care, jobs and tax cuts for the middle-class. He followed through with an economic stimulus bill — which included, among many other things, a middle-class tax cut — and a large, ambitious health care bill that eventually became the Affordable Care Act.
Even Donald Trump, not principally known for telling the truth, acted on the promises of his 2016 campaign. He promised, for example, to build a wall on the border with Mexico and he tried to build a wall on the border with Mexico. He promised to ban Muslim immigrants from entering the United States and he tried to ban Muslim immigrants from the United States. Trump’s overt racism in office, his confrontational posture toward North Korea and Iran and even his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election were all also presaged by his rhetoric on the campaign trail.
What a candidate and a campaign say matters. How a candidate and a campaign say it also matters.
With these truths in hand, let’s look at the rhetoric of Trump’s current campaign for the White House. At rallies and in interviews, the former president rails against his political opponents as enemies of the nation.
“The threat from outside forces,” Trump said at a rally last year in New Hampshire, “is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within.” He said that one critic, Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, deserved to be executed for his actions during Trump’s final month in office. To Trump, any attempt to contain his authority was tantamount to treason.
Other critics, Trump has said, are “vermin” and “thugs.” He’s called for the “termination” of parts of the Constitution and has said that, if elected again, he would have “no choice” but to lock up his political opponents. He says that migrants from Central and South America “are poisoning the blood of our country.”
When told, outright, that he’s using the language of Hitler and Mussolini — the language of fascism — Trump embraces it.
“That’s what they say. I didn’t know that, but that’s what they say. Because our country is being poisoned,” Trump said in a recent interview with Howard Kurtz of Fox News. “Look, we can be nice about it — we can talk about, ‘Oh, I want to be politically correct’ — but we have people coming in from prisons and jails, long-term murderers … They’re all being released into our country. These are murderers, these are people at the highest level of crime, and then you have mental institutions and insane asylums … and then you have terrorists pouring in at a level we have never seen before.”
On one hand, there’s no way in which any of this represents a statement of policy or future plans. There are no proposals to glean from the former president’s attacks, his invective or his endless denunciations. You could say, if you were inclined to do so, that it was just rhetoric — full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
That would be a huge mistake. We may not be able to give an exact accounting of the consequences of Trump’s violent and fascistic rhetoric if he were granted a second term in office, but rest assured, there would be consequences. Given the power of the federal government and the total backing of the Republican Party, invested with the legitimacy granted by the Constitution, freed from the shackles of legal scrutiny and consumed with a thirst for vengeance — “I am your retribution,” he tells his supporters — there is no question that Trump would act on the desires he has expressed on the campaign trail.
As promised, he would free the Jan. 6 rioters who were prosecuted and imprisoned. As promised, he would unleash federal law enforcement on his political opponents. As promised, he would do something about the people he says are “poisoning the blood of our country.” He would try to be, as he has said to much applause from his supporters, a dictator “only on day one.”
Of course, if there’s one promise I do expect Trump to break if he gets back into the Oval Office, it’s that one. If Trump does want to be a dictator, I highly doubt it will be for just one day.
DON’T DEFUND THE FIGHT AGAINST RUSSIA AND CHINA’S DISINFORMATION
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
Two authoritarian U.S. adversaries, Russia and China, are carrying out what some have called a “hidden war on democracy,” attempting to shape global opinion using deception and false narratives. By one estimate, Russia spends about $1.5 billion a year and China $7 billion or more annually to influence overseas audiences. We’ve argued before that the United States should resist their information warfare. Unfortunately, House Republicans are threatening to eliminate a key U.S. agency that does so.
The Global Engagement Center (GEC), headquartered at the State Department, deploys a $61 million budget and a staff of 125 to counter disinformation from Russia, China, Iran and terrorist organizations. It was founded as part of the fight against terrorist messaging. It is due for reauthorization by Congress by the end of this year. A measure has cleared the Senate, but the Republican-controlled House is so far refusing to follow suit, meaning the program could lapse.
The GEC efforts to preempt disinformation have been promising. Last month, the GEC exposed an attempt by Russia’s security services to undercut U.S. influence in Africa through a new disinformation agency, “African Initiative.” According to the center, this agency intended to spread tales about the outbreak of a mosquito-borne viral disease, to be followed by conspiracy theories about Western pharmaceutical corporations, health-focused philanthropic efforts, and the spread of disease in West and East Africa. Even before this, Russia had an active campaign in Moscow to claim, falsely, that the United States was testing biological weapons in Ukraine. The claim was based on twisted information about legitimate public health projects in Ukraine sponsored by the United States to fight disease. Russia’s untruths were picked up and widely disseminated by China, too.
The African Initiative was going to use social media and place articles in the news. It recruited staff from the enterprises of mercenary chieftain Yevgeniy Prigozhin, who started a Russian troll farm that attempted to disrupt the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Mr. Prigozhin’s Wagner Group had extensive contracts in Africa before his death in a suspicious plane crash in Russia.
The GEC got ahead and labeled the African Initiative as a Russian creation, thus preventing many from believing untruths that could have discouraged them from seeking legitimate health care. The GEC last fall also unmasked a Russian effort in Latin America. The organization exposed how Russian officials were launching a disinformation campaign to “persuade Latin American audiences that Russia’s war against Ukraine is just” and to get across “Russia’s broader false narrative that it is a champion against neocolonialization.”
Conservatives in Congress and elsewhere have complained that the center is part of an effort to muffle conservative speech and ideas in the United States. They have pointed to the GEC’s past funding of a London-based group, the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), in late 2021. That $100,000 grant helped to expand a disinformation tool in Asia. An entirely unrelated GDI project, published in December 2022, had compiled a list of U.S. media outlets likely to be susceptible to disinformation. The GEC and GDI projects were quite separate, but conservatives charged the GEC with underwriting a blacklist of conservative voices. Elon Musk wrote on his platform X, “The worst offender in U.S. government censorship & media manipulation is an obscure agency called GEC.”
Two news organizations on the list, the Federalist and the Daily Wire, have filed suit against the GEC, saying the GEC has infringed on their First Amendment rights by “actively intervening in the news-media market to render disfavored press outlets unprofitable by funding the infrastructure, development, and marketing and promotion of censorship technology and private censorship enterprises to covertly suppress speech.” This is misguided. The center does not look at what goes on inside the United States — all its programs are for fighting disinformation abroad. The GEC also instructs its grantees not to work in the United States.
The House Republicans who are taking down the GEC could, more constructively, reauthorize the program with legislative language that would ban any operations in the United States. By eliminating the program altogether, they are denying the United States a vital tool in a contest for hearts and minds around the world — while rewarding the purveyors of lies.
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
Two authoritarian U.S. adversaries, Russia and China, are carrying out what some have called a “hidden war on democracy,” attempting to shape global opinion using deception and false narratives. By one estimate, Russia spends about $1.5 billion a year and China $7 billion or more annually to influence overseas audiences. We’ve argued before that the United States should resist their information warfare. Unfortunately, House Republicans are threatening to eliminate a key U.S. agency that does so.
The Global Engagement Center (GEC), headquartered at the State Department, deploys a $61 million budget and a staff of 125 to counter disinformation from Russia, China, Iran and terrorist organizations. It was founded as part of the fight against terrorist messaging. It is due for reauthorization by Congress by the end of this year. A measure has cleared the Senate, but the Republican-controlled House is so far refusing to follow suit, meaning the program could lapse.
The GEC efforts to preempt disinformation have been promising. Last month, the GEC exposed an attempt by Russia’s security services to undercut U.S. influence in Africa through a new disinformation agency, “African Initiative.” According to the center, this agency intended to spread tales about the outbreak of a mosquito-borne viral disease, to be followed by conspiracy theories about Western pharmaceutical corporations, health-focused philanthropic efforts, and the spread of disease in West and East Africa. Even before this, Russia had an active campaign in Moscow to claim, falsely, that the United States was testing biological weapons in Ukraine. The claim was based on twisted information about legitimate public health projects in Ukraine sponsored by the United States to fight disease. Russia’s untruths were picked up and widely disseminated by China, too.
The African Initiative was going to use social media and place articles in the news. It recruited staff from the enterprises of mercenary chieftain Yevgeniy Prigozhin, who started a Russian troll farm that attempted to disrupt the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Mr. Prigozhin’s Wagner Group had extensive contracts in Africa before his death in a suspicious plane crash in Russia.
The GEC got ahead and labeled the African Initiative as a Russian creation, thus preventing many from believing untruths that could have discouraged them from seeking legitimate health care. The GEC last fall also unmasked a Russian effort in Latin America. The organization exposed how Russian officials were launching a disinformation campaign to “persuade Latin American audiences that Russia’s war against Ukraine is just” and to get across “Russia’s broader false narrative that it is a champion against neocolonialization.”
Conservatives in Congress and elsewhere have complained that the center is part of an effort to muffle conservative speech and ideas in the United States. They have pointed to the GEC’s past funding of a London-based group, the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), in late 2021. That $100,000 grant helped to expand a disinformation tool in Asia. An entirely unrelated GDI project, published in December 2022, had compiled a list of U.S. media outlets likely to be susceptible to disinformation. The GEC and GDI projects were quite separate, but conservatives charged the GEC with underwriting a blacklist of conservative voices. Elon Musk wrote on his platform X, “The worst offender in U.S. government censorship & media manipulation is an obscure agency called GEC.”
Two news organizations on the list, the Federalist and the Daily Wire, have filed suit against the GEC, saying the GEC has infringed on their First Amendment rights by “actively intervening in the news-media market to render disfavored press outlets unprofitable by funding the infrastructure, development, and marketing and promotion of censorship technology and private censorship enterprises to covertly suppress speech.” This is misguided. The center does not look at what goes on inside the United States — all its programs are for fighting disinformation abroad. The GEC also instructs its grantees not to work in the United States.
The House Republicans who are taking down the GEC could, more constructively, reauthorize the program with legislative language that would ban any operations in the United States. By eliminating the program altogether, they are denying the United States a vital tool in a contest for hearts and minds around the world — while rewarding the purveyors of lies.
DON’T THINK OF IT AS A CONTEST BETWEEN BIDEN AND TRUMP
By Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times
It’s official — we have a rematch. This week, both Joe Biden and Donald Trump officially secured the delegates needed to win renomination in their respective primaries. This will be the first contest since the 1892 race between Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland where a former challenger, now incumbent, faces off against a former incumbent, now challenger, for a second term in the White House. Cleveland won his challenge, but this does not tell us anything about our situation.
Truth be told, there is a pervasive sense floating around this election that there is nothing new to discuss — that there’s nothing new to learn about Biden and certainly nothing new to learn about Trump.
But while it’s fair to say that we already know quite a bit about the two men — their strengths and weaknesses, their perspectives and views, the character of their administrations and their records while in office — there is still a great deal to say about what they intend to do with another four years in the White House.
Both Trump and Biden have far-reaching plans for the country, either one of which would transform the United States. Of course, one of those transformations would be for the worst, the other for the better.
Let’s start with the worst. We already know that Donald Trump’s main targets for his second term are American democracy and the American constitutional order. For Trump, the basics of American governance — separation of powers, an independent civil service and the popular selection of elected officials — are a direct obstacle to his desire to protect himself, enrich himself and extend his personalized rule as far over the country as possible.
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My colleague Carlos Lozada has already taken a deep dive into Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump term. The overall thrust of the “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” is an authoritarian remodeling of the executive branch, designed around Trump. “It calls for a relentless politicizing of the federal government, with presidential appointees overpowering career officials at every turn and agencies and offices abolished on overtly ideological grounds,” writes Lozada, who also notes that the Heritage vision “portrays the president as the personal embodiment of popular will and treats the law as an impediment to conservative governance.”
In practice, one of the things this would mean is that Trump would be empowered to use the Department of Justice to investigate his political enemies, or use the Internal Revenue Service to harass them with audits and other forms of heightened scrutiny.
But a second Trump term wouldn’t just be about the abuse of power, the erosion of checks and balances and the elevation of assorted hacks and apparatchiks into positions of real authority. It would also be about the concerted effort to make the federal government a vehicle for the upward distribution of wealth.
Both Trump and Republicans in Congress want to extend his 2017 tax cuts at a cost of $3.3 trillion, the large majority of which would benefit the highest income earners. Trump also hopes to slash the corporate tax rate, reducing the government’s revenue by an additional $522 billion. To pay for this, both Trump and Republicans would almost certainly take an ax to the social safety net, targeting Medicaid, food stamps and other programs for low-income and working Americans. Trump has even said he is open to cutting Medicare and Social Security, a move that might be necessary if Republicans manage to starve the federal government of nearly $4 trillion in taxes.
We should also expect a second Trump administration to resume the effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, as well as try to unravel as much of the climate spending in the Inflation Reduction Act as possible.
Biden wants something very different for the country. His first goal, to start, is to preserve and defend the American constitutional order. He would not subvert American democracy to make himself a strongman along the lines of Viktor Orban, who recently met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
What Biden would try to do, if his proposed budget is any indication, is reinvigorate the social insurance state. His proposal, released on Monday, calls for about $5 trillion in new taxes on corporations and the wealthy over the next decade. This would pay for, among other things: a plan to extend the fiscal solvency of Medicare, a plan to restore the expanded child tax credit enacted in the American Rescue Plan at the start of his administration, a plan to guarantee low-cost, early child care to most families, and a plan to expand health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act. In short, Biden hopes to make good on longstanding Democratic priorities.
There is a larger point that flows from this capsule summary of each candidate’s priorities. Americans are accustomed to thinking of their presidential elections as a battle of personalities, a framework that is only encouraged by the candidate-centric nature of the American political system as well as the way that our media reports on elections. Even the way that most Americans think about their country’s history, always focused so intently on whoever occupies the White House in a given moment, works to reinforce this notion that presidential elections are mostly about the people and personalities involved.
Personality certainly matters. But it might be more useful, in terms of the actual stakes of a contest, to think about the presidential election as a race between competing coalitions of Americans. Different groups, and different communities, who want very different — sometimes mutually incompatible — things for the country.
The coalition behind Joe Biden wants what Democratic coalitions have wanted since at least the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt: government assistance for working people, federal support for the inclusion of more marginal Americans.
As for the coalition behind Trump? Beyond the insatiable desire for lower taxes on the nation’s monied interests, there appears to be an even deeper desire for a politics of domination. Trump speaks less about policy, in any sense, than he does about getting revenge on his critics. He’s only concerned with the mechanisms of government to the extent that they are tools for punishing his enemies.
And if what Trump wants tells us anything, it’s that the actual goal of the Trump coalition is not to govern the country, but to rule over others.
By Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times
It’s official — we have a rematch. This week, both Joe Biden and Donald Trump officially secured the delegates needed to win renomination in their respective primaries. This will be the first contest since the 1892 race between Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland where a former challenger, now incumbent, faces off against a former incumbent, now challenger, for a second term in the White House. Cleveland won his challenge, but this does not tell us anything about our situation.
Truth be told, there is a pervasive sense floating around this election that there is nothing new to discuss — that there’s nothing new to learn about Biden and certainly nothing new to learn about Trump.
But while it’s fair to say that we already know quite a bit about the two men — their strengths and weaknesses, their perspectives and views, the character of their administrations and their records while in office — there is still a great deal to say about what they intend to do with another four years in the White House.
Both Trump and Biden have far-reaching plans for the country, either one of which would transform the United States. Of course, one of those transformations would be for the worst, the other for the better.
Let’s start with the worst. We already know that Donald Trump’s main targets for his second term are American democracy and the American constitutional order. For Trump, the basics of American governance — separation of powers, an independent civil service and the popular selection of elected officials — are a direct obstacle to his desire to protect himself, enrich himself and extend his personalized rule as far over the country as possible.
Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.
My colleague Carlos Lozada has already taken a deep dive into Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump term. The overall thrust of the “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” is an authoritarian remodeling of the executive branch, designed around Trump. “It calls for a relentless politicizing of the federal government, with presidential appointees overpowering career officials at every turn and agencies and offices abolished on overtly ideological grounds,” writes Lozada, who also notes that the Heritage vision “portrays the president as the personal embodiment of popular will and treats the law as an impediment to conservative governance.”
In practice, one of the things this would mean is that Trump would be empowered to use the Department of Justice to investigate his political enemies, or use the Internal Revenue Service to harass them with audits and other forms of heightened scrutiny.
But a second Trump term wouldn’t just be about the abuse of power, the erosion of checks and balances and the elevation of assorted hacks and apparatchiks into positions of real authority. It would also be about the concerted effort to make the federal government a vehicle for the upward distribution of wealth.
Both Trump and Republicans in Congress want to extend his 2017 tax cuts at a cost of $3.3 trillion, the large majority of which would benefit the highest income earners. Trump also hopes to slash the corporate tax rate, reducing the government’s revenue by an additional $522 billion. To pay for this, both Trump and Republicans would almost certainly take an ax to the social safety net, targeting Medicaid, food stamps and other programs for low-income and working Americans. Trump has even said he is open to cutting Medicare and Social Security, a move that might be necessary if Republicans manage to starve the federal government of nearly $4 trillion in taxes.
We should also expect a second Trump administration to resume the effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, as well as try to unravel as much of the climate spending in the Inflation Reduction Act as possible.
Biden wants something very different for the country. His first goal, to start, is to preserve and defend the American constitutional order. He would not subvert American democracy to make himself a strongman along the lines of Viktor Orban, who recently met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
What Biden would try to do, if his proposed budget is any indication, is reinvigorate the social insurance state. His proposal, released on Monday, calls for about $5 trillion in new taxes on corporations and the wealthy over the next decade. This would pay for, among other things: a plan to extend the fiscal solvency of Medicare, a plan to restore the expanded child tax credit enacted in the American Rescue Plan at the start of his administration, a plan to guarantee low-cost, early child care to most families, and a plan to expand health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act. In short, Biden hopes to make good on longstanding Democratic priorities.
There is a larger point that flows from this capsule summary of each candidate’s priorities. Americans are accustomed to thinking of their presidential elections as a battle of personalities, a framework that is only encouraged by the candidate-centric nature of the American political system as well as the way that our media reports on elections. Even the way that most Americans think about their country’s history, always focused so intently on whoever occupies the White House in a given moment, works to reinforce this notion that presidential elections are mostly about the people and personalities involved.
Personality certainly matters. But it might be more useful, in terms of the actual stakes of a contest, to think about the presidential election as a race between competing coalitions of Americans. Different groups, and different communities, who want very different — sometimes mutually incompatible — things for the country.
The coalition behind Joe Biden wants what Democratic coalitions have wanted since at least the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt: government assistance for working people, federal support for the inclusion of more marginal Americans.
As for the coalition behind Trump? Beyond the insatiable desire for lower taxes on the nation’s monied interests, there appears to be an even deeper desire for a politics of domination. Trump speaks less about policy, in any sense, than he does about getting revenge on his critics. He’s only concerned with the mechanisms of government to the extent that they are tools for punishing his enemies.
And if what Trump wants tells us anything, it’s that the actual goal of the Trump coalition is not to govern the country, but to rule over others.
BIDEN’S BUDGET CALLS THE BLUFF OF SUPPOSED GOP BUDGET HAWKS
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
President Biden’s budget, like all administrations’ budget proposals, will not become law. But it achieves two important goals: It makes several policy proposals whose times have come. And it reveals GOP hypocrisy on deficit control.
A favorite Biden expression is, “Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” And that certainly applies here. In particular, his tax proposals evince a commitment to narrowing income inequality. He also advances several innovative programs to address the housing crisis.
For starters, Biden’s tax proposals seek to bolster the working poor. “The President’s Budget would restore the expanded Child Tax Credit, lifting 3 million children out of poverty and cutting taxes by an average of $2,600 for 39 million low- and middle-income families that include 66 million children,” the administration’s fact sheet explains. “This includes 18 million children in low-income families who would be newly eligible for the full credit, and 2 million children living with a caregiver who is at least 60 years old.”
At the other end of the spectrum, Biden tackles one of the most regressive aspects of our tax system: the cap on earnings subject to Medicare taxes. His plan would lift the cap on earnings subject to these payroll taxes and hike the rate to 5 percent on those with incomes over $400,000. It would also end the payroll tax exemption for some earnings from “pass-through businesses.”
The proposal comes at the point in the calendar in which people who make $1 million a year have already capped out on payroll taxes. “Most Americans can expect to pay Social Security payroll taxes throughout 2024,” CNBC reported. “But for top earners with gross annual wage income of $1 million, March 2 marks the date at which they will stop paying into the program, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research.” With the income cap presently set at $168,600, they’ll enjoy the rest of the year without payroll tax deductions.
Frankly, there is no policy reason not to simply lift the $168,600 cap for everyone. However, Biden is sticking with his promise not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000. That means his new proposal would create a sort of “doughnut” where earnings between $168,600 and $400,000 still are not subject to Medicare taxes, but those above $400,000 start paying more. Despite the awkward nod to politics, the concept remains strong. So long as the very well-to-do continue to draw Social Security paid for through the earnings of much less affluent taxpayers, the wealthy can and should pay more.
With a House Republican majority, Biden’s Medicare tax proposal will go nowhere. But it should begin a robust discussion. Why is there a cap? And why not lift the cap for Social Security as well as Medicare taxes?
Coupled with a refusal to renew the costly Donald Trump tax cuts for the richest Americans and increases in the corporate tax rate, the Biden tax proposals fulfill his promise of making the tax code more progressive while giving a specific boost to poor parents. Those changes allow Biden to lay claim to cutting $3.3 trillion from the deficit over 10 years.
Finally, Biden — on the heels of significant efforts to cut student debt despite the Supreme Court’s overturning his central student debt forgiveness effort — comes up with a plan to aid generally young, first-time home buyers. Biden seeks to “unstick” the housing market where low supply of housing stock and higher rates put a home out of reach for millions of first-time buyers. He also addresses the problem of rising rents by subsidizing new construction and renovation and with a “strike force” across agencies. “Launched on Tuesday to curb unfair and illegal pricing across the economy,” USA Today reports, the group “will also work to combat egregious rent increases and other practices driving up rents.”
The Biden budget’s housing plans include subsidies and administrative measures to increase building of affordable housing units and creates a mortgage relief credit for first-time home buyers of up to $10,000, paid over two years. (“This is the equivalent of reducing the mortgage rate by 1.5 percentage points for two years on the median home, to help more than 3.5 million middle-class families purchase their first home over the next two years,” the administration explains in its fact sheet.) The budget would also offer a $10,000 credit to homeowners to sell their starter homes.
In response to this array of proposals, Republicans will holler that tax hikes will crash the economy and spending will balloon the debt. But Biden’s budget, which cuts the deficit, now stands as a challenge: What is their plan?
We already know Republicans want to extend the Trump tax cuts, expanding the pool of red ink. Trump’s incoherent rambling about entitlements suggests … well … we don’t know exactly what he meant. But it sure sounds like he is open to cutting Social Security and Medicare. (“There is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements in terms of cutting and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements, tremendous bad management of entitlements. There’s tremendous amounts of things and numbers of things you can do.”If such a word salad came out of Biden’s mouth, the press would be apoplectic.) Forcing the Republicans to explain what spending they want to cut and whose taxes they want to lower should be part of Biden’s budget rollout.
Republicans talk a good game, but so far we have seen nothing of their “economic populism” or any realistic deficit-cutting plan, even one acceptable to their own House and Senate members. Biden has showed his hand. Now it’s time for them show theirs.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
President Biden’s budget, like all administrations’ budget proposals, will not become law. But it achieves two important goals: It makes several policy proposals whose times have come. And it reveals GOP hypocrisy on deficit control.
A favorite Biden expression is, “Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” And that certainly applies here. In particular, his tax proposals evince a commitment to narrowing income inequality. He also advances several innovative programs to address the housing crisis.
For starters, Biden’s tax proposals seek to bolster the working poor. “The President’s Budget would restore the expanded Child Tax Credit, lifting 3 million children out of poverty and cutting taxes by an average of $2,600 for 39 million low- and middle-income families that include 66 million children,” the administration’s fact sheet explains. “This includes 18 million children in low-income families who would be newly eligible for the full credit, and 2 million children living with a caregiver who is at least 60 years old.”
At the other end of the spectrum, Biden tackles one of the most regressive aspects of our tax system: the cap on earnings subject to Medicare taxes. His plan would lift the cap on earnings subject to these payroll taxes and hike the rate to 5 percent on those with incomes over $400,000. It would also end the payroll tax exemption for some earnings from “pass-through businesses.”
The proposal comes at the point in the calendar in which people who make $1 million a year have already capped out on payroll taxes. “Most Americans can expect to pay Social Security payroll taxes throughout 2024,” CNBC reported. “But for top earners with gross annual wage income of $1 million, March 2 marks the date at which they will stop paying into the program, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research.” With the income cap presently set at $168,600, they’ll enjoy the rest of the year without payroll tax deductions.
Frankly, there is no policy reason not to simply lift the $168,600 cap for everyone. However, Biden is sticking with his promise not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000. That means his new proposal would create a sort of “doughnut” where earnings between $168,600 and $400,000 still are not subject to Medicare taxes, but those above $400,000 start paying more. Despite the awkward nod to politics, the concept remains strong. So long as the very well-to-do continue to draw Social Security paid for through the earnings of much less affluent taxpayers, the wealthy can and should pay more.
With a House Republican majority, Biden’s Medicare tax proposal will go nowhere. But it should begin a robust discussion. Why is there a cap? And why not lift the cap for Social Security as well as Medicare taxes?
Coupled with a refusal to renew the costly Donald Trump tax cuts for the richest Americans and increases in the corporate tax rate, the Biden tax proposals fulfill his promise of making the tax code more progressive while giving a specific boost to poor parents. Those changes allow Biden to lay claim to cutting $3.3 trillion from the deficit over 10 years.
Finally, Biden — on the heels of significant efforts to cut student debt despite the Supreme Court’s overturning his central student debt forgiveness effort — comes up with a plan to aid generally young, first-time home buyers. Biden seeks to “unstick” the housing market where low supply of housing stock and higher rates put a home out of reach for millions of first-time buyers. He also addresses the problem of rising rents by subsidizing new construction and renovation and with a “strike force” across agencies. “Launched on Tuesday to curb unfair and illegal pricing across the economy,” USA Today reports, the group “will also work to combat egregious rent increases and other practices driving up rents.”
The Biden budget’s housing plans include subsidies and administrative measures to increase building of affordable housing units and creates a mortgage relief credit for first-time home buyers of up to $10,000, paid over two years. (“This is the equivalent of reducing the mortgage rate by 1.5 percentage points for two years on the median home, to help more than 3.5 million middle-class families purchase their first home over the next two years,” the administration explains in its fact sheet.) The budget would also offer a $10,000 credit to homeowners to sell their starter homes.
In response to this array of proposals, Republicans will holler that tax hikes will crash the economy and spending will balloon the debt. But Biden’s budget, which cuts the deficit, now stands as a challenge: What is their plan?
We already know Republicans want to extend the Trump tax cuts, expanding the pool of red ink. Trump’s incoherent rambling about entitlements suggests … well … we don’t know exactly what he meant. But it sure sounds like he is open to cutting Social Security and Medicare. (“There is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements in terms of cutting and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements, tremendous bad management of entitlements. There’s tremendous amounts of things and numbers of things you can do.”If such a word salad came out of Biden’s mouth, the press would be apoplectic.) Forcing the Republicans to explain what spending they want to cut and whose taxes they want to lower should be part of Biden’s budget rollout.
Republicans talk a good game, but so far we have seen nothing of their “economic populism” or any realistic deficit-cutting plan, even one acceptable to their own House and Senate members. Biden has showed his hand. Now it’s time for them show theirs.
TRUMP HAS A BUNCH OF NEW FALSE CLAIMS. HERE’S A GUIDE.
By Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post
When a politician gives rally speeches lasting nearly two hours, it’s hard to decide what factually challenged statements should be examined. In the case of Donald Trump, it’s especially difficult because he frequently says so many things that are false or misleading.
Last Saturday, in Georgia, when Trump spoke for 1 hour and 55 minutes, he devoted huge chunks of time offering inaccurate accounts of the legal cases against him. He made nearly five dozen references to President Biden but they consisted mostly of epithets — such as “incompetent,” “crooked,” “out of control,” and “weak, angry, flailing.” Trump also repeatedly labeled Biden as “corrupt” — but he applied the same charge to MSNBC, the 2020 elections, the judge in a libel case Trump lost, the judge in a business fraud case Trump lost, the prosecutor in a pending Georgia case, New York state and the finally entire United States.
“We have a very corrupt country,” he declared during a 30-second rant that touched on allegations that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help him win, his first impeachment over blocking aid to Ukraine, Hunter Biden’s laptop, his firing of FBI director James B. Comey and unproven allegations that Pfizer forged informed consent signatures for clinical trials of the coronavirus vaccine.
On top of that, Trump frequently recycles false claims of achievement from when he was president that we have repeatedly fact-checked, including:
Rather than repeat ourselves, we are going to focus on new false claims that Trump has introduced to his repertory in recent months. Many appeared in his Georgia speech but others came up in other recent speeches, a town hall and an interview. Any of these would be worthy of at least Three or Four Pinocchios but we don’t award Pinocchios when we do quick roundups.
Biden was declared ‘incompetent’ to stand trial in documents case
“He’s [Biden] at great jeopardy, really, but they said: ‘Look, he’s incompetent to go to court but he can be president.’ Figure that one. In other words, he can’t represent himself at court because he’s incompetent.” (Fox News town hall, Feb. 20)
“Well, Joe Biden had more boxes than any human being ever, and they let him off. Of course, I wouldn’t want to be let off that way. They say ‘he’s incompetent, we’ll let him off.’” (rally in Richmond, March 2)
“He has no clue, like with the documents hoax. How about that? He’s not competent to stand trial, but he’s allowed to be the president.” (rally in Rome, Ga., March 9)
Trump faces a criminal trial for hoarding classified documents after he left office and refusing to return them. But Biden also discovered that he had retained classified documents at his home and office. He returned them but a special counsel was appointed to see if he, too, should face criminal charges. The special counsel, Robert K. Hur, concluded that it would be tough to win a case — because Biden had reasonable defenses, the facts were occasionally murky and Biden (unlike Trump) had cooperated fully with the investigation. In a controversial passage, he wrote that jurors likely would view Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Trump has now absurdly twisted this sentence to falsely claim that Biden was not competent to stand trial — which under the law means a person is incapable of understanding or assisting in their defense. In reality, Hur was making the point that, if a case were brought to trial, Biden could make a credible case he did not willfully retain the documents, especially because he cooperated. In many cases, the special counsel decided that the documents were mishandled by mistake — or were not especially important anymore, despite the classification level.
During a congressional hearing on his report Tuesday, Hur was asked if he found that the president was senile and exhibited a decline of cognitive ability. “I did not,” Hur said. “That conclusion does not appear in my report.”
In his report, Hur addressed the difference between the Trump and Biden document cases. “Several material distinctions between Mr. Trump’s case and Mr. Biden’s are clear,” Hur wrote. “After being given multiple chances to return classified documents and avoid prosecution, Mr. Trump allegedly did the opposite. According to the indictment, he not only refused to return the documents for many months, but he also obstructed justice by enlisting others to destroy evidence and then to lie about it. In contrast, Mr. Biden turned in classified documents to the National Archives and the Department of Justice, consented to the search of multiple locations including his homes, sat for a voluntary interview and in other ways cooperated with the investigation.”
The United States is a Third World country
“We have a country that a political person uses weaponization against his political opponent never happened here. It happens in other countries, but they’re Third World countries. And in some ways, we’re a Third World country. We’re a Third World country at our borders, and we’re a Third World country at our elections, and we have to stop that.” (remarks after Super Tuesday, March 5)
The United States is an economic powerhouse and its currency, the U.S. dollar, is dominant. But Trump frequently reaches for a dated Cold War-era term used to refer to poor or developing countries. Sometimes, he also calls the United States a “banana republic.”
“Third World” is an all-purpose phrase used to falsely claim that the 2020 election was rigged by Democrats — and to claim that Biden is personally directing federal, state and local prosecutions of Trump, not to mention a civil defamation lawsuit that he lost. There is no evidence that Biden is involved in any of these cases. And it’s simply silly to claim the United States is a Third World country.
Prisons are being emptied around the world to flood U.S. borders
“The prison population all over the world is at the lowest point it’s been in many decades because they’re dumping their prisoners into our country.” (Richmond)
“When you look at the people that are being allowed to come all over the world, they’re emptying their prisons. They’re emptying their mental institutions into the United States of America.” (Rome, Ga.)
This claim is an echo of Trump’s notorious comment in his 2015 speech announcing he would run for president — that Mexico was “sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” Illegal immigration by Mexicans has fallen sharply, so now Trump claims the entire world is sending criminals to the southern border. Sometimes he even riffs that it’s a cost-saving maneuver by world leaders — “nothing more expensive than storing a prisoner in a jail for 60 years.”
This is poppycock. Immigration experts know of no effort by other countries. As someone who came to prominence in the late ’70s and early ’80s, Trump appears to be channeling Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s 1980 Mariel boatlift. About 125,000 Cubans were allowed to flee to the United States in 1,700 boats — but there was a backlash when it was discovered hundreds of refugees had been released from jails and mental health facilities.
Helen Fair, research associate at the Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research in Britain, which tracks the world prison population (except for a handful of countries), says the numbers keep growing. In 2013, 10.2 million people were in prison — and that had grown to 10.77 million in 2021. A preliminary estimate for February 2024, not ready to be published, indicates the population has grown even more. “In short, I would disagree with Donald Trump’s assertion,” she said.
Congo has released murderers into the United States
“Last night they had four from the Congo. Where in the Congo do you live? I wonder what beautiful place do you live in the Congo? ‘We are from prison.’ What did you do? ‘Murder.’ They’re in the United States right now, right? This is what they’re allowing.” (Richmond)
“The Congo — very big population coming in from the jails of the Congo.” (speech at Eagle Pass, Tex., Feb. 29)
“The other day from Africa, the Congo, they had numerous prisoners caught from the Congo.” (Rome, Ga.)
As part of his falsehood on prisons being emptied, Trump often conjures up another bit of fiction — that a conflict-riven country in Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo, is shipping murderers to the United States. Fair says no such decline in Congo’s prison population is shown in the data. Instead, the DRC’s prison population keeps growing.
When Trump was president, he greatly restricted refugee admissions, stranding Congolese who had been waiting in camps seeking to reunite with relatives already in the United States. Still, Customs and Border Protection data show that during his presidency there was a surge in undocumented arrivals from the Democratic Republic of Congo. In 2017 and 2018, no one from Congo sought to cross either the southern or northern border, but in 2019 and 2020, that changed, with 614 and 267 encounters, respectively.
15 million migrants have entered the United States under Biden
“They’ve let in 15 million people … and I think it’s going to be 18 million by the time we get the worst president in our history out of office.” (Richmond)
“I think the number is 15 million people already, I think it’ll be 18 to 20 million people by the time we get rid of this guy. Think of it, that’s bigger than New York state. I think it’s going to be close to 20 million people.” (Rome, Ga.)
“This is the worst invasion probably. We’ve never had anything like it. No country has ever had anything like it. The number today could be 15 million people, and they’re coming from rough places and dangerous places.” (Super Tuesday remarks.)
Trump never met a number that he could not double, triple or quadruple. Here’s he manages to take a real number — 4 to 5 million migrants arriving during Biden’s presidency — and increase it threefold. Then he offers a prediction to make its sound even larger.
Here’s the reality: Customs and Border Protection recorded about 8.5 million “encounters” between February 2021, after Biden took office, through December of last year. But that does not mean all those people entered the country illegally. Some people were “encountered” numerous times as they tried to enter the country — and others (about 4 million of the total) were expelled, mostly because of covid-related rules that have since ended.
CBP has released more than 2.3 million migrants into the United States at the southern border under the Biden administration through September, the Department of Homeland Security said. These numbers, however, do not include “gotaways” — which occur when cameras or sensors detect migrants crossing the border but no one is found or no agents are available to respond. That figure could add an additional 2 million, bringing the total number of migrants arriving during Biden’s presidency to between 4 and 5 million.
That’s a big number, but apparently not big enough for Trump.
The inflation rate under Biden is 50 percent
“But the fact is, under Biden, we have a three-year inflation rate of almost 50 percent. Under me, you had no inflation. You had no inflation.” (Rome, Ga.)
“We have cumulative inflation of over 50 percent. That means people are, you know, they have to make more than 50 percent more over a fairly short period of time to stay up.” (interview on CNBC, March 11)
The monthly inflation headlines are often about the year-over-year inflation rate, as measured by changes in the consumer price index. It reached a high of 9 percent during Biden’s presidency, largely because of supply chain issues after the pandemic. Annualized inflation has dropped since then. The year-over-year figure in February was 3.2 percent.
Cumulative inflation measures the total increase in the price of goods and services over a specific period of time. But of course Trump nearly triples the real number. Since Biden took office, cumulative inflation is 18.5 percent. Moreover, Trump is wrong when he says there was “no inflation” when he was president. Cumulative inflation during Trump’s presidency was nearly 8 percent.
Wages have also gone up under Biden, helping to mitigate the impact, though many workers have not seen their paychecks keep up with inflation. Average hourly earnings are up 15.5 percent during Biden’s presidency and the Employment Cost Index is up 14 percent. Since early 2023, wage growth began to outpace inflation, with the gap expected to fully close sometime this year.
Native-born Americans have lost 1 million jobs to immigrants
“In February alone, nearly 1 million jobs held by native-born Americans disappeared. Think of that. You lost a million jobs. Black people, that’s who lost the jobs. Hispanic people, that’s who lost the jobs.” (Rome, Ga.)
Here, Trump seizes on a confusing (and exaggerated) number to make a misleading claim. In the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics employment report, it shows the number of native-born workers with jobs fell from 129.8 million in January to 129.3 million in February 2024, for a decline of about 500,000. So Trump doubled the actual figure. Meanwhile, the number of foreign-born workers, meaning people who were not citizens at birth, grew from nearly 30 million to 31 million — an increase of more than 1 million.
But that does not mean that U.S. citizens have “lost” those jobs to immigrants. Monthly changes in employment don’t tell you much — and this report is not seasonably adjusted, meaning temporary holiday hiring and a winter slowdown in construction can affect the numbers at the start of the year. The BLS report shows the unemployment rate is lower for native-born Americans — 4.0 versus 4.7 percent. That’s the more important figure. Moreover, according to the Economic Policy Institute, the share of prime-age (ages 25-54) employment-to-population ratio (EPOP) for U.S.-born individuals was 81.4 percent in 2023, up from 80.7 percent in 2019 — for its highest rate since 2001. Indeed, native-born workers have gained more than 6 million jobs during Biden’s presidency — as have foreign-born workers.
By Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post
When a politician gives rally speeches lasting nearly two hours, it’s hard to decide what factually challenged statements should be examined. In the case of Donald Trump, it’s especially difficult because he frequently says so many things that are false or misleading.
Last Saturday, in Georgia, when Trump spoke for 1 hour and 55 minutes, he devoted huge chunks of time offering inaccurate accounts of the legal cases against him. He made nearly five dozen references to President Biden but they consisted mostly of epithets — such as “incompetent,” “crooked,” “out of control,” and “weak, angry, flailing.” Trump also repeatedly labeled Biden as “corrupt” — but he applied the same charge to MSNBC, the 2020 elections, the judge in a libel case Trump lost, the judge in a business fraud case Trump lost, the prosecutor in a pending Georgia case, New York state and the finally entire United States.
“We have a very corrupt country,” he declared during a 30-second rant that touched on allegations that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help him win, his first impeachment over blocking aid to Ukraine, Hunter Biden’s laptop, his firing of FBI director James B. Comey and unproven allegations that Pfizer forged informed consent signatures for clinical trials of the coronavirus vaccine.
On top of that, Trump frequently recycles false claims of achievement from when he was president that we have repeatedly fact-checked, including:
- He created the greatest U.S. economy in U.S. history (not by any metric).
- He passed the biggest tax cut in history (it ranks 8th).
- He did more for Black people than any president than Abraham Lincoln (not by any metric).
- He defeated ISIS in four weeks (it took the United States and coalition partners more than two years after he took office).
- He was the first president to impose tariffs on China (China has faced U.S. tariffs since George Washington first enacted them in 1789).
- He increased government revenue even though he cut taxes (False).
Rather than repeat ourselves, we are going to focus on new false claims that Trump has introduced to his repertory in recent months. Many appeared in his Georgia speech but others came up in other recent speeches, a town hall and an interview. Any of these would be worthy of at least Three or Four Pinocchios but we don’t award Pinocchios when we do quick roundups.
Biden was declared ‘incompetent’ to stand trial in documents case
“He’s [Biden] at great jeopardy, really, but they said: ‘Look, he’s incompetent to go to court but he can be president.’ Figure that one. In other words, he can’t represent himself at court because he’s incompetent.” (Fox News town hall, Feb. 20)
“Well, Joe Biden had more boxes than any human being ever, and they let him off. Of course, I wouldn’t want to be let off that way. They say ‘he’s incompetent, we’ll let him off.’” (rally in Richmond, March 2)
“He has no clue, like with the documents hoax. How about that? He’s not competent to stand trial, but he’s allowed to be the president.” (rally in Rome, Ga., March 9)
Trump faces a criminal trial for hoarding classified documents after he left office and refusing to return them. But Biden also discovered that he had retained classified documents at his home and office. He returned them but a special counsel was appointed to see if he, too, should face criminal charges. The special counsel, Robert K. Hur, concluded that it would be tough to win a case — because Biden had reasonable defenses, the facts were occasionally murky and Biden (unlike Trump) had cooperated fully with the investigation. In a controversial passage, he wrote that jurors likely would view Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Trump has now absurdly twisted this sentence to falsely claim that Biden was not competent to stand trial — which under the law means a person is incapable of understanding or assisting in their defense. In reality, Hur was making the point that, if a case were brought to trial, Biden could make a credible case he did not willfully retain the documents, especially because he cooperated. In many cases, the special counsel decided that the documents were mishandled by mistake — or were not especially important anymore, despite the classification level.
During a congressional hearing on his report Tuesday, Hur was asked if he found that the president was senile and exhibited a decline of cognitive ability. “I did not,” Hur said. “That conclusion does not appear in my report.”
In his report, Hur addressed the difference between the Trump and Biden document cases. “Several material distinctions between Mr. Trump’s case and Mr. Biden’s are clear,” Hur wrote. “After being given multiple chances to return classified documents and avoid prosecution, Mr. Trump allegedly did the opposite. According to the indictment, he not only refused to return the documents for many months, but he also obstructed justice by enlisting others to destroy evidence and then to lie about it. In contrast, Mr. Biden turned in classified documents to the National Archives and the Department of Justice, consented to the search of multiple locations including his homes, sat for a voluntary interview and in other ways cooperated with the investigation.”
The United States is a Third World country
“We have a country that a political person uses weaponization against his political opponent never happened here. It happens in other countries, but they’re Third World countries. And in some ways, we’re a Third World country. We’re a Third World country at our borders, and we’re a Third World country at our elections, and we have to stop that.” (remarks after Super Tuesday, March 5)
The United States is an economic powerhouse and its currency, the U.S. dollar, is dominant. But Trump frequently reaches for a dated Cold War-era term used to refer to poor or developing countries. Sometimes, he also calls the United States a “banana republic.”
“Third World” is an all-purpose phrase used to falsely claim that the 2020 election was rigged by Democrats — and to claim that Biden is personally directing federal, state and local prosecutions of Trump, not to mention a civil defamation lawsuit that he lost. There is no evidence that Biden is involved in any of these cases. And it’s simply silly to claim the United States is a Third World country.
Prisons are being emptied around the world to flood U.S. borders
“The prison population all over the world is at the lowest point it’s been in many decades because they’re dumping their prisoners into our country.” (Richmond)
“When you look at the people that are being allowed to come all over the world, they’re emptying their prisons. They’re emptying their mental institutions into the United States of America.” (Rome, Ga.)
This claim is an echo of Trump’s notorious comment in his 2015 speech announcing he would run for president — that Mexico was “sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” Illegal immigration by Mexicans has fallen sharply, so now Trump claims the entire world is sending criminals to the southern border. Sometimes he even riffs that it’s a cost-saving maneuver by world leaders — “nothing more expensive than storing a prisoner in a jail for 60 years.”
This is poppycock. Immigration experts know of no effort by other countries. As someone who came to prominence in the late ’70s and early ’80s, Trump appears to be channeling Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s 1980 Mariel boatlift. About 125,000 Cubans were allowed to flee to the United States in 1,700 boats — but there was a backlash when it was discovered hundreds of refugees had been released from jails and mental health facilities.
Helen Fair, research associate at the Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research in Britain, which tracks the world prison population (except for a handful of countries), says the numbers keep growing. In 2013, 10.2 million people were in prison — and that had grown to 10.77 million in 2021. A preliminary estimate for February 2024, not ready to be published, indicates the population has grown even more. “In short, I would disagree with Donald Trump’s assertion,” she said.
Congo has released murderers into the United States
“Last night they had four from the Congo. Where in the Congo do you live? I wonder what beautiful place do you live in the Congo? ‘We are from prison.’ What did you do? ‘Murder.’ They’re in the United States right now, right? This is what they’re allowing.” (Richmond)
“The Congo — very big population coming in from the jails of the Congo.” (speech at Eagle Pass, Tex., Feb. 29)
“The other day from Africa, the Congo, they had numerous prisoners caught from the Congo.” (Rome, Ga.)
As part of his falsehood on prisons being emptied, Trump often conjures up another bit of fiction — that a conflict-riven country in Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo, is shipping murderers to the United States. Fair says no such decline in Congo’s prison population is shown in the data. Instead, the DRC’s prison population keeps growing.
When Trump was president, he greatly restricted refugee admissions, stranding Congolese who had been waiting in camps seeking to reunite with relatives already in the United States. Still, Customs and Border Protection data show that during his presidency there was a surge in undocumented arrivals from the Democratic Republic of Congo. In 2017 and 2018, no one from Congo sought to cross either the southern or northern border, but in 2019 and 2020, that changed, with 614 and 267 encounters, respectively.
15 million migrants have entered the United States under Biden
“They’ve let in 15 million people … and I think it’s going to be 18 million by the time we get the worst president in our history out of office.” (Richmond)
“I think the number is 15 million people already, I think it’ll be 18 to 20 million people by the time we get rid of this guy. Think of it, that’s bigger than New York state. I think it’s going to be close to 20 million people.” (Rome, Ga.)
“This is the worst invasion probably. We’ve never had anything like it. No country has ever had anything like it. The number today could be 15 million people, and they’re coming from rough places and dangerous places.” (Super Tuesday remarks.)
Trump never met a number that he could not double, triple or quadruple. Here’s he manages to take a real number — 4 to 5 million migrants arriving during Biden’s presidency — and increase it threefold. Then he offers a prediction to make its sound even larger.
Here’s the reality: Customs and Border Protection recorded about 8.5 million “encounters” between February 2021, after Biden took office, through December of last year. But that does not mean all those people entered the country illegally. Some people were “encountered” numerous times as they tried to enter the country — and others (about 4 million of the total) were expelled, mostly because of covid-related rules that have since ended.
CBP has released more than 2.3 million migrants into the United States at the southern border under the Biden administration through September, the Department of Homeland Security said. These numbers, however, do not include “gotaways” — which occur when cameras or sensors detect migrants crossing the border but no one is found or no agents are available to respond. That figure could add an additional 2 million, bringing the total number of migrants arriving during Biden’s presidency to between 4 and 5 million.
That’s a big number, but apparently not big enough for Trump.
The inflation rate under Biden is 50 percent
“But the fact is, under Biden, we have a three-year inflation rate of almost 50 percent. Under me, you had no inflation. You had no inflation.” (Rome, Ga.)
“We have cumulative inflation of over 50 percent. That means people are, you know, they have to make more than 50 percent more over a fairly short period of time to stay up.” (interview on CNBC, March 11)
The monthly inflation headlines are often about the year-over-year inflation rate, as measured by changes in the consumer price index. It reached a high of 9 percent during Biden’s presidency, largely because of supply chain issues after the pandemic. Annualized inflation has dropped since then. The year-over-year figure in February was 3.2 percent.
Cumulative inflation measures the total increase in the price of goods and services over a specific period of time. But of course Trump nearly triples the real number. Since Biden took office, cumulative inflation is 18.5 percent. Moreover, Trump is wrong when he says there was “no inflation” when he was president. Cumulative inflation during Trump’s presidency was nearly 8 percent.
Wages have also gone up under Biden, helping to mitigate the impact, though many workers have not seen their paychecks keep up with inflation. Average hourly earnings are up 15.5 percent during Biden’s presidency and the Employment Cost Index is up 14 percent. Since early 2023, wage growth began to outpace inflation, with the gap expected to fully close sometime this year.
Native-born Americans have lost 1 million jobs to immigrants
“In February alone, nearly 1 million jobs held by native-born Americans disappeared. Think of that. You lost a million jobs. Black people, that’s who lost the jobs. Hispanic people, that’s who lost the jobs.” (Rome, Ga.)
Here, Trump seizes on a confusing (and exaggerated) number to make a misleading claim. In the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics employment report, it shows the number of native-born workers with jobs fell from 129.8 million in January to 129.3 million in February 2024, for a decline of about 500,000. So Trump doubled the actual figure. Meanwhile, the number of foreign-born workers, meaning people who were not citizens at birth, grew from nearly 30 million to 31 million — an increase of more than 1 million.
But that does not mean that U.S. citizens have “lost” those jobs to immigrants. Monthly changes in employment don’t tell you much — and this report is not seasonably adjusted, meaning temporary holiday hiring and a winter slowdown in construction can affect the numbers at the start of the year. The BLS report shows the unemployment rate is lower for native-born Americans — 4.0 versus 4.7 percent. That’s the more important figure. Moreover, according to the Economic Policy Institute, the share of prime-age (ages 25-54) employment-to-population ratio (EPOP) for U.S.-born individuals was 81.4 percent in 2023, up from 80.7 percent in 2019 — for its highest rate since 2001. Indeed, native-born workers have gained more than 6 million jobs during Biden’s presidency — as have foreign-born workers.
THE SPECIAL COUNSEL WAS UNFAIR TO BIDEN AND HIS TRANSCRIPT PROVES IT
By Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post
Special counsel Robert K. Hur was even more unfair to President Biden than we originally knew.
When Hur released his report on Biden’s mishandling of classified documents last month, his extensive characterization of the president as “a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” came in for sharp criticism as gratuitous and beyond the bounds of proper prosecutorial commentary.
We now have the transcript of the president’s interview with Hur, and, to my astonishment, it’s worse than that. It turns out that the special counsel mischaracterized and overstated Biden’s alleged memory lapses. He consistently adopted an interpretation that is as uncharitable and damaging to Biden as possible.
Gratuitous is bad enough. This was gratuitous and misleading.
This isn’t to say that Biden’s performance was perfect, or anywhere close. He’s always had a penchant for mangling facts, and I don’t doubt that has worsened with age. After the Hur report was released, Biden blasted the special counsel for having brought up the painful topic of his son Beau’s death. “How in the hell dare he raise that?” the president asked. “Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself, it wasn’t any of their damn business.”
In fact, the transcript shows, Biden was the one who first mentioned the timing of Beau’s death.
“So what was happening, though — what month did Beau die? Oh, God, May 30?”
Two aides chime in with the year, 2015.
Then, according to the transcript:
President Biden: Was it 2015 he had died?
Unidentified male speaker: It was May of 2015.
Contrast this with the damning account in Hur’s report: “He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.”
During his testimony on Tuesday before the House Judiciary Committee, Hur defended his conduct. “My assessment in the report about the relevance of the president’s memory was necessary and accurate and fair,” he said. “I did not sanitize my explanation, nor did I disparage the president unfairly.”
Well, that “even within several years” characterization seems unfair to me.
And it’s not the only example. Hur’s report also notes that Biden’s “memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him. Among other things, he mistakenly said he ‘had a real difference’ of opinion with General Karl Eikenberry, when, in fact, Eikenberry was an ally whom Mr. Biden cited approvingly in his Thanksgiving memo to President Biden.”
But the totality of Biden’s references to Eikenberry, who was U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan in 2009, when then-Vice President Biden was lobbying President Barack Obama not to send more troops to the country, presents a less definitive — and less damning — picture of Biden’s memory.
The first time Eikenberry comes up is during a discussion of the troop surge. Obama “knew I had a real difference with the key foreign policy types, particularly — whether it was Eikenberry or whether it was — anyway,” Biden said. Did Biden merely say Eikenberry when he was thinking of someone else — or was he misremembering the position of a key player in the Afghanistan debate?
Of relevance in determining that, Biden returned to the topic of Eikenberry’s position later in the deposition — and then he stated it correctly. He described telling the president, “You know, ‘I had a long conversation with Eikenberry, yes, I urge you to call him before you make a decision. Karl can speak for himself and he has eloquently in some of his cables, let me relay just a few things. Adding troops will not speed up the ability to train Afghans because …’ etc. So these are criticisms of the proposal that was being made to the president by, by others in the administration wanting him to double down.”
Somehow, this later, more flattering recollection, didn’t make it into Hur’s report.
By Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post
Special counsel Robert K. Hur was even more unfair to President Biden than we originally knew.
When Hur released his report on Biden’s mishandling of classified documents last month, his extensive characterization of the president as “a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” came in for sharp criticism as gratuitous and beyond the bounds of proper prosecutorial commentary.
We now have the transcript of the president’s interview with Hur, and, to my astonishment, it’s worse than that. It turns out that the special counsel mischaracterized and overstated Biden’s alleged memory lapses. He consistently adopted an interpretation that is as uncharitable and damaging to Biden as possible.
Gratuitous is bad enough. This was gratuitous and misleading.
This isn’t to say that Biden’s performance was perfect, or anywhere close. He’s always had a penchant for mangling facts, and I don’t doubt that has worsened with age. After the Hur report was released, Biden blasted the special counsel for having brought up the painful topic of his son Beau’s death. “How in the hell dare he raise that?” the president asked. “Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself, it wasn’t any of their damn business.”
In fact, the transcript shows, Biden was the one who first mentioned the timing of Beau’s death.
“So what was happening, though — what month did Beau die? Oh, God, May 30?”
Two aides chime in with the year, 2015.
Then, according to the transcript:
President Biden: Was it 2015 he had died?
Unidentified male speaker: It was May of 2015.
Contrast this with the damning account in Hur’s report: “He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.”
During his testimony on Tuesday before the House Judiciary Committee, Hur defended his conduct. “My assessment in the report about the relevance of the president’s memory was necessary and accurate and fair,” he said. “I did not sanitize my explanation, nor did I disparage the president unfairly.”
Well, that “even within several years” characterization seems unfair to me.
And it’s not the only example. Hur’s report also notes that Biden’s “memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him. Among other things, he mistakenly said he ‘had a real difference’ of opinion with General Karl Eikenberry, when, in fact, Eikenberry was an ally whom Mr. Biden cited approvingly in his Thanksgiving memo to President Biden.”
But the totality of Biden’s references to Eikenberry, who was U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan in 2009, when then-Vice President Biden was lobbying President Barack Obama not to send more troops to the country, presents a less definitive — and less damning — picture of Biden’s memory.
The first time Eikenberry comes up is during a discussion of the troop surge. Obama “knew I had a real difference with the key foreign policy types, particularly — whether it was Eikenberry or whether it was — anyway,” Biden said. Did Biden merely say Eikenberry when he was thinking of someone else — or was he misremembering the position of a key player in the Afghanistan debate?
Of relevance in determining that, Biden returned to the topic of Eikenberry’s position later in the deposition — and then he stated it correctly. He described telling the president, “You know, ‘I had a long conversation with Eikenberry, yes, I urge you to call him before you make a decision. Karl can speak for himself and he has eloquently in some of his cables, let me relay just a few things. Adding troops will not speed up the ability to train Afghans because …’ etc. So these are criticisms of the proposal that was being made to the president by, by others in the administration wanting him to double down.”
Somehow, this later, more flattering recollection, didn’t make it into Hur’s report.
‘TRICKLE-DOWN ECONOMICS’ IS A SCAM THAT IGNORES DECADES OF EVIDENCE
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Like climate change denial, the claimed economic benefits of tax cuts for the rich don’t hold up under scrutiny. When Democrats deride tax cuts for the wealthiest as a budget buster and a vehicle for allowing the rich to get richer, Republicans often reply: “But look at the growth and jobs!” Actually, we have seen a steady stream of evidence debunking this rationale.
The day after his State of the Union address, President Biden crowed about another 275,000 jobs added to the economy in the month of February. “Three years ago, I inherited an economy on the brink. Now, our economy is the envy of the world,” he said in a written statement. “We added 275,000 jobs last month — nearly 15 million since I took office.” He concluded, “Across the country, the American people are writing the greatest comeback story never told. The days of trickle-down are over.”
Last July, NEC Director Lael Brainard laid out the overwhelming evidence that “trickle-down” economics — defined as “cutting taxes for big businesses and those at the top” — has been a bust.
“Economic inequality increased, many communities suffered from sustained disinvestment, and earnings growth for many Americans failed to keep pace with the cost of necessities like health care, housing, and education,” she said. “Investments in infrastructure and vital industries stagnated.”
This isn’t new evidence, either. A 2020 paper by David Hope of the London School of Economics and Julian Limberg of King’s College London examined “18 developed countries — from Australia to the United States — over a 50-year period from 1965 to 2015,” CBS News reported. “The study compared countries that passed tax cuts in a specific year, such as the U.S. in 1982 when President Ronald Reagan slashed taxes on the wealthy, with those that didn’t, and then examined their economic outcomes.” It turns out that “per capita gross domestic product and unemployment rates were nearly identical after five years in countries that slashed taxes on the rich and in those that didn’t, the study found.”
But there was one significant difference: “The incomes of the rich grew much faster in countries where tax rates were lowered. Instead of trickling down to the middle class, tax cuts for the rich may not accomplish much more than help the rich keep more of their riches and exacerbate income inequality, the research indicates.” Oops.
Well, what about the huge tax cuts passed by MAGA Republicans in 2017? Were those any different? “Mr. Trump’s tax cuts have lifted the fortunes of the ultra-rich,” the report found. “For the first time in a century, the 400 richest American families paid lower taxes in 2018 than people in the middle class, the economists found.”
But economic growth made up for this handout, right?! Not so fast. Wages for average Americans did not keep up with the cost of living. Worse, “Even before the pandemic, income inequality had reached its highest point in 50 years, according to Census data,” as CBS News reported. And, before Biden came into office, income inequality worsened as the pandemic hurt the less-well-off more severely than it did the rich.
A 2022 update by Hope and Limberg reiterated, “Our findings on the effects of growth and unemployment provide evidence against supply side theories that suggest lower taxes on the rich will induce labor supply responses from high-income individuals (more hours of work, more effort, etc.) that boost economic activity.” Instead, they confirmed there is “strong evidence that cutting taxes on the rich increases income inequality but has no effect on growth or unemployment.”
Given that experience, Biden entered office determined to deploy targeted investments (e.g., infrastructure, chip manufacturing), tailored tax increases on rich individuals and corporations that had been paying no taxes, cost controls on items such as prescription drug prices, and expansion of the Affordable Care Act. Robust immigration and energy production further boosted growth. Biden also canceled billions in student loan debt, freeing up consumer spending. The result has been a record recovery from the pandemic and real wage growth adjusted for inflation.
The chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, Jared Bernstein, told me after the State of the Union: “There’s a solid, empirical body of research confirming this. Tax cuts for the rich just make them richer, exacerbating both the deficit and economic inequality.”
One type of tax credit has worked spectacularly well. “The 2021 expansion of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) led to a historic reduction in poverty in the United States, particularly for children. Research showed that child poverty fell immediately and substantially,” the Brookings Institution reported last year. “On an annual basis, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, child poverty fell to its lowest level on record in 2021: 5.2%.”
Biden now proposes a tax increase for billionaires. “There are 1,000 billionaires in America,” he told the country during the State of the Union. “You know what the average federal tax rate for these billionaires is? 8.2 percent!” He argued, “No billionaire should pay a lower tax rate than a teacher, a sanitation worker, a nurse! That’s why I’ve proposed a minimum tax of 25 percent for billionaires. Just 25 percent.”
There is no evidence that doing this would impair the economic recovery Biden has presided over. It, however, would help pare down the deficit (something Republicans used to pretend to care about).
Sold as a prosperity booster, trickle-down tax cuts for the very rich do not increase prosperity, growth or employment for the average American. This sop to the rich does increase the deficit and income disparity. By contrast, restoring the child tax credit and enacting a billionaire’s tax would continue to narrow the gulf between the very rich and everyone else.
Trickle-down economics is a scam. Renewing tax cuts for the rich that are due to expire at the end of 2025 would do about as much for you as a degree from Trump University.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Like climate change denial, the claimed economic benefits of tax cuts for the rich don’t hold up under scrutiny. When Democrats deride tax cuts for the wealthiest as a budget buster and a vehicle for allowing the rich to get richer, Republicans often reply: “But look at the growth and jobs!” Actually, we have seen a steady stream of evidence debunking this rationale.
The day after his State of the Union address, President Biden crowed about another 275,000 jobs added to the economy in the month of February. “Three years ago, I inherited an economy on the brink. Now, our economy is the envy of the world,” he said in a written statement. “We added 275,000 jobs last month — nearly 15 million since I took office.” He concluded, “Across the country, the American people are writing the greatest comeback story never told. The days of trickle-down are over.”
Last July, NEC Director Lael Brainard laid out the overwhelming evidence that “trickle-down” economics — defined as “cutting taxes for big businesses and those at the top” — has been a bust.
“Economic inequality increased, many communities suffered from sustained disinvestment, and earnings growth for many Americans failed to keep pace with the cost of necessities like health care, housing, and education,” she said. “Investments in infrastructure and vital industries stagnated.”
This isn’t new evidence, either. A 2020 paper by David Hope of the London School of Economics and Julian Limberg of King’s College London examined “18 developed countries — from Australia to the United States — over a 50-year period from 1965 to 2015,” CBS News reported. “The study compared countries that passed tax cuts in a specific year, such as the U.S. in 1982 when President Ronald Reagan slashed taxes on the wealthy, with those that didn’t, and then examined their economic outcomes.” It turns out that “per capita gross domestic product and unemployment rates were nearly identical after five years in countries that slashed taxes on the rich and in those that didn’t, the study found.”
But there was one significant difference: “The incomes of the rich grew much faster in countries where tax rates were lowered. Instead of trickling down to the middle class, tax cuts for the rich may not accomplish much more than help the rich keep more of their riches and exacerbate income inequality, the research indicates.” Oops.
Well, what about the huge tax cuts passed by MAGA Republicans in 2017? Were those any different? “Mr. Trump’s tax cuts have lifted the fortunes of the ultra-rich,” the report found. “For the first time in a century, the 400 richest American families paid lower taxes in 2018 than people in the middle class, the economists found.”
But economic growth made up for this handout, right?! Not so fast. Wages for average Americans did not keep up with the cost of living. Worse, “Even before the pandemic, income inequality had reached its highest point in 50 years, according to Census data,” as CBS News reported. And, before Biden came into office, income inequality worsened as the pandemic hurt the less-well-off more severely than it did the rich.
A 2022 update by Hope and Limberg reiterated, “Our findings on the effects of growth and unemployment provide evidence against supply side theories that suggest lower taxes on the rich will induce labor supply responses from high-income individuals (more hours of work, more effort, etc.) that boost economic activity.” Instead, they confirmed there is “strong evidence that cutting taxes on the rich increases income inequality but has no effect on growth or unemployment.”
Given that experience, Biden entered office determined to deploy targeted investments (e.g., infrastructure, chip manufacturing), tailored tax increases on rich individuals and corporations that had been paying no taxes, cost controls on items such as prescription drug prices, and expansion of the Affordable Care Act. Robust immigration and energy production further boosted growth. Biden also canceled billions in student loan debt, freeing up consumer spending. The result has been a record recovery from the pandemic and real wage growth adjusted for inflation.
The chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, Jared Bernstein, told me after the State of the Union: “There’s a solid, empirical body of research confirming this. Tax cuts for the rich just make them richer, exacerbating both the deficit and economic inequality.”
One type of tax credit has worked spectacularly well. “The 2021 expansion of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) led to a historic reduction in poverty in the United States, particularly for children. Research showed that child poverty fell immediately and substantially,” the Brookings Institution reported last year. “On an annual basis, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, child poverty fell to its lowest level on record in 2021: 5.2%.”
Biden now proposes a tax increase for billionaires. “There are 1,000 billionaires in America,” he told the country during the State of the Union. “You know what the average federal tax rate for these billionaires is? 8.2 percent!” He argued, “No billionaire should pay a lower tax rate than a teacher, a sanitation worker, a nurse! That’s why I’ve proposed a minimum tax of 25 percent for billionaires. Just 25 percent.”
There is no evidence that doing this would impair the economic recovery Biden has presided over. It, however, would help pare down the deficit (something Republicans used to pretend to care about).
Sold as a prosperity booster, trickle-down tax cuts for the very rich do not increase prosperity, growth or employment for the average American. This sop to the rich does increase the deficit and income disparity. By contrast, restoring the child tax credit and enacting a billionaire’s tax would continue to narrow the gulf between the very rich and everyone else.
Trickle-down economics is a scam. Renewing tax cuts for the rich that are due to expire at the end of 2025 would do about as much for you as a degree from Trump University.
MITCH MCCONNELL DOESN’T WEAR A MAGA HAT. I’M NOT FOOLED.
By Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times
Late last month, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky announced that he would leave his position as Republican leader after the November elections. He’ll depart as the longest-serving party leader in the Senate’s history. He is also the longest-serving senator in Kentucky history.
There’s no question that McConnell is one of the most consequential politicians of his generation. This isn’t a compliment. McConnell is not consequential for what he accomplished as a legislator or legislative leader — he’s no Robert F. Wagner or Everett Dirksen. He’s consequential for what he’s done to degrade and diminish American democracy.
McConnell, as the journalist Alec MacGillis noted in “The Cynic: The Political Education of Mitch McConnell,” was never driven by ideology. He was a moderate, pro-choice Republican before he became a hard-right, conservative one. “What has motivated McConnell has not been a particular vision for the government or the country, but the game of politics and career advancement in its own right,” MacGillis wrote in 2014.
It is a politics of the will to power, in which the only thing that matters is partisan victory. “At some point along the way,” MacGillis wrote, “Mitch McConnell decided that his own longevity in Washington trumped all — that he would even be willing to feed the public’s disillusionment with its elected leaders if it would increase his and his party’s odds of success at the polls.”
McConnell’s quest for power, no matter the cost, explains how he became a fierce opponent of campaign finance reform, doing everything he could to help flood American politics with the unaccountable money of anonymous billionaires and other wealthy interests.
Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.
That same quest for power is what brought us his now infamous declaration that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” which he operationalized by weaponizing the filibuster to effectively end majority rule in the Senate. The rules were changed decades before his ascent to the leadership of the Republican conference in 2007, but it was McConnell who established the de facto 60-vote threshold for legislation that keeps most items from reaching the floor, much less getting a vote.
The routine use of the filibuster to gum up the works is a McConnell innovation. And while he’s often described as an institutionalist, with the respect that implies for the Senate as a working body, the main effect of McConnell’s strategy of obstruction has been to erode Congress’s ability to govern the country. You might even say that Donald Trump’s promise, during his 2016 campaign, to personally seize control of the federal government (“I alone can fix it”) fed directly on the dysfunction produced by McConnell’s commitment to congressional gridlock.
As bad as that is, however, it is only the beginning of McConnell’s responsibility for Trump. His decision to deny a hearing to Obama’s third Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, turned the 2016 presidential election into a contest for ideological control of the court. The prospect of a solid right-wing majority on the court unified the Republican coalition behind Trump. It helped him consolidate wary conservative voters, including evangelicals, and pushed skeptical Republican lawmakers to fall in line behind the demagogic reality television star. There is a real sense in which Trump owes his victory over Hillary Clinton to that vacant seat on the Supreme Court.
Of course, McConnell was always quick to share his distaste for Trump’s language, behavior and overall countenance. He was, after all, a man of Washington: a staid figure of the permanent Republican establishment, a regular presence on Sunday panel shows and at events like the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. But McConnell was nothing if not business first, and Trump was a vehicle for realizing his partisan and political goals.
The Senate Republican leader would defend Trump from Democratic scrutiny during his first impeachment trial. He would stand by Trump throughout the 2020 presidential race, even as Trump mismanaged a deadly pandemic. And while McConnell would condemn Trump for the events of Jan. 6, 2021 — he said the former president was “morally responsible” and had engaged in a “disgraceful dereliction of duty” — he refused to hold Trump accountable. As Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin reported in “This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden and the Battle for America’s Future,” McConnell justified himself by telling two associates, “The Democrats are going to take care of the son of a bitch for us.” He voted “not guilty” in the subsequent impeachment trial.
Given the opportunity to show real leadership, McConnell withered in the face not of pressure, but of the potential for pressure: the chance that he might have to explain himself to other Republicans. “I didn’t get to be leader by voting with five people in the conference,” McConnell said, discussing his decision to vote to acquit Trump. Perhaps if he had actually acted as a leader, more than a handful of Republicans would have voted to convict Trump and the former president would not be poised to win office a second time.
Mitch McConnell devoted his life to the acquisition of power. One imagines that power grants freedom. It does, but only to an extent, for we are also bound by the habits of mind we form and cultivate in our quest to obtain power. The Mitch McConnell with the strength of character to confront Trump in the wake of his crime against the American republic is almost certainly not the Mitch McConnell with the power to do so. The McConnell with the power to do so was, and is, a coward.
This is why the most fitting coda to McConnell’s career was not the speech he gave announcing his decision to step down as Republican leader, but the statement he made the following week. “It is abundantly clear that former President Trump has earned the requisite support of Republican voters to be our nominee for president of the United States,” McConnell announced after Trump’s victory on Super Tuesday. “It should come as no surprise that as nominee, he will have my support.”
McConnell is right — his support for Trump came as no surprise. When he goes for good in January 2027, McConnell will not leave the Senate as a statesman. He will leave it as handmaiden to a would-be despot.
By Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times
Late last month, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky announced that he would leave his position as Republican leader after the November elections. He’ll depart as the longest-serving party leader in the Senate’s history. He is also the longest-serving senator in Kentucky history.
There’s no question that McConnell is one of the most consequential politicians of his generation. This isn’t a compliment. McConnell is not consequential for what he accomplished as a legislator or legislative leader — he’s no Robert F. Wagner or Everett Dirksen. He’s consequential for what he’s done to degrade and diminish American democracy.
McConnell, as the journalist Alec MacGillis noted in “The Cynic: The Political Education of Mitch McConnell,” was never driven by ideology. He was a moderate, pro-choice Republican before he became a hard-right, conservative one. “What has motivated McConnell has not been a particular vision for the government or the country, but the game of politics and career advancement in its own right,” MacGillis wrote in 2014.
It is a politics of the will to power, in which the only thing that matters is partisan victory. “At some point along the way,” MacGillis wrote, “Mitch McConnell decided that his own longevity in Washington trumped all — that he would even be willing to feed the public’s disillusionment with its elected leaders if it would increase his and his party’s odds of success at the polls.”
McConnell’s quest for power, no matter the cost, explains how he became a fierce opponent of campaign finance reform, doing everything he could to help flood American politics with the unaccountable money of anonymous billionaires and other wealthy interests.
Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.
That same quest for power is what brought us his now infamous declaration that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” which he operationalized by weaponizing the filibuster to effectively end majority rule in the Senate. The rules were changed decades before his ascent to the leadership of the Republican conference in 2007, but it was McConnell who established the de facto 60-vote threshold for legislation that keeps most items from reaching the floor, much less getting a vote.
The routine use of the filibuster to gum up the works is a McConnell innovation. And while he’s often described as an institutionalist, with the respect that implies for the Senate as a working body, the main effect of McConnell’s strategy of obstruction has been to erode Congress’s ability to govern the country. You might even say that Donald Trump’s promise, during his 2016 campaign, to personally seize control of the federal government (“I alone can fix it”) fed directly on the dysfunction produced by McConnell’s commitment to congressional gridlock.
As bad as that is, however, it is only the beginning of McConnell’s responsibility for Trump. His decision to deny a hearing to Obama’s third Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, turned the 2016 presidential election into a contest for ideological control of the court. The prospect of a solid right-wing majority on the court unified the Republican coalition behind Trump. It helped him consolidate wary conservative voters, including evangelicals, and pushed skeptical Republican lawmakers to fall in line behind the demagogic reality television star. There is a real sense in which Trump owes his victory over Hillary Clinton to that vacant seat on the Supreme Court.
Of course, McConnell was always quick to share his distaste for Trump’s language, behavior and overall countenance. He was, after all, a man of Washington: a staid figure of the permanent Republican establishment, a regular presence on Sunday panel shows and at events like the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. But McConnell was nothing if not business first, and Trump was a vehicle for realizing his partisan and political goals.
The Senate Republican leader would defend Trump from Democratic scrutiny during his first impeachment trial. He would stand by Trump throughout the 2020 presidential race, even as Trump mismanaged a deadly pandemic. And while McConnell would condemn Trump for the events of Jan. 6, 2021 — he said the former president was “morally responsible” and had engaged in a “disgraceful dereliction of duty” — he refused to hold Trump accountable. As Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin reported in “This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden and the Battle for America’s Future,” McConnell justified himself by telling two associates, “The Democrats are going to take care of the son of a bitch for us.” He voted “not guilty” in the subsequent impeachment trial.
Given the opportunity to show real leadership, McConnell withered in the face not of pressure, but of the potential for pressure: the chance that he might have to explain himself to other Republicans. “I didn’t get to be leader by voting with five people in the conference,” McConnell said, discussing his decision to vote to acquit Trump. Perhaps if he had actually acted as a leader, more than a handful of Republicans would have voted to convict Trump and the former president would not be poised to win office a second time.
Mitch McConnell devoted his life to the acquisition of power. One imagines that power grants freedom. It does, but only to an extent, for we are also bound by the habits of mind we form and cultivate in our quest to obtain power. The Mitch McConnell with the strength of character to confront Trump in the wake of his crime against the American republic is almost certainly not the Mitch McConnell with the power to do so. The McConnell with the power to do so was, and is, a coward.
This is why the most fitting coda to McConnell’s career was not the speech he gave announcing his decision to step down as Republican leader, but the statement he made the following week. “It is abundantly clear that former President Trump has earned the requisite support of Republican voters to be our nominee for president of the United States,” McConnell announced after Trump’s victory on Super Tuesday. “It should come as no surprise that as nominee, he will have my support.”
McConnell is right — his support for Trump came as no surprise. When he goes for good in January 2027, McConnell will not leave the Senate as a statesman. He will leave it as handmaiden to a would-be despot.
TRUMP’S FREEWHEELING SPEECHES OFFER A DARK VISION OF A SECOND TERM
A close examination of one appearance in Rock Hill, S.C., offers an anatomy of a signature rally by the former president
By Ashley Parker, Marianne LeVine and Ross Godwin, The Washington Post
A Donald Trump rally is a freewheeling extravaganza. A festival of grievance and retribution. A dystopian vision of darkness and despair. A political rock show. A bacchanalia of lies and mistruths. A pitch to voters.
Since bursting onto the presidential scene in 2015, Trump has transformed the American public’s conception of a political rally, taking the stage after hours of eardrum-shattering decibels of a self-curated playlist and offering a spectacle that changes depending on the place, the news cycle and the former president’s mood.
On the last Friday in February, the day before the South Carolina primary, Trump took the stage in Rock Hill, S.C., where he spoke for just over an hour and a half. A close examination of his remarks that day offers an anatomy of a Trump rally speech.
Like many of his recent speeches, it was long and laden with resentments, offering a dark vision for the nation that terrifies Democrats and animates his Republican base. It touched on recurring themes, including his election denialism, his promise of a sudden transformation in another Trump term and his claims of persecution and martyrdom.
Perhaps more importantly, Trump’s stump speech provides a road map of what a second Trump term might look like — fulfilling his promises to root out the so-called “deep state” of civil servants, harshly cracking down on illegal immigration and crime, and pulling back from the world stage. It also reveals many of his weaknesses as a candidate, such as sometimes slurring his words, confusing names of world leaders and attacking minorities in offensive ways.
At times, Trump hews to a teleprompter, while at others he careens gleefully off script. He can channel both comedy and rage, charisma and revenge.
Over time, his stump speech has evolved, though certain hallmarks remain. One constant is that it is certain to contain a slew of falsehoods and mistruths, ranging from hyperbole to outright lies, like his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen.
The Washington Post Fact Checker found that in the four years of his presidency, Trump offered a total of 30,573 untruths — an average of roughly 21 erroneous claims a day.
Themes of retribution and vengeance are also central, hovering like an ominous storm cloud. In a closing riff that has become a staple of every rally, Trump promises to “demolish the deep state,” to “cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists” and to “throw off the sick political class that hates our country.”
“We will rout the fake news media, we will drain the swamp and we will liberate our country from these tyrants and villains once and for all,” he declares.
Steven Cheung, campaign spokesman, said in an email statement to The Post: “President Trump is the only one speaking the truth and he’s going to continue shoving it down the media’s throat every single day, and there is nothing they can do about it.”
Trump fans, meanwhile, come hoping to hear his greatest hits, which have changed over time, from a call-and-response about the nation’s southern border to, now, boasting incorrectly of being indicted more times than Al Capone.
Last month, taking the stage in Rock Hill to the tunes of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA,” Trump enthused about the crowd size — “Wow, that’s a lot of people!” — and then he began to speak.
Election denialism
Following the 2020 election, Trump refused to acknowledge his loss — denialism that ultimately culminated with a deadly insurrection on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, at the hands of his angry supporters.
That hasn’t prevented Trump from returning to what he falsely claims is the stolen 2020 election — or the threat of a future rigged election — a theme that he regularly weaves through his stump speech. He has invoked the rhetoric at each of the 43 rallies he has held since officially kicking off his campaign in November 2022, according to a Post analysis.
Speaking in Rock Hill, Trump first broached the topic of what he dubbed “a failed election” by warning that “the only way it can end where they win is a rigged election,” before noting — again falsely — that what Democrats “did in 2020 is disgraceful.”
Alternate reality
Trump campaigns offering almost a complete alternate reality of what the world looked like under his administration — and what it would look like under a second one, as well.
“Under the Trump administration, you were better off, your family was better off, your neighbors were better off, your communities were better off and our country was far, far, far better off; that’s for sure,” Trump said, less than 10 minutes into his Rock Hill speech. “America was stronger and tougher and richer and safer and more confident.”
“Look what happened to our country,” he continued. “You have wars that never would have taken place. Russia would have never attacked Ukraine. Israel would have never been attacked. You wouldn’t have had inflation.”
In fact, Russia experts and members of Trump’s own administration say that Trump, overall, was notably weak in his stance toward Russia and other autocracies, and that Russian President Vladimir Putin would probably feel more emboldened under a second Trump term. Just last month, Trump said he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO-member countries he views as not spending enough on their own defense.
Victimization and persecution
To hear Trump tell it, he is the victim of massive political persecution.
The four indictments? The 91 total charges against him in four federal courts? The nearly $500 million in fees and fines that juries and judges have ordered him to pay? By his telling, Trump is a mere unwitting victim, fighting on behalf of his MAGA flock.
Immigration and the border
Trump has made immigration and the border a central part of his stump speech and his bid for a second term. In Rock Hill, Trump boasted that under his presidency, “nobody cared about the border because we solved the problem,” and he claimed that “we now have the worst border in the history of the world.”
Trump, of course, coped with a steady tide of illegal border crossings. The Border Patrol made 300,000 to 400,000 arrests a year during most of his term. An exception was in fiscal 2019, when arrests surged past 850,000, pushing the border to a breaking point and leading officials to release thousands of people into the United States.
But it is also true that illegal border crossings have surged to record levels under Biden, in part because the U.S. economy has rebounded faster from the pandemic than those of other countries. The U.S. Border Patrol is taking into custody an average of 2 million people a year, the highest levels in the agency’s 100-year history.
Trump called the arrival of undocumented immigrants an “invasion” — a description that comes up at almost every rally. “They’re taking your jobs. They’re taking your slots on education. Black and Hispanic populations have been hurt more by this travesty,” he declared. Studies show immigrants are a key reason the U.S. economy has rebounded so strongly after the pandemic, which critics say Trump worsened by deliberately downplaying the dangers of covid.
In Rock Hill, he vowed to “begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”
Trump has a long history of anti-immigrant rhetoric. In his speech, he characterized undocumented immigrants as violent, describing them without evidence as coming from “jails” and “mental institutions.”
Most of those arrested at the southern border do not have criminal convictions, federal data show, and experts say evidence indicates that undocumented immigrants do not cause more crime than legal U.S. residents.
Dark and apocalyptic
Trump offers a dark and apocalyptic description of the state of the country under Biden. And he has cast anything other than a win for him in November as spelling doom for the nation, often saying that 2024 “is our final battle.”
According a database of crimes created and maintained by The Post, for 85 of America’s largest cities and counties, homicide, robbery and aggravated assault went down in 2023, compared to 2022. The District, however, finished 2023 with the most homicides since 1997.
Trump concluded by narrating his view of the state of the country to a song that’s become an anthem for QAnon, an extremist movement that the FBI has designated as a domestic terrorism threat. As the song played in the background, Trump bemoaned: “We are a nation in decline. We are a failing nation”
Greatest hits
Trump can go off script during his rallies, but he has some go-to lines that draw loud cheers and raucous applause. Among those lines in Rock Hill were Trump’s vow to “not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or mask mandate”.
The crowd also broke into “USA” chants as Trump said: “We’re going to tell Crooked Joe Biden, ‘You’re fired, get out of here, you’re fired,’” and later when he falsely declared: “They rigged the presidential election and we’re not going to allow them to rig the presidential election of 2024.”
Tall tales
Trump often likes to tell dubious stories about his time in office that he argues highlight his negotiating skills — a central part of his projected identity.
One example came during his Rock Hill event, when he claimed he could solve complex matters “with a phone call.” He then offered a play-by-play rendition of an alleged conversation with French President Emmanuel Macron, in which Trump claimed Macron wanted to place a tax on American companies but that he stopped it.
The reality of the dispute was far more complicated — and it lasted much longer than a phone call.
In January 2020 — when the phone call that Trump is presumably referring to took place — Macron and Trump reached a truce that postponed the tax while the United States held back on retaliatory tariffs.
A close examination of one appearance in Rock Hill, S.C., offers an anatomy of a signature rally by the former president
By Ashley Parker, Marianne LeVine and Ross Godwin, The Washington Post
A Donald Trump rally is a freewheeling extravaganza. A festival of grievance and retribution. A dystopian vision of darkness and despair. A political rock show. A bacchanalia of lies and mistruths. A pitch to voters.
Since bursting onto the presidential scene in 2015, Trump has transformed the American public’s conception of a political rally, taking the stage after hours of eardrum-shattering decibels of a self-curated playlist and offering a spectacle that changes depending on the place, the news cycle and the former president’s mood.
On the last Friday in February, the day before the South Carolina primary, Trump took the stage in Rock Hill, S.C., where he spoke for just over an hour and a half. A close examination of his remarks that day offers an anatomy of a Trump rally speech.
Like many of his recent speeches, it was long and laden with resentments, offering a dark vision for the nation that terrifies Democrats and animates his Republican base. It touched on recurring themes, including his election denialism, his promise of a sudden transformation in another Trump term and his claims of persecution and martyrdom.
Perhaps more importantly, Trump’s stump speech provides a road map of what a second Trump term might look like — fulfilling his promises to root out the so-called “deep state” of civil servants, harshly cracking down on illegal immigration and crime, and pulling back from the world stage. It also reveals many of his weaknesses as a candidate, such as sometimes slurring his words, confusing names of world leaders and attacking minorities in offensive ways.
At times, Trump hews to a teleprompter, while at others he careens gleefully off script. He can channel both comedy and rage, charisma and revenge.
Over time, his stump speech has evolved, though certain hallmarks remain. One constant is that it is certain to contain a slew of falsehoods and mistruths, ranging from hyperbole to outright lies, like his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen.
The Washington Post Fact Checker found that in the four years of his presidency, Trump offered a total of 30,573 untruths — an average of roughly 21 erroneous claims a day.
Themes of retribution and vengeance are also central, hovering like an ominous storm cloud. In a closing riff that has become a staple of every rally, Trump promises to “demolish the deep state,” to “cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists” and to “throw off the sick political class that hates our country.”
“We will rout the fake news media, we will drain the swamp and we will liberate our country from these tyrants and villains once and for all,” he declares.
Steven Cheung, campaign spokesman, said in an email statement to The Post: “President Trump is the only one speaking the truth and he’s going to continue shoving it down the media’s throat every single day, and there is nothing they can do about it.”
Trump fans, meanwhile, come hoping to hear his greatest hits, which have changed over time, from a call-and-response about the nation’s southern border to, now, boasting incorrectly of being indicted more times than Al Capone.
Last month, taking the stage in Rock Hill to the tunes of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA,” Trump enthused about the crowd size — “Wow, that’s a lot of people!” — and then he began to speak.
Election denialism
Following the 2020 election, Trump refused to acknowledge his loss — denialism that ultimately culminated with a deadly insurrection on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, at the hands of his angry supporters.
That hasn’t prevented Trump from returning to what he falsely claims is the stolen 2020 election — or the threat of a future rigged election — a theme that he regularly weaves through his stump speech. He has invoked the rhetoric at each of the 43 rallies he has held since officially kicking off his campaign in November 2022, according to a Post analysis.
Speaking in Rock Hill, Trump first broached the topic of what he dubbed “a failed election” by warning that “the only way it can end where they win is a rigged election,” before noting — again falsely — that what Democrats “did in 2020 is disgraceful.”
Alternate reality
Trump campaigns offering almost a complete alternate reality of what the world looked like under his administration — and what it would look like under a second one, as well.
“Under the Trump administration, you were better off, your family was better off, your neighbors were better off, your communities were better off and our country was far, far, far better off; that’s for sure,” Trump said, less than 10 minutes into his Rock Hill speech. “America was stronger and tougher and richer and safer and more confident.”
“Look what happened to our country,” he continued. “You have wars that never would have taken place. Russia would have never attacked Ukraine. Israel would have never been attacked. You wouldn’t have had inflation.”
In fact, Russia experts and members of Trump’s own administration say that Trump, overall, was notably weak in his stance toward Russia and other autocracies, and that Russian President Vladimir Putin would probably feel more emboldened under a second Trump term. Just last month, Trump said he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO-member countries he views as not spending enough on their own defense.
Victimization and persecution
To hear Trump tell it, he is the victim of massive political persecution.
The four indictments? The 91 total charges against him in four federal courts? The nearly $500 million in fees and fines that juries and judges have ordered him to pay? By his telling, Trump is a mere unwitting victim, fighting on behalf of his MAGA flock.
Immigration and the border
Trump has made immigration and the border a central part of his stump speech and his bid for a second term. In Rock Hill, Trump boasted that under his presidency, “nobody cared about the border because we solved the problem,” and he claimed that “we now have the worst border in the history of the world.”
Trump, of course, coped with a steady tide of illegal border crossings. The Border Patrol made 300,000 to 400,000 arrests a year during most of his term. An exception was in fiscal 2019, when arrests surged past 850,000, pushing the border to a breaking point and leading officials to release thousands of people into the United States.
But it is also true that illegal border crossings have surged to record levels under Biden, in part because the U.S. economy has rebounded faster from the pandemic than those of other countries. The U.S. Border Patrol is taking into custody an average of 2 million people a year, the highest levels in the agency’s 100-year history.
Trump called the arrival of undocumented immigrants an “invasion” — a description that comes up at almost every rally. “They’re taking your jobs. They’re taking your slots on education. Black and Hispanic populations have been hurt more by this travesty,” he declared. Studies show immigrants are a key reason the U.S. economy has rebounded so strongly after the pandemic, which critics say Trump worsened by deliberately downplaying the dangers of covid.
In Rock Hill, he vowed to “begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”
Trump has a long history of anti-immigrant rhetoric. In his speech, he characterized undocumented immigrants as violent, describing them without evidence as coming from “jails” and “mental institutions.”
Most of those arrested at the southern border do not have criminal convictions, federal data show, and experts say evidence indicates that undocumented immigrants do not cause more crime than legal U.S. residents.
Dark and apocalyptic
Trump offers a dark and apocalyptic description of the state of the country under Biden. And he has cast anything other than a win for him in November as spelling doom for the nation, often saying that 2024 “is our final battle.”
According a database of crimes created and maintained by The Post, for 85 of America’s largest cities and counties, homicide, robbery and aggravated assault went down in 2023, compared to 2022. The District, however, finished 2023 with the most homicides since 1997.
Trump concluded by narrating his view of the state of the country to a song that’s become an anthem for QAnon, an extremist movement that the FBI has designated as a domestic terrorism threat. As the song played in the background, Trump bemoaned: “We are a nation in decline. We are a failing nation”
Greatest hits
Trump can go off script during his rallies, but he has some go-to lines that draw loud cheers and raucous applause. Among those lines in Rock Hill were Trump’s vow to “not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or mask mandate”.
The crowd also broke into “USA” chants as Trump said: “We’re going to tell Crooked Joe Biden, ‘You’re fired, get out of here, you’re fired,’” and later when he falsely declared: “They rigged the presidential election and we’re not going to allow them to rig the presidential election of 2024.”
Tall tales
Trump often likes to tell dubious stories about his time in office that he argues highlight his negotiating skills — a central part of his projected identity.
One example came during his Rock Hill event, when he claimed he could solve complex matters “with a phone call.” He then offered a play-by-play rendition of an alleged conversation with French President Emmanuel Macron, in which Trump claimed Macron wanted to place a tax on American companies but that he stopped it.
The reality of the dispute was far more complicated — and it lasted much longer than a phone call.
In January 2020 — when the phone call that Trump is presumably referring to took place — Macron and Trump reached a truce that postponed the tax while the United States held back on retaliatory tariffs.
HOW BIG PHARMA IS FIGHTING BIDEN’S PROGRAM TO LOWER SENIORS’ DRUG COSTS
In court cases nationwide, drug companies are trying to block a new law that would cut prices on drugs for high blood pressure, heart disease, cancer and diabetes.
By Tony Romm, The Washington Post
TRENTON, N.J. — Pharmaceutical giants are mounting a vigorous legal battle against President Biden’s plan to lower seniors’ prescription drug costs, urging federal judges here and around the country to invalidate a new program that aims to reduce the price of medications for high blood pressure, heart disease, cancer and diabetes.
In a flurry of lawsuits, these drugmakers have blasted the government initiative as unconstitutional, defended their pricing practices and warned that regulation could undermine future cures — even as millions of older Americans say they are struggling to afford essential treatments.
The legal wrangling appears primed to reach the Supreme Court, which could carry lasting implications for the government’s ability to regulate health-care prices broadly. The stakes are also enormous for Biden, who ran in 2020 on a pledge to fulfill a longtime promise — made by both parties — to ease a key financial strain on older Americans.
The pharmaceutical industry specifically seeks to block a new law that enables Medicare to negotiate the price of select drugs under its prescription benefit, known as Part D. The idea is modeled after similar systems internationally, which have helped lower costs in other countries even as Americans face sky-high prices for some of the same treatments.
Enacted in 2022 as part of Biden’s signature economic package, the Inflation Reduction Act, the law tasks the administration with identifying an initial set of 10 drugs to negotiate. The list was unveiled in August and includes the blood-thinner Eliquis, the heart-failure medication Farxiga and the diabetes pill Jardiance.
While manufacturers have since engaged in price discussions with the administration, they have also unleashed a blitz of legal challenges meant to upend the entire system. The intensity of their opposition was on display Thursday, as four pharmaceutical giants urged a federal judge in New Jersey to terminate the program before seniors would see any change to their drug costs.
The lawyers’ criticisms of the program echoed years of attacks from industry lobbyists, who signaled anew this month that they are committed to preventing the Biden administration from striking agreements to lower prices under Medicare.
The legal campaign offers the most immediate test for one of Biden’s prized legislative accomplishments, which relaxed a longtime prohibition against Medicare negotiating drug costs directly with manufacturers. Hours after court arguments concluded in Trenton, the president called on Congress to preserve and expand the very program that pharmaceutical giants are trying to unwind.
“Americans pay more for prescription drugs than anywhere else,” he said during his State of the Union address. “It’s wrong, and I’m ending it.
Generally, Americans do pay more for prescription drugs: Among the 10 medications that the United States has targeted for negotiation, prices can range from three to eight times higher than in Canada, Japan and other countries, according to a January report from the Commonwealth Fund, a research nonprofit, which studied 2021 data.
Historically, these costs have forced some of the poorest families to choose between lifesaving treatments and other needs like food and housing, while adding to the price of Medicare as U.S. debt skyrockets.
Supporters of the law point to the industry’s sky-high profits, generous executive compensation packages and lucrative stock buyback programs. Last year, Bristol Myers Squibb posted $45 billion in revenue, Merck reported about $60 billion in sales, and Johnson & Johnson raked in more than $85 billion, which includes drugs sold by Janssen, according to their earnings reports.
“Pharmaceutical companies are doing well right now,” said Kelly Bagby, vice president at AARP Foundation Litigation, which has filed legal briefs in support of the Biden administration. “They want to make sure their historical profitability is maintained, and not changed, while at the same time trying to delay everything.”
The drug industry has focused its attention on the courts: Since last year, companies and lobbying groups have filed nine lawsuits in Delaware, Ohio, New Jersey, Texas and the District of Columbia. While pharmaceutical giants have so far failed to score a victory, they have signaled they do not plan to waver in their campaign.
Under the Inflation Reduction Act, drug companies that engage in negotiations but refuse to accept the final price have a choice: They can pay a massive tax, or they can withdraw from Medicare entirely, denying medicines to seniors and losing a major source of revenue.
This month, Colm F. Connolly, chief judge for the U.S. District Court in Delaware, rejected AstraZeneca’s arguments. Appointed by former president Donald Trump in 2018, he described the negotiations as an “economic opportunity that AstraZeneca is free to accept or reject” because the government is not required to buy drugs at prices it isn’t willing to pay.
The legal challenges are part of a wider-ranging offensive by the pharmaceutical industry, long seen as one of the most powerful political forces in the nation’s capital. Since 2022, drugmakers and other companies have spent more than $761 million to lobby lawmakers and regulators, according to data from OpenSecrets, a money-in-politics watchdog.
Over that same period, the industry’s political action committees, along with their executives and employees, have also donated more than $77.5 million to federal office-seekers, the figures show. The tally does not include sharply critical ads run by groups like PhRMA targeting supporters of the Inflation Reduction Act.
The effort helped the industry whittle down Democrats’ original plans in 2022 to negotiate a wider range of drugs on a more aggressive timeline. Since then, major drugmakers have also supported a slew of Republican-led efforts to weaken or repeal Medicare’s new powers. The sustained opposition has raised the stakes entering the 2024 election; a GOP takeover of Congress and the White House could end the result in the termination of Biden’s negotiation program.
“The drug companies are going to full-court press through all the avenues they have influence,” said Steve Knievel, a health policy expert at Public Citizen, which has filed briefs supporting the administration.
In court cases nationwide, drug companies are trying to block a new law that would cut prices on drugs for high blood pressure, heart disease, cancer and diabetes.
By Tony Romm, The Washington Post
TRENTON, N.J. — Pharmaceutical giants are mounting a vigorous legal battle against President Biden’s plan to lower seniors’ prescription drug costs, urging federal judges here and around the country to invalidate a new program that aims to reduce the price of medications for high blood pressure, heart disease, cancer and diabetes.
In a flurry of lawsuits, these drugmakers have blasted the government initiative as unconstitutional, defended their pricing practices and warned that regulation could undermine future cures — even as millions of older Americans say they are struggling to afford essential treatments.
The legal wrangling appears primed to reach the Supreme Court, which could carry lasting implications for the government’s ability to regulate health-care prices broadly. The stakes are also enormous for Biden, who ran in 2020 on a pledge to fulfill a longtime promise — made by both parties — to ease a key financial strain on older Americans.
The pharmaceutical industry specifically seeks to block a new law that enables Medicare to negotiate the price of select drugs under its prescription benefit, known as Part D. The idea is modeled after similar systems internationally, which have helped lower costs in other countries even as Americans face sky-high prices for some of the same treatments.
Enacted in 2022 as part of Biden’s signature economic package, the Inflation Reduction Act, the law tasks the administration with identifying an initial set of 10 drugs to negotiate. The list was unveiled in August and includes the blood-thinner Eliquis, the heart-failure medication Farxiga and the diabetes pill Jardiance.
While manufacturers have since engaged in price discussions with the administration, they have also unleashed a blitz of legal challenges meant to upend the entire system. The intensity of their opposition was on display Thursday, as four pharmaceutical giants urged a federal judge in New Jersey to terminate the program before seniors would see any change to their drug costs.
The lawyers’ criticisms of the program echoed years of attacks from industry lobbyists, who signaled anew this month that they are committed to preventing the Biden administration from striking agreements to lower prices under Medicare.
The legal campaign offers the most immediate test for one of Biden’s prized legislative accomplishments, which relaxed a longtime prohibition against Medicare negotiating drug costs directly with manufacturers. Hours after court arguments concluded in Trenton, the president called on Congress to preserve and expand the very program that pharmaceutical giants are trying to unwind.
“Americans pay more for prescription drugs than anywhere else,” he said during his State of the Union address. “It’s wrong, and I’m ending it.
Generally, Americans do pay more for prescription drugs: Among the 10 medications that the United States has targeted for negotiation, prices can range from three to eight times higher than in Canada, Japan and other countries, according to a January report from the Commonwealth Fund, a research nonprofit, which studied 2021 data.
Historically, these costs have forced some of the poorest families to choose between lifesaving treatments and other needs like food and housing, while adding to the price of Medicare as U.S. debt skyrockets.
Supporters of the law point to the industry’s sky-high profits, generous executive compensation packages and lucrative stock buyback programs. Last year, Bristol Myers Squibb posted $45 billion in revenue, Merck reported about $60 billion in sales, and Johnson & Johnson raked in more than $85 billion, which includes drugs sold by Janssen, according to their earnings reports.
“Pharmaceutical companies are doing well right now,” said Kelly Bagby, vice president at AARP Foundation Litigation, which has filed legal briefs in support of the Biden administration. “They want to make sure their historical profitability is maintained, and not changed, while at the same time trying to delay everything.”
The drug industry has focused its attention on the courts: Since last year, companies and lobbying groups have filed nine lawsuits in Delaware, Ohio, New Jersey, Texas and the District of Columbia. While pharmaceutical giants have so far failed to score a victory, they have signaled they do not plan to waver in their campaign.
Under the Inflation Reduction Act, drug companies that engage in negotiations but refuse to accept the final price have a choice: They can pay a massive tax, or they can withdraw from Medicare entirely, denying medicines to seniors and losing a major source of revenue.
This month, Colm F. Connolly, chief judge for the U.S. District Court in Delaware, rejected AstraZeneca’s arguments. Appointed by former president Donald Trump in 2018, he described the negotiations as an “economic opportunity that AstraZeneca is free to accept or reject” because the government is not required to buy drugs at prices it isn’t willing to pay.
The legal challenges are part of a wider-ranging offensive by the pharmaceutical industry, long seen as one of the most powerful political forces in the nation’s capital. Since 2022, drugmakers and other companies have spent more than $761 million to lobby lawmakers and regulators, according to data from OpenSecrets, a money-in-politics watchdog.
Over that same period, the industry’s political action committees, along with their executives and employees, have also donated more than $77.5 million to federal office-seekers, the figures show. The tally does not include sharply critical ads run by groups like PhRMA targeting supporters of the Inflation Reduction Act.
The effort helped the industry whittle down Democrats’ original plans in 2022 to negotiate a wider range of drugs on a more aggressive timeline. Since then, major drugmakers have also supported a slew of Republican-led efforts to weaken or repeal Medicare’s new powers. The sustained opposition has raised the stakes entering the 2024 election; a GOP takeover of Congress and the White House could end the result in the termination of Biden’s negotiation program.
“The drug companies are going to full-court press through all the avenues they have influence,” said Steve Knievel, a health policy expert at Public Citizen, which has filed briefs supporting the administration.
BIDEN, REPUBLICANS AND MEDIA FACE CRITICAL GENERAL ELECTION CHOICES
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Biden has known for months he would face four-times-indicted former president Donald Trump in the general election. But with former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley’s departure from the race and the Supreme Court keeping Trump on the ballot, the general election now begins in earnest. That means Biden, Republicans and the media face critical decisions.
First, Biden must decide if he wants to ignore Trump’s criminal cases. He certainly should not comment on the specifics of those cases (for fear of giving Trump grounds to appeal). However, while Trump spends weeks in courtrooms, Biden has the opportunity to make the election into a referendum: Do voters want to let Trump escape prosecution?
If Trump wins, he likely will either pardon himself or simply instruct the Justice Department to drop federal cases. He no doubt also will demand state courts halt their cases while he is in office. That would be antithetical to the rule of law, an outlandish effort to put himself above the law. The Trump campaign itself is a scheme to avoid the criminal justice system. Biden can present the stark choice: Do we rescue Trump from 91 criminal charges by putting him in the White House?
Moreover, Biden can remind voters that Trump thinks the presidency empowers him to act without fear of criminal liability. Trump’s counsel explicitly argued there are no consequences for a president’s overtly criminal acts (e.g., assassinating opponents). Biden should bring the argument to the country (and implicitly to the Supreme Court, which is considering Trump’s immunity case) that a president with this imperial outlook will upend our democracy.
Second, Republicans have reached a moment of truth. If Haley, former Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney, Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah) and former president George W. Bush recognize the threat Trump poses to democracy, the rule of law and America’s national security, they cannot merely withhold support. Do they continue to speak out against his election — or even endorse Biden, the only person who can prevent Trump from regaining power and sinking our democracy?
They can enlist supporters under the banner of something along the lines of “One Election.” (If Trump wins, there might be no others!) As Cheney has said, We “can survive bad policies. We can’t survive a president who goes to war with the Constitution.” Now it’s time for these Republicans to make that endorsement decision.
Third, mainstream news outlets must decide how to cover the general election. Do they finally cover Trump’s obvious defects, zero in on the implications of installing a Vladimir Putin sympathizer and confront the danger of another Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection if Trump loses? To date, the traditional print and TV news operations have refused to cover the race as they would a foreign contest between a democratic candidate and an authoritarian bent on overturning democracy. Some insist Trump’s campaign is pivoting from grievances to serious “policy”!
However, traditional media still have time to reveal the true nature of the MAGA movement, its leader and its cult followers. News outlets at any time can drop the false equivalence and educate themselves and voters.
The brilliant Democratic strategist Michael Podhorzer, for example, puts the MAGA movement in the context of the old Confederacy (which geographically overlaps GOP electoral strongholds):
“You can think of MAGA as a fascist movement or as the “legitimate” expression of a theocratic Red Nation that is in a cold war with the Blue Nation, or both. (In the 21st century, the Red Nation has also been making inroads in the purple states.) Either way, the MAGA movement is an enemy of liberal democracy and has taken over the Republican Party. Its and MAGA’s continued success in building its preferred version of America depends on the political class’s stubborn refusal to call out the Republican Party for what it has become.
No matter how many times the Confederate Faction signals that it does not accept the legitimacy of the American project, we refuse to believe them. We reflexively reinterpret attacks against America as mere disagreements or empty rhetoric aimed at their MAGA base, even as our attackers lack no clarity about their own intentions. . . .
In reality, our choice in November is whether to keep giving the benefit of the doubt to rebels who believe that theirs, not ours, is the legitimate cause.”
The mainstream news can reach out to any of the numerous expert historians on authoritarianism and the Lost Cause mind-set that still drives MAGA politicians. (E.g., Texas insists it can nullify federal immigration policy.) There is still time to explain to voters that the election will determine if we enter a fascist era that rejects democratic pluralism and cedes power to a dangerous strongman. (While news organizations are looking for experts, they should consult some candid mental health professionals to explain Trump’s mental state and seeming linguistic deterioration).
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Biden has known for months he would face four-times-indicted former president Donald Trump in the general election. But with former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley’s departure from the race and the Supreme Court keeping Trump on the ballot, the general election now begins in earnest. That means Biden, Republicans and the media face critical decisions.
First, Biden must decide if he wants to ignore Trump’s criminal cases. He certainly should not comment on the specifics of those cases (for fear of giving Trump grounds to appeal). However, while Trump spends weeks in courtrooms, Biden has the opportunity to make the election into a referendum: Do voters want to let Trump escape prosecution?
If Trump wins, he likely will either pardon himself or simply instruct the Justice Department to drop federal cases. He no doubt also will demand state courts halt their cases while he is in office. That would be antithetical to the rule of law, an outlandish effort to put himself above the law. The Trump campaign itself is a scheme to avoid the criminal justice system. Biden can present the stark choice: Do we rescue Trump from 91 criminal charges by putting him in the White House?
Moreover, Biden can remind voters that Trump thinks the presidency empowers him to act without fear of criminal liability. Trump’s counsel explicitly argued there are no consequences for a president’s overtly criminal acts (e.g., assassinating opponents). Biden should bring the argument to the country (and implicitly to the Supreme Court, which is considering Trump’s immunity case) that a president with this imperial outlook will upend our democracy.
Second, Republicans have reached a moment of truth. If Haley, former Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney, Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah) and former president George W. Bush recognize the threat Trump poses to democracy, the rule of law and America’s national security, they cannot merely withhold support. Do they continue to speak out against his election — or even endorse Biden, the only person who can prevent Trump from regaining power and sinking our democracy?
They can enlist supporters under the banner of something along the lines of “One Election.” (If Trump wins, there might be no others!) As Cheney has said, We “can survive bad policies. We can’t survive a president who goes to war with the Constitution.” Now it’s time for these Republicans to make that endorsement decision.
Third, mainstream news outlets must decide how to cover the general election. Do they finally cover Trump’s obvious defects, zero in on the implications of installing a Vladimir Putin sympathizer and confront the danger of another Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection if Trump loses? To date, the traditional print and TV news operations have refused to cover the race as they would a foreign contest between a democratic candidate and an authoritarian bent on overturning democracy. Some insist Trump’s campaign is pivoting from grievances to serious “policy”!
However, traditional media still have time to reveal the true nature of the MAGA movement, its leader and its cult followers. News outlets at any time can drop the false equivalence and educate themselves and voters.
The brilliant Democratic strategist Michael Podhorzer, for example, puts the MAGA movement in the context of the old Confederacy (which geographically overlaps GOP electoral strongholds):
“You can think of MAGA as a fascist movement or as the “legitimate” expression of a theocratic Red Nation that is in a cold war with the Blue Nation, or both. (In the 21st century, the Red Nation has also been making inroads in the purple states.) Either way, the MAGA movement is an enemy of liberal democracy and has taken over the Republican Party. Its and MAGA’s continued success in building its preferred version of America depends on the political class’s stubborn refusal to call out the Republican Party for what it has become.
No matter how many times the Confederate Faction signals that it does not accept the legitimacy of the American project, we refuse to believe them. We reflexively reinterpret attacks against America as mere disagreements or empty rhetoric aimed at their MAGA base, even as our attackers lack no clarity about their own intentions. . . .
In reality, our choice in November is whether to keep giving the benefit of the doubt to rebels who believe that theirs, not ours, is the legitimate cause.”
The mainstream news can reach out to any of the numerous expert historians on authoritarianism and the Lost Cause mind-set that still drives MAGA politicians. (E.g., Texas insists it can nullify federal immigration policy.) There is still time to explain to voters that the election will determine if we enter a fascist era that rejects democratic pluralism and cedes power to a dangerous strongman. (While news organizations are looking for experts, they should consult some candid mental health professionals to explain Trump’s mental state and seeming linguistic deterioration).
ONLY VOTERS CAN SAVE THE COUNTRY FROM A SECOND TRUMP TERM
Everyone who cares about democracy and hard-won civil rights must do everything possible to increase voter registration and turnout.
by The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
The winner of November’s presidential election will be decided by a handful of states, including Pennsylvania. Polls in the Keystone State show the likely rematch between President Joe Biden and Donald Trump is a toss-up. That means every vote will matter. Every nonvoter and third-party voter will also impact the outcome. (See 2016.)
Given the extreme danger of a second Trump term, county officials must do everything possible to increase voter registration and turnout. There is nothing more important they could be doing between now and Election Day.
These are not normal times. And this is not a normal election between candidates debating tax rates or defense spending. In fact, Trump bizarrely claimed last month that if he loses, Pennsylvania will change its name.
Hence the 911 situation. Or as Ben Bradlee said in All the President’s Men, “Nothing’s riding on this except the, uh, First Amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press, and maybe the future of the country.”
Many other pressing issues are also at stake, including climate change, immigration, inflation, abortion rights, Obamacare, voting rights, LGBTQ rights, peace in the Middle East, the future of NATO, support for Ukraine, crime, public education, student loan debt, gay marriage, and affordable housing.
While Biden has not solved every problem, he will not take a wrecking ball to all the above and more. Yes, Biden is old (81), but he’s also decent and honorable and will uphold his sworn oath to support and protect the Constitution.
Trump, on the other hand, called for terminating the Constitution and vowed to become a dictator on Day One. He also fueled an insurrection and tried to overthrow the 2020 election. He’s facing four criminal indictments and has been found liable for rape and fraud. (And, at 77, he’s also old.)
We all witnessed the damage Trump inflicted during his last term. Trump was instrumental in overturning Roe v. Wade. He pulled the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, eliminated more than 100 environmental rules, and thinks climate change is a hoax. He tried to repeal Obamacare and plans to renew those efforts if elected. He failed repeatedly to fix the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. Even the conservative Cato Institute said his “impenetrable” border wall was a failure that gets breached daily.
Trump increased the deficit by nearly $8 trillion and mismanaged the pandemic, causing tens of thousands of avoidable deaths. He repeatedly threatened to withdraw the U.S. from NATO and recently renewed similar talk.
Perhaps worst of all, Trump left the country more divided and hate-filled. If elected, Trump and his allies plan to implement much more radical policies that will upend core beliefs in American governance, foreign policy, and the rule of law.
Plans include using the U.S. Justice Department to go after political enemies, rounding up millions of undocumented immigrants and putting them in camps, dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency to allow for the burning of more fossil fuels, and implementing a 16-week national abortion ban.
Trump has already signaled his foreign policy will be more dangerous and destabilizing than the last time.
He called Vladimir Putin a “genius” for invading Ukraine and said he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries that don’t pay their share if reelected.
He said Israel should “finish the problem” in Gaza, where fighting has resulted in thousands of deaths of women and children and a ghastly humanitarian crisis.
Trump plans a massive trade war with China that includes a 60% tariff on imports, and also casually predicts China will invade Taiwan.
That’s just the short list.
Congress, prosecutors, and the courts will not save the country from Trump. It is up to voters. The narrow voter margin requires all hands on deck. Gov. Shapiro created a task force to protect the vote. That’s well and good, but hardly enough. Pennsylvania has much to gain if Biden is reelected. And much to lose in the way of federal funding if Trump returns.
Biden won Pennsylvania by just 80,555 votes in 2020, and Trump won by 44,292 in 2016. With a few thousand votes likely to dictate the future of U.S. democracy. Otherwise, a much bigger calamity awaits.
Everyone who cares about democracy and hard-won civil rights must do everything possible to increase voter registration and turnout.
by The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
The winner of November’s presidential election will be decided by a handful of states, including Pennsylvania. Polls in the Keystone State show the likely rematch between President Joe Biden and Donald Trump is a toss-up. That means every vote will matter. Every nonvoter and third-party voter will also impact the outcome. (See 2016.)
Given the extreme danger of a second Trump term, county officials must do everything possible to increase voter registration and turnout. There is nothing more important they could be doing between now and Election Day.
These are not normal times. And this is not a normal election between candidates debating tax rates or defense spending. In fact, Trump bizarrely claimed last month that if he loses, Pennsylvania will change its name.
Hence the 911 situation. Or as Ben Bradlee said in All the President’s Men, “Nothing’s riding on this except the, uh, First Amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press, and maybe the future of the country.”
Many other pressing issues are also at stake, including climate change, immigration, inflation, abortion rights, Obamacare, voting rights, LGBTQ rights, peace in the Middle East, the future of NATO, support for Ukraine, crime, public education, student loan debt, gay marriage, and affordable housing.
While Biden has not solved every problem, he will not take a wrecking ball to all the above and more. Yes, Biden is old (81), but he’s also decent and honorable and will uphold his sworn oath to support and protect the Constitution.
Trump, on the other hand, called for terminating the Constitution and vowed to become a dictator on Day One. He also fueled an insurrection and tried to overthrow the 2020 election. He’s facing four criminal indictments and has been found liable for rape and fraud. (And, at 77, he’s also old.)
We all witnessed the damage Trump inflicted during his last term. Trump was instrumental in overturning Roe v. Wade. He pulled the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, eliminated more than 100 environmental rules, and thinks climate change is a hoax. He tried to repeal Obamacare and plans to renew those efforts if elected. He failed repeatedly to fix the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. Even the conservative Cato Institute said his “impenetrable” border wall was a failure that gets breached daily.
Trump increased the deficit by nearly $8 trillion and mismanaged the pandemic, causing tens of thousands of avoidable deaths. He repeatedly threatened to withdraw the U.S. from NATO and recently renewed similar talk.
Perhaps worst of all, Trump left the country more divided and hate-filled. If elected, Trump and his allies plan to implement much more radical policies that will upend core beliefs in American governance, foreign policy, and the rule of law.
Plans include using the U.S. Justice Department to go after political enemies, rounding up millions of undocumented immigrants and putting them in camps, dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency to allow for the burning of more fossil fuels, and implementing a 16-week national abortion ban.
Trump has already signaled his foreign policy will be more dangerous and destabilizing than the last time.
He called Vladimir Putin a “genius” for invading Ukraine and said he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries that don’t pay their share if reelected.
He said Israel should “finish the problem” in Gaza, where fighting has resulted in thousands of deaths of women and children and a ghastly humanitarian crisis.
Trump plans a massive trade war with China that includes a 60% tariff on imports, and also casually predicts China will invade Taiwan.
That’s just the short list.
Congress, prosecutors, and the courts will not save the country from Trump. It is up to voters. The narrow voter margin requires all hands on deck. Gov. Shapiro created a task force to protect the vote. That’s well and good, but hardly enough. Pennsylvania has much to gain if Biden is reelected. And much to lose in the way of federal funding if Trump returns.
Biden won Pennsylvania by just 80,555 votes in 2020, and Trump won by 44,292 in 2016. With a few thousand votes likely to dictate the future of U.S. democracy. Otherwise, a much bigger calamity awaits.
WHY HALEY VOTERS SHOULD SUPPORT BIDEN
By David French, The New York Times
Last Wednesday, a day before he delivered a rousing State of the Union address, Joe Biden issued an invitation to the roughly 30 percent of Republican primary voters who had voted for Nikki Haley in the G.O.P. presidential primaries before she dropped out. The message was simple: Donald Trump doesn’t want you, but we do. After all, Trump said on Truth Social that anyone who made a “contribution” to Haley would be “permanently barred from the MAGA camp.” Biden, by contrast, acknowledged differences of opinion with Haley voters but argued that agreement on democracy, decency, the rule of law and support for NATO should unite Haley voters against Trump.
Is Biden correct? Is there an argument that could persuade a meaningful number of Haley conservatives to vote for Biden? In ordinary times the answer would be no. It still may be no. Negative polarization is the dominant fact of American political life. Asking a person to change political teams is like asking him or her to disrupt friendships and family relationships, to move from the beloved “us” to the hated “them.” They’re going to do it only as a last resort, when they truly understand and feel the same way about the Republican Party that Ronald Reagan felt when he departed the Democratic Party: He didn’t leave the party. The party left him.
Now, however, it’s the G.O.P. that is sprinting away from Reagan — and from Haley Republicans — as fast as MAGA can carry it. The right is not just mad at Republican dissenters for defying Trump; it has such profound policy disagreements with Reagan and Haley Republicans that it’s hard to imagine the two factions coexisting for much longer. Given the power imbalance in a Trump G.O.P., that means that for the foreseeable future traditional conservatives will face a choice: conform or leave.
It’s likely that most people will conform. But they ought to leave. If a political party is a shared enterprise for advancing policies and ideas with the hope of achieving concrete outcomes, then there are key ways in which a second Biden term would be a better fit for Reagan Republicans than Round 2 of Trump.
Take national security. Even apart from his self-evident disregard for democracy, Trump’s weakness in the Ukraine conflict and his hostility to American alliances may represent the most dangerous aspects of a second term, with potential world-historic consequences similar to those of American isolationism before World War II.
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Biden’s continuing support for NATO, by contrast, has made America stronger. The accession of Finland and Sweden to NATO has added their potent militaries to the Western alliance. The strategic Baltic Sea is now a “NATO lake.” Biden was smart to start his State of the Union address by contrasting Reagan’s demand to Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall with Trump’s invitation to Vladimir Putin’s Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries who “don’t pay.”
There is no fiscal conservative in the race. Trump had a higher deficit each successive year he was in office, for example. But Biden’s economic stewardship has been sound. Inflation is easing, the stock market has reached record highs, unemployment is below 4 percent, and the median net worth of the American family increased by 37 percent between 2019 and 2022, even controlling for inflation.
The record is even better in a global context. To the extent America has struggled, we’ve struggled less than our peer competitors. Last year, The Economist published a comprehensive economic analysis demonstrating that “on a whole range of measures American dominance remains striking. And relative to its rich-world peers its lead is increasing.”
Let’s also look at the rule of law. Trump took office promising to end “American carnage,” but it skyrocketed on his watch. Between 2019 and 2020, America experienced the “largest single-year increase” in the murder rate in “more than a century.” Under Biden, by contrast, in 2023, “The number of murders in U.S. cities fell by more than 12 percent,” a number that would represent “the biggest national decline on record,” as my colleague German Lopez reported earlier this year. Violent crime “is near its lowest level in 50 years.”
Moreover, the Biden administration didn’t defund the police, but MAGA might. Last Wednesday, the House speaker, Mike Johnson, promised to “cut 3 percent from D.O.J., 7 percent from the ATF, 6 percent from the F.B.I., and 10 percent from the E.P.A.,” and, he said, “that’s just a start.” He claims that these cuts are due to federal “overreach,” but that’s also the justification for left-wing defunding efforts. MAGA likewise believes that law enforcement has abused its authority.
The most fraught issue for many conservatives considering crossing the aisle is abortion. That’s certainly the most difficult issue for me. But while Trump nominated the justices who helped reverse Roe v. Wade, he also failed on the most important metric of all: the number of abortions performed in America. Although Barack Obama was very much a pro-choice president, the abortion rate decreased by a remarkable 28 percent during his two terms, with 338,270 fewer abortions performed in 2016 than in 2008. By contrast, there were 56,080 more abortions by the end of Trump’s presidency in 2020 than there had been in 2016, and the abortion rate rose for three consecutive years, in 2018, 2019 and 2020.
Compounding the problem for anti-abortion conservatives, the MAGA-dominated G.O.P. has been an electoral disaster. The anti-abortion position is failing even in red states. The MAGA ethos of corruption and cruelty is a poor fit for a movement that’s supposed to be dedicated to loving the most vulnerable among us.
I raise these issues not to argue that Reagan Republicans have a true home in a Biden-led Democratic Party. Of course profound differences remain, and the far left may prove implacably hostile to any conservatives in the Democratic tent. But Reagan (and Haley) Republicans also have such profound differences with MAGA that it is genuinely debatable which party now better advances their preferred policies.
But here’s what’s not debatable: While the ideological alignments of the two parties are in a state of flux, only one party is nominating a man who’s been impeached twice, indicted in four criminal cases, found liable for systemic financial fraud, and found liable for sexual abuse and for defaming his victim. He is a man who inspired and gave at least tacit support to a violent assault on the Capitol in an effort to overturn an American election.
It’s plain, however, that the corruption argument alone isn’t pulling sufficient numbers from Trump. Reagan conservatives don’t just need reasons to vote against Trump. They also plainly need reasons to vote for Joe Biden. In 2024, we have two presidential records to compare. And this time it’s the Democrat who can say that he’s tougher on Russia and better on crime, and overseeing an economy that’s the envy of the world. That’s a case for conservatives. The question is whether it’s a case they’re willing to hear.
By David French, The New York Times
Last Wednesday, a day before he delivered a rousing State of the Union address, Joe Biden issued an invitation to the roughly 30 percent of Republican primary voters who had voted for Nikki Haley in the G.O.P. presidential primaries before she dropped out. The message was simple: Donald Trump doesn’t want you, but we do. After all, Trump said on Truth Social that anyone who made a “contribution” to Haley would be “permanently barred from the MAGA camp.” Biden, by contrast, acknowledged differences of opinion with Haley voters but argued that agreement on democracy, decency, the rule of law and support for NATO should unite Haley voters against Trump.
Is Biden correct? Is there an argument that could persuade a meaningful number of Haley conservatives to vote for Biden? In ordinary times the answer would be no. It still may be no. Negative polarization is the dominant fact of American political life. Asking a person to change political teams is like asking him or her to disrupt friendships and family relationships, to move from the beloved “us” to the hated “them.” They’re going to do it only as a last resort, when they truly understand and feel the same way about the Republican Party that Ronald Reagan felt when he departed the Democratic Party: He didn’t leave the party. The party left him.
Now, however, it’s the G.O.P. that is sprinting away from Reagan — and from Haley Republicans — as fast as MAGA can carry it. The right is not just mad at Republican dissenters for defying Trump; it has such profound policy disagreements with Reagan and Haley Republicans that it’s hard to imagine the two factions coexisting for much longer. Given the power imbalance in a Trump G.O.P., that means that for the foreseeable future traditional conservatives will face a choice: conform or leave.
It’s likely that most people will conform. But they ought to leave. If a political party is a shared enterprise for advancing policies and ideas with the hope of achieving concrete outcomes, then there are key ways in which a second Biden term would be a better fit for Reagan Republicans than Round 2 of Trump.
Take national security. Even apart from his self-evident disregard for democracy, Trump’s weakness in the Ukraine conflict and his hostility to American alliances may represent the most dangerous aspects of a second term, with potential world-historic consequences similar to those of American isolationism before World War II.
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Biden’s continuing support for NATO, by contrast, has made America stronger. The accession of Finland and Sweden to NATO has added their potent militaries to the Western alliance. The strategic Baltic Sea is now a “NATO lake.” Biden was smart to start his State of the Union address by contrasting Reagan’s demand to Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall with Trump’s invitation to Vladimir Putin’s Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries who “don’t pay.”
There is no fiscal conservative in the race. Trump had a higher deficit each successive year he was in office, for example. But Biden’s economic stewardship has been sound. Inflation is easing, the stock market has reached record highs, unemployment is below 4 percent, and the median net worth of the American family increased by 37 percent between 2019 and 2022, even controlling for inflation.
The record is even better in a global context. To the extent America has struggled, we’ve struggled less than our peer competitors. Last year, The Economist published a comprehensive economic analysis demonstrating that “on a whole range of measures American dominance remains striking. And relative to its rich-world peers its lead is increasing.”
Let’s also look at the rule of law. Trump took office promising to end “American carnage,” but it skyrocketed on his watch. Between 2019 and 2020, America experienced the “largest single-year increase” in the murder rate in “more than a century.” Under Biden, by contrast, in 2023, “The number of murders in U.S. cities fell by more than 12 percent,” a number that would represent “the biggest national decline on record,” as my colleague German Lopez reported earlier this year. Violent crime “is near its lowest level in 50 years.”
Moreover, the Biden administration didn’t defund the police, but MAGA might. Last Wednesday, the House speaker, Mike Johnson, promised to “cut 3 percent from D.O.J., 7 percent from the ATF, 6 percent from the F.B.I., and 10 percent from the E.P.A.,” and, he said, “that’s just a start.” He claims that these cuts are due to federal “overreach,” but that’s also the justification for left-wing defunding efforts. MAGA likewise believes that law enforcement has abused its authority.
The most fraught issue for many conservatives considering crossing the aisle is abortion. That’s certainly the most difficult issue for me. But while Trump nominated the justices who helped reverse Roe v. Wade, he also failed on the most important metric of all: the number of abortions performed in America. Although Barack Obama was very much a pro-choice president, the abortion rate decreased by a remarkable 28 percent during his two terms, with 338,270 fewer abortions performed in 2016 than in 2008. By contrast, there were 56,080 more abortions by the end of Trump’s presidency in 2020 than there had been in 2016, and the abortion rate rose for three consecutive years, in 2018, 2019 and 2020.
Compounding the problem for anti-abortion conservatives, the MAGA-dominated G.O.P. has been an electoral disaster. The anti-abortion position is failing even in red states. The MAGA ethos of corruption and cruelty is a poor fit for a movement that’s supposed to be dedicated to loving the most vulnerable among us.
I raise these issues not to argue that Reagan Republicans have a true home in a Biden-led Democratic Party. Of course profound differences remain, and the far left may prove implacably hostile to any conservatives in the Democratic tent. But Reagan (and Haley) Republicans also have such profound differences with MAGA that it is genuinely debatable which party now better advances their preferred policies.
But here’s what’s not debatable: While the ideological alignments of the two parties are in a state of flux, only one party is nominating a man who’s been impeached twice, indicted in four criminal cases, found liable for systemic financial fraud, and found liable for sexual abuse and for defaming his victim. He is a man who inspired and gave at least tacit support to a violent assault on the Capitol in an effort to overturn an American election.
It’s plain, however, that the corruption argument alone isn’t pulling sufficient numbers from Trump. Reagan conservatives don’t just need reasons to vote against Trump. They also plainly need reasons to vote for Joe Biden. In 2024, we have two presidential records to compare. And this time it’s the Democrat who can say that he’s tougher on Russia and better on crime, and overseeing an economy that’s the envy of the world. That’s a case for conservatives. The question is whether it’s a case they’re willing to hear.
TRUMP MEETS WITH ORBAN, HUNGARY’S AUTOCRATIC LEADER
The meeting immediately drew rebuke from Biden, who cited Orban’s criticisms of democracy
By Maegan Vazquez, The Washington Post
Former president Donald Trump met with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban on Friday, continuing his embrace of autocratic world leaders as he seeks reelection for the American presidency.
Orban’s trip to the United States also included a stop in Washington, where he delivered remarks at the Heritage Foundation, which has close ties to Trump. That appearance was on Thursday, the same day as President Biden’s State of the Union address, which took place in the Capitol just a few blocks away from the conservative think tank’s headquarters.
It marked an extraordinary move: a foreign leader paying a visit to the United States, including making a stop in the nation’s capital, without meeting with the sitting president and instead meeting with his political rival.
Trump has repeatedly praised Orban over the years, frequently praising what he sees as strength in leadership on the campaign trail. He also hosted Orban at the White House in 2019, an invitation the previous two American presidents had purposefully not extended.
Orban has worked to undermine key democratic institutions in Hungary since coming into power in 2010. A self-proclaimed proponent of “illiberal” Christian democracy, he’s championed restrictions on LGBTQ+ rights and immigration while cracking down on the country’s judiciary and the press. He’s also garnered praise from conservative populists and conservative institutions in the United States, reinterpreting Trump’s longtime slogan and frequently saying “Make Europe Great Again” in public remarks.
After appearing at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, Orban wrote on X that he discussed the “common ground for cooperation between the conservative forces of Europe and the US,” in his remarks. “Supporting families, fighting illegal migration and standing up for the sovereignty of our nations,” he said.
The Hungarian leader then traveled from Washington to Palm Beach, Fla., to see Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate, in a meeting on Friday that displayed some of the symbolism typically reserved for two sitting world leaders.
each other at the steps of the estate, posing on a red carpet flanked by American and Hungarian flags.
Inside, with their parties facing one another at long conference tables, the two men held meetings to discuss “a wide range of issues affecting Hungary and the United States, including the paramount importance of strong and secure borders to protect the sovereignty of each nation,” according to the Trump campaign. There was an evening concert inside the compound, where Trump took the stage to praise Orban.
“There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orban,” Trump said Friday night. The former president, in an apparent nod to the Hungarian leader’s autocratic approach, went on to say Orban is “a noncontroversial figure because he says, ‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it. Right? He’s the boss. No, he’s a great leader.”
Orban lent his support to Trump on X, saying that the world needs “leaders in the world who are respected and can bring peace. He is one of them! Come back and bring us peace, Mr. President!”
President Biden slammed the Trump-Orban meeting on Friday, saying it demonstrated his main rival’s authoritarian tendencies.
“You know [who Trump is] meeting with today down at Mar-a-Lago? Orban of Hungary, who stated flatly he doesn’t think democracy works,” Biden said at a campaign stop in Pennsylvania. “He’s looking for dictatorship ... that’s who he’s meeting with. I see a future where we defend democracy, not diminish it.”
On Saturday, Trump doubled down on his embrace of Orban, describing him as a “great gentleman.” “Some people don’t like him because he’s very tough,” Trump said to supporters at his campaign rally in Rome, Ga. “I know him very well.”
The president’s remarks came a day after he hosted Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson at the State of the Union address to mark Sweden joining the NATO alliance. Orban had initially resisted Sweden’s bid to join the alliance as well as the European Union’s aid for Ukraine amid its war with Russia. He’s also maintained close ties with the Kremlin and Russian President Vladimir Putin, despite continued tensions between Russia and the West as a result of the war.
The meeting immediately drew rebuke from Biden, who cited Orban’s criticisms of democracy
By Maegan Vazquez, The Washington Post
Former president Donald Trump met with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban on Friday, continuing his embrace of autocratic world leaders as he seeks reelection for the American presidency.
Orban’s trip to the United States also included a stop in Washington, where he delivered remarks at the Heritage Foundation, which has close ties to Trump. That appearance was on Thursday, the same day as President Biden’s State of the Union address, which took place in the Capitol just a few blocks away from the conservative think tank’s headquarters.
It marked an extraordinary move: a foreign leader paying a visit to the United States, including making a stop in the nation’s capital, without meeting with the sitting president and instead meeting with his political rival.
Trump has repeatedly praised Orban over the years, frequently praising what he sees as strength in leadership on the campaign trail. He also hosted Orban at the White House in 2019, an invitation the previous two American presidents had purposefully not extended.
Orban has worked to undermine key democratic institutions in Hungary since coming into power in 2010. A self-proclaimed proponent of “illiberal” Christian democracy, he’s championed restrictions on LGBTQ+ rights and immigration while cracking down on the country’s judiciary and the press. He’s also garnered praise from conservative populists and conservative institutions in the United States, reinterpreting Trump’s longtime slogan and frequently saying “Make Europe Great Again” in public remarks.
After appearing at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, Orban wrote on X that he discussed the “common ground for cooperation between the conservative forces of Europe and the US,” in his remarks. “Supporting families, fighting illegal migration and standing up for the sovereignty of our nations,” he said.
The Hungarian leader then traveled from Washington to Palm Beach, Fla., to see Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate, in a meeting on Friday that displayed some of the symbolism typically reserved for two sitting world leaders.
each other at the steps of the estate, posing on a red carpet flanked by American and Hungarian flags.
Inside, with their parties facing one another at long conference tables, the two men held meetings to discuss “a wide range of issues affecting Hungary and the United States, including the paramount importance of strong and secure borders to protect the sovereignty of each nation,” according to the Trump campaign. There was an evening concert inside the compound, where Trump took the stage to praise Orban.
“There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orban,” Trump said Friday night. The former president, in an apparent nod to the Hungarian leader’s autocratic approach, went on to say Orban is “a noncontroversial figure because he says, ‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it. Right? He’s the boss. No, he’s a great leader.”
Orban lent his support to Trump on X, saying that the world needs “leaders in the world who are respected and can bring peace. He is one of them! Come back and bring us peace, Mr. President!”
President Biden slammed the Trump-Orban meeting on Friday, saying it demonstrated his main rival’s authoritarian tendencies.
“You know [who Trump is] meeting with today down at Mar-a-Lago? Orban of Hungary, who stated flatly he doesn’t think democracy works,” Biden said at a campaign stop in Pennsylvania. “He’s looking for dictatorship ... that’s who he’s meeting with. I see a future where we defend democracy, not diminish it.”
On Saturday, Trump doubled down on his embrace of Orban, describing him as a “great gentleman.” “Some people don’t like him because he’s very tough,” Trump said to supporters at his campaign rally in Rome, Ga. “I know him very well.”
The president’s remarks came a day after he hosted Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson at the State of the Union address to mark Sweden joining the NATO alliance. Orban had initially resisted Sweden’s bid to join the alliance as well as the European Union’s aid for Ukraine amid its war with Russia. He’s also maintained close ties with the Kremlin and Russian President Vladimir Putin, despite continued tensions between Russia and the West as a result of the war.
MIKE JOHNSON ASKED FOR ‘DECORUM.’ REPUBLICANS IGNORED HIM.
By Dana Milbank
The day before President Biden delivered his State of the Union address, House Speaker Mike Johnson, in a closed-door meeting with his Republican caucus, urged his colleagues to observe “decorum” and not to act like hooligans during the speech.
He might as well have asked them not to breathe.
Just minutes into the president’s address, as Biden was talking about the Trump administration’s failures during the covid pandemic, Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) bellowed from the back of the chamber: “Lies!”
When Biden spoke about forcing the wealthiest Americans to “pay your fair share in taxes,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), wearing a red Make America Great Again baseball cap autographed on the bill by Donald Trump, shouted out: “Tell Hunter to pay his taxes!”
And when Biden spoke about the bipartisan border security legislation that Republicans killed at Trump’s behest, the Republican side erupted in boos, jeers and screaming at the commander in chief.
The GOP lawmakers’ invited guests in the gallery joined in the general abuse of the president. Biden mentioned crime — and a man started screaming about the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Biden spoke about the more than 30,000 Palestinians reported killed in Gaza — and another heckler shouted: “Says who?”
Adding to the Republicans’ tawdry treatment of this once solemn ritual of democracy, George Santos, the New York congressman expelled in December, could be seen cavorting on the floor (where he still has privileges, despite his ouster), wearing a glittery shirt and shoes, receiving well wishes from his former GOP colleagues. And Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Tex.) served as a human billboard throughout the speech, standing in the chamber wearing a T-shirt that showed Trump’s mug shot with the message “Never Surrender.”
Many others in the House majority took Johnson’s call for “decorum” to the other extreme. They were so determined not to react to Biden that they refused to applaud even the most anodyne, patriotic sentiments.
“Let’s remember who we are. We are the United States of America!” Biden cried.
On the Republican side: crickets.
He called for federal funds to go only for “American products ... built by American workers, creating good-paying American jobs.”
Again, Republicans sat on their hands.
“We all come from somewhere, but we’re all Americans,” Biden offered.
Even this produced almost no applause from Republican lawmakers.
Johnson, in his seat behind Biden, didn’t heed his own instructions. The Louisiana Republican rolled his eyes at Biden, shaking his head, contorting his face into pained expressions and shrinking into his chair.
Many of his rank-and-file Republicans skipped the address entirely or left in the middle: There were 21 empty seats on the Republican side at the start, and 37 at the end, even though several Democrats took over the empty seats on the GOP side. Biden’s opponents exaggerated their boredom, slouching, scrolling their phones and showing their screens to each other. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) yawned. Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) yawned. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) yawned. Marc Molinaro (R-N.Y.) yawned.
If Biden’s opponents were hoping that the address would show him to be tired and feeble, the result was nearly the opposite. Biden was feisty and energetic, often shouting as he took the fight to Trump and the Republicans. He plunged right into his speech without waiting for the customary introduction from Johnson. By contrast, his critics — some somnolent, the others cranky — looked as though they needed a nap.
Biden had his usual stumbles over words, but those expecting the senile old man of Republican fantasies instead saw a guy who couldn’t wait to mix it up with his foes. He made a surprised, delighted look when he spied Greene waiting for him on the center aisle as he walked in, and he kept the pin she gave him with the name of a young woman allegedly killed by an illegal immigrant.
He scolded Republicans for rejecting “the toughest set of border security reforms we’ve ever seen,” and though his opponents jeered Biden’s claims about the bill, the man who negotiated the reforms, Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) could be seen in the audience saying “That’s true.”
That’s when Greene began shouting at Biden to say the name of Laken Riley, the woman who had been killed — and Biden did, angering progressives when he said she had been killed by “an illegal.”
“To her parents, I say, my heart goes out to you,” he said, holding up Greene’s button. “Having lost children myself, I understand.”
Biden went after his “predecessor” no fewer than 13 times, starting with a brutal contrast between Ronald Reagan telling Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” and Trump’s recent suggestion that he would tell Vladimir Putin’s regime to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO members who don’t contribute sufficiently to the alliance.
The president attacked Trump, congressional Republicans or both, for seeking “to bury the truth about Jan. 6,” 2021, for pursuing an abortion ban, for demonizing immigrants as “poison in the blood of our country.” He ridiculed those who opposed the infrastructure bill, saying, “If any of you don’t want that money in your district, just let me know.”
It was a ferocious, and partisan, address. The combative Biden lifted the spirits of Democrats in the chamber, who repeatedly erupted in cheers of “Four more years!” And for Republicans who had apparently believed their own nonsense about Biden’s “dementia,” it caught them off guard.
Biden lingered in the chamber for half an hour after the speech, basking in the adoration of Democratic lawmakers until after 11 p.m. His critics had cleared out long ago. It was past their bedtimes.
By Dana Milbank
The day before President Biden delivered his State of the Union address, House Speaker Mike Johnson, in a closed-door meeting with his Republican caucus, urged his colleagues to observe “decorum” and not to act like hooligans during the speech.
He might as well have asked them not to breathe.
Just minutes into the president’s address, as Biden was talking about the Trump administration’s failures during the covid pandemic, Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) bellowed from the back of the chamber: “Lies!”
When Biden spoke about forcing the wealthiest Americans to “pay your fair share in taxes,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), wearing a red Make America Great Again baseball cap autographed on the bill by Donald Trump, shouted out: “Tell Hunter to pay his taxes!”
And when Biden spoke about the bipartisan border security legislation that Republicans killed at Trump’s behest, the Republican side erupted in boos, jeers and screaming at the commander in chief.
The GOP lawmakers’ invited guests in the gallery joined in the general abuse of the president. Biden mentioned crime — and a man started screaming about the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Biden spoke about the more than 30,000 Palestinians reported killed in Gaza — and another heckler shouted: “Says who?”
Adding to the Republicans’ tawdry treatment of this once solemn ritual of democracy, George Santos, the New York congressman expelled in December, could be seen cavorting on the floor (where he still has privileges, despite his ouster), wearing a glittery shirt and shoes, receiving well wishes from his former GOP colleagues. And Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Tex.) served as a human billboard throughout the speech, standing in the chamber wearing a T-shirt that showed Trump’s mug shot with the message “Never Surrender.”
Many others in the House majority took Johnson’s call for “decorum” to the other extreme. They were so determined not to react to Biden that they refused to applaud even the most anodyne, patriotic sentiments.
“Let’s remember who we are. We are the United States of America!” Biden cried.
On the Republican side: crickets.
He called for federal funds to go only for “American products ... built by American workers, creating good-paying American jobs.”
Again, Republicans sat on their hands.
“We all come from somewhere, but we’re all Americans,” Biden offered.
Even this produced almost no applause from Republican lawmakers.
Johnson, in his seat behind Biden, didn’t heed his own instructions. The Louisiana Republican rolled his eyes at Biden, shaking his head, contorting his face into pained expressions and shrinking into his chair.
Many of his rank-and-file Republicans skipped the address entirely or left in the middle: There were 21 empty seats on the Republican side at the start, and 37 at the end, even though several Democrats took over the empty seats on the GOP side. Biden’s opponents exaggerated their boredom, slouching, scrolling their phones and showing their screens to each other. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) yawned. Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) yawned. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) yawned. Marc Molinaro (R-N.Y.) yawned.
If Biden’s opponents were hoping that the address would show him to be tired and feeble, the result was nearly the opposite. Biden was feisty and energetic, often shouting as he took the fight to Trump and the Republicans. He plunged right into his speech without waiting for the customary introduction from Johnson. By contrast, his critics — some somnolent, the others cranky — looked as though they needed a nap.
Biden had his usual stumbles over words, but those expecting the senile old man of Republican fantasies instead saw a guy who couldn’t wait to mix it up with his foes. He made a surprised, delighted look when he spied Greene waiting for him on the center aisle as he walked in, and he kept the pin she gave him with the name of a young woman allegedly killed by an illegal immigrant.
He scolded Republicans for rejecting “the toughest set of border security reforms we’ve ever seen,” and though his opponents jeered Biden’s claims about the bill, the man who negotiated the reforms, Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) could be seen in the audience saying “That’s true.”
That’s when Greene began shouting at Biden to say the name of Laken Riley, the woman who had been killed — and Biden did, angering progressives when he said she had been killed by “an illegal.”
“To her parents, I say, my heart goes out to you,” he said, holding up Greene’s button. “Having lost children myself, I understand.”
Biden went after his “predecessor” no fewer than 13 times, starting with a brutal contrast between Ronald Reagan telling Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” and Trump’s recent suggestion that he would tell Vladimir Putin’s regime to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO members who don’t contribute sufficiently to the alliance.
The president attacked Trump, congressional Republicans or both, for seeking “to bury the truth about Jan. 6,” 2021, for pursuing an abortion ban, for demonizing immigrants as “poison in the blood of our country.” He ridiculed those who opposed the infrastructure bill, saying, “If any of you don’t want that money in your district, just let me know.”
It was a ferocious, and partisan, address. The combative Biden lifted the spirits of Democrats in the chamber, who repeatedly erupted in cheers of “Four more years!” And for Republicans who had apparently believed their own nonsense about Biden’s “dementia,” it caught them off guard.
Biden lingered in the chamber for half an hour after the speech, basking in the adoration of Democratic lawmakers until after 11 p.m. His critics had cleared out long ago. It was past their bedtimes.
BIDEN’S STATE OF THE UNION CHALLENGE
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
The presidential State of the Union address might be the most hyped ritual in American politics. Endless media speculation about what the president will say and how he will be received becomes obsolete as soon as the speech is given, which, in turn, is usually forgotten within days. What is not forgotten, however, are the related incidents: President Biden tussling with Republicans over Social Security; Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) tearing up the text of President Donald Trump’s State of the Union; Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. mouthing “not true” to President Barack Obama; and Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) screaming “You lie!” at Obama.
As these speeches have devolved into laundry lists of accomplishments and proposals, the words mean less and the visual images mean more. (The decline of language and the prominence of visuals are a defining, albeit disagreeable, feature of modern politics.) In the case of Biden — whose age remains an obsession and whose premature polling rattles Democrats — how he “seems” is as important as what he says.
If there is an overarching impression he needs to convey, it is this: combative. A combative person is energetic, sharp, aggressive, focused and nimble. If Biden conveys that — and lures Republicans into helping create another memorable visual — he will have succeeded. How does he do this?
On the economy, he must not only recite the “bests” (best stock market, best economy in the world, best recovery) but remind voters and Republicans that he was handed a mess (e.g., the coronavirus running rampant, unemployment over 6 percent). If he wants to get a rise out of Republicans, he would do well to note they fought him every step of the way. After all, most voted against the infrastructure bill (but bragged about its results) and against insulin price controls, and they tried to roll back his green-energy investments.
Contrasts are the bread and butter of a successful campaign. And, let’s face it, this is as much a campaign appearance as it is an official event. Biden wants to get rich tax cheats; Republicans want to starve the IRS. Biden wants to help the little guy; Republicans want to protect some corporations and super-rich people from paying any taxes. In short, Biden must not simply boast about his accomplishments but provoke Republicans with contrasts between their two economic visions.
On foreign policy and border security, he has a golden opportunity to saddle Republicans in Congress and Trump with coddling Russian President Vladimir Putin, plotting to destroy NATO, welcoming a Russian invasion of Europe and blowing up the toughest border deal in decades (with a shout-out to Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma). Never before has a significant part of a major party — let alone the party that takes credit for winning the Cold War — acted like a willing dupe for a foreign enemy of the United States. If Republicans in the chamber hoot and holler, Biden will get his viral moment. (Hey, you guys aren’t Putin’s poodles, are you?! You aren’t on the side of Alexei Navalny’s killer, are you?!)
Biden, with public opinion strongly on his side, cannot mince words when it comes to abortion and in vitro fertilization. He needs to attribute responsibility. Trump and the Republican Senate gave us a radical Supreme Court that opened the way to abortion bans. They are responsible for forcing rape and incest victims to travel out of state and putting women’s lives at risk. He can call out Republicans on IVF hypocrisy. Now they say they are all for it, but they have voted against it and for “personhood” bills that would ban not only IVF but also some forms of contraception. Biden cannot afford to tread lightly when it comes to Republicans’ biggest political Achilles’ heel.
Likewise, Biden has the chance to remind voters of just how radical Republicans are on guns. Trump insisted after a school shooting that Iowans should “get over it.” Trump also brags he did “nothing” on guns. If Biden stresses the sheer callousness of those sentiments and slams Republicans for putting the gun industry’s and Second Amendment absolutists’ interests above the lives of little children, he can make a deep impression with some voters.
When it comes to “democracy,” abstractions seem not to resonate with voters. What does that concept mean for the lives of ordinary Americans? He can be blunt: Maybe we shouldn’t elect someone who wants to be dictator “for a day”? Moreover, if Biden vows to stand up for freedom (to control your body, your family, your reading list) and against tyranny (mass roundup of immigrants, using the military against the people, wielding power to wreak vengeance, enabling international aggressors), he can help make the stark choice more concrete.
Biden doesn’t need to sprint up the aisle to the podium or arm wrestle with members as he makes his way out of the chamber. He does, however, need to show he is in fighting political form. Biden will want to remind voters he has an impressive record and that he can effectively defend it. Even more critical, he needs to impress upon them that his MAGA opponents are nutty, destructive and irresponsible. If he leaves that impression with millions of voters — most of whom won’t see or hear the whole speech — democracy defenders will breath a sigh of relief.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
The presidential State of the Union address might be the most hyped ritual in American politics. Endless media speculation about what the president will say and how he will be received becomes obsolete as soon as the speech is given, which, in turn, is usually forgotten within days. What is not forgotten, however, are the related incidents: President Biden tussling with Republicans over Social Security; Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) tearing up the text of President Donald Trump’s State of the Union; Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. mouthing “not true” to President Barack Obama; and Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) screaming “You lie!” at Obama.
As these speeches have devolved into laundry lists of accomplishments and proposals, the words mean less and the visual images mean more. (The decline of language and the prominence of visuals are a defining, albeit disagreeable, feature of modern politics.) In the case of Biden — whose age remains an obsession and whose premature polling rattles Democrats — how he “seems” is as important as what he says.
If there is an overarching impression he needs to convey, it is this: combative. A combative person is energetic, sharp, aggressive, focused and nimble. If Biden conveys that — and lures Republicans into helping create another memorable visual — he will have succeeded. How does he do this?
On the economy, he must not only recite the “bests” (best stock market, best economy in the world, best recovery) but remind voters and Republicans that he was handed a mess (e.g., the coronavirus running rampant, unemployment over 6 percent). If he wants to get a rise out of Republicans, he would do well to note they fought him every step of the way. After all, most voted against the infrastructure bill (but bragged about its results) and against insulin price controls, and they tried to roll back his green-energy investments.
Contrasts are the bread and butter of a successful campaign. And, let’s face it, this is as much a campaign appearance as it is an official event. Biden wants to get rich tax cheats; Republicans want to starve the IRS. Biden wants to help the little guy; Republicans want to protect some corporations and super-rich people from paying any taxes. In short, Biden must not simply boast about his accomplishments but provoke Republicans with contrasts between their two economic visions.
On foreign policy and border security, he has a golden opportunity to saddle Republicans in Congress and Trump with coddling Russian President Vladimir Putin, plotting to destroy NATO, welcoming a Russian invasion of Europe and blowing up the toughest border deal in decades (with a shout-out to Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma). Never before has a significant part of a major party — let alone the party that takes credit for winning the Cold War — acted like a willing dupe for a foreign enemy of the United States. If Republicans in the chamber hoot and holler, Biden will get his viral moment. (Hey, you guys aren’t Putin’s poodles, are you?! You aren’t on the side of Alexei Navalny’s killer, are you?!)
Biden, with public opinion strongly on his side, cannot mince words when it comes to abortion and in vitro fertilization. He needs to attribute responsibility. Trump and the Republican Senate gave us a radical Supreme Court that opened the way to abortion bans. They are responsible for forcing rape and incest victims to travel out of state and putting women’s lives at risk. He can call out Republicans on IVF hypocrisy. Now they say they are all for it, but they have voted against it and for “personhood” bills that would ban not only IVF but also some forms of contraception. Biden cannot afford to tread lightly when it comes to Republicans’ biggest political Achilles’ heel.
Likewise, Biden has the chance to remind voters of just how radical Republicans are on guns. Trump insisted after a school shooting that Iowans should “get over it.” Trump also brags he did “nothing” on guns. If Biden stresses the sheer callousness of those sentiments and slams Republicans for putting the gun industry’s and Second Amendment absolutists’ interests above the lives of little children, he can make a deep impression with some voters.
When it comes to “democracy,” abstractions seem not to resonate with voters. What does that concept mean for the lives of ordinary Americans? He can be blunt: Maybe we shouldn’t elect someone who wants to be dictator “for a day”? Moreover, if Biden vows to stand up for freedom (to control your body, your family, your reading list) and against tyranny (mass roundup of immigrants, using the military against the people, wielding power to wreak vengeance, enabling international aggressors), he can help make the stark choice more concrete.
Biden doesn’t need to sprint up the aisle to the podium or arm wrestle with members as he makes his way out of the chamber. He does, however, need to show he is in fighting political form. Biden will want to remind voters he has an impressive record and that he can effectively defend it. Even more critical, he needs to impress upon them that his MAGA opponents are nutty, destructive and irresponsible. If he leaves that impression with millions of voters — most of whom won’t see or hear the whole speech — democracy defenders will breath a sigh of relief.
TRUMP’S CONQUEST OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY MATTERS TO EVERY AMERICAN
By The New York Times Editorial Board
With Donald Trump’s victories on Tuesday, he has moved to the cusp of securing the 1,215 delegates necessary to win the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. The rest is a formality. The party has become a vessel for the fulfillment of Mr. Trump’s ambitions, and he will almost certainly be its standard-bearer for a third time.
This is a tragedy for the Republican Party and for the country it purports to serve.
In a healthy democracy, political parties are organizations devoted to electing politicians who share a set of values and policy goals. They operate part of the machinery of politics, working with elected officials and civil servants to make elections happen. Members air their differences within the party to strengthen and sharpen its positions. In America’s two-party democracy, Republicans and Democrats have regularly traded places in the White House and shared power in Congress in a system that has been stable for more than a century.
The Republican Party is forsaking all of those responsibilities and instead has become an organization whose goal is the election of one person at the expense of anything else, including integrity, principle, policy and patriotism. As an individual, Mr. Trump has demonstrated a contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law that makes him unfit to hold office. But when an entire political party, particularly one of the two main parties in a country as powerful as the United States, turns into an instrument of that person and his most dangerous ideas, the damage affects everyone.
Mr. Trump’s ability to solidify control of the Republican Party and to quickly defeat his challengers for the nomination owes partly to the fervor of a bedrock of supporters who have delivered substantial victories for him in nearly every primary contest so far. Perhaps his most important advantage, however, is that there are few remaining leaders in the Republican Party who seem willing to stand up for an alternative vision of the party’s future. Those who continue to openly oppose him are, overwhelmingly, those who have left office. Some have said they feared speaking out because they faced threats of violence and retribution.
In a traditional presidential primary contest, victory signals a democratic mandate, in which the winner enjoys popular legitimacy, conferred by the party’s voters, but also accepts that defeated rivals and their competing views have a place within the party. Mr. Trump no longer does, having used the primary contest as a tool for purging the party of dissent. The Republican candidates who have dropped out of the race have had to either demonstrate their devotion to him or risk being shunned. His last rival, Nikki Haley, is a Republican leader with a conservative track record going back decades who served in Mr. Trump’s cabinet in his first term. He has now cast her out. “She’s essentially a Democrat,” the former president said the day before her loss in South Carolina. “I think she should probably switch parties.”
Without a sufficient number of Republicans holding positions of power who have shown that they will serve the Constitution and the American people before the president, the country takes an enormous risk. Some of the Republicans who are no longer welcome — such as Adam Kinzinger, Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney — tried to hold their party’s leader accountable to his basic duty to uphold the law. Without such leaders, the Republican Party also loses the capacity to avoid decisions that can hurt its supporters. John McCain, for example, voted to save Obamacare because his party had not come up with an alternative and millions of people otherwise would have lost their health coverage.
A party without dissent or internal debate, one that exists only to serve the will of one man, is also one that is unable to govern.
Republicans in Congress have already shown their willingness to set aside their own priorities as lawmakers at Mr. Trump’s direction. The country witnessed a stark display of this devotion recently during the clashes over negotiations for a spending bill. Republicans have long pushed for tougher border security measures, and Mr. Trump put this at the top of the party’s agenda. With a narrow majority in the House and bipartisan agreement on a compromise in the Senate, Republicans could have achieved this goal. But once Mr. Trump insisted that he needed immigration as a campaign issue, his loyalists in the House ensured that the party would lose a chance to give their voters what they had promised. Even the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, who pushed for the bill for months, ultimately abandoned it and voted against it. He is now considering endorsing Mr. Trump, a man whom he has not spoken to in over three years, according to reporting by Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman and Shane Goldmacher of The Times. And last week, Mr. McConnell announced that he would step down from his leadership post.
Similarly, the party appears ready to ditch its promises to support Ukraine and its longstanding commitment to the security of our NATO allies in Europe. When Mr. Trump ranted about getting NATO countries to “pay up” or face his threats to encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to them, many Republican leaders said nothing.
The Republican Party has long included leaders with widely different visions of America’s place in the world, and many Republican voters may agree with Mr. Trump’s view that the United States should not be involved in foreign conflicts or even that NATO is unimportant. But once competing views are no longer welcome, the party loses its ability to consider how ideas are put into practice and what the consequences may be.
During Mr. Trump’s first term, for example, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo persuaded him not to abruptly withdraw from NATO. If Mr. Trump were to try in a second term, Congress could, in theory, restrain him; in December lawmakers passed a measure requiring congressional approval for any president to leave NATO. But as Peter Feaver pointed out recently in Foreign Affairs, such constraints mean little to a party that has submitted to the “ideological mastery” of its leader. Marco Rubio, one of the authors of that legislation, now insists that he has “zero concern” about Mr. Trump’s comments.
It may be tempting for Americans to dismiss these capitulations as politicians doing whatever it takes to get elected or to ignore Mr. Trump’s bullying of other Republicans and tune out until Election Day. In one recent poll, two-thirds of Americans said they were “tired of seeing the same candidates in presidential elections and want someone new.”
But tuning out is a luxury that no American, regardless of party, can afford. Mr. Trump in 2024 would be the nominee of a very different Republican Party — one that has lost whatever power it once had to hold him in check.
This subservience was not inevitable. After Mr. Trump incited the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, some party leaders, especially in Congress, suggested that they were ready to break with him. The Republican Party’s disappointing results in the 2022 midterm elections appeared to further undermine Mr. Trump’s support, adding doubts about his political potency to the longstanding concerns about his commitment to democracy.
But after Mr. Trump announced his candidacy and it became clear that the multiple indictments against him only strengthened his support, that resistance faded away. He is now using these cases for his own political purposes, campaigning to raise money for his legal defense, and has turned his appearances in court into opportunities to cast doubt on the integrity of the legal system.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the federal Jan. 6 trial, imposed a gag order on him to prevent him from intimidating witnesses. She noted that Mr. Trump’s defense lawyers did not contradict testimony “that when defendant has publicly attacked individuals, including on matters related to this case, those individuals are consequently threatened and harassed.” The leadership of the Republican Party has been silent.
With loyalists now in control of the Republican National Committee and his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, in line to become its co-chair, the party may soon bend to Mr. Trump’s insistence that the party pay his legal bills. His campaign spent roughly $50 million on lawyers last year, and those expenses are mounting as the trial dates approach. One prominent Republican, Henry Barbour, has sponsored resolutions barring the committee from doing so, but he conceded that the effort can do little more than just make a point.
Mr. Trump has also taken over the party’s state-level machinery. This has allowed him to rewrite the rules of the Republican primary process and add winner-take-all contests, which work in his favor. That is the kind of advantage that political parties normally give incumbents. But in the process, he has divided some state parties into factions, some of which no longer speak to each other. Democrats may see the dysfunction and bickering among Republicans as an advantage. But it also means that for Democrats, even state and local races turn into ones against Mr. Trump. Rather than competing on the merits of policy or ideology, they find themselves running against candidates without coherent positions other than their loyalty to Trumpism.
Republican voters may soon no longer have a choice about their nominee; their only choice is whether to support someone who would do to the country what he has already done to his party.
By The New York Times Editorial Board
With Donald Trump’s victories on Tuesday, he has moved to the cusp of securing the 1,215 delegates necessary to win the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. The rest is a formality. The party has become a vessel for the fulfillment of Mr. Trump’s ambitions, and he will almost certainly be its standard-bearer for a third time.
This is a tragedy for the Republican Party and for the country it purports to serve.
In a healthy democracy, political parties are organizations devoted to electing politicians who share a set of values and policy goals. They operate part of the machinery of politics, working with elected officials and civil servants to make elections happen. Members air their differences within the party to strengthen and sharpen its positions. In America’s two-party democracy, Republicans and Democrats have regularly traded places in the White House and shared power in Congress in a system that has been stable for more than a century.
The Republican Party is forsaking all of those responsibilities and instead has become an organization whose goal is the election of one person at the expense of anything else, including integrity, principle, policy and patriotism. As an individual, Mr. Trump has demonstrated a contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law that makes him unfit to hold office. But when an entire political party, particularly one of the two main parties in a country as powerful as the United States, turns into an instrument of that person and his most dangerous ideas, the damage affects everyone.
Mr. Trump’s ability to solidify control of the Republican Party and to quickly defeat his challengers for the nomination owes partly to the fervor of a bedrock of supporters who have delivered substantial victories for him in nearly every primary contest so far. Perhaps his most important advantage, however, is that there are few remaining leaders in the Republican Party who seem willing to stand up for an alternative vision of the party’s future. Those who continue to openly oppose him are, overwhelmingly, those who have left office. Some have said they feared speaking out because they faced threats of violence and retribution.
In a traditional presidential primary contest, victory signals a democratic mandate, in which the winner enjoys popular legitimacy, conferred by the party’s voters, but also accepts that defeated rivals and their competing views have a place within the party. Mr. Trump no longer does, having used the primary contest as a tool for purging the party of dissent. The Republican candidates who have dropped out of the race have had to either demonstrate their devotion to him or risk being shunned. His last rival, Nikki Haley, is a Republican leader with a conservative track record going back decades who served in Mr. Trump’s cabinet in his first term. He has now cast her out. “She’s essentially a Democrat,” the former president said the day before her loss in South Carolina. “I think she should probably switch parties.”
Without a sufficient number of Republicans holding positions of power who have shown that they will serve the Constitution and the American people before the president, the country takes an enormous risk. Some of the Republicans who are no longer welcome — such as Adam Kinzinger, Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney — tried to hold their party’s leader accountable to his basic duty to uphold the law. Without such leaders, the Republican Party also loses the capacity to avoid decisions that can hurt its supporters. John McCain, for example, voted to save Obamacare because his party had not come up with an alternative and millions of people otherwise would have lost their health coverage.
A party without dissent or internal debate, one that exists only to serve the will of one man, is also one that is unable to govern.
Republicans in Congress have already shown their willingness to set aside their own priorities as lawmakers at Mr. Trump’s direction. The country witnessed a stark display of this devotion recently during the clashes over negotiations for a spending bill. Republicans have long pushed for tougher border security measures, and Mr. Trump put this at the top of the party’s agenda. With a narrow majority in the House and bipartisan agreement on a compromise in the Senate, Republicans could have achieved this goal. But once Mr. Trump insisted that he needed immigration as a campaign issue, his loyalists in the House ensured that the party would lose a chance to give their voters what they had promised. Even the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, who pushed for the bill for months, ultimately abandoned it and voted against it. He is now considering endorsing Mr. Trump, a man whom he has not spoken to in over three years, according to reporting by Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman and Shane Goldmacher of The Times. And last week, Mr. McConnell announced that he would step down from his leadership post.
Similarly, the party appears ready to ditch its promises to support Ukraine and its longstanding commitment to the security of our NATO allies in Europe. When Mr. Trump ranted about getting NATO countries to “pay up” or face his threats to encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to them, many Republican leaders said nothing.
The Republican Party has long included leaders with widely different visions of America’s place in the world, and many Republican voters may agree with Mr. Trump’s view that the United States should not be involved in foreign conflicts or even that NATO is unimportant. But once competing views are no longer welcome, the party loses its ability to consider how ideas are put into practice and what the consequences may be.
During Mr. Trump’s first term, for example, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo persuaded him not to abruptly withdraw from NATO. If Mr. Trump were to try in a second term, Congress could, in theory, restrain him; in December lawmakers passed a measure requiring congressional approval for any president to leave NATO. But as Peter Feaver pointed out recently in Foreign Affairs, such constraints mean little to a party that has submitted to the “ideological mastery” of its leader. Marco Rubio, one of the authors of that legislation, now insists that he has “zero concern” about Mr. Trump’s comments.
It may be tempting for Americans to dismiss these capitulations as politicians doing whatever it takes to get elected or to ignore Mr. Trump’s bullying of other Republicans and tune out until Election Day. In one recent poll, two-thirds of Americans said they were “tired of seeing the same candidates in presidential elections and want someone new.”
But tuning out is a luxury that no American, regardless of party, can afford. Mr. Trump in 2024 would be the nominee of a very different Republican Party — one that has lost whatever power it once had to hold him in check.
This subservience was not inevitable. After Mr. Trump incited the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, some party leaders, especially in Congress, suggested that they were ready to break with him. The Republican Party’s disappointing results in the 2022 midterm elections appeared to further undermine Mr. Trump’s support, adding doubts about his political potency to the longstanding concerns about his commitment to democracy.
But after Mr. Trump announced his candidacy and it became clear that the multiple indictments against him only strengthened his support, that resistance faded away. He is now using these cases for his own political purposes, campaigning to raise money for his legal defense, and has turned his appearances in court into opportunities to cast doubt on the integrity of the legal system.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the federal Jan. 6 trial, imposed a gag order on him to prevent him from intimidating witnesses. She noted that Mr. Trump’s defense lawyers did not contradict testimony “that when defendant has publicly attacked individuals, including on matters related to this case, those individuals are consequently threatened and harassed.” The leadership of the Republican Party has been silent.
With loyalists now in control of the Republican National Committee and his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, in line to become its co-chair, the party may soon bend to Mr. Trump’s insistence that the party pay his legal bills. His campaign spent roughly $50 million on lawyers last year, and those expenses are mounting as the trial dates approach. One prominent Republican, Henry Barbour, has sponsored resolutions barring the committee from doing so, but he conceded that the effort can do little more than just make a point.
Mr. Trump has also taken over the party’s state-level machinery. This has allowed him to rewrite the rules of the Republican primary process and add winner-take-all contests, which work in his favor. That is the kind of advantage that political parties normally give incumbents. But in the process, he has divided some state parties into factions, some of which no longer speak to each other. Democrats may see the dysfunction and bickering among Republicans as an advantage. But it also means that for Democrats, even state and local races turn into ones against Mr. Trump. Rather than competing on the merits of policy or ideology, they find themselves running against candidates without coherent positions other than their loyalty to Trumpism.
Republican voters may soon no longer have a choice about their nominee; their only choice is whether to support someone who would do to the country what he has already done to his party.
TRUMP IS RUNNING ON DYSTOPIAN FANTASIES
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
President Biden recently went to New York to appear on “Late Night With Seth Meyers.” On the show he was the same guy whom those of us who’ve spoken with him have seen: not a spring chicken, obviously, but lucid, well informed and moderately funny. The contrast couldn’t be greater with Donald Trump, whose ranting has become increasingly incoherent; after mixing up Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi a few weeks back, he has now once again appeared to confuse Biden with Barack Obama.
But not to worry: Trump recently assured an audience, “There’s no cognitive problem. If there was, I’d know about it.”
Oh.
Republicans aren’t going to acknowledge either Biden’s lucidity or Trump’s increasingly more noticeable lack thereof. But the reaction to the “Late Night” appearance that I found most revealing wasn’t about presidential age; it was about what happened next. Biden and Meyers went for ice cream after the show, and Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama fired off a post on social media hoping Biden enjoyed his ice cream “while the rest of the city is afraid of crime and migrants.”
Reporters and readers were quick to point out that according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2021 Alabama had a homicide rate more than three times as high as that of New York State, and, as Bloomberg’s Justin Fox notes, New York City is among the safest big cities in America. Tuberville has become known for getting crossed up on the issues, but his comment illustrated two larger aspects of our politics.
First, there’s a striking double standard in the ways politicians are allowed to talk about different regions of America. Voters from rural states often complain about not getting enough respect, but can you imagine the reaction if, say, the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, were to describe Alabama — which in 2021 had an extraordinarily high rate of firearm mortality — as a place where everyone runs around shooting one another and themselves?
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Second, and more important, I’m always struck by the extent to which today’s right-wing politics is driven by a grim, dystopian image of America, especially American cities, that just isn’t grounded in reality.
A lot of this seems to reflect perceptions that congealed long ago and haven’t been updated to reflect the ways in which urban America has changed for the better. New York really was a dangerous place a few decades back: There were 2,262 murders in 1990. Last year, however, with the pandemic-era bump in crime rapidly receding, there were only 391 — still too many — and early indications are that violent crime is continuing to fall.
Nationally, violent crime, at least according to the F.B.I., is approaching a 50-year low.
Those are official statistics, but what about personal experience? I remember New York in the bad old days, and it’s nothing like that now. Polling on crime is remarkable, especially when broken down by partisan affiliation: According to Gallup, 78 percent of Republicans say that crime is an extremely or very serious problem for the nation, but only 16 percent say it’s a serious problem where they live. That’s not because Republicans live in safer places: Only 15 percent of Democrats say that local crime is a serious problem.
Crime isn’t the only subject where Republicans seem to be living in the past. In another recent speech, Trump declared: “We’re like a third world nation. Look at our airports. … I mean, how bad are the airports?” He may have been thinking of La Guardia in the 1970s. I recently landed at Newark’s new Terminal A, and it was a striking reminder of just how gentrified America’s major airports have become.
Trump has also been going on lately about “migrant crime” being “through the roof,” singling out New York (naturally). But as I’ve already noted, homicides in New York — where 36 percent of the population is foreign born — have been falling rapidly.
And while there have, of course, been violent crimes committed by immigrants, including those here illegally, an analysis by NBC News found that “despite several horrifying high-profile episodes, there is no evidence of a migrant-driven crime wave in the United States.”
None of this says that we should have an open border. Indeed, this year Democrats and Republicans in the Senate agreed on a bill that would have greatly stiffened border security; Republicans then backed out at Trump’s behest, pretty clearly because Trump wants to keep the fear factor going.
Now, I’m not saying that everything is fine. Americans were badly rattled by a crime surge in 2020-21 and an inflation surge in 2021-22, both of which were probably, for the most part, aftershocks from the Covid-19 pandemic. Both surges now appear to be rapidly receding, but the unease remains, and there are still plenty of social and economic problems to address.
Yet in 2024, Trump and his party appear to be running not against America’s rising problems but against problems that have actually become much less dire.
Can a political party really win a national election on the strength of dystopian fantasies? Unfortunately, current polling suggests that it can.
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
President Biden recently went to New York to appear on “Late Night With Seth Meyers.” On the show he was the same guy whom those of us who’ve spoken with him have seen: not a spring chicken, obviously, but lucid, well informed and moderately funny. The contrast couldn’t be greater with Donald Trump, whose ranting has become increasingly incoherent; after mixing up Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi a few weeks back, he has now once again appeared to confuse Biden with Barack Obama.
But not to worry: Trump recently assured an audience, “There’s no cognitive problem. If there was, I’d know about it.”
Oh.
Republicans aren’t going to acknowledge either Biden’s lucidity or Trump’s increasingly more noticeable lack thereof. But the reaction to the “Late Night” appearance that I found most revealing wasn’t about presidential age; it was about what happened next. Biden and Meyers went for ice cream after the show, and Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama fired off a post on social media hoping Biden enjoyed his ice cream “while the rest of the city is afraid of crime and migrants.”
Reporters and readers were quick to point out that according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2021 Alabama had a homicide rate more than three times as high as that of New York State, and, as Bloomberg’s Justin Fox notes, New York City is among the safest big cities in America. Tuberville has become known for getting crossed up on the issues, but his comment illustrated two larger aspects of our politics.
First, there’s a striking double standard in the ways politicians are allowed to talk about different regions of America. Voters from rural states often complain about not getting enough respect, but can you imagine the reaction if, say, the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, were to describe Alabama — which in 2021 had an extraordinarily high rate of firearm mortality — as a place where everyone runs around shooting one another and themselves?
Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.
Second, and more important, I’m always struck by the extent to which today’s right-wing politics is driven by a grim, dystopian image of America, especially American cities, that just isn’t grounded in reality.
A lot of this seems to reflect perceptions that congealed long ago and haven’t been updated to reflect the ways in which urban America has changed for the better. New York really was a dangerous place a few decades back: There were 2,262 murders in 1990. Last year, however, with the pandemic-era bump in crime rapidly receding, there were only 391 — still too many — and early indications are that violent crime is continuing to fall.
Nationally, violent crime, at least according to the F.B.I., is approaching a 50-year low.
Those are official statistics, but what about personal experience? I remember New York in the bad old days, and it’s nothing like that now. Polling on crime is remarkable, especially when broken down by partisan affiliation: According to Gallup, 78 percent of Republicans say that crime is an extremely or very serious problem for the nation, but only 16 percent say it’s a serious problem where they live. That’s not because Republicans live in safer places: Only 15 percent of Democrats say that local crime is a serious problem.
Crime isn’t the only subject where Republicans seem to be living in the past. In another recent speech, Trump declared: “We’re like a third world nation. Look at our airports. … I mean, how bad are the airports?” He may have been thinking of La Guardia in the 1970s. I recently landed at Newark’s new Terminal A, and it was a striking reminder of just how gentrified America’s major airports have become.
Trump has also been going on lately about “migrant crime” being “through the roof,” singling out New York (naturally). But as I’ve already noted, homicides in New York — where 36 percent of the population is foreign born — have been falling rapidly.
And while there have, of course, been violent crimes committed by immigrants, including those here illegally, an analysis by NBC News found that “despite several horrifying high-profile episodes, there is no evidence of a migrant-driven crime wave in the United States.”
None of this says that we should have an open border. Indeed, this year Democrats and Republicans in the Senate agreed on a bill that would have greatly stiffened border security; Republicans then backed out at Trump’s behest, pretty clearly because Trump wants to keep the fear factor going.
Now, I’m not saying that everything is fine. Americans were badly rattled by a crime surge in 2020-21 and an inflation surge in 2021-22, both of which were probably, for the most part, aftershocks from the Covid-19 pandemic. Both surges now appear to be rapidly receding, but the unease remains, and there are still plenty of social and economic problems to address.
Yet in 2024, Trump and his party appear to be running not against America’s rising problems but against problems that have actually become much less dire.
Can a political party really win a national election on the strength of dystopian fantasies? Unfortunately, current polling suggests that it can.
DEMOCRACY IS IMPERILED GLOBALLY. REPUBLICANS ARE ON THE WRONG SIDE.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
The refusal of House Republicans to fund aid for Ukraine, their insistence on pursuing a bogus impeachment scheme hatched by an indicted Russian FBI source in contact with Russian intelligence services and their unfailing loyalty to an anti-democratic demagogue infatuated with Russian President Vladimir Putin will further aggravate the existential threat facing democracy around the globe. MAGA Republicans’ recent conduct will only hasten the dangerous trend toward authoritarianism spelled out in Freedom House’s recent report “Freedom in the World 2024: The Mounting Damage of Flawed Elections and Armed Conflict.”
“Global freedom declined for the 18th consecutive year in 2023,” Freedom House reported. “The breadth and depth of the deterioration were extensive. Political rights and civil liberties were diminished in 52 countries, while only 21 countries made improvements. Flawed elections and armed conflict contributed to the decline, endangering freedom and causing severe human suffering.”
The threat from right-wing groups and ideologies rejecting democratic values such as diversity, the rule of law, free speech, equality and tolerance — the very same values the MAGA movement targets — are at the root of the worldwide phenomenon. “Almost everywhere, the downturn in rights was driven by attacks on pluralism — the peaceful coexistence of people with different political ideas, religions, or ethnic identities — that harmed elections and sowed violence,” Freedom House observed. “These intensifying assaults on a core feature of democracy reinforce the urgent need to support the groups and individuals, including human rights defenders and journalists, who are on the front lines of the struggle for freedom worldwide.”
The role of the United States in bolstering democracies, just as it did in World War II and the Cold War, has never been more critical. “As it has for decades, the United States can play a vital role in the expansion of global freedom,” the report reiterated. “But much depends on whether the November 2024 presidential election reinforces or weakens America’s democratic values, processes, and institutions, along with its will to uphold the cause of democracy around the world.”
The United States remains vulnerable at home, where “harassment and intimidation of federal, state, and local politicians, election administrators, and judges pose a serious challenge to the conduct of November’s presidential election.” Moreover, still “haunted by the January 2021 attack on the Capitol and related court cases, Americans are heading into a decisive election starkly divided, with some questioning the very utility of fundamental democratic institutions.”
As the world’s only true superpower, the only country that can summon a global alliance and the historic exemplar of democratic values, the United States must take the lead in defending democracies against internal and external threats. If “governments, donors, and the private sector” do not “deepen their solidarity with front-line allies, hold dictators accountable for rights abuses and corruption, and invest in democratic institutions at home and abroad,” democracy will continue its downward trajectory, the report said. If the United States sacrifices “core principles for the sake of illusory short-term interests,” then we will lose a “global order in which democratic norms prevail” and that “deliver liberty, prosperity, and security — for those living now and for future generations.”
Military defense of democracies continues to be an essential part of protecting our alliances facing aggression from authoritarian regimes such as “the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine [that] continued for a second year, further degrading basic rights in occupied areas and prompting more intense repression in Russia itself.” But the question remains if the United States has the will to do so.
We recently witnessed how perilously close the United States is to frittering away our democratic leadership in the world. When the Republican presidential front-runner espouses fondness for fascist ideas and displays a determination to destroy NATO, and his minions rely on Russian-hatched conspiracies to impeach a president and seem willing to let Ukraine go under, we can imagine the threats to democracy here and abroad reaching the point of no return.
Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-N.J.), a nine-year veteran of the Navy and three-term congresswoman who recently returned from the Munich Conference, expressed to me her dismay at Republicans’ irresponsibility in defending democracy at a critical moment. She pointed at four-times-indicted former president Donald Trump and his party for “undermining and walking away from our alliances.”
She explained, “The rules-based order benefits not just the U.S. but other countries,” yet Republicans “want to blow up the system.” Republicans seem not to care that we depend on an alliance of democratic allies to do everything from protecting the seaways to confronting China’s aggression, she noted. She said there is a military phrase: “We never fight alone.” And yet we will find ourselves isolated, vulnerable and saddled with higher defense costs if Republicans persist in enabling Putin and destroying our democratic alliances.
“We are at an inflection point,” Sherrill said, echoing the Freedom House report and speaking with obvious emotion. “I cannot accept that the country I have given my life to, the country [for which] I cannot count the number of oaths I have taken, the country I have fought for, I cannot accept that we cannot stand with Ukraine.”
And yet if Republicans have their way — denying Ukraine a lifeline, doing the bidding of Putin internationally and lifting a Putin pawn to the U.S. presidency — democracy’s backsliding will become an avalanche. Imagine if the only country capable of reinforcing the rules-based order and preventing tyrannical regimes from overwhelming vulnerable countries stood with the authoritarians. Under such circumstances, democracy in the United States and around the world would be unlikely to survive.
It’s hard to quibble with the argument that the upcoming election is the most important in our history and in the history of Western democracies. The world will be watching.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
The refusal of House Republicans to fund aid for Ukraine, their insistence on pursuing a bogus impeachment scheme hatched by an indicted Russian FBI source in contact with Russian intelligence services and their unfailing loyalty to an anti-democratic demagogue infatuated with Russian President Vladimir Putin will further aggravate the existential threat facing democracy around the globe. MAGA Republicans’ recent conduct will only hasten the dangerous trend toward authoritarianism spelled out in Freedom House’s recent report “Freedom in the World 2024: The Mounting Damage of Flawed Elections and Armed Conflict.”
“Global freedom declined for the 18th consecutive year in 2023,” Freedom House reported. “The breadth and depth of the deterioration were extensive. Political rights and civil liberties were diminished in 52 countries, while only 21 countries made improvements. Flawed elections and armed conflict contributed to the decline, endangering freedom and causing severe human suffering.”
The threat from right-wing groups and ideologies rejecting democratic values such as diversity, the rule of law, free speech, equality and tolerance — the very same values the MAGA movement targets — are at the root of the worldwide phenomenon. “Almost everywhere, the downturn in rights was driven by attacks on pluralism — the peaceful coexistence of people with different political ideas, religions, or ethnic identities — that harmed elections and sowed violence,” Freedom House observed. “These intensifying assaults on a core feature of democracy reinforce the urgent need to support the groups and individuals, including human rights defenders and journalists, who are on the front lines of the struggle for freedom worldwide.”
The role of the United States in bolstering democracies, just as it did in World War II and the Cold War, has never been more critical. “As it has for decades, the United States can play a vital role in the expansion of global freedom,” the report reiterated. “But much depends on whether the November 2024 presidential election reinforces or weakens America’s democratic values, processes, and institutions, along with its will to uphold the cause of democracy around the world.”
The United States remains vulnerable at home, where “harassment and intimidation of federal, state, and local politicians, election administrators, and judges pose a serious challenge to the conduct of November’s presidential election.” Moreover, still “haunted by the January 2021 attack on the Capitol and related court cases, Americans are heading into a decisive election starkly divided, with some questioning the very utility of fundamental democratic institutions.”
As the world’s only true superpower, the only country that can summon a global alliance and the historic exemplar of democratic values, the United States must take the lead in defending democracies against internal and external threats. If “governments, donors, and the private sector” do not “deepen their solidarity with front-line allies, hold dictators accountable for rights abuses and corruption, and invest in democratic institutions at home and abroad,” democracy will continue its downward trajectory, the report said. If the United States sacrifices “core principles for the sake of illusory short-term interests,” then we will lose a “global order in which democratic norms prevail” and that “deliver liberty, prosperity, and security — for those living now and for future generations.”
Military defense of democracies continues to be an essential part of protecting our alliances facing aggression from authoritarian regimes such as “the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine [that] continued for a second year, further degrading basic rights in occupied areas and prompting more intense repression in Russia itself.” But the question remains if the United States has the will to do so.
We recently witnessed how perilously close the United States is to frittering away our democratic leadership in the world. When the Republican presidential front-runner espouses fondness for fascist ideas and displays a determination to destroy NATO, and his minions rely on Russian-hatched conspiracies to impeach a president and seem willing to let Ukraine go under, we can imagine the threats to democracy here and abroad reaching the point of no return.
Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-N.J.), a nine-year veteran of the Navy and three-term congresswoman who recently returned from the Munich Conference, expressed to me her dismay at Republicans’ irresponsibility in defending democracy at a critical moment. She pointed at four-times-indicted former president Donald Trump and his party for “undermining and walking away from our alliances.”
She explained, “The rules-based order benefits not just the U.S. but other countries,” yet Republicans “want to blow up the system.” Republicans seem not to care that we depend on an alliance of democratic allies to do everything from protecting the seaways to confronting China’s aggression, she noted. She said there is a military phrase: “We never fight alone.” And yet we will find ourselves isolated, vulnerable and saddled with higher defense costs if Republicans persist in enabling Putin and destroying our democratic alliances.
“We are at an inflection point,” Sherrill said, echoing the Freedom House report and speaking with obvious emotion. “I cannot accept that the country I have given my life to, the country [for which] I cannot count the number of oaths I have taken, the country I have fought for, I cannot accept that we cannot stand with Ukraine.”
And yet if Republicans have their way — denying Ukraine a lifeline, doing the bidding of Putin internationally and lifting a Putin pawn to the U.S. presidency — democracy’s backsliding will become an avalanche. Imagine if the only country capable of reinforcing the rules-based order and preventing tyrannical regimes from overwhelming vulnerable countries stood with the authoritarians. Under such circumstances, democracy in the United States and around the world would be unlikely to survive.
It’s hard to quibble with the argument that the upcoming election is the most important in our history and in the history of Western democracies. The world will be watching.
MITCH MCCONNELL IS THE ARSONIST WHO SET AMERICA ON FIRE AND RAN AWAY
A corrupt Supreme Court, looming dictatorship and a "Handmaid's Tale" society is the America Mitch McConnell created and runs away from.
by Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
The lyrics to Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler” are branded onto my brain. In the summer of 1979, I was a 20-year-old so eager to break into journalism I took a job at a tiny paper in Peoria, Ill., and lived there with my grandparents. “You know that ol’ ‘Gambler’?” was probably the first thing my grandfather, A.B. Bunch, said to me in his hillbilly drawl when I walked off the plane. The 45-rpm single was maybe the first record he’d bought in 20 years, and so he blared it from his large prehistoric stereo five or six times a day.
“You gotta know when to hold ‘em/Know when to fold ‘em/Know when to walk away/Know when to run.”
You gotta hand it to Mitch McConnell, the GOP’s 82-year-old Senate minority leader who arguably has done more to bend, staple and mutilate America in the 21st century than anyone else. He did so with zero charm or charisma, in the slow, ageless and ultimately inscrutable manner of the giant Galapagos turtle he so weirdly resembles.
But last Wednesday, the ancient gambler of the Senate looked carefully at his final hand. He knew when to run.
In announcing that he’ll step down as the chamber’s Republican leader after November’s presidential election, McConnell did his best impersonation of a statesman, proclaiming: “One of life’s most underappreciated talents is to know when it’s time to move on to life’s next chapter.” But the real McConnell burned through as he tried to have it every which way — seemingly attacking today’s MAGA-mesmerized GOP without saying exactly what the problem is or using his power to do anything about it, while pretending he had nothing to do with it.
“Believe me, I know the politics within my party at this particular moment in time,” McConnell said, in a seeming verbal subtweet of his fellow Republicans who are delighting Russian dictator Vladimir Putin with their failure to fund Ukraine aid. “I have many faults. Misunderstanding politics is not one of them.”
Here’s what McConnell understood but wouldn’t say out loud: America’s political arsonist, having managed in his record-setting 17-year run as Senate GOP leader to light multiple matches under all three branches of U.S. government, could see the wildfire he started finally lapping at the Capitol. This November, he will make us all truly believe that turtles can run.
The echoes from McConnell’s farewell had barely died in the Senate chamber when the Supreme Court that the senatorhas shaped and molded like a lump of Kentucky clay did exactly what many of us feared and put its clumsy thumb of injustice firmly on the life-or-death scales of November’s presidential election. The high court’s handling of Donald Trump’s ridiculous claims of presidential immunity from all crimes has been guided by three principles — delay, delay, and delay — that are pushing Trump’s 2020 election interference trial past Election Day. It’s a realpolitik move in the image of the court’s creator, McConnell, but Mitch doesn’t want to be around for the consequences.
This is my first column back after a two-week staycation, and I watched with alarm from my couch as the flames of the McConnell Fire jumped from place to place, fanned by the gale-force winds of autocracy and intolerance. In almost every soul-crushing story, I could practically smell the senator’s presence amid the rubble and ashes. Remember that MAGA stunt a couple years ago when gas prices were so high and they put those stickers of a laughing President Joe Biden on the pumps, saying “I did that!”? When they sift through the smoldering ashes of the American Experiment in a couple of decades, the “I did that!” stickers on the burned-out stumps will instead picture McConnell.
Look at the news. Last week’s Supreme Court shocker was all but guaranteed the moment in 2016 when McConnell ended any debate over whether or not SCOTUS is a political animal — smashing through the guardrails of democracy to block even a hearing for the nominee of the first Black president, to hold the seat open for a Trump-flavored conservative. The court’s stall tactic around Trump’s federal Jan. 6 trial is an echo of McConnell’s stall tactics that gave them their right-wing supermajority. Mitch did that!
It was also the McConnell Court, of course, that by that one-vote margin he carved out finally overturned Roe vs. Wade in 2022 and reversed nearly a half-century of women’s reproductive rights in America. That Dobbs decision has sparked a red-state revival of the patriarchy that is making The Handmaid’s Tale seem like a documentary. That Alabama Supreme Court’s God-citing decision blocking desperate would-be parents from in-vitro fertilization (IVF) — so extreme it even had the state’s right-wing Republicans backpedaling? Mitch did that!
And don’t forget that McConnell’s reshaping of the judiciary didn’t begin and end with the Supreme Court. The GOP Senate leader slowed Barack Obama’s nominees at the end of his presidency and then flipped the switch when Trump arrived in January 2017, ultimately pushing through 230 new federal judges, including one-third of the appellate seats. Some had minimal qualifications except for their ties to the right-wing Federalist Society. Exhibit A might be U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon of Florida, whom Trump plucked from legal obscurity in 2020 and seems hell-bent on returning the favor by slow walking the ex-president’s classified documents trial. Mitch did that!
Some Democrats seem willing to give McConnell a pass because they find themselves allies on the urgent issue of funding Ukraine’s war effort to block Putin’s aggression. But the reality is more complicated. It always is with Mitch. In 2016, McConnell could have worked to expose the Russian political interference that seems to have poisoned the brains of Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson. Instead, he refused that fall to sign a bipartisan statement that would have warned voters about Putin’s crusade. Stopping Russian meddling? Mitch didn’t do that!
Of course, it’s fair to ask why Putin’s preferred candidate — the man who summoned a violent coup attempt on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021 — is even allowed to run for another term. Once again, the cowardly machinations of McConnell played the decisive role. Weeks after the insurrection, Sen. Watch-What-I-Do-Not-What-I-Say issued a stinging verbal condemnation of Trump’s actions, then voted to acquit his fellow Republican at his impeachment trial. Even worse, he didn’t use his sizable clout as leader to convince his GOP colleagues to convict Trump, which would have barred him from running this year. America’s political arsonist seemed to really believe the blaze would burn out and die of its own accord. Instead, the wildfires are engulfing everything — including McConnell’s legacy.
Like everything with McConnell, it’s hard to say exactly why he’s surrendering his leadership post now. His almost ghostly countenance last week clearly suggested his declining health was a factor. But he also must have taken a long look at the political cards he was holding. The Democrats could hold onto their narrow Senate majority in 2025, but I have to think McConnell realized the likelihood of returning as majority leader was even worse. A GOP leader under Trump 47 would have to actually enact the end game for democracy that McConnell has teed up over the decades. Having to whip 51 votes for authoritarian Trumpists — just imagine Homeland Security Secretary Stephen Miller — or for mass detention camps along the border would expose McConnell as the firebug he’s been all along.
Why’d he do it? It’s not even clear McConnell knew what he was doing, on a lifelong political power trip that spiraled out of control. His epitaph was written by the friend who — as the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer struggled to understand what made McConnell tick in writing a 2020 profile — told her: “Give up. You can look and look for something more in him, but it isn’t there. I wish I could tell you there is some secret thing he believes in, but he doesn’t.”
We are currently consumed, as we should be, with Trump’s autocratic march on Washington. But it was McConnell’s rank amorality, in a wetlands where everything and everybody — even justices of the Supreme Court — is up for sale, that caused the utter devastation that burned the pathway for a narcissistic dictator. When McConnell tells you that he doesn’t misunderstand politics, he is telling you he’s smart enough to know he doesn’t want to be seen wandering lost among the smoldering wreckage he created. Somewhere in the darkness, this gambler did not break even. It’s time to run.
A corrupt Supreme Court, looming dictatorship and a "Handmaid's Tale" society is the America Mitch McConnell created and runs away from.
by Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
The lyrics to Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler” are branded onto my brain. In the summer of 1979, I was a 20-year-old so eager to break into journalism I took a job at a tiny paper in Peoria, Ill., and lived there with my grandparents. “You know that ol’ ‘Gambler’?” was probably the first thing my grandfather, A.B. Bunch, said to me in his hillbilly drawl when I walked off the plane. The 45-rpm single was maybe the first record he’d bought in 20 years, and so he blared it from his large prehistoric stereo five or six times a day.
“You gotta know when to hold ‘em/Know when to fold ‘em/Know when to walk away/Know when to run.”
You gotta hand it to Mitch McConnell, the GOP’s 82-year-old Senate minority leader who arguably has done more to bend, staple and mutilate America in the 21st century than anyone else. He did so with zero charm or charisma, in the slow, ageless and ultimately inscrutable manner of the giant Galapagos turtle he so weirdly resembles.
But last Wednesday, the ancient gambler of the Senate looked carefully at his final hand. He knew when to run.
In announcing that he’ll step down as the chamber’s Republican leader after November’s presidential election, McConnell did his best impersonation of a statesman, proclaiming: “One of life’s most underappreciated talents is to know when it’s time to move on to life’s next chapter.” But the real McConnell burned through as he tried to have it every which way — seemingly attacking today’s MAGA-mesmerized GOP without saying exactly what the problem is or using his power to do anything about it, while pretending he had nothing to do with it.
“Believe me, I know the politics within my party at this particular moment in time,” McConnell said, in a seeming verbal subtweet of his fellow Republicans who are delighting Russian dictator Vladimir Putin with their failure to fund Ukraine aid. “I have many faults. Misunderstanding politics is not one of them.”
Here’s what McConnell understood but wouldn’t say out loud: America’s political arsonist, having managed in his record-setting 17-year run as Senate GOP leader to light multiple matches under all three branches of U.S. government, could see the wildfire he started finally lapping at the Capitol. This November, he will make us all truly believe that turtles can run.
The echoes from McConnell’s farewell had barely died in the Senate chamber when the Supreme Court that the senator
This is my first column back after a two-week staycation, and I watched with alarm from my couch as the flames of the McConnell Fire jumped from place to place, fanned by the gale-force winds of autocracy and intolerance. In almost every soul-crushing story, I could practically smell the senator’s presence amid the rubble and ashes. Remember that MAGA stunt a couple years ago when gas prices were so high and they put those stickers of a laughing President Joe Biden on the pumps, saying “I did that!”? When they sift through the smoldering ashes of the American Experiment in a couple of decades, the “I did that!” stickers on the burned-out stumps will instead picture McConnell.
Look at the news. Last week’s Supreme Court shocker was all but guaranteed the moment in 2016 when McConnell ended any debate over whether or not SCOTUS is a political animal — smashing through the guardrails of democracy to block even a hearing for the nominee of the first Black president, to hold the seat open for a Trump-flavored conservative. The court’s stall tactic around Trump’s federal Jan. 6 trial is an echo of McConnell’s stall tactics that gave them their right-wing supermajority. Mitch did that!
It was also the McConnell Court, of course, that by that one-vote margin he carved out finally overturned Roe vs. Wade in 2022 and reversed nearly a half-century of women’s reproductive rights in America. That Dobbs decision has sparked a red-state revival of the patriarchy that is making The Handmaid’s Tale seem like a documentary. That Alabama Supreme Court’s God-citing decision blocking desperate would-be parents from in-vitro fertilization (IVF) — so extreme it even had the state’s right-wing Republicans backpedaling? Mitch did that!
And don’t forget that McConnell’s reshaping of the judiciary didn’t begin and end with the Supreme Court. The GOP Senate leader slowed Barack Obama’s nominees at the end of his presidency and then flipped the switch when Trump arrived in January 2017, ultimately pushing through 230 new federal judges, including one-third of the appellate seats. Some had minimal qualifications except for their ties to the right-wing Federalist Society. Exhibit A might be U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon of Florida, whom Trump plucked from legal obscurity in 2020 and seems hell-bent on returning the favor by slow walking the ex-president’s classified documents trial. Mitch did that!
Some Democrats seem willing to give McConnell a pass because they find themselves allies on the urgent issue of funding Ukraine’s war effort to block Putin’s aggression. But the reality is more complicated. It always is with Mitch. In 2016, McConnell could have worked to expose the Russian political interference that seems to have poisoned the brains of Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson. Instead, he refused that fall to sign a bipartisan statement that would have warned voters about Putin’s crusade. Stopping Russian meddling? Mitch didn’t do that!
Of course, it’s fair to ask why Putin’s preferred candidate — the man who summoned a violent coup attempt on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021 — is even allowed to run for another term. Once again, the cowardly machinations of McConnell played the decisive role. Weeks after the insurrection, Sen. Watch-What-I-Do-Not-What-I-Say issued a stinging verbal condemnation of Trump’s actions, then voted to acquit his fellow Republican at his impeachment trial. Even worse, he didn’t use his sizable clout as leader to convince his GOP colleagues to convict Trump, which would have barred him from running this year. America’s political arsonist seemed to really believe the blaze would burn out and die of its own accord. Instead, the wildfires are engulfing everything — including McConnell’s legacy.
Like everything with McConnell, it’s hard to say exactly why he’s surrendering his leadership post now. His almost ghostly countenance last week clearly suggested his declining health was a factor. But he also must have taken a long look at the political cards he was holding. The Democrats could hold onto their narrow Senate majority in 2025, but I have to think McConnell realized the likelihood of returning as majority leader was even worse. A GOP leader under Trump 47 would have to actually enact the end game for democracy that McConnell has teed up over the decades. Having to whip 51 votes for authoritarian Trumpists — just imagine Homeland Security Secretary Stephen Miller — or for mass detention camps along the border would expose McConnell as the firebug he’s been all along.
Why’d he do it? It’s not even clear McConnell knew what he was doing, on a lifelong political power trip that spiraled out of control. His epitaph was written by the friend who — as the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer struggled to understand what made McConnell tick in writing a 2020 profile — told her: “Give up. You can look and look for something more in him, but it isn’t there. I wish I could tell you there is some secret thing he believes in, but he doesn’t.”
We are currently consumed, as we should be, with Trump’s autocratic march on Washington. But it was McConnell’s rank amorality, in a wetlands where everything and everybody — even justices of the Supreme Court — is up for sale, that caused the utter devastation that burned the pathway for a narcissistic dictator. When McConnell tells you that he doesn’t misunderstand politics, he is telling you he’s smart enough to know he doesn’t want to be seen wandering lost among the smoldering wreckage he created. Somewhere in the darkness, this gambler did not break even. It’s time to run.
UKRAINE WILL LOSE ONLY IF MAGA REPUBLICANS CUT OFF U.S. AID
By Max Boot, The Washington Post
In 1940 and 1941, America First isolationists argued that the United States should not help Britain resist the Nazi onslaught because it had no chance to prevail. “I have been forced to the conclusion that we cannot win this war for England, regardless of how much assistance we extend,” Charles Lindbergh said on April 23, 1941.
Today’s America Firsters are voicing a similar refrain when it comes to Ukraine. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) said: “I haven’t voted for any money to go to Ukraine because I know they can’t win.” Former president Donald Trump chimed in: “You’re really up against a war machine in Russia. … They defeated Hitler, they defeated Napoleon.” (This vaunted “war machine” lost the Crimean War, the Russo-Japanese War, World War I and the Soviet-Afghan war.) Many of these isolationists make it sound as though they are doing Ukraine a favor by hastening its defeat and occupation. “It doesn’t help the Ukrainian people,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), said recently, “to prolong their suffering in this war.”
Just as the original America Firsters played into Adolf Hitler’s hands, so their ideological descendants play into Vladimir Putin’s. Dictators always want to convey a sense that their triumph is inevitable and that resistance is futile. Indeed, the MAGA Republicans sound indistinguishable from Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, who said last year that Western aid deliveries “will not change anything” and “can only prolong the suffering of the Ukrainian people.”
Yet Ukraine has proved the naysayers wrong for more than two years and it can continue to do so as long as it receives aid from the United States. But if U.S. aid is cut off, as the MAGA Republicans demand, then their predictions of doom might become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It’s worth recalling that few analysts gave Ukraine any chance of successfully repelling the initial Russian onslaught which began on Feb. 24, 2022. The U.S. intelligence community feared that Kyiv could fall within 72 hours. Yet here we are 740 days later, as of Monday, and the Ukrainian state is, in many ways, stronger than it was before the war, with a far larger and more capable military, a more popular leader, and a far more united populace.
Ukrainian nationalism has been turbocharged by the Russian assault, and Ukrainians remain nearly unanimous in their desire to fight the invaders. In one recent poll, 89 percent of Ukrainians said they are still convinced they will win the war.
As I saw on a trip around the country last month, much of Ukraine continues to function remarkably well despite the war. In major cities, grocery store shelves are stocked, restaurants are packed and streets are full of traffic. There have been no major shortages of heat or electricity this winter despite Russian attacks. The blockade of Ukraine’s Black Sea coast has been broken, with Russia’s Black Sea Fleet losing roughly one-third of its ships. Ukrainian grain exports from Odessa are almost back to prewar volumes.
Putin’s goal was to snuff out Ukraine’s independence. So far, he has failed miserably. So, too, his gambit of cutting off Russian natural gas to Europe failed to cow the continent. The war has actually strengthened NATO, with Sweden and Finland joining the alliance and member states boosting their defense spending.
The Russians have managed to increase the amount of Ukrainian territory they control from 7 percent to 18 percent — but at frightful cost. The U.S. intelligence community estimates that Russia has lost more than 315,000 soldiers killed and wounded, its worst casualty figures since World War II. The Estonian intelligence service calculates that the Russians have lost “over 2,600 tanks, 5,100 armored personnel carriers and 600 self-propelled artillery units.” Two-thirds of Russia’s prewar tank inventory has been destroyed.
The bad news is that, despite Western sanctions, Russia’s economy continues to function, and it has been put on a wartime footing to churn out more weapons systems. But even so, Russia is expending munitions faster than it can manufacture them. The Kremlin has had to deplete Soviet-era stockpiles and buy artillery shells from North Korea and drones and missiles from Iran.
It’s also dismaying that Putin’s hold on power has not been shaken by the needless loss of so many soldiers in meat-grinder assaults. Indeed, following the deaths of mercenary leader Yevgeniy Prigozhin and opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the Russian dictator appears more firmly entrenched than ever.
The final bit of negative news is that the Russian military’s combat performance has improved since the early days of the war. The Russian army has greatly increased its drone and electronic warfare capabilities, in particular. Ukraine’s counteroffensive failed to break through heavily fortified Russian lines last year, and, in mid-February, the Russians took Avdiivka — their biggest victory since the fall of Bakhmut in May 2023.
The Russian success in Avdiivka was possible because, with U.S. aid already cut off, the Ukrainians are suffering from an acute shortage of artillery shells. If U.S. aid doesn’t restart and ammunition shortages worsen, the Russians can break through elsewhere along the 600-mile front and rain down air attacks on Ukrainian cities. That could eventually lead to Ukraine’s defeat.
But if U.S. aid resumes, Ukraine could continue to hold out indefinitely, and Russia will find it extremely difficult to advance. As long as Russia cannot substantially expand its zone of occupation — and Ukraine remains a functioning, pro-Western state — I would consider that a victory for Ukraine. Ukraine might even be able to claw back more of its lost territory next year if the West provides more long-range-strike weapons (such as American-made ATACMS) to target Russian bases in Crimea. Ukraine should receive a boost when it takes delivery of its first F-16 fighter jets this summer.
Yes, Russia is a large country — much larger than Ukraine — but it does not have infinite stocks of men and materiel. Russia is most amply supplied with young men who could become cannon fodder, and Ukraine needs to increase its own conscription to keep pace. But, since mobilizing 300,000 fighters in the fall of 2022, Putin has been careful not to expand the draft for fear of popular pushback.
Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute in London, writing for Time magazine, notes that “Russia’s firepower dominance will potentially diminish” in 2025 as it runs low on ammunition stockpiles. In a similar vein, a senior Biden administration official told the New Yorker that “Russia can continue its current level of war expenditures into the spring of 2025, at which point it will run into trouble.” Meanwhile, the United States and Europe are expanding their defense production; next year, they might be able to produce twice as many artillery shells as Russia.
If those estimates are accurate, then Ukraine just has to survive this year before the tide might start to turn again. “Ukraine’s prospects are grim but hardly fatal,” retired Australian major general Mick Ryan told me. “There were multiple occasions when the allies faced such terrible prospects in World War II. They won not just through perseverance and production, but with an alliance strategy to defeat their enemy, not just defend against them. Such is Ukraine’s pathway to victory. Russia is a relatively weak bully — and very beatable. We just have to decide to do it.”
Whether Ukraine wins or loses will be decided not on the battlefield but in the House of Representatives, where a Senate-approved $60 billion aid bill continues to languish. There is nothing inevitable about Ukraine’s defeat, any more than there was anything inevitable about Britain’s defeat in World War II. But, despite Ukraine’s impressive and inspirational record of resistance thus far, it can still lose this war if MAGA Republicans succeed in cutting off U.S. aid.
By Max Boot, The Washington Post
In 1940 and 1941, America First isolationists argued that the United States should not help Britain resist the Nazi onslaught because it had no chance to prevail. “I have been forced to the conclusion that we cannot win this war for England, regardless of how much assistance we extend,” Charles Lindbergh said on April 23, 1941.
Today’s America Firsters are voicing a similar refrain when it comes to Ukraine. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) said: “I haven’t voted for any money to go to Ukraine because I know they can’t win.” Former president Donald Trump chimed in: “You’re really up against a war machine in Russia. … They defeated Hitler, they defeated Napoleon.” (This vaunted “war machine” lost the Crimean War, the Russo-Japanese War, World War I and the Soviet-Afghan war.) Many of these isolationists make it sound as though they are doing Ukraine a favor by hastening its defeat and occupation. “It doesn’t help the Ukrainian people,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), said recently, “to prolong their suffering in this war.”
Just as the original America Firsters played into Adolf Hitler’s hands, so their ideological descendants play into Vladimir Putin’s. Dictators always want to convey a sense that their triumph is inevitable and that resistance is futile. Indeed, the MAGA Republicans sound indistinguishable from Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, who said last year that Western aid deliveries “will not change anything” and “can only prolong the suffering of the Ukrainian people.”
Yet Ukraine has proved the naysayers wrong for more than two years and it can continue to do so as long as it receives aid from the United States. But if U.S. aid is cut off, as the MAGA Republicans demand, then their predictions of doom might become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It’s worth recalling that few analysts gave Ukraine any chance of successfully repelling the initial Russian onslaught which began on Feb. 24, 2022. The U.S. intelligence community feared that Kyiv could fall within 72 hours. Yet here we are 740 days later, as of Monday, and the Ukrainian state is, in many ways, stronger than it was before the war, with a far larger and more capable military, a more popular leader, and a far more united populace.
Ukrainian nationalism has been turbocharged by the Russian assault, and Ukrainians remain nearly unanimous in their desire to fight the invaders. In one recent poll, 89 percent of Ukrainians said they are still convinced they will win the war.
As I saw on a trip around the country last month, much of Ukraine continues to function remarkably well despite the war. In major cities, grocery store shelves are stocked, restaurants are packed and streets are full of traffic. There have been no major shortages of heat or electricity this winter despite Russian attacks. The blockade of Ukraine’s Black Sea coast has been broken, with Russia’s Black Sea Fleet losing roughly one-third of its ships. Ukrainian grain exports from Odessa are almost back to prewar volumes.
Putin’s goal was to snuff out Ukraine’s independence. So far, he has failed miserably. So, too, his gambit of cutting off Russian natural gas to Europe failed to cow the continent. The war has actually strengthened NATO, with Sweden and Finland joining the alliance and member states boosting their defense spending.
The Russians have managed to increase the amount of Ukrainian territory they control from 7 percent to 18 percent — but at frightful cost. The U.S. intelligence community estimates that Russia has lost more than 315,000 soldiers killed and wounded, its worst casualty figures since World War II. The Estonian intelligence service calculates that the Russians have lost “over 2,600 tanks, 5,100 armored personnel carriers and 600 self-propelled artillery units.” Two-thirds of Russia’s prewar tank inventory has been destroyed.
The bad news is that, despite Western sanctions, Russia’s economy continues to function, and it has been put on a wartime footing to churn out more weapons systems. But even so, Russia is expending munitions faster than it can manufacture them. The Kremlin has had to deplete Soviet-era stockpiles and buy artillery shells from North Korea and drones and missiles from Iran.
It’s also dismaying that Putin’s hold on power has not been shaken by the needless loss of so many soldiers in meat-grinder assaults. Indeed, following the deaths of mercenary leader Yevgeniy Prigozhin and opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the Russian dictator appears more firmly entrenched than ever.
The final bit of negative news is that the Russian military’s combat performance has improved since the early days of the war. The Russian army has greatly increased its drone and electronic warfare capabilities, in particular. Ukraine’s counteroffensive failed to break through heavily fortified Russian lines last year, and, in mid-February, the Russians took Avdiivka — their biggest victory since the fall of Bakhmut in May 2023.
The Russian success in Avdiivka was possible because, with U.S. aid already cut off, the Ukrainians are suffering from an acute shortage of artillery shells. If U.S. aid doesn’t restart and ammunition shortages worsen, the Russians can break through elsewhere along the 600-mile front and rain down air attacks on Ukrainian cities. That could eventually lead to Ukraine’s defeat.
But if U.S. aid resumes, Ukraine could continue to hold out indefinitely, and Russia will find it extremely difficult to advance. As long as Russia cannot substantially expand its zone of occupation — and Ukraine remains a functioning, pro-Western state — I would consider that a victory for Ukraine. Ukraine might even be able to claw back more of its lost territory next year if the West provides more long-range-strike weapons (such as American-made ATACMS) to target Russian bases in Crimea. Ukraine should receive a boost when it takes delivery of its first F-16 fighter jets this summer.
Yes, Russia is a large country — much larger than Ukraine — but it does not have infinite stocks of men and materiel. Russia is most amply supplied with young men who could become cannon fodder, and Ukraine needs to increase its own conscription to keep pace. But, since mobilizing 300,000 fighters in the fall of 2022, Putin has been careful not to expand the draft for fear of popular pushback.
Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute in London, writing for Time magazine, notes that “Russia’s firepower dominance will potentially diminish” in 2025 as it runs low on ammunition stockpiles. In a similar vein, a senior Biden administration official told the New Yorker that “Russia can continue its current level of war expenditures into the spring of 2025, at which point it will run into trouble.” Meanwhile, the United States and Europe are expanding their defense production; next year, they might be able to produce twice as many artillery shells as Russia.
If those estimates are accurate, then Ukraine just has to survive this year before the tide might start to turn again. “Ukraine’s prospects are grim but hardly fatal,” retired Australian major general Mick Ryan told me. “There were multiple occasions when the allies faced such terrible prospects in World War II. They won not just through perseverance and production, but with an alliance strategy to defeat their enemy, not just defend against them. Such is Ukraine’s pathway to victory. Russia is a relatively weak bully — and very beatable. We just have to decide to do it.”
Whether Ukraine wins or loses will be decided not on the battlefield but in the House of Representatives, where a Senate-approved $60 billion aid bill continues to languish. There is nothing inevitable about Ukraine’s defeat, any more than there was anything inevitable about Britain’s defeat in World War II. But, despite Ukraine’s impressive and inspirational record of resistance thus far, it can still lose this war if MAGA Republicans succeed in cutting off U.S. aid.
A NUCLEAR WEAPON IN SPACE IS ABSURD. THIS IS AN ARMS RACE TO NOWHERE.
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
On Feb. 16, President Biden chose his words carefully about U.S. intelligence reports of a possible Russian nuclear-armed antisatellite weapon in space. “There is no nuclear threat to the people of America or anywhere else in the world,” he said, adding that such a weapon has not been deployed. Left unsaid: It would pose an enormous danger to satellites upon which billions of people rely.
President Vladimir Putin sometimes boasts about new and exotic weapons systems. Not all of them exist, nor will they. But the latest controversy is a reminder that such boasts can become reality. New weapons and technology often lead to arms races, tension and instability.
A nuclear-armed antisatellite weapon is a lunatic idea, as has been clear for decades. On July 9, 1962, a then-secret U.S. missile test hurled a nuclear warhead into space from a Pacific atoll. The 1.4-megaton warhead detonated at an altitude of about 250 miles. It caused streetlight blackouts in Hawaii, about 900 miles away, and emitted a huge plume of high-energy electrons that became trapped in Earth’s magnetic field, damaging at least eight satellites in orbit. The United States and the Soviet Union subsequently agreed to ban nuclear tests in the atmosphere and space in 1963 and outlawed placing nuclear weapons in orbit in 1967.
Today, there are more than 8,200 satellites in low Earth orbit, many privately owned and operated. A Russian nuclear weapon in space could disrupt communications for everything from global shipping to combat communications in Ukraine. It would threaten all satellites, including Russia’s.
In a 2018 speech, Mr. Putin displayed a video of what he described as a nuclear-powered cruise missile that might travel thousands of miles at low altitude without refueling. The missile was reportedly the cause of a 2019 explosion at a Russian navy range on the White Sea; last year, Mr. Putin announced that development was complete, although little else is known. Another reported new Russian weapon, Poseidon, is an underwater drone driven by nuclear power and carrying a nuclear warhead that could cause panic and fear if deployed in a coastal harbor.
Meanwhile, China is rapidly and significantly expanding its nuclear arsenal, expected to reach 1,000 warheads by the end of this decade. (Under the New START accord, Russia and the United States are each limited to 1,550 deployed strategic or long-range warheads through 2026.) China is also pursuing other types of sophisticated weapons. In 2007, it used an antisatellite missile fired from the ground to smash apart a defunct weather satellite, leaving more than 3,000 pieces of traceable space debris, of which more than 2,700 remain in orbit. Most will continue orbiting Earth for decades, according to the Pentagon. China’s ground-based ASAT system is intended to target low Earth orbit satellites. In 2021, China/it also tested the first fractional orbital launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile with a hypersonic glide vehicle. If deployed, it would use a missile to carry a bomb halfway around the world and then drop it with a speeding sled that might be impossible to stop.
In its report in October, the congressional Strategic Posture Commission concluded that the United States “will soon encounter a fundamentally different global setting than it has ever experienced” in the rise of two nuclear-armed peers, Russia and China, bent on disrupting and displacing the U.S.-led international order. Even though Russia’s resources are being drained by the invasion of Ukraine, and China’s economy is dragging, both seem capable and willing to use technology to probe for asymmetric weaknesses in the United States and perhaps unleash new arms races.
Technology drives weapons competitions. In the 1970s, the United States and Soviet Union developed multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles, or MIRVs, which allowed a single missile to carry up to 10 nuclear warheads, each aimed at a different target. This dramatically changed calculations about nuclear warfare. Other advances from the United States came rapidly: precision weapons, low-flying cruise missiles, stealth aircraft and super-accurate ballistic missiles. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, realizing his economy was buckling under the cost of keeping up with the United States, turned to nuclear arms control agreements with President Ronald Reagan. But almost all those treaties have expired or been abandoned.
The United States now faces not one but two rivals in Russia and China; competition with them will be necessary, difficult and costly. Mr. Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine makes arms control negotiation nearly impossible — he cannot be trusted — and China has refused to talk about limits on nuclear weapons. Still, at the very least, extension of the New START accord beyond 2026 with Russia and starting talks with China would be in everyone’s interest. In the long term, arms control treaties might again be needed to contain the dangers, not only of nuclear weapons but also of armaments in cyber, disinformation or something entirely new.
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
On Feb. 16, President Biden chose his words carefully about U.S. intelligence reports of a possible Russian nuclear-armed antisatellite weapon in space. “There is no nuclear threat to the people of America or anywhere else in the world,” he said, adding that such a weapon has not been deployed. Left unsaid: It would pose an enormous danger to satellites upon which billions of people rely.
President Vladimir Putin sometimes boasts about new and exotic weapons systems. Not all of them exist, nor will they. But the latest controversy is a reminder that such boasts can become reality. New weapons and technology often lead to arms races, tension and instability.
A nuclear-armed antisatellite weapon is a lunatic idea, as has been clear for decades. On July 9, 1962, a then-secret U.S. missile test hurled a nuclear warhead into space from a Pacific atoll. The 1.4-megaton warhead detonated at an altitude of about 250 miles. It caused streetlight blackouts in Hawaii, about 900 miles away, and emitted a huge plume of high-energy electrons that became trapped in Earth’s magnetic field, damaging at least eight satellites in orbit. The United States and the Soviet Union subsequently agreed to ban nuclear tests in the atmosphere and space in 1963 and outlawed placing nuclear weapons in orbit in 1967.
Today, there are more than 8,200 satellites in low Earth orbit, many privately owned and operated. A Russian nuclear weapon in space could disrupt communications for everything from global shipping to combat communications in Ukraine. It would threaten all satellites, including Russia’s.
In a 2018 speech, Mr. Putin displayed a video of what he described as a nuclear-powered cruise missile that might travel thousands of miles at low altitude without refueling. The missile was reportedly the cause of a 2019 explosion at a Russian navy range on the White Sea; last year, Mr. Putin announced that development was complete, although little else is known. Another reported new Russian weapon, Poseidon, is an underwater drone driven by nuclear power and carrying a nuclear warhead that could cause panic and fear if deployed in a coastal harbor.
Meanwhile, China is rapidly and significantly expanding its nuclear arsenal, expected to reach 1,000 warheads by the end of this decade. (Under the New START accord, Russia and the United States are each limited to 1,550 deployed strategic or long-range warheads through 2026.) China is also pursuing other types of sophisticated weapons. In 2007, it used an antisatellite missile fired from the ground to smash apart a defunct weather satellite, leaving more than 3,000 pieces of traceable space debris, of which more than 2,700 remain in orbit. Most will continue orbiting Earth for decades, according to the Pentagon. China’s ground-based ASAT system is intended to target low Earth orbit satellites. In 2021, China/it also tested the first fractional orbital launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile with a hypersonic glide vehicle. If deployed, it would use a missile to carry a bomb halfway around the world and then drop it with a speeding sled that might be impossible to stop.
In its report in October, the congressional Strategic Posture Commission concluded that the United States “will soon encounter a fundamentally different global setting than it has ever experienced” in the rise of two nuclear-armed peers, Russia and China, bent on disrupting and displacing the U.S.-led international order. Even though Russia’s resources are being drained by the invasion of Ukraine, and China’s economy is dragging, both seem capable and willing to use technology to probe for asymmetric weaknesses in the United States and perhaps unleash new arms races.
Technology drives weapons competitions. In the 1970s, the United States and Soviet Union developed multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles, or MIRVs, which allowed a single missile to carry up to 10 nuclear warheads, each aimed at a different target. This dramatically changed calculations about nuclear warfare. Other advances from the United States came rapidly: precision weapons, low-flying cruise missiles, stealth aircraft and super-accurate ballistic missiles. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, realizing his economy was buckling under the cost of keeping up with the United States, turned to nuclear arms control agreements with President Ronald Reagan. But almost all those treaties have expired or been abandoned.
The United States now faces not one but two rivals in Russia and China; competition with them will be necessary, difficult and costly. Mr. Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine makes arms control negotiation nearly impossible — he cannot be trusted — and China has refused to talk about limits on nuclear weapons. Still, at the very least, extension of the New START accord beyond 2026 with Russia and starting talks with China would be in everyone’s interest. In the long term, arms control treaties might again be needed to contain the dangers, not only of nuclear weapons but also of armaments in cyber, disinformation or something entirely new.
WHO REALLY STANDS WITH AMERICAN WORKERS?
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
There was a lot of breathless speculation before Tuesday’s presidential primaries in Michigan, but the actual results didn’t clarify the two most important questions: How many “uncommitted” voters angry about President Biden’s approach to the war in Gaza will abstain in November, even though Donald Trump would surely be much more supportive of Benjamin Netanyahu than Biden? And how many blue-collar workers will support Trump in the false belief that he’s on their side?
But we can at least say with certainty that Trump is not now and never has been pro-worker — while Biden is.
Naturally, that’s not the way Trump tells the story. In September, during an autoworkers’ strike, Trump, addressing workers at a nonunion Michigan auto parts factory, declared that he had saved an auto industry that was “on its knees, gasping its last breaths” when he took office. The day before, by contrast, Biden joined union workers on the picket line.
This is, however, pure self-aggrandizing fantasy. When Trump took office, the auto industry had already regained most of the ground it had lost during the Great Recession. This recovery was possible because in 2009, the Obama-Biden administration stepped in to rescue the major auto companies. At the time, many Republicans vehemently opposed that bailout.
What about Trump personally? He flip-flopped, first endorsing the bailout, then years later siding with the Republican right in denouncing it, saying, “You could have let it” — the auto industry — “go bankrupt, frankly, and rebuilt itself.” He once floated the idea of automakers moving production out of Michigan to lower-wage locations and then eventually move back “because those guys are going to want their jobs back even if it is less.” If you don’t quite get the meaning there, he was in effect suggesting busting the auto unions so that workers would be forced to accept pay cuts. Populism!
governed as a standard conservative. His promises to rebuild America’s infrastructure — which drew pushback from Republicans in Congress — became a running joke. His biggest legislative achievement was a tax cut that was a big giveaway to corporations and high-income Americans. His attempt at health care “reform” would have gutted Obamacare without any workable replacement, causing millions of Americans to lose health insurance coverage.
Trump did depart from G.O.P. orthodoxy by imposing substantial tariffs on imports, with the supposed goal of restoring manufacturing. But by imposing tariffs on industrial inputs like steel and aluminum, raising their price, Trump made U.S. manufacturing — auto production in particular — less competitive, and probably destroyed jobs on net.
Crucially, there is nothing to hint that Trump and those around him learned anything from that experience. In particular, the Trump team still appears to believe that tariffs are paid by foreigners, when in fact their burden falls on U.S. workers and consumers. All indications are that a second Trump term would be marked bymore tariffs, just as badly conceived as those of his first.
Despite all this, our economy was running close to full employment on the eve of the Covid-19 pandemic. But this mainly reflected the fact that Republicans in Congress, who delayed recovery from the 2008 financial crisis by squeezing government spending, suddenly loosened the purse strings once Trump was in office.
How does Biden’s record compare? He did preside over a burst of inflation, but so did the leaders of other advanced economies, pretty clearly indicating that pandemic-related disruptions, rather than policy, were responsible. And inflation has been subsiding, despite a few bumps along the way — without the high unemployment some economists asserted would be necessary.
In terms of policy, Biden has made a big break with Trump’s golf-course conservatism. He delivered on infrastructure. He enacted two major bills promoting manufacturing — one in semiconductors, the other focused on green energy. Manufacturing employment has fully recovered from the Covid shock; manufacturing investment has soared.
I don’t know how many Americans are even aware of these policy initiatives. Or how many realize that the Biden era has been really good for blue-collar wages. Overall, wage gains have more than kept up with inflation, and wage gains have been most rapid for lower-paid workers. As a result, most workers’ wages adjusted for inflation are higher than before the pandemic, and are actually above the prepandemic trend.
In short, there’s a reason the United Automobile Workers endorsed Biden, although many of its members will vote for Trump anyway, imagining that he’s on their side.
But Trump isn’t a populist, he’s a poseur. When making actual policy as opposed to speeches, he basically governed as Mitch McConnell with tariffs. Biden, on the other hand, really has pursued a pro-worker agenda — more so, arguably, than any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt — and has presided over a significant reduction in inequality.
How many of us will vote based on this reality? I guess we’ll find out.
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
There was a lot of breathless speculation before Tuesday’s presidential primaries in Michigan, but the actual results didn’t clarify the two most important questions: How many “uncommitted” voters angry about President Biden’s approach to the war in Gaza will abstain in November, even though Donald Trump would surely be much more supportive of Benjamin Netanyahu than Biden? And how many blue-collar workers will support Trump in the false belief that he’s on their side?
But we can at least say with certainty that Trump is not now and never has been pro-worker — while Biden is.
Naturally, that’s not the way Trump tells the story. In September, during an autoworkers’ strike, Trump, addressing workers at a nonunion Michigan auto parts factory, declared that he had saved an auto industry that was “on its knees, gasping its last breaths” when he took office. The day before, by contrast, Biden joined union workers on the picket line.
This is, however, pure self-aggrandizing fantasy. When Trump took office, the auto industry had already regained most of the ground it had lost during the Great Recession. This recovery was possible because in 2009, the Obama-Biden administration stepped in to rescue the major auto companies. At the time, many Republicans vehemently opposed that bailout.
What about Trump personally? He flip-flopped, first endorsing the bailout, then years later siding with the Republican right in denouncing it, saying, “You could have let it” — the auto industry — “go bankrupt, frankly, and rebuilt itself.” He once floated the idea of automakers moving production out of Michigan to lower-wage locations and then eventually move back “because those guys are going to want their jobs back even if it is less.” If you don’t quite get the meaning there, he was in effect suggesting busting the auto unions so that workers would be forced to accept pay cuts. Populism!
governed as a standard conservative. His promises to rebuild America’s infrastructure — which drew pushback from Republicans in Congress — became a running joke. His biggest legislative achievement was a tax cut that was a big giveaway to corporations and high-income Americans. His attempt at health care “reform” would have gutted Obamacare without any workable replacement, causing millions of Americans to lose health insurance coverage.
Trump did depart from G.O.P. orthodoxy by imposing substantial tariffs on imports, with the supposed goal of restoring manufacturing. But by imposing tariffs on industrial inputs like steel and aluminum, raising their price, Trump made U.S. manufacturing — auto production in particular — less competitive, and probably destroyed jobs on net.
Crucially, there is nothing to hint that Trump and those around him learned anything from that experience. In particular, the Trump team still appears to believe that tariffs are paid by foreigners, when in fact their burden falls on U.S. workers and consumers. All indications are that a second Trump term would be marked by
Despite all this, our economy was running close to full employment on the eve of the Covid-19 pandemic. But this mainly reflected the fact that Republicans in Congress, who delayed recovery from the 2008 financial crisis by squeezing government spending, suddenly loosened the purse strings once Trump was in office.
How does Biden’s record compare? He did preside over a burst of inflation, but so did the leaders of other advanced economies, pretty clearly indicating that pandemic-related disruptions, rather than policy, were responsible. And inflation has been subsiding, despite a few bumps along the way — without the high unemployment some economists asserted would be necessary.
In terms of policy, Biden has made a big break with Trump’s golf-course conservatism. He delivered on infrastructure. He enacted two major bills promoting manufacturing — one in semiconductors, the other focused on green energy. Manufacturing employment has fully recovered from the Covid shock; manufacturing investment has soared.
I don’t know how many Americans are even aware of these policy initiatives. Or how many realize that the Biden era has been really good for blue-collar wages. Overall, wage gains have more than kept up with inflation, and wage gains have been most rapid for lower-paid workers. As a result, most workers’ wages adjusted for inflation are higher than before the pandemic, and are actually above the prepandemic trend.
In short, there’s a reason the United Automobile Workers endorsed Biden, although many of its members will vote for Trump anyway, imagining that he’s on their side.
But Trump isn’t a populist, he’s a poseur. When making actual policy as opposed to speeches, he basically governed as Mitch McConnell with tariffs. Biden, on the other hand, really has pursued a pro-worker agenda — more so, arguably, than any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt — and has presided over a significant reduction in inequality.
How many of us will vote based on this reality? I guess we’ll find out.
WHAT TRUMP WOULD DO TO OUR ECONOMY
By Steven Rattner, counselor to the Treasury secretary in the Obama administration.
Much to fear about another Donald Trump presidency: The existential threat to U.S. democracy. The potential abandonment of traditional allies in Europe and elsewhere. The cozying up to dictators like Vladimir Putin. And the danger Mr. Trump poses to our strong economy.
Our economy? Yes, while Trumponomics 1.0 had major flaws (like the deficit-expanding tax cut giveaways to business and the rich), Trumponomics 2.0 is downright scary.
Although Mr. Trump has yet to issue a formal plan, the unalterable conclusion based on what has dribbled out from his campaign speeches, video monologues and his current set of advisers is that he will follow a course that veers even farther from the traditional Republican lane of a global approach to economic policy and into the populist, isolationist lane. A second Trump term would most likely represent a continuation of Mr. Trump’s unsophisticated instincts and what will appeal to his base.
On tariffs, immigration and regulation, Mr. Trump would continue the troubling trend lines of his first term in office. The United States would sink farther into misguided protectionism with new trade wars. Business and the wealthy would be enriched by lower taxes and increasingly freed from oversight. Legal immigration would be reduced. And we would continue to pour carbon dioxide into the atmosphere while intentionally sandbagging our booming clean energy sector.
It’s a prospect that concerns even some in the business community who generally liked Mr. Trump’s first-term economic program while expressing distaste for his personal qualities.
Now executives are in the situation of liking his economic plans less (particularly the international elements) and abhorring the individual — while being turned off by what they perceive to be the anti-business mien of the Biden administration.
At the top of my worry list for a second Trump term: an even more aggressively protectionist approach to trade than he pursued during his four years in office. Mr. Trump has never understood that, on balance, trade can elevate the standard of living and add jobs.
Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.
In his first term, Mr. Trump imposed tariffs on items ranging from steel to washing machines that, according to economic studies, raised consumer prices and ultimately cost American jobs, in part because other countries retaliated with their own tariffs.
And the inflation that’s worrying voters now could get a lot worse, given that Mr. Trump wants to double down with 10 percent across-the-board levies on imports (and still bigger tariffs on countries that retaliate), up from an average of 2 percent at present. That move alone could raise the overall price level by an estimated two to three percentage points.
Then there’s an even more forceful assault on trade with China. No one can legitimately deny that China pursues aggressively protectionist policies. But Mr. Trump’s remedy could well hurt us as much as — if not more than — the Chinese.
In addition to ending China’s most favored nation status, which would raise tariffs on many Chinese goods to as much as 40 percent, he would impose outright bans on some products, including electronics, steel and pharmaceuticals.
Sourcing those items elsewhere in the world in high volumes could be difficult, if not impossible, and the substitutions would certainly add to consumer costs.
On another isolationist front, immigration remains one of Mr. Trump’s signature issues (even though he recently pushed fellow Republicans to abandon bipartisan legislation to address the problem). We certainly need to get control of our borders. That said, slashing the number of new legal arrivals — the language on the Trump website suggests by well more than half — and restricting work permits for all undocumented immigrants would hurt us economically. With unemployment at 3.7 percent, America has too few workers, not too many.
And with the fertility rate low and baby boomers retiring, that worker shortage will only grow. To simply maintain our population growth rate of the past two decades, we would need to elevate our intake of legal immigrants to about four million a year, up from roughly one million at present.
Less quantifiably, immigrants have contributed mightily to our economic success, from filling entry-level jobs to pioneering some of our most important innovations to leading large corporations.
Whoever wins the election will quickly face major tax decisions, as many provisions of Mr. Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act are set to expire at the end of next year. The act conferred most of its tax relief on business and wealthy Americans. And contrary to Trump administration promises, it never came close to paying for itself through increased economic activity. With our budget deficit stubbornly high (nearing $2 trillion annually) do we really want to spend $3.4 trillion to extend its giveaways for a decade?
Another Trump presidency would almost surely bring an assault on a signature Biden administration accomplishment, the Inflation Reduction Act. That (inaptly named) law has unleashed a flood of new energy projects that will give a substantial push to reducing our fossil fuel emissions.
Mr. Trump would go in the opposite direction, vowing to repeal many clean energy provisions and proclaiming at rallies that he would encourage energy companies to “drill, baby, drill.”
More generally, Mr. Trump wants to reshape the entire administrative state in his image, raising the potential for unfortunate consequences, from business running amok to unprosecuted corruption. He has vowed to slash federal regulations, promising (as he did in his first term) to remove two rules for every new rule imposed. Furthermore, he wants to strip key agencies like the federal trade and communications commissions of their independence in order to centralize — and weaponize — their power in the White House. He also plans to subject all civil servants to a political test and vows to cull the ranks of those he described as “rogue bureaucrats.”
This overt politicization of critical government functions could allow Mr. Trump to pursue his whims. In 2017 he reportedly wanted to block AT&T’s takeover of TimeWarner because of his dislike of CNN. He also repeatedly told his chief of staff John Kelly that he wanted his perceived enemies to be investigated by the Internal Revenue Service.
As for monetary policy, expect a war on the Federal Reserve. Mr. Trump appointed the current chair, Jerome Powell, but quickly turned on him, calling him an “enemy” for acknowledging the deleterious effects of the president’s trade war during a speech. Mr. Trump has also routinely railed against the raising of interest rates by the Fed that helped bring down our post-Covid inflation.
Mr. Powell’s term expires in 2026, which would give Mr. Trump the chance to appoint a more submissive Fed chairman — perhaps someone who would indulge his passion for the easy money that would goose the economy in the short term while risking renewed inflation.
Speaking of personnel, Mr. Trump would be unlikely to attract a capable economic team that might be able to restrain his worst instincts. I doubt that temperate advisers like Gary Cohn, a former Goldman Sachs executive who led Mr. Trump’s National Economic Council from January 2017 to April 2018, would be willing to join a second Trump administration.
So what would the overall economic impact of another Trump presidency be? Irresponsibly stimulative monetary and tax policies that might juice the economy at the expense of higher inflation. Prices that would be pushed upward by Mr. Trump’s protectionist trade policies. All of that would eventually cost jobs.
Perhaps Mr. Trump would be deterred by a close win. And Democrats retaining control in at least one house of Congress would provide at least a partial check.
Nonetheless, it’s an unsavory prospect, one of many reasons Americans, including business executives, should be fearful — so very fearful — about Mr. Trump returning to the White House.
By Steven Rattner, counselor to the Treasury secretary in the Obama administration.
Much to fear about another Donald Trump presidency: The existential threat to U.S. democracy. The potential abandonment of traditional allies in Europe and elsewhere. The cozying up to dictators like Vladimir Putin. And the danger Mr. Trump poses to our strong economy.
Our economy? Yes, while Trumponomics 1.0 had major flaws (like the deficit-expanding tax cut giveaways to business and the rich), Trumponomics 2.0 is downright scary.
Although Mr. Trump has yet to issue a formal plan, the unalterable conclusion based on what has dribbled out from his campaign speeches, video monologues and his current set of advisers is that he will follow a course that veers even farther from the traditional Republican lane of a global approach to economic policy and into the populist, isolationist lane. A second Trump term would most likely represent a continuation of Mr. Trump’s unsophisticated instincts and what will appeal to his base.
On tariffs, immigration and regulation, Mr. Trump would continue the troubling trend lines of his first term in office. The United States would sink farther into misguided protectionism with new trade wars. Business and the wealthy would be enriched by lower taxes and increasingly freed from oversight. Legal immigration would be reduced. And we would continue to pour carbon dioxide into the atmosphere while intentionally sandbagging our booming clean energy sector.
It’s a prospect that concerns even some in the business community who generally liked Mr. Trump’s first-term economic program while expressing distaste for his personal qualities.
Now executives are in the situation of liking his economic plans less (particularly the international elements) and abhorring the individual — while being turned off by what they perceive to be the anti-business mien of the Biden administration.
At the top of my worry list for a second Trump term: an even more aggressively protectionist approach to trade than he pursued during his four years in office. Mr. Trump has never understood that, on balance, trade can elevate the standard of living and add jobs.
Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.
In his first term, Mr. Trump imposed tariffs on items ranging from steel to washing machines that, according to economic studies, raised consumer prices and ultimately cost American jobs, in part because other countries retaliated with their own tariffs.
And the inflation that’s worrying voters now could get a lot worse, given that Mr. Trump wants to double down with 10 percent across-the-board levies on imports (and still bigger tariffs on countries that retaliate), up from an average of 2 percent at present. That move alone could raise the overall price level by an estimated two to three percentage points.
Then there’s an even more forceful assault on trade with China. No one can legitimately deny that China pursues aggressively protectionist policies. But Mr. Trump’s remedy could well hurt us as much as — if not more than — the Chinese.
In addition to ending China’s most favored nation status, which would raise tariffs on many Chinese goods to as much as 40 percent, he would impose outright bans on some products, including electronics, steel and pharmaceuticals.
Sourcing those items elsewhere in the world in high volumes could be difficult, if not impossible, and the substitutions would certainly add to consumer costs.
On another isolationist front, immigration remains one of Mr. Trump’s signature issues (even though he recently pushed fellow Republicans to abandon bipartisan legislation to address the problem). We certainly need to get control of our borders. That said, slashing the number of new legal arrivals — the language on the Trump website suggests by well more than half — and restricting work permits for all undocumented immigrants would hurt us economically. With unemployment at 3.7 percent, America has too few workers, not too many.
And with the fertility rate low and baby boomers retiring, that worker shortage will only grow. To simply maintain our population growth rate of the past two decades, we would need to elevate our intake of legal immigrants to about four million a year, up from roughly one million at present.
Less quantifiably, immigrants have contributed mightily to our economic success, from filling entry-level jobs to pioneering some of our most important innovations to leading large corporations.
Whoever wins the election will quickly face major tax decisions, as many provisions of Mr. Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act are set to expire at the end of next year. The act conferred most of its tax relief on business and wealthy Americans. And contrary to Trump administration promises, it never came close to paying for itself through increased economic activity. With our budget deficit stubbornly high (nearing $2 trillion annually) do we really want to spend $3.4 trillion to extend its giveaways for a decade?
Another Trump presidency would almost surely bring an assault on a signature Biden administration accomplishment, the Inflation Reduction Act. That (inaptly named) law has unleashed a flood of new energy projects that will give a substantial push to reducing our fossil fuel emissions.
Mr. Trump would go in the opposite direction, vowing to repeal many clean energy provisions and proclaiming at rallies that he would encourage energy companies to “drill, baby, drill.”
More generally, Mr. Trump wants to reshape the entire administrative state in his image, raising the potential for unfortunate consequences, from business running amok to unprosecuted corruption. He has vowed to slash federal regulations, promising (as he did in his first term) to remove two rules for every new rule imposed. Furthermore, he wants to strip key agencies like the federal trade and communications commissions of their independence in order to centralize — and weaponize — their power in the White House. He also plans to subject all civil servants to a political test and vows to cull the ranks of those he described as “rogue bureaucrats.”
This overt politicization of critical government functions could allow Mr. Trump to pursue his whims. In 2017 he reportedly wanted to block AT&T’s takeover of TimeWarner because of his dislike of CNN. He also repeatedly told his chief of staff John Kelly that he wanted his perceived enemies to be investigated by the Internal Revenue Service.
As for monetary policy, expect a war on the Federal Reserve. Mr. Trump appointed the current chair, Jerome Powell, but quickly turned on him, calling him an “enemy” for acknowledging the deleterious effects of the president’s trade war during a speech. Mr. Trump has also routinely railed against the raising of interest rates by the Fed that helped bring down our post-Covid inflation.
Mr. Powell’s term expires in 2026, which would give Mr. Trump the chance to appoint a more submissive Fed chairman — perhaps someone who would indulge his passion for the easy money that would goose the economy in the short term while risking renewed inflation.
Speaking of personnel, Mr. Trump would be unlikely to attract a capable economic team that might be able to restrain his worst instincts. I doubt that temperate advisers like Gary Cohn, a former Goldman Sachs executive who led Mr. Trump’s National Economic Council from January 2017 to April 2018, would be willing to join a second Trump administration.
So what would the overall economic impact of another Trump presidency be? Irresponsibly stimulative monetary and tax policies that might juice the economy at the expense of higher inflation. Prices that would be pushed upward by Mr. Trump’s protectionist trade policies. All of that would eventually cost jobs.
Perhaps Mr. Trump would be deterred by a close win. And Democrats retaining control in at least one house of Congress would provide at least a partial check.
Nonetheless, it’s an unsavory prospect, one of many reasons Americans, including business executives, should be fearful — so very fearful — about Mr. Trump returning to the White House.
REPUBLICAN OPPOSITION TO BIRTH CONTROL BILL COULD ALIENATE VOTERS, POLL FINDS
A survey conducted by Americans for Contraception shows the overwhelming popularity of birth control, and suggests voters are primed to punish Republicans for opposing a measure to protect access to it.
By Annie Karni, The New York Times
One month after the Supreme Court struck down the right to an abortion, Democrats who then controlled the House pushed through a bill aimed to ensure access to contraception nationwide. All but eight Republicans opposed it.
That vote two years ago, opposing legislation that would protect the right to purchase and use contraception without government restriction, may come back to haunt Republicans in November, as they seek to keep hold of their slim majority at a time when real fears about reproductive rights threaten to drive voters away from them.
The risks they face became glaringly clear last week, after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos should be considered children. In response, a stampede of Republicans in Congress have rushed to voice their support for in vitro fertilization treatment — even though they have supported legislation that could severely curtail or even outlaw aspects of the procedure.
A new national poll conducted by Americans for Contraception and obtained by The New York Times found that most voters across the political spectrum believe their access to birth control is actively at risk, and that 80 percent of voters said that protecting access to contraception was “deeply important” to them. Even among Republican voters, 72 percent said they had a favorable view of birth control.
When voters were told that 195 House Republicans had voted against the Right to Contraception Act, 64 percent of them said they would be less likely to support Republican candidates for Congress, according to the poll. And overall, the issue of protecting access to contraception bolstered voters’ preference for Democrats by nine points, giving them a 12-point edge over Republicans, up from three.
The survey found that birth control access was especially motivating to critical groups in the Democratic coalition, including Black voters and young people, who are currently less enthusiastic about the election.
Pollsters said the shift in overall party preference — known as the generic ballot — was notable, particularly by such a large margin.
“It’s really hard to move a generic ballot because parties are branded,” said Molly Murphy, the president of Impact Research, which conducted the poll. “You can move numbers on named candidates, but people generally think they know the parties. It’s hard to change that perception.”
While the survey, conducted in early February, did not contain questions about I.V.F., its findings may help explain why so many Republicans have distanced themselves from a voting record that promotes policies that could put such procedures at risk.
Speaker Mike Johnson, for instance, added his voice on Friday night to the growing chorus of Republicans claiming they support in vitro fertilization treatments. But like many of the other House Republicans now saying they back unrestricted I.V.F., Mr. Johnson is a co-sponsor of the Life at Conception Act, which would recognize a fertilized egg as a person with equal protections under the 14th Amendment.
The bill states that the term “human being” includes “all stages of life, including the moment of fertilization,” and does not include any exceptions for I.V.F. and fertility treatments. If enacted, that could severely restrict I.V.F. treatments, which typically involve the creation of several embryos, only one of which is implanted while the others are frozen to allow for subsequent attempts at a successful implantation.
It is the latest bit of politically rocky terrain that Republicans have had to walk on issues of reproductive health since the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which has made real to voters the threat that other rights could be next to go. According to the new poll, three out of five voters living in states where abortion has been banned or restricted said they were concerned that contraception is next.
Ms. Murphy said Republicans’ reaction to the Alabama ruling indicated that they know they have a political crisis on their hands.
“The reason they’re having to come out against this is because they know that it isn’t plausible for voters to believe it was just a court in Alabama, but more of a representation of what this entire party stands for,” Ms. Murphy said. “If they thought this was an outlier ruling from a rogue court in the South and they didn’t have to say anything, they wouldn’t be saying anything. This is damage control.”
It will be the second national election cycle in which Republicans face a bind of their own making as they try to reconcile their party’s hard-line policies on women’s health — based on a fealty to a conservative religious doctrine — with a vast majority of the country that now views the issue differently.
A majority of voters support the Right to Contraception Act across party, racial and gender lines, according to the poll. About 94 percent of Democrats support it, and 68 percent of Republican voters favor it.
But when the proposal came before the House, Republicans balked. Many of them claimed that they supported contraception in practice but considered the bill a gateway to allowing abortion. They argued that the bill’s definition of contraceptives could be interpreted to include pills that induce abortion.
“The Republican Party has so underestimated the way the country has changed,” said Karen Finney, a longtime abortion rights activist. “This is part of the deal they made with very far-right conservatives who are unbending on these issues. There are Republicans who recognize the damage it could do to their base of support if they were to modify in any direction.”
Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a prominent anti-abortion group, opposed the Right to Contraception Act and rated lawmakers according to their votes on the bill, downgrading those who supported it and rewarding those opposed.
Ms. Finney said Democrats will score their political opponents on it, too, in their own way. “You will see ads in some places questioning whether the Republican Party really is saying ‘abstinence only,’” Ms. Finney said. “That’s not going to win the youth vote.”
Some vulnerable Republicans have already been trying to change course on contraception after opposing the 2022 bill. Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Republican of Iowa, led a group of Republican women in the House last year in sponsoring the Orally Taken Contraception Act of 2023, a bill they pitched as a way to expand access to birth control.
Democrats dismissed the bill — which was notably unopposed by Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America — as so narrow as to have virtually no effect except as an attempt to mask House Republicans’ hostility to contraception. The bill, which Mr. Johnson has yet to bring up for a vote, would direct the Food and Drug Administration to issue guidance for companies that want to make oral contraception available without prescriptions.
Only two drug companies are actively working to offer birth control over the counter. One of them, Opill, was already approved for sale without a prescription before the legislation was introduced. The other, from Cadence Health, is years into the application process with the F.D.A. and would not necessarily benefit from or need the guidance the bill directs the agency to issue.
The new poll by Americans for Contraception, conducted between Feb. 2 and Feb. 8, included interviews with 1,800 voters.
In their conclusion, the pollsters delivered some unequivocal advice to Democratic candidates before the November elections that could also serve as a strong note of caution for Republicans who have opposed birth control access.
“Don’t shy away from talking about all forms of contraception, including I.U.D.s and emergency contraception like Plan B,” they wrote. “Contraception is popular, and voters want to be the ones making the decisions on what methods they use. They do not draw distinctions between types of birth control, and neither should we.”
A survey conducted by Americans for Contraception shows the overwhelming popularity of birth control, and suggests voters are primed to punish Republicans for opposing a measure to protect access to it.
By Annie Karni, The New York Times
One month after the Supreme Court struck down the right to an abortion, Democrats who then controlled the House pushed through a bill aimed to ensure access to contraception nationwide. All but eight Republicans opposed it.
That vote two years ago, opposing legislation that would protect the right to purchase and use contraception without government restriction, may come back to haunt Republicans in November, as they seek to keep hold of their slim majority at a time when real fears about reproductive rights threaten to drive voters away from them.
The risks they face became glaringly clear last week, after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos should be considered children. In response, a stampede of Republicans in Congress have rushed to voice their support for in vitro fertilization treatment — even though they have supported legislation that could severely curtail or even outlaw aspects of the procedure.
A new national poll conducted by Americans for Contraception and obtained by The New York Times found that most voters across the political spectrum believe their access to birth control is actively at risk, and that 80 percent of voters said that protecting access to contraception was “deeply important” to them. Even among Republican voters, 72 percent said they had a favorable view of birth control.
When voters were told that 195 House Republicans had voted against the Right to Contraception Act, 64 percent of them said they would be less likely to support Republican candidates for Congress, according to the poll. And overall, the issue of protecting access to contraception bolstered voters’ preference for Democrats by nine points, giving them a 12-point edge over Republicans, up from three.
The survey found that birth control access was especially motivating to critical groups in the Democratic coalition, including Black voters and young people, who are currently less enthusiastic about the election.
Pollsters said the shift in overall party preference — known as the generic ballot — was notable, particularly by such a large margin.
“It’s really hard to move a generic ballot because parties are branded,” said Molly Murphy, the president of Impact Research, which conducted the poll. “You can move numbers on named candidates, but people generally think they know the parties. It’s hard to change that perception.”
While the survey, conducted in early February, did not contain questions about I.V.F., its findings may help explain why so many Republicans have distanced themselves from a voting record that promotes policies that could put such procedures at risk.
Speaker Mike Johnson, for instance, added his voice on Friday night to the growing chorus of Republicans claiming they support in vitro fertilization treatments. But like many of the other House Republicans now saying they back unrestricted I.V.F., Mr. Johnson is a co-sponsor of the Life at Conception Act, which would recognize a fertilized egg as a person with equal protections under the 14th Amendment.
The bill states that the term “human being” includes “all stages of life, including the moment of fertilization,” and does not include any exceptions for I.V.F. and fertility treatments. If enacted, that could severely restrict I.V.F. treatments, which typically involve the creation of several embryos, only one of which is implanted while the others are frozen to allow for subsequent attempts at a successful implantation.
It is the latest bit of politically rocky terrain that Republicans have had to walk on issues of reproductive health since the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which has made real to voters the threat that other rights could be next to go. According to the new poll, three out of five voters living in states where abortion has been banned or restricted said they were concerned that contraception is next.
Ms. Murphy said Republicans’ reaction to the Alabama ruling indicated that they know they have a political crisis on their hands.
“The reason they’re having to come out against this is because they know that it isn’t plausible for voters to believe it was just a court in Alabama, but more of a representation of what this entire party stands for,” Ms. Murphy said. “If they thought this was an outlier ruling from a rogue court in the South and they didn’t have to say anything, they wouldn’t be saying anything. This is damage control.”
It will be the second national election cycle in which Republicans face a bind of their own making as they try to reconcile their party’s hard-line policies on women’s health — based on a fealty to a conservative religious doctrine — with a vast majority of the country that now views the issue differently.
A majority of voters support the Right to Contraception Act across party, racial and gender lines, according to the poll. About 94 percent of Democrats support it, and 68 percent of Republican voters favor it.
But when the proposal came before the House, Republicans balked. Many of them claimed that they supported contraception in practice but considered the bill a gateway to allowing abortion. They argued that the bill’s definition of contraceptives could be interpreted to include pills that induce abortion.
“The Republican Party has so underestimated the way the country has changed,” said Karen Finney, a longtime abortion rights activist. “This is part of the deal they made with very far-right conservatives who are unbending on these issues. There are Republicans who recognize the damage it could do to their base of support if they were to modify in any direction.”
Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a prominent anti-abortion group, opposed the Right to Contraception Act and rated lawmakers according to their votes on the bill, downgrading those who supported it and rewarding those opposed.
Ms. Finney said Democrats will score their political opponents on it, too, in their own way. “You will see ads in some places questioning whether the Republican Party really is saying ‘abstinence only,’” Ms. Finney said. “That’s not going to win the youth vote.”
Some vulnerable Republicans have already been trying to change course on contraception after opposing the 2022 bill. Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Republican of Iowa, led a group of Republican women in the House last year in sponsoring the Orally Taken Contraception Act of 2023, a bill they pitched as a way to expand access to birth control.
Democrats dismissed the bill — which was notably unopposed by Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America — as so narrow as to have virtually no effect except as an attempt to mask House Republicans’ hostility to contraception. The bill, which Mr. Johnson has yet to bring up for a vote, would direct the Food and Drug Administration to issue guidance for companies that want to make oral contraception available without prescriptions.
Only two drug companies are actively working to offer birth control over the counter. One of them, Opill, was already approved for sale without a prescription before the legislation was introduced. The other, from Cadence Health, is years into the application process with the F.D.A. and would not necessarily benefit from or need the guidance the bill directs the agency to issue.
The new poll by Americans for Contraception, conducted between Feb. 2 and Feb. 8, included interviews with 1,800 voters.
In their conclusion, the pollsters delivered some unequivocal advice to Democratic candidates before the November elections that could also serve as a strong note of caution for Republicans who have opposed birth control access.
“Don’t shy away from talking about all forms of contraception, including I.U.D.s and emergency contraception like Plan B,” they wrote. “Contraception is popular, and voters want to be the ones making the decisions on what methods they use. They do not draw distinctions between types of birth control, and neither should we.”
BIDEN TARGETS A NEW ECONOMIC VILLAIN: SHRINKFLATION
Liberals prodded the president for years to blame big corporations for price increases. He is finally doing so, in the grocery aisle.
By Jim Tankersley, The New York Times
On Super Bowl Sunday, the White House released a short video in which a smiling President Biden, sitting next to a table stocked with chips, cookies and sports drinks, slammed companies for reducing the package size and portions of popular foods without an accompanying reduction in price.
“I’ve had enough of what they call shrinkflation,” Mr. Biden declared.
The video lit up social media and delighted a consumer advocate named Edgar Dworsky, who has studied “shrinkflation” trends for more than a decade. He has twice briefed Mr. Biden’s economic aides, first in early 2023 and again a few days before the video aired. The first briefing seemed to lead nowhere. The second clearly informed Mr. Biden’s new favorite economic argument — that companies have used a rapid run-up in prices to pad their pockets by keeping those prices high while giving consumers less.
The products arrayed in the president’s video, like Oreos and Wheat Thins, were all examples of the shrinkflation that Mr. Dworsky had documented on his Consumer World website.
While inflation is moderating, shoppers remain furious over the high price of groceries. Mr. Biden, who has seen his approval ratings suffer amid rising prices, has found a blame-shifting message he loves in the midst of his re-election campaign: skewering companies for shrinking the size of candy bars, ice cream cartons and other food items, while raising prices or holding them steady, even as the companies’ profit margins remain high.
The president has begun accusing companies of “ripping off” Americans with those tactics and is considering new executive actions to crack down on the practice, administration officials and other allies say, though they will not specify the steps he might take. He is also likely to criticize shrinkflation during his State of the Union address next week.
Mr. Biden could also embrace new legislation seeking to empower the Federal Trade Commission to more aggressively investigate and punish corporate price gouging, including in grocery stories.
White House officials credit Senator Bob Casey, Democrat of Pennsylvania, with bending the president’s ear on the issue. Mr. Casey’s office released a scathing shrinkflation report last year calculating that about one-tenth of recent price increases for snacks and toilet paper were attributable to companies’ reducing the number of cookies in a bag or sheets on a roll.
Mr. Casey has centered the issue in his re-election campaign, blaming large companies for price increases that have left consumers struggling to afford sufficient amounts of essential items. “Some of this is really pernicious,” he said in an interview. “You can’t wait a year to buy paper towels or to buy boneless chicken or to buy groceries or to buy Huggies diapers.”
Liberal senators and some progressive think tanks in Washington pushed Mr. Biden early in his term to blame corporate greed for the biggest surge in consumer prices in four decades. Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, accused corporations of gouging consumers as prices began to spike in 2021.
Some Democratic economists, including veterans of previous administrations, like Harvard’s Jason Furman, have rejected claims that price gouging was to blame for inflation. Mr. Biden only partially embraced the argument, calling out meatpackers and oil companies selectively, and talking extensively about other drivers of inflation, including supply chains snarled by the pandemic.
“It was not as broad of a brush as some people would have wanted,” said Bharat Ramamurti, a former economic adviser to Mr. Biden, who nevertheless fielded angry calls from companies that Mr. Biden called out in 2021 and 2022.
Since then, Mr. Ramamurti noted, polls have shown that Americans are angry at corporations for price increases — including for groceries. Part of Mr. Biden’s shrinkflation strategy, Mr. Ramamurti said, “is trying to meet the public where they are and talk about issues that are really top of mind.”
White House officials acknowledge the politics of the issue but say other factors are also driving Mr. Biden’s rhetoric. Administration economists have been struck by persistently high corporate profit margins even as inflation cools; food production costs have fallen much faster over the last year than the price of food on store shelves.
Mr. Biden has discussed grocery prices extensively with voters. And, as he noted in his Super Bowl Sunday video, he is an unabashed ice cream fanatic.
Progressives who pushed Mr. Biden to target corporations earlier and more aggressively on price increases have welcomed his new focus. Lindsay Owens, the executive director of the liberal think tank Groundwork Collaborative in Washington, said in an interview that Mr. Biden’s comments were well timed to help voters understand why, even amid falling inflation, groceries and other key prices remain stubbornly high.
“The supply chain piece isn’t resonating with folks anymore," she said. “The shelves are stocked. When you’re trying to explain the last mile, this is an important piece of it.”
Mr. Dworsky said he was glad that Mr. Biden had realized the power in focusing on shrinkflation.
“I found a good spokesperson,” he said in an interview. “I can’t think of too many consumer education issues that have risen to that level.”
Liberals prodded the president for years to blame big corporations for price increases. He is finally doing so, in the grocery aisle.
By Jim Tankersley, The New York Times
On Super Bowl Sunday, the White House released a short video in which a smiling President Biden, sitting next to a table stocked with chips, cookies and sports drinks, slammed companies for reducing the package size and portions of popular foods without an accompanying reduction in price.
“I’ve had enough of what they call shrinkflation,” Mr. Biden declared.
The video lit up social media and delighted a consumer advocate named Edgar Dworsky, who has studied “shrinkflation” trends for more than a decade. He has twice briefed Mr. Biden’s economic aides, first in early 2023 and again a few days before the video aired. The first briefing seemed to lead nowhere. The second clearly informed Mr. Biden’s new favorite economic argument — that companies have used a rapid run-up in prices to pad their pockets by keeping those prices high while giving consumers less.
The products arrayed in the president’s video, like Oreos and Wheat Thins, were all examples of the shrinkflation that Mr. Dworsky had documented on his Consumer World website.
While inflation is moderating, shoppers remain furious over the high price of groceries. Mr. Biden, who has seen his approval ratings suffer amid rising prices, has found a blame-shifting message he loves in the midst of his re-election campaign: skewering companies for shrinking the size of candy bars, ice cream cartons and other food items, while raising prices or holding them steady, even as the companies’ profit margins remain high.
The president has begun accusing companies of “ripping off” Americans with those tactics and is considering new executive actions to crack down on the practice, administration officials and other allies say, though they will not specify the steps he might take. He is also likely to criticize shrinkflation during his State of the Union address next week.
Mr. Biden could also embrace new legislation seeking to empower the Federal Trade Commission to more aggressively investigate and punish corporate price gouging, including in grocery stories.
White House officials credit Senator Bob Casey, Democrat of Pennsylvania, with bending the president’s ear on the issue. Mr. Casey’s office released a scathing shrinkflation report last year calculating that about one-tenth of recent price increases for snacks and toilet paper were attributable to companies’ reducing the number of cookies in a bag or sheets on a roll.
Mr. Casey has centered the issue in his re-election campaign, blaming large companies for price increases that have left consumers struggling to afford sufficient amounts of essential items. “Some of this is really pernicious,” he said in an interview. “You can’t wait a year to buy paper towels or to buy boneless chicken or to buy groceries or to buy Huggies diapers.”
Liberal senators and some progressive think tanks in Washington pushed Mr. Biden early in his term to blame corporate greed for the biggest surge in consumer prices in four decades. Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, accused corporations of gouging consumers as prices began to spike in 2021.
Some Democratic economists, including veterans of previous administrations, like Harvard’s Jason Furman, have rejected claims that price gouging was to blame for inflation. Mr. Biden only partially embraced the argument, calling out meatpackers and oil companies selectively, and talking extensively about other drivers of inflation, including supply chains snarled by the pandemic.
“It was not as broad of a brush as some people would have wanted,” said Bharat Ramamurti, a former economic adviser to Mr. Biden, who nevertheless fielded angry calls from companies that Mr. Biden called out in 2021 and 2022.
Since then, Mr. Ramamurti noted, polls have shown that Americans are angry at corporations for price increases — including for groceries. Part of Mr. Biden’s shrinkflation strategy, Mr. Ramamurti said, “is trying to meet the public where they are and talk about issues that are really top of mind.”
White House officials acknowledge the politics of the issue but say other factors are also driving Mr. Biden’s rhetoric. Administration economists have been struck by persistently high corporate profit margins even as inflation cools; food production costs have fallen much faster over the last year than the price of food on store shelves.
Mr. Biden has discussed grocery prices extensively with voters. And, as he noted in his Super Bowl Sunday video, he is an unabashed ice cream fanatic.
Progressives who pushed Mr. Biden to target corporations earlier and more aggressively on price increases have welcomed his new focus. Lindsay Owens, the executive director of the liberal think tank Groundwork Collaborative in Washington, said in an interview that Mr. Biden’s comments were well timed to help voters understand why, even amid falling inflation, groceries and other key prices remain stubbornly high.
“The supply chain piece isn’t resonating with folks anymore," she said. “The shelves are stocked. When you’re trying to explain the last mile, this is an important piece of it.”
Mr. Dworsky said he was glad that Mr. Biden had realized the power in focusing on shrinkflation.
“I found a good spokesperson,” he said in an interview. “I can’t think of too many consumer education issues that have risen to that level.”
A TRUMP WIN WOULD USHER IN AN AMERICAN THEOCRACY CENTERED ON DESTROYING REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS
Thomas Jefferson referred to the First Amendment as “a wall between Church and State.” If Donald Trump returns to the White House, the GOP will likely demolish that separation.
By The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
With the ink barely dry on the U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned the constitutional right to abortion, Donald Trump and his fellow MAGA Republicans are on a crusade, mixing religion with politics and further undermining reproductive rights.
Nearly a dozen antiabortion measures were included in federal budget bills last year, including a national ban on abortion pills, limits on access to contraception, and a ban on paid leave for military service members seeking the procedure.
If elected again, Trump reportedly supports a 16-week national abortion ban, which would override Pennsylvania’s law that allows abortions up until 24 weeks of pregnancy. Trump apparently wants to secure the GOP presidential nomination before going public with his view for fear of upsetting social conservatives who support a more restrictive law.
Of course, in his last term, Trump appointed the three conservative Supreme Court justices who voted with the majority in 2022 to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling that had guaranteed a right to abortion for nearly half a century. Trump’s three appointees included one justice sworn in under a cloud of alleged binge drinking and sexual harassment, another who never tried a case to verdict, and a third who signed off on the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization opinion that overturned Roe in just 10 minutes.
Trump recently boasted that he “was able to kill Roe v. Wade.” During a town hall meeting, Trump added: “I did it, and I’m proud to have done it.”
Now comes a recent ruling by the Alabama Supreme Court that said frozen embryos — millimeter-wide blastocysts consisting of a few hundred cells — are children. Or “little people,” as Chief Justice Tom Parker wrote in a concurring opinion.
The court’s decision involved a case brought by three couples whose frozen embryos were dropped on the floor of a clinic and destroyed. The parents sued, and one of their claims alleged the “wrongful death of a minor.”
The Mobile County Circuit Court dismissed the wrongful death claim, but the state Supreme Court ruled the embryos are children and the clinic can be held responsible for destroying them.
The ruling will further upend women’s reproductive health care as other red states will look to follow the Yellowhammer State. In fact, Alabama’s largest hospital already halted IVF treatments. So, the zealots who want to stop individuals from ending a pregnancy have now prevented pregnancies from starting.
Meanwhile, questions swirled about the estimated 600,000 frozen embryos that exist nationwide. Attorneys voiced concern about divorce settlements that called for frozen embryos to be destroyed.
Parents desperate to have babies may face higher costs for an already expensive and lengthy procedure. More troubling is how Christian nationalism continues to animate Republican politics. The Alabama ruling is the latest to blur the bright line that has separated church and state since America’s founding.
Parker, a former aide to then-Chief Justice Roy Moore, who installed a Ten Commandments monument in the state judiciary building, cited Bible passages to support his opinion that life begins at conception. “God made every person in His image,” he wrote.
Without a trace of irony from a man who once prosecuted death penalty cases, Parker added, “Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God.” The chief justice, whose religious beliefs shape his legal views, affirmed that the state constitution adopts a “theologically based view of the sanctity of life.”
Welcome to the American theocracy.
Never mind the U.S. Constitution does not mention God or Christianity, or that a 1797 treaty with Tripoli declared “the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” Indeed, Thomas Jefferson referred to the First Amendment as “a wall between Church and State.”
But in recent years, the GOP has been dismantling that wall. Under Chief Justice John Roberts, the U.S. Supreme Court has chipped away at the separation of church and state, siding with religious organizations 83% of the time. During oral arguments on a First Amendment case in 2022, Justice Neil Gorsuch derisively referenced the “so-called” separation of church and state.
More recently, House Speaker Mike Johnson called the separation of church and state a “misnomer.” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., QAnon) cut to the chase and proudly called the GOP the “party of Christian nationalism.”
If Trump is elected in November, Christian nationalism, which subverts the separation of church and state and imposes rules on religious minorities, LGBTQ people, women, and other marginalized groups, will shape American policy. A think tank tied to Trump plans to infuse Christian nationalist ideas throughout the administration, documents obtained by Politico show.
That would include invoking the Insurrection Act on Day One to quash protests, ending the U.S. Justice Department’s independence from the president, and deporting millions of immigrants.
Trump’s dystopian vision for a meaner and divided country would trample the rule of law, terminate the Constitution, and pervert the cornerstone of the country’s founding. Trump supporters welcome the authoritarianism.
Even though Trump has mangled the Bible and is not devout, many followers believe he was sent by God. Trump is clearly on a mission to strip away human rights, exact revenge, and impose a Christian nationalist ideology.
Thomas Jefferson referred to the First Amendment as “a wall between Church and State.” If Donald Trump returns to the White House, the GOP will likely demolish that separation.
By The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
With the ink barely dry on the U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned the constitutional right to abortion, Donald Trump and his fellow MAGA Republicans are on a crusade, mixing religion with politics and further undermining reproductive rights.
Nearly a dozen antiabortion measures were included in federal budget bills last year, including a national ban on abortion pills, limits on access to contraception, and a ban on paid leave for military service members seeking the procedure.
If elected again, Trump reportedly supports a 16-week national abortion ban, which would override Pennsylvania’s law that allows abortions up until 24 weeks of pregnancy. Trump apparently wants to secure the GOP presidential nomination before going public with his view for fear of upsetting social conservatives who support a more restrictive law.
Of course, in his last term, Trump appointed the three conservative Supreme Court justices who voted with the majority in 2022 to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling that had guaranteed a right to abortion for nearly half a century. Trump’s three appointees included one justice sworn in under a cloud of alleged binge drinking and sexual harassment, another who never tried a case to verdict, and a third who signed off on the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization opinion that overturned Roe in just 10 minutes.
Trump recently boasted that he “was able to kill Roe v. Wade.” During a town hall meeting, Trump added: “I did it, and I’m proud to have done it.”
Now comes a recent ruling by the Alabama Supreme Court that said frozen embryos — millimeter-wide blastocysts consisting of a few hundred cells — are children. Or “little people,” as Chief Justice Tom Parker wrote in a concurring opinion.
The court’s decision involved a case brought by three couples whose frozen embryos were dropped on the floor of a clinic and destroyed. The parents sued, and one of their claims alleged the “wrongful death of a minor.”
The Mobile County Circuit Court dismissed the wrongful death claim, but the state Supreme Court ruled the embryos are children and the clinic can be held responsible for destroying them.
The ruling will further upend women’s reproductive health care as other red states will look to follow the Yellowhammer State. In fact, Alabama’s largest hospital already halted IVF treatments. So, the zealots who want to stop individuals from ending a pregnancy have now prevented pregnancies from starting.
Meanwhile, questions swirled about the estimated 600,000 frozen embryos that exist nationwide. Attorneys voiced concern about divorce settlements that called for frozen embryos to be destroyed.
Parents desperate to have babies may face higher costs for an already expensive and lengthy procedure. More troubling is how Christian nationalism continues to animate Republican politics. The Alabama ruling is the latest to blur the bright line that has separated church and state since America’s founding.
Parker, a former aide to then-Chief Justice Roy Moore, who installed a Ten Commandments monument in the state judiciary building, cited Bible passages to support his opinion that life begins at conception. “God made every person in His image,” he wrote.
Without a trace of irony from a man who once prosecuted death penalty cases, Parker added, “Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God.” The chief justice, whose religious beliefs shape his legal views, affirmed that the state constitution adopts a “theologically based view of the sanctity of life.”
Welcome to the American theocracy.
Never mind the U.S. Constitution does not mention God or Christianity, or that a 1797 treaty with Tripoli declared “the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” Indeed, Thomas Jefferson referred to the First Amendment as “a wall between Church and State.”
But in recent years, the GOP has been dismantling that wall. Under Chief Justice John Roberts, the U.S. Supreme Court has chipped away at the separation of church and state, siding with religious organizations 83% of the time. During oral arguments on a First Amendment case in 2022, Justice Neil Gorsuch derisively referenced the “so-called” separation of church and state.
More recently, House Speaker Mike Johnson called the separation of church and state a “misnomer.” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., QAnon) cut to the chase and proudly called the GOP the “party of Christian nationalism.”
If Trump is elected in November, Christian nationalism, which subverts the separation of church and state and imposes rules on religious minorities, LGBTQ people, women, and other marginalized groups, will shape American policy. A think tank tied to Trump plans to infuse Christian nationalist ideas throughout the administration, documents obtained by Politico show.
That would include invoking the Insurrection Act on Day One to quash protests, ending the U.S. Justice Department’s independence from the president, and deporting millions of immigrants.
Trump’s dystopian vision for a meaner and divided country would trample the rule of law, terminate the Constitution, and pervert the cornerstone of the country’s founding. Trump supporters welcome the authoritarianism.
Even though Trump has mangled the Bible and is not devout, many followers believe he was sent by God. Trump is clearly on a mission to strip away human rights, exact revenge, and impose a Christian nationalist ideology.
THE FOUNDERS’ ANTIDOTE TO DEMAGOGUERY IS A LESSON FOR TODAY
By Jeffrey Rosen, president and chief executive of the National Constitution Center
If the Founding Fathers were alive today, they would tremble for the future of our republic.
Watching the rise of hyperpartisanship and populist demagogues in the United States and around the world would be their worst nightmare. And they would wonder: Can the citizens of today muster the personal and political virtue necessary to save our nation?
When they drafted the Constitution, the Founders’ greatest fear was that a populist demagogue would flatter the mob, subvert American democracy and establish authoritarian rule. “The only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion,” Alexander Hamilton wrote to George Washington in 1792. “When a man unprincipled in private life[,] desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper … is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity … It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”
Thomas Jefferson agreed with Hamilton about very little, except for the danger of populist demagogues. After he read a draft of the Constitution, his main concern was that an unscrupulous candidate in the distant future might lose an election and refuse to leave office. “If once elected, and at a second or third election outvoted by one or two votes, he will pretend false votes, foul play, hold possession of the reins of government, be supported by the States voting for him,” Jefferson wrote to James Madison in 1787.
In the Founders’ view, the only thing standing between America and an authoritarian demagogue was the virtuous self-control of citizens who would find the wisdom to choose virtuous leaders. “I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom,” Madison said at the Constitutional Convention. “Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks — no form of government can render us secure.”
When the Founders talked about the need for virtuous citizens and leaders, they were referring to the four classical virtues: prudence, temperance, fortitude and justice. (By contrast, the three theological virtues are faith, hope and charity.) Following the classical and Enlightenment moral philosophers, the Founders believed that personal self-government was necessary for political self-government. In their view, the key to a healthy republic begins with how we address our own flaws and commit to becoming better citizens over time.
In the Federalist Papers, Madison and Hamilton made clear that the Constitution was designed to foster deliberation so that citizens could avoid retreating into the angry mobs and partisan factions that demagogues can inflame. Ancient Athens had fallen because the demagogue Cleon had seduced the Athenian assembly into continuing the war with the Peloponnesian League; the Roman Republic had fallen because the people were corrupted by Caesar, who offered them luxury in exchange for liberty. Only by governing their selfish emotions as individuals could citizens avoid degenerating into selfish factions that threaten the common good.
The Founders believed that virtuous self-mastery was necessary for both personal and political happiness. Today, we think of happiness as the pursuit of pleasure. But classical and Enlightenment thinkers defined happiness as the pursuit of virtue — as being good rather than feeling good. Just as individuals can use their powers of reason to achieve psychological happiness, so can groups of citizens use theirs to achieve political happiness.
Washington made the connection between public and private virtue and happiness repeatedly in his career. “Virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government,” he warned in his Farewell Address. In his Circular to the States in 1783, he said that four things were necessary for the people’s political and social happiness: an “indissoluble Union,” a “sacred regard to public Justice,” a “proper Peace Establishment,” and the cultivation of private virtue, which he defined as “the prevalence of that pacific and friendly disposition among the people of the United States, which will induce them to forget their local prejudices and policies” and “to sacrifice their individual advantages to the interest of the community.”
At the end of their lives, the Founders disagreed about whether the American people would find the virtuous self-mastery to elect presidents who would sustain the republic. Jefferson, always more optimistic about American democracy, was more confident that the public mind could be calmed and perfected by education. “No government can continue good but under the control of the people,” Jefferson wrote to John Adams in 1819. “Their minds were to be informed, by education, what is right & what wrong, to be encouraged in habits of virtue.” Adams doubted that virtue could be taught on a wide scale. “Have you ever found in history one single example of a nation thoroughly Corrupted — that was afterwards restored to Virtue?” he replied to Jefferson.
Madison, as always, took the middle ground regarding the possibility of educating citizens in the habits of virtuous self-restraint. He put particular faith in a class of enlightened journalists and public officials, whom he called the literati. They could serve as moral educators, using new forms of media such as the broadside newspaper to calm and elevate the public mind. As Madison put it in a crucial passage in his “Notes for the National Gazette Essays”: “The class of literati is not less necessary than any other. They are the cultivators of the human mind — the manufacturers of useful knowledge — the agents of the commerce of ideas — the censors of public manners — the teachers of the arts of life and the means of happiness.”
Today, of course, the idea that new media might be deployed by an enlightened class of literati to refine public opinion seems quaint. In the age of social media, with its “enrage to engage” model, the opposite occurs. The passions, hyperpartisanship and split-second decision-making that Madison and Hamilton feared from large groups meeting face to face have proved to be even more dangerous from exponentially larger groups that meet online.
It remains to be seen whether Americans today can find the virtuous self-restraint to put the public interest before the angry partisanship the Founders most feared. What’s clear, however, is that nothing less than the future of the Republic is at stake. As Madison wrote in Federalist 57: “The aim of every political Constitution is or ought to be first to obtain for rulers, men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous, whilst they continue to hold their public trust.”
By Jeffrey Rosen, president and chief executive of the National Constitution Center
If the Founding Fathers were alive today, they would tremble for the future of our republic.
Watching the rise of hyperpartisanship and populist demagogues in the United States and around the world would be their worst nightmare. And they would wonder: Can the citizens of today muster the personal and political virtue necessary to save our nation?
When they drafted the Constitution, the Founders’ greatest fear was that a populist demagogue would flatter the mob, subvert American democracy and establish authoritarian rule. “The only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion,” Alexander Hamilton wrote to George Washington in 1792. “When a man unprincipled in private life[,] desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper … is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity … It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”
Thomas Jefferson agreed with Hamilton about very little, except for the danger of populist demagogues. After he read a draft of the Constitution, his main concern was that an unscrupulous candidate in the distant future might lose an election and refuse to leave office. “If once elected, and at a second or third election outvoted by one or two votes, he will pretend false votes, foul play, hold possession of the reins of government, be supported by the States voting for him,” Jefferson wrote to James Madison in 1787.
In the Founders’ view, the only thing standing between America and an authoritarian demagogue was the virtuous self-control of citizens who would find the wisdom to choose virtuous leaders. “I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom,” Madison said at the Constitutional Convention. “Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks — no form of government can render us secure.”
When the Founders talked about the need for virtuous citizens and leaders, they were referring to the four classical virtues: prudence, temperance, fortitude and justice. (By contrast, the three theological virtues are faith, hope and charity.) Following the classical and Enlightenment moral philosophers, the Founders believed that personal self-government was necessary for political self-government. In their view, the key to a healthy republic begins with how we address our own flaws and commit to becoming better citizens over time.
In the Federalist Papers, Madison and Hamilton made clear that the Constitution was designed to foster deliberation so that citizens could avoid retreating into the angry mobs and partisan factions that demagogues can inflame. Ancient Athens had fallen because the demagogue Cleon had seduced the Athenian assembly into continuing the war with the Peloponnesian League; the Roman Republic had fallen because the people were corrupted by Caesar, who offered them luxury in exchange for liberty. Only by governing their selfish emotions as individuals could citizens avoid degenerating into selfish factions that threaten the common good.
The Founders believed that virtuous self-mastery was necessary for both personal and political happiness. Today, we think of happiness as the pursuit of pleasure. But classical and Enlightenment thinkers defined happiness as the pursuit of virtue — as being good rather than feeling good. Just as individuals can use their powers of reason to achieve psychological happiness, so can groups of citizens use theirs to achieve political happiness.
Washington made the connection between public and private virtue and happiness repeatedly in his career. “Virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government,” he warned in his Farewell Address. In his Circular to the States in 1783, he said that four things were necessary for the people’s political and social happiness: an “indissoluble Union,” a “sacred regard to public Justice,” a “proper Peace Establishment,” and the cultivation of private virtue, which he defined as “the prevalence of that pacific and friendly disposition among the people of the United States, which will induce them to forget their local prejudices and policies” and “to sacrifice their individual advantages to the interest of the community.”
At the end of their lives, the Founders disagreed about whether the American people would find the virtuous self-mastery to elect presidents who would sustain the republic. Jefferson, always more optimistic about American democracy, was more confident that the public mind could be calmed and perfected by education. “No government can continue good but under the control of the people,” Jefferson wrote to John Adams in 1819. “Their minds were to be informed, by education, what is right & what wrong, to be encouraged in habits of virtue.” Adams doubted that virtue could be taught on a wide scale. “Have you ever found in history one single example of a nation thoroughly Corrupted — that was afterwards restored to Virtue?” he replied to Jefferson.
Madison, as always, took the middle ground regarding the possibility of educating citizens in the habits of virtuous self-restraint. He put particular faith in a class of enlightened journalists and public officials, whom he called the literati. They could serve as moral educators, using new forms of media such as the broadside newspaper to calm and elevate the public mind. As Madison put it in a crucial passage in his “Notes for the National Gazette Essays”: “The class of literati is not less necessary than any other. They are the cultivators of the human mind — the manufacturers of useful knowledge — the agents of the commerce of ideas — the censors of public manners — the teachers of the arts of life and the means of happiness.”
Today, of course, the idea that new media might be deployed by an enlightened class of literati to refine public opinion seems quaint. In the age of social media, with its “enrage to engage” model, the opposite occurs. The passions, hyperpartisanship and split-second decision-making that Madison and Hamilton feared from large groups meeting face to face have proved to be even more dangerous from exponentially larger groups that meet online.
It remains to be seen whether Americans today can find the virtuous self-restraint to put the public interest before the angry partisanship the Founders most feared. What’s clear, however, is that nothing less than the future of the Republic is at stake. As Madison wrote in Federalist 57: “The aim of every political Constitution is or ought to be first to obtain for rulers, men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous, whilst they continue to hold their public trust.”
DIM OR DISLOYAL? REPUBLICANS AGAIN ENSNARED IN POSSIBLE RUSSIAN PLOT.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Are Republicans easy marks or willing participants in Russian anti-Biden operations? That’s a troubling question raised by the Feb. 14 grand jury indictment of a former FBI informant, Alexander Smirnov, on charges of concocting a tale about President Biden’s supposed involvement in his family members’ business dealings.
Allegations by Smirnov — who appears to have ties to Russian intelligence, according to the federal indictment — have formed the backbone of the House Republicans’ laughable attempt to build an impeachment case against the president. They championed him as their star witness. Now the Republicans’ fact-deficient storyline has been shredded.
The Post reported that Smirnov, who has not entered a plea yet, is accused of “making a false statement and creating a false and fictitious record” by trying to implicate Biden in corruption related to his son Hunter Biden’s involvement with the Ukraine energy company Burisma. “The charges,” the article said, “amount to a stark rebuke of conservatives, particularly Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, who touted Smirnov’s claims as he and other Republican lawmakers tried to build a corruption case against the president and his family.”
Even more damning, The Post subsequently reported that “Smirnov’s indictment and detention memo suggest the allegations were not only false, but possibly a Russian-inspired smear.”
In the aftermath of the indictment, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) declared, “Smirnov was the foundation of the whole thing. He was the one who came forward to say that Burisma had given Joe Biden $5 million, and that was just concocted in thin air. It was that foundation that the whole house of cards has been built on, and the entire thing has collapsed.”
Raskin added that “we don’t even have to rely on Smirnov’s own words because there have been somewhere near a dozen witnesses who have completely repudiated and refuted these essential allegations.”
Now Republicans are pretending that Smirnov wasn’t so important after all. They’re vowing to plow ahead on this cock-and-bull mission that never got off the ground. Not only did multiple witnesses testify that Biden had no involvement with his son’s business dealings, but previous allegations that Biden acted on his son’s behalf had also already been thoroughly repudiated.
The current House debacle overlaps with a Russian disinformation project described by the national security specialists Ryan Goodman and Asha Rangappa on the website Just Security in 2020. That scheme enticed Republican Sens. Ron Johnson (Wis.) and Chuck Grassley (Iowa) to buy into the now-discredited scenario that as vice president Biden sought on behalf of his son to stop an investigation of Burisma. (It also added in another phony Ukraine election interference claim.)
And let’s not forget that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III found “sweeping and systematic” Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election on Donald Trump’s behalf.
The current revelations concerning Smirnov should not merely spell the end of the comically inept impeachment proceedings; they should provoke questions about Republicans’ recklessness in peddling claims they apparently knew were unreliable.
At the very least, it is clear that House Republicans had reason to be skeptical of Smirnov’s allegations instead of embracing them. FBI briefers “warned lawmakers that the document, known as a 1023, containing Smirnov’s allegations against the Bidens also included raw, uncorroborated intelligence that should not be made public,” CNN reported on Wednesday. Even if the Republicans did not know Smirnov might have ties to Russian intelligence, they certainly knew the basis for making wild allegations about Biden was extremely shaky.
Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.), appearing on CNN, revealed, “We were warned at the time that we received the document outlining this witness’s testimony. We were warned that the credibility of this statement was not known.”
Asked directly if Republicans Comer and Rep. Jim Jordan (Ohio) knowingly proceeded with possibly baseless allegations, Buck replied, “That’s what it appears. I certainly didn’t have any evidence outside the statement itself that it was credible.” He added that as “a prosecutor for 25 years ... I never went to the public until I could prove the reliability of a statement.”
It’s bad enough if Republicans were simply reckless in attempting to smear the president; it would be quite stunning if they knew this was another Russian influence scheme. “DOJ must investigate whether and when Grassley, Comer or Jordan knew that Smirnov was spreading Russian disinformation,” Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) warned. At a Thursday news conference, Goldman said of the impeachment effort, “There’s no question this is dead. To the extent that they continue to push forward with it, they are now doing it with a knowing asset of Russian intelligence.” He underscored, “It is one thing to lead an investigation where you fail to find evidence to support unfounded conclusions. It is altogether something else when you are acting as an agent of Vladimir Putin.”
Republicans have built their entire oversight operation on rooting out the “weaponization of government” as a tool for accusing Democrats of misdeeds. Talk about projection. As former FBI agent Rangappa told me, “It seems like Comer’s impeachment inquiry is the real ‘weaponization committee’ — weaponized by Russia, that is.”
Republicans’ affinity over multiple elections for Russian-backed plots should warrant wall-to-wall coverage. (Let us not forget Russian efforts detailed in the Mueller report to enlist the Trump campaign and sabotage Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016.) Responsible news outlets should press House Republicans to justify their refusal to vote for aid for Ukraine and habit of spreading Russian conspiracy theories.
In short, Trump (enabled by House Republicans) wants Ukraine aid blocked and invites Vladimir Putin to invade NATO countries with military budgets Trump deems insufficient. He already has served as an indispensable helpmate in Putin’s assault on democracy and the international order. No wonder Russia appears yet again ready to pull out all the stops to boost Trump.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Are Republicans easy marks or willing participants in Russian anti-Biden operations? That’s a troubling question raised by the Feb. 14 grand jury indictment of a former FBI informant, Alexander Smirnov, on charges of concocting a tale about President Biden’s supposed involvement in his family members’ business dealings.
Allegations by Smirnov — who appears to have ties to Russian intelligence, according to the federal indictment — have formed the backbone of the House Republicans’ laughable attempt to build an impeachment case against the president. They championed him as their star witness. Now the Republicans’ fact-deficient storyline has been shredded.
The Post reported that Smirnov, who has not entered a plea yet, is accused of “making a false statement and creating a false and fictitious record” by trying to implicate Biden in corruption related to his son Hunter Biden’s involvement with the Ukraine energy company Burisma. “The charges,” the article said, “amount to a stark rebuke of conservatives, particularly Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, who touted Smirnov’s claims as he and other Republican lawmakers tried to build a corruption case against the president and his family.”
Even more damning, The Post subsequently reported that “Smirnov’s indictment and detention memo suggest the allegations were not only false, but possibly a Russian-inspired smear.”
In the aftermath of the indictment, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) declared, “Smirnov was the foundation of the whole thing. He was the one who came forward to say that Burisma had given Joe Biden $5 million, and that was just concocted in thin air. It was that foundation that the whole house of cards has been built on, and the entire thing has collapsed.”
Raskin added that “we don’t even have to rely on Smirnov’s own words because there have been somewhere near a dozen witnesses who have completely repudiated and refuted these essential allegations.”
Now Republicans are pretending that Smirnov wasn’t so important after all. They’re vowing to plow ahead on this cock-and-bull mission that never got off the ground. Not only did multiple witnesses testify that Biden had no involvement with his son’s business dealings, but previous allegations that Biden acted on his son’s behalf had also already been thoroughly repudiated.
The current House debacle overlaps with a Russian disinformation project described by the national security specialists Ryan Goodman and Asha Rangappa on the website Just Security in 2020. That scheme enticed Republican Sens. Ron Johnson (Wis.) and Chuck Grassley (Iowa) to buy into the now-discredited scenario that as vice president Biden sought on behalf of his son to stop an investigation of Burisma. (It also added in another phony Ukraine election interference claim.)
And let’s not forget that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III found “sweeping and systematic” Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election on Donald Trump’s behalf.
The current revelations concerning Smirnov should not merely spell the end of the comically inept impeachment proceedings; they should provoke questions about Republicans’ recklessness in peddling claims they apparently knew were unreliable.
At the very least, it is clear that House Republicans had reason to be skeptical of Smirnov’s allegations instead of embracing them. FBI briefers “warned lawmakers that the document, known as a 1023, containing Smirnov’s allegations against the Bidens also included raw, uncorroborated intelligence that should not be made public,” CNN reported on Wednesday. Even if the Republicans did not know Smirnov might have ties to Russian intelligence, they certainly knew the basis for making wild allegations about Biden was extremely shaky.
Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.), appearing on CNN, revealed, “We were warned at the time that we received the document outlining this witness’s testimony. We were warned that the credibility of this statement was not known.”
Asked directly if Republicans Comer and Rep. Jim Jordan (Ohio) knowingly proceeded with possibly baseless allegations, Buck replied, “That’s what it appears. I certainly didn’t have any evidence outside the statement itself that it was credible.” He added that as “a prosecutor for 25 years ... I never went to the public until I could prove the reliability of a statement.”
It’s bad enough if Republicans were simply reckless in attempting to smear the president; it would be quite stunning if they knew this was another Russian influence scheme. “DOJ must investigate whether and when Grassley, Comer or Jordan knew that Smirnov was spreading Russian disinformation,” Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) warned. At a Thursday news conference, Goldman said of the impeachment effort, “There’s no question this is dead. To the extent that they continue to push forward with it, they are now doing it with a knowing asset of Russian intelligence.” He underscored, “It is one thing to lead an investigation where you fail to find evidence to support unfounded conclusions. It is altogether something else when you are acting as an agent of Vladimir Putin.”
Republicans have built their entire oversight operation on rooting out the “weaponization of government” as a tool for accusing Democrats of misdeeds. Talk about projection. As former FBI agent Rangappa told me, “It seems like Comer’s impeachment inquiry is the real ‘weaponization committee’ — weaponized by Russia, that is.”
Republicans’ affinity over multiple elections for Russian-backed plots should warrant wall-to-wall coverage. (Let us not forget Russian efforts detailed in the Mueller report to enlist the Trump campaign and sabotage Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016.) Responsible news outlets should press House Republicans to justify their refusal to vote for aid for Ukraine and habit of spreading Russian conspiracy theories.
In short, Trump (enabled by House Republicans) wants Ukraine aid blocked and invites Vladimir Putin to invade NATO countries with military budgets Trump deems insufficient. He already has served as an indispensable helpmate in Putin’s assault on democracy and the international order. No wonder Russia appears yet again ready to pull out all the stops to boost Trump.
MIDTERM VOTERS REJECTED MAGA CHAOS. SO THE GOP DOUBLED DOWN ON CRAZY.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Voters in 2022 rebelled against Republican extremism,compulsive lying, chaos, hysteria and nihilism. House Democrats did quite well by historical standards; Senate Democrats actually added to their majority. And nearly all election deniers in swing states running for governor, attorney general or secretary of state lost.
What has happened since? House Republicans have cycled through speakers, tried to shut down the government several times and brought the United States to the brink of default. They spent months on bogus impeachment investigations and harassed local district attorneys prosecuting defeated former president Donald Trump. They also demanded, and then nixed, a border-control measure. To top it off, they refused even a vote on vital aid for Ukraine. It sure doesn’t appear as though they learned their lesson.
Some House Republicans are destructive, bordering on nihilistic, because they are following Trump’s lead. And sure enough, Republican primary voters are on the verge of handing the nomination to a man who threatens courts and the FBI, spews fascist “pure” blood language, vows to unleash the Justice Department on his enemies (“I am your vengeance!”) and sabotages bipartisanship when it suits his interests. He still refuses to admit he lost in 2020 — a sign he would not accept defeat this year, either. In a textbook case of toxic narcissism, Trump mentions the death of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny only in connection with his own (self-inflicted) legal problems.
He brags about removing the protection of abortion rights, which upended the lives of millions of women, their families and the medical community. He wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act with no replacement in sight. He wants to split NATO. Chaos, chaos and more chaos.
To top it off, he will be running while sitting through at least one criminal trial — and possibly two. Should he be convicted in one or more and then elected, we will have leaped into a constitutional dumpster fire in which either the will of the voters or the judgment of juries in criminal cases might be sacrificed to satisfy the other. If he loses in November, we can expect a rerun of Jan. 6, 2021. Violence and chaos.
Even Republicans acknowledge the former president’s destructive impulses. Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley regularly calls Trump out for bringing on chaos. She also declared, “An unhinged president is an unsafe president.” Her audiences understand exactly what she means.
Trump’s maelstrom has yet to reach its apex. He will likely decompose further as his financial situation craters and his criminal cases go from bad to worse. With every temper tantrum on courtroom steps, flurry of insane posts on social media and outburst at a judge, he will remind voters of what they hate — and what they have to fear should he return to the White House.
President Biden gets harangued constantly about his age, but no one seriously thinks he is impulsive, destructive, chaotic, plundering, violent or bent on dismantling our constitutional system. We need not worry that he will try to pardon himself and hundreds of insurrectionists. We know he declines to interfere with the Justice Department, abides by court rulings and respects the military’s apolitical role. He is trying to bolster the international order, not upend it. With age and solid character come stability, calm, competence and, occasionally, wisdom. That is the real contrast between the two.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Voters in 2022 rebelled against Republican extremism,
What has happened since? House Republicans have cycled through speakers, tried to shut down the government several times and brought the United States to the brink of default. They spent months on bogus impeachment investigations and harassed local district attorneys prosecuting defeated former president Donald Trump. They also demanded, and then nixed, a border-control measure. To top it off, they refused even a vote on vital aid for Ukraine. It sure doesn’t appear as though they learned their lesson.
Some House Republicans are destructive, bordering on nihilistic, because they are following Trump’s lead. And sure enough, Republican primary voters are on the verge of handing the nomination to a man who threatens courts and the FBI, spews fascist “pure” blood language, vows to unleash the Justice Department on his enemies (“I am your vengeance!”) and sabotages bipartisanship when it suits his interests. He still refuses to admit he lost in 2020 — a sign he would not accept defeat this year, either. In a textbook case of toxic narcissism, Trump mentions the death of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny only in connection with his own (self-inflicted) legal problems.
He brags about removing the protection of abortion rights, which upended the lives of millions of women, their families and the medical community. He wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act with no replacement in sight. He wants to split NATO. Chaos, chaos and more chaos.
To top it off, he will be running while sitting through at least one criminal trial — and possibly two. Should he be convicted in one or more and then elected, we will have leaped into a constitutional dumpster fire in which either the will of the voters or the judgment of juries in criminal cases might be sacrificed to satisfy the other. If he loses in November, we can expect a rerun of Jan. 6, 2021. Violence and chaos.
Even Republicans acknowledge the former president’s destructive impulses. Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley regularly calls Trump out for bringing on chaos. She also declared, “An unhinged president is an unsafe president.” Her audiences understand exactly what she means.
Trump’s maelstrom has yet to reach its apex. He will likely decompose further as his financial situation craters and his criminal cases go from bad to worse. With every temper tantrum on courtroom steps, flurry of insane posts on social media and outburst at a judge, he will remind voters of what they hate — and what they have to fear should he return to the White House.
President Biden gets harangued constantly about his age, but no one seriously thinks he is impulsive, destructive, chaotic, plundering, violent or bent on dismantling our constitutional system. We need not worry that he will try to pardon himself and hundreds of insurrectionists. We know he declines to interfere with the Justice Department, abides by court rulings and respects the military’s apolitical role. He is trying to bolster the international order, not upend it. With age and solid character come stability, calm, competence and, occasionally, wisdom. That is the real contrast between the two.
ARE THERE FOUR BRAVE GOP HOUSE MEMBERS WITH THE COURAGE TO SAVE UKRAINE?
That's all it would take to get the majority needed to bypass speaker Mike Johnson and get a vote on Ukraine aid to the House floor.
by Trudy Rubin, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Wanted: Four GOP House members with a tiny fraction of the courage of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny.
Saturday marks the second anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine. It comes one week after Navalny died in an icy Siberian prison for his fight for democracy and opposition to the Ukraine war.
Yet the United States is on the verge of surrendering Ukraine into Putin’s hands because House Republican leaders refuse to allow members to vote for urgent military aid for Kyiv, a vote that would most likely pass (as it did with in a bipartisan vote in the Senate).
Pressed by Donald Trump and extremist MAGA members, Congress may doom brave Ukrainians to destruction by a Russian dictator who despises the West — and is armed by Iran and North Korea. Nothing like this has been seen since British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain conceded part of Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler in 1938 in hopes of dissuading him from occupying more European lands.
Whether Trump and GOP extremists succeed in gifting Ukraine to Putin may depend on whether four GOP House members have the courage to stand up to MAGA appeasement and defend America’s long-term security.
Here’s how it could work.
The best chance to skirt House Speaker Mike Johnson’s refusal to permit a vote on Ukraine aid would be via a discharge petition. That is a parliamentary maneuver that effectively bypasses the speaker to bring a bill before the full House for a vote — if a majority of members agree to do so. If all Democrats signed on, it would only require four Republicans to get the Ukraine supplemental aid bill to the floor.
The battle wouldn’t end there. The bill would still have to be passed, and Republicans might try to add hard-line amendments on border security beyond the huge border concessions the White House has already agreed to. Some progressive Democrats might vote nay because the bill also contains military aid for Israel.
But the best guess of legislators with whom I have spoken is that the bill has a decent chance of passing if can only reach the floor.
There is something truly sickening about the fact that Johnson — and so many GOP supporters of aid for Ukraine — are too scared to allow Congress to vote on such a key measure. Johnson fears being ousted from his speakership by the MAGA clique, as was the previous speaker, Kevin McCarthy. House members fear that, if they buck the Trump line, a MAGA candidate will run against them in the GOP primary. And above all hangs the threat of physical danger to them or their families by deranged MAGA supporters who take Trump’s ugly rhetoric to heart.
Yet, surely, among more than 200 GOP House members, there are four whose belief in democracy and U.S. security would embolden them to take the risk.
For inspiration, they need only look to Navalny, or his mother, who is fighting Russian officials in Siberia to return her son’s body. She is being told by morgue officials that she can only have it if she promises the funeral will be private. So great is the Kremlin’s fear of this dead hero that they worry about mass demonstrations if a public burial is held.
Or look to the bravery of the Ukrainians fighting two years on the front line without rotation despite a severe lack of ammunition since U.S. aid has shriveled. Only last week, they had to abandon the town of Avdiivka to Russian troops because they were running out of bullets.
Moreover, MAGA arguments against aid run hollow.
Send the aid to the border? Trump sank a tough bipartisan Senate border bill (linked to Ukraine aid) that had the support of some of the most conservative GOP senators.
Europeans don’t pay their fair share? Trump makes up numbers out of thin air. In reality, the European Union and its members have committed twice as much aid to Ukraine as the U.S. has, along with sheltering millions of Ukrainian refugees. Eighteen of 31 NATO members meet the organization’s goal of spending 2% of GDP on defense. But the U.S. makes key weapons systems, in bulk, that the Europeans don’t have.
Negotiate now? Putin has made clear he has no interest unless Ukraine capitulates totally. With U.S. aid frozen he thinks he is winning — and is waiting for a victory by Trump who has made clear he will back Putin against Ukraine.
Moreover, contrary to many media reports, Ukraine was not “losing” before the ammo ran out.
Although Kyiv has been stymied on land, the Ukrainians have made incredible progress at sea. Ukraine has no navy, yet they have driven Russian ships back to home ports and reopened Black Sea corridors for their exports by using European-made long range missiles and homemade sea drones.
Ukraine knows its future depends heavily on what happens in the U.S. Congress in the next few weeks. “If Ukraine loses to Putin, a big reason will be because the U.S. turned its back,” said Philadelphia’s Democratic Rep. Brendan Boyle, who just returned from the Munich Security Conference and a meeting at NATO headquarters.
“This is not just about Ukraine, it is about our security,” Boyle told me. “Putin is evil on the same level as Hitler. It is a lot less expensive to stand up to him now; if we wait until later, it will be much more costly in money and lives.”
Let us hope there are four GOP stalwarts with a backbone, who want to be able to look in the mirror and know they opposed appeasement. They may be all that stands between repelling Putin and an ugly, self-inflicted, defense debacle that will haunt the United States for years.
That's all it would take to get the majority needed to bypass speaker Mike Johnson and get a vote on Ukraine aid to the House floor.
by Trudy Rubin, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Wanted: Four GOP House members with a tiny fraction of the courage of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny.
Saturday marks the second anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine. It comes one week after Navalny died in an icy Siberian prison for his fight for democracy and opposition to the Ukraine war.
Yet the United States is on the verge of surrendering Ukraine into Putin’s hands because House Republican leaders refuse to allow members to vote for urgent military aid for Kyiv, a vote that would most likely pass (as it did with in a bipartisan vote in the Senate).
Pressed by Donald Trump and extremist MAGA members, Congress may doom brave Ukrainians to destruction by a Russian dictator who despises the West — and is armed by Iran and North Korea. Nothing like this has been seen since British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain conceded part of Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler in 1938 in hopes of dissuading him from occupying more European lands.
Whether Trump and GOP extremists succeed in gifting Ukraine to Putin may depend on whether four GOP House members have the courage to stand up to MAGA appeasement and defend America’s long-term security.
Here’s how it could work.
The best chance to skirt House Speaker Mike Johnson’s refusal to permit a vote on Ukraine aid would be via a discharge petition. That is a parliamentary maneuver that effectively bypasses the speaker to bring a bill before the full House for a vote — if a majority of members agree to do so. If all Democrats signed on, it would only require four Republicans to get the Ukraine supplemental aid bill to the floor.
The battle wouldn’t end there. The bill would still have to be passed, and Republicans might try to add hard-line amendments on border security beyond the huge border concessions the White House has already agreed to. Some progressive Democrats might vote nay because the bill also contains military aid for Israel.
But the best guess of legislators with whom I have spoken is that the bill has a decent chance of passing if can only reach the floor.
There is something truly sickening about the fact that Johnson — and so many GOP supporters of aid for Ukraine — are too scared to allow Congress to vote on such a key measure. Johnson fears being ousted from his speakership by the MAGA clique, as was the previous speaker, Kevin McCarthy. House members fear that, if they buck the Trump line, a MAGA candidate will run against them in the GOP primary. And above all hangs the threat of physical danger to them or their families by deranged MAGA supporters who take Trump’s ugly rhetoric to heart.
Yet, surely, among more than 200 GOP House members, there are four whose belief in democracy and U.S. security would embolden them to take the risk.
For inspiration, they need only look to Navalny, or his mother, who is fighting Russian officials in Siberia to return her son’s body. She is being told by morgue officials that she can only have it if she promises the funeral will be private. So great is the Kremlin’s fear of this dead hero that they worry about mass demonstrations if a public burial is held.
Or look to the bravery of the Ukrainians fighting two years on the front line without rotation despite a severe lack of ammunition since U.S. aid has shriveled. Only last week, they had to abandon the town of Avdiivka to Russian troops because they were running out of bullets.
Moreover, MAGA arguments against aid run hollow.
Send the aid to the border? Trump sank a tough bipartisan Senate border bill (linked to Ukraine aid) that had the support of some of the most conservative GOP senators.
Europeans don’t pay their fair share? Trump makes up numbers out of thin air. In reality, the European Union and its members have committed twice as much aid to Ukraine as the U.S. has, along with sheltering millions of Ukrainian refugees. Eighteen of 31 NATO members meet the organization’s goal of spending 2% of GDP on defense. But the U.S. makes key weapons systems, in bulk, that the Europeans don’t have.
Negotiate now? Putin has made clear he has no interest unless Ukraine capitulates totally. With U.S. aid frozen he thinks he is winning — and is waiting for a victory by Trump who has made clear he will back Putin against Ukraine.
Moreover, contrary to many media reports, Ukraine was not “losing” before the ammo ran out.
Although Kyiv has been stymied on land, the Ukrainians have made incredible progress at sea. Ukraine has no navy, yet they have driven Russian ships back to home ports and reopened Black Sea corridors for their exports by using European-made long range missiles and homemade sea drones.
Ukraine knows its future depends heavily on what happens in the U.S. Congress in the next few weeks. “If Ukraine loses to Putin, a big reason will be because the U.S. turned its back,” said Philadelphia’s Democratic Rep. Brendan Boyle, who just returned from the Munich Security Conference and a meeting at NATO headquarters.
“This is not just about Ukraine, it is about our security,” Boyle told me. “Putin is evil on the same level as Hitler. It is a lot less expensive to stand up to him now; if we wait until later, it will be much more costly in money and lives.”
Let us hope there are four GOP stalwarts with a backbone, who want to be able to look in the mirror and know they opposed appeasement. They may be all that stands between repelling Putin and an ugly, self-inflicted, defense debacle that will haunt the United States for years.
A BAD CASE OF PUTIN-ENVY PREVENTS TRUMP FROM CALLING OUT DEATH OF NAVALNY
Trump lawyers argue he has the right to near-absolute immunity, even for the assassination of opponents, the modus operandi of his Kremlin pal.
by Trudy Rubin, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Blame America. Blame Joe Biden. Blame Alexei Navalny for his own death. But never blame Vladimir Putin.
Donald Trump’s continued refusal to criticize the Russian leader for the death of Russian dissident Navalny is a stunner, even if you have been numbed by Trump’s constant pandering to Putin.
Trump’s response has been to portray himself as an innocent victim of corrupt U.S. courts and politicians — while continuing to boast about his relationship with the Russian strongman.
No word of criticism for a Russian system of “telephone justice,” where a top official calls the judge and dictates the verdict. Not a word about the horrific “Polar Wolf” maximum security penal colony in the freezing Russian Artic, where Navalny was tortured and died under circumstances that may never be clear, especially since the Kremlin is refusing to turn over his body to his family.
No mention from Trump of Putin’s decades of killing and/or poisoning dozens of journalists and political opponents. Yet, he managed a slap at Navalny for being foolish enough to return from Berlin to sure arrest in Moscow after being treated for poison administered by Putin’s security officials. No comprehension of a principled sacrifice made to fight dictatorship in Russia.
I’ve heard the explanations of why Trump behaves this way: the embrace of isolationism, Putin as an exemplar for evangelicals of anti-wokeness and “Christian values,” a Trumpian desire to hobnob with the big men’s club of powerful dictators.
But I believe the real reason is Putin-envy.
How can Trump decry Putin, when the Kremlin killer is only doing exactly what Trump wishes he could do — in perhaps not so lethal terms — if only the U.S. system of checks and balances didn’t constrain him? That is, delivering vengeance to his enemies if he wins a second term.
The whole idea was perfectly summed up in the Trump legal team’s argument in January before a federal appeals court, claiming former presidents are immune from criminal prosecution, even for murders they ordered while in office.
Judge Florence Pan asked, “Could a president who ordered SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival … be subject to criminal prosecution?” Trump’s lawyer, D. John Sauer, effectively said no, unless they had first been impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate. (No president has ever been so convicted.)
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected this claim, and Trump has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to temporarily suspend the lower court’s action, pending a formal appeal. I have to believe that even this Supreme Court would ultimately reject Trump’s premise.
So, one has to ask: What else than Putin-envy could make Trump so unwilling to condemn Navalny’s murder and to call Putin out for the killer he is?
You will recall that Trump declared during his 2016 presidential campaign that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”
Long before Navalny’s death, the likely GOP presidential candidate had zero moral qualms about leaders who commit murder. Just recall in his 2017 Super Bowl interview with Fox News, when he shoved aside criticism of Putin as a “killer” by insisting: “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. Do you think our country’s so innocent?”
In other words, after 17 years of Putin — after opposition leader Boris Nemtsov had been shot dead in front of the Kremlin, after high profile Russian intelligence defector Alexander Litvinenko had been killed by Russian agents with polonium in London, and dozens of other enemies had been dispatched by Putin at home and abroad — Trump had nothing bad to say about the Russian leader and nothing good to say about America.
Trump’s take was echoed by his acolyte Tucker Carlson, after the latter’s sycophantic interview with Putin shortly before Navalny’s death. Following the interview, Carlson was asked by a TV interviewer in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, why he didn’t ask about the imprisoned Navalny or the assassinations of Kremlin opponents.
“Every leader kills people, including my leader,” Carlson responded. “Leadership requires killing people.”
In the wake of Navalny’s death, and his gushing videos praising Moscow supermarkets and subways, Carlson labeled the event “barbaric.” Yet, he insisted to London’s Daily Mail that “people who say Putin killed him are idiots.”
Given that Putin’s minions had nearly killed Navalny in 2020 and Putin had ensured the dissident would suffer for decades in a brutal prison, only a “useful idiot” such as Carlson could make such a dumb remark. (The term “useful idiot” was coined by Vladimir Lenin for naive Western intellectuals who blindly followed the Bolsheviks.)
Consider how free Putin believes himself to murder opponents at home or in Europe, as he watches Trump instruct the GOP to cut off aid to Ukraine and threaten to abandon NATO members to Russian attack.
This week, the bullet-riddled body of Maksim Kuzminov, a Russian military defector, was found in Spain, where he had been living. After Kuzminov flew his Mi-8 helicopter to Ukraine in August, interviews on Russian state-controlled TV made clear he would be assassinated. He should have remained in Ukraine.
In Carlson’s interview, Putin suggested he might be open to swapping Wall Street Journal correspondent Evan Gershkovich, who is being held on trumped-up spying charges, if Germany released a Russian agent who fatally shot a former Chechen rebel in broad daylight in a Berlin park in 2019. In other words, the release of an American hostage depends on whether Germany permits a Russian assassin to go free.
Meantime, inside Russia, a prominent pro-war Russian blogger has reportedly died by “suicide” this week after he angered the Kremlin by posting that the Russian army lost 16,000 soldiers during its recent capture of the eastern Ukrainian city of Avdiivka. (The Kremlin keeps military casualty figures secret.)
Russians joke grimly that “suicide” means “either tea or the window,” meaning poison or defenestration. Even pro-war Russians are at risk of being murdered if they utter any truths or embarrassing statistics.
This is the Kremlin regime that Trump and Carlson claim is superior to our democratic system. This is the modus operandi — Putin’s political murder at will — that Trump and Carlson justify by saying every leader does it, even in America.
That is a grotesque lie so long as our imperfect system retains independent courts, a Congress that functions, and fact-based media that aren’t overtaken by internet conspiracy mongers.
Trump’s disdain for Navalny and the embrace of his killer makes clear the risk America is facing: electing a man infected with Putin-envy in 2024.
Trump lawyers argue he has the right to near-absolute immunity, even for the assassination of opponents, the modus operandi of his Kremlin pal.
by Trudy Rubin, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Blame America. Blame Joe Biden. Blame Alexei Navalny for his own death. But never blame Vladimir Putin.
Donald Trump’s continued refusal to criticize the Russian leader for the death of Russian dissident Navalny is a stunner, even if you have been numbed by Trump’s constant pandering to Putin.
Trump’s response has been to portray himself as an innocent victim of corrupt U.S. courts and politicians — while continuing to boast about his relationship with the Russian strongman.
No word of criticism for a Russian system of “telephone justice,” where a top official calls the judge and dictates the verdict. Not a word about the horrific “Polar Wolf” maximum security penal colony in the freezing Russian Artic, where Navalny was tortured and died under circumstances that may never be clear, especially since the Kremlin is refusing to turn over his body to his family.
No mention from Trump of Putin’s decades of killing and/or poisoning dozens of journalists and political opponents. Yet, he managed a slap at Navalny for being foolish enough to return from Berlin to sure arrest in Moscow after being treated for poison administered by Putin’s security officials. No comprehension of a principled sacrifice made to fight dictatorship in Russia.
I’ve heard the explanations of why Trump behaves this way: the embrace of isolationism, Putin as an exemplar for evangelicals of anti-wokeness and “Christian values,” a Trumpian desire to hobnob with the big men’s club of powerful dictators.
But I believe the real reason is Putin-envy.
How can Trump decry Putin, when the Kremlin killer is only doing exactly what Trump wishes he could do — in perhaps not so lethal terms — if only the U.S. system of checks and balances didn’t constrain him? That is, delivering vengeance to his enemies if he wins a second term.
The whole idea was perfectly summed up in the Trump legal team’s argument in January before a federal appeals court, claiming former presidents are immune from criminal prosecution, even for murders they ordered while in office.
Judge Florence Pan asked, “Could a president who ordered SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival … be subject to criminal prosecution?” Trump’s lawyer, D. John Sauer, effectively said no, unless they had first been impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate. (No president has ever been so convicted.)
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected this claim, and Trump has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to temporarily suspend the lower court’s action, pending a formal appeal. I have to believe that even this Supreme Court would ultimately reject Trump’s premise.
So, one has to ask: What else than Putin-envy could make Trump so unwilling to condemn Navalny’s murder and to call Putin out for the killer he is?
You will recall that Trump declared during his 2016 presidential campaign that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”
Long before Navalny’s death, the likely GOP presidential candidate had zero moral qualms about leaders who commit murder. Just recall in his 2017 Super Bowl interview with Fox News, when he shoved aside criticism of Putin as a “killer” by insisting: “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. Do you think our country’s so innocent?”
In other words, after 17 years of Putin — after opposition leader Boris Nemtsov had been shot dead in front of the Kremlin, after high profile Russian intelligence defector Alexander Litvinenko had been killed by Russian agents with polonium in London, and dozens of other enemies had been dispatched by Putin at home and abroad — Trump had nothing bad to say about the Russian leader and nothing good to say about America.
Trump’s take was echoed by his acolyte Tucker Carlson, after the latter’s sycophantic interview with Putin shortly before Navalny’s death. Following the interview, Carlson was asked by a TV interviewer in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, why he didn’t ask about the imprisoned Navalny or the assassinations of Kremlin opponents.
“Every leader kills people, including my leader,” Carlson responded. “Leadership requires killing people.”
In the wake of Navalny’s death, and his gushing videos praising Moscow supermarkets and subways, Carlson labeled the event “barbaric.” Yet, he insisted to London’s Daily Mail that “people who say Putin killed him are idiots.”
Given that Putin’s minions had nearly killed Navalny in 2020 and Putin had ensured the dissident would suffer for decades in a brutal prison, only a “useful idiot” such as Carlson could make such a dumb remark. (The term “useful idiot” was coined by Vladimir Lenin for naive Western intellectuals who blindly followed the Bolsheviks.)
Consider how free Putin believes himself to murder opponents at home or in Europe, as he watches Trump instruct the GOP to cut off aid to Ukraine and threaten to abandon NATO members to Russian attack.
This week, the bullet-riddled body of Maksim Kuzminov, a Russian military defector, was found in Spain, where he had been living. After Kuzminov flew his Mi-8 helicopter to Ukraine in August, interviews on Russian state-controlled TV made clear he would be assassinated. He should have remained in Ukraine.
In Carlson’s interview, Putin suggested he might be open to swapping Wall Street Journal correspondent Evan Gershkovich, who is being held on trumped-up spying charges, if Germany released a Russian agent who fatally shot a former Chechen rebel in broad daylight in a Berlin park in 2019. In other words, the release of an American hostage depends on whether Germany permits a Russian assassin to go free.
Meantime, inside Russia, a prominent pro-war Russian blogger has reportedly died by “suicide” this week after he angered the Kremlin by posting that the Russian army lost 16,000 soldiers during its recent capture of the eastern Ukrainian city of Avdiivka. (The Kremlin keeps military casualty figures secret.)
Russians joke grimly that “suicide” means “either tea or the window,” meaning poison or defenestration. Even pro-war Russians are at risk of being murdered if they utter any truths or embarrassing statistics.
This is the Kremlin regime that Trump and Carlson claim is superior to our democratic system. This is the modus operandi — Putin’s political murder at will — that Trump and Carlson justify by saying every leader does it, even in America.
That is a grotesque lie so long as our imperfect system retains independent courts, a Congress that functions, and fact-based media that aren’t overtaken by internet conspiracy mongers.
Trump’s disdain for Navalny and the embrace of his killer makes clear the risk America is facing: electing a man infected with Putin-envy in 2024.
ALABAMA’S I.V.F. RULING SHOWS OUR SLIDE TOWARD THEOCRACY
By Charles M. Blow, The New York Times
If you don’t think this country is sliding toward theocracy, you’re not paying attention.
The drumbeat of incidents moving us ever closer to the seemingly inescapable future is so steady and frequent that we’ve developed outrage fatigue — we’ve grown numb.
For instance, on Tuesday, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are children, and that destruction of those embryos, even by accident, is subject to the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. In his concurring opinion, the chief justice of the court, Tom Parker, wrote, “Even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”
The ruling could mean less access to reproductive care in Alabama if specialists in the field of in vitro fertilization simply choose to practice in states that don’t threaten their efforts.
There have been cases before in which embryos were destroyed as a result of negligence, but the Alabama decision significantly ups the ante. It essentially turns cryopreservation tanks into frozen nurseries.
The idea is absurd and unscientific. It is instead tied to a religious crusade to downgrade the personhood of women by conferring personhood on frozen embryos.
I called Sean Tipton, the chief advocacy and policy officer at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, who told me: “One of the points in the abortion debate is, ‘Is it really about abortion or is it about controlling women and controlling sex?’ And this clearly exposes the idea that it’s not just about abortion.” He said, “There is no more pro-life medical treatment available, ever, than in vitro fertilization, and this decision clearly threatens the ability for that to continue.”
Control of women’s bodies is the endgame. And some religious conservatives won’t stop until that goal is achieved. For that reason, intervening victories — like the overturning of Roe v. Wade — will never be seen as enough; they will only intensify a blinding sense of righteousness.
There is an array of reproductive rights cases percolating around the country that could make their way to the Supreme Court — the same court that Donald Trump brags about transforming, having appointed a third of its justices. The legal and political battles over these issues are far from over, and the preservation of women’s remaining rights is far from certain.
The only thing that seems to be temporarily stopping congressional Republicans from pushing for a national abortion ban — after years of arguing that their goal was merely to allow individual states to make their own laws — is that the issue of reproductive choice is an electoral
But now Trump is reportedly talking privately about supporting a national 16-week abortion ban, with some exceptions.
This is what many of his supporters want, and many of them believe he has been singularly chosen by God to advance their theocratic aims. It’s one of the reasons that they overlook Trump’s glaring flaws and the fact that Trump himself is not a particularly religious man.
It’s worth noting that many of the right’s efforts, including on the issue of abortion, are led by men who want births but can’t give birth, reflecting an imbalance between power and expectation that may carry over to a younger generation. A fascinating new report from Pew Research found that although men and women 18 to 34 “are about equally likely to say they want to get married,” 57 percent of young men say they want children one day, compared to just 45 percent of young women.
Abortion is just one front on which this religious fight is being waged. As of last week, the A.C.L.U. was tracking 437 anti-L.G.B.T.Q. bills being considered by state legislatures.
Then there’s the alarming effort by conservative groups to transform and reshape the federal government in ways that curtail American freedoms, but also, according to Politico, to bring Christian nationalist ideas into a second Trump administration.
To those advancing these ideas, the will of God counts more than the will of the American people, even when Americans object or disagree.
Reportedly, one idea among the various proposals is invoking the Insurrection Act on Trump’s first day back in office to facilitate deployment of the military against protesters.
We are perilously close to all this becoming a reality, potentially aided and abetted by disaffected Democratic voters.
I’m talking about many Democrats with single-issue objections to President Biden — whether it’s opposition to his position on the Israel-Hamas war, disappointments about the overall state of the economy or concerns about the president’s age — who haven’t committed to supporting his re-election, who don’t seem to see that in November the country faces one of the most existential electoral decisions it ever has faced.
If these Democrats decide to punish Biden by sitting it out, they could wind up performing one of the greatest acts of self-immolation in recent political history: abandoning an administration committed to the protection of democracy and possibly allowing the ascension of a theocracy intent on destroying the very freedoms that progressives cherish.
By Charles M. Blow, The New York Times
If you don’t think this country is sliding toward theocracy, you’re not paying attention.
The drumbeat of incidents moving us ever closer to the seemingly inescapable future is so steady and frequent that we’ve developed outrage fatigue — we’ve grown numb.
For instance, on Tuesday, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are children, and that destruction of those embryos, even by accident, is subject to the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. In his concurring opinion, the chief justice of the court, Tom Parker, wrote, “Even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”
The ruling could mean less access to reproductive care in Alabama if specialists in the field of in vitro fertilization simply choose to practice in states that don’t threaten their efforts.
There have been cases before in which embryos were destroyed as a result of negligence, but the Alabama decision significantly ups the ante. It essentially turns cryopreservation tanks into frozen nurseries.
The idea is absurd and unscientific. It is instead tied to a religious crusade to downgrade the personhood of women by conferring personhood on frozen embryos.
I called Sean Tipton, the chief advocacy and policy officer at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, who told me: “One of the points in the abortion debate is, ‘Is it really about abortion or is it about controlling women and controlling sex?’ And this clearly exposes the idea that it’s not just about abortion.” He said, “There is no more pro-life medical treatment available, ever, than in vitro fertilization, and this decision clearly threatens the ability for that to continue.”
Control of women’s bodies is the endgame. And some religious conservatives won’t stop until that goal is achieved. For that reason, intervening victories — like the overturning of Roe v. Wade — will never be seen as enough; they will only intensify a blinding sense of righteousness.
There is an array of reproductive rights cases percolating around the country that could make their way to the Supreme Court — the same court that Donald Trump brags about transforming, having appointed a third of its justices. The legal and political battles over these issues are far from over, and the preservation of women’s remaining rights is far from certain.
The only thing that seems to be temporarily stopping congressional Republicans from pushing for a national abortion ban — after years of arguing that their goal was merely to allow individual states to make their own laws — is that the issue of reproductive choice is an electoral
But now Trump is reportedly talking privately about supporting a national 16-week abortion ban, with some exceptions.
This is what many of his supporters want, and many of them believe he has been singularly chosen by God to advance their theocratic aims. It’s one of the reasons that they overlook Trump’s glaring flaws and the fact that Trump himself is not a particularly religious man.
It’s worth noting that many of the right’s efforts, including on the issue of abortion, are led by men who want births but can’t give birth, reflecting an imbalance between power and expectation that may carry over to a younger generation. A fascinating new report from Pew Research found that although men and women 18 to 34 “are about equally likely to say they want to get married,” 57 percent of young men say they want children one day, compared to just 45 percent of young women.
Abortion is just one front on which this religious fight is being waged. As of last week, the A.C.L.U. was tracking 437 anti-L.G.B.T.Q. bills being considered by state legislatures.
Then there’s the alarming effort by conservative groups to transform and reshape the federal government in ways that curtail American freedoms, but also, according to Politico, to bring Christian nationalist ideas into a second Trump administration.
To those advancing these ideas, the will of God counts more than the will of the American people, even when Americans object or disagree.
Reportedly, one idea among the various proposals is invoking the Insurrection Act on Trump’s first day back in office to facilitate deployment of the military against protesters.
We are perilously close to all this becoming a reality, potentially aided and abetted by disaffected Democratic voters.
I’m talking about many Democrats with single-issue objections to President Biden — whether it’s opposition to his position on the Israel-Hamas war, disappointments about the overall state of the economy or concerns about the president’s age — who haven’t committed to supporting his re-election, who don’t seem to see that in November the country faces one of the most existential electoral decisions it ever has faced.
If these Democrats decide to punish Biden by sitting it out, they could wind up performing one of the greatest acts of self-immolation in recent political history: abandoning an administration committed to the protection of democracy and possibly allowing the ascension of a theocracy intent on destroying the very freedoms that progressives cherish.
ANOTHER GOP BIDEN ‘INFORMANT.’ ANOTHER INDICTMENT AND LINK TO RUSSIA.
It’s been the story of many of those from whom Republicans have sought information
By Aaron Blake, The Washington Post
In one way, it’s shocking that a key person in the GOP’s efforts to dig up dirt on the Bidens has been indicted and tells prosecutors he has extensive ties to Russian intelligence.
In another way, it’s altogether familiar.
This isn’t even the first time we’ve learned that a person has been indicted after the GOP cited his claims. Nor is it the first time a person has been linked to Russian intelligence after the GOP leaned on their version of events.
The cast of characters Republicans have sought out to substantiate President Biden’s purported corruption over the years has come to include half a dozen convicted and accused criminals, as well as multiple people the U.S. government has linked to Russia, corruption and subverting American democracy.
For months, the House GOP cited an FBI informant to suggest Joe Biden took a bribe as vice president. Now, the Justice Department says that source was lying.
The most recent example is Alexander Smirnov, whom the government said last week had invented the claim that Biden and his son Hunter took $5 million bribes. That allegation was promoted far and wide by Republicans, many of whom treated it as fact.
The government then said this week that Smirnov has “extensive foreign ties, including, most troublingly and by his own account, contact with foreign intelligence services, including Russian intelligence agencies, and has had such contacts recently.”
The news comes seven months after the indictment of another GOP source was unsealed. Republicans had conspiratorially suggested that a key witness who claimed to have damaging information about Hunter Biden had mysteriously gone missing. It turned out the witness was Gal Luft, who the government said had skipped bail after his indictment for alleged arms trafficking and foreign lobbying violations was handed down months earlier.
Days before the indictment was unsealed, House GOP impeachment leader Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) called Luft a “a very credible witness on Biden family corruption.” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said shortly before the unsealing that Luft had a “wealth of information” about the Bidens.
Smirnov and Luft are hardly the only ones who have faced criminal charges or other penalties — or whose credibility could otherwise be called into question.
Republicans in their impeachment push have hailed — and spun — the testimony of Hunter Biden’s former business partner, Devon Archer. Archer was sentenced in 2022 to a year in prison for defrauding a Native American tribe.
They have repeatedly referenced former Ukraine prosecutor general Viktor Shokin’s dubious claim that then-Vice President Biden had sought Shokin’s firing to protect the Ukrainian energy company that employed Hunter Biden, Burisma. (Now-House Speaker Mike Johnson [R-La.] even said last year that Shokin’s Fox News interview should be “the headline in every news outlet in America.”)
In fact, the evidence suggests Shokin was not really scrutinizing Burisma. And Shokin was widely decried by the West as being soft on corruption.
The fired Ukrainian prosecutor is not a reliable narrator
The Shokin allegation dates back to the earliest GOP efforts to dig up dirt on Biden during the 2020 election. Several figures who worked with then-Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani have since been accused of ties to Russia, interfering in the 2020 election and/or crimes.
A sampling:
Some of the above situations echoed the Trump campaign’s flirtations with Russian help in the 2016 election.
A bipartisan 2020 Senate Intelligence Committee report cited 2016 Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s sharing of information with Vladimir Putin-linked oligarch Oleg Deripaska and Konstantin Kilimnik, whom it described as a “Russian intelligence officer.” It said the arrangement “represented a grave counterintelligence threat.”
Kilimnik was indicted alongside Manafort in 2018. Deripaska was sanctioned by Trump’s Treasury Department in 2018 and indicted in 2022.
But thus far, Republicans have very little actual evidence against the Bidens to show for their efforts. And when your most-touted claim is apparently falling apart in spectacular fashion, against the backdrop of the aforementioned, it sure risks looking like you’re desperate for anything to grab hold of — no matter where it comes from.
It’s been the story of many of those from whom Republicans have sought information
By Aaron Blake, The Washington Post
In one way, it’s shocking that a key person in the GOP’s efforts to dig up dirt on the Bidens has been indicted and tells prosecutors he has extensive ties to Russian intelligence.
In another way, it’s altogether familiar.
This isn’t even the first time we’ve learned that a person has been indicted after the GOP cited his claims. Nor is it the first time a person has been linked to Russian intelligence after the GOP leaned on their version of events.
The cast of characters Republicans have sought out to substantiate President Biden’s purported corruption over the years has come to include half a dozen convicted and accused criminals, as well as multiple people the U.S. government has linked to Russia, corruption and subverting American democracy.
For months, the House GOP cited an FBI informant to suggest Joe Biden took a bribe as vice president. Now, the Justice Department says that source was lying.
The most recent example is Alexander Smirnov, whom the government said last week had invented the claim that Biden and his son Hunter took $5 million bribes. That allegation was promoted far and wide by Republicans, many of whom treated it as fact.
The government then said this week that Smirnov has “extensive foreign ties, including, most troublingly and by his own account, contact with foreign intelligence services, including Russian intelligence agencies, and has had such contacts recently.”
The news comes seven months after the indictment of another GOP source was unsealed. Republicans had conspiratorially suggested that a key witness who claimed to have damaging information about Hunter Biden had mysteriously gone missing. It turned out the witness was Gal Luft, who the government said had skipped bail after his indictment for alleged arms trafficking and foreign lobbying violations was handed down months earlier.
Days before the indictment was unsealed, House GOP impeachment leader Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) called Luft a “a very credible witness on Biden family corruption.” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said shortly before the unsealing that Luft had a “wealth of information” about the Bidens.
Smirnov and Luft are hardly the only ones who have faced criminal charges or other penalties — or whose credibility could otherwise be called into question.
Republicans in their impeachment push have hailed — and spun — the testimony of Hunter Biden’s former business partner, Devon Archer. Archer was sentenced in 2022 to a year in prison for defrauding a Native American tribe.
They have repeatedly referenced former Ukraine prosecutor general Viktor Shokin’s dubious claim that then-Vice President Biden had sought Shokin’s firing to protect the Ukrainian energy company that employed Hunter Biden, Burisma. (Now-House Speaker Mike Johnson [R-La.] even said last year that Shokin’s Fox News interview should be “the headline in every news outlet in America.”)
In fact, the evidence suggests Shokin was not really scrutinizing Burisma. And Shokin was widely decried by the West as being soft on corruption.
The fired Ukrainian prosecutor is not a reliable narrator
The Shokin allegation dates back to the earliest GOP efforts to dig up dirt on Biden during the 2020 election. Several figures who worked with then-Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani have since been accused of ties to Russia, interfering in the 2020 election and/or crimes.
A sampling:
- Giuliani early in the 2020 election worked and met with Ukrainian politician Andriy Derkach. In September 2020, the Treasury Department under President Donald Trump sanctioned Derkach while calling him an “active Russian agent for over a decade” who was “complicit in foreign interference in an attempt to undermine the upcoming 2020 U.S. presidential election.” The Justice Department indicted him in late 2022. (Derkach, like others in this post who aren’t on U.S. soil, has not faced trial.)
- The Treasury Department under Biden later sanctioned other Russia- and Derkach-linked Ukrainians who had worked with Giuliani and his associates. They, too, were accused of interfering in the 2020 election. One of them, Oleksandr Dubinsky, was recently charged by Ukraine’s government with treason for allegedly helping Russia in its war against Ukraine.
- Two other Giuliani associates who worked to investigate Biden, Soviet-born Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas, were indicted in 2019 for campaign finance violations involving Russian money. Fruman later pleaded guilty. Parnas was convicted and later pleaded guilty to fraud in a separate case.
Some of the above situations echoed the Trump campaign’s flirtations with Russian help in the 2016 election.
A bipartisan 2020 Senate Intelligence Committee report cited 2016 Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s sharing of information with Vladimir Putin-linked oligarch Oleg Deripaska and Konstantin Kilimnik, whom it described as a “Russian intelligence officer.” It said the arrangement “represented a grave counterintelligence threat.”
Kilimnik was indicted alongside Manafort in 2018. Deripaska was sanctioned by Trump’s Treasury Department in 2018 and indicted in 2022.
But thus far, Republicans have very little actual evidence against the Bidens to show for their efforts. And when your most-touted claim is apparently falling apart in spectacular fashion, against the backdrop of the aforementioned, it sure risks looking like you’re desperate for anything to grab hold of — no matter where it comes from.
PRO-LIFE UP UNTIL BIRTH? EVEN THAT ASSESSMENT IS TOO GENEROUS.
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
Conservative politicians are sometimes accused of being pro-life up until the point the baby is born. But perhaps even that assessment is too generous.
Unborn children are getting short shrift thanks to recent state and federal policy choices that have worsened access to prenatal care.
Take, for instance, a new Florida law championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) that forces hospitals that receive any Medicaid dollars to ask patients about their immigration status — even though undocumented women in the state are not on, and do not qualify for, Medicaid.
Predictably, the law has discouraged immigrants from accessing available care, including when pregnant. Providers and maternity-focused nonprofits in the state report that fewer immigrant women have shown up for medical checkups and prenatal care since the law went into effect last year. Some pregnant women have been reluctant to seek emergency care when in severe pain or facing complications for fear that their immigration status will be used against them, advocates report.
Even if the state is indifferent to the health of foreign-born women, it should at least feign an interest in their gestating, U.S.-citizen children.
Many states are also purging their Medicaid rolls, leaving new moms and infants without access to care, often because of paperwork mix-ups. Last year, Texas erroneously disenrolled thousands of pregnant women, state whistleblowers claim.
Meanwhile, gridlock and obstructionism on Capitol Hill have taken a toll on the availability of critical maternal and fetal care.
Syphilis cases have soared in recent years, reaching their highest level since the 1950s. This has put both adults and their in-utero children at risk, as the disease can transfer from mother to baby through the placenta (known as congenital syphilis). The consequences for babies are severe: About 40 percent of babies born to women with untreated syphilis are stillborn or die as a newborn, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports. Others suffer from bone damage, anemia and nerve problems causing blindness or deafness, among other complications.
But the disease is easily treatable, assuming patients know they have it and receive care. So doctors have asked for more funding to support testing, tracking and treatment.
Alas, as part of last year’s debt limit showdown, Republicans pushed for, and Democrats ultimately capitulated to, large cuts to government spending, including to public health programs for sexually transmitted diseases. The actual funding levels have been in limbo, as Congress has been unable to pass a budget for the current fiscal year.
Legislative gridlock has also shortchanged the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, known as WIC. Research has found that prenatal participation in WIC has led to better birth outcomes and fewer infant deaths. But with no budget agreement several months into the current fiscal year, WIC funding has stayed flat at last year’s level. This is inadequate to cover all eligible applicants this year given higher-than-expected participation rates and food costs.
In the coming months, if no increase in funding passes, pregnant and postpartum women and young children could end up on waitlists for the first time in 25 years, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. While it is tempting to blame “Congress” for this outcome, the greater obstacle is House Republicans, who have explicitly tried to reduce WIC funding.
Finally, there’s the elephant in the room: the Dobbs decision, championed by conservatives, which has enabled abortion bans around the country. While these bans have forced more unintended pregnancies to be carried to term, they have also jeopardized wanted pregnancies — even those that might be considered less complicated.
That’s because experienced obstetricians are fleeing red states because of fears of legal liability and restrictions on their ability to provide needed care. States with abortion bans likewise saw the number of applicants for OB/GYN residencies drop more than 10 percent in 2023, the Association of American Medical Colleges reports.
“Fewer providers will mean less access to prenatal care, to say nothing of the restrictions those providers face when it comes to providing certain kinds of care,” said Dana Suskind, co-director of the University of Chicago’s TMW Center for Early Learning + Public Health.
There are some encouraging counterexamples to this broad trend. For example, most states have now taken up a federal option to extend postpartum Medicaid coverage. (Of course, that only helps those who aren’t erroneously purged from Medicaid rolls.)
Still, politicians who call themselves pro-life should be passing more policies to support lives at all ages, including those in utero. Doing so would not only abide by their moralizing rhetoric; it would also support their stated concerns about budget deficits. Each dollar spent on prenatal nutrition and other maternal care offers a great return on investment by reducing spending on government services further down the line.
Something you’d never guess from any of their actual policy choices.
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
Conservative politicians are sometimes accused of being pro-life up until the point the baby is born. But perhaps even that assessment is too generous.
Unborn children are getting short shrift thanks to recent state and federal policy choices that have worsened access to prenatal care.
Take, for instance, a new Florida law championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) that forces hospitals that receive any Medicaid dollars to ask patients about their immigration status — even though undocumented women in the state are not on, and do not qualify for, Medicaid.
Predictably, the law has discouraged immigrants from accessing available care, including when pregnant. Providers and maternity-focused nonprofits in the state report that fewer immigrant women have shown up for medical checkups and prenatal care since the law went into effect last year. Some pregnant women have been reluctant to seek emergency care when in severe pain or facing complications for fear that their immigration status will be used against them, advocates report.
Even if the state is indifferent to the health of foreign-born women, it should at least feign an interest in their gestating, U.S.-citizen children.
Many states are also purging their Medicaid rolls, leaving new moms and infants without access to care, often because of paperwork mix-ups. Last year, Texas erroneously disenrolled thousands of pregnant women, state whistleblowers claim.
Meanwhile, gridlock and obstructionism on Capitol Hill have taken a toll on the availability of critical maternal and fetal care.
Syphilis cases have soared in recent years, reaching their highest level since the 1950s. This has put both adults and their in-utero children at risk, as the disease can transfer from mother to baby through the placenta (known as congenital syphilis). The consequences for babies are severe: About 40 percent of babies born to women with untreated syphilis are stillborn or die as a newborn, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports. Others suffer from bone damage, anemia and nerve problems causing blindness or deafness, among other complications.
But the disease is easily treatable, assuming patients know they have it and receive care. So doctors have asked for more funding to support testing, tracking and treatment.
Alas, as part of last year’s debt limit showdown, Republicans pushed for, and Democrats ultimately capitulated to, large cuts to government spending, including to public health programs for sexually transmitted diseases. The actual funding levels have been in limbo, as Congress has been unable to pass a budget for the current fiscal year.
Legislative gridlock has also shortchanged the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, known as WIC. Research has found that prenatal participation in WIC has led to better birth outcomes and fewer infant deaths. But with no budget agreement several months into the current fiscal year, WIC funding has stayed flat at last year’s level. This is inadequate to cover all eligible applicants this year given higher-than-expected participation rates and food costs.
In the coming months, if no increase in funding passes, pregnant and postpartum women and young children could end up on waitlists for the first time in 25 years, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. While it is tempting to blame “Congress” for this outcome, the greater obstacle is House Republicans, who have explicitly tried to reduce WIC funding.
Finally, there’s the elephant in the room: the Dobbs decision, championed by conservatives, which has enabled abortion bans around the country. While these bans have forced more unintended pregnancies to be carried to term, they have also jeopardized wanted pregnancies — even those that might be considered less complicated.
That’s because experienced obstetricians are fleeing red states because of fears of legal liability and restrictions on their ability to provide needed care. States with abortion bans likewise saw the number of applicants for OB/GYN residencies drop more than 10 percent in 2023, the Association of American Medical Colleges reports.
“Fewer providers will mean less access to prenatal care, to say nothing of the restrictions those providers face when it comes to providing certain kinds of care,” said Dana Suskind, co-director of the University of Chicago’s TMW Center for Early Learning + Public Health.
There are some encouraging counterexamples to this broad trend. For example, most states have now taken up a federal option to extend postpartum Medicaid coverage. (Of course, that only helps those who aren’t erroneously purged from Medicaid rolls.)
Still, politicians who call themselves pro-life should be passing more policies to support lives at all ages, including those in utero. Doing so would not only abide by their moralizing rhetoric; it would also support their stated concerns about budget deficits. Each dollar spent on prenatal nutrition and other maternal care offers a great return on investment by reducing spending on government services further down the line.
Something you’d never guess from any of their actual policy choices.
FANI WILLIS TURNS THE TABLES ON HER ATTACKERS
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Fulton County, Ga., District Attorney Fani Willis took the stand last week under attack from Michael Roman, former henchman 0f four-times-indicted former president Donald Trump, and many in the media and legal community. At issue was whether her romantic relationship with a special counsel, Nathan Wade, was grounds for disqualifying her from the sprawling RICO case she brought against Trump and nearly 20 co-defendants (some of whom struck plea deals). What was legally at issue — the narrow grounds for disqualification — appeared to have very little to do with the soap opera that unfolded.
Under Georgia law, a prosecutor can be disqualified only when there is a conflict of interest that prejudices the defendant. Norman L. Eisen, Joyce Vance and Richard Painter explained:
Under Georgia law, “[t]here are two generally recognized grounds for disqualification of a prosecuting attorney. The first such ground is based on a conflict of interest, and the second ground has been described as ‘forensic misconduct.’” Williams v. State, 258 Ga. 305, 314, 369 S. E. 2d 232, 238 (1988). There is no allegation of “forensic misconduct” in this prosecution. A conflict of interest may arise when the prosecutor has “acquired a personal interest or stake in the defendant’s conviction.” Id. “[A] conflict of interest requires more than a theoretical or speculative conflict. An actual conflict of interest must be involved.”
Having a relationship with someone on your side creates no prejudice to the other side. “Georgia courts have resoundingly rejected romantic relationships between attorneys as a basis for prosecutorial disqualification,” the authors explained. The only grounds for disqualifying Willis would have been a financial conflict arising from Wade’s contract to provide legal services to her office. On that score, the “financial compensation paid to Wade is consistent with well-established practice in Georgia and does not give rise to a conflict of interest warranting prosecutorial disqualification.” That left only one basis for disqualification: Any gifts (e.g., travel) Willis received from Wade that incentivized her to prosecute the defendants.
However, there was no there there. Willis left no doubt that no man paid her way. “A man is not a plan, a man is a companion,” she declared. “I don’t need anyone to foot my bills. The only man who has ever footed my bills completely is my daddy.” She paid Wade back for her half of trips with cash. She explained why she always carried plenty of cash: “If you’re a woman and you go on a date with a man, you better have $200 so if that man acts up you can go where you want to go,” she said. No one contradicted her testimony.
With sass and style, she demolished the accusation that Wade paid for her travel. Social media lit up with “A man is not a plan” posts, many from women who shared their cash-on-hand dating stories.
The conventional wisdom (among a mostly male, mostly White media) pronounced that Willis had irretrievably damaged her case. During Thursday’s testimony, some journalists breathlessly predicted she was doomed when an aggrieved former employee claimed the relationship began before Wade was hired. (Far more credible witnesses subsequently debunked that testimony.) Even more cringeworthy: Mostly White commentators sounded incredulous that an African American woman would habitually carry cash. That spoke to the racial ignorance that too often results from non-diverse newsrooms.
Gwen Keyes Fleming, an experienced litigator and the first African American and the first woman to be elected district attorney in DeKalb County, Ga., told me, “The fight and determination we observed from the stand is the same tenacity with which the DA fights for justice for her constituents. And this is what has produced a #TeamFani [a trending hashtag on social media] groundswell among her many supporters in the community.” Put differently, Willis achieved folk-hero status among many women angered by her ordeal, especially Black women (whose voting turnout exceeds other groups and who sit on juries).
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee has yet to render a decision. However, there was widespread agreement among knowledgeable lawyers that the defendant had not come close to proving a conflict of interest, let alone one sufficient to justify recusal.
Taking a step back, Trump has a habit of demeaning powerful Black women. He has called Willis and New York Attorney General Letitia James, who won an eye-popping judgment of more than $450 million (including interest), racist. He has falsely accused them of letting crime fester. (Crime is dramatically down in Atlanta and New York.) But with Willis’s retort (and James’s smashing victory), they have put him in his place. James proudly posted on social media site X (formerly known as Twitter): “For years, Donald Trump engaged in massive fraud to unjustly enrich himself, his family, and his organization. … Now, he is finally facing the consequences of his illegal actions.”
The legal system does not eradicate all inequities. Wealth allows Trump to hire a boatload of high-priced, if not always competent, lawyers. His threats and disruptive behavior in courtrooms and on social media would likely land an ordinary defendant, at the very least, in contempt of court. Still, unlike the political system, the legal system turns on objective reality, administers accountability and cannot be bullied. Trump might soon grasp that his usual bag of tricks won’t work in court.
Nevertheless, the unseemly hearing rankled many observers. Mimi Rocah, the district attorney for Westchester County, N.Y., posted on X: “Elected prosecutors should be held to the absolute highest ethical standards [and] we must conduct ourselves in ways that expect scrutiny.” However, she warned, defendants “have great incentives to make the story about prosecutors or law enforcement [and] airing allegations in detail publicly can damage a prosecutor’s professional reputation [and] ability to handle a case (which is sometimes the only goal).” She concluded, “This is not a way to treat a public servant, and it is not good for the criminal justice system [and] people’s faith in institutions.”
Why did McAfee, the judge, let the defense go down a rabbit hole, prying into Willis’s personal life? Perhaps he wanted to deny defendants an issue for appeal. That the protracted hearing wound up backfiring on the defendant, however, did not excuse indulging the defense for two full days. It also reflected poorly on McAfee, who failed to appreciate that airing unsubstantiated smears, especially ones tinged with racism and sexism, damages real people and undermines the rule of law.
Fortunately, McAfee is accountable to the people of Fulton County. Like Willis, he will be on the ballot this year. That’s democracy’s greatest attribute: The government is answerable to the people.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Fulton County, Ga., District Attorney Fani Willis took the stand last week under attack from Michael Roman, former henchman 0f four-times-indicted former president Donald Trump, and many in the media and legal community. At issue was whether her romantic relationship with a special counsel, Nathan Wade, was grounds for disqualifying her from the sprawling RICO case she brought against Trump and nearly 20 co-defendants (some of whom struck plea deals). What was legally at issue — the narrow grounds for disqualification — appeared to have very little to do with the soap opera that unfolded.
Under Georgia law, a prosecutor can be disqualified only when there is a conflict of interest that prejudices the defendant. Norman L. Eisen, Joyce Vance and Richard Painter explained:
Under Georgia law, “[t]here are two generally recognized grounds for disqualification of a prosecuting attorney. The first such ground is based on a conflict of interest, and the second ground has been described as ‘forensic misconduct.’” Williams v. State, 258 Ga. 305, 314, 369 S. E. 2d 232, 238 (1988). There is no allegation of “forensic misconduct” in this prosecution. A conflict of interest may arise when the prosecutor has “acquired a personal interest or stake in the defendant’s conviction.” Id. “[A] conflict of interest requires more than a theoretical or speculative conflict. An actual conflict of interest must be involved.”
Having a relationship with someone on your side creates no prejudice to the other side. “Georgia courts have resoundingly rejected romantic relationships between attorneys as a basis for prosecutorial disqualification,” the authors explained. The only grounds for disqualifying Willis would have been a financial conflict arising from Wade’s contract to provide legal services to her office. On that score, the “financial compensation paid to Wade is consistent with well-established practice in Georgia and does not give rise to a conflict of interest warranting prosecutorial disqualification.” That left only one basis for disqualification: Any gifts (e.g., travel) Willis received from Wade that incentivized her to prosecute the defendants.
However, there was no there there. Willis left no doubt that no man paid her way. “A man is not a plan, a man is a companion,” she declared. “I don’t need anyone to foot my bills. The only man who has ever footed my bills completely is my daddy.” She paid Wade back for her half of trips with cash. She explained why she always carried plenty of cash: “If you’re a woman and you go on a date with a man, you better have $200 so if that man acts up you can go where you want to go,” she said. No one contradicted her testimony.
With sass and style, she demolished the accusation that Wade paid for her travel. Social media lit up with “A man is not a plan” posts, many from women who shared their cash-on-hand dating stories.
The conventional wisdom (among a mostly male, mostly White media) pronounced that Willis had irretrievably damaged her case. During Thursday’s testimony, some journalists breathlessly predicted she was doomed when an aggrieved former employee claimed the relationship began before Wade was hired. (Far more credible witnesses subsequently debunked that testimony.) Even more cringeworthy: Mostly White commentators sounded incredulous that an African American woman would habitually carry cash. That spoke to the racial ignorance that too often results from non-diverse newsrooms.
Gwen Keyes Fleming, an experienced litigator and the first African American and the first woman to be elected district attorney in DeKalb County, Ga., told me, “The fight and determination we observed from the stand is the same tenacity with which the DA fights for justice for her constituents. And this is what has produced a #TeamFani [a trending hashtag on social media] groundswell among her many supporters in the community.” Put differently, Willis achieved folk-hero status among many women angered by her ordeal, especially Black women (whose voting turnout exceeds other groups and who sit on juries).
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee has yet to render a decision. However, there was widespread agreement among knowledgeable lawyers that the defendant had not come close to proving a conflict of interest, let alone one sufficient to justify recusal.
Taking a step back, Trump has a habit of demeaning powerful Black women. He has called Willis and New York Attorney General Letitia James, who won an eye-popping judgment of more than $450 million (including interest), racist. He has falsely accused them of letting crime fester. (Crime is dramatically down in Atlanta and New York.) But with Willis’s retort (and James’s smashing victory), they have put him in his place. James proudly posted on social media site X (formerly known as Twitter): “For years, Donald Trump engaged in massive fraud to unjustly enrich himself, his family, and his organization. … Now, he is finally facing the consequences of his illegal actions.”
The legal system does not eradicate all inequities. Wealth allows Trump to hire a boatload of high-priced, if not always competent, lawyers. His threats and disruptive behavior in courtrooms and on social media would likely land an ordinary defendant, at the very least, in contempt of court. Still, unlike the political system, the legal system turns on objective reality, administers accountability and cannot be bullied. Trump might soon grasp that his usual bag of tricks won’t work in court.
Nevertheless, the unseemly hearing rankled many observers. Mimi Rocah, the district attorney for Westchester County, N.Y., posted on X: “Elected prosecutors should be held to the absolute highest ethical standards [and] we must conduct ourselves in ways that expect scrutiny.” However, she warned, defendants “have great incentives to make the story about prosecutors or law enforcement [and] airing allegations in detail publicly can damage a prosecutor’s professional reputation [and] ability to handle a case (which is sometimes the only goal).” She concluded, “This is not a way to treat a public servant, and it is not good for the criminal justice system [and] people’s faith in institutions.”
Why did McAfee, the judge, let the defense go down a rabbit hole, prying into Willis’s personal life? Perhaps he wanted to deny defendants an issue for appeal. That the protracted hearing wound up backfiring on the defendant, however, did not excuse indulging the defense for two full days. It also reflected poorly on McAfee, who failed to appreciate that airing unsubstantiated smears, especially ones tinged with racism and sexism, damages real people and undermines the rule of law.
Fortunately, McAfee is accountable to the people of Fulton County. Like Willis, he will be on the ballot this year. That’s democracy’s greatest attribute: The government is answerable to the people.
MAGA’S VIOLENT THREATS ARE WARPING LIFE IN AMERICA
By David French, The New York Times
Amid the constant drumbeat of sensational news stories — the scandals, the legal rulings, the wild political gambits — it’s sometimes easy to overlook the deeper trends that are shaping American life. For example, are you aware how much the constant threat of violence, principally from MAGA sources, is now warping American politics? If you wonder why so few people in red America seem to stand up directly against the MAGA movement, are you aware of the price they might pay if they did?
Late last month, I listened to a fascinating NPR interview with the journalists Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman regarding their new book, “Find Me the Votes,” about Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. They report that Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis had trouble finding lawyers willing to help prosecute her case against Trump. Even a former Georgia governor turned her down, saying, “Hypothetically speaking, do you want to have a bodyguard follow you around for the rest of your life?”
He wasn’t exaggerating. Willis received an assassination threat so specific that one evening she had to leave her office incognito while a body double wearing a bulletproof vest courageously pretended to be her and offered a target for any possible incoming fire.
Don’t think for a moment that this is unusual today. Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing Trump’s federal Jan. 6 trial, has been swatted, as has the special counsel Jack Smith. For those unfamiliar, swatting is a terrifying act of intimidation in which someone calls law enforcement and falsely claims a violent crime is in process at the target’s address. This sends heavily armed police to a person’s home with the expectation of a violent confrontation. A swatting incident claimed the life of a Kansas man in 2017.
The Colorado Supreme Court likewise endured terrible threats after it ruled that Trump was disqualified from the ballot. There is deep concern for the safety of the witnesses and jurors in Trump’s various trials.
Mitt Romney faces so many threats that he spends $5,000 per day on security to protect his family. After Jan. 6, the former Republican congressman Peter Meijer said that at least one colleague voted not to certify the election out of fear for the safety of their family. Threats against members of Congress are pervasive, and there has been a shocking surge since Trump took office. Last year, Capitol Police opened more than 8,000 threat assessments, an eightfold increase since 2016.
Nor is the challenge confined to national politics. In 2021, Reuterspublished a horrifying and comprehensive report detailing the persistent threats against local election workers. In 2022, it followed up with another report detailing threats against local school boards. In my own Tennessee community, doctors and nurses who advocated wearing masks in schools were targets of screaming, threatening right-wing activists, who told one man, “We know who you are” and “We will find you.”
My own family has experienced terrifying nights and terrifying days over the last several years. We’ve faced death threats, a bomb scare, a clumsy swatting attempt and doxxing by white nationalists. People have shown up at our home. A man even came to my kids’ school. I’ve interacted with the F.B.I., the Tennessee Department of Homeland Security and local law enforcement. While the explicit threats come and go, the sense of menace never quite leaves. We’re always looking over our shoulders.
The tsunami of MAGA threats is systemic intimidation is a ubiquitous, systemic, and an acknowledged tactic in the playbook of the Trump right that flows all the way down from the violent fantasies of Donald Trump himself. It is rare to encounter a public-facing Trump critic who hasn’t faced threats and intimidation.
The threats drive decent men and women from public office. They isolate and frighten dissenters. When my family first began to face threats, the most dispiriting responses came from Christian acquaintances who concluded I was a traitor for turning on a movement whose members had expressed an explicit desire to kill my family.
But I don’t want to be too bleak. So let me end with a point of light. In the summer of 2021, I received a quite direct threat after I’d written a series of pieces opposing bans on teaching critical race theory in public schools. Someone sent my wife an email threatening to shoot me in the face.
My wife and I knew that it was almost certainly a bluff. But we also knew that white nationalists had our home address, both of us were out of town and the only person home that night was my college-age son. So we called the local sheriff, shared the threat, and asked if the department could send someone to check our house.
Minutes later, a young deputy called to tell me all was quiet at our home. When I asked if he would mind checking back frequently, he said he’d stay in front of our house all night. Then he asked, “Why did you get this threat?”
I hesitated before I told him. Our community is so MAGA that I had a pang of concern about his response. “I’m a columnist,” I said, “and we’ve had lots of threats ever since I wrote against Donald Trump.”
The deputy paused for a moment. “I’m a vet,” he said, “and I volunteered to serve because I believe in our Constitution. I believe in free speech.” And then he said words I’ll never forget: “You keep speaking, and I’ll stand guard.”
I didn’t know that deputy’s politics and I didn’t need to. When I heard his words, I thought, that’s it. That’s the way through. Sometimes we are called to speak. Sometimes we are called to stand guard. All the time we can at least comfort those under threat, telling them with words and deeds that they are not alone. If we do that, we can persevere. Otherwise, the fear will be too much for good people to bear.
By David French, The New York Times
Amid the constant drumbeat of sensational news stories — the scandals, the legal rulings, the wild political gambits — it’s sometimes easy to overlook the deeper trends that are shaping American life. For example, are you aware how much the constant threat of violence, principally from MAGA sources, is now warping American politics? If you wonder why so few people in red America seem to stand up directly against the MAGA movement, are you aware of the price they might pay if they did?
Late last month, I listened to a fascinating NPR interview with the journalists Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman regarding their new book, “Find Me the Votes,” about Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. They report that Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis had trouble finding lawyers willing to help prosecute her case against Trump. Even a former Georgia governor turned her down, saying, “Hypothetically speaking, do you want to have a bodyguard follow you around for the rest of your life?”
He wasn’t exaggerating. Willis received an assassination threat so specific that one evening she had to leave her office incognito while a body double wearing a bulletproof vest courageously pretended to be her and offered a target for any possible incoming fire.
Don’t think for a moment that this is unusual today. Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing Trump’s federal Jan. 6 trial, has been swatted, as has the special counsel Jack Smith. For those unfamiliar, swatting is a terrifying act of intimidation in which someone calls law enforcement and falsely claims a violent crime is in process at the target’s address. This sends heavily armed police to a person’s home with the expectation of a violent confrontation. A swatting incident claimed the life of a Kansas man in 2017.
The Colorado Supreme Court likewise endured terrible threats after it ruled that Trump was disqualified from the ballot. There is deep concern for the safety of the witnesses and jurors in Trump’s various trials.
Mitt Romney faces so many threats that he spends $5,000 per day on security to protect his family. After Jan. 6, the former Republican congressman Peter Meijer said that at least one colleague voted not to certify the election out of fear for the safety of their family. Threats against members of Congress are pervasive, and there has been a shocking surge since Trump took office. Last year, Capitol Police opened more than 8,000 threat assessments, an eightfold increase since 2016.
Nor is the challenge confined to national politics. In 2021, Reuters
My own family has experienced terrifying nights and terrifying days over the last several years. We’ve faced death threats, a bomb scare, a clumsy swatting attempt and doxxing by white nationalists. People have shown up at our home. A man even came to my kids’ school. I’ve interacted with the F.B.I., the Tennessee Department of Homeland Security and local law enforcement. While the explicit threats come and go, the sense of menace never quite leaves. We’re always looking over our shoulders.
The tsunami of MAGA threats is systemic intimidation is a ubiquitous, systemic, and an acknowledged tactic in the playbook of the Trump right that flows all the way down from the violent fantasies of Donald Trump himself. It is rare to encounter a public-facing Trump critic who hasn’t faced threats and intimidation.
The threats drive decent men and women from public office. They isolate and frighten dissenters. When my family first began to face threats, the most dispiriting responses came from Christian acquaintances who concluded I was a traitor for turning on a movement whose members had expressed an explicit desire to kill my family.
But I don’t want to be too bleak. So let me end with a point of light. In the summer of 2021, I received a quite direct threat after I’d written a series of pieces opposing bans on teaching critical race theory in public schools. Someone sent my wife an email threatening to shoot me in the face.
My wife and I knew that it was almost certainly a bluff. But we also knew that white nationalists had our home address, both of us were out of town and the only person home that night was my college-age son. So we called the local sheriff, shared the threat, and asked if the department could send someone to check our house.
Minutes later, a young deputy called to tell me all was quiet at our home. When I asked if he would mind checking back frequently, he said he’d stay in front of our house all night. Then he asked, “Why did you get this threat?”
I hesitated before I told him. Our community is so MAGA that I had a pang of concern about his response. “I’m a columnist,” I said, “and we’ve had lots of threats ever since I wrote against Donald Trump.”
The deputy paused for a moment. “I’m a vet,” he said, “and I volunteered to serve because I believe in our Constitution. I believe in free speech.” And then he said words I’ll never forget: “You keep speaking, and I’ll stand guard.”
I didn’t know that deputy’s politics and I didn’t need to. When I heard his words, I thought, that’s it. That’s the way through. Sometimes we are called to speak. Sometimes we are called to stand guard. All the time we can at least comfort those under threat, telling them with words and deeds that they are not alone. If we do that, we can persevere. Otherwise, the fear will be too much for good people to bear.
DONALD TRUMP’S RUSSIA TIES REMAIN A NATIONAL SECURITY RISK
There are dozens of reasons why Trump is unfit to return to the White House, but his subservience to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is near the top of the list.
By The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
Many gasped recently when Donald Trump said he’d encourage Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” with NATO allies who don’t pay their share of the transatlantic alliance’s defense spending. It was a brazen but hardly surprising turn from someone who has shown a long and loyal affection for Russian President Vladimir Putin, a wanted war criminal.
Trump has called Putin — a former KGB agent who jails and murders critics — smart, savvy, and his friend. Trump sided with Putin after a U.S. intelligence community assessment found Russia meddled in the 2016 election. More troubling, in 2017 Trump shared highly classified intelligence with the Russian ambassador.
These were not innocent missteps. Rather, they are part of Trump’s decades-long support for Russia. As he mounts another presidential bid, voters must understand that Trump remains a national security risk.
There are dozens of reasons why Trump is unfit to be president, but his subservience to Putin is near the top of the list. Russia remains one of America’s fiercest foes. Yet, before, during, and after his one term as president, Trump bowed down to what Ronald Reagan called the “evil empire.”
Trump’s unyielding support for Russia was evident again last week as Washington lawmakers haggled over a $95.3 billion aid package to largely help Ukraine defend itself from the Kremlin’s invasion that began two years ago.
Supporting an ally during an unprovoked, bloody invasion should be a no-brainer, but Trump pressured House Speaker Mike Johnson to flip-flop on border security and aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. The shameful display by MAGA devotees has weakened America’s standing with allies and enemies and is a preview of the reckless chaos to come if Trump is reelected.
A free and independent Ukraine is in America’s national security and economic interests. Stopping Russia’s naked aggression is necessary to maintain peace and stability here and abroad.
The cost of not supporting Ukraine will be greater in the long run and may embolden other aggressors like China and Iran. Trump’s efforts to block the aid package may result in Ukraine losing the war, setting off a cascade of events that will likely upend the world order.
Trump does not care. He has long been enthralled with Putin. Trump’s fawning over Russia has a long and disturbing arc that should focus voters on Election Day.
A former KGB agent said Trump has been a Russian asset since the 1980s. Politico reported that the KGB may have opened a file on Trump as early as 1977, after he married a model from Czechoslovakia. In investigative journalist Craig Unger’s book, American Kompromat, the former spy said Trump’s “low intellect” and “hyperinflated vanity” made it easy to manipulate him with “simple flattery.”
In 1987, the Russian ambassador met with Trump in New York and invited him to Moscow to discuss a hotel deal. Trump bragged in his book, The Art of the Deal, about staying in the Lenin suite of the Hotel National, which likely was bugged.
The hotel deal never happened, but Trump returned home and began parroting Russian talking points. He took out full-page ads in three major newspapers that said the United States should not pay to defend countries that can protect themselves.
In the 1990s, as Trump’s business empire teetered on the edge of financial collapse, U.S. banks stopped lending to him. Trump turned to foreign banks and wealthy Russian backers. By 2008, Donald Trump Jr. told attendees at a real estate conference, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets.”
In 2014, Trump’s son, Eric, told a reporter who inquired about financing for a golf course development: “We have all the funding we need out of Russia.”
As president, Trump echoed the message from his old newspaper ads by pressuring NATO allies to spend more on defense. His recent criticism of long-standing international allies offered a shocking window into how a second Trump term could unfold and is consistent with his decades of kowtowing to Russia.
In 2007, Trump said Putin was “doing a great job.” In 2013, Trump said Putin “outsmarted” America and tweeted a pathetic note wondering, “[W]ill he become my new best friend?” In 2015, Trump defended Putin’s alleged murders of journalists.
Putin returned the favor by authorizing a sweeping Russian campaign to help elect Trump in 2016. During the campaign, Trump Jr., Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort met with a Kremlin-connected lawyer to get dirt on Hillary Clinton. Even sleazy Steve Bannon, a twice-indicted and pardoned former Trump strategist, called the meeting “treasonous” and “unpatriotic.”
A Senate intelligence report that examined Russia’s election interference efforts found Manafort was “a grave counterintelligence threat” who was deeply compromised by years of business dealings with oligarchs who lent him millions of dollars. Manafort was later convicted of bank and tax fraud over his business dealings in Ukraine but was pardoned by Trump.
After getting elected, Trump appointed several officials to his administration with ties to Russia, including former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who resigned after one month due to his vulnerability to blackmail over previous dealings with the Kremlin. Flynn twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his interactions with Russia but was also pardoned by Trump.
Roger Stone, a longtime Trump adviser, was convicted of lying to Congress, witness tampering, and obstruction following the investigation into his role in Russia’s election interference. Trump later pardoned Stone.
The Trump circle has many more ties to Russia. That may explain why Trump doubled down on his comments about letting Russia do whatever it wants — even though he faced significant backlash.
This much is clear when it comes to Trump and Russia: A vote for Trump is a vote for a useful idiot
There are dozens of reasons why Trump is unfit to return to the White House, but his subservience to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is near the top of the list.
By The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
Many gasped recently when Donald Trump said he’d encourage Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” with NATO allies who don’t pay their share of the transatlantic alliance’s defense spending. It was a brazen but hardly surprising turn from someone who has shown a long and loyal affection for Russian President Vladimir Putin, a wanted war criminal.
Trump has called Putin — a former KGB agent who jails and murders critics — smart, savvy, and his friend. Trump sided with Putin after a U.S. intelligence community assessment found Russia meddled in the 2016 election. More troubling, in 2017 Trump shared highly classified intelligence with the Russian ambassador.
These were not innocent missteps. Rather, they are part of Trump’s decades-long support for Russia. As he mounts another presidential bid, voters must understand that Trump remains a national security risk.
There are dozens of reasons why Trump is unfit to be president, but his subservience to Putin is near the top of the list. Russia remains one of America’s fiercest foes. Yet, before, during, and after his one term as president, Trump bowed down to what Ronald Reagan called the “evil empire.”
Trump’s unyielding support for Russia was evident again last week as Washington lawmakers haggled over a $95.3 billion aid package to largely help Ukraine defend itself from the Kremlin’s invasion that began two years ago.
Supporting an ally during an unprovoked, bloody invasion should be a no-brainer, but Trump pressured House Speaker Mike Johnson to flip-flop on border security and aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. The shameful display by MAGA devotees has weakened America’s standing with allies and enemies and is a preview of the reckless chaos to come if Trump is reelected.
A free and independent Ukraine is in America’s national security and economic interests. Stopping Russia’s naked aggression is necessary to maintain peace and stability here and abroad.
The cost of not supporting Ukraine will be greater in the long run and may embolden other aggressors like China and Iran. Trump’s efforts to block the aid package may result in Ukraine losing the war, setting off a cascade of events that will likely upend the world order.
Trump does not care. He has long been enthralled with Putin. Trump’s fawning over Russia has a long and disturbing arc that should focus voters on Election Day.
A former KGB agent said Trump has been a Russian asset since the 1980s. Politico reported that the KGB may have opened a file on Trump as early as 1977, after he married a model from Czechoslovakia. In investigative journalist Craig Unger’s book, American Kompromat, the former spy said Trump’s “low intellect” and “hyperinflated vanity” made it easy to manipulate him with “simple flattery.”
In 1987, the Russian ambassador met with Trump in New York and invited him to Moscow to discuss a hotel deal. Trump bragged in his book, The Art of the Deal, about staying in the Lenin suite of the Hotel National, which likely was bugged.
The hotel deal never happened, but Trump returned home and began parroting Russian talking points. He took out full-page ads in three major newspapers that said the United States should not pay to defend countries that can protect themselves.
In the 1990s, as Trump’s business empire teetered on the edge of financial collapse, U.S. banks stopped lending to him. Trump turned to foreign banks and wealthy Russian backers. By 2008, Donald Trump Jr. told attendees at a real estate conference, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets.”
In 2014, Trump’s son, Eric, told a reporter who inquired about financing for a golf course development: “We have all the funding we need out of Russia.”
As president, Trump echoed the message from his old newspaper ads by pressuring NATO allies to spend more on defense. His recent criticism of long-standing international allies offered a shocking window into how a second Trump term could unfold and is consistent with his decades of kowtowing to Russia.
In 2007, Trump said Putin was “doing a great job.” In 2013, Trump said Putin “outsmarted” America and tweeted a pathetic note wondering, “[W]ill he become my new best friend?” In 2015, Trump defended Putin’s alleged murders of journalists.
Putin returned the favor by authorizing a sweeping Russian campaign to help elect Trump in 2016. During the campaign, Trump Jr., Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort met with a Kremlin-connected lawyer to get dirt on Hillary Clinton. Even sleazy Steve Bannon, a twice-indicted and pardoned former Trump strategist, called the meeting “treasonous” and “unpatriotic.”
A Senate intelligence report that examined Russia’s election interference efforts found Manafort was “a grave counterintelligence threat” who was deeply compromised by years of business dealings with oligarchs who lent him millions of dollars. Manafort was later convicted of bank and tax fraud over his business dealings in Ukraine but was pardoned by Trump.
After getting elected, Trump appointed several officials to his administration with ties to Russia, including former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who resigned after one month due to his vulnerability to blackmail over previous dealings with the Kremlin. Flynn twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his interactions with Russia but was also pardoned by Trump.
Roger Stone, a longtime Trump adviser, was convicted of lying to Congress, witness tampering, and obstruction following the investigation into his role in Russia’s election interference. Trump later pardoned Stone.
The Trump circle has many more ties to Russia. That may explain why Trump doubled down on his comments about letting Russia do whatever it wants — even though he faced significant backlash.
This much is clear when it comes to Trump and Russia: A vote for Trump is a vote for a useful idiot
MANHATTAN DISTRICT ATTORNEY GETS BRAGG-ING RIGHTS
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has been demeaned, dismissed and denounced. How dare he bring a state criminal case against a former president! How dare he “jump the line” to try his case first! From the ill-informed to ill-intended, his critics have refused to recognize that this is a tightly drawn, factually sound case that a Manhattan jury is likely to decide against pouting, surly former president Donald Trump, who exuded contempt for the proceedings in a devastating hearing on Thursday.
The core issue was Trump’s motion to dismiss the entire case. Point by point, Justice Juan Merchan shot down each Trump argument and, by implication, the critics who scorned the case. His ruling put to rest the notion that this is a picayune matter. “The Court agrees that the instant matter involved a complex investigation. Further, while it is true that the charges involve the lowest level felony and no one suffered physical harm, it can hardly be said that the allegations are nor severe.” He emphasized, “The People claim that the Defendant paid an individual $130,000 to conceal a sexual encounter in an effort to influence the 2016 Presidential election and then falsified 34 business records to cover up the payoff.” In short, the judge wrote; “Those are serious allegations.”
The media routinely calls this the “hush money” case. But the payment of hush money is neither illegal nor relevant. It is the attempt to illegally conceal damaging information from voters that is at issue. If the “big lie” about a stolen election was the central feature of Trump’s attempted coup after the 2020 election, the lie about the nature of his payments was an effort — just days after the “Access Hollywood” revelation — to con voters in 2016.
The judge specifically held that Trump (infamous for delaying his cases) did not suffer any deprivation of due process rights because of the district attorney’s office. The case is going to trial on March 25. Period.
Merchan also explained that the elevation to felony counts was fully justified under New York law: The falsification of business records rises to a felony when “his intent to defraud includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.” (The allegation of lying to conceal other crimes echoes the obstruction charge in the Mar-a-Lago case; the coverup is at least as bad as the underlying crime.)
Merchan held that “the invoices, checks, and general ledger entries are in fact ‘business records’” under the statute. (“The invoices, checks, and general ledger entries created in 2017, that were kept and maintained by the Trump Organization, reflected payments made to [then-Trump-lawyer Michael] Cohen for a scheme that was discussed and implemented by Cohen and the Defendant in 2015 and 2016.”) Noteworthy: The scheme originated before Trump became president and was unrelated to his job as president.
As for lifting the counts to felonies, Merchan cited prior cases (yes, this is nothing new) to show that all that is required is intent to commit other crimes. Of those on offer here — federal election finance laws, state election finance laws, tax laws (by grossing up amounts to Cohen) and causing other false records (i.e., for the “catch and kill” scheme) — Merchan found all but the last sufficient to present to the jury. That gives Bragg three solid theories, with factual support, to present in support of his felony charges.
Bragg also presented evidence of Trump’s intent to defraud sufficient to defeat any motion to dismiss. “The People submit that Defendant’s ‘intent to defraud’ was established in the Grand Jury by evidence that Defendant sought to suppress disclosure of information that could have negatively impacted his campaign for President of the United States and that he made ‘false entries in the relevant business records to prevent public disclosure of both the scheme and the underlying information.”
Merchan dismissed a favorite Trump complaint: selective prosecution. The sole instance Trump cited — campaign violations by Hillary Clinton, his 2016 opponent — as evidence he was singled out, Merchan said, was not remotely similar. Moreover, the judge pointed to plenty of other cases, 437 to be exact, in which falsification of business records was charged as a felony because the defendant intended to conceal other crimes.
And that is where Bragg critics falter. Rather than go hunting for something to pin on Trump, Bragg made the correct decision not to exempt Trump from charges 437 other New Yorkers faced simply because he is now a former president. This goes to the heart of the rule of law. Former presidents enjoy no get-out-of-jail-free cards either for conduct before or during their presidency. (The Supreme Court will likely decide whether Trump has immunity for alleged crimes committed during his presidency.) If it were otherwise, we would countenance a special status simply for a small class of former presidents.
Do we really want criminals running for president so they might avoid ever being prosecuted? And to the extent critics think this is just a “small crime,” their beef is with the people of New York who decided this conduct constitutes a felony.
That’s the case: easily explained to a jury, resting on sound facts and justifying felony charges that have been brought against other defendants. As Merchan explained at the hearing, Bragg did not choose to jump ahead of other cases. (To the contrary, he deferred to others should they have started in early March.) Trump’s excessive delays and appeals (all losers, to date) pushed back other cases. The judge therefore slotted the case for late March. The people of New York have every right and expectation that their laws be enforced.
Bragg must still prove all the elements of the crimes beyond a reasonable doubt. Though Cohen is a shaky witness, to put it mildly, evidence appears to support the key contentions. Manhattan jurors sworn to follow the facts and apply them to the law will be the ultimate deciders. Those who think it’s wrong to prosecute Trump will be weeded out during jury selection. And then Trump will face a jury of his peers. No wonder he is so angry at the prospect of going to trial.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has been demeaned, dismissed and denounced. How dare he bring a state criminal case against a former president! How dare he “jump the line” to try his case first! From the ill-informed to ill-intended, his critics have refused to recognize that this is a tightly drawn, factually sound case that a Manhattan jury is likely to decide against pouting, surly former president Donald Trump, who exuded contempt for the proceedings in a devastating hearing on Thursday.
The core issue was Trump’s motion to dismiss the entire case. Point by point, Justice Juan Merchan shot down each Trump argument and, by implication, the critics who scorned the case. His ruling put to rest the notion that this is a picayune matter. “The Court agrees that the instant matter involved a complex investigation. Further, while it is true that the charges involve the lowest level felony and no one suffered physical harm, it can hardly be said that the allegations are nor severe.” He emphasized, “The People claim that the Defendant paid an individual $130,000 to conceal a sexual encounter in an effort to influence the 2016 Presidential election and then falsified 34 business records to cover up the payoff.” In short, the judge wrote; “Those are serious allegations.”
The media routinely calls this the “hush money” case. But the payment of hush money is neither illegal nor relevant. It is the attempt to illegally conceal damaging information from voters that is at issue. If the “big lie” about a stolen election was the central feature of Trump’s attempted coup after the 2020 election, the lie about the nature of his payments was an effort — just days after the “Access Hollywood” revelation — to con voters in 2016.
The judge specifically held that Trump (infamous for delaying his cases) did not suffer any deprivation of due process rights because of the district attorney’s office. The case is going to trial on March 25. Period.
Merchan also explained that the elevation to felony counts was fully justified under New York law: The falsification of business records rises to a felony when “his intent to defraud includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.” (The allegation of lying to conceal other crimes echoes the obstruction charge in the Mar-a-Lago case; the coverup is at least as bad as the underlying crime.)
Merchan held that “the invoices, checks, and general ledger entries are in fact ‘business records’” under the statute. (“The invoices, checks, and general ledger entries created in 2017, that were kept and maintained by the Trump Organization, reflected payments made to [then-Trump-lawyer Michael] Cohen for a scheme that was discussed and implemented by Cohen and the Defendant in 2015 and 2016.”) Noteworthy: The scheme originated before Trump became president and was unrelated to his job as president.
As for lifting the counts to felonies, Merchan cited prior cases (yes, this is nothing new) to show that all that is required is intent to commit other crimes. Of those on offer here — federal election finance laws, state election finance laws, tax laws (by grossing up amounts to Cohen) and causing other false records (i.e., for the “catch and kill” scheme) — Merchan found all but the last sufficient to present to the jury. That gives Bragg three solid theories, with factual support, to present in support of his felony charges.
Bragg also presented evidence of Trump’s intent to defraud sufficient to defeat any motion to dismiss. “The People submit that Defendant’s ‘intent to defraud’ was established in the Grand Jury by evidence that Defendant sought to suppress disclosure of information that could have negatively impacted his campaign for President of the United States and that he made ‘false entries in the relevant business records to prevent public disclosure of both the scheme and the underlying information.”
Merchan dismissed a favorite Trump complaint: selective prosecution. The sole instance Trump cited — campaign violations by Hillary Clinton, his 2016 opponent — as evidence he was singled out, Merchan said, was not remotely similar. Moreover, the judge pointed to plenty of other cases, 437 to be exact, in which falsification of business records was charged as a felony because the defendant intended to conceal other crimes.
And that is where Bragg critics falter. Rather than go hunting for something to pin on Trump, Bragg made the correct decision not to exempt Trump from charges 437 other New Yorkers faced simply because he is now a former president. This goes to the heart of the rule of law. Former presidents enjoy no get-out-of-jail-free cards either for conduct before or during their presidency. (The Supreme Court will likely decide whether Trump has immunity for alleged crimes committed during his presidency.) If it were otherwise, we would countenance a special status simply for a small class of former presidents.
Do we really want criminals running for president so they might avoid ever being prosecuted? And to the extent critics think this is just a “small crime,” their beef is with the people of New York who decided this conduct constitutes a felony.
That’s the case: easily explained to a jury, resting on sound facts and justifying felony charges that have been brought against other defendants. As Merchan explained at the hearing, Bragg did not choose to jump ahead of other cases. (To the contrary, he deferred to others should they have started in early March.) Trump’s excessive delays and appeals (all losers, to date) pushed back other cases. The judge therefore slotted the case for late March. The people of New York have every right and expectation that their laws be enforced.
Bragg must still prove all the elements of the crimes beyond a reasonable doubt. Though Cohen is a shaky witness, to put it mildly, evidence appears to support the key contentions. Manhattan jurors sworn to follow the facts and apply them to the law will be the ultimate deciders. Those who think it’s wrong to prosecute Trump will be weeded out during jury selection. And then Trump will face a jury of his peers. No wonder he is so angry at the prospect of going to trial.
THE FLORIDA FRAUDSTER AND THE RUSSIAN ‘KILLER’
By Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
When I covered George H.W. Bush’s presidential campaign in 1988, he was so eager to wrap himself in the American flag that he took us to a New Jersey flag factory. That way, he could claim that the G.O.P. was “on the American side” while caressing pieces of striped, red-and-white nylon.
At the time, it seemed like a cynical move by Republicans, trying to bogart patriotism. But at least they respected our country enough to try to monopolize its symbol.
That vanishing breed of Republican pledged allegiance to the American flag. Now Republicans pledge allegiance to Donald Trump’s ego. He has to be bigger than everything — even America itself.
“Bush wrapped himself in the American flag,” David Axelrod said. “Trump wants to wrap himself in the Mar-a-Lago flag.”
Just as Trump has remade the Republican Party in his own nasty and selfish image, he wants to remake America in his own nasty and selfish image.
Trump doesn’t seem to subscribe to any of the verities about this country. He doesn’t believe America is exceptional. He only believes that Trump is exceptional — an exception to all the rules that the rest of us live by.
If American laws get in his way — like counting votes to choose a president — he tries to smash them. He’s bigger than democracy, after all.
If American values get in his way — like our distaste for authoritarians like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban — he mocks those values. When Putin and Orban flattered Trump, that seemed more important to the Mar-a-Lago megalomaniac than our nation’s proud history of facing down autocrats.
Bill O’Reilly asked President Trump in 2017 why he respected Putin even though he was “a killer.”
“You got a lot of killers,” he replied. “What, you think our country’s so innocent?”
America the Beautiful, our Shining City on a Hill, is not so hot. Get in his way, and Trump will bust up institutions, trash courts, tear down cultural icons like Taylor Swift and egg on acolytes to storm the Capitol.
He doesn’t see America as the idealistic leader of the free world. He sees the world as “The Hunger Games,” as Axelrod put it. And frighteningly, Trump sometimes acts as if he prefers America’s enemies to America.
The former president shocked the world last weekend when he said at a rally that if NATO countries did not pay more for defense, he would “encourage” Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to our allies. Biden called that “un-American.”
Trump’s bromance with the sociopathic Putin, unimpeded by Putin’s foul bid to swallow Ukraine, grew even more sickening with news that the Russian president’s most potent opponent, Aleksei Navalny, 47, died mysteriously in an Arctic prison — very, very suddenly, as high-profile Putin critics often do.
“Make no mistake: Putin is responsible,” President Biden said.
When a CNN reporter asked if Trump had a response to the heroic Navalny’s death, the Trump campaign pointed her to a Truth Social post that wasn’t about Navalny or Putin. It was about how awful America was.
“America is no longer respected,” Trump posted, “because we have an incompetent president who is weak and doesn’t understand what the World is thinking.”
This American Carnage garbage is how he bonds with his base, many of whom are deeply cynical about politics and government, seeing hypocrisy and conspiracies everywhere.
His hallucinatory worshipers admire him as a strongman, even when he’s shown to be liable for sexual assault and an aggrandizing con man whose real estate empire was a Potemkin village. On Friday, a New York judge ordered Trump to pay a penalty of $355 million plus interest and barred him from holding high-up roles at any New York business — including his own — for three years, saying about Trump & Company, “Their complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological.”
The Renfields to Trump’s Dracula are also busy playing sycophants to dictators. At an Axios conference in Miami, Jared Kushner — who was festooned with $2 billion in Saudi investments after he left the White House — called Mohammed bin Salman a “visionary leader.” Asked about the crown prince’s complicity in Jamal Khashoggi’s murder, Kushner replied with exasperation, “Are we really still doing this?”
Before Navalny’s death, Tucker Carlson — who scorned Ukraine’s desperate fight for its independence — cavorted in the Kremlin. His interview with Putin was so indulgent that even Putin complained of a “lack of sharp questions.”
In an interview with an Egyptian journalist, Carlson defended his decision not to ask Putin about freedom of speech or assassinations of his opponents.
“Every leader kills people,” Carlson said blithely, adding, “Leadership requires killing people, sorry.”
Will the craven Republicans ever stand up against autocracy — at home or abroad?
Navalny’s death at the hands of the murderous Putin has given momentum to the push for military assistance for Ukraine.
It’s the American thing to do.
By Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
When I covered George H.W. Bush’s presidential campaign in 1988, he was so eager to wrap himself in the American flag that he took us to a New Jersey flag factory. That way, he could claim that the G.O.P. was “on the American side” while caressing pieces of striped, red-and-white nylon.
At the time, it seemed like a cynical move by Republicans, trying to bogart patriotism. But at least they respected our country enough to try to monopolize its symbol.
That vanishing breed of Republican pledged allegiance to the American flag. Now Republicans pledge allegiance to Donald Trump’s ego. He has to be bigger than everything — even America itself.
“Bush wrapped himself in the American flag,” David Axelrod said. “Trump wants to wrap himself in the Mar-a-Lago flag.”
Just as Trump has remade the Republican Party in his own nasty and selfish image, he wants to remake America in his own nasty and selfish image.
Trump doesn’t seem to subscribe to any of the verities about this country. He doesn’t believe America is exceptional. He only believes that Trump is exceptional — an exception to all the rules that the rest of us live by.
If American laws get in his way — like counting votes to choose a president — he tries to smash them. He’s bigger than democracy, after all.
If American values get in his way — like our distaste for authoritarians like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban — he mocks those values. When Putin and Orban flattered Trump, that seemed more important to the Mar-a-Lago megalomaniac than our nation’s proud history of facing down autocrats.
Bill O’Reilly asked President Trump in 2017 why he respected Putin even though he was “a killer.”
“You got a lot of killers,” he replied. “What, you think our country’s so innocent?”
America the Beautiful, our Shining City on a Hill, is not so hot. Get in his way, and Trump will bust up institutions, trash courts, tear down cultural icons like Taylor Swift and egg on acolytes to storm the Capitol.
He doesn’t see America as the idealistic leader of the free world. He sees the world as “The Hunger Games,” as Axelrod put it. And frighteningly, Trump sometimes acts as if he prefers America’s enemies to America.
The former president shocked the world last weekend when he said at a rally that if NATO countries did not pay more for defense, he would “encourage” Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to our allies. Biden called that “un-American.”
Trump’s bromance with the sociopathic Putin, unimpeded by Putin’s foul bid to swallow Ukraine, grew even more sickening with news that the Russian president’s most potent opponent, Aleksei Navalny, 47, died mysteriously in an Arctic prison — very, very suddenly, as high-profile Putin critics often do.
“Make no mistake: Putin is responsible,” President Biden said.
When a CNN reporter asked if Trump had a response to the heroic Navalny’s death, the Trump campaign pointed her to a Truth Social post that wasn’t about Navalny or Putin. It was about how awful America was.
“America is no longer respected,” Trump posted, “because we have an incompetent president who is weak and doesn’t understand what the World is thinking.”
This American Carnage garbage is how he bonds with his base, many of whom are deeply cynical about politics and government, seeing hypocrisy and conspiracies everywhere.
His hallucinatory worshipers admire him as a strongman, even when he’s shown to be liable for sexual assault and an aggrandizing con man whose real estate empire was a Potemkin village. On Friday, a New York judge ordered Trump to pay a penalty of $355 million plus interest and barred him from holding high-up roles at any New York business — including his own — for three years, saying about Trump & Company, “Their complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological.”
The Renfields to Trump’s Dracula are also busy playing sycophants to dictators. At an Axios conference in Miami, Jared Kushner — who was festooned with $2 billion in Saudi investments after he left the White House — called Mohammed bin Salman a “visionary leader.” Asked about the crown prince’s complicity in Jamal Khashoggi’s murder, Kushner replied with exasperation, “Are we really still doing this?”
Before Navalny’s death, Tucker Carlson — who scorned Ukraine’s desperate fight for its independence — cavorted in the Kremlin. His interview with Putin was so indulgent that even Putin complained of a “lack of sharp questions.”
In an interview with an Egyptian journalist, Carlson defended his decision not to ask Putin about freedom of speech or assassinations of his opponents.
“Every leader kills people,” Carlson said blithely, adding, “Leadership requires killing people, sorry.”
Will the craven Republicans ever stand up against autocracy — at home or abroad?
Navalny’s death at the hands of the murderous Putin has given momentum to the push for military assistance for Ukraine.
It’s the American thing to do.
NAVALNY STOOD AGAINST PUTIN’S EVIL. WILL THE GOP ABANDON THE FIGHT NOW?
By Max Boot, The Washington Post
Friday has been a dark day for freedom. In eastern Ukraine, Russian forces are on the verge of taking the city of Avdiivka after a months-long fight, thereby bringing closer Vladimir Putin’s goal of fully annexing yet another Ukrainian province: Donetsk. And in a Russian penal colony north of the Arctic Circle, Russia’s foremost dissident, Alexei Navalny, was pronounced dead at age 47.
I am filled with anger and despair as I write these words. Not because I am surprised by the Russian president’s villainy — that, by now, is sadly well-established. But because I am shocked and dismayed that America, the bastion of freedom, might abandon the fight against Putin’s evil. House Republican leaders are giving every indication that they are willing to reward Navalny’s killer by cutting off Russia’s Ukrainian victims from further U.S. aid, thereby making it inevitable that more good people will suffer his fate.
The circumstances of Navalny’s death remain murky. But whatever cause of death is listed on his death certificate, there is no doubt as to who killed him: He was murdered by Putin. Navalny was a tireless and fearless crusader against corruption and in favor of freedom. He was thus a mortal threat to a dictator who has established the most complete personal tyranny in Russia since the days of Joseph Stalin.
Putin had already tried to kill Navalny once, in 2020, by poisoning him with a nerve agent. Navalny survived, thanks to medical care he received in Germany. He could easily have stayed in the West with his beautiful family, yet in January 2021 he chose to return to Russia to lead the fight against Putin in person. He knew what would happen to him upon landing: He would be sent to prison on trumped-up charges. And he was. Yet he willingly sacrificed himself, because he calculated he could be a more effective advocate for freedom within Russia than outside it.
Some Ukrainians had criticized Navalny for flirting with right-wing elements in Russia and embracing Russian nationalism. But although Navalny refused to condemn Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 — a move that was widely popular in Russia — he was a steadfast opponent of Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Last year, he called for Ukraine to return to its internationally recognized 1991 borders, which would mean the return of Crimea.
Even with Navalny behind bars, his associates continued to expose Putin’s breathtaking corruption — including the dictator’s construction of a $1.3 billion palace. The video about Putin’s palace swiftly reached more than 93 million views on YouTube. We can only imagine Putin’s rage. Navalny’s prison sentence kept getting longer, and the conditions of his imprisonment kept getting worse. As my Post colleague Robyn Dixon notes, “Navalny was repeatedly placed in harsh conditions in solitary punishment cells, confined in those conditions on 27 occasions totaling more than 300 days, often for trivial offenses such as failing to keep his top button fastened.”
In December, Navalny was sent to a former gulag north of the Arctic Circle, where he died Friday. He thus joins a long list of martyrs for Russian democracy — including Anna Politkovskaya, Sergei Magnitsky and Boris Nemtsov — who have been murdered by Putin’s odious regime.
In 2021, President Biden said the consequences of Navalny’s death in prison “would be devastating for Russia.” He no doubt had in mind more sanctions. But since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the West has already maxed out sanctions on Russia — or close to it. The Russian economy is hurting but is being kept afloat by oil sales to China, India and Turkey. There is not much more the United States can realistically do on the sanctions front without more cooperation from those nations.
But there are two things that the West can do that would get Putin’s attention:
First, send to Ukraine the estimated $300 billion in frozen Russian assets held in the West, primarily in a Belgian clearinghouse. The European Union and the Group of Seven recently agreed to send to Ukraine the profits from the Russian holdings, which could amount to $4 billion this year. But it would be far more effective to send the entire amount to make clear to Putin that aggression does not pay — literally.
Second, pass the $60 billion aid package for Ukraine that was just approved on a bipartisan vote of 70-29 in the Senate but that remains stuck in the House. Avdiivka is falling because the defenders are running out of ammunition. It would be a tragedy and disaster if that occurred elsewhere along the front lines — or if Ukraine ran out of air-defense ammunition to protect its cities from Putin’s murderous missile and drone strikes.
The only way to avoid Ukraine’s defeat is by providing more U.S. aid. Yet House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), in thrall to former president Donald Trump and his “America First” isolationists, refuses to grant the aid bill a floor vote. A failure to pass the aid bill will reward Navalny’s killer.
It might be no coincidence that Navalny died when he did, and it’s not only because Putin is determined to eliminate all opponents ahead of his farcical “election” next month. Putin is feeling confident because of the emergence of a pro-Kremlin caucus on the American right. Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, the very definition of a “useful idiot,” traveled to Russia recently for a simpering interview with Putin followed by the posting of propaganda videos about how much better life supposedly is in Russia than in the United States. Even worse, Trump — who, according to the polls, would win another term if the election were held today — recently said he would not protect NATO members who failed to pay their nonexistent “dues” and said that he would encourage the Russians “to do whatever the hell they want” to those supposed deadbeats.
Putin feels as though he is winning — and thus as though he can get away with murder. Giving that rapacious dictator a sense of impunity and invincibility is extremely dangerous. We can still fight back, however, by giving Ukraine the funds and military equipment it needs to defend itself. Only by defeating Putin’s aggression in Ukraine can we hope to see the emergence of a better, freer Russia — the dream that Navalny gave his life for.
By Max Boot, The Washington Post
Friday has been a dark day for freedom. In eastern Ukraine, Russian forces are on the verge of taking the city of Avdiivka after a months-long fight, thereby bringing closer Vladimir Putin’s goal of fully annexing yet another Ukrainian province: Donetsk. And in a Russian penal colony north of the Arctic Circle, Russia’s foremost dissident, Alexei Navalny, was pronounced dead at age 47.
I am filled with anger and despair as I write these words. Not because I am surprised by the Russian president’s villainy — that, by now, is sadly well-established. But because I am shocked and dismayed that America, the bastion of freedom, might abandon the fight against Putin’s evil. House Republican leaders are giving every indication that they are willing to reward Navalny’s killer by cutting off Russia’s Ukrainian victims from further U.S. aid, thereby making it inevitable that more good people will suffer his fate.
The circumstances of Navalny’s death remain murky. But whatever cause of death is listed on his death certificate, there is no doubt as to who killed him: He was murdered by Putin. Navalny was a tireless and fearless crusader against corruption and in favor of freedom. He was thus a mortal threat to a dictator who has established the most complete personal tyranny in Russia since the days of Joseph Stalin.
Putin had already tried to kill Navalny once, in 2020, by poisoning him with a nerve agent. Navalny survived, thanks to medical care he received in Germany. He could easily have stayed in the West with his beautiful family, yet in January 2021 he chose to return to Russia to lead the fight against Putin in person. He knew what would happen to him upon landing: He would be sent to prison on trumped-up charges. And he was. Yet he willingly sacrificed himself, because he calculated he could be a more effective advocate for freedom within Russia than outside it.
Some Ukrainians had criticized Navalny for flirting with right-wing elements in Russia and embracing Russian nationalism. But although Navalny refused to condemn Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 — a move that was widely popular in Russia — he was a steadfast opponent of Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Last year, he called for Ukraine to return to its internationally recognized 1991 borders, which would mean the return of Crimea.
Even with Navalny behind bars, his associates continued to expose Putin’s breathtaking corruption — including the dictator’s construction of a $1.3 billion palace. The video about Putin’s palace swiftly reached more than 93 million views on YouTube. We can only imagine Putin’s rage. Navalny’s prison sentence kept getting longer, and the conditions of his imprisonment kept getting worse. As my Post colleague Robyn Dixon notes, “Navalny was repeatedly placed in harsh conditions in solitary punishment cells, confined in those conditions on 27 occasions totaling more than 300 days, often for trivial offenses such as failing to keep his top button fastened.”
In December, Navalny was sent to a former gulag north of the Arctic Circle, where he died Friday. He thus joins a long list of martyrs for Russian democracy — including Anna Politkovskaya, Sergei Magnitsky and Boris Nemtsov — who have been murdered by Putin’s odious regime.
In 2021, President Biden said the consequences of Navalny’s death in prison “would be devastating for Russia.” He no doubt had in mind more sanctions. But since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the West has already maxed out sanctions on Russia — or close to it. The Russian economy is hurting but is being kept afloat by oil sales to China, India and Turkey. There is not much more the United States can realistically do on the sanctions front without more cooperation from those nations.
But there are two things that the West can do that would get Putin’s attention:
First, send to Ukraine the estimated $300 billion in frozen Russian assets held in the West, primarily in a Belgian clearinghouse. The European Union and the Group of Seven recently agreed to send to Ukraine the profits from the Russian holdings, which could amount to $4 billion this year. But it would be far more effective to send the entire amount to make clear to Putin that aggression does not pay — literally.
Second, pass the $60 billion aid package for Ukraine that was just approved on a bipartisan vote of 70-29 in the Senate but that remains stuck in the House. Avdiivka is falling because the defenders are running out of ammunition. It would be a tragedy and disaster if that occurred elsewhere along the front lines — or if Ukraine ran out of air-defense ammunition to protect its cities from Putin’s murderous missile and drone strikes.
The only way to avoid Ukraine’s defeat is by providing more U.S. aid. Yet House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), in thrall to former president Donald Trump and his “America First” isolationists, refuses to grant the aid bill a floor vote. A failure to pass the aid bill will reward Navalny’s killer.
It might be no coincidence that Navalny died when he did, and it’s not only because Putin is determined to eliminate all opponents ahead of his farcical “election” next month. Putin is feeling confident because of the emergence of a pro-Kremlin caucus on the American right. Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, the very definition of a “useful idiot,” traveled to Russia recently for a simpering interview with Putin followed by the posting of propaganda videos about how much better life supposedly is in Russia than in the United States. Even worse, Trump — who, according to the polls, would win another term if the election were held today — recently said he would not protect NATO members who failed to pay their nonexistent “dues” and said that he would encourage the Russians “to do whatever the hell they want” to those supposed deadbeats.
Putin feels as though he is winning — and thus as though he can get away with murder. Giving that rapacious dictator a sense of impunity and invincibility is extremely dangerous. We can still fight back, however, by giving Ukraine the funds and military equipment it needs to defend itself. Only by defeating Putin’s aggression in Ukraine can we hope to see the emergence of a better, freer Russia — the dream that Navalny gave his life for.
WHAT FECKLESS AMERICANS CAN LEARN FROM NAVALNY’S BRAVERY
By Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times
Vladimir Putin’s Russia has just become even more bleak and soulless with the reported death in an Arctic prison of Aleksei Navalny, the 47-year-old dissident who showed immense bravery and humor as he tried to bring democracy to his homeland.
Navalny’s strength, resilience and courage contrast with the fecklessness of so many Americans dealing with Putin. From Donald Trump to Tucker Carlson, a remarkable number of American leaders and their mouthpieces roll over before the Russian president.
“Why do Trump and his congressional enablers want to further appease this Russian tyrant?” Senator Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, asked after the news broke of Navalny’s death.
I hope Navalny’s example will fortify Americans and Europeans alike, for despite all our resources we have not shown a sliver of the strength that he did.
The most fundamental test of our fortitude is simple: Will the United States continue to support Ukraine as it tries to fight off Russian invaders? I hope Navalny’s sacrifice helps us find the will to stand up to Putin.
Navalny was Russia’s foremost dissident and opposition leader but also emerged as something of a Mandela of our age. Despite being poisoned and repeatedly punished with long bouts of isolation in remote prisons, Navalny stood unbroken. He continued to mock Putin and denounce the invasion of Ukraine.
His wit and refusal to bow to authority made him a Kremlin nightmare. Sent to the gulag, he mischievously attempted to unionize prisoners and guards alike.
As recently as Thursday, he appeared by video in a court hearing and jokingly asked for part of the judge’s salary. “Because I am running out of money, thanks to your decisions,” Navalny explained, referring to fines imposed on him.
No wonder Navalny is reported dead. So many brave Russians — journalists, lawyers, political figures — have died after challenging the authorities. It’s baffling how many Americans have responded in the opposite way, by acting as Putin’s poodles.
Tucker Carlson managed a 127-minute interview with Putin this month without even asking a single question about Navalny. It was such a softball interview that Putin professed exasperation at the deference and said he wished he’d been asked sharper questions.
Carlson even embarked on what seemed a promotional tour of Putin’s Russia, praising Moscow. “It is so much nicer than any city in my country,” he said. “It is so much cleaner and safer and prettier, aesthetically, its architecture, its food, its service, than any city in the United States.”
And the Moscow subway? “There’s no graffiti. There’s no filth. There are no foul smells,” Carlson said. “There are no bums or drug addicts or rapists or people waiting to push you onto the train tracks and kill you. No, it’s perfectly clean and orderly.”
And grocery shopping? It’s a bargain! Carlson goes shopping in Moscow, spends less money than he expects and says the experience radicalized him against America’s leaders. He doesn’t seem to understand that Russians spend four times as much of their income on food as Americans, and that prices are cheap because Russia is a poor country with a weak currency.
It is of course true that Moscow has a beautiful subway, and I’ve no objection to commentators pointing that out — or wondering aloud why American cities can’t have mass transit as nice. But it is profoundly troubling when American sycophants seem eager to whitewash Putin’s brutality, largely ignore his victims and score political points at home in ways that burnish Russian dictatorship and diminish American democracy.
(After news of Navalny’s death, Carlson seemed to pirouette. “It’s horrifying what happened to Navalny,” he told The Daily Mail. “The whole thing is barbaric and awful. No decent person would defend it.”)
Navalny’s daughter, Dasha, a student at Stanford, told me last year that she had had reservations when her father decided to return to Russia voluntarily in 2021 after Russian agents had apparently poisoned him and nearly killed him. He knew the risks he faced, yet he went ahead. “My personal preference would have been that he stayed with me,” she said. “But I never questioned his decision to go back.”
“I’m super worried about him always, as a daughter,” she added. “I have it in the back of my head that maybe he shouldn’t be doing this. But it’s what he’s passionate about, and for the greater good of the country.”
Today’s right-wing affection for Putin is an echo of the traditional myopia that ideologues have had for overseas dictators, including the left’s onetime fondness for Mao. Today’s version, led by Trump himself, is dangerous — witness Trump’s recent suggestion that he might invite Russia to attack NATO allies that did not pay enough for arms — and it’s also oblivious to Putin’s long history of brutality at home and abroad.
Putin solidified his grip on power in 1999, in the aftermath of several mysterious apartment bombings that killed more than 300 people. Putin blamed Chechen terrorists and began a war in Chechnya that presented him as a decisive, tough patriot defending his nation’s interests. However, there have long been suspicions that the bombings were orchestrated by Russian security authorities themselves, to give Moscow an excuse to crack down. We still don’t know for sure, but my view and that of many others is that on balance the evidence suggests that the authorities were more likely to have planned the bombings than Chechen terrorists.
In other words, from the very dawn of his rule, Putin has been associated with repression, deceit and brutality toward his own people. Russia has also destabilized or attacked its neighbors, from Georgia to Moldova, Estonia and Ukraine, and according to the F.B.I. interfered in the U.S. presidential election in 2016.
That is the Russia that Navalny stood against. And that is the Russia that too many Americans have buttressed by opposing aid to Ukraine.
It’s natural to see the loss of Russia’s most important opposition figure as a sign of Putin’s commanding power, but I wonder if it isn’t also a sign of his insecurity.
A Russian dissident, Vladimir Kara-Murza, wrote a few days ago in The Washington Post, “Even from a Russian prison, I can see Putin’s weakness.” And Navalny himself once said: “If they decide to kill me, it means that we are incredibly strong. We need to utilize this power.”
Those are words that Russians and Ukrainians alike should take to heart, but it’s also a message to American members of Congress and right-wing partisans who have become Moscow’s fellow travelers. May Navalny’s heroic sacrifice wake them up.
By Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times
Vladimir Putin’s Russia has just become even more bleak and soulless with the reported death in an Arctic prison of Aleksei Navalny, the 47-year-old dissident who showed immense bravery and humor as he tried to bring democracy to his homeland.
Navalny’s strength, resilience and courage contrast with the fecklessness of so many Americans dealing with Putin. From Donald Trump to Tucker Carlson, a remarkable number of American leaders and their mouthpieces roll over before the Russian president.
“Why do Trump and his congressional enablers want to further appease this Russian tyrant?” Senator Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, asked after the news broke of Navalny’s death.
I hope Navalny’s example will fortify Americans and Europeans alike, for despite all our resources we have not shown a sliver of the strength that he did.
The most fundamental test of our fortitude is simple: Will the United States continue to support Ukraine as it tries to fight off Russian invaders? I hope Navalny’s sacrifice helps us find the will to stand up to Putin.
Navalny was Russia’s foremost dissident and opposition leader but also emerged as something of a Mandela of our age. Despite being poisoned and repeatedly punished with long bouts of isolation in remote prisons, Navalny stood unbroken. He continued to mock Putin and denounce the invasion of Ukraine.
His wit and refusal to bow to authority made him a Kremlin nightmare. Sent to the gulag, he mischievously attempted to unionize prisoners and guards alike.
As recently as Thursday, he appeared by video in a court hearing and jokingly asked for part of the judge’s salary. “Because I am running out of money, thanks to your decisions,” Navalny explained, referring to fines imposed on him.
No wonder Navalny is reported dead. So many brave Russians — journalists, lawyers, political figures — have died after challenging the authorities. It’s baffling how many Americans have responded in the opposite way, by acting as Putin’s poodles.
Tucker Carlson managed a 127-minute interview with Putin this month without even asking a single question about Navalny. It was such a softball interview that Putin professed exasperation at the deference and said he wished he’d been asked sharper questions.
Carlson even embarked on what seemed a promotional tour of Putin’s Russia, praising Moscow. “It is so much nicer than any city in my country,” he said. “It is so much cleaner and safer and prettier, aesthetically, its architecture, its food, its service, than any city in the United States.”
And the Moscow subway? “There’s no graffiti. There’s no filth. There are no foul smells,” Carlson said. “There are no bums or drug addicts or rapists or people waiting to push you onto the train tracks and kill you. No, it’s perfectly clean and orderly.”
And grocery shopping? It’s a bargain! Carlson goes shopping in Moscow, spends less money than he expects and says the experience radicalized him against America’s leaders. He doesn’t seem to understand that Russians spend four times as much of their income on food as Americans, and that prices are cheap because Russia is a poor country with a weak currency.
It is of course true that Moscow has a beautiful subway, and I’ve no objection to commentators pointing that out — or wondering aloud why American cities can’t have mass transit as nice. But it is profoundly troubling when American sycophants seem eager to whitewash Putin’s brutality, largely ignore his victims and score political points at home in ways that burnish Russian dictatorship and diminish American democracy.
(After news of Navalny’s death, Carlson seemed to pirouette. “It’s horrifying what happened to Navalny,” he told The Daily Mail. “The whole thing is barbaric and awful. No decent person would defend it.”)
Navalny’s daughter, Dasha, a student at Stanford, told me last year that she had had reservations when her father decided to return to Russia voluntarily in 2021 after Russian agents had apparently poisoned him and nearly killed him. He knew the risks he faced, yet he went ahead. “My personal preference would have been that he stayed with me,” she said. “But I never questioned his decision to go back.”
“I’m super worried about him always, as a daughter,” she added. “I have it in the back of my head that maybe he shouldn’t be doing this. But it’s what he’s passionate about, and for the greater good of the country.”
Today’s right-wing affection for Putin is an echo of the traditional myopia that ideologues have had for overseas dictators, including the left’s onetime fondness for Mao. Today’s version, led by Trump himself, is dangerous — witness Trump’s recent suggestion that he might invite Russia to attack NATO allies that did not pay enough for arms — and it’s also oblivious to Putin’s long history of brutality at home and abroad.
Putin solidified his grip on power in 1999, in the aftermath of several mysterious apartment bombings that killed more than 300 people. Putin blamed Chechen terrorists and began a war in Chechnya that presented him as a decisive, tough patriot defending his nation’s interests. However, there have long been suspicions that the bombings were orchestrated by Russian security authorities themselves, to give Moscow an excuse to crack down. We still don’t know for sure, but my view and that of many others is that on balance the evidence suggests that the authorities were more likely to have planned the bombings than Chechen terrorists.
In other words, from the very dawn of his rule, Putin has been associated with repression, deceit and brutality toward his own people. Russia has also destabilized or attacked its neighbors, from Georgia to Moldova, Estonia and Ukraine, and according to the F.B.I. interfered in the U.S. presidential election in 2016.
That is the Russia that Navalny stood against. And that is the Russia that too many Americans have buttressed by opposing aid to Ukraine.
It’s natural to see the loss of Russia’s most important opposition figure as a sign of Putin’s commanding power, but I wonder if it isn’t also a sign of his insecurity.
A Russian dissident, Vladimir Kara-Murza, wrote a few days ago in The Washington Post, “Even from a Russian prison, I can see Putin’s weakness.” And Navalny himself once said: “If they decide to kill me, it means that we are incredibly strong. We need to utilize this power.”
Those are words that Russians and Ukrainians alike should take to heart, but it’s also a message to American members of Congress and right-wing partisans who have become Moscow’s fellow travelers. May Navalny’s heroic sacrifice wake them up.
TRUMP OWNS DOBBS AND EVERYTHING THAT COMES WITH IT
By Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times
As president, Donald Trump appointed the three justices who proved pivotal to the outcome in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade.
Trump has made it very clear that he is proud of this. He said so at the time. Dobbs, he pointed out in a statement, was “the biggest WIN for LIFE in a generation” and was “only made possible because I delivered everything as promised, including nominating and getting three highly respected and strong Constitutionalists confirmed to the United States Supreme Court.”
It was, he continued, “my great honor to do so!”
If the ruling was Trump’s, then so are the results. Since the Supreme Court freed Republican-led states to outlaw abortion and impose harsh penalties for women and doctors who either seek or perform the procedure, there has been diminished access to reproductive and maternal care, as well as a rise in premature births. In a national poll conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 68 percent of OB-GYNs surveyed said that Dobbs has “worsened their ability to manage pregnancy-related emergencies.” Sixty-four percent also said that the ruling has “worsened pregnancy-related mortality.”
It is not hard to find stories of women forced to risk death and carry dangerous pregnancies because of the court’s decision, delivered by Trump, to revoke a constitutional right to abortion. And it’s the sheer horror of the post-Roe world that has pushed voters, in red and blue states, to codify abortion rights into state constitutions whenever possible.
But despite the clear provenance of the attack on reproductive rights — despite the fact that Trump openly bragged about his pivotal role in overturning Roe v. Wade — many Americans don’t seem to blame the former president for the actions of the Supreme Court majority he assembled during his term.
According to a December poll conducted by Data for Progress, a left-leaning think tank, 24 percent of likely voters hold Trump responsible for new bans or restrictions on abortions in states across the country. Somewhat more, around one-third, blame Republicans in state office and Republicans in Congress. Half blame the court.
It is true that the Supreme Court made the ultimate decision on Roe. It is a political problem for the Democratic Party however, that voters — including many independents and rank-and-file Democrats — do not connect the actions of the court to those of the president who shaped and cemented its right-wing majority. And it’s this identification gap between Trump and the court that gives him the space to position himself against the Republican Party on abortion rights, which he’s trying to do right now.
There is an even larger problem here, for Democrats. We’ll call it the Trump mulligan. Trump was president for four years, during which time he flailed and fumbled through domestic and world affairs, creating new problems and exacerbating old ones at home and abroad. Trump’s fundamental inability to lead — his narcissism, his solipsism, his absorption in petty grievances and conspiratorial thinking — culminated in the government’s chaotic early response to the coronavirus pandemic, which paralyzed the nation amid a mounting death toll. If the main measure of a president is how he responds to crisis, then Trump was a failure.
These facts would almost certainly weigh down any other defeated president who tried to run for a second term. Imagine, for instance, if Jimmy Carter had run for the Democratic nomination in 1984 — he would have struggled to win a vote, much less a primary.
Trump, somehow, gets a mulligan. Voters — and to some extent the political media — have allowed him to set the signature events of his administration aside as if they don’t count, as if they don’t define his past performance and weigh on what he might do with a second term. The Trump mulligan allows him to promise the moon as if we don’t already know he can’t reach it. It allows him to stand for a return to normalcy when the only thing he can deliver is disarray.
Why does Trump get this mulligan on his presidency? I think it owes a lot to his celebrity persona. Although Trump has not been on a major screen in Hollywood since 2015, when he was fired from NBC’s “The Apprentice,” he still retains the celebrity status he cultivated over decades in film and television. He is a politician — he was, again, president of the United States — but he’s not perceived as a politician. He is seen, even now, as outside of or somehow transcending traditional politics.
The result is that many Americans don’t seem to hold Trump responsible for the political and policy consequences of his actions as president. The challenge for Democrats, which is to say the challenge for Joe Biden’s re-election campaign, is to tie Trump to his own four years in power. The Supreme Court’s attack on abortion rights, backed by three Trump-appointed justices, should be understood, politically, as Trump’s attack on abortion rights. The economic pain of the pandemic should be understood, in the same way, as a product of Trump’s decisions in office.
The key to making this stick, I think, is for Democrats to resist the urge to treat Trump as exceptional. The more his opponents hold him up to the public as a dangerous gamble or a threatening aberration, the more they reinforce the outsider persona that makes him an electoral threat. It is not a coincidence that Trump was at his least popular, during his term and before Jan. 6, when he was most associated with traditional Republican causes such as the effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act or the push to cut taxes on the wealthiest Americans.
For the past two years of elections — from the 2022 midterms to the 2023 elections in Virginia and Kentucky to this week’s special elections in New York and Pennsylvania — voters have held Republicans responsible for unpopular Republican policies. What Democrats have to do is hold Trump responsible for unpopular Republican policies.
By Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times
As president, Donald Trump appointed the three justices who proved pivotal to the outcome in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade.
Trump has made it very clear that he is proud of this. He said so at the time. Dobbs, he pointed out in a statement, was “the biggest WIN for LIFE in a generation” and was “only made possible because I delivered everything as promised, including nominating and getting three highly respected and strong Constitutionalists confirmed to the United States Supreme Court.”
It was, he continued, “my great honor to do so!”
If the ruling was Trump’s, then so are the results. Since the Supreme Court freed Republican-led states to outlaw abortion and impose harsh penalties for women and doctors who either seek or perform the procedure, there has been diminished access to reproductive and maternal care, as well as a rise in premature births. In a national poll conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 68 percent of OB-GYNs surveyed said that Dobbs has “worsened their ability to manage pregnancy-related emergencies.” Sixty-four percent also said that the ruling has “worsened pregnancy-related mortality.”
It is not hard to find stories of women forced to risk death and carry dangerous pregnancies because of the court’s decision, delivered by Trump, to revoke a constitutional right to abortion. And it’s the sheer horror of the post-Roe world that has pushed voters, in red and blue states, to codify abortion rights into state constitutions whenever possible.
But despite the clear provenance of the attack on reproductive rights — despite the fact that Trump openly bragged about his pivotal role in overturning Roe v. Wade — many Americans don’t seem to blame the former president for the actions of the Supreme Court majority he assembled during his term.
According to a December poll conducted by Data for Progress, a left-leaning think tank, 24 percent of likely voters hold Trump responsible for new bans or restrictions on abortions in states across the country. Somewhat more, around one-third, blame Republicans in state office and Republicans in Congress. Half blame the court.
It is true that the Supreme Court made the ultimate decision on Roe. It is a political problem for the Democratic Party however, that voters — including many independents and rank-and-file Democrats — do not connect the actions of the court to those of the president who shaped and cemented its right-wing majority. And it’s this identification gap between Trump and the court that gives him the space to position himself against the Republican Party on abortion rights, which he’s trying to do right now.
There is an even larger problem here, for Democrats. We’ll call it the Trump mulligan. Trump was president for four years, during which time he flailed and fumbled through domestic and world affairs, creating new problems and exacerbating old ones at home and abroad. Trump’s fundamental inability to lead — his narcissism, his solipsism, his absorption in petty grievances and conspiratorial thinking — culminated in the government’s chaotic early response to the coronavirus pandemic, which paralyzed the nation amid a mounting death toll. If the main measure of a president is how he responds to crisis, then Trump was a failure.
These facts would almost certainly weigh down any other defeated president who tried to run for a second term. Imagine, for instance, if Jimmy Carter had run for the Democratic nomination in 1984 — he would have struggled to win a vote, much less a primary.
Trump, somehow, gets a mulligan. Voters — and to some extent the political media — have allowed him to set the signature events of his administration aside as if they don’t count, as if they don’t define his past performance and weigh on what he might do with a second term. The Trump mulligan allows him to promise the moon as if we don’t already know he can’t reach it. It allows him to stand for a return to normalcy when the only thing he can deliver is disarray.
Why does Trump get this mulligan on his presidency? I think it owes a lot to his celebrity persona. Although Trump has not been on a major screen in Hollywood since 2015, when he was fired from NBC’s “The Apprentice,” he still retains the celebrity status he cultivated over decades in film and television. He is a politician — he was, again, president of the United States — but he’s not perceived as a politician. He is seen, even now, as outside of or somehow transcending traditional politics.
The result is that many Americans don’t seem to hold Trump responsible for the political and policy consequences of his actions as president. The challenge for Democrats, which is to say the challenge for Joe Biden’s re-election campaign, is to tie Trump to his own four years in power. The Supreme Court’s attack on abortion rights, backed by three Trump-appointed justices, should be understood, politically, as Trump’s attack on abortion rights. The economic pain of the pandemic should be understood, in the same way, as a product of Trump’s decisions in office.
The key to making this stick, I think, is for Democrats to resist the urge to treat Trump as exceptional. The more his opponents hold him up to the public as a dangerous gamble or a threatening aberration, the more they reinforce the outsider persona that makes him an electoral threat. It is not a coincidence that Trump was at his least popular, during his term and before Jan. 6, when he was most associated with traditional Republican causes such as the effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act or the push to cut taxes on the wealthiest Americans.
For the past two years of elections — from the 2022 midterms to the 2023 elections in Virginia and Kentucky to this week’s special elections in New York and Pennsylvania — voters have held Republicans responsible for unpopular Republican policies. What Democrats have to do is hold Trump responsible for unpopular Republican policies.
TRUMP IS LOSING IT
By Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times
It is unclear whether Donald Trump has forgotten the precise nature of NATO or whether he ever fully grasped it in the first place.
What is clear, however, is that Trump — who ostensibly spent four years as president of the United States — has little clue of what NATO is or what NATO does. And when he spoke on the subject at a rally in South Carolina over the weekend, what he said was less a cogent discussion of foreign policy than it was gibberish — the kind of outrageous nonsense that flows without interruption from an empty and unreflective mind.
“One of the presidents of a big country stood up and said, ‘Well, sir, if we don’t pay, and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?’ ” Trump said, recalling an implausible conversation with an unnamed, presumably European head of state. “‘You didn’t pay? You’re delinquent?’ ” Trump recounted responding. “ ‘No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You gotta pay. You gotta pay your bills.’”
The former president’s message was clear: If NATO members do not pay up, then he will leave them to the mercy of a continental aggressor who has already plunged one European country into death, destruction and devastation.
Except, NATO isn’t a mafia protection racket. NATO, in case anyone needs to be reminded, is a mutual defense organization, formed by treaty in 1949 as tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union hardened into conflict. “The parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all,” states Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty.
According to the terms of an agreement reached last year, member states will work to spend at least 2 percent of national G.D.P. on military investment.
But let’s set this bit of fact-checking aside for a moment and look at the big picture.
It is not just that Trump is ignorant on this and other vital questions; it is that he is incoherent.
Consider his remarks at a recent gathering of the National Rifle Association in Harrisburg, Pa. “We have to win in November, or we’re not going to have Pennsylvania. They’ll change the name. They’re going to change the name of Pennsylvania,” Trump said.
Who, exactly, is going to change the name of Pennsylvania? And to what? I don’t know. I doubt Trump does either.
Or consider the time, last November, when Trump confused China and North Korea, telling an audience of supporters in Florida that “Kim Jong Un leads 1.4 billion people, and there is no doubt about who the boss is. And they want me to say he’s not an intelligent man.”
There was also the time that Trump mistook Nikki Haley, his former ambassador to the United Nations, for Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House.
“Nikki Haley, you know they, do you know they destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence, everything, deleted and destroyed all of it. All of it, because of lots of things like Nikki Haley is in charge of security. We offered her 10,000 people, soldiers, National Guard, whatever they want. They turned it down. They don’t want to talk about that. These are very dishonest people,” Trump said, repeating his false claim that Pelosi was responsible for the failure of Capitol security on Jan. 6.
If you would like, you can also try to make sense of the former president’s recent attempt to describe a missile defense system:
“I will build an Iron Dome over our country, a state-of-the-art missile defense shield made in the U.S.A.,” Trump said, before taking an unusual detour. “These are not muscle guys here, they’re muscle guys up here, right,” he continued, gesturing to his arms and his head to emphasize, I guess, that the people responsible for building such systems are capable and intelligent.
“And they calmly walk to us, and ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. They’ve only got 17 seconds to figure this whole thing out. Boom. OK. Missile launch. Whoosh. Boom,” Trump added.
I assume Trump is describing the pressure of actually manning a missile defense system. Even so, one would think that a former president — currently vying to be the next president — would at least try to be a little more articulate.
But this gets to one of the oddest things about this election cycle so far. There is no shortage of coverage of President Biden’s age, even if there’s no evidence that his age has been an obstacle to his ability to perform his duties. Indeed, it is plainly true that Biden has been an unusually successful president in areas, like legislative negotiations, that require skill and mental acuity.
Coverage of Biden’s age, in other words, has more to do with the vibes of an “elderly” president — he isn’t as outwardly vigorous and robust as we would like — than it does with any particular issue with his performance.
In contrast to the obsessive coverage of Biden’s age, there is comparatively little coverage of Trump’s obvious deficiencies in that department. If we are going to use public comments as the measure of mental fitness, then the former president is clearly at a disadvantage.
Unfortunately for Biden, Trump benefits from something akin to the soft bigotry of low expectations. Because no one expected him, in the 2016 election, to speak and behave like a normal candidate, Trump was held to a lower effective standard than his rivals in both parties. Because no one expected him, during his presidency, to be orderly and responsible, his endless scandals were framed as business as usual. And because no one now expects him to be a responsible political figure with a coherent vision for the country, it’s as if no one blinks an eye when he rants and raves on the campaign trail.
It’s not that there aren’t legitimate reasons to be concerned about Biden’s age. He is already the oldest person to serve in the Oval Office. The issue, here, is one of proportion and consequence. Biden may be unable to do the job at some point in the future; Trump, it seems to me, already is.
One of those is a lot more concerning than the other.
By Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times
It is unclear whether Donald Trump has forgotten the precise nature of NATO or whether he ever fully grasped it in the first place.
What is clear, however, is that Trump — who ostensibly spent four years as president of the United States — has little clue of what NATO is or what NATO does. And when he spoke on the subject at a rally in South Carolina over the weekend, what he said was less a cogent discussion of foreign policy than it was gibberish — the kind of outrageous nonsense that flows without interruption from an empty and unreflective mind.
“One of the presidents of a big country stood up and said, ‘Well, sir, if we don’t pay, and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?’ ” Trump said, recalling an implausible conversation with an unnamed, presumably European head of state. “‘You didn’t pay? You’re delinquent?’ ” Trump recounted responding. “ ‘No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You gotta pay. You gotta pay your bills.’”
The former president’s message was clear: If NATO members do not pay up, then he will leave them to the mercy of a continental aggressor who has already plunged one European country into death, destruction and devastation.
Except, NATO isn’t a mafia protection racket. NATO, in case anyone needs to be reminded, is a mutual defense organization, formed by treaty in 1949 as tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union hardened into conflict. “The parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all,” states Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty.
According to the terms of an agreement reached last year, member states will work to spend at least 2 percent of national G.D.P. on military investment.
But let’s set this bit of fact-checking aside for a moment and look at the big picture.
It is not just that Trump is ignorant on this and other vital questions; it is that he is incoherent.
Consider his remarks at a recent gathering of the National Rifle Association in Harrisburg, Pa. “We have to win in November, or we’re not going to have Pennsylvania. They’ll change the name. They’re going to change the name of Pennsylvania,” Trump said.
Who, exactly, is going to change the name of Pennsylvania? And to what? I don’t know. I doubt Trump does either.
Or consider the time, last November, when Trump confused China and North Korea, telling an audience of supporters in Florida that “Kim Jong Un leads 1.4 billion people, and there is no doubt about who the boss is. And they want me to say he’s not an intelligent man.”
There was also the time that Trump mistook Nikki Haley, his former ambassador to the United Nations, for Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House.
“Nikki Haley, you know they, do you know they destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence, everything, deleted and destroyed all of it. All of it, because of lots of things like Nikki Haley is in charge of security. We offered her 10,000 people, soldiers, National Guard, whatever they want. They turned it down. They don’t want to talk about that. These are very dishonest people,” Trump said, repeating his false claim that Pelosi was responsible for the failure of Capitol security on Jan. 6.
If you would like, you can also try to make sense of the former president’s recent attempt to describe a missile defense system:
“I will build an Iron Dome over our country, a state-of-the-art missile defense shield made in the U.S.A.,” Trump said, before taking an unusual detour. “These are not muscle guys here, they’re muscle guys up here, right,” he continued, gesturing to his arms and his head to emphasize, I guess, that the people responsible for building such systems are capable and intelligent.
“And they calmly walk to us, and ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. They’ve only got 17 seconds to figure this whole thing out. Boom. OK. Missile launch. Whoosh. Boom,” Trump added.
I assume Trump is describing the pressure of actually manning a missile defense system. Even so, one would think that a former president — currently vying to be the next president — would at least try to be a little more articulate.
But this gets to one of the oddest things about this election cycle so far. There is no shortage of coverage of President Biden’s age, even if there’s no evidence that his age has been an obstacle to his ability to perform his duties. Indeed, it is plainly true that Biden has been an unusually successful president in areas, like legislative negotiations, that require skill and mental acuity.
Coverage of Biden’s age, in other words, has more to do with the vibes of an “elderly” president — he isn’t as outwardly vigorous and robust as we would like — than it does with any particular issue with his performance.
In contrast to the obsessive coverage of Biden’s age, there is comparatively little coverage of Trump’s obvious deficiencies in that department. If we are going to use public comments as the measure of mental fitness, then the former president is clearly at a disadvantage.
Unfortunately for Biden, Trump benefits from something akin to the soft bigotry of low expectations. Because no one expected him, in the 2016 election, to speak and behave like a normal candidate, Trump was held to a lower effective standard than his rivals in both parties. Because no one expected him, during his presidency, to be orderly and responsible, his endless scandals were framed as business as usual. And because no one now expects him to be a responsible political figure with a coherent vision for the country, it’s as if no one blinks an eye when he rants and raves on the campaign trail.
It’s not that there aren’t legitimate reasons to be concerned about Biden’s age. He is already the oldest person to serve in the Oval Office. The issue, here, is one of proportion and consequence. Biden may be unable to do the job at some point in the future; Trump, it seems to me, already is.
One of those is a lot more concerning than the other.
‘BUT HIS MEMORY’ AND THE SLOW TRAIN WRECK OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
Feb. 8, 2024, is a date that will live in infamy for America's failures to stop fascism, from a corrupt SCOTUS to a broken media.
By Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Some night around the year 2064, when the ragtag children of the last historians huddle around a cave fire and mix up some berries and the blood of their groundhog dinner to paint crude images of what the heck ever happened to the United States of America, they will probably render a depiction of Feb. 8, 2024 — a date which will live in infamy.
There are so many images to choose from — a corrupt and contented black-robed Supreme Court putting the last rubber stamp of cowardice on a nation’s failure to hold a coup leader accountable, or a White House press corps shouting like a pack of wild hyenas at President Joe Biden about his 81-year-old brain while ignoring the orange blob of Donald Trump as he plots the betrayal of Europe and a kind of American Kristallnacht against immigrants.
To see last Thursday unfold in real time was like watching the wreck of a slow-moving train, with democracy heading like Wile E. Coyote toward a cliff and nobody — not a Supreme Court bought and paid for by billionaires, nor a judiciary too easily gamed by inertia, nor a Congress engineered to produce only gridlock and gibberish, nor a gullible news media lacking backbone — throwing the switch to stop it. And the American people?
No one bothered to get off the couch.
Too many of us looked like the meme of Michael Jackson at the movies, shoveling buttered popcorn into our faces while watching the prime-time political theater of a suddenly energized White House press corps pummel Biden over a special counsel’s report that couldn’t find a crime in his mishandling of classified documents so it made over-the-top swipes at the octogenarian’s memory. In a nation where more than half of voters can’t name all three branches of government, Biden’s inevitable verbal gaffe — calling Egypt “Mexico” — was gleefully treated by reporters and MAGA partisans alike as if they’d won a Super Bowl prop bet on a Travis Kelce touchdown.
The real import of what happened on Feb. 8, 2024, probably won’t be understood until it is too late: The Trump train of a U.S. dictatorship gained considerable steam. Once upon a time, it was unthinkable that anyone would make a serious effort to stop the peaceful transition of presidential power. It was unthinkable that the tools we thought existed to punish someone who did this — impeachment, constitutional sanctions, the courts — would not rise to the occasion. And it was most unthinkable of all that the coup plotter could run for president again, and win.
For a lot of folks, the 2024 election is starting to feel like déjà vu all over again, a replay of 2016. That year, the news media and a good chunk of the political establishment — so convinced America could never elect a buffoonish demagogue, determined to show toughness toward the expected 45th president — turned a mini-scandal over Hillary Clinton’s private email server into the second coming of Watergate. Trump’s victory, and the media’s complicity, led to a popular meme of a neighborhood flooded by 6 feet of water with a barely visible road sign, “But Her Emails.”
Eight years later, here we are again.
There are three ways to understand such a pivotal moment for the American Experiment. The first is to look with clear eyes at what actually happened last Thursday.
— In the morning, a skeptical Supreme Court heard oral arguments on whether Trump — after leading the call for an insurrection on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021 — can be disqualified from the ballot by states invoking the specific language in the Fourteenth Amendment that aimed to bar an insurrectionist from holding federal office. It wasn’t much of a surprise that even the “liberal” justices are looking for ways to have voters, and not themselves, decide the election.
But hearing the first question from Justice Clarence Thomas — who recently recused himself from a case because of his wife’s own involvement in the run-up to Jan. 6, but inexplicably not from this case, and whose gifts from billionaires have made a mockery of the law — felt like a slap in the face of democracy. It all raises the question of whether Trump is actually above the law, in a nation too partisan for impeachment and too afraid of taking the Constitution literally, and with a judicial system that allows Trump’s lawyers to throw sand in the gears until he becomes 47th president and makes it all disappear.
— Later that day came the unexpected bombshell: the final report of the special counsel, Republican Robert Hur, about the classified documents that turned up in Biden’s home and private offices, mirroring similar scandals with Trump and his vice president Mike Pence. Hur did a good job in explaining why Biden — who cooperated with the investigation from Day One — was not charged while Trump, who labored to hide documents from probers at Mar-a-Lago, was indicted.
But the clearly ambitious GOP prosecutor didn’t stop there. Hur’s lengthy report was littered with over-the-top and seemingly gratuitous commentary about what his team believed about the 81-year-old Biden’s memory lapses, explaining at one point it would be useless to later try POTUS 46 since a jury would see him as “a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” It was the sentence that launched 1,000 New York Times hot takes, a bumper sticker of stunning cynicism.
— Thursday night, the exclamation point came in the form of another Trump victory — in a complicated Nevada caucus process that had been rigged by party bosses for his benefit — with 99.1% of the tally, a number that Saddam Hussein would have envied. It reflected the anxieties of a nation where two-thirds of voters say they’re unhappy with the two presumptive nominees and yet no serious alternatives have been offered.
A second way to view last week’s events is through the eyes of a flailing news media. Hur’s official stamp on the perception among a lot of casual voters (although not people who’ve actually dealt with the president, from retired Gen. Mark Milley to journalist John Harwood) that Biden is too old for another term was an excuse for journalists to party like it’s 2016. Especially so at the Times, which littered its home page with a half-dozen riffs including the absurdity that Biden might end his campaign.
It’s not just that Trump is nearly as old as Biden and not only makes similar gaffes — like referring to Nancy Pelosi as Nikki Haley — but also veers into insane digressions like claiming ”they” will rename Pennsylvania if he loses here in November. Or that some of the folks criticizing Biden last week, like House Speaker Mike Johnson or Fox News’ Jesse Watters, also confused nations, or states, proving anyone can do this.
It’s the media’s failure to put Biden’s occasional slips into any meaningful context. Unfortunately, Ronald Reagan helped cement the idea of a president as performer-in-chief, when that’s really not the job. The person in the White House is CEO of an outfit with a cadre of whip-smart top aides and cabinet secretaries overseeing nearly 3 million federal employees. They implement policies set by what is in the president’s heart, not the speed of the neurons in his brain. No one is going to drop a bomb on Norway instead of Syria because POTUS said the wrong word in the Oval Office.
You say a jury would find Biden “a well-meaning elderly man?” What will a jury — if it ever gets that far — say about Trump, who clearly does not mean well?
The press corps’ feeding frenzy over Biden’s brain is maybe the worst example we’ve seen in 2024 of reporters playing the odds of a political horse race, as defined by media critic Jay Rosen, while ignoring what’s at stake between the only actual choices we have, Biden and Trump.
That was driven home in what I would argue was actually the biggest story of the week — which, of course, received minimal coverage. That would be Trump’s confirmation that he and his anti-immigration guru, Stephen Miller, are advancing plans for a Day One policy in January 2025 of large-scale deportations of undocumented immigrants, bringing dead-of-night door-knocking terror to the neighborhoods where people who deserve a path toward citizenship are working and raising families. The huge number of deportees would require massive detention camps near the Texas border, in a grim echo of the worst of modern world history.
The current president thought for a split second that Egypt was Mexico, while his would-be replacement wants a war zone on the border with Mexico. Anyone see a difference here? And that’s just one of the many stakes of electing a wannabe dictator who, among other things, would surely have the “well-meaning, elderly” Biden indicted. Sometimes the media does hint at the stakes — as with Trump’s seeming greenlight to his pal Vladimir Putin to invade Europe, which ran lower on the page than Biden memory mania. But it’s not enough.
I want to be clear that, as a journalist and as a voter, I don’t think that Trump’s awfulness means that Biden gets a free pass. I was, in fact, troubled by something the president said in his Thursday night news conference — not the Egypt-Mexico thing, but when he said Israel’s murderous assault on civilians in Gaza is “over the top,” without addressing the measures like withholding weapons that he as president could do to help stop it. These are the stakes, not the odds. So many desperate human beings — from Central Americans seeking asylum to children in Gaza seeking to grow up — need us to get democracy right.
That’s why it’s painful to feel we are on that couch, watching this slow train wreck. If neither Biden’s age nor Trump’s neo-fascist policies are viewed in the right perspective, democracy will go over that cliff on Jan. 20, 2025. We need to listen to the famous words of the 1960s activist Mario Savio, that “there’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part! ... And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus — and you’ve got to make it stop!”
Feb. 8, 2024, is a date that will live in infamy for America's failures to stop fascism, from a corrupt SCOTUS to a broken media.
By Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Some night around the year 2064, when the ragtag children of the last historians huddle around a cave fire and mix up some berries and the blood of their groundhog dinner to paint crude images of what the heck ever happened to the United States of America, they will probably render a depiction of Feb. 8, 2024 — a date which will live in infamy.
There are so many images to choose from — a corrupt and contented black-robed Supreme Court putting the last rubber stamp of cowardice on a nation’s failure to hold a coup leader accountable, or a White House press corps shouting like a pack of wild hyenas at President Joe Biden about his 81-year-old brain while ignoring the orange blob of Donald Trump as he plots the betrayal of Europe and a kind of American Kristallnacht against immigrants.
To see last Thursday unfold in real time was like watching the wreck of a slow-moving train, with democracy heading like Wile E. Coyote toward a cliff and nobody — not a Supreme Court bought and paid for by billionaires, nor a judiciary too easily gamed by inertia, nor a Congress engineered to produce only gridlock and gibberish, nor a gullible news media lacking backbone — throwing the switch to stop it. And the American people?
No one bothered to get off the couch.
Too many of us looked like the meme of Michael Jackson at the movies, shoveling buttered popcorn into our faces while watching the prime-time political theater of a suddenly energized White House press corps pummel Biden over a special counsel’s report that couldn’t find a crime in his mishandling of classified documents so it made over-the-top swipes at the octogenarian’s memory. In a nation where more than half of voters can’t name all three branches of government, Biden’s inevitable verbal gaffe — calling Egypt “Mexico” — was gleefully treated by reporters and MAGA partisans alike as if they’d won a Super Bowl prop bet on a Travis Kelce touchdown.
The real import of what happened on Feb. 8, 2024, probably won’t be understood until it is too late: The Trump train of a U.S. dictatorship gained considerable steam. Once upon a time, it was unthinkable that anyone would make a serious effort to stop the peaceful transition of presidential power. It was unthinkable that the tools we thought existed to punish someone who did this — impeachment, constitutional sanctions, the courts — would not rise to the occasion. And it was most unthinkable of all that the coup plotter could run for president again, and win.
For a lot of folks, the 2024 election is starting to feel like déjà vu all over again, a replay of 2016. That year, the news media and a good chunk of the political establishment — so convinced America could never elect a buffoonish demagogue, determined to show toughness toward the expected 45th president — turned a mini-scandal over Hillary Clinton’s private email server into the second coming of Watergate. Trump’s victory, and the media’s complicity, led to a popular meme of a neighborhood flooded by 6 feet of water with a barely visible road sign, “But Her Emails.”
Eight years later, here we are again.
There are three ways to understand such a pivotal moment for the American Experiment. The first is to look with clear eyes at what actually happened last Thursday.
— In the morning, a skeptical Supreme Court heard oral arguments on whether Trump — after leading the call for an insurrection on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021 — can be disqualified from the ballot by states invoking the specific language in the Fourteenth Amendment that aimed to bar an insurrectionist from holding federal office. It wasn’t much of a surprise that even the “liberal” justices are looking for ways to have voters, and not themselves, decide the election.
But hearing the first question from Justice Clarence Thomas — who recently recused himself from a case because of his wife’s own involvement in the run-up to Jan. 6, but inexplicably not from this case, and whose gifts from billionaires have made a mockery of the law — felt like a slap in the face of democracy. It all raises the question of whether Trump is actually above the law, in a nation too partisan for impeachment and too afraid of taking the Constitution literally, and with a judicial system that allows Trump’s lawyers to throw sand in the gears until he becomes 47th president and makes it all disappear.
— Later that day came the unexpected bombshell: the final report of the special counsel, Republican Robert Hur, about the classified documents that turned up in Biden’s home and private offices, mirroring similar scandals with Trump and his vice president Mike Pence. Hur did a good job in explaining why Biden — who cooperated with the investigation from Day One — was not charged while Trump, who labored to hide documents from probers at Mar-a-Lago, was indicted.
But the clearly ambitious GOP prosecutor didn’t stop there. Hur’s lengthy report was littered with over-the-top and seemingly gratuitous commentary about what his team believed about the 81-year-old Biden’s memory lapses, explaining at one point it would be useless to later try POTUS 46 since a jury would see him as “a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” It was the sentence that launched 1,000 New York Times hot takes, a bumper sticker of stunning cynicism.
— Thursday night, the exclamation point came in the form of another Trump victory — in a complicated Nevada caucus process that had been rigged by party bosses for his benefit — with 99.1% of the tally, a number that Saddam Hussein would have envied. It reflected the anxieties of a nation where two-thirds of voters say they’re unhappy with the two presumptive nominees and yet no serious alternatives have been offered.
A second way to view last week’s events is through the eyes of a flailing news media. Hur’s official stamp on the perception among a lot of casual voters (although not people who’ve actually dealt with the president, from retired Gen. Mark Milley to journalist John Harwood) that Biden is too old for another term was an excuse for journalists to party like it’s 2016. Especially so at the Times, which littered its home page with a half-dozen riffs including the absurdity that Biden might end his campaign.
It’s not just that Trump is nearly as old as Biden and not only makes similar gaffes — like referring to Nancy Pelosi as Nikki Haley — but also veers into insane digressions like claiming ”they” will rename Pennsylvania if he loses here in November. Or that some of the folks criticizing Biden last week, like House Speaker Mike Johnson or Fox News’ Jesse Watters, also confused nations, or states, proving anyone can do this.
It’s the media’s failure to put Biden’s occasional slips into any meaningful context. Unfortunately, Ronald Reagan helped cement the idea of a president as performer-in-chief, when that’s really not the job. The person in the White House is CEO of an outfit with a cadre of whip-smart top aides and cabinet secretaries overseeing nearly 3 million federal employees. They implement policies set by what is in the president’s heart, not the speed of the neurons in his brain. No one is going to drop a bomb on Norway instead of Syria because POTUS said the wrong word in the Oval Office.
You say a jury would find Biden “a well-meaning elderly man?” What will a jury — if it ever gets that far — say about Trump, who clearly does not mean well?
The press corps’ feeding frenzy over Biden’s brain is maybe the worst example we’ve seen in 2024 of reporters playing the odds of a political horse race, as defined by media critic Jay Rosen, while ignoring what’s at stake between the only actual choices we have, Biden and Trump.
That was driven home in what I would argue was actually the biggest story of the week — which, of course, received minimal coverage. That would be Trump’s confirmation that he and his anti-immigration guru, Stephen Miller, are advancing plans for a Day One policy in January 2025 of large-scale deportations of undocumented immigrants, bringing dead-of-night door-knocking terror to the neighborhoods where people who deserve a path toward citizenship are working and raising families. The huge number of deportees would require massive detention camps near the Texas border, in a grim echo of the worst of modern world history.
The current president thought for a split second that Egypt was Mexico, while his would-be replacement wants a war zone on the border with Mexico. Anyone see a difference here? And that’s just one of the many stakes of electing a wannabe dictator who, among other things, would surely have the “well-meaning, elderly” Biden indicted. Sometimes the media does hint at the stakes — as with Trump’s seeming greenlight to his pal Vladimir Putin to invade Europe, which ran lower on the page than Biden memory mania. But it’s not enough.
I want to be clear that, as a journalist and as a voter, I don’t think that Trump’s awfulness means that Biden gets a free pass. I was, in fact, troubled by something the president said in his Thursday night news conference — not the Egypt-Mexico thing, but when he said Israel’s murderous assault on civilians in Gaza is “over the top,” without addressing the measures like withholding weapons that he as president could do to help stop it. These are the stakes, not the odds. So many desperate human beings — from Central Americans seeking asylum to children in Gaza seeking to grow up — need us to get democracy right.
That’s why it’s painful to feel we are on that couch, watching this slow train wreck. If neither Biden’s age nor Trump’s neo-fascist policies are viewed in the right perspective, democracy will go over that cliff on Jan. 20, 2025. We need to listen to the famous words of the 1960s activist Mario Savio, that “there’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part! ... And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus — and you’ve got to make it stop!”
IF TRUMP BETRAYS NATO, HE BETRAYS AMERICA.
By David French, The New York Times
At a rally on Saturday, Donald Trump made one of the most dangerous declarations ever uttered by a presumptive nominee of a major American political party. As his MAGA crowd cheered him on, he said he would “encourage” Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries that were “delinquent” in meeting NATO defense-spending targets.
The statement was shocking and — if he wins in November — deeply destabilizing. In ordinary political times it would be catastrophic to his candidacy, perhaps even catastrophic enough to energize Nikki Haley’s campaign. But these are not ordinary times.
Trump is leveraging a deeply troubling combination of partisan and ideological hatred and mass-scale civic ignorance to create the conditions for World War III. He’s every bit as dangerous as American isolationists before World War II. If one could imagine a combination of Charles Lindbergh and Neville Chamberlain, that would be Donald Trump.
I’ve interacted with MAGA enough to understand its motivations. Elements of the right despise Western democracies that they believe are “weak” or “woke.” Many of those same people admire Vladimir Putin as a modern form of Christian nationalist, a man who can wield the power of the state to protect the faith against a secularizing West.
Only a small minority of Americans hold those views, but they have disproportionate power in part because they can exploit a staggering amount of civic ignorance. Americans simply don’t know what NATO means to the United States. Many of them think we’re doing Europe some sort of favor by helping guarantee our allies’ security.
But as we’ve learned again, and again, and again in American history, starting with the War of 1812, large-scale European conflicts don’t just result in slaughter abroad; they cost us dearly at home.
NATO’s ultimate goal is relatively simple, but vital to the entire human race — to keep the gates of hell closed. By deterring a Great Power war with vast destructive potential, NATO enables an immense amount of prosperity and human flourishing, all of which could go up in literal smoke if our resolve fails.
And now a corrupt and obviously mentally decaying reality-television star threatens to crack open those terrible gates, to the raucous cheers of his devoted fans. I have concerns about Joe Biden, but no matter his condition next term, one thing I do know: He will not endanger America by destroying our most vital alliance.
By David French, The New York Times
At a rally on Saturday, Donald Trump made one of the most dangerous declarations ever uttered by a presumptive nominee of a major American political party. As his MAGA crowd cheered him on, he said he would “encourage” Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries that were “delinquent” in meeting NATO defense-spending targets.
The statement was shocking and — if he wins in November — deeply destabilizing. In ordinary political times it would be catastrophic to his candidacy, perhaps even catastrophic enough to energize Nikki Haley’s campaign. But these are not ordinary times.
Trump is leveraging a deeply troubling combination of partisan and ideological hatred and mass-scale civic ignorance to create the conditions for World War III. He’s every bit as dangerous as American isolationists before World War II. If one could imagine a combination of Charles Lindbergh and Neville Chamberlain, that would be Donald Trump.
I’ve interacted with MAGA enough to understand its motivations. Elements of the right despise Western democracies that they believe are “weak” or “woke.” Many of those same people admire Vladimir Putin as a modern form of Christian nationalist, a man who can wield the power of the state to protect the faith against a secularizing West.
Only a small minority of Americans hold those views, but they have disproportionate power in part because they can exploit a staggering amount of civic ignorance. Americans simply don’t know what NATO means to the United States. Many of them think we’re doing Europe some sort of favor by helping guarantee our allies’ security.
But as we’ve learned again, and again, and again in American history, starting with the War of 1812, large-scale European conflicts don’t just result in slaughter abroad; they cost us dearly at home.
NATO’s ultimate goal is relatively simple, but vital to the entire human race — to keep the gates of hell closed. By deterring a Great Power war with vast destructive potential, NATO enables an immense amount of prosperity and human flourishing, all of which could go up in literal smoke if our resolve fails.
And now a corrupt and obviously mentally decaying reality-television star threatens to crack open those terrible gates, to the raucous cheers of his devoted fans. I have concerns about Joe Biden, but no matter his condition next term, one thing I do know: He will not endanger America by destroying our most vital alliance.
SPEAKER JOHNSON SHOULD SEE WHAT I JUST SAW IN UKRAINE
By Max Boot, The Washington Post
KYIV — I wish House Speaker Mike Johnson and other MAGA Republicans who have been holding up desperately needed aid to Ukraine could see what I just saw there. In particular, I wish they had been with me on Wednesday morning in Dnipro, a bustling city of about 1 million people in eastern Ukraine. If they had been, they might be less willing to betray the people of Ukraine in their desperate struggle for survival against a barbaric invader.
The day began when air-raid alarms sounded at 5:15 a.m. Roused out of sleep, I stumbled down to the hotel bomb shelter along with other members of a U.S. delegation of policy analysts and former government officials invited to Ukraine by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. We were in Ukraine to see the important work UNHCR is doing to help the millions of people displaced by war.
That morning, as we spent hours in a bomb shelter, we saw why so many have been forced to flee their homes: Vladimir Putin keeps deliberately attacking civilian targets in the hope of breaking Ukraine’s will to resist. On Wednesday, the Russians launched 64 drones and missiles at Ukraine. Most were intercepted, but some got through. A few days later, we saw the damage to an apartment building in Kyiv where four people had been killed, 39 injured and hundreds of others forced out of their homes.
In Dnipro, we visited an apartment building where at least 64 people had died in an earlier Russian missile strike. Eerily enough, we could still see clothes hanging in a top-floor closet — visible because the entire front wall of the building was gone. Other Russian missiles have struck hospitals, schools and shopping malls in the area. These are targets of no military value whose destruction amounts to crimes against humanity.
The situation is even grimmer in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, which is located only about 20 miles from the Russian border. Russian forces are constantly bombarding Kharkiv with short-range rockets. The city’s best hotel, once favored by Western journalists and aid workers, was destroyed on Dec. 30. Most other businesses remain open, but many have boarded-up windows. We visited a “subway school” held underground, because it’s too dangerous for children to go to their normal classrooms. (Most of the city’s pupils are forced into the pedagogical purgatory of online learning.) I marveled at Ukrainian ingenuity in converting five subway stations into schools but was heartbroken by the necessity to do so.
In Kharkiv’s North Saltivka neighborhood — shelled regularly by the Russians for six months in 2022 — not a building had escaped damage. Once home to 40,000 residents, this district we visited is now virtually deserted. One of the few remaining residents, an elderly woman named Nadiia, couldn’t stop crying as she recounted to me the shock of the Russian invasion nearly two years ago. “I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “Bullets were flying past us. I was just praying.”
I wished I could comfort her and tell her that she was safe now, but the evidence suggests otherwise. Just last month, a Russian rocket demolished another nearby building. And residents have recently been forced to flee the town of Kupyansk, just 74 miles away, because the Russians are massing for another attack there in the hope of regaining territory lost to the Ukrainians in October 2022.
Last May, when I was in Ukraine, optimism was in the air. The Ukrainians were preparing a major counteroffensive that they hoped would drive the invaders out of the country’s south and shorten the war. But it ultimately failed, and the war grinds on — with no end in sight as it enters its third year. Putin has mobilized more troops, converted his economy to a war footing, and bought weapons from Iran and North Korea. Ukraine is struggling to keep pace. “People are tired,” Odessa’s regional governor, Oleh Kiper, told us. “They don’t understand what lies ahead.”
The first cracks are beginning to appear in the facade of Ukraine’s wartime unity. On Thursday, while I was on a train from Kharkiv to Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelensky fired the popular commander of his armed forces, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny. The two men had long had a tense relationship. Zaluzhny was replaced by Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, the former commander of land forces, who is less popular with the rank-and-file but gets along better with the president. The change of commanders was risky, but Zaluzhny’s exit was at least handled with dignity.
No matter who runs the military, however, Ukraine confronts two fundamental problems: a shortage of troops and a shortage of ammunition. The former is Ukraine’s own doing. It needs to mobilize more soldiers and to give a breather to those who have been fighting continuously for two years. But men are no longer rushing to volunteer as in the early days of the war, and an expansion of conscription would be unpopular and expensive. So Zelensky has dawdled, leading to complaints from front-line units that they don’t have enough troops to hold back the Russians’ meat-grinder assaults. Zelensky resisted Zaluzhny’s recommendations to mobilize as many as 500,000 additional troops. Now, a bill to expand conscription is finally advancing in parliament, but it will take time to train raw draftees.
The shortage of weapons, by contrast, is the West’s fault. The Western countries are collectively far bigger than Russia in both population and wealth, but they have not increased their armaments production as rapidly as Moscow has done. Ukraine is ramping up its own output, particularly of drones, but it will take years for it to develop the necessary manufacturing capacity. In the meantime, Ukraine faces an alarming shortage of ammunition: Russian forces are firing five artillery shells for every shell fired by the Ukrainians. If this disparity is not addressed soon, Ukrainian front lines might crumble. That is why it’s so critical for the United States to provide $60 billion in aid — much of which will go to U.S. defense companies.
The European Union, admittedly, just pledged $54 billion in financial aid to Ukraine, and European countries are providing far more aid overall than the United States. But Europe can’t meet Ukraine’s urgent military needs without U.S. help. Unless the United States steps forward soon, Ukraine will run low not only on artillery ammunition but also on air-defense ammunition. That could lead to greater destruction in its cities, which would spark a fresh refugee crisis and set back a burgeoning economic recovery.
Ukraine’s unheralded success in the battle for the Black Sea — employing sea drones and missiles to drive back the Russian fleet — has reopened that vital shipping route. As we discovered during a visit to Odessa, that region’s three ports are back to almost prewar levels of exports. The National Bank of Ukraine has forecast a 3.6 percent economic growth this year, but those projections will be dashed if Ukraine can’t safeguard its major population centers from Russian airstrikes.
The Ukrainians are not giving up, even if polls show that a small but growing minority — about 20 percent in December, up from 10 percent in May — are willing to make territorial concessions to the Russians if that will bring peace. Of course, Putin, buoyed by growing Republican opposition to aiding Ukraine, shows no interest in compromising, regardless of his feint in that direction in an interview last week with Tucker Carlson. So the killing continues.
“People are traumatized, but we don’t have a choice,” Deputy Foreign Minister Iryna Borovets told us in Kyiv. “We are fighting for our existence. … If the Russians win, there would be genocide.” A regional official in Dnipro pithily summed up the national mood: “We are tired but not exhausted.”
Many Ukrainians told us that they are inspired to fight on in part because they know that they are not alone — they have the support of the West. If the United States were to cut them off, it would be, among other things, a devastating psychological blow, giving Ukrainians the impression that they are being abandoned.
There is still time for the House of Representatives to do the right thing and pass the aid package that is finally advancing in the Senate. But it isn’t clear whether the speaker, in thrall to former president Donald Trump and his MAGA extremists, will even give the bill a floor vote. As Johnson (La.) prepares to make the most momentous decision of his political career, he should travel to Ukraine to meet the people whose lives and liberties rest in his hands.
Every time I visit Ukraine, I come away impressed by Ukrainian resilience and enraged by Putin’s continuing aggression. I imagine that Johnson, who professes to be a devout Christian, might feel equally moved by the suffering of the Ukrainians — and by their pleas for more U.S. support. (“We will not endure without the assistance of the U.S.A.,” Borovets warned.) But Johnson has not been to Ukraine since the Russian invasion and has not announced any plans to visit. That worries me. It’s easier to stab people in the back if you’re unwilling to look them in the eye.
By Max Boot, The Washington Post
KYIV — I wish House Speaker Mike Johnson and other MAGA Republicans who have been holding up desperately needed aid to Ukraine could see what I just saw there. In particular, I wish they had been with me on Wednesday morning in Dnipro, a bustling city of about 1 million people in eastern Ukraine. If they had been, they might be less willing to betray the people of Ukraine in their desperate struggle for survival against a barbaric invader.
The day began when air-raid alarms sounded at 5:15 a.m. Roused out of sleep, I stumbled down to the hotel bomb shelter along with other members of a U.S. delegation of policy analysts and former government officials invited to Ukraine by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. We were in Ukraine to see the important work UNHCR is doing to help the millions of people displaced by war.
That morning, as we spent hours in a bomb shelter, we saw why so many have been forced to flee their homes: Vladimir Putin keeps deliberately attacking civilian targets in the hope of breaking Ukraine’s will to resist. On Wednesday, the Russians launched 64 drones and missiles at Ukraine. Most were intercepted, but some got through. A few days later, we saw the damage to an apartment building in Kyiv where four people had been killed, 39 injured and hundreds of others forced out of their homes.
In Dnipro, we visited an apartment building where at least 64 people had died in an earlier Russian missile strike. Eerily enough, we could still see clothes hanging in a top-floor closet — visible because the entire front wall of the building was gone. Other Russian missiles have struck hospitals, schools and shopping malls in the area. These are targets of no military value whose destruction amounts to crimes against humanity.
The situation is even grimmer in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, which is located only about 20 miles from the Russian border. Russian forces are constantly bombarding Kharkiv with short-range rockets. The city’s best hotel, once favored by Western journalists and aid workers, was destroyed on Dec. 30. Most other businesses remain open, but many have boarded-up windows. We visited a “subway school” held underground, because it’s too dangerous for children to go to their normal classrooms. (Most of the city’s pupils are forced into the pedagogical purgatory of online learning.) I marveled at Ukrainian ingenuity in converting five subway stations into schools but was heartbroken by the necessity to do so.
In Kharkiv’s North Saltivka neighborhood — shelled regularly by the Russians for six months in 2022 — not a building had escaped damage. Once home to 40,000 residents, this district we visited is now virtually deserted. One of the few remaining residents, an elderly woman named Nadiia, couldn’t stop crying as she recounted to me the shock of the Russian invasion nearly two years ago. “I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “Bullets were flying past us. I was just praying.”
I wished I could comfort her and tell her that she was safe now, but the evidence suggests otherwise. Just last month, a Russian rocket demolished another nearby building. And residents have recently been forced to flee the town of Kupyansk, just 74 miles away, because the Russians are massing for another attack there in the hope of regaining territory lost to the Ukrainians in October 2022.
Last May, when I was in Ukraine, optimism was in the air. The Ukrainians were preparing a major counteroffensive that they hoped would drive the invaders out of the country’s south and shorten the war. But it ultimately failed, and the war grinds on — with no end in sight as it enters its third year. Putin has mobilized more troops, converted his economy to a war footing, and bought weapons from Iran and North Korea. Ukraine is struggling to keep pace. “People are tired,” Odessa’s regional governor, Oleh Kiper, told us. “They don’t understand what lies ahead.”
The first cracks are beginning to appear in the facade of Ukraine’s wartime unity. On Thursday, while I was on a train from Kharkiv to Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelensky fired the popular commander of his armed forces, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny. The two men had long had a tense relationship. Zaluzhny was replaced by Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, the former commander of land forces, who is less popular with the rank-and-file but gets along better with the president. The change of commanders was risky, but Zaluzhny’s exit was at least handled with dignity.
No matter who runs the military, however, Ukraine confronts two fundamental problems: a shortage of troops and a shortage of ammunition. The former is Ukraine’s own doing. It needs to mobilize more soldiers and to give a breather to those who have been fighting continuously for two years. But men are no longer rushing to volunteer as in the early days of the war, and an expansion of conscription would be unpopular and expensive. So Zelensky has dawdled, leading to complaints from front-line units that they don’t have enough troops to hold back the Russians’ meat-grinder assaults. Zelensky resisted Zaluzhny’s recommendations to mobilize as many as 500,000 additional troops. Now, a bill to expand conscription is finally advancing in parliament, but it will take time to train raw draftees.
The shortage of weapons, by contrast, is the West’s fault. The Western countries are collectively far bigger than Russia in both population and wealth, but they have not increased their armaments production as rapidly as Moscow has done. Ukraine is ramping up its own output, particularly of drones, but it will take years for it to develop the necessary manufacturing capacity. In the meantime, Ukraine faces an alarming shortage of ammunition: Russian forces are firing five artillery shells for every shell fired by the Ukrainians. If this disparity is not addressed soon, Ukrainian front lines might crumble. That is why it’s so critical for the United States to provide $60 billion in aid — much of which will go to U.S. defense companies.
The European Union, admittedly, just pledged $54 billion in financial aid to Ukraine, and European countries are providing far more aid overall than the United States. But Europe can’t meet Ukraine’s urgent military needs without U.S. help. Unless the United States steps forward soon, Ukraine will run low not only on artillery ammunition but also on air-defense ammunition. That could lead to greater destruction in its cities, which would spark a fresh refugee crisis and set back a burgeoning economic recovery.
Ukraine’s unheralded success in the battle for the Black Sea — employing sea drones and missiles to drive back the Russian fleet — has reopened that vital shipping route. As we discovered during a visit to Odessa, that region’s three ports are back to almost prewar levels of exports. The National Bank of Ukraine has forecast a 3.6 percent economic growth this year, but those projections will be dashed if Ukraine can’t safeguard its major population centers from Russian airstrikes.
The Ukrainians are not giving up, even if polls show that a small but growing minority — about 20 percent in December, up from 10 percent in May — are willing to make territorial concessions to the Russians if that will bring peace. Of course, Putin, buoyed by growing Republican opposition to aiding Ukraine, shows no interest in compromising, regardless of his feint in that direction in an interview last week with Tucker Carlson. So the killing continues.
“People are traumatized, but we don’t have a choice,” Deputy Foreign Minister Iryna Borovets told us in Kyiv. “We are fighting for our existence. … If the Russians win, there would be genocide.” A regional official in Dnipro pithily summed up the national mood: “We are tired but not exhausted.”
Many Ukrainians told us that they are inspired to fight on in part because they know that they are not alone — they have the support of the West. If the United States were to cut them off, it would be, among other things, a devastating psychological blow, giving Ukrainians the impression that they are being abandoned.
There is still time for the House of Representatives to do the right thing and pass the aid package that is finally advancing in the Senate. But it isn’t clear whether the speaker, in thrall to former president Donald Trump and his MAGA extremists, will even give the bill a floor vote. As Johnson (La.) prepares to make the most momentous decision of his political career, he should travel to Ukraine to meet the people whose lives and liberties rest in his hands.
Every time I visit Ukraine, I come away impressed by Ukrainian resilience and enraged by Putin’s continuing aggression. I imagine that Johnson, who professes to be a devout Christian, might feel equally moved by the suffering of the Ukrainians — and by their pleas for more U.S. support. (“We will not endure without the assistance of the U.S.A.,” Borovets warned.) But Johnson has not been to Ukraine since the Russian invasion and has not announced any plans to visit. That worries me. It’s easier to stab people in the back if you’re unwilling to look them in the eye.
HUR’S POLITICAL HATCHET JOB. GARLAND’S BLUNDER. MEDIA COMPLICITY.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Special counsel Robert K. Hur had a single task: Determine if President Biden illegally retained sensitive documents after his vice presidency. The answer should not have taken nearly 13 months or a more than 300-page report. Hur also should have avoided trashing “the fundamental ethos of a prosecutor to avoid gratuitous smears,” as former White House ethics czar Norm Eisen told me.
Hur found that “the evidence does not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt” and that prosecution was “also unwarranted based on our consideration of the aggravating and mitigating factors.” He seemed to intentionally disguise that conclusion with contradictory and misleading language that “Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.” He conceded that was not legally provable. (As Just Security pointed out, the media predictably and widely misreported this: “The press incorrectly and repeatedly blast out that the Hur report found Biden willfully retained classified documents, in other words, that Biden committed a felony; with some in the news media further trumpeting that the Special Counsel decided only as a matter of discretion not to recommend charges.”)
Hur acknowledged that Biden’s cooperation, “including by reporting to the government that the Afghanistan documents were in his Delaware garage,” leaves the impression he made “an innocent mistake, rather than acting willfully — that is, with intent to break the law — as the statute requires.” Moreover, Hur conceded that the documents “could have been stored, by mistake and without his knowledge, at his Delaware home since the time he was vice president, as were other classified documents recovered during our investigation.”
The body of the report refutes the element of willfulness — noting a variety of factors (e.g., a good-faith belief the Afghanistan memo was no longer classified, presidents’ practice of taking notes with them). Hur also distinguished Biden’s behavior from four-times-indicted former president Donald Trump:
Several material distinctions between Mr. Trump’s case and Mr. Biden’s are clear. Unlike the evidence involving Mr. Biden, the allegations set forth in the indictment of Mr. Trump, if proven, would present serious aggravating facts. Most notably, after being given multiple chances to return classified documents and avoid prosecution, Mr. Trump allegedly did the opposite. According to the indictment, he not only refused to return the documents for many months, but he also obstructed justice by enlisting others to destroy evidence and then to lie about it. In contrast, Mr. Biden turned in classified documents to the National Archives and the Department of Justice, consented to the search of multiple locations including his homes, sat for a voluntary interview, and in other ways cooperated with the investigation.
That should have been the end of the matter.
But it was Hur’s gratuitous smear about Biden’s age and memory — most egregiously, his far-fetched allegation that Biden could not recall the date of his son Beau’s death — that transformed a snide report into a political screed. Speculating about how a jury might have perceived the president years after the incidents took place was entirely irrelevant because the lack of evidence meant there would be no case.
Former prosecutors were almost uniformly outraged. Jeffrey Toobin remarked, “It was outrageous that Hur put in some of that stuff in this report. That had no place in it.” He added, “There is no reason this report had to be 300 pages. There is no reason this fairly straightforward case had to be treated this way. … The job of prosecutors is to put up or shut up.”
Former prosecutor Andrew Weissmann called Hur’s jabs “entirely inappropriate.” He tweeted, “Of course, no crime was committed by Biden, but as anticipated, Hur takes the opportunity to make a gratuitous political swipe at Biden. … [Attorney General Merrick] Garland was right to have appointed a Special Counsel but wrong to pick Hur and to think only a Republican could fit the bill.” (Weissmann analogized to former FBI chief James B. Comey, who exonerated Hillary Clinton of crimes but savaged her conduct just days before the 2016 election.)
Likewise, ethics guru Matthew Seligman told me, “What Hur should have written — and all he should have written — is that there is insufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that President Biden’s level of intent rose to the willfulness standard required by the statute.” Eisen argues that Hur violated the Justice Department’s prosecutorial principles. (“Federal prosecutors should remain sensitive to the privacy and reputation interests of uncharged parties,” the rules say.)
Hur is not solely to blame for going beyond his mandate and introducing smears. Garland erred in appointing and giving free rein to a Republican loyalist. He should have anticipated that a rock-ribbed Republican such as Hur would echo GOP campaign smears attacking Biden’s memory and age. Garland’s lousy judgment wound up sullying and politicizing the Justice Department.
As former prosecutor Shan Wu wrote, “It was Garland’s responsibility to ensure that Hur’s report did not stray from proper Justice Department standards. Garland should have known the risks when he picked Hur — who had clerked for conservative Chief Justice William Rehnquist, served as the top aide to Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who assisted [Attorney General] Bill Barr’s distortion of the Mueller Report, and who was a Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney.” (Hur also clerked for Judge Alex Kozinski, a right-wing icon on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit who was forced to resign over accusations of decades-long egregious sexual harassment.) Unlike Barr, Garland did not even release a summary to focus on the salient facts. This blunder, coupled with his unconscionable delay in investigating Trump, bolsters criticism that Garland has been the wrong man for the job.
Finally, the media — which made a spectacle of itself hollering at and interrupting Biden in his news conference after the report was released — certainly amplified the GOP talking point. Many outlets failed to explain that there was insufficient evidence of willfulness. For days, headlines focused on the memory smear rather than on Biden’s exoneration. Worse, Sunday news shows misreported the report.
The Biden-Harris campaign decried the media’s obsession with Biden’s age while virtually ignoring another rambling, incoherent Trump speech in which he insisted Pennsylvania would be renamed if he lost. (In South Carolina on Saturday, he was at it again, inviting Russia to invade NATO countries and insulting Nikki Haley’s deployed husband.) By habitually and artificially leveling the playing field, much of the media enables MAGA propaganda and neglects Trump’s obvious mental and emotional infirmities.
Still, facts matter. Biden acted responsibly and committed no crime. Trump faces multiple felony counts, including intentionally withholding top-secret documents and obstructing an investigation. Three years separate Biden and Trump in age, but the distance between their mental and emotional fitness remains incalculable — as is the chasm between the media we have and the media democracy requires.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Special counsel Robert K. Hur had a single task: Determine if President Biden illegally retained sensitive documents after his vice presidency. The answer should not have taken nearly 13 months or a more than 300-page report. Hur also should have avoided trashing “the fundamental ethos of a prosecutor to avoid gratuitous smears,” as former White House ethics czar Norm Eisen told me.
Hur found that “the evidence does not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt” and that prosecution was “also unwarranted based on our consideration of the aggravating and mitigating factors.” He seemed to intentionally disguise that conclusion with contradictory and misleading language that “Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.” He conceded that was not legally provable. (As Just Security pointed out, the media predictably and widely misreported this: “The press incorrectly and repeatedly blast out that the Hur report found Biden willfully retained classified documents, in other words, that Biden committed a felony; with some in the news media further trumpeting that the Special Counsel decided only as a matter of discretion not to recommend charges.”)
Hur acknowledged that Biden’s cooperation, “including by reporting to the government that the Afghanistan documents were in his Delaware garage,” leaves the impression he made “an innocent mistake, rather than acting willfully — that is, with intent to break the law — as the statute requires.” Moreover, Hur conceded that the documents “could have been stored, by mistake and without his knowledge, at his Delaware home since the time he was vice president, as were other classified documents recovered during our investigation.”
The body of the report refutes the element of willfulness — noting a variety of factors (e.g., a good-faith belief the Afghanistan memo was no longer classified, presidents’ practice of taking notes with them). Hur also distinguished Biden’s behavior from four-times-indicted former president Donald Trump:
Several material distinctions between Mr. Trump’s case and Mr. Biden’s are clear. Unlike the evidence involving Mr. Biden, the allegations set forth in the indictment of Mr. Trump, if proven, would present serious aggravating facts. Most notably, after being given multiple chances to return classified documents and avoid prosecution, Mr. Trump allegedly did the opposite. According to the indictment, he not only refused to return the documents for many months, but he also obstructed justice by enlisting others to destroy evidence and then to lie about it. In contrast, Mr. Biden turned in classified documents to the National Archives and the Department of Justice, consented to the search of multiple locations including his homes, sat for a voluntary interview, and in other ways cooperated with the investigation.
That should have been the end of the matter.
But it was Hur’s gratuitous smear about Biden’s age and memory — most egregiously, his far-fetched allegation that Biden could not recall the date of his son Beau’s death — that transformed a snide report into a political screed. Speculating about how a jury might have perceived the president years after the incidents took place was entirely irrelevant because the lack of evidence meant there would be no case.
Former prosecutors were almost uniformly outraged. Jeffrey Toobin remarked, “It was outrageous that Hur put in some of that stuff in this report. That had no place in it.” He added, “There is no reason this report had to be 300 pages. There is no reason this fairly straightforward case had to be treated this way. … The job of prosecutors is to put up or shut up.”
Former prosecutor Andrew Weissmann called Hur’s jabs “entirely inappropriate.” He tweeted, “Of course, no crime was committed by Biden, but as anticipated, Hur takes the opportunity to make a gratuitous political swipe at Biden. … [Attorney General Merrick] Garland was right to have appointed a Special Counsel but wrong to pick Hur and to think only a Republican could fit the bill.” (Weissmann analogized to former FBI chief James B. Comey, who exonerated Hillary Clinton of crimes but savaged her conduct just days before the 2016 election.)
Likewise, ethics guru Matthew Seligman told me, “What Hur should have written — and all he should have written — is that there is insufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that President Biden’s level of intent rose to the willfulness standard required by the statute.” Eisen argues that Hur violated the Justice Department’s prosecutorial principles. (“Federal prosecutors should remain sensitive to the privacy and reputation interests of uncharged parties,” the rules say.)
Hur is not solely to blame for going beyond his mandate and introducing smears. Garland erred in appointing and giving free rein to a Republican loyalist. He should have anticipated that a rock-ribbed Republican such as Hur would echo GOP campaign smears attacking Biden’s memory and age. Garland’s lousy judgment wound up sullying and politicizing the Justice Department.
As former prosecutor Shan Wu wrote, “It was Garland’s responsibility to ensure that Hur’s report did not stray from proper Justice Department standards. Garland should have known the risks when he picked Hur — who had clerked for conservative Chief Justice William Rehnquist, served as the top aide to Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who assisted [Attorney General] Bill Barr’s distortion of the Mueller Report, and who was a Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney.” (Hur also clerked for Judge Alex Kozinski, a right-wing icon on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit who was forced to resign over accusations of decades-long egregious sexual harassment.) Unlike Barr, Garland did not even release a summary to focus on the salient facts. This blunder, coupled with his unconscionable delay in investigating Trump, bolsters criticism that Garland has been the wrong man for the job.
Finally, the media — which made a spectacle of itself hollering at and interrupting Biden in his news conference after the report was released — certainly amplified the GOP talking point. Many outlets failed to explain that there was insufficient evidence of willfulness. For days, headlines focused on the memory smear rather than on Biden’s exoneration. Worse, Sunday news shows misreported the report.
The Biden-Harris campaign decried the media’s obsession with Biden’s age while virtually ignoring another rambling, incoherent Trump speech in which he insisted Pennsylvania would be renamed if he lost. (In South Carolina on Saturday, he was at it again, inviting Russia to invade NATO countries and insulting Nikki Haley’s deployed husband.) By habitually and artificially leveling the playing field, much of the media enables MAGA propaganda and neglects Trump’s obvious mental and emotional infirmities.
Still, facts matter. Biden acted responsibly and committed no crime. Trump faces multiple felony counts, including intentionally withholding top-secret documents and obstructing an investigation. Three years separate Biden and Trump in age, but the distance between their mental and emotional fitness remains incalculable — as is the chasm between the media we have and the media democracy requires.
LET’S JUST SAY IT: THE REPUBLICAN PROBLEM IS METASTASIZING
By E.J. Dionne Jr., The Washington Post
Twelve years ago, political scientists Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein shook up Washington with their argument that the U.S. government wasn’t working because of what had happened to the Republican Party.
They made their case in a book, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” and in a powerful Post op-ed titled “Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.”
“The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics,” they wrote. “It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.”
Mann and Ornstein — I should note they’re my friends, and we wrote a subsequent book together — took a lot of grief for supposedly being partisan. This criticism flew in the face of their entire professional careers: thoroughly balanced, appreciative of the work of many Republican politicians and deeply engaged in making our nation’s political institutions work better.
Events of the past week not only ratify what they wrote but suggest that matters are, to borrow from them, even worse now.
It’s one thing for a party to oppose the other party’s proposals over differences of principle. Small-d democratic politics ought to be a contest of ideas and a debate over which remedies are more likely to work.
It’s something else entirely for a party to reject its own ideas to address a crisis simply because it doesn’t want to get in the way of a campaign issue. This is exactly what Republicans did at the behest of former president Donald Trump after President Biden and Senate Democrats offered the best deal the GOP could hope for to strengthen the nation’s southern border.
You have to feel for Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who was chosen by Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to negotiate the border deal precisely because he had tough immigration views. Trump himself described Lankford in his 2022 endorsement as “Strong on the Border.”
But if Trump claims the right as president to break the law, he also asserts the right to lie with impunity. He insisted, falsely: “I did not endorse Sen. Lankford. I didn’t do it.” Former students at Trump University are familiar with this sort of thing.
Lankford recounted on the Senate floor what happens these days to Republicans who try to legislate: A “popular commentator,” he said, threatened to “destroy” him if he dared try to solve the border crisis during a presidential election year.
The episode speaks to how the trends Mann and Ornstein caught on to early have metastasized. Power in the GOP has moved away from elected officials and toward those right-wing “commentators” on television, radio, podcasts and online. The creation of ideological media bubbles enhances their power. Republicans in large numbers rely on partisan outlets that lied freely about what Lankford’s compromise did and didn’t do, rather than on straight news reports.
The party’s hostile vibe can also be traced back to a habit in the Bush years to distinguish between “real America” (the places that vote Republican) and what is presumably unreal America. Declaring a large swath of the population to be less than American means they’re not worth dealing with and, increasingly, easy to hold in contempt.
Then there is the denigration of science, dispassionate research and technical knowledge. In his book “The Death of Expertise,” writer Tom Nichols described this mournfully as a “campaign against established knowledge.”
Challenging experts is, of course, a democratic right and can be useful in calling out those who disguise their interests behind claims of special understanding. But Republicans have put this practice to naked political use in pushing back against action on climate, necessary regulation and public health advice.
Something big happened in this arena in the late 2000s. GOP attitudes on climate are a telltale: In 2007, the Pew Research Center found, 62 percent of Republicans believed there was solid evidence of global warming. By 2009, only 35 percent did.
Many GOP legislators — notably John McCain — were active in climate discussions earlier in the decade; not so later. This speaks to the larger retreat from problem-solving, reflected now, in the most perverse way possible, in the flight from an immigration proposal Republicans could have written themselves — and, thanks to Lankford, largely did.
For those who try to be hopeful, there are a few straws to clutch at. The Senate just might approve aid for Ukraine, putting pressure on GOP leaders in the House to keep our nation’s commitments. For its part, the House passed an important increase in the child tax credit, which might move Senate Republicans to do the same.
But the way things are going, Republicans in each chamber are just as likely to ignore the other’s better instincts. “Worsest” is not a word, but Mann and Ornstein might need it if they publish a new edition.
By E.J. Dionne Jr., The Washington Post
Twelve years ago, political scientists Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein shook up Washington with their argument that the U.S. government wasn’t working because of what had happened to the Republican Party.
They made their case in a book, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” and in a powerful Post op-ed titled “Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.”
“The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics,” they wrote. “It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.”
Mann and Ornstein — I should note they’re my friends, and we wrote a subsequent book together — took a lot of grief for supposedly being partisan. This criticism flew in the face of their entire professional careers: thoroughly balanced, appreciative of the work of many Republican politicians and deeply engaged in making our nation’s political institutions work better.
Events of the past week not only ratify what they wrote but suggest that matters are, to borrow from them, even worse now.
It’s one thing for a party to oppose the other party’s proposals over differences of principle. Small-d democratic politics ought to be a contest of ideas and a debate over which remedies are more likely to work.
It’s something else entirely for a party to reject its own ideas to address a crisis simply because it doesn’t want to get in the way of a campaign issue. This is exactly what Republicans did at the behest of former president Donald Trump after President Biden and Senate Democrats offered the best deal the GOP could hope for to strengthen the nation’s southern border.
You have to feel for Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who was chosen by Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to negotiate the border deal precisely because he had tough immigration views. Trump himself described Lankford in his 2022 endorsement as “Strong on the Border.”
But if Trump claims the right as president to break the law, he also asserts the right to lie with impunity. He insisted, falsely: “I did not endorse Sen. Lankford. I didn’t do it.” Former students at Trump University are familiar with this sort of thing.
Lankford recounted on the Senate floor what happens these days to Republicans who try to legislate: A “popular commentator,” he said, threatened to “destroy” him if he dared try to solve the border crisis during a presidential election year.
The episode speaks to how the trends Mann and Ornstein caught on to early have metastasized. Power in the GOP has moved away from elected officials and toward those right-wing “commentators” on television, radio, podcasts and online. The creation of ideological media bubbles enhances their power. Republicans in large numbers rely on partisan outlets that lied freely about what Lankford’s compromise did and didn’t do, rather than on straight news reports.
The party’s hostile vibe can also be traced back to a habit in the Bush years to distinguish between “real America” (the places that vote Republican) and what is presumably unreal America. Declaring a large swath of the population to be less than American means they’re not worth dealing with and, increasingly, easy to hold in contempt.
Then there is the denigration of science, dispassionate research and technical knowledge. In his book “The Death of Expertise,” writer Tom Nichols described this mournfully as a “campaign against established knowledge.”
Challenging experts is, of course, a democratic right and can be useful in calling out those who disguise their interests behind claims of special understanding. But Republicans have put this practice to naked political use in pushing back against action on climate, necessary regulation and public health advice.
Something big happened in this arena in the late 2000s. GOP attitudes on climate are a telltale: In 2007, the Pew Research Center found, 62 percent of Republicans believed there was solid evidence of global warming. By 2009, only 35 percent did.
Many GOP legislators — notably John McCain — were active in climate discussions earlier in the decade; not so later. This speaks to the larger retreat from problem-solving, reflected now, in the most perverse way possible, in the flight from an immigration proposal Republicans could have written themselves — and, thanks to Lankford, largely did.
For those who try to be hopeful, there are a few straws to clutch at. The Senate just might approve aid for Ukraine, putting pressure on GOP leaders in the House to keep our nation’s commitments. For its part, the House passed an important increase in the child tax credit, which might move Senate Republicans to do the same.
But the way things are going, Republicans in each chamber are just as likely to ignore the other’s better instincts. “Worsest” is not a word, but Mann and Ornstein might need it if they publish a new edition.
TRUMP SAYS HE GAVE NATO ALLIES WARNING: PAY IN OR HE’D URGE RUSSIAN AGGRESSION
Speaking in Conway, S.C., Donald J. Trump said as president he had told NATO allies that he would urge Russian aggression against countries that had not met unofficial financial commitments.
By Michael Gold, The New York Times
Former President Donald J. Trump said on Saturday that, while president, he told the leaders of NATO countries that he would “encourage” Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to countries that had not paid the money they owed to the military alliance.
In repeating a claim he has made previously to highlight his negotiation skills, Mr. Trump did not make clear that while there has been a spending-related dispute, it was not about an unpaid debt to NATO, but over European countries meeting their spending commitments to their own militaries. Some NATO members are spending below an unofficial commitment to spend 2 percent of their economic output on defense.
Mr. Trump’s suggestion that he would encourage Russian aggression against allies of the United States — for any reason — comes as Republicans in Congress have pushed back against more aid for Ukraine in its war against Russia, and is likely to cause concern among NATO member states, which are already very nervous about the prospect of a Trump return.
Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, dismissed those warnings as “threat mongering" in an interview with Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, that aired on Thursday. “We have no interest in Poland, Latvia or anywhere else,” Mr. Putin said.
But he has also called on the United States to “make an agreement” to end the war in Ukraine by ceding Ukrainian territory to Russia, comments that were seen by some as an appeal to American conservatives to block further involvement in the war.
Some European officials and foreign policy experts have said they are concerned that Russia could invade a NATO nation after its war with Ukraine concludes, fears that they say are heightened by the possibility of Mr. Trump returning to the presidency.
In a statement, a White House spokesman, Andrew Bates, called Mr. Trump’s comments “appalling and unhinged,” adding, “Rather than calling for wars and promoting deranged chaos, President Biden will continue to bolster American leadership and stand up for our national security interests — not against them.”
Mr. Trump has previously expressed his belief that support for NATO is overly burdensome on the United States, saying the alliance drains its financial and military resources. His campaign website says that the country must re-evaluate the organization’s purpose.
He has in the past recalled privately telling NATO members that the United States would not defend them from Russian attacks if they were in arrears. Last year, he claimed during a campaign speech that “hundreds of billions of dollars came flowing in” to NATO after he made that threat.
On Saturday, he again brought up that anecdote, saying that he told European leaders they had to “pay up.”
Then, he said, the president of “a big country stood up and said, ‘Well, sir, if we don’t pay and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?’”
Mr. Trump said he asked the other president if the country was “delinquent” in its payments. The leader responded, “Yes. Let’s say that happened,” Mr. Trump said.
“No, I would not protect you,” Mr. Trump recalled responding. “In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You’ve got to pay. You got to pay your bills.”
Speaking in Conway, S.C., Donald J. Trump said as president he had told NATO allies that he would urge Russian aggression against countries that had not met unofficial financial commitments.
By Michael Gold, The New York Times
Former President Donald J. Trump said on Saturday that, while president, he told the leaders of NATO countries that he would “encourage” Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to countries that had not paid the money they owed to the military alliance.
In repeating a claim he has made previously to highlight his negotiation skills, Mr. Trump did not make clear that while there has been a spending-related dispute, it was not about an unpaid debt to NATO, but over European countries meeting their spending commitments to their own militaries. Some NATO members are spending below an unofficial commitment to spend 2 percent of their economic output on defense.
Mr. Trump’s suggestion that he would encourage Russian aggression against allies of the United States — for any reason — comes as Republicans in Congress have pushed back against more aid for Ukraine in its war against Russia, and is likely to cause concern among NATO member states, which are already very nervous about the prospect of a Trump return.
Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, dismissed those warnings as “threat mongering" in an interview with Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, that aired on Thursday. “We have no interest in Poland, Latvia or anywhere else,” Mr. Putin said.
But he has also called on the United States to “make an agreement” to end the war in Ukraine by ceding Ukrainian territory to Russia, comments that were seen by some as an appeal to American conservatives to block further involvement in the war.
Some European officials and foreign policy experts have said they are concerned that Russia could invade a NATO nation after its war with Ukraine concludes, fears that they say are heightened by the possibility of Mr. Trump returning to the presidency.
In a statement, a White House spokesman, Andrew Bates, called Mr. Trump’s comments “appalling and unhinged,” adding, “Rather than calling for wars and promoting deranged chaos, President Biden will continue to bolster American leadership and stand up for our national security interests — not against them.”
Mr. Trump has previously expressed his belief that support for NATO is overly burdensome on the United States, saying the alliance drains its financial and military resources. His campaign website says that the country must re-evaluate the organization’s purpose.
He has in the past recalled privately telling NATO members that the United States would not defend them from Russian attacks if they were in arrears. Last year, he claimed during a campaign speech that “hundreds of billions of dollars came flowing in” to NATO after he made that threat.
On Saturday, he again brought up that anecdote, saying that he told European leaders they had to “pay up.”
Then, he said, the president of “a big country stood up and said, ‘Well, sir, if we don’t pay and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?’”
Mr. Trump said he asked the other president if the country was “delinquent” in its payments. The leader responded, “Yes. Let’s say that happened,” Mr. Trump said.
“No, I would not protect you,” Mr. Trump recalled responding. “In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You’ve got to pay. You got to pay your bills.”
NO MORE LEGAL GAMES FOR DONALD TRUMP
By The New York Times Editorial Board
The most important words to issue from the federal appeals court in Washington on Tuesday were not in its unanimous 57-page opinion rejecting Donald Trump’s claim of absolute immunity from prosecution.
That ruling, which denied the former president’s attempt to be absolved for his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, was never in doubt. His claim is that presidents don’t enjoy immunity in just some cases, but that they are effectively above the law in all cases. During oral arguments last month, his lawyer even contended that a sitting president could order the assassination of a political rival and face no legal consequences.
Rejecting this claim was easy. This line of reasoning “would collapse our system of separated powers by placing the president beyond the reach of all three branches,” wrote the three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. “We cannot accept that the office of the presidency places its former occupants above the law for all time thereafter.”
The key sentence appeared elsewhere, in the one-page formal judgment accompanying the court’s opinion. “The clerk is directed to withhold issuance of the mandate through Feb. 12, 2024,” the judges wrote. With those words, the court put a hard deadline on Mr. Trump’s delay games. He has until the end of this coming Monday to appeal his loss to the Supreme Court. If he doesn’t, the mandate will issue, meaning that the trial court will regain jurisdiction of the case, and the trial can move forward.
It was a welcome acknowledgment and rebuke of Mr. Trump’s strategy in the Jan. 6 case, which is to delay any legal reckoning. He is trying to run out the clock in the hope that he can win re-election and then dissolve the prosecution.
So far, it’s working. The trial stemming from Jan. 6 has already been on hold for two months while the immunity appeal has played out, forcing the trial judge, Tanya Chutkan, to cancel the original start date, March 4. As Election Day approaches, it may become increasingly difficult to hold a trial that can be completed before Americans vote in the general election.
This isn’t some arcane legal dispute. Millions of Americans are waiting anxiously to find out whether one of the two likely major-party candidates for president is convicted of trying to overturn a free and fair election. A recent Gallup poll found that 70 percent of all American voters, and nearly as many Republican voters, would not vote for a candidate who had been found guilty of a felony. In other words, the outcome of the election could hinge on the Jan. 6 trial.
This is how democracy is supposed to work — people go to the polls armed with all relevant information about the candidates who seek to lead them, including whether they have ever committed a serious crime.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly underscored the importance of letting the American people decide the most consequential political matters. In this case, that means allowing the Jan. 6 trial to proceed as soon as possible.
The quickest and easiest path is for the court to do nothing. When Mr. Trump appeals, as expected, six or more justices can vote to deny certiorari, which means they refuse to take the case and they let the circuit court’s ruling stand as the final word. There are several arguments in favor of this approach. The most important is that, as a legal matter, there is nothing contested about this case. Four judges on two courts, appointed by both Republican and Democratic presidents, have agreed that a former president is not immune from criminal prosecution for the actions at issue here. Even legal scholars who argue for the most expansive possible interpretations of executive power for presidents in office have not claimed that presidents are immune from criminal prosecution once they leave.
Thus, it is not an issue demanding the Supreme Court’s resolution. The justices already have their dockets filled with Trump-related litigation, including a momentous case in which the court heard oral arguments on Thursday, involving whether the former president’s role in the Jan. 6 insurrection renders him ineligible to hold office.
Still, it will not be surprising if the justices decide to take up Mr. Trump’s immunity appeal anyway. However obvious the result may be, the case involves a central issue of American government — namely, the scope of presidential power and authority. In such cases, the Supreme Court often wants to have the definitive and final word.
If the justices choose to go that route, they should do everything possible to limit further delays of the trial. They can expedite the briefing and oral arguments and then issue a quick, clear ruling. This is within the justices’ abilities, particularly when a presidential election is on the line. The court showed as much by deciding President Richard Nixon’s White House tapes case in a matter of weeks, and Bush v. Gore in a single day.
Second, the justices should lift the stay on the district court, which would allow Judge Chutkan to move forward with pretrial preparations like resolving motions and selecting a jury. This would not indicate any bias against Mr. Trump; it would simply uphold the basic principles of justice and fairness. That’s why the Supreme Court has held that, as a rule, trials should proceed without unnecessary delay. That is in the interests of everyone involved in a criminal trial, and it is unquestionably the case here, with only nine months until Election Day and a vital question about one of the candidates left unresolved.
After decades of avoiding accountability for his actions in business and in politics, Mr. Trump may have gotten the impression that he is immune to the consequences most other Americans would face. But legal immunity in a criminal case is different, and the justices should make that crystal clear.
Mr. Trump deserves his day in court. As the circuit court noted, he is a private citizen now and is entitled to “all of the defenses of any other criminal defendant.” What he is not entitled to do is to play frivolous games in the hopes of preventing justice from taking its course.
By The New York Times Editorial Board
The most important words to issue from the federal appeals court in Washington on Tuesday were not in its unanimous 57-page opinion rejecting Donald Trump’s claim of absolute immunity from prosecution.
That ruling, which denied the former president’s attempt to be absolved for his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, was never in doubt. His claim is that presidents don’t enjoy immunity in just some cases, but that they are effectively above the law in all cases. During oral arguments last month, his lawyer even contended that a sitting president could order the assassination of a political rival and face no legal consequences.
Rejecting this claim was easy. This line of reasoning “would collapse our system of separated powers by placing the president beyond the reach of all three branches,” wrote the three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. “We cannot accept that the office of the presidency places its former occupants above the law for all time thereafter.”
The key sentence appeared elsewhere, in the one-page formal judgment accompanying the court’s opinion. “The clerk is directed to withhold issuance of the mandate through Feb. 12, 2024,” the judges wrote. With those words, the court put a hard deadline on Mr. Trump’s delay games. He has until the end of this coming Monday to appeal his loss to the Supreme Court. If he doesn’t, the mandate will issue, meaning that the trial court will regain jurisdiction of the case, and the trial can move forward.
It was a welcome acknowledgment and rebuke of Mr. Trump’s strategy in the Jan. 6 case, which is to delay any legal reckoning. He is trying to run out the clock in the hope that he can win re-election and then dissolve the prosecution.
So far, it’s working. The trial stemming from Jan. 6 has already been on hold for two months while the immunity appeal has played out, forcing the trial judge, Tanya Chutkan, to cancel the original start date, March 4. As Election Day approaches, it may become increasingly difficult to hold a trial that can be completed before Americans vote in the general election.
This isn’t some arcane legal dispute. Millions of Americans are waiting anxiously to find out whether one of the two likely major-party candidates for president is convicted of trying to overturn a free and fair election. A recent Gallup poll found that 70 percent of all American voters, and nearly as many Republican voters, would not vote for a candidate who had been found guilty of a felony. In other words, the outcome of the election could hinge on the Jan. 6 trial.
This is how democracy is supposed to work — people go to the polls armed with all relevant information about the candidates who seek to lead them, including whether they have ever committed a serious crime.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly underscored the importance of letting the American people decide the most consequential political matters. In this case, that means allowing the Jan. 6 trial to proceed as soon as possible.
The quickest and easiest path is for the court to do nothing. When Mr. Trump appeals, as expected, six or more justices can vote to deny certiorari, which means they refuse to take the case and they let the circuit court’s ruling stand as the final word. There are several arguments in favor of this approach. The most important is that, as a legal matter, there is nothing contested about this case. Four judges on two courts, appointed by both Republican and Democratic presidents, have agreed that a former president is not immune from criminal prosecution for the actions at issue here. Even legal scholars who argue for the most expansive possible interpretations of executive power for presidents in office have not claimed that presidents are immune from criminal prosecution once they leave.
Thus, it is not an issue demanding the Supreme Court’s resolution. The justices already have their dockets filled with Trump-related litigation, including a momentous case in which the court heard oral arguments on Thursday, involving whether the former president’s role in the Jan. 6 insurrection renders him ineligible to hold office.
Still, it will not be surprising if the justices decide to take up Mr. Trump’s immunity appeal anyway. However obvious the result may be, the case involves a central issue of American government — namely, the scope of presidential power and authority. In such cases, the Supreme Court often wants to have the definitive and final word.
If the justices choose to go that route, they should do everything possible to limit further delays of the trial. They can expedite the briefing and oral arguments and then issue a quick, clear ruling. This is within the justices’ abilities, particularly when a presidential election is on the line. The court showed as much by deciding President Richard Nixon’s White House tapes case in a matter of weeks, and Bush v. Gore in a single day.
Second, the justices should lift the stay on the district court, which would allow Judge Chutkan to move forward with pretrial preparations like resolving motions and selecting a jury. This would not indicate any bias against Mr. Trump; it would simply uphold the basic principles of justice and fairness. That’s why the Supreme Court has held that, as a rule, trials should proceed without unnecessary delay. That is in the interests of everyone involved in a criminal trial, and it is unquestionably the case here, with only nine months until Election Day and a vital question about one of the candidates left unresolved.
After decades of avoiding accountability for his actions in business and in politics, Mr. Trump may have gotten the impression that he is immune to the consequences most other Americans would face. But legal immunity in a criminal case is different, and the justices should make that crystal clear.
Mr. Trump deserves his day in court. As the circuit court noted, he is a private citizen now and is entitled to “all of the defenses of any other criminal defendant.” What he is not entitled to do is to play frivolous games in the hopes of preventing justice from taking its course.
CULTS
Cults (By Amy Morin, LCSW) are characterized by:
1-Absolute authoritarianism without accountability
2-Zero tolerance for criticism or questions
3-Lack of meaningful financial disclosure regarding budget
4-Unreasonable fears about the outside world that often involve evil conspiracies and persecutions
5-A belief that former followers are always wrong for leaving and there is never a legitimate reason for anyone else to leave
6-Abuse of members
7-Records, books, articles, or programs documenting the abuses of the leader or group
8-Followers feeling they are never able to be “good enough”
9-A belief that the leader is right at all times
10-A belief that the leader is the exclusive means of knowing “truth” or giving validation
Cults are dangerous because they typically rely on deceptive and authoritarian practices to make members dependent on and obedient to the group.
The silos of political groupthink created by social media have turned out to be ideal settings for the germination and dissemination of extremist ideas and alternative realities. To date, the most significant and frightening cultic phenomenon to arise from social media is QAnon. According to some observers, the QAnon movement does not qualify as a proper cult, because it lacks a single charismatic leader. Donald Trump is a hero of the movement, but not its controller. “Q,” the online presence whose gnomic briefings—“Q drops”—form the basis of the QAnon mythology, is arguably a leader of sorts, but the army of “gurus” and “promoters” who decode, interpret, and embroider Q’s utterances have shown themselves perfectly capable of generating doctrine and inciting violence in the absence of Q’s directives. (Q has not posted anything since December, but the prophecies and conspiracies have continued to proliferate.)
A survey published in May by the Public Religion Research Institute found that fifteen per cent of Americans subscribe to the central QAnon belief that the government is run by a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles and that twenty per cent believe that “there is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders.” Yet anxiety about the movement tends to be undercut by laughter at the presumed imbecility of its members. Some of the attorneys representing QAnon followers who took part in the invasion of the Capitol have even made this their chief line of defense; Albert Watkins, who represents Jacob Chansley, the bare-chested “Q Shaman,” recently told a reporter that his client and other defendants were “people with brain damage, they’re retarded.”
The Common Stages in the Life Cycle of a Cult By Psychology Today
1-The Big Idea. A leader or leaders propose a new transcendent idea that promises a panacea solution for alienated and vulnerable people. This big idea promises to solve all problems; to end loneliness, isolation, and a sense of personal failure. It makes vague promises of meaning and salvation. There is usually a charismatic leader or a single text with its own coded language that spreads the big idea.
2-Love-Bombing. Cult leaders and early devotees recruit from the wider population through love-bombing and promising a new start, a hope for a future of love, belonging, and salvation within a living community of people who all believe in the big idea. As a new recruit, you become one of the chosen to whom ‘the truth’ is revealed. You are loved and 'saved.'
3-A New Life. New recruits are inducted into a secret language of signs and symbols. They're encouraged to identify as victims of the world outside and are promised a rebirth, a new body or identity within this life, or an afterlife. Recruits are taught to see the world as black or white, good or evil, us or them; and this creates tight group unity which is enforced by rote learning of the cult’s slogans. These beliefs are often illogical as a test of ‘true belief.’ New recruits experience euphoria as part of a 'chosen' secretive group.
4-Growth. As new recruits move into greater commitment, the cult enters the ‘expansion phase’ and looks outwards. The new task is to recruit ever more people. Love-bombing and promising a new life are used on outsiders, and the young and needy are targeted. The cult expands rapidly with its promises of future rewards, be they spiritual, or political. Mantras and slogans replace all individual thought and offer collective 'one-ness.'
5-Rites of Passage. Allegiance is sworn through acts such as renouncing your own family, past life, and past name. New members are separated from all past support systems and become dependent on the cult. New members are tested by having to transform their identity, body, language, and even sexual behaviors. They must ‘don the robes’ and declare to the world that ‘I am no longer who I was, I am now part of group X.’
6-Isolation. The cult becomes too large to control and has to prevent influences from the outside world from weakening its power over members. The leaders ban acts of individual free will. The cult isolates its members from the world beyond, depicting the outside as corrupt, evil, and violent. This increases bonding as members see themselves as ‘threatened victims’. Language control and growing paranoia make questioning the cult impossible. Mantras and slogans silence doubts and dissent. Internal repression grows.
7-Hate Bonding. The cult reaches its size limit and problems arise from failures in its ‘plan for all.’ But the cult cannot admit errors. It starts to feed on hatred of the outside world. It evolves rituals of hatred, building a deeper ‘unity of the persecuted.’ One stratum of society is usually the target of all hatred and they might be given a coded name. Members are encouraged to share their hatred in ritualized forms.
8-Traitors. Afraid of the growing hate culture, some members question the leaders but they are thrown out or made to do penance. The contraction phase begins and leads to a clampdown on any freedoms within the cult. In the face of internal persecution, a senior member often leaves and becomes a ‘traitor.’ Gaslighting, peer pressure, and groupthink prevent others from leaving. A few are helped to leave the cult by family members or forced out by cult deprogrammers, but such acts only fuel the cult's conviction that it is under attack.
9-Witch Hunts. Internal trials within the cult weed out all potential traitors. Doubters are shamed into falsely accusing others. The remaining members are forced into committing acts of personal supplication that might be sexual, or involve body-marking, self-mutilation, or a pledge to transgressive acts. A common test of belonging involves committing small crimes against the hated world beyond. Once a member commits an illegal act, the cult has evidence it can use to blackmail that member into compliance. This is abusive trauma bonding.
10-Persecution Paranoia. As more people flee the cult, secrets are leaked to the outside world about the authoritarian rule of the leaders. External law forces investigate the cult. The cult’s paranoia grows. Increasingly paranoid, the cult weaponizes for a showdown against the world and sees violence as the necessary purifying force that will save itself from its scheming enemies. All who commit acts of violence are pardoned in advance by the leader or leaders. Many other cult members leave, and this increases paranoid fear of impending confrontation with external enemies.
11-Attack. Often a respected member of the cult is accused, tortured, or even killed and the ‘secret’ scapegoating becomes the new form of group cohesion. Cult members are forbidden to leave and terror is whipped up about an imminent attack from external enemies, imagined or real. Allegiance to the cult is now proven by 'striking back' against the outside world. After an attack, the collective fear of being destroyed by the external enemy takes over.
12-Final Conflict. Fearing destruction, the cult either attempts one final attack against the world or barricades itself up and enters into a state of siege. In the latter case, cult suicide pacts are common. The cult either destroys itself or lashes out against its often fantasized enemies. Either way, the cult collapses with violation of laws or loss of life.
Does any of this sound familiar with regards to the current political climate?
Cults (By Amy Morin, LCSW) are characterized by:
1-Absolute authoritarianism without accountability
2-Zero tolerance for criticism or questions
3-Lack of meaningful financial disclosure regarding budget
4-Unreasonable fears about the outside world that often involve evil conspiracies and persecutions
5-A belief that former followers are always wrong for leaving and there is never a legitimate reason for anyone else to leave
6-Abuse of members
7-Records, books, articles, or programs documenting the abuses of the leader or group
8-Followers feeling they are never able to be “good enough”
9-A belief that the leader is right at all times
10-A belief that the leader is the exclusive means of knowing “truth” or giving validation
Cults are dangerous because they typically rely on deceptive and authoritarian practices to make members dependent on and obedient to the group.
The silos of political groupthink created by social media have turned out to be ideal settings for the germination and dissemination of extremist ideas and alternative realities. To date, the most significant and frightening cultic phenomenon to arise from social media is QAnon. According to some observers, the QAnon movement does not qualify as a proper cult, because it lacks a single charismatic leader. Donald Trump is a hero of the movement, but not its controller. “Q,” the online presence whose gnomic briefings—“Q drops”—form the basis of the QAnon mythology, is arguably a leader of sorts, but the army of “gurus” and “promoters” who decode, interpret, and embroider Q’s utterances have shown themselves perfectly capable of generating doctrine and inciting violence in the absence of Q’s directives. (Q has not posted anything since December, but the prophecies and conspiracies have continued to proliferate.)
A survey published in May by the Public Religion Research Institute found that fifteen per cent of Americans subscribe to the central QAnon belief that the government is run by a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles and that twenty per cent believe that “there is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders.” Yet anxiety about the movement tends to be undercut by laughter at the presumed imbecility of its members. Some of the attorneys representing QAnon followers who took part in the invasion of the Capitol have even made this their chief line of defense; Albert Watkins, who represents Jacob Chansley, the bare-chested “Q Shaman,” recently told a reporter that his client and other defendants were “people with brain damage, they’re retarded.”
The Common Stages in the Life Cycle of a Cult By Psychology Today
1-The Big Idea. A leader or leaders propose a new transcendent idea that promises a panacea solution for alienated and vulnerable people. This big idea promises to solve all problems; to end loneliness, isolation, and a sense of personal failure. It makes vague promises of meaning and salvation. There is usually a charismatic leader or a single text with its own coded language that spreads the big idea.
2-Love-Bombing. Cult leaders and early devotees recruit from the wider population through love-bombing and promising a new start, a hope for a future of love, belonging, and salvation within a living community of people who all believe in the big idea. As a new recruit, you become one of the chosen to whom ‘the truth’ is revealed. You are loved and 'saved.'
3-A New Life. New recruits are inducted into a secret language of signs and symbols. They're encouraged to identify as victims of the world outside and are promised a rebirth, a new body or identity within this life, or an afterlife. Recruits are taught to see the world as black or white, good or evil, us or them; and this creates tight group unity which is enforced by rote learning of the cult’s slogans. These beliefs are often illogical as a test of ‘true belief.’ New recruits experience euphoria as part of a 'chosen' secretive group.
4-Growth. As new recruits move into greater commitment, the cult enters the ‘expansion phase’ and looks outwards. The new task is to recruit ever more people. Love-bombing and promising a new life are used on outsiders, and the young and needy are targeted. The cult expands rapidly with its promises of future rewards, be they spiritual, or political. Mantras and slogans replace all individual thought and offer collective 'one-ness.'
5-Rites of Passage. Allegiance is sworn through acts such as renouncing your own family, past life, and past name. New members are separated from all past support systems and become dependent on the cult. New members are tested by having to transform their identity, body, language, and even sexual behaviors. They must ‘don the robes’ and declare to the world that ‘I am no longer who I was, I am now part of group X.’
6-Isolation. The cult becomes too large to control and has to prevent influences from the outside world from weakening its power over members. The leaders ban acts of individual free will. The cult isolates its members from the world beyond, depicting the outside as corrupt, evil, and violent. This increases bonding as members see themselves as ‘threatened victims’. Language control and growing paranoia make questioning the cult impossible. Mantras and slogans silence doubts and dissent. Internal repression grows.
7-Hate Bonding. The cult reaches its size limit and problems arise from failures in its ‘plan for all.’ But the cult cannot admit errors. It starts to feed on hatred of the outside world. It evolves rituals of hatred, building a deeper ‘unity of the persecuted.’ One stratum of society is usually the target of all hatred and they might be given a coded name. Members are encouraged to share their hatred in ritualized forms.
8-Traitors. Afraid of the growing hate culture, some members question the leaders but they are thrown out or made to do penance. The contraction phase begins and leads to a clampdown on any freedoms within the cult. In the face of internal persecution, a senior member often leaves and becomes a ‘traitor.’ Gaslighting, peer pressure, and groupthink prevent others from leaving. A few are helped to leave the cult by family members or forced out by cult deprogrammers, but such acts only fuel the cult's conviction that it is under attack.
9-Witch Hunts. Internal trials within the cult weed out all potential traitors. Doubters are shamed into falsely accusing others. The remaining members are forced into committing acts of personal supplication that might be sexual, or involve body-marking, self-mutilation, or a pledge to transgressive acts. A common test of belonging involves committing small crimes against the hated world beyond. Once a member commits an illegal act, the cult has evidence it can use to blackmail that member into compliance. This is abusive trauma bonding.
10-Persecution Paranoia. As more people flee the cult, secrets are leaked to the outside world about the authoritarian rule of the leaders. External law forces investigate the cult. The cult’s paranoia grows. Increasingly paranoid, the cult weaponizes for a showdown against the world and sees violence as the necessary purifying force that will save itself from its scheming enemies. All who commit acts of violence are pardoned in advance by the leader or leaders. Many other cult members leave, and this increases paranoid fear of impending confrontation with external enemies.
11-Attack. Often a respected member of the cult is accused, tortured, or even killed and the ‘secret’ scapegoating becomes the new form of group cohesion. Cult members are forbidden to leave and terror is whipped up about an imminent attack from external enemies, imagined or real. Allegiance to the cult is now proven by 'striking back' against the outside world. After an attack, the collective fear of being destroyed by the external enemy takes over.
12-Final Conflict. Fearing destruction, the cult either attempts one final attack against the world or barricades itself up and enters into a state of siege. In the latter case, cult suicide pacts are common. The cult either destroys itself or lashes out against its often fantasized enemies. Either way, the cult collapses with violation of laws or loss of life.
Does any of this sound familiar with regards to the current political climate?
TRUMP BIGGEST DISQUALIFIER: HE CAN’T PUT AMERICA FIRST.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
There are many reasons to vote against four-times-indicted Donald Trump, but this week we saw replete evidence of the former president’s mental unfitness and its consequences.
Trump’s broken psyche: GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley and President Biden have both started talking in earnest about Trump’s apparent mental decline. They point to episodes of slurred speech, his incoherent riffs and his habit of mixing up politicians. Though, in fact, those are the least of Trump’s problems.
Serious analysis of Trump’s underlying mental state remains largely out of bounds, despite the Republican front-runner’s compulsive lying and grandiosity, his classic use of DARVO (deny, attack and reverse victim and offender) and his impulsivity. No other public figure engages in such aggressive, antisocial and shocking conduct (e.g., threatening Truth Social barrages; adjudicated sexual assault against E. Jean Carroll; crude insults directed at women; vows to seek revenge against enemies). Some close aides have candidly described his aberrant conduct and inability to process information. Nevertheless, the reaction to Trump’s abnormal conduct amounts to a collective shoulder shrug.
Trump’s threats of violence make an unmistakable pattern: He egged on the Jan. 6 violent attack on the Capitol, baited the crowd seeking to hang his vice president and was found liable for what is colloquially considered rape. Surely that is a subject that deserves more attention.
Voters must be able to evaluate a presidential candidate’s mental and emotional fitness. After all, Trump keeps bringing up the topic, distorting his performance on a cognitive test — as though that proves his mental soundness. (Prevaricating about a mental fitness test is quite meta.) The media has no excuse to avoid covering this topic.
With so much evidence of Trump’s mental and emotional unfitness, more exacting coverage is long overdue.
He can’t put America first — and he goads other Republicans to violate their oaths. The ramifications of Trump’s influence were in full view this week. Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and James Lankford (R-Okla.) pulled off what seemed to be impossible: They crafted the toughest border security bill in decades, one so strong that the conservative Wall Street editorial board, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Borden Patrol Union all backed it.
Several GOP senators initially praised the bill. After all, Republicans had insisted on this as a condition for aide to Ukraine. Republicans got a border provision trigger. The bill would have empowered Biden to do what Trump could not: namely, stem the flow of unauthorized border crossings and, when needed, shut down the border.
And yet, after all that and after years of castigating Biden for an “open border,” Republicans reversed themselves and felt compelled to sink it simply because Trump wanted to deny Biden a “win.” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) correctly said this was nothing short of “appalling.” Likewise, Murphy wondered how Republicans could “vote against a landmark bipartisan bill that we negotiated with one of the most conservative Republican Senators on the border issue,” referring to Lankford. The answer: They could do so because so many in the GOP follow Trump’s self-centered orders. (Even more jaw-dropping: Republicans now want to move ahead only on aid for Ukraine without any border measure, something they had demanded for months be considered along with aid.)
We will not have a robust border security bill because, as Biden said, “Donald Trump thinks it’s bad for him politically.” That sort of twisted thinking is par for the course for Trump, who cannot fathom doing anything for America if it does not suit his needs. He wants the border to remain a mess. He wants the stock market to crash. Trump cannot grasp the meaning of his oath or any other constraint.
His elevation of self above all else constitutes the essence of his unfitness. Worse, he cows other Republicans into violating their oaths. They, too, feel compelled to betray America at Trump’s bidding. (We know the answer to Biden’s query: “Republicans have to decide: Who do they serve — Donald Trump or the American people? Are they here to solve problems or just weaponize those problems for political purposes?”) Again, we see that when you empower someone as depraved as Trump, the country will always come last.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
There are many reasons to vote against four-times-indicted Donald Trump, but this week we saw replete evidence of the former president’s mental unfitness and its consequences.
Trump’s broken psyche: GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley and President Biden have both started talking in earnest about Trump’s apparent mental decline. They point to episodes of slurred speech, his incoherent riffs and his habit of mixing up politicians. Though, in fact, those are the least of Trump’s problems.
Serious analysis of Trump’s underlying mental state remains largely out of bounds, despite the Republican front-runner’s compulsive lying and grandiosity, his classic use of DARVO (deny, attack and reverse victim and offender) and his impulsivity. No other public figure engages in such aggressive, antisocial and shocking conduct (e.g., threatening Truth Social barrages; adjudicated sexual assault against E. Jean Carroll; crude insults directed at women; vows to seek revenge against enemies). Some close aides have candidly described his aberrant conduct and inability to process information. Nevertheless, the reaction to Trump’s abnormal conduct amounts to a collective shoulder shrug.
Trump’s threats of violence make an unmistakable pattern: He egged on the Jan. 6 violent attack on the Capitol, baited the crowd seeking to hang his vice president and was found liable for what is colloquially considered rape. Surely that is a subject that deserves more attention.
Voters must be able to evaluate a presidential candidate’s mental and emotional fitness. After all, Trump keeps bringing up the topic, distorting his performance on a cognitive test — as though that proves his mental soundness. (Prevaricating about a mental fitness test is quite meta.) The media has no excuse to avoid covering this topic.
With so much evidence of Trump’s mental and emotional unfitness, more exacting coverage is long overdue.
He can’t put America first — and he goads other Republicans to violate their oaths. The ramifications of Trump’s influence were in full view this week. Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and James Lankford (R-Okla.) pulled off what seemed to be impossible: They crafted the toughest border security bill in decades, one so strong that the conservative Wall Street editorial board, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Borden Patrol Union all backed it.
Several GOP senators initially praised the bill. After all, Republicans had insisted on this as a condition for aide to Ukraine. Republicans got a border provision trigger. The bill would have empowered Biden to do what Trump could not: namely, stem the flow of unauthorized border crossings and, when needed, shut down the border.
And yet, after all that and after years of castigating Biden for an “open border,” Republicans reversed themselves and felt compelled to sink it simply because Trump wanted to deny Biden a “win.” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) correctly said this was nothing short of “
We will not have a robust border security bill because, as Biden said, “Donald Trump thinks it’s bad for him politically.” That sort of twisted thinking is par for the course for Trump, who cannot fathom doing anything for America if it does not suit his needs. He wants the border to remain a mess. He wants the stock market to crash. Trump cannot grasp the meaning of his oath or any other constraint.
His elevation of self above all else constitutes the essence of his unfitness. Worse, he cows other Republicans into violating their oaths. They, too, feel compelled to betray America at Trump’s bidding. (We know the answer to Biden’s query: “Republicans have to decide: Who do they serve — Donald Trump or the American people? Are they here to solve problems or just weaponize those problems for political purposes?”) Again, we see that when you empower someone as depraved as Trump, the country will always come last.
GOV. SHAPIRO’S BUDGET PROPOSAL WISELY LOOKS TOWARD THE FUTURE
The governor’s focus on education equity, public transportation funding, and raising the minimum wage — all without new tax increases — provides legislators with a road map worth following.
By The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
Gov. Josh Shapiro’s recently unveiled $48.3 billion budget plan is ambitious. It is also exactly what Pennsylvania needs to begin reversing the shameful trend of disinvestment in education that has long shortchanged students and jeopardized the state’s growth.
While any proposal is a working document, the governor’s focus on education equity, public transportation funding, and raising the minimum wage — all without new tax increases — provides legislators with a road map worth following.
Shapiro’s $1.1 billion proposed increase in K-12 education spending would be not only money well-spent but will also be the first step in bringing the state into compliance after a court decision last year that found Pennsylvania’s method of funding schools was unconstitutional.
After years of deep disparities, with wealthy districts offering brand-new facilities and rural and urban districts suffering with the costs of lead remediation and asbestos removal, the commonwealth might finally begin to make good on its guarantee of a quality education for all. Under the governor’s budget plan, for example, the Philadelphia School District would see an added investment of $242 million in the next fiscal year.
Similarly, Shapiro’s intended overhaul of the state-run higher education system is also long overdue. Pennsylvania ranks 49th out of 50 states when it comes to investing in higher education. Finding a way to cap fees for working-class families doesn’t just restore a pathway to the middle class, it will also help the state address shortages in critical fields like teaching and nursing.
Shapiro also proposed additional funding for public transportation, as this board urged in December. SEPTA has guaranteed no service cuts or fare hikes if the proposal passes; the transit agency has also promised an enhanced approach to public safety throughout the system. If Philadelphia is to present the best version of itself to a national and international audience two years from now — as America’s 250th anniversary overlaps with the 2026 World Cup — SEPTA must be clean, safe, and dependable.
The standard of living for an estimated1.3 million Pennsylvanians would also improve under Shapiro’s plan to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour from the current $7.25. It’s been more than a decade since the last increase. All of the states bordering Pennsylvania have higher minimum wages.
The negative reactions to Shapiro’s proposal from some Republican legislators started rolling in even before he finished speaking on Tuesday.
State Senate President Kim Ward posted on social media that she “doesn’t stand for out of control spending,” and included a picture of her using her phone as the rest of the chamber — including other Republicans — stood and clapped. While they did not resort to such juvenile posturing, other Republican and conservative groups also objected to what they have called a “big-spending budget.”
Given the depth of the state’s needs and the resources available, the GOP urge to shrink the budget is entirely wrongheaded.
For decades, Pennsylvania has functioned as a slow, low, or no-growth state, coasting off investments made decades ago during the heyday of the railroad, coal, steel, and textile industries. Major companies regularly leave the state, its major cities are 20% to 50% below their peak populations, and young Pennsylvanians consistently leave to find work and opportunity. As a result, our elderly population is growing at a rate 20 times higher than the general population.
Smart spending on education, transportation, housing, and economic development is the most effective way for Harrisburg to turn the tide. By bringing more people and businesses to Pennsylvania, and by building an educated workforce, these expenditures will save taxpayers money in the long term.
The state — which now sits on a $14 billion surplus — has the fiscal cushion it needs to make these investments, and in Shapiro, a governor with the ambition to get it done.
The governor’s focus on education equity, public transportation funding, and raising the minimum wage — all without new tax increases — provides legislators with a road map worth following.
By The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
Gov. Josh Shapiro’s recently unveiled $48.3 billion budget plan is ambitious. It is also exactly what Pennsylvania needs to begin reversing the shameful trend of disinvestment in education that has long shortchanged students and jeopardized the state’s growth.
While any proposal is a working document, the governor’s focus on education equity, public transportation funding, and raising the minimum wage — all without new tax increases — provides legislators with a road map worth following.
Shapiro’s $1.1 billion proposed increase in K-12 education spending would be not only money well-spent but will also be the first step in bringing the state into compliance after a court decision last year that found Pennsylvania’s method of funding schools was unconstitutional.
After years of deep disparities, with wealthy districts offering brand-new facilities and rural and urban districts suffering with the costs of lead remediation and asbestos removal, the commonwealth might finally begin to make good on its guarantee of a quality education for all. Under the governor’s budget plan, for example, the Philadelphia School District would see an added investment of $242 million in the next fiscal year.
Similarly, Shapiro’s intended overhaul of the state-run higher education system is also long overdue. Pennsylvania ranks 49th out of 50 states when it comes to investing in higher education. Finding a way to cap fees for working-class families doesn’t just restore a pathway to the middle class, it will also help the state address shortages in critical fields like teaching and nursing.
Shapiro also proposed additional funding for public transportation, as this board urged in December. SEPTA has guaranteed no service cuts or fare hikes if the proposal passes; the transit agency has also promised an enhanced approach to public safety throughout the system. If Philadelphia is to present the best version of itself to a national and international audience two years from now — as America’s 250th anniversary overlaps with the 2026 World Cup — SEPTA must be clean, safe, and dependable.
The standard of living for an estimated
The negative reactions to Shapiro’s proposal from some Republican legislators started rolling in even before he finished speaking on Tuesday.
State Senate President Kim Ward posted on social media that she “doesn’t stand for out of control spending,” and included a picture of her using her phone as the rest of the chamber — including other Republicans — stood and clapped. While they did not resort to such juvenile posturing, other Republican and conservative groups also objected to what they have called a “big-spending budget.”
Given the depth of the state’s needs and the resources available, the GOP urge to shrink the budget is entirely wrongheaded.
For decades, Pennsylvania has functioned as a slow, low, or no-growth state, coasting off investments made decades ago during the heyday of the railroad, coal, steel, and textile industries. Major companies regularly leave the state, its major cities are 20% to 50% below their peak populations, and young Pennsylvanians consistently leave to find work and opportunity. As a result, our elderly population is growing at a rate 20 times higher than the general population.
Smart spending on education, transportation, housing, and economic development is the most effective way for Harrisburg to turn the tide. By bringing more people and businesses to Pennsylvania, and by building an educated workforce, these expenditures will save taxpayers money in the long term.
The state — which now sits on a $14 billion surplus — has the fiscal cushion it needs to make these investments, and in Shapiro, a governor with the ambition to get it done.
HISTORY WON’T FORGET GOP’S BOW TO PUTIN OVER UKRAINE
Donald Trump squeezed Republican senators to dump a bipartisan bill on the border, along with aid to Ukraine and Israel, that was vital for U.S. security at home and abroad.
by Trudy Rubin, The Philadelphia Inquirer
History will record this as the week the GOP formally kowtowed to Vladimir Putin.
This was the week when otherwise sane Republicans, who’d spent months drafting a bipartisan Senate bill that linked major border reforms to more military aid for Ukraine, threw in the towel.
These senators abandoned the bill under heavy pressure from Donald Trump, who prefers to keep the border boiling as an election issue. Far worse, Trump has shown he buys Putin’s rationale for crushing Ukraine.
What’s so disgusting about the cave-in is that most of these senators — unlike the mindless MAGA mob in the House or the blinkered Trump — understand the strategic risk of abandoning Kyiv.
On Monday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell urged his Republican colleagues to show strength by backing the bill — and Ukraine — because “our adversaries, Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran are working together to undermine us.” Yet, his colleagues suddenly decided to swallow an aid cutoff with hardly a dissenter.
“We cannot walk away from Ukraine now,” President Joe Biden said on Tuesday.” If we don’t stop Putin’s appetite for power … he won’t limit himself to Ukraine.”
Craven GOP senators effectively responded: “We don’t care. Drop dead, Ukraine.”
If you think I’m exaggerating the cost of the GOP’s kowtow, consider the following: Trump insists he can solve the Ukraine war directly with Putin in 24 hours. He has made clear he supports Russia keeping large parts of Ukraine that it acquired by invading and bombing its neighbor.
Displaying total ignorance of Ukrainian history, the former president has said publicly that Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine rightly belong to Russia. Clearly, he has no idea that before Russia invaded, much of Ukraine was Russian-speaking, having been under Soviet rule for decades. Yet, Putin has bombed Russian-speaking regions relentlessly, killing more Russian speakers than anyone since Hitler, because these Ukrainians do not want to live under harsh Russian imperial rule.
Putin has played Trump for a fool, praising Trump’s 24-hour pledge fulsomely last September. When asked on NBC’s Meet the Press whether he welcomed Putin’s support, Trump said: “Well, I like that he said that. Because that means what I’m saying is right.”
It’s no accident that Trump acolyte Tucker Carlson has been roaming around Moscow this week, apparently invited to interview Putin. Carlson, as you will recall, frequently praises Putin, and is often featured on Russian television.
Writing about Carlson’s Moscow visit, the Daily Beast’s Russia expert, Julia Davis, who closely follows all Moscow media, wrote: “Russia’s state TV stooges [talk show hosts] believe a Tucker Carlson-Putin interview will boost Putin at home and help restore Trump to the White House.”
Indeed, the English-language Moscow Times quoted an unnamed Moscow official as saying of the Carlson visit: “Access to an American audience through Carlson during the heated struggle between Biden and Trump is again an opportunity to exert that proverbial influence on the U.S. election, given Carlson’s huge audience.”
No doubt, Putin is delighted at a prospective U.S. aid cutoff at a critical moment when Ukraine is running short of everything.
In WhatsApp conversations with Ukrainian fighters on the front lines this week, I have heard repeated stories of desperate shortages of ammunition. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said two weeks ago in Kyiv that Ukraine couldn’t survive without U.S. help.
And yet, contrary to claims by Trump and MAGA acolytes, Ukraine is not losing. Its military has made amazing progress. Without a navy, it is pushing back Russia’s Black Sea fleet via missiles and Ukrainian-made sea drones.
If the United States and Germany sent long-range missiles, more ammo, and air defenses — something Biden will be discussing with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz this Friday in Washington — Ukraine could make further progress in 2024.
Also contrary to MAGA disinformation, Europe already sends Ukraine twice as much aid as does the United States, but does not have the volume and many of the types of weapons that Kyiv desperately needs.
Nor will a cutoff of Ukraine aid result in more aid for the southern border or for poor U.S. communities — another falsehood spread by the bill’s opponents. In reality, most U.S. aid to Ukraine goes to the Pentagon to purchase new weapons while Ukraine is sent older models.
By dooming the bipartisan border-Ukraine bill (which also contains aid for Israel and Taiwan), the GOP is sinking the best chance for border reform in decades. The bill was endorsed by the Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial board, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Border Patrol Council, and — until they were intimidated by Trump — many Republican legislators in Congress.
In standing by and letting Russia dismember Ukraine, the GOP has sent a message of profound weakness to Putin and his dictator cronies in Beijing, Tehran, and Pyongyang.
The Russian dictator need only wait until (as he hopes) Trump is elected, with the expectation that he cares nothing about what Putin does in Europe. Nor does Trump care what happens to America’s most important military alliance, NATO, which he has said he will withdraw from if he returns to the White House.
In other words — as the world sees this week — the GOP won’t stop Putin, who will feel free to nibble around Poland, the Baltics, the North Sea, the Arctic, East Asia, and the Middle East. Already, he is reportedly helping Tehran with nuclear weapons technology in return for Iran’s sending drones to help Moscow destroy Ukraine.
The lesson Putin has learned over the last few days will be absorbed by China, Iran, and North Korea. With his threats, Trump is capable of silencing those in his party who understand the dangers posed by dictators to America.
“History is watching,” Biden said Tuesday. “The failure to support Ukraine at this critical moment will never be forgotten.”
The question at hand is whether Biden can still find a way to funnel aid to Ukraine despite GOP blindness before Trump has ensured Ukraine’s demise.
Donald Trump squeezed Republican senators to dump a bipartisan bill on the border, along with aid to Ukraine and Israel, that was vital for U.S. security at home and abroad.
by Trudy Rubin, The Philadelphia Inquirer
History will record this as the week the GOP formally kowtowed to Vladimir Putin.
This was the week when otherwise sane Republicans, who’d spent months drafting a bipartisan Senate bill that linked major border reforms to more military aid for Ukraine, threw in the towel.
These senators abandoned the bill under heavy pressure from Donald Trump, who prefers to keep the border boiling as an election issue. Far worse, Trump has shown he buys Putin’s rationale for crushing Ukraine.
What’s so disgusting about the cave-in is that most of these senators — unlike the mindless MAGA mob in the House or the blinkered Trump — understand the strategic risk of abandoning Kyiv.
On Monday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell urged his Republican colleagues to show strength by backing the bill — and Ukraine — because “our adversaries, Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran are working together to undermine us.” Yet, his colleagues suddenly decided to swallow an aid cutoff with hardly a dissenter.
“We cannot walk away from Ukraine now,” President Joe Biden said on Tuesday.” If we don’t stop Putin’s appetite for power … he won’t limit himself to Ukraine.”
Craven GOP senators effectively responded: “We don’t care. Drop dead, Ukraine.”
If you think I’m exaggerating the cost of the GOP’s kowtow, consider the following: Trump insists he can solve the Ukraine war directly with Putin in 24 hours. He has made clear he supports Russia keeping large parts of Ukraine that it acquired by invading and bombing its neighbor.
Displaying total ignorance of Ukrainian history, the former president has said publicly that Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine rightly belong to Russia. Clearly, he has no idea that before Russia invaded, much of Ukraine was Russian-speaking, having been under Soviet rule for decades. Yet, Putin has bombed Russian-speaking regions relentlessly, killing more Russian speakers than anyone since Hitler, because these Ukrainians do not want to live under harsh Russian imperial rule.
Putin has played Trump for a fool, praising Trump’s 24-hour pledge fulsomely last September. When asked on NBC’s Meet the Press whether he welcomed Putin’s support, Trump said: “Well, I like that he said that. Because that means what I’m saying is right.”
It’s no accident that Trump acolyte Tucker Carlson has been roaming around Moscow this week, apparently invited to interview Putin. Carlson, as you will recall, frequently praises Putin, and is often featured on Russian television.
Writing about Carlson’s Moscow visit, the Daily Beast’s Russia expert, Julia Davis, who closely follows all Moscow media, wrote: “Russia’s state TV stooges [talk show hosts] believe a Tucker Carlson-Putin interview will boost Putin at home and help restore Trump to the White House.”
Indeed, the English-language Moscow Times quoted an unnamed Moscow official as saying of the Carlson visit: “Access to an American audience through Carlson during the heated struggle between Biden and Trump is again an opportunity to exert that proverbial influence on the U.S. election, given Carlson’s huge audience.”
No doubt, Putin is delighted at a prospective U.S. aid cutoff at a critical moment when Ukraine is running short of everything.
In WhatsApp conversations with Ukrainian fighters on the front lines this week, I have heard repeated stories of desperate shortages of ammunition. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said two weeks ago in Kyiv that Ukraine couldn’t survive without U.S. help.
And yet, contrary to claims by Trump and MAGA acolytes, Ukraine is not losing. Its military has made amazing progress. Without a navy, it is pushing back Russia’s Black Sea fleet via missiles and Ukrainian-made sea drones.
If the United States and Germany sent long-range missiles, more ammo, and air defenses — something Biden will be discussing with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz this Friday in Washington — Ukraine could make further progress in 2024.
Also contrary to MAGA disinformation, Europe already sends Ukraine twice as much aid as does the United States, but does not have the volume and many of the types of weapons that Kyiv desperately needs.
Nor will a cutoff of Ukraine aid result in more aid for the southern border or for poor U.S. communities — another falsehood spread by the bill’s opponents. In reality, most U.S. aid to Ukraine goes to the Pentagon to purchase new weapons while Ukraine is sent older models.
By dooming the bipartisan border-Ukraine bill (which also contains aid for Israel and Taiwan), the GOP is sinking the best chance for border reform in decades. The bill was endorsed by the Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial board, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Border Patrol Council, and — until they were intimidated by Trump — many Republican legislators in Congress.
In standing by and letting Russia dismember Ukraine, the GOP has sent a message of profound weakness to Putin and his dictator cronies in Beijing, Tehran, and Pyongyang.
The Russian dictator need only wait until (as he hopes) Trump is elected, with the expectation that he cares nothing about what Putin does in Europe. Nor does Trump care what happens to America’s most important military alliance, NATO, which he has said he will withdraw from if he returns to the White House.
In other words — as the world sees this week — the GOP won’t stop Putin, who will feel free to nibble around Poland, the Baltics, the North Sea, the Arctic, East Asia, and the Middle East. Already, he is reportedly helping Tehran with nuclear weapons technology in return for Iran’s sending drones to help Moscow destroy Ukraine.
The lesson Putin has learned over the last few days will be absorbed by China, Iran, and North Korea. With his threats, Trump is capable of silencing those in his party who understand the dangers posed by dictators to America.
“History is watching,” Biden said Tuesday. “The failure to support Ukraine at this critical moment will never be forgotten.”
The question at hand is whether Biden can still find a way to funnel aid to Ukraine despite GOP blindness before Trump has ensured Ukraine’s demise.
THE G.O.P. BUMPER STICKER: TRUMP FIRST. PUTIN SECOND. AMERICA THIRD.
By Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times
Every so often there is a piece of legislation on Capitol Hill that defines America and its values — that shows what kind of country we want to be. I would argue that when it comes to the $118.3 billion bipartisan compromise bill in the Senate to repair our broken immigration system and supply vital aid to Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel, its passage or failure won’t define just America but also the world that we’re going to inhabit.
There are hinges in history, and this is one of them. What Washington does — or does not do — this year to support its allies and secure our border will say so much about our approach to security and stability in this new post-post-Cold War era. Will America carry the red, white and blue flag into the future or just a white flag? Given the pessimistic talk coming out of the Capitol, it is looking more and more like the white flag, autographed by Donald Trump.
Barring some last-minute surprise that saves the compromise bill, a terrible thing is about to happen, thanks largely to a Republican Party that has lost its way as it falls in lock step behind a man whose philosophy is not “America First” but “Donald Trump First.” “Trump First” means that a bill that would strengthen America and its allies must be set aside so that America can continue to boil in polarization, Vladimir Putin can triumph in Ukraine and our southern border can remain an open sore — until and unless Trump becomes president once more. Our allies be damned. Our enemies be emboldened. Our children’s future security be mortgaged.
Today’s G.O.P. bumper sticker: Trump First. Putin Second. America Third.
“The United States has for some time ceased to be a serious country. Our extreme polarization combined with institutional rules that privilege minorities makes it impossible for us to meet our international obligations,” the political theorist Francis Fukuyama remarked on the American Purpose website. “The Republican Party has grown very adept at hostage holding. … The hard-core MAGA wing represents a minority within a minority, yet our institutional rules permit them to veto decisions clearly favored by a majority of Americans.”
Alas, though, while the current dysfunction of the Republican Party can explain why this particular legislation is likely to fail, how we came to this awful moment is a longer, deeper story.
This emerging post-post-Cold War era is a real throwback to the kind of dangerous, traditional great-power competition prevalent in the Cold War and World War II and most of history before that. Unfortunately, we have arrived at this moment with too many elected officials — especially in the senior ranks of the Republican Party — who never experienced such a world and with a defense-industrial base woefully unprepared for this world. Believe it or not, President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, has had to spend hours of valuable time each month searching the world for 155-millimeter shells for the Ukrainian Army because we don’t have enough.
That’s crazy. And it is particularly crazy at a time when three revisionist powers (Russia, China and Iran) are each simultaneously probing every day to see if they can push back America and its allies along three different frontiers (Europe, the South China Sea and the Middle East). They probe, individually and through proxies, to see how we react — if we react — and then probe some more. In Putin’s case, when the time seemed right, he launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“Because of generational change, most of America’s political elite today grew up in the relatively benign Pax Americana post-Cold War era, 1989 to 2022” (when Putin invaded Ukraine), “and they have lost the habit and the knack of thinking about global politics in military terms,” the U.S. foreign policy historian Michael Mandelbaum told me. “Very few members of the elite today have served in the military.”
This is “very different from the Cold War era, when most of our policymaking elite were people who experienced World War II,” added Mandelbaum, the author of the forthcoming book “The Titans of the Twentieth Century: How They Made History and the History They Made.” “Now, after 30 years of the post-Cold War era, Joe Biden is one of the few remaining leaders who was a policymaker during the Cold War — and issues of grand strategy and the management of great-power competition are no longer a major part of our public discourse.”
Trump, like Biden, grew up in the Cold War, but he spent a lot of it contemplating his wealth rather than contemplating the world. Trump’s instincts, Mandelbaum noted, are really a throwback to the interwar period between World War I and World War II, when a whole segment of the elite felt World War I was a failure and a mistake — the equivalent today of Iraq and Afghanistan — and then approached the dawn of World War II as isolationists and protectionists, seeing our allies as either hopeless or leeches.
As for House Speaker Mike Johnson, I wonder how often he uses his passport. I wonder if he has a passport. He is one of the most powerful people in America, following in the footsteps of both Republican and Democratic speakers who advanced our interests and made us strong in the world for decades. So far, he seems to care only about serving Trump’s interests, even if that means playing extremely risky games with foreign policy.
Meanwhile, many on the left emerged from this post-Cold War era with the view that the biggest problem in the world is not too little American power but too much — the lessons they drew from Iraq and Afghanistan.
And so who will tell the people? Who will tell the people that America is the tent pole that holds up the world? If we let that pole disintegrate, your kids won’t grow up in just a different America; they’ll grow up in a different world, and a much worse one.
After Ukraine inflicted a terrible defeat on the Russian Army — thanks to U.S. and NATO funding and weapons — without costing a single American soldier’s life, Putin now has to be licking his chops at the thought that we will walk away from Ukraine, leaving him surely counting the days until Kyiv’s missile stocks run out and he will own the skies. Then it’s bombs away.
As the Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman reported, the ammunition shortage in Ukraine “has already led to an increase in Ukrainian casualties. … The shortage of weaponry is also having an effect on the willingness of Ukrainians to volunteer for military service. The mounting pressure on the Kyiv government is part of the explanation for the public falling-out between President Volodymyr Zelensky and his commander in chief, Valeriy Zaluzhny.”
If this is the future and our friends from Europe to the Middle East to Asia sense that we are going into hibernation, they will all start to cut deals — European allies with Putin, Arab allies with Iran, Asian allies with China. We won’t feel the change overnight, but, unless we pass this bill or something close to it, we will feel it over time.
America’s ability to assemble alliances against the probes of Russia, China and Iran will gradually be diminished. Our ability to sustain sanctions on pariah nations like North Korea will erode. The rules governing trade, banking and the sanctity of borders being violated by force — rules that America set, enforced and benefited from since World War II — will increasingly be set by others and by their interests.
Yes, America still has considerable power, but that power led to influence because allies and enemies knew we were ready to use it to defend ourselves and help our friends defend themselves and our shared values. All of that will now be in doubt if this bill goes down for good.
Remember this week, folks — because historians surely will.
By Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times
Every so often there is a piece of legislation on Capitol Hill that defines America and its values — that shows what kind of country we want to be. I would argue that when it comes to the $118.3 billion bipartisan compromise bill in the Senate to repair our broken immigration system and supply vital aid to Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel, its passage or failure won’t define just America but also the world that we’re going to inhabit.
There are hinges in history, and this is one of them. What Washington does — or does not do — this year to support its allies and secure our border will say so much about our approach to security and stability in this new post-post-Cold War era. Will America carry the red, white and blue flag into the future or just a white flag? Given the pessimistic talk coming out of the Capitol, it is looking more and more like the white flag, autographed by Donald Trump.
Barring some last-minute surprise that saves the compromise bill, a terrible thing is about to happen, thanks largely to a Republican Party that has lost its way as it falls in lock step behind a man whose philosophy is not “America First” but “Donald Trump First.” “Trump First” means that a bill that would strengthen America and its allies must be set aside so that America can continue to boil in polarization, Vladimir Putin can triumph in Ukraine and our southern border can remain an open sore — until and unless Trump becomes president once more. Our allies be damned. Our enemies be emboldened. Our children’s future security be mortgaged.
Today’s G.O.P. bumper sticker: Trump First. Putin Second. America Third.
“The United States has for some time ceased to be a serious country. Our extreme polarization combined with institutional rules that privilege minorities makes it impossible for us to meet our international obligations,” the political theorist Francis Fukuyama remarked on the American Purpose website. “The Republican Party has grown very adept at hostage holding. … The hard-core MAGA wing represents a minority within a minority, yet our institutional rules permit them to veto decisions clearly favored by a majority of Americans.”
Alas, though, while the current dysfunction of the Republican Party can explain why this particular legislation is likely to fail, how we came to this awful moment is a longer, deeper story.
This emerging post-post-Cold War era is a real throwback to the kind of dangerous, traditional great-power competition prevalent in the Cold War and World War II and most of history before that. Unfortunately, we have arrived at this moment with too many elected officials — especially in the senior ranks of the Republican Party — who never experienced such a world and with a defense-industrial base woefully unprepared for this world. Believe it or not, President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, has had to spend hours of valuable time each month searching the world for 155-millimeter shells for the Ukrainian Army because we don’t have enough.
That’s crazy. And it is particularly crazy at a time when three revisionist powers (Russia, China and Iran) are each simultaneously probing every day to see if they can push back America and its allies along three different frontiers (Europe, the South China Sea and the Middle East). They probe, individually and through proxies, to see how we react — if we react — and then probe some more. In Putin’s case, when the time seemed right, he launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“Because of generational change, most of America’s political elite today grew up in the relatively benign Pax Americana post-Cold War era, 1989 to 2022” (when Putin invaded Ukraine), “and they have lost the habit and the knack of thinking about global politics in military terms,” the U.S. foreign policy historian Michael Mandelbaum told me. “Very few members of the elite today have served in the military.”
This is “very different from the Cold War era, when most of our policymaking elite were people who experienced World War II,” added Mandelbaum, the author of the forthcoming book “The Titans of the Twentieth Century: How They Made History and the History They Made.” “Now, after 30 years of the post-Cold War era, Joe Biden is one of the few remaining leaders who was a policymaker during the Cold War — and issues of grand strategy and the management of great-power competition are no longer a major part of our public discourse.”
Trump, like Biden, grew up in the Cold War, but he spent a lot of it contemplating his wealth rather than contemplating the world. Trump’s instincts, Mandelbaum noted, are really a throwback to the interwar period between World War I and World War II, when a whole segment of the elite felt World War I was a failure and a mistake — the equivalent today of Iraq and Afghanistan — and then approached the dawn of World War II as isolationists and protectionists, seeing our allies as either hopeless or leeches.
As for House Speaker Mike Johnson, I wonder how often he uses his passport. I wonder if he has a passport. He is one of the most powerful people in America, following in the footsteps of both Republican and Democratic speakers who advanced our interests and made us strong in the world for decades. So far, he seems to care only about serving Trump’s interests, even if that means playing extremely risky games with foreign policy.
Meanwhile, many on the left emerged from this post-Cold War era with the view that the biggest problem in the world is not too little American power but too much — the lessons they drew from Iraq and Afghanistan.
And so who will tell the people? Who will tell the people that America is the tent pole that holds up the world? If we let that pole disintegrate, your kids won’t grow up in just a different America; they’ll grow up in a different world, and a much worse one.
After Ukraine inflicted a terrible defeat on the Russian Army — thanks to U.S. and NATO funding and weapons — without costing a single American soldier’s life, Putin now has to be licking his chops at the thought that we will walk away from Ukraine, leaving him surely counting the days until Kyiv’s missile stocks run out and he will own the skies. Then it’s bombs away.
As the Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman reported, the ammunition shortage in Ukraine “has already led to an increase in Ukrainian casualties. … The shortage of weaponry is also having an effect on the willingness of Ukrainians to volunteer for military service. The mounting pressure on the Kyiv government is part of the explanation for the public falling-out between President Volodymyr Zelensky and his commander in chief, Valeriy Zaluzhny.”
If this is the future and our friends from Europe to the Middle East to Asia sense that we are going into hibernation, they will all start to cut deals — European allies with Putin, Arab allies with Iran, Asian allies with China. We won’t feel the change overnight, but, unless we pass this bill or something close to it, we will feel it over time.
America’s ability to assemble alliances against the probes of Russia, China and Iran will gradually be diminished. Our ability to sustain sanctions on pariah nations like North Korea will erode. The rules governing trade, banking and the sanctity of borders being violated by force — rules that America set, enforced and benefited from since World War II — will increasingly be set by others and by their interests.
Yes, America still has considerable power, but that power led to influence because allies and enemies knew we were ready to use it to defend ourselves and help our friends defend themselves and our shared values. All of that will now be in doubt if this bill goes down for good.
Remember this week, folks — because historians surely will.
ON THE BORDER, REPUBLICANS SET A TRAP, THEN FELL INTO IT
The G.O.P. abandoned a bipartisan border security bill that also aided Ukraine after Democrats called their bluff on immigration, agreeing to tough measures Republicans demanded.
By Carl Hulse, The New York Times
Congressional Republicans thought they had set a clever trap for Democrats that would accomplish complementary political and policy goals.
Their idea was to tie approval of military assistance to Ukraine to tough border security demands that Democrats would never accept, allowing Republicans to block the money for Kyiv that many of them oppose while simultaneously enabling them to pound Democrats for refusing to halt a surge of migrants at the border. It was to be a win-win headed into November’s elections.
But Democrats tripped them up by offering substantial — almost unheard-of — concessions on immigration policy without insisting on much in return. Now it is Republicans who are rapidly abandoning a compromise that gave them much of what they wanted, leaving aid to Ukraine in deep jeopardy, border policy in turmoil and Congress again flailing as multiple crises at home and abroad go without attention because of a legislative stalemate.
The turn of events led to a remarkable Capitol Hill spectacle this week as a parade of Senate Republicans almost instantly repudiated a major piece of legislation they had spent months demanding as part of any agreement to provide more help to a beleaguered Ukraine. Even Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader and foremost Republican advocate of helping Ukraine, and Senator James Lankford, the Oklahoma Republican who invested months in cutting the border deal, suggested they would vote to block it on the floor in a test vote set for Wednesday.
It left Senate Republicans, who had mainly avoided the chaos that has consumed House Republicans for the past two years, looking more like their counterparts across the Rotunda, rocked by division, finger-pointing and even calls from the far right for new leadership.
“A year ago they said, ‘We need a change in the law,’” said Mr. Lankford, frustrated by his Republican colleagues who had been up in arms about the border situation only to suddenly reject the new legislation. “Now the conversation is, ‘Just kidding, we don’t need a change in the law. We just need the president to use the laws they already have.’ That wasn’t where we were before.”
The episode left Democrats amazed.
“Just gobsmacked,” Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii, wrote on social media. “I’ve never seen anything like it. They literally demanded specific policy, got it, and then killed it.”
As they sought to rationalize their anticipated decision to mount a filibuster against legislation they had called for, Republicans said they needed more time to digest the bill and perhaps be allowed to propose some changes. But those seemed mainly like excuses. Additional time is unlikely to be a friend of the bill as the politics surrounding it grow more volatile with the approach of this year’s elections. In past immigration fights, failed procedural votes typically doomed the effort.
Plus, some top Republicans said it wasn’t just a matter of a few modifications to the text. They said it was time to move on to the ballot box.
“Joe Biden will never enforce any new law and refuses to use the tools he already has today to end this crisis,” Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the No. 3 Senate Republican, said Tuesday in a statement announcing his opposition. “I cannot vote for this bill. Americans will turn to the upcoming election to end the border crisis.”
Mr. Barrasso’s statement was just the latest indication that the looming election — and Donald J. Trump’s tightening grip on the party as the expected nominee — had made Republican approval of the border deal all but impossible.
Mr. Trump trashed the bipartisan proposal quickly after it was rolled out, and senators who embraced it risked running afoul of him and his supporters. Mr. Trump sees border turmoil — and the motivation it provides to conservative voters — as one of his biggest political advantages. As President Biden noted in remarks Tuesday, the former president has been feverishly stoking opposition to the new legislation.
In the House, Speaker Mike Johnson and his leadership team made it clear they wanted nothing to do with the Senate bill. So even some Republicans who might be inclined to support it could choose not to, avoiding a tough vote for a measure that had no prospect of making it out of Congress.
For Mr. Johnson, opposing the measure represented part of the delicate balancing act he is attempting. He has so far managed to hold at bay the archconservatives unhappy with the bipartisan spending deals he has struck to keep the government open. But allowing a vote on the border-Ukraine package could spark their ire to the point where he would face a challenge to his post as well.
Plus, House Republicans are going to be in a pitched battle to hold on to their majority after two years in charge with minimal accomplishment, and many of them view immigration as a winning wedge issue. Still, Democrats in tough races in both the House and Senate will now be able to say they were willing to accept stringent new border controls, but Republicans killed the effort.
The showdown has put Mr. McConnell himself in a difficult spot. He viewed the border legislation mainly as a vehicle to unlocking the assistance to Ukraine, which he sees as in an existential battle with Russia for Western and democratic values. Should the new legislation collapse, as now seems likely, he will need to pursue some other avenue for helping Ukraine, even as many of his G.O.P. colleagues in the House and Senate are increasingly resistant to the funding.
Opponents of Mr. McConnell sought to capitalize on the policy distance between him and fellow Republicans.
“WE NEED NEW LEADERSHIP — NOW,” Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, wrote on social media after the bill was released. Such calls are unlikely to get any traction, but they do show the increased willingness of the rank and file to publicly challenge Mr. McConnell.
As the border legislation was about to be released, Senator Kyrsten Sinema, the Arizona independent who helped negotiate the measure, said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that Republicans in the House and Senate would be afforded ample opportunity to digest the bill.
“Then they get to make a choice,” she said. “Do you want to secure the border?”
It turns out they didn’t need much time. They made their decision quickly, choosing not to act on the border — at least not before November’s elections.
The G.O.P. abandoned a bipartisan border security bill that also aided Ukraine after Democrats called their bluff on immigration, agreeing to tough measures Republicans demanded.
By Carl Hulse, The New York Times
Congressional Republicans thought they had set a clever trap for Democrats that would accomplish complementary political and policy goals.
Their idea was to tie approval of military assistance to Ukraine to tough border security demands that Democrats would never accept, allowing Republicans to block the money for Kyiv that many of them oppose while simultaneously enabling them to pound Democrats for refusing to halt a surge of migrants at the border. It was to be a win-win headed into November’s elections.
But Democrats tripped them up by offering substantial — almost unheard-of — concessions on immigration policy without insisting on much in return. Now it is Republicans who are rapidly abandoning a compromise that gave them much of what they wanted, leaving aid to Ukraine in deep jeopardy, border policy in turmoil and Congress again flailing as multiple crises at home and abroad go without attention because of a legislative stalemate.
The turn of events led to a remarkable Capitol Hill spectacle this week as a parade of Senate Republicans almost instantly repudiated a major piece of legislation they had spent months demanding as part of any agreement to provide more help to a beleaguered Ukraine. Even Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader and foremost Republican advocate of helping Ukraine, and Senator James Lankford, the Oklahoma Republican who invested months in cutting the border deal, suggested they would vote to block it on the floor in a test vote set for Wednesday.
It left Senate Republicans, who had mainly avoided the chaos that has consumed House Republicans for the past two years, looking more like their counterparts across the Rotunda, rocked by division, finger-pointing and even calls from the far right for new leadership.
“A year ago they said, ‘We need a change in the law,’” said Mr. Lankford, frustrated by his Republican colleagues who had been up in arms about the border situation only to suddenly reject the new legislation. “Now the conversation is, ‘Just kidding, we don’t need a change in the law. We just need the president to use the laws they already have.’ That wasn’t where we were before.”
The episode left Democrats amazed.
“Just gobsmacked,” Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii, wrote on social media. “I’ve never seen anything like it. They literally demanded specific policy, got it, and then killed it.”
As they sought to rationalize their anticipated decision to mount a filibuster against legislation they had called for, Republicans said they needed more time to digest the bill and perhaps be allowed to propose some changes. But those seemed mainly like excuses. Additional time is unlikely to be a friend of the bill as the politics surrounding it grow more volatile with the approach of this year’s elections. In past immigration fights, failed procedural votes typically doomed the effort.
Plus, some top Republicans said it wasn’t just a matter of a few modifications to the text. They said it was time to move on to the ballot box.
“Joe Biden will never enforce any new law and refuses to use the tools he already has today to end this crisis,” Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the No. 3 Senate Republican, said Tuesday in a statement announcing his opposition. “I cannot vote for this bill. Americans will turn to the upcoming election to end the border crisis.”
Mr. Barrasso’s statement was just the latest indication that the looming election — and Donald J. Trump’s tightening grip on the party as the expected nominee — had made Republican approval of the border deal all but impossible.
Mr. Trump trashed the bipartisan proposal quickly after it was rolled out, and senators who embraced it risked running afoul of him and his supporters. Mr. Trump sees border turmoil — and the motivation it provides to conservative voters — as one of his biggest political advantages. As President Biden noted in remarks Tuesday, the former president has been feverishly stoking opposition to the new legislation.
In the House, Speaker Mike Johnson and his leadership team made it clear they wanted nothing to do with the Senate bill. So even some Republicans who might be inclined to support it could choose not to, avoiding a tough vote for a measure that had no prospect of making it out of Congress.
For Mr. Johnson, opposing the measure represented part of the delicate balancing act he is attempting. He has so far managed to hold at bay the archconservatives unhappy with the bipartisan spending deals he has struck to keep the government open. But allowing a vote on the border-Ukraine package could spark their ire to the point where he would face a challenge to his post as well.
Plus, House Republicans are going to be in a pitched battle to hold on to their majority after two years in charge with minimal accomplishment, and many of them view immigration as a winning wedge issue. Still, Democrats in tough races in both the House and Senate will now be able to say they were willing to accept stringent new border controls, but Republicans killed the effort.
The showdown has put Mr. McConnell himself in a difficult spot. He viewed the border legislation mainly as a vehicle to unlocking the assistance to Ukraine, which he sees as in an existential battle with Russia for Western and democratic values. Should the new legislation collapse, as now seems likely, he will need to pursue some other avenue for helping Ukraine, even as many of his G.O.P. colleagues in the House and Senate are increasingly resistant to the funding.
Opponents of Mr. McConnell sought to capitalize on the policy distance between him and fellow Republicans.
“WE NEED NEW LEADERSHIP — NOW,” Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, wrote on social media after the bill was released. Such calls are unlikely to get any traction, but they do show the increased willingness of the rank and file to publicly challenge Mr. McConnell.
As the border legislation was about to be released, Senator Kyrsten Sinema, the Arizona independent who helped negotiate the measure, said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that Republicans in the House and Senate would be afforded ample opportunity to digest the bill.
“Then they get to make a choice,” she said. “Do you want to secure the border?”
It turns out they didn’t need much time. They made their decision quickly, choosing not to act on the border — at least not before November’s elections.
THE GOP’S BLUNDERS TAKE THEIR TOLL
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
House Republicans who have become indifferent to the adverse consequences of nihilism and performative politics might want to consider the toll their chaos-producing antics are taking. From vowing to pursue meritless impeachments to nixing a border security measure to please former president Donald Trump, they have given Democrats plenty of ammunition to blast them out of the majority in November.
Republicans, by the admission of conservative Rep. Chip Roy (Tex.), have not a single accomplishment on which to run this year. “For the life of me, I do not understand how you can go to the trouble of campaigning, raising money, going to events, talking to people, coming to this town as a member of a party who allegedly stands for something … and then do nothing about it,” he bellowed on the House floor in November. “One thing: I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing — one — that I can go campaign on and say we did. One!” He got no answer.
Most Republicans voted against the overwhelmingly popular infrastructure bill. Now they routinely claim credit for it. Only occasionally do they get called out for hypocrisy. (Get ready to hear plenty of it as the campaign heats up.) With help from some Republicans in the Senate and very few in the House, Democrats were able to pass the infrastructure bill in 2021. As with infrastructure, Republicans have largely escaped blame for causing economic havoc thanks to Democratic votes for keeping the government open and avoiding a default on the debt.
Now, however, with no one to cover their tracks, Republicans risk making themselves vulnerable to voters disgusted with partisan melodrama. On the impeachment front, Republicans embarrassingly have come up with nothing to justify the impeachments of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas or President Biden. As for Mayorkas, Republicans’ favorite lawyer, Jonathan Turley, wrote in the Daily Beast that “being a bad person is not impeachable — or many cabinets would be largely empty,” nor is doing a bad job. He added that if poor performance were grounds for impeachment, Mayorkas “would be only the latest in a long line of cabinet officers frog-marched into Congress for constitutional termination.”
Norman Eisen, former impeachment counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, along with Democracy 21 founder Fred Wertheimer and researcher Sasha Matsuki, wrote for MSNBC: “Both the Biden and Mayorkas impeachments are clearly not backed up by evidence. … What really concerns us, though, is the way these impeachments will both weaponize a key constitutional remedy and undermine its sober original intent.” In turning impeachment into a “partisan joke” to satisfy four-times-indicted and twice-impeached Trump, they wind up revealing their own recklessness, irresponsibility and deep dishonesty. When Turley, a fierce defender of Trump during his impeachments, and Eisen, a counsel to House impeachment managers, agree these are baseless stunts, the jig might be up for Republicans.
Making matters worse, House and Senate Republicans’ objection to a massive funding bill to secure the border — to make Mayorkas’s job easier — only underscores their cynical disinterest in actually securing the border. Even for some Republicans, this is a bridge too far. “I didn’t come here to have the president as a boss or a candidate as a boss. I came here to pass good, solid policy,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said last week. “It is immoral for me to think you looked the other way because you think this is the linchpin for President Trump to win.”
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) denounced Republicans’ obstructionism as well. “The border is a very important issue for Donald Trump. And the fact that he would communicate to Republican senators and Congress people that he doesn’t want us to solve the border problem — because he wants to blame Biden for it — is really appalling,” Romney said. “The American people are suffering as a result of what’s happening at the border. And someone running for president ought to try and get the problem solved, as opposed to saying, ‘Hey, save that problem! Don’t solve it! Let me take credit for solving it later.’”
Put differently, Republicans’ brazen objection to arguably the most serious border funding measure in decades makes both their Mayorkas impeachment and caterwauling about the border look absurdly cynical, even for them.
Unsurprisingly, the public is not buying any of it. Last year, a Wall Street Journal poll found that, concerning Biden, “while overwhelming shares of Republicans support impeachment and Democrats oppose it, independents on the whole side with the opponents, the poll found, with 51% against impeachment and 37% in favor.” As my Post colleague Aaron Blake found in a December review of polling that showed meager support for impeachment, “If the poll numbers don’t move significantly toward where they were for Trump’s impeachments (and are now for his indictments), a Biden impeachment vote could be tricky for a lot of Republicans — and for GOP leadership. And failing to even hold a vote would be a remarkable capitulation.”
Matters have not improved for Republicans. A USA Today-Suffolk University poll in January found, “Republicans’ impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden could be costing them with voters, particularly with America’s moderates. About twice as many of these middle-of-the-road voters — a crucial bloc for both parties in this year’s presidential election — said they oppose rather than support the House GOP’s recent impeachment inquiry.”
Republicans overwhelmingly were against Biden’s popular infrastructure bill and in favor of shutting down the government, defaulting on the debt and conducting bogus impeachment hearings that the voters do not want while opposing a tough border control bill. Democrats can hardly believe their good fortune heading into November. Chip Roy likely will not be the only one who cannot think of a single reason to keep them in power.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
House Republicans who have become indifferent to the adverse consequences of nihilism and performative politics might want to consider the toll their chaos-producing antics are taking. From vowing to pursue meritless impeachments to nixing a border security measure to please former president Donald Trump, they have given Democrats plenty of ammunition to blast them out of the majority in November.
Republicans, by the admission of conservative Rep. Chip Roy (Tex.), have not a single accomplishment on which to run this year. “For the life of me, I do not understand how you can go to the trouble of campaigning, raising money, going to events, talking to people, coming to this town as a member of a party who allegedly stands for something … and then do nothing about it,” he bellowed on the House floor in November. “One thing: I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing — one — that I can go campaign on and say we did. One!” He got no answer.
Most Republicans voted against the overwhelmingly popular infrastructure bill. Now they routinely claim credit for it. Only occasionally do they get called out for hypocrisy. (Get ready to hear plenty of it as the campaign heats up.) With help from some Republicans in the Senate and very few in the House, Democrats were able to pass the infrastructure bill in 2021. As with infrastructure, Republicans have largely escaped blame for causing economic havoc thanks to Democratic votes for keeping the government open and avoiding a default on the debt.
Now, however, with no one to cover their tracks, Republicans risk making themselves vulnerable to voters disgusted with partisan melodrama. On the impeachment front, Republicans embarrassingly have come up with nothing to justify the impeachments of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas or President Biden. As for Mayorkas, Republicans’ favorite lawyer, Jonathan Turley, wrote in the Daily Beast that “being a bad person is not impeachable — or many cabinets would be largely empty,” nor is doing a bad job. He added that if poor performance were grounds for impeachment, Mayorkas “would be only the latest in a long line of cabinet officers frog-marched into Congress for constitutional termination.”
Norman Eisen, former impeachment counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, along with Democracy 21 founder Fred Wertheimer and researcher Sasha Matsuki, wrote for MSNBC: “Both the Biden and Mayorkas impeachments are clearly not backed up by evidence. … What really concerns us, though, is the way these impeachments will both weaponize a key constitutional remedy and undermine its sober original intent.” In turning impeachment into a “partisan joke” to satisfy four-times-indicted and twice-impeached Trump, they wind up revealing their own recklessness, irresponsibility and deep dishonesty. When Turley, a fierce defender of Trump during his impeachments, and Eisen, a counsel to House impeachment managers, agree these are baseless stunts, the jig might be up for Republicans.
Making matters worse, House and Senate Republicans’ objection to a massive funding bill to secure the border — to make Mayorkas’s job easier — only underscores their cynical disinterest in actually securing the border. Even for some Republicans, this is a bridge too far. “I didn’t come here to have the president as a boss or a candidate as a boss. I came here to pass good, solid policy,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said last week. “It is immoral for me to think you looked the other way because you think this is the linchpin for President Trump to win.”
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) denounced Republicans’ obstructionism as well. “The border is a very important issue for Donald Trump. And the fact that he would communicate to Republican senators and Congress people that he doesn’t want us to solve the border problem — because he wants to blame Biden for it — is really appalling,” Romney said. “The American people are suffering as a result of what’s happening at the border. And someone running for president ought to try and get the problem solved, as opposed to saying, ‘Hey, save that problem! Don’t solve it! Let me take credit for solving it later.’”
Put differently, Republicans’ brazen objection to arguably the most serious border funding measure in decades makes both their Mayorkas impeachment and caterwauling about the border look absurdly cynical, even for them.
Unsurprisingly, the public is not buying any of it. Last year, a Wall Street Journal poll found that, concerning Biden, “while overwhelming shares of Republicans support impeachment and Democrats oppose it, independents on the whole side with the opponents, the poll found, with 51% against impeachment and 37% in favor.” As my Post colleague Aaron Blake found in a December review of polling that showed meager support for impeachment, “If the poll numbers don’t move significantly toward where they were for Trump’s impeachments (and are now for his indictments), a Biden impeachment vote could be tricky for a lot of Republicans — and for GOP leadership. And failing to even hold a vote would be a remarkable capitulation.”
Matters have not improved for Republicans. A USA Today-Suffolk University poll in January found, “Republicans’ impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden could be costing them with voters, particularly with America’s moderates. About twice as many of these middle-of-the-road voters — a crucial bloc for both parties in this year’s presidential election — said they oppose rather than support the House GOP’s recent impeachment inquiry.”
Republicans overwhelmingly were against Biden’s popular infrastructure bill and in favor of shutting down the government, defaulting on the debt and conducting bogus impeachment hearings that the voters do not want while opposing a tough border control bill. Democrats can hardly believe their good fortune heading into November. Chip Roy likely will not be the only one who cannot think of a single reason to keep them in power.
IF TRUMP WINS, HE WILL DESTROY THE AMERICAN-LED WORLD ORDER
By Max Boot, The Washington Post
It has become a cliché to say that every election is the most important of our lifetimes, but the looming contest between President Biden and former president Donald Trump really is. This will be a referendum not only on the future of American democracy but also on the future of America’s role in the world.
Ever since World War II, the United States has played a vital, indeed indispensable, leadership role in the world. It continues to play that role today. You can see it in the U.S. military action, in cooperation with allies, in Yemen to safeguard shipping through the Bab al-Mandab Strait — a maritime chokepoint that handles a third of the world’s container ship traffic — from Houthi missiles and drones. Other U.S. troops stand guard from Poland to South Korea to protect allies against aggressors. In all, there are some 171,000 U.S. military personnel deployed across 750 bases in at least 80 countries. Notwithstanding the tragic loss of three service members in a drone attack on a U.S. base in Jordan on Sunday, most of these deployments keep the peace without incurring any casualties.
Along with being the world’s policeman, the United States is also the world’s chief diplomat, spearheading efforts to address vital concerns such as public health, climate change and human rights.
Every president but one since Franklin D. Roosevelt has believed that the United States should exercise preeminent international influence for its own good and that of the world. Trump is the lone exception. He is committed to an “America First” agenda — the same label embraced by the Nazi sympathizers and isolationists of the pre-Pearl Harbor period. He has nothing but scorn for the twin pillars of postwar U.S. foreign policy: free-trade pacts and security alliances.
In Trump’s first term, he did not manage to overturn more than 70 years of American global leadership, but he certainly undermined it. He pulled out of the Paris Climate Accords, the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Iran nuclear accord. He tried to pull all U.S. forces out of Syria and about a third of them out of Germany. He temporarily blocked arms deliveries to Ukraine to coerce President Volodymyr Zelensky into helping him politically. He launched a pointless trade war with China that inflicted considerable costs on the U.S. economy.
Trump’s foreign policy record had a few isolated successes — e.g., the Abraham Accords in the Middle East — but, on the whole, he veered from one blunder to another. In dealing with North Korea, he went from “fire and fury” warmongering to exchanging “love letters” with Kim Jong Un. Trump undoubtedly would have been more destructive still if he hadn’t been held back by the “adults in the room” such as Defense Secretaries Jim Mattis and Mark T. Esper and national security advisers H.R. McMaster and John Bolton.
But it’s a safe bet Trump will not be appointing any moderates next time. He has vowed to purge apolitical civil servants — a.k.a. “Communists, Marxists, Racists, and Radical Left Thugs.” The Heritage Foundation is compiling long lists of MAGA loyalists to staff a Trump administration.
Thus, there would be little — aside from his own mental fog — to stop Trump from carrying out his isolationist agenda. According to Thierry Breton, a senior European Union official, Trump in 2020 told E.U. leaders “that if Europe is under attack we will never come to help you and to support you” and “NATO is dead, and we will leave, we will quit NATO.” Congress recently passed legislation to prevent a president from exiting NATO without congressional approval, but Trump could still make the alliance a dead letter by refusing to honor the Article 5 obligation to defend members under attack.
Trump would almost certainly cut off U.S. aid to Ukraine — as his followers in Congress are already attempting to do, at his behest. He says he would end the Ukraine war “in one day” by telling Zelensky that Ukraine would have “to make a deal.” Such a deal would presumably turn over at least 20 percent of Ukraine’s territory to Russian occupation while dictator Vladimir Putin readied his forces to take the rest. Zelensky called Trump’s talk “very dangerous,” but Trump is far more interested in courting Putin than Zelensky. (“I was the apple of his eye,” Trump recently boasted about his Kremlin pal.)
You might expect that, while caving to Russia, Trump would take a tougher line against China. And it’s true that he promises to revoke China’s most-favored-nation trade status and impose tariffs of up to 60 percent on Chinese goods — actions that could lead to a breakdown of the global trade system. But he also says he might not come to Taiwan’s defense because it “took all of our chip business.” So, bizarrely, he seems more exercised about China trading with other nations than invading them.
The leaders of some countries — e.g., Russia, North Korea, Hungary, Saudi Arabia — might be enthused about Trump returning to power, but it’s a safe bet that Mexico, America’s top trade partner, won’t be one of them. Trump has vowed to “carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” with most of those migrants presumably being sent south of the border over the opposition of the Mexican government. Trump, who talked in office about firing missiles at drug labs in Mexico, is also developing plans to unilaterally use military force against Mexican drug cartels — a move that no sovereign nation could tolerate.
Of course, it’s entirely possible that a lot of what Trump says is mere bluster and that he would do something entirely different in office. As John Bolton wrote last August in the Hill, “Trump’s approach to decision-making verges on incoherence”: He “disdains knowledge,” listens “to the last person in the door” and sees all U.S. relationships “as matters of personality” — so he is favorably inclined toward foreign leaders who flatter him. Perhaps democratic leaders can get on Trump’s good side by letting him win at golf — or staying at his hotels.
But I don’t think Bolton is quite right that Trump “has neither philosophy nor policies.” For decades, Trump has espoused consistently protectionist, isolationist views. He didn’t have as much success as he hoped in implementing his philosophy the first time around. The danger is that he would be more effective in his second term. (His campaign is already better run than it was in 2016 or 2020.) The result could be the end of the Pax Americana. We would then enter a chaotic post-American world where rogue states committed aggression with impunity, democracies cowered and trade ties frayed. Sea lanes turning into shooting galleries would become the norm, not the exception, with the U.S. economy paying the price.
The conventional wisdom is that foreign policy doesn’t decide U.S. elections, but the choice has seldom been this scary or stark. The November election will decide whether America continues its post-1945 internationalist foreign policy — or risks a return to the pre-Pearl Harbor policy of isolationism. How did that work out?
By Max Boot, The Washington Post
It has become a cliché to say that every election is the most important of our lifetimes, but the looming contest between President Biden and former president Donald Trump really is. This will be a referendum not only on the future of American democracy but also on the future of America’s role in the world.
Ever since World War II, the United States has played a vital, indeed indispensable, leadership role in the world. It continues to play that role today. You can see it in the U.S. military action, in cooperation with allies, in Yemen to safeguard shipping through the Bab al-Mandab Strait — a maritime chokepoint that handles a third of the world’s container ship traffic — from Houthi missiles and drones. Other U.S. troops stand guard from Poland to South Korea to protect allies against aggressors. In all, there are some 171,000 U.S. military personnel deployed across 750 bases in at least 80 countries. Notwithstanding the tragic loss of three service members in a drone attack on a U.S. base in Jordan on Sunday, most of these deployments keep the peace without incurring any casualties.
Along with being the world’s policeman, the United States is also the world’s chief diplomat, spearheading efforts to address vital concerns such as public health, climate change and human rights.
Every president but one since Franklin D. Roosevelt has believed that the United States should exercise preeminent international influence for its own good and that of the world. Trump is the lone exception. He is committed to an “America First” agenda — the same label embraced by the Nazi sympathizers and isolationists of the pre-Pearl Harbor period. He has nothing but scorn for the twin pillars of postwar U.S. foreign policy: free-trade pacts and security alliances.
In Trump’s first term, he did not manage to overturn more than 70 years of American global leadership, but he certainly undermined it. He pulled out of the Paris Climate Accords, the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Iran nuclear accord. He tried to pull all U.S. forces out of Syria and about a third of them out of Germany. He temporarily blocked arms deliveries to Ukraine to coerce President Volodymyr Zelensky into helping him politically. He launched a pointless trade war with China that inflicted considerable costs on the U.S. economy.
Trump’s foreign policy record had a few isolated successes — e.g., the Abraham Accords in the Middle East — but, on the whole, he veered from one blunder to another. In dealing with North Korea, he went from “fire and fury” warmongering to exchanging “love letters” with Kim Jong Un. Trump undoubtedly would have been more destructive still if he hadn’t been held back by the “adults in the room” such as Defense Secretaries Jim Mattis and Mark T. Esper and national security advisers H.R. McMaster and John Bolton.
But it’s a safe bet Trump will not be appointing any moderates next time. He has vowed to purge apolitical civil servants — a.k.a. “Communists, Marxists, Racists, and Radical Left Thugs.” The Heritage Foundation is compiling long lists of MAGA loyalists to staff a Trump administration.
Thus, there would be little — aside from his own mental fog — to stop Trump from carrying out his isolationist agenda. According to Thierry Breton, a senior European Union official, Trump in 2020 told E.U. leaders “that if Europe is under attack we will never come to help you and to support you” and “NATO is dead, and we will leave, we will quit NATO.” Congress recently passed legislation to prevent a president from exiting NATO without congressional approval, but Trump could still make the alliance a dead letter by refusing to honor the Article 5 obligation to defend members under attack.
Trump would almost certainly cut off U.S. aid to Ukraine — as his followers in Congress are already attempting to do, at his behest. He says he would end the Ukraine war “in one day” by telling Zelensky that Ukraine would have “to make a deal.” Such a deal would presumably turn over at least 20 percent of Ukraine’s territory to Russian occupation while dictator Vladimir Putin readied his forces to take the rest. Zelensky called Trump’s talk “very dangerous,” but Trump is far more interested in courting Putin than Zelensky. (“I was the apple of his eye,” Trump recently boasted about his Kremlin pal.)
You might expect that, while caving to Russia, Trump would take a tougher line against China. And it’s true that he promises to revoke China’s most-favored-nation trade status and impose tariffs of up to 60 percent on Chinese goods — actions that could lead to a breakdown of the global trade system. But he also says he might not come to Taiwan’s defense because it “took all of our chip business.” So, bizarrely, he seems more exercised about China trading with other nations than invading them.
The leaders of some countries — e.g., Russia, North Korea, Hungary, Saudi Arabia — might be enthused about Trump returning to power, but it’s a safe bet that Mexico, America’s top trade partner, won’t be one of them. Trump has vowed to “carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” with most of those migrants presumably being sent south of the border over the opposition of the Mexican government. Trump, who talked in office about firing missiles at drug labs in Mexico, is also developing plans to unilaterally use military force against Mexican drug cartels — a move that no sovereign nation could tolerate.
Of course, it’s entirely possible that a lot of what Trump says is mere bluster and that he would do something entirely different in office. As John Bolton wrote last August in the Hill, “Trump’s approach to decision-making verges on incoherence”: He “disdains knowledge,” listens “to the last person in the door” and sees all U.S. relationships “as matters of personality” — so he is favorably inclined toward foreign leaders who flatter him. Perhaps democratic leaders can get on Trump’s good side by letting him win at golf — or staying at his hotels.
But I don’t think Bolton is quite right that Trump “has neither philosophy nor policies.” For decades, Trump has espoused consistently protectionist, isolationist views. He didn’t have as much success as he hoped in implementing his philosophy the first time around. The danger is that he would be more effective in his second term. (His campaign is already better run than it was in 2016 or 2020.) The result could be the end of the Pax Americana. We would then enter a chaotic post-American world where rogue states committed aggression with impunity, democracies cowered and trade ties frayed. Sea lanes turning into shooting galleries would become the norm, not the exception, with the U.S. economy paying the price.
The conventional wisdom is that foreign policy doesn’t decide U.S. elections, but the choice has seldom been this scary or stark. The November election will decide whether America continues its post-1945 internationalist foreign policy — or risks a return to the pre-Pearl Harbor policy of isolationism. How did that work out?
GOP GODFATHERS DEFEAT IN WAR THAT UKRAINE COULD STILL WIN
The party of Donald Trump would abandon an ally in its fight against Russia while embroiling the U.S. in a war with Iran.
by Trudy Rubin, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Even as GOP hawks promote a dangerous new Mideast war with Iran, MAGA Republicans are pursuing a U.S. defeat in a much more critical conflict: Ukraine’s war with Russia.
Yes, you read that correctly. On the one hand, Donald Trump decries President Joe Biden’s “weakness and surrender” over a drone attack by a radical Iraqi militia allied with Iran that killed three U.S. troops on Sunday. This has prompted GOP demands that Biden bomb Iran — never mind that this could trigger the wider Mideast conflagration that everyone feared might be provoked by the war in Gaza.
Yet, at the same time, also obeying Trump, House Republicans are determined to cut off military aid for Ukraine. This, even though Democrats have bowed to GOP demands that this funding be linked to legislation to block the massive flow of migrants on the southern border. This aid cutoff will doom Kyiv in 2024 and convince Vladimir Putin that he need only wait for Trump, who, if elected, will consign Ukraine to Russian domination.
But the depth of the GOP’s betrayal of U.S. security is even more severe than I have described. Contrary to many news reports, Ukraine has scored impressive sea victories in 2023 and could still force Putin to the table on Kyiv’s terms.
Instead, Trump’s GOP is pushing for an unnecessary new Mideast war while promoting defeat in a war where Ukraine could still win.
This is an absurd moment to embark on a U.S. war with Tehran. U.S. focus needs to be on pursuing regional diplomacy over the war in Gaza — diplomacy that can bring Israeli hostages home, address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and, ultimately, neuter Hamas terrorists.
Iran has been using the excuse of the Gaza war to activate pro-Iranian militias — Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen — or Shiite militias in Syria and Iraq. They include the Iraqi band that managed to kill three soldiers at a small U.S. base in Jordan used to monitor resurgence of Islamic terror groups.
Yes, after these American deaths, the U.S. response must convince Tehran that its proxies must be restrained from blocking Red Sea maritime traffic and attacking U.S. bases. However, the goal should not be an all-out conflict with Iran that would embroil major U.S. forces and trap Israel into a wider war with Hezbollah on its northern front.
As former NATO supreme commander James Stavridis proposed via Bloomberg, there are many options short of attacking the Iranian mainland. For example, use cybertools against Tehran’s oil and gas infrastructure, hit an Iranian warship supporting its proxies in Yemen, or target Iranian oil and gas platforms in the Arabian Gulf.
What is infuriating about the GOP’s Mideast warmongering is not just the usual Trump hypocrisy (he backed off bombing Iran after a rocket attack by Tehran proxies in 2020 killed two Americans). Much more outrageous and anti-American is the Trump-led resistance in Congress to helping Ukraine push back an expansionist Russia — an adversary that poses a far greater threat to America than Iran.
Putin has made clear that his imperialist goals in Europe go far beyond taking control of Ukraine. I believe his threats of using nuclear weapons in Europe and against America are bluster. But if the U.S. bows to Putin on Ukraine, whether from fear or from Trump’s embrace of autocrats, it will encourage the Russian leader and other dictators to undermine our interests on land, sea, and in space.
What is particularly tragic is that Ukraine has achieved astonishing gains in 2023 that get insufficient attention in the mainstream press. Although Kyiv lacks a navy, it forced Russia to withdraw the bulk of its Black Sea fleet from Moscow’s main naval base in occupied Crimea. It used sea drones invented by Ukraine’s impressive tech sector, along with domestic cruise missiles, plus long-range missiles supplied by the United Kingdom and France.
The Ukrainians even managed to break Russia’s blockade of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, which was driving up global food prices.
I was in Odesa in July, when Moscow abandoned a U.S.-brokered deal to let grain ships leave the port city. Putin threatened to bomb any further grain exports and targeted grain silos in Odesa’s harbor. But in August, Ukraine struck back and hit a Russian oil tanker near the Russian port of Novorossiysk on the Black Sea’s eastern coast, threatening Russian oil exports. The Russians blinked and pulled most of their fleet from Crimea back to Russia, enabling Ukraine to set up a new export corridor for grain and other goods.
The clear message: If you push back hard enough against Putin, he yields and abandons red lines. If the GOP permitted the passage of Ukraine aid — and if Biden would finally green-light the export of U.S. long-range ATACMS single warhead missiles — Ukraine could make the entire Crimean Peninsula untenable for Russian occupation. This would finally put Putin on the back foot and force him to reconsider his war.
Instead, Trump tells Republican legislators to defeat an emerging bipartisan bill in the Senate that would link Ukraine aid to detailed protections for the southern border — a compromise demanded by the GOP. Meantime, the MAGA crowd pursues a circus impeachment vote against Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas.
There are no two ways to describe the current degradation of the Republican Party. The now party of Trump seeks to open a new Mideast war that would harm Americans and Israel — but godfathers defeat in a war that Ukraine could win.
The party of Donald Trump would abandon an ally in its fight against Russia while embroiling the U.S. in a war with Iran.
by Trudy Rubin, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Even as GOP hawks promote a dangerous new Mideast war with Iran, MAGA Republicans are pursuing a U.S. defeat in a much more critical conflict: Ukraine’s war with Russia.
Yes, you read that correctly. On the one hand, Donald Trump decries President Joe Biden’s “weakness and surrender” over a drone attack by a radical Iraqi militia allied with Iran that killed three U.S. troops on Sunday. This has prompted GOP demands that Biden bomb Iran — never mind that this could trigger the wider Mideast conflagration that everyone feared might be provoked by the war in Gaza.
Yet, at the same time, also obeying Trump, House Republicans are determined to cut off military aid for Ukraine. This, even though Democrats have bowed to GOP demands that this funding be linked to legislation to block the massive flow of migrants on the southern border. This aid cutoff will doom Kyiv in 2024 and convince Vladimir Putin that he need only wait for Trump, who, if elected, will consign Ukraine to Russian domination.
But the depth of the GOP’s betrayal of U.S. security is even more severe than I have described. Contrary to many news reports, Ukraine has scored impressive sea victories in 2023 and could still force Putin to the table on Kyiv’s terms.
Instead, Trump’s GOP is pushing for an unnecessary new Mideast war while promoting defeat in a war where Ukraine could still win.
This is an absurd moment to embark on a U.S. war with Tehran. U.S. focus needs to be on pursuing regional diplomacy over the war in Gaza — diplomacy that can bring Israeli hostages home, address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and, ultimately, neuter Hamas terrorists.
Iran has been using the excuse of the Gaza war to activate pro-Iranian militias — Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen — or Shiite militias in Syria and Iraq. They include the Iraqi band that managed to kill three soldiers at a small U.S. base in Jordan used to monitor resurgence of Islamic terror groups.
Yes, after these American deaths, the U.S. response must convince Tehran that its proxies must be restrained from blocking Red Sea maritime traffic and attacking U.S. bases. However, the goal should not be an all-out conflict with Iran that would embroil major U.S. forces and trap Israel into a wider war with Hezbollah on its northern front.
As former NATO supreme commander James Stavridis proposed via Bloomberg, there are many options short of attacking the Iranian mainland. For example, use cybertools against Tehran’s oil and gas infrastructure, hit an Iranian warship supporting its proxies in Yemen, or target Iranian oil and gas platforms in the Arabian Gulf.
What is infuriating about the GOP’s Mideast warmongering is not just the usual Trump hypocrisy (he backed off bombing Iran after a rocket attack by Tehran proxies in 2020 killed two Americans). Much more outrageous and anti-American is the Trump-led resistance in Congress to helping Ukraine push back an expansionist Russia — an adversary that poses a far greater threat to America than Iran.
Putin has made clear that his imperialist goals in Europe go far beyond taking control of Ukraine. I believe his threats of using nuclear weapons in Europe and against America are bluster. But if the U.S. bows to Putin on Ukraine, whether from fear or from Trump’s embrace of autocrats, it will encourage the Russian leader and other dictators to undermine our interests on land, sea, and in space.
What is particularly tragic is that Ukraine has achieved astonishing gains in 2023 that get insufficient attention in the mainstream press. Although Kyiv lacks a navy, it forced Russia to withdraw the bulk of its Black Sea fleet from Moscow’s main naval base in occupied Crimea. It used sea drones invented by Ukraine’s impressive tech sector, along with domestic cruise missiles, plus long-range missiles supplied by the United Kingdom and France.
The Ukrainians even managed to break Russia’s blockade of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, which was driving up global food prices.
I was in Odesa in July, when Moscow abandoned a U.S.-brokered deal to let grain ships leave the port city. Putin threatened to bomb any further grain exports and targeted grain silos in Odesa’s harbor. But in August, Ukraine struck back and hit a Russian oil tanker near the Russian port of Novorossiysk on the Black Sea’s eastern coast, threatening Russian oil exports. The Russians blinked and pulled most of their fleet from Crimea back to Russia, enabling Ukraine to set up a new export corridor for grain and other goods.
The clear message: If you push back hard enough against Putin, he yields and abandons red lines. If the GOP permitted the passage of Ukraine aid — and if Biden would finally green-light the export of U.S. long-range ATACMS single warhead missiles — Ukraine could make the entire Crimean Peninsula untenable for Russian occupation. This would finally put Putin on the back foot and force him to reconsider his war.
Instead, Trump tells Republican legislators to defeat an emerging bipartisan bill in the Senate that would link Ukraine aid to detailed protections for the southern border — a compromise demanded by the GOP. Meantime, the MAGA crowd pursues a circus impeachment vote against Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas.
There are no two ways to describe the current degradation of the Republican Party. The now party of Trump seeks to open a new Mideast war that would harm Americans and Israel — but godfathers defeat in a war that Ukraine could win.
HOUSE REPUBLICANS KEEP FUMBLING IMMIGRATION. MAYBE THEY’RE JUST INCOMPETENT?
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
House Republicans in recent weeks have blown up an immigration deal negotiated by their own party in the Senate and urged President Biden to adopt border measures that courts have found illegal. A cynic might say this is all theater — that Republicans (led by former president Donald Trump) want to keep immigration problems going through the election.
But did anyone consider a simpler explanation: that Republicans have no clue how our immigration system works.
Republican lawmakers have been holding up aid for Ukraine and Israel for months while seeking concessions on unrelated immigration measures. Yet after Democrats finally cried uncle, House Republicans said oh, just kidding. They don’t want this deal after all!
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and others now claim Biden doesn’t need new legislation to crack down on the border. Instead, they allege Biden can use his existing authority to reduce immigration by reviving all the executive actions that Trump had put into place.
“If [Biden] wants our conference to view him as a good faith negotiator, he can start with the stroke of a pen,” Johnson said.
There are a few problems with this claim. First, Biden has already issued more than 500 immigration-related executive actions, more than Trump announced over four years, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Biden has arguably exhausted the extent of his presidential authority, and so far his measures haven’t stemmed the tide of border crossings.
Second, if Biden hasn’t revived Trump’s specific policies — as Republicans urge him to do — that’s largely because so many Trump policies were found to be illegal.
Of the 35 major Trump-era immigration agency actions that faced legal challenges, 33 (94 percent) did not survive litigation — that is, either the court ruled against the relevant agency, or the agency withdrew the action after being sued. These numbers are from the New York University Institute for Policy Integrity’s regulatory challenge database.
Even when Republican-appointed judges presided over such cases, Trump immigration actions were unsuccessful 90 percent of the time.
To be fair, one specific Trump-era program that Johnson wants to revive, informally known as “Remain in Mexico,” is the subject of legal cases that are still working their way through the courts. But any final court decision on this policy might not matter much.
Why? It’s unclear whether this program ever effectively deterred unlawful border crossings (though it did expose desperate migrants to rape, kidnapping, torture and other dangers). More important, the Mexican government has said it would not cooperate if the United States were to reboot the program, regardless of what U.S. courts decide.
Johnson has also demanded that Biden begin “renewing construction of the border wall.” On this policy, Biden’s obstacle isn’t executive authority exactly. It’s insufficient funding, says Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council.
Alas, House Republicans appear unlikely to fund it.
How do we know? Because last year the Republican-controlled House passed a different (much more draconian) immigration bill, known as H.R. 2. This was basically a messaging bill, though lately Johnson has said it’s the only immigration-related legislation his chamber would consider. That bill would require Biden to restart wall construction, as set down in the fiscal 2019 appropriations bill, but it does not give any new funds that would be necessary to build the wall, Reichlin-Melnick says.
Similarly, Johnson has demanded that Biden end “catch and release,” which would mean detaining anyone waiting for their asylum claim to be heard in court. But there’s nowhere near enough funding under current law to provide that number of detention beds. Unsurprisingly, H.R. 2 provides zero new money for this objective either.
In other words, the policies that House Republicans claim Biden can adopt “with the stroke of a pen” are outside his pen’s reach — unless Congress passes the bipartisan legislation that these Republicans refuse to consider.
Maybe Johnson and his GOP colleagues claim Biden can do things without lawmakers’ help because they want Biden to look feckless. Maybe they grew so accustomed to Trump’s lawlessness that they figure Biden should be willing to cross a line now and then, too.
But again, there’s a reasonably strong case that the problem here is incompetence.
After all, this week House Republicans unveiled articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for his alleged failures on immigration. Unfortunately, these articles complain about measures taken by a completely different government agency — the State Department — which Mayorkas does not control.
Oops. Who can tell these Cabinet secretaries apart, anyway?
In Republicans’ defense, our immigration system is confusing. Lots of people don’t get it. Still, one would hope that politicians paid to understand these things — and who have made immigration a centerpiece of their 2024 campaign — might try a bit harder.
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
House Republicans in recent weeks have blown up an immigration deal negotiated by their own party in the Senate and urged President Biden to adopt border measures that courts have found illegal. A cynic might say this is all theater — that Republicans (led by former president Donald Trump) want to keep immigration problems going through the election.
But did anyone consider a simpler explanation: that Republicans have no clue how our immigration system works.
Republican lawmakers have been holding up aid for Ukraine and Israel for months while seeking concessions on unrelated immigration measures. Yet after Democrats finally cried uncle, House Republicans said oh, just kidding. They don’t want this deal after all!
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and others now claim Biden doesn’t need new legislation to crack down on the border. Instead, they allege Biden can use his existing authority to reduce immigration by reviving all the executive actions that Trump had put into place.
“If [Biden] wants our conference to view him as a good faith negotiator, he can start with the stroke of a pen,” Johnson said.
There are a few problems with this claim. First, Biden has already issued more than 500 immigration-related executive actions, more than Trump announced over four years, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Biden has arguably exhausted the extent of his presidential authority, and so far his measures haven’t stemmed the tide of border crossings.
Second, if Biden hasn’t revived Trump’s specific policies — as Republicans urge him to do — that’s largely because so many Trump policies were found to be illegal.
Of the 35 major Trump-era immigration agency actions that faced legal challenges, 33 (94 percent) did not survive litigation — that is, either the court ruled against the relevant agency, or the agency withdrew the action after being sued. These numbers are from the New York University Institute for Policy Integrity’s regulatory challenge database.
Even when Republican-appointed judges presided over such cases, Trump immigration actions were unsuccessful 90 percent of the time.
To be fair, one specific Trump-era program that Johnson wants to revive, informally known as “Remain in Mexico,” is the subject of legal cases that are still working their way through the courts. But any final court decision on this policy might not matter much.
Why? It’s unclear whether this program ever effectively deterred unlawful border crossings (though it did expose desperate migrants to rape, kidnapping, torture and other dangers). More important, the Mexican government has said it would not cooperate if the United States were to reboot the program, regardless of what U.S. courts decide.
Johnson has also demanded that Biden begin “renewing construction of the border wall.” On this policy, Biden’s obstacle isn’t executive authority exactly. It’s insufficient funding, says Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council.
Alas, House Republicans appear unlikely to fund it.
How do we know? Because last year the Republican-controlled House passed a different (much more draconian) immigration bill, known as H.R. 2. This was basically a messaging bill, though lately Johnson has said it’s the only immigration-related legislation his chamber would consider. That bill would require Biden to restart wall construction, as set down in the fiscal 2019 appropriations bill, but it does not give any new funds that would be necessary to build the wall, Reichlin-Melnick says.
Similarly, Johnson has demanded that Biden end “catch and release,” which would mean detaining anyone waiting for their asylum claim to be heard in court. But there’s nowhere near enough funding under current law to provide that number of detention beds. Unsurprisingly, H.R. 2 provides zero new money for this objective either.
In other words, the policies that House Republicans claim Biden can adopt “with the stroke of a pen” are outside his pen’s reach — unless Congress passes the bipartisan legislation that these Republicans refuse to consider.
Maybe Johnson and his GOP colleagues claim Biden can do things without lawmakers’ help because they want Biden to look feckless. Maybe they grew so accustomed to Trump’s lawlessness that they figure Biden should be willing to cross a line now and then, too.
But again, there’s a reasonably strong case that the problem here is incompetence.
After all, this week House Republicans unveiled articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for his alleged failures on immigration. Unfortunately, these articles complain about measures taken by a completely different government agency — the State Department — which Mayorkas does not control.
Oops. Who can tell these Cabinet secretaries apart, anyway?
In Republicans’ defense, our immigration system is confusing. Lots of people don’t get it. Still, one would hope that politicians paid to understand these things — and who have made immigration a centerpiece of their 2024 campaign — might try a bit harder.
JUDGES REBUKE LAWLESS MAGA REPUBLICANS. WE NEED MORE OF THE SAME.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
A distinguishing characteristic of MAGA Republicans is their contempt for the rule of law. Not to be bound by election results, the Constitution or court processes, four-time-indicted former president Donald Trump sets the tone. He declares himself immune from prosecution. He defies judicial gag orders, throws temper tantrums in court and tosses around “executive privilege” like confetti. Thankfully, judges have begun responding to MAGA lawlessness and attempts to nullify federal law.
U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, for example, in an otherwise routine sentencing memo for Jan. 6, 2021, participant James Little, castigated election deniers and Jan. 6 apologists. “The Court is accustomed to defendants who refuse to accept that they did anything wrong,” he wrote. “But in my thirty-seven years on the bench, I cannot recall a time when such meritless justifications of criminal activity have gone mainstream.”
Although Lamberth did not specify MAGA adherents, he condemned “distortions and outright falsehoods [that] seep into the public consciousness.” He continued: “I have been shocked to watch some public figures try to rewrite history, claiming rioters behaved ‘in an orderly fashion’ like ordinary tourists, or martyrizing convicted January 6 defendants as ‘political prisoners’ or even, incredibly, ‘hostages.’” (The latter came from the lips of MAGA flunkies, including Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, a contender for vice president on Trump’s ticket.) Lamberth added that though such claims are “preposterous,” he fears that “such destructive, misguided rhetoric could presage further danger to our country.”
Lamberth concluded:
This was not a protest that got out of hand. It was a riot; in many respects a coordinated riot, as is clear from cases before me. … ‘Protestors’ would have simply shared their views on the election — as did thousands that day who did not approach the Capitol. But those who breached and occupied the Capitol building and grounds halted the counting of the electoral college votes required by the Twelfth Amendment.
The rioters interfered with a necessary step in the constitutional process, disrupted the lawful transfer of power, and thus jeopardized the American constitutional order. Although the rioters failed in their ultimate goal, their actions nonetheless resulted in the deaths of multiple people, injury to over 140 members of law enforcement, and lasting trauma for our entire nation. This was not patriotism; it was the antithesis of patriotism.
And the rioters achieved this result through force. ... The First Amendment does not give anyone the right to enter a restricted area or to engage in riotous activity in the Capitol.
He conceded that his opinion wouldn’t stop the flood of lies, but he expressed hope that “a little truth will go a long way.” His extraordinary admonition (akin to former federal judge J. Michael Luttig identifying Trump and his supporters as a “clear and present danger”) speaks to the severity of the MAGA movement’s attack on the rule of law.
Likewise, in sentencing former Trump economic adviser Peter Navarro for contempt of Congress, U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta admonished: “I know you think it’s a political hatchet job. … [The House Jan. 6 committee] had a job to do, and you made it harder.” He called out Navarro’s attempt to play the victim as nothing but “chutzpah.” He lectured the defendant: “You are not a victim. You are not the object of a political prosecution. These are circumstances of your own making.” And he scolded Navarro that executive privilege was neither “magic dust to avoid a duty” nor “a get-out-of-jail-free card.” Every word of this would be equally applicable to Trump and his legion of enablers.
These rebukes serve as a long-overdue declaration from the judicial branch that piling lie upon lie won’t fly in the justice system. Facts matter in courts; miscreants cannot escape responsibility for lawbreaking. These judges refuse to let MAGA’s widespread contempt for courts and the Constitution be normalized; they remind ordinary Americans that Trump and his minions are not above the law.
Despite these efforts, judges can and must do more to confront law- and truth-defying Republicans. After the Supreme Court issued its opinion instructing Alabama to redraw its congressional districts to create a second majority-Black district, the Republican legislature and governor produced a new map that did not follow the court’s order. The Justice Department went back to court to direct Alabama to follow the high court’s order, but, regrettably, Alabama Republicans were not held in contempt. Their defiance did more than cost taxpayers additional money and court time; they set a troublesome precedent that they could defy courts to show off for their base without consequences.
Meanwhile, Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott intruded into the province of federal immigration authorities by installing life-threatening razor wire across the Rio Grande. He “seized” the border by putting the Texas National Guard in place, denying access to federal border agents. “The Supreme Court on Thursday granted a request from the Biden administration to allow federal Border Patrol agents to cut or move razor wire installed by Texas along a portion of the U.S.-Mexico border,” Scotus Blog reported. “Three migrants — a woman and two children — drowned on Jan. 12 near the disputed area, the Biden administration told the justices in a filing last week, while the Mexican government had to rescue two more who were suffering from hypothermia.”
Abbott announced that he will defy the Supreme Court’s order, thereby violating his oath to abide by the U.S. Constitution and other laws. The general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security wrote a letter to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (who sued, you might recall, to overturn the 2020 election), demanding access granted by the court. The standoff continues.
Just as troublesome, Speaker Mike Johnson (La.) and other House Republicans cheered Abbott’s attempt at nullification. They encourage blatantly lawless action when it serves their interests. (This echoes Johnson’s handiwork in rounding up more than 125 House Republicans to sign a brief seeking to disenfranchise millions of Americans and steal the election for Trump.)
If Abbott continues to flout the Supreme Court, the federal government should return to court to get a contempt order against him. If the executive branch and the courts do not put an end to states’ antebellum-like legal nullification, it will become the norm.
As we saw on Jan. 6, when elected leaders defy the law, they invite their followers to do the same. Chaos reigns, the courts become powerless, and mob rule (directed by an authoritarian leader) prevails. When Trump lambastes judges and prosecutors and promises to “weaponize” the Justice Department, judges must maintain a zero-tolerance policy for officials’ (and former officials’) defiance of laws and court orders and ignore their claims of persecution. Judges should continue to denounce the contempt for courts, the law and truth Republicans routinely display.
If courts do not mete out severe consequences for willful disregard of the law and attacks on the legitimacy of the courts, Trump will succeed in ripping up the foundation of our democracy. Judges simply must hold the line.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
A distinguishing characteristic of MAGA Republicans is their contempt for the rule of law. Not to be bound by election results, the Constitution or court processes, four-time-indicted former president Donald Trump sets the tone. He declares himself immune from prosecution. He defies judicial gag orders, throws temper tantrums in court and tosses around “executive privilege” like confetti. Thankfully, judges have begun responding to MAGA lawlessness and attempts to nullify federal law.
U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, for example, in an otherwise routine sentencing memo for Jan. 6, 2021, participant James Little, castigated election deniers and Jan. 6 apologists. “The Court is accustomed to defendants who refuse to accept that they did anything wrong,” he wrote. “But in my thirty-seven years on the bench, I cannot recall a time when such meritless justifications of criminal activity have gone mainstream.”
Although Lamberth did not specify MAGA adherents, he condemned “distortions and outright falsehoods [that] seep into the public consciousness.” He continued: “I have been shocked to watch some public figures try to rewrite history, claiming rioters behaved ‘in an orderly fashion’ like ordinary tourists, or martyrizing convicted January 6 defendants as ‘political prisoners’ or even, incredibly, ‘hostages.’” (The latter came from the lips of MAGA flunkies, including Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, a contender for vice president on Trump’s ticket.) Lamberth added that though such claims are “preposterous,” he fears that “such destructive, misguided rhetoric could presage further danger to our country.”
Lamberth concluded:
This was not a protest that got out of hand. It was a riot; in many respects a coordinated riot, as is clear from cases before me. … ‘Protestors’ would have simply shared their views on the election — as did thousands that day who did not approach the Capitol. But those who breached and occupied the Capitol building and grounds halted the counting of the electoral college votes required by the Twelfth Amendment.
The rioters interfered with a necessary step in the constitutional process, disrupted the lawful transfer of power, and thus jeopardized the American constitutional order. Although the rioters failed in their ultimate goal, their actions nonetheless resulted in the deaths of multiple people, injury to over 140 members of law enforcement, and lasting trauma for our entire nation. This was not patriotism; it was the antithesis of patriotism.
And the rioters achieved this result through force. ... The First Amendment does not give anyone the right to enter a restricted area or to engage in riotous activity in the Capitol.
He conceded that his opinion wouldn’t stop the flood of lies, but he expressed hope that “a little truth will go a long way.” His extraordinary admonition (akin to former federal judge J. Michael Luttig identifying Trump and his supporters as a “clear and present danger”) speaks to the severity of the MAGA movement’s attack on the rule of law.
Likewise, in sentencing former Trump economic adviser Peter Navarro for contempt of Congress, U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta admonished: “I know you think it’s a political hatchet job. … [The House Jan. 6 committee] had a job to do, and you made it harder.” He called out Navarro’s attempt to play the victim as nothing but “chutzpah.” He lectured the defendant: “You are not a victim. You are not the object of a political prosecution. These are circumstances of your own making.” And he scolded Navarro that executive privilege was neither “magic dust to avoid a duty” nor “a get-out-of-jail-free card.” Every word of this would be equally applicable to Trump and his legion of enablers.
These rebukes serve as a long-overdue declaration from the judicial branch that piling lie upon lie won’t fly in the justice system. Facts matter in courts; miscreants cannot escape responsibility for lawbreaking. These judges refuse to let MAGA’s widespread contempt for courts and the Constitution be normalized; they remind ordinary Americans that Trump and his minions are not above the law.
Despite these efforts, judges can and must do more to confront law- and truth-defying Republicans. After the Supreme Court issued its opinion instructing Alabama to redraw its congressional districts to create a second majority-Black district, the Republican legislature and governor produced a new map that did not follow the court’s order. The Justice Department went back to court to direct Alabama to follow the high court’s order, but, regrettably, Alabama Republicans were not held in contempt. Their defiance did more than cost taxpayers additional money and court time; they set a troublesome precedent that they could defy courts to show off for their base without consequences.
Meanwhile, Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott intruded into the province of federal immigration authorities by installing life-threatening razor wire across the Rio Grande. He “seized” the border by putting the Texas National Guard in place, denying access to federal border agents. “The Supreme Court on Thursday granted a request from the Biden administration to allow federal Border Patrol agents to cut or move razor wire installed by Texas along a portion of the U.S.-Mexico border,” Scotus Blog reported. “Three migrants — a woman and two children — drowned on Jan. 12 near the disputed area, the Biden administration told the justices in a filing last week, while the Mexican government had to rescue two more who were suffering from hypothermia.”
Abbott announced that he will defy the Supreme Court’s order, thereby violating his oath to abide by the U.S. Constitution and other laws. The general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security wrote a letter to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (who sued, you might recall, to overturn the 2020 election), demanding access granted by the court. The standoff continues.
Just as troublesome, Speaker Mike Johnson (La.) and other House Republicans cheered Abbott’s attempt at nullification. They encourage blatantly lawless action when it serves their interests. (This echoes Johnson’s handiwork in rounding up more than 125 House Republicans to sign a brief seeking to disenfranchise millions of Americans and steal the election for Trump.)
If Abbott continues to flout the Supreme Court, the federal government should return to court to get a contempt order against him. If the executive branch and the courts do not put an end to states’ antebellum-like legal nullification, it will become the norm.
As we saw on Jan. 6, when elected leaders defy the law, they invite their followers to do the same. Chaos reigns, the courts become powerless, and mob rule (directed by an authoritarian leader) prevails. When Trump lambastes judges and prosecutors and promises to “weaponize” the Justice Department, judges must maintain a zero-tolerance policy for officials’ (and former officials’) defiance of laws and court orders and ignore their claims of persecution. Judges should continue to denounce the contempt for courts, the law and truth Republicans routinely display.
If courts do not mete out severe consequences for willful disregard of the law and attacks on the legitimacy of the courts, Trump will succeed in ripping up the foundation of our democracy. Judges simply must hold the line.
THE OGRE GORGING ON AMERICA
By Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
If you can imagine the lobby bar of the Manchester Marriott as an Anglo-Saxon mead hall, I can explain how it felt to cover the New Hampshire primary.
I will need the help of the late Seamus Heaney, who described what it was like to be quaffing in Heorot Hall while Grendel lurked and swooped through the frost-stiffened north.
In his lyrical translation of “Beowulf,” Heaney described Grendel as “the terror-monger,” the “captain of evil” and “the dread of the land.”
He wrote that the fiend “ruled in defiance of right” and was “malignant by nature, he never showed remorse.”
The “powerful demon, a prowler through the dark, nursed a hard grievance,” he said, adding: “Grendel waged his lonely war, inflicting constant cruelties on the people, atrocious hurt,” pursuing “vicious raids and ravages.”
The New Hampshire primary felt like a chapter of that Old English saga: Donald Trump, the ogre who keeps coming back to terrorize us, was stomping around that lovely little snow-covered state, devouring his foes.
Unfortunately, Nikki Haley was no Beowulf. She was not mighty and canny enough to rescue us from the brute. Not a single mead bench was broken in the battle. Her blade made slight cuts, but she was tentative, hoping not to drive away Trump supporters. She was on defense, not offense. She needed more of that adamantine quality that Nancy Pelosi showed against Trump.
Haley did not say what needed to be said: Donald Trump should not be president because he tried to overthrow the government. We can’t have someone guiding our democracy who is undemocratic, claiming that every contest he loses is rigged. We can’t have a president who encourages violence, vomits misinformation, campaigns by humiliation and smears and, lately, portrays himself as divine.
Engorged by his victories over Haley and Ron DeSanctimonious, the Mar-a-Lago Monster grew stronger.
Haley was able to get under his skin by taking a page out of his book on election night. She took her second-place finish and boasted that it really counted as a win of sorts. And that sent Trump into a scary “Caine Mutiny” monologue.
All he had to do Tuesday night in Nashua was be gracious in victory and say he was going to focus on the general election.
But he is so frightened of being cast as a loser that he was totally thrown for a loop by Haley bragging about taking the silver medal. He thinks he’s the only one who’s allowed to spin election results.
“I said, ‘Wow, she’s doing, like, a speech, like she won,’” Trump said. “She didn’t win. She lost.” How removed is he from his own reality that he can say that with a straight face? That he doesn’t know he’s talking about himself?
He was befuddled by the effrontery of Haley continuing her challenge to him. He couldn’t stop his Captain Queeg rant.
Ah, but the strawberries.
“We’ve won almost every single poll in the last three months against Crooked Joe Biden, almost every poll. And she doesn’t win those polls. And she doesn’t win those. This is not your typical victory speech, but let’s not have somebody take a victory when she had a very bad night. She had a very bad night.” (Needless to say, Haley does win some polls.)
Ah, but the strawberries.
“I said I can go up and I can say to everybody, ‘Oh, thank you for the victory. It’s wonderful.’ Or I can go up and say, ‘Who the hell was the impostor that went up on the stage before and, like, claimed a victory?’ She did very poorly, actually.” He added: “I don’t get too angry. I get even.”
Ah, but the strawberries.
“But I felt I should do this because I find in life you can’t let people get away with bullshit. You can’t. You just can’t do that. And when I watched her in the fancy dress that probably wasn’t so fancy, come up, I said, ‘What’s she doing? We won.’”
What does that bitchy line about Haley’s pretty blue flowered dress even mean? It’s as if he can’t even summon a sexist insult that makes sense. No wonder Haley called him “totally unhinged” on Friday.
He kept going with his demented rant on Truth Social two days later: “I heard BIRDBRAIN totally ‘bombed’ last night in South Carolina. Why the surprise, she just bombed in Iowa and New Hampshire in a very big way, and lost both States.”
He has really lost the thread of how a democracy works. This was evident again in his outrageous endorsement of a plan to short-circuit the primaries and have himself crowned the presumptive nominee by the Republican National Committee. After a backlash, he backed off and disavowed his own desire.
Trump was still acting erratically in a federal courtroom in Manhattan on Friday, stalking in and out. After the jury returned a verdict ordering him to pay $83.3 million to E. Jean Carroll for defaming her, he blasted out a screwy screed on Truth Social, ending with, “THIS IS NOT AMERICA!”
Fortunately, it is. But it won’t be if Grendel terrorizes his way back into the Oval Office.
By Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
If you can imagine the lobby bar of the Manchester Marriott as an Anglo-Saxon mead hall, I can explain how it felt to cover the New Hampshire primary.
I will need the help of the late Seamus Heaney, who described what it was like to be quaffing in Heorot Hall while Grendel lurked and swooped through the frost-stiffened north.
In his lyrical translation of “Beowulf,” Heaney described Grendel as “the terror-monger,” the “captain of evil” and “the dread of the land.”
He wrote that the fiend “ruled in defiance of right” and was “malignant by nature, he never showed remorse.”
The “powerful demon, a prowler through the dark, nursed a hard grievance,” he said, adding: “Grendel waged his lonely war, inflicting constant cruelties on the people, atrocious hurt,” pursuing “vicious raids and ravages.”
The New Hampshire primary felt like a chapter of that Old English saga: Donald Trump, the ogre who keeps coming back to terrorize us, was stomping around that lovely little snow-covered state, devouring his foes.
Unfortunately, Nikki Haley was no Beowulf. She was not mighty and canny enough to rescue us from the brute. Not a single mead bench was broken in the battle. Her blade made slight cuts, but she was tentative, hoping not to drive away Trump supporters. She was on defense, not offense. She needed more of that adamantine quality that Nancy Pelosi showed against Trump.
Haley did not say what needed to be said: Donald Trump should not be president because he tried to overthrow the government. We can’t have someone guiding our democracy who is undemocratic, claiming that every contest he loses is rigged. We can’t have a president who encourages violence, vomits misinformation, campaigns by humiliation and smears and, lately, portrays himself as divine.
Engorged by his victories over Haley and Ron DeSanctimonious, the Mar-a-Lago Monster grew stronger.
Haley was able to get under his skin by taking a page out of his book on election night. She took her second-place finish and boasted that it really counted as a win of sorts. And that sent Trump into a scary “Caine Mutiny” monologue.
All he had to do Tuesday night in Nashua was be gracious in victory and say he was going to focus on the general election.
But he is so frightened of being cast as a loser that he was totally thrown for a loop by Haley bragging about taking the silver medal. He thinks he’s the only one who’s allowed to spin election results.
“I said, ‘Wow, she’s doing, like, a speech, like she won,’” Trump said. “She didn’t win. She lost.” How removed is he from his own reality that he can say that with a straight face? That he doesn’t know he’s talking about himself?
He was befuddled by the effrontery of Haley continuing her challenge to him. He couldn’t stop his Captain Queeg rant.
Ah, but the strawberries.
“We’ve won almost every single poll in the last three months against Crooked Joe Biden, almost every poll. And she doesn’t win those polls. And she doesn’t win those. This is not your typical victory speech, but let’s not have somebody take a victory when she had a very bad night. She had a very bad night.” (Needless to say, Haley does win some polls.)
Ah, but the strawberries.
“I said I can go up and I can say to everybody, ‘Oh, thank you for the victory. It’s wonderful.’ Or I can go up and say, ‘Who the hell was the impostor that went up on the stage before and, like, claimed a victory?’ She did very poorly, actually.” He added: “I don’t get too angry. I get even.”
Ah, but the strawberries.
“But I felt I should do this because I find in life you can’t let people get away with bullshit. You can’t. You just can’t do that. And when I watched her in the fancy dress that probably wasn’t so fancy, come up, I said, ‘What’s she doing? We won.’”
What does that bitchy line about Haley’s pretty blue flowered dress even mean? It’s as if he can’t even summon a sexist insult that makes sense. No wonder Haley called him “totally unhinged” on Friday.
He kept going with his demented rant on Truth Social two days later: “I heard BIRDBRAIN totally ‘bombed’ last night in South Carolina. Why the surprise, she just bombed in Iowa and New Hampshire in a very big way, and lost both States.”
He has really lost the thread of how a democracy works. This was evident again in his outrageous endorsement of a plan to short-circuit the primaries and have himself crowned the presumptive nominee by the Republican National Committee. After a backlash, he backed off and disavowed his own desire.
Trump was still acting erratically in a federal courtroom in Manhattan on Friday, stalking in and out. After the jury returned a verdict ordering him to pay $83.3 million to E. Jean Carroll for defaming her, he blasted out a screwy screed on Truth Social, ending with, “THIS IS NOT AMERICA!”
Fortunately, it is. But it won’t be if Grendel terrorizes his way back into the Oval Office.
THE VICTORIOUS, CENSORIOUS, MALICIOUS DONALD TRUMP
By Frank Bruni, The New York Times
About an hour and a half after Donald Trump was declared the winner of the Republican primary in New Hampshire, he appeared onstage at a victory rally in Nashua, N.H., to bask in his accomplishment and bash lesser mortals. Bask-and-bash is his preferred M.O., an indulgence of the love he feels for himself and the contempt he feels for almost everybody else, and his bearing and remarks indeed had a familiar, compulsory ring. As Trump performances go, it was an unremarkable one.
And yet so utterly revealing. So perfectly emblematic. CNN, which I happened to be watching, went live to Nashua and stayed with him for maybe 10 minutes, maybe less — the new fashion is to mete out attention to Trump modestly, carefully, lest he get too big a megaphone for his lies — and yet that abbreviated encounter provided ample information. I was struck by all that it communicated.
Such as the sycophancy surrounding Trump. Right behind him, visible over his shoulder, was Senator Tim Scott, a man who prides himself on his faith and decency, a former rival of Trump’s for the Republican nomination, now another toady in Trump’s service, surely angling to be his running mate, already on board as a campaign-trail surrogate. Scott was smiling broadly. It was as sad an expression as I’ve ever seen. Maybe sacrificing scruples on the altar of ambition is more joyful than I ever imagined. Maybe Stockholm syndrome takes effect more quickly and fully than I ever realized.
Or maybe Scott was intent on being as sunny a sidekick to Trump as Vivek Ramaswamy, who jittered into the frame to take a turn at the microphone and declare his devotion. Trump is an inconstant ally, but no matter: He’s rewarded with a retinue of fawners and flatterers. It’s a parable of conquest. It’s also morally pathetic.
During Trump’s own time at the microphone, he called Nikki Haley an “impostor” because she spoke on Tuesday night as if she’d had a good showing when, actually, she’d been vanquished. Gee, of whom does that remind me? Maybe Trump circa November 2020 to January 2021? Maybe Trump to this day?
Trump accused the governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu, who’d endorsed Haley, of being on uppers. He claimed that President Biden “can’t put two sentences together.”
Just a minute before, he put together these two sentences: “I don’t get too angry. I get even.” The first of those is laughably false. The second distills the gleeful and gloating ugliness of his brand and of his movement.
Trump also said that Haley, contrary to her claims, doesn’t beat Biden in polls that pit her against him. Untrue. He said that he had a flawless track record in New Hampshire from 2016 to the present. “We win the primary,” he boasted. “We win the generals.” He must have meant the general elections, and that’s dead wrong. Hillary Clinton very narrowly beat Trump in New Hampshire in 2016. Biden beat him there in 2020 by more than seven percentage points.
Fantasy in place of reality. Insults in lieu of inspiration. A clutch of sellouts jockeying for his favor and fluffing his ego. It was all there because that’s all there is. I watched Trump only briefly and saw the highlights of his political odyssey to this point and the whole of the campaign ahead. It’s a scary vision. Welcome to 2024.
By Frank Bruni, The New York Times
About an hour and a half after Donald Trump was declared the winner of the Republican primary in New Hampshire, he appeared onstage at a victory rally in Nashua, N.H., to bask in his accomplishment and bash lesser mortals. Bask-and-bash is his preferred M.O., an indulgence of the love he feels for himself and the contempt he feels for almost everybody else, and his bearing and remarks indeed had a familiar, compulsory ring. As Trump performances go, it was an unremarkable one.
And yet so utterly revealing. So perfectly emblematic. CNN, which I happened to be watching, went live to Nashua and stayed with him for maybe 10 minutes, maybe less — the new fashion is to mete out attention to Trump modestly, carefully, lest he get too big a megaphone for his lies — and yet that abbreviated encounter provided ample information. I was struck by all that it communicated.
Such as the sycophancy surrounding Trump. Right behind him, visible over his shoulder, was Senator Tim Scott, a man who prides himself on his faith and decency, a former rival of Trump’s for the Republican nomination, now another toady in Trump’s service, surely angling to be his running mate, already on board as a campaign-trail surrogate. Scott was smiling broadly. It was as sad an expression as I’ve ever seen. Maybe sacrificing scruples on the altar of ambition is more joyful than I ever imagined. Maybe Stockholm syndrome takes effect more quickly and fully than I ever realized.
Or maybe Scott was intent on being as sunny a sidekick to Trump as Vivek Ramaswamy, who jittered into the frame to take a turn at the microphone and declare his devotion. Trump is an inconstant ally, but no matter: He’s rewarded with a retinue of fawners and flatterers. It’s a parable of conquest. It’s also morally pathetic.
During Trump’s own time at the microphone, he called Nikki Haley an “impostor” because she spoke on Tuesday night as if she’d had a good showing when, actually, she’d been vanquished. Gee, of whom does that remind me? Maybe Trump circa November 2020 to January 2021? Maybe Trump to this day?
Trump accused the governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu, who’d endorsed Haley, of being on uppers. He claimed that President Biden “can’t put two sentences together.”
Just a minute before, he put together these two sentences: “I don’t get too angry. I get even.” The first of those is laughably false. The second distills the gleeful and gloating ugliness of his brand and of his movement.
Trump also said that Haley, contrary to her claims, doesn’t beat Biden in polls that pit her against him. Untrue. He said that he had a flawless track record in New Hampshire from 2016 to the present. “We win the primary,” he boasted. “We win the generals.” He must have meant the general elections, and that’s dead wrong. Hillary Clinton very narrowly beat Trump in New Hampshire in 2016. Biden beat him there in 2020 by more than seven percentage points.
Fantasy in place of reality. Insults in lieu of inspiration. A clutch of sellouts jockeying for his favor and fluffing his ego. It was all there because that’s all there is. I watched Trump only briefly and saw the highlights of his political odyssey to this point and the whole of the campaign ahead. It’s a scary vision. Welcome to 2024.
DONALD TRUMP IS VERY CONFUSED
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
MANCHESTER, N.H. — This New Hampshire primary, like the Iowa caucuses before it, was a dud, with no real contest on either side. But that is not to say it was without value.
For New Hampshire showed us, beyond all doubt, that Donald Trump is very, very confused.
In October, in a speech in Derry, N.H., he informed his audience that Viktor Orban, the strongman who rules Hungary, is “the leader of Turkey.”
In November, in a speech in Claremont, N.H., he advised the crowd that the current leader of the United States is “President Obama.” (He later claimed this mistake, which he made on several other occasions, was actually him being “sarcastic” — get it?)
Then, on Friday night, at a rally in Concord, N.H., Trump confused his Republican primary opponent, Nikki Haley, with former House speaker Nancy Pelosi. He claimed that Haley was “in charge of security” during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, that she refused all of his offers of help, and that she destroyed the evidence.
Haley, the former South Carolina governor and Trump’s own U.N. ambassador who was neither in office nor in Washington on Jan. 6, responded: “They’re saying he got confused … When you’re dealing with the pressures of a presidency, we can’t have someone else that we question whether they’re mentally fit to do this.”
I went to Trump’s rally on Saturday night in Manchester, where he didn’t address the Haley-Pelosi mix-up but assured his supporters that he “took a cognitive test” and “I aced it.” He has previously boasted of his ability to identify an image of a “whale” on said assessment, but, as The Post’s Ashley Parker and Dan Diamond pointed out, there is no such marine mammal on any version of the test. (Maybe he was being “sarcastic” about the whale, too.)
But I listened carefully to Trump that night — no easy feat because he went on for 100 minutes — and noticed that, even though his text was fed to him through a teleprompter, he told many of the same stories over and over again, repeating some lines almost word for word in the same speech, with no apparent awareness that he had done so.
Unlike so much of what Trump does, his memory lapses aren’t disqualifying — only hypocritical. Trump routinely calls President Biden, 81, “cognitively impaired,” but the 77-year-old Trump seems also to have lost a step. He mangles names and words — a visiting foreign dignitary becomes a “foreign dignity” — and occasionally just talks nonsense.
Many in the news media don’t make much of this; while they focus on Biden’s mental acuity, in Trump’s case they rightly focus more on his authoritarian outbursts and gratuitous racism. Last week, for example, he bastardized Haley’s Indian name and falsely suggested she’s disqualified from the presidency because her parents weren’t citizens.
In fairness, the Trump of four and eight years ago was also plenty erratic. But a closer look at his public performances — his courtroom outbursts and on the stump — suggests the very stable genius is off his game. He’s propped up by a very professional campaign, which he didn’t have before, and more insulated from questions and spontaneous exchanges. Yet he’s still saying and doing the sort of things that, had Biden done them, Republicans would cry: dementia!
“Each drug dealer kills on average 500 people during his or her lifetime,” he informed his audience early in his speech.
“Each dealer is responsible for the deaths during their lives of over 500 people or more,” he informed them late in his speech.
He told them early in the speech about Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell, right, where the 51 intelligence agents said, oh, no, it was from Russia.”
He told them late in the speech that “Hunter Biden’s laptop from hell was Russian disinformation,” according to “51 intelligence agents.”
During the Trump presidency, he declared, “Hamas, Hezbollah, they didn’t have any money because Iran had no money to give them.”
Later, he announced: “Iran was broke under President Trump. They didn’t have the money to fund Hamas, Hezbollah.”
Near the top of his speech he vowed to end “Biden’s insane electric vehicle mandate,” because the vehicles “don’t go far. That’s true: They don’t go far.”
Near the bottom of the speech, he complained that “we are a nation whose leaders are demanding all-electric cars, despite the fact that they don’t go far.”
Some stories were so good he told them three times.
“We’ll end up in a world war because of this guy,” he said of Biden.
Later: “We have the serious danger of going into a World War III.”
Still later: “We’re going to end up in World War III with this guy running.”
This was somewhat of an improvement for Trump, who in September warned an audience that, under Biden, we will soon be “in World War II.”
Trump similarly told and retold a tale about Biden’s competence. “He’s a threat to democracy,” Trump said, for “a couple of reasons. But, you know, the first reason why, he’s grossly incompetent.”
“He’s a threat to democracy,” Trump repeated later.
And again, still later: “Joe Biden is a threat to democracy for a number of reasons,” primarily because “he’s grossly incompetent.”
Sounds as though somebody needs a nap.
And it wasn’t just one off night. At a rally the next night, Trump mispronounced the name of Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), his devoted ally who had just come to campaign for him in New Hampshire. He mentioned the name of a pollster — his pollster — Tony Fabrizio, with an Italian accent, then asked, “Is he a relation to Al Capone?” The following night, he served up this puzzler: “We are an institute and a powerful death penalty. We will put this on.”
It’s perhaps easy to lose all this in the grotesque carnival that is a Trump rally.
There’s the abuse offered by Trump, his warm-up acts and his supporters whose shouted epithets get woven into the performance: CNN’s Anderson Cooper is a “pervert.” Nikki Haley is a “birdbrain,” a “globalist fool” and “Hillary Haley” backed by “radical left communists.” Ron DeSantis got “a new pair of high heels.”
There are the gratuitous, extravagant lies. There were but 4,500 souls in the arena, which has a maximum capacity of 12,000, but Trump told them they “set every record” for attendance. Turnout in the Iowa Republican caucuses was only 15 percent, the lowest in years, but one lawmaker Trump called onstage announced that Iowa just voted in “record numbers.” Trump falsely complained that the state’s anti-Trump Republican governor, Chris Sununu, “allows Democrats to vote in the Republican primary” to help Haley; state law has long allowed independents (not Democrats) to vote in either primary.
There are the barely veiled appeals to white nationalism. A video played on the big screen before Trump takes the stage had the tagline: “Make America Great For Us Again.” Of his political opponents, Trump told the crowd: “This nation does not belong to them. This nation belongs to you. This is your home. This is your heritage.”
Above all there was his apocalyptic description of America, now recited over orchestral music. Trump told his followers: “We are a failing nation. We are a nation that has the highest inflation in 50 years, where banks are collapsing. … We are a Third World nation. … Fake news is all you get, and they are indeed the enemy of the people. … We are a nation that, in many ways has become a joke. … We are a nation whose economy is collapsing into a cesspool of ruin, whose supply chain is broken, whose stores are not stocked.”
Maybe he just couldn’t remember that, the day before, the stock market had hit a record and consumer sentiment had seen the largest two-month jump in more than 30 years. Perhaps he forgot that inflation had been tamed, that supply-chain problems eased long ago, that unemployment is near historic lows.
“I feel my mind is stronger now than it was 25 years ago,” he told the crowd, promising them: “I’ll let you know when I go bad. I really think I’ll be able to tell you.”
There, there now. I’m sure you will.
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
MANCHESTER, N.H. — This New Hampshire primary, like the Iowa caucuses before it, was a dud, with no real contest on either side. But that is not to say it was without value.
For New Hampshire showed us, beyond all doubt, that Donald Trump is very, very confused.
In October, in a speech in Derry, N.H., he informed his audience that Viktor Orban, the strongman who rules Hungary, is “the leader of Turkey.”
In November, in a speech in Claremont, N.H., he advised the crowd that the current leader of the United States is “President Obama.” (He later claimed this mistake, which he made on several other occasions, was actually him being “sarcastic” — get it?)
Then, on Friday night, at a rally in Concord, N.H., Trump confused his Republican primary opponent, Nikki Haley, with former House speaker Nancy Pelosi. He claimed that Haley was “in charge of security” during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, that she refused all of his offers of help, and that she destroyed the evidence.
Haley, the former South Carolina governor and Trump’s own U.N. ambassador who was neither in office nor in Washington on Jan. 6, responded: “They’re saying he got confused … When you’re dealing with the pressures of a presidency, we can’t have someone else that we question whether they’re mentally fit to do this.”
I went to Trump’s rally on Saturday night in Manchester, where he didn’t address the Haley-Pelosi mix-up but assured his supporters that he “took a cognitive test” and “I aced it.” He has previously boasted of his ability to identify an image of a “whale” on said assessment, but, as The Post’s Ashley Parker and Dan Diamond pointed out, there is no such marine mammal on any version of the test. (Maybe he was being “sarcastic” about the whale, too.)
But I listened carefully to Trump that night — no easy feat because he went on for 100 minutes — and noticed that, even though his text was fed to him through a teleprompter, he told many of the same stories over and over again, repeating some lines almost word for word in the same speech, with no apparent awareness that he had done so.
Unlike so much of what Trump does, his memory lapses aren’t disqualifying — only hypocritical. Trump routinely calls President Biden, 81, “cognitively impaired,” but the 77-year-old Trump seems also to have lost a step. He mangles names and words — a visiting foreign dignitary becomes a “foreign dignity” — and occasionally just talks nonsense.
Many in the news media don’t make much of this; while they focus on Biden’s mental acuity, in Trump’s case they rightly focus more on his authoritarian outbursts and gratuitous racism. Last week, for example, he bastardized Haley’s Indian name and falsely suggested she’s disqualified from the presidency because her parents weren’t citizens.
In fairness, the Trump of four and eight years ago was also plenty erratic. But a closer look at his public performances — his courtroom outbursts and on the stump — suggests the very stable genius is off his game. He’s propped up by a very professional campaign, which he didn’t have before, and more insulated from questions and spontaneous exchanges. Yet he’s still saying and doing the sort of things that, had Biden done them, Republicans would cry: dementia!
“Each drug dealer kills on average 500 people during his or her lifetime,” he informed his audience early in his speech.
“Each dealer is responsible for the deaths during their lives of over 500 people or more,” he informed them late in his speech.
He told them early in the speech about Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell, right, where the 51 intelligence agents said, oh, no, it was from Russia.”
He told them late in the speech that “Hunter Biden’s laptop from hell was Russian disinformation,” according to “51 intelligence agents.”
During the Trump presidency, he declared, “Hamas, Hezbollah, they didn’t have any money because Iran had no money to give them.”
Later, he announced: “Iran was broke under President Trump. They didn’t have the money to fund Hamas, Hezbollah.”
Near the top of his speech he vowed to end “Biden’s insane electric vehicle mandate,” because the vehicles “don’t go far. That’s true: They don’t go far.”
Near the bottom of the speech, he complained that “we are a nation whose leaders are demanding all-electric cars, despite the fact that they don’t go far.”
Some stories were so good he told them three times.
“We’ll end up in a world war because of this guy,” he said of Biden.
Later: “We have the serious danger of going into a World War III.”
Still later: “We’re going to end up in World War III with this guy running.”
This was somewhat of an improvement for Trump, who in September warned an audience that, under Biden, we will soon be “in World War II.”
Trump similarly told and retold a tale about Biden’s competence. “He’s a threat to democracy,” Trump said, for “a couple of reasons. But, you know, the first reason why, he’s grossly incompetent.”
“He’s a threat to democracy,” Trump repeated later.
And again, still later: “Joe Biden is a threat to democracy for a number of reasons,” primarily because “he’s grossly incompetent.”
Sounds as though somebody needs a nap.
And it wasn’t just one off night. At a rally the next night, Trump mispronounced the name of Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), his devoted ally who had just come to campaign for him in New Hampshire. He mentioned the name of a pollster — his pollster — Tony Fabrizio, with an Italian accent, then asked, “Is he a relation to Al Capone?” The following night, he served up this puzzler: “We are an institute and a powerful death penalty. We will put this on.”
It’s perhaps easy to lose all this in the grotesque carnival that is a Trump rally.
There’s the abuse offered by Trump, his warm-up acts and his supporters whose shouted epithets get woven into the performance: CNN’s Anderson Cooper is a “pervert.” Nikki Haley is a “birdbrain,” a “globalist fool” and “Hillary Haley” backed by “radical left communists.” Ron DeSantis got “a new pair of high heels.”
There are the gratuitous, extravagant lies. There were but 4,500 souls in the arena, which has a maximum capacity of 12,000, but Trump told them they “set every record” for attendance. Turnout in the Iowa Republican caucuses was only 15 percent, the lowest in years, but one lawmaker Trump called onstage announced that Iowa just voted in “record numbers.” Trump falsely complained that the state’s anti-Trump Republican governor, Chris Sununu, “allows Democrats to vote in the Republican primary” to help Haley; state law has long allowed independents (not Democrats) to vote in either primary.
There are the barely veiled appeals to white nationalism. A video played on the big screen before Trump takes the stage had the tagline: “Make America Great For Us Again.” Of his political opponents, Trump told the crowd: “This nation does not belong to them. This nation belongs to you. This is your home. This is your heritage.”
Above all there was his apocalyptic description of America, now recited over orchestral music. Trump told his followers: “We are a failing nation. We are a nation that has the highest inflation in 50 years, where banks are collapsing. … We are a Third World nation. … Fake news is all you get, and they are indeed the enemy of the people. … We are a nation that, in many ways has become a joke. … We are a nation whose economy is collapsing into a cesspool of ruin, whose supply chain is broken, whose stores are not stocked.”
Maybe he just couldn’t remember that, the day before, the stock market had hit a record and consumer sentiment had seen the largest two-month jump in more than 30 years. Perhaps he forgot that inflation had been tamed, that supply-chain problems eased long ago, that unemployment is near historic lows.
“I feel my mind is stronger now than it was 25 years ago,” he told the crowd, promising them: “I’ll let you know when I go bad. I really think I’ll be able to tell you.”
There, there now. I’m sure you will.
SWATTING AND THE DANGEROUS RISE OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE
By Barbara McQuade, former U.S. attorney and the author of the forthcoming book “Attack From Within: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America.”
In a year with so much political and legal tension, law enforcement is seeing a disturbing trend: targeting public officials with swatting, or false emergency calls intended to draw a heavily armed police response. This conduct isn’t a harmless prank; it’s a symptom of a deeper disorder in American politics. Recent incidents involving officials who have taken stands seen as hostile to Donald Trump and bomb threats in multiple state capitols are signs of a troubling escalation in political violence.
These hoaxes pose real dangers. Sending armed police officers to someone’s home on the ruse that violence is occurring there risks tragic outcomes, including fatalities, as we saw in Kansas in 2017, when swatting led to a police officer shooting an unarmed man. In addition, swatting diverts law enforcement resources from real emergencies. But more insidiously, these tactics are tools of intimidation, designed to silence voices in the political process.
The frequency and visibility of these incidents suggest that swatting and political violence require prosecutors to prioritize their efforts to stop it. Recent targets of swatting include Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is presiding over the federal election interference case and whom Mr. Trump has accused of election interference; the special counsel Jack Smith, whom Mr. Trump has called “deranged” and a “thug”; and Gabriel Sterling, a Republican election official in Georgia who rejected Mr. Trump’s claims of fraud in the 2020 election. Justice Arthur Engoron, who is presiding over Mr. Trump’s New York civil fraud trial, received a bomb threat at his home on the day of closing arguments. Maine’s secretary of state, Shenna Bellows,became a victim of swatting shortly after she removed Mr. Trump from the presidential ballot in her state under the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment. She rightly sees these acts as attempts to chill efforts to enforce the law, calling the incident at her home “designed to scare not only me but also others into silence, to send a message.”
Public officials are human. Threats and the specter of violence can get into their heads. The possibility that a loved one might be unnerved, injured or worse as a result of one’s official duties isn’t easily shrugged off for most of us. The husband of Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, retired from his dental practice about eight years earlier than planned because of threats he received at his office. The risks can go beyond words. A federal judge in New Jersey suffered the loss of her 20-year-old son in 2020 when a gunman, apparently dressed as a delivery driver, came to her home looking for her and killed her son instead. We cannot forget that threats can escalate into violence. Fear of placing family members in harm’s way can make public officials shrink from making unpopular decisions and can even cause some good people to avoid serving altogether.
Of course, this phenomenon isn’t entirely new. At the dawn of the American Revolution, some colonists harassed tax collectors and published the names of those who refused to boycott British goods. And we have experienced bomb threats for decades, learning to live with the disruptions caused by evacuations that result when a threat is phoned in or posted online.
But the recent uptick in swatting can be attributed, at least in part, to the dangerous drumbeat of disinformation and dehumanization, a tactic long employed by authoritarians. Political extremists engage in what is known as the either-or fallacy. By framing issues as binary conflicts and demonizing opponents, they create a climate in which violence becomes normalized. Recent statements by Mr. Trump exemplify this strategy. He uses Truth Social posts to make unfounded accusations and express disdain for rivals. These posts do more than spread disinformation. They foster an environment in which violence against perceived enemies becomes not just conceivable but justified.
The consequences of such talk are tangible and terrifying. Mr. Trump’s words have already preceded acts of violence: An attack on the F.B.I. field office in Cincinnati after he baselessly accused agents of planting evidence during their search of his Mar-a-Lago home in 2022. The plot of the MAGA bomber, who sent pipe bombs to Mr. Trump’s perceived enemies in the media and the Democratic Party in 2018. The Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol came after Mr. Trump urged his supporters to “fight like hell” or “you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Recent threats against Colorado Supreme Court justices who ruled that Mr. Trump was ineligible for the ballot in their state and harassment of the grand jury members who returned an indictment against him in Georgia underscore the real-world impact of stirring up political passions. Regardless of whether he intends to provoke attacks, his rants are heard by some as calls to action. And his success is likely to spawn imitators.
There is no easy answer to reversing this trend, but one way to start is for law enforcement officials to take a strong stand against political violence. When I served as a U.S. attorney in Michigan, I found that enforcement action worked best when coupled with messaging — before and after prosecution. In 2013, after carjacking became a significant problem in Detroit, law enforcement agencies used billboards and television ads to inform the public of the long prison sentences for carjacking. Carjackers were prosecuted, and their sentences were publicized. The following year saw a 32 percent reduction in that offense. While it is never possible to pinpoint the cause of a reduction in crime, educating would-be offenders about the serious consequences probably had some deterrent effect.
We can use the same approach in addressing swatting and threats. First, law enforcement officials should make it known that communicating a false police report or hoax threat can carry significant prison time under state and federal law. Second, prosecutors should prioritize cases of swatting and threats. Prosecutors lack the resources to pursue every case that comes across their desks, so they must choose those they deem the most serious. It is time to put swatting and threats into that top category. Third, political and community leaders should express moral condemnation for swatting, explaining the immediate danger this crime presents to public safety and the long-term dangers it poses to democracy.
In addition, as citizens, we must condemn the reckless language that leads to swatting. As voters in a democracy, we can reject inflammatory speech that targets public servants and demand civil discourse from our government representatives and candidates for office. We should cast as traitors to our foundational values anyone who fans the flames of division. To be a patriot is to seek truth and promote nonviolence.
The path we choose will determine whether the current trend of political violence and intimidation fades or gives way to something even more sinister. Our democracy’s health and our nation’s stability depend on our collective response to this dangerous turn.
By Barbara McQuade, former U.S. attorney and the author of the forthcoming book “Attack From Within: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America.”
In a year with so much political and legal tension, law enforcement is seeing a disturbing trend: targeting public officials with swatting, or false emergency calls intended to draw a heavily armed police response. This conduct isn’t a harmless prank; it’s a symptom of a deeper disorder in American politics. Recent incidents involving officials who have taken stands seen as hostile to Donald Trump and bomb threats in multiple state capitols are signs of a troubling escalation in political violence.
These hoaxes pose real dangers. Sending armed police officers to someone’s home on the ruse that violence is occurring there risks tragic outcomes, including fatalities, as we saw in Kansas in 2017, when swatting led to a police officer shooting an unarmed man. In addition, swatting diverts law enforcement resources from real emergencies. But more insidiously, these tactics are tools of intimidation, designed to silence voices in the political process.
The frequency and visibility of these incidents suggest that swatting and political violence require prosecutors to prioritize their efforts to stop it. Recent targets of swatting include Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is presiding over the federal election interference case and whom Mr. Trump has accused of election interference; the special counsel Jack Smith, whom Mr. Trump has called “deranged” and a “thug”; and Gabriel Sterling, a Republican election official in Georgia who rejected Mr. Trump’s claims of fraud in the 2020 election. Justice Arthur Engoron, who is presiding over Mr. Trump’s New York civil fraud trial, received a bomb threat at his home on the day of closing arguments. Maine’s secretary of state, Shenna Bellows,
Public officials are human. Threats and the specter of violence can get into their heads. The possibility that a loved one might be unnerved, injured or worse as a result of one’s official duties isn’t easily shrugged off for most of us. The husband of Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, retired from his dental practice about eight years earlier than planned because of threats he received at his office. The risks can go beyond words. A federal judge in New Jersey suffered the loss of her 20-year-old son in 2020 when a gunman, apparently dressed as a delivery driver, came to her home looking for her and killed her son instead. We cannot forget that threats can escalate into violence. Fear of placing family members in harm’s way can make public officials shrink from making unpopular decisions and can even cause some good people to avoid serving altogether.
Of course, this phenomenon isn’t entirely new. At the dawn of the American Revolution, some colonists harassed tax collectors and published the names of those who refused to boycott British goods. And we have experienced bomb threats for decades, learning to live with the disruptions caused by evacuations that result when a threat is phoned in or posted online.
But the recent uptick in swatting can be attributed, at least in part, to the dangerous drumbeat of disinformation and dehumanization, a tactic long employed by authoritarians. Political extremists engage in what is known as the either-or fallacy. By framing issues as binary conflicts and demonizing opponents, they create a climate in which violence becomes normalized. Recent statements by Mr. Trump exemplify this strategy. He uses Truth Social posts to make unfounded accusations and express disdain for rivals. These posts do more than spread disinformation. They foster an environment in which violence against perceived enemies becomes not just conceivable but justified.
The consequences of such talk are tangible and terrifying. Mr. Trump’s words have already preceded acts of violence: An attack on the F.B.I. field office in Cincinnati after he baselessly accused agents of planting evidence during their search of his Mar-a-Lago home in 2022. The plot of the MAGA bomber, who sent pipe bombs to Mr. Trump’s perceived enemies in the media and the Democratic Party in 2018. The Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol came after Mr. Trump urged his supporters to “fight like hell” or “you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Recent threats against Colorado Supreme Court justices who ruled that Mr. Trump was ineligible for the ballot in their state and harassment of the grand jury members who returned an indictment against him in Georgia underscore the real-world impact of stirring up political passions. Regardless of whether he intends to provoke attacks, his rants are heard by some as calls to action. And his success is likely to spawn imitators.
There is no easy answer to reversing this trend, but one way to start is for law enforcement officials to take a strong stand against political violence. When I served as a U.S. attorney in Michigan, I found that enforcement action worked best when coupled with messaging — before and after prosecution. In 2013, after carjacking became a significant problem in Detroit, law enforcement agencies used billboards and television ads to inform the public of the long prison sentences for carjacking. Carjackers were prosecuted, and their sentences were publicized. The following year saw a 32 percent reduction in that offense. While it is never possible to pinpoint the cause of a reduction in crime, educating would-be offenders about the serious consequences probably had some deterrent effect.
We can use the same approach in addressing swatting and threats. First, law enforcement officials should make it known that communicating a false police report or hoax threat can carry significant prison time under state and federal law. Second, prosecutors should prioritize cases of swatting and threats. Prosecutors lack the resources to pursue every case that comes across their desks, so they must choose those they deem the most serious. It is time to put swatting and threats into that top category. Third, political and community leaders should express moral condemnation for swatting, explaining the immediate danger this crime presents to public safety and the long-term dangers it poses to democracy.
In addition, as citizens, we must condemn the reckless language that leads to swatting. As voters in a democracy, we can reject inflammatory speech that targets public servants and demand civil discourse from our government representatives and candidates for office. We should cast as traitors to our foundational values anyone who fans the flames of division. To be a patriot is to seek truth and promote nonviolence.
The path we choose will determine whether the current trend of political violence and intimidation fades or gives way to something even more sinister. Our democracy’s health and our nation’s stability depend on our collective response to this dangerous turn.
IS CORPORATE AMERICA WELCOMING A TRUMP DICTATORSHIP? HISTORY SAYS ‘YES.’
The U.S. economy is booming under Biden, so why are many CEOs seemingly resigned to, if not openly rooting for, an autocratic Trump?
by Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
If there is such a thing as a global world order on this crazy mixed-up planet, the World Economic Forum in Davos is its every-January Super Bowl. And in 2024, the captains of industry who arrive by private jet to hear how some vague future will finally solve climate change, and our many other problems, for once had something in the present to celebrate under the spectacular shadow of the Swiss Alps.
Some 3,999 miles back home, the S&P 500 stock index skyrocketed to an all-time high, as Wall Street enthused over a new survey showing U.S. consumer sentiment took its biggest two-month jump in three decades. Those numbers are an inevitable result of months of falling gas prices, cooling inflation at the supermarket, the lowest unemployment numbers in over a half-century, and the aftermath of a free-spending Christmas season.
The U.S. presidential election that kicked off last Monday with Donald Trump’s landslide win in the GOP Iowa caucus was on the brain of every self-proclaimed, self-important “thought leader.” The forum’s chroniclers wrote that the off-the-record whispers were predictions that a Trump victory is likely in November. Then, one of Wall Street’s grand pooh-bahs said the quiet part out loud.
Jamie Dimon, heir to Wall Street’s most iconic names as longtime CEO of JPMorgan Chase, went on CNBC from Davos last week to warn Democrats — the party he says he “barely” belongs to even as he gives money to GOP also-ran Nikki Haley — they are making a mistake in denigrating the MAGA voters propelling the 45th president toward another Republican nomination. That’s not a new criticism, even from Democrats, but Dimon didn’t stop there. “I don’t think they are voting for Trump because of his family values,” Dimon said. “His tax reform worked.”
OK, before we get into the history of authoritarian strongmen and their business buddies, let’s talk about the absurd views of arguably the most powerful man in American finance. It’s not just that the specifics he cited to CNBC don’t jibe with the real world, where Trump’s tax policies increased deficits and mainly benefited Dimon’s tax bracket, and his dismal vision for NATO probably would have sacrificed Kyiv and God knows how much else of Eastern Europe to Vladimir Putin’s tanks.
But as an American brand of fascism marches forward, it was less what Dimon said than what he didn’t say. Addressing the investor class on its favorite channel, the JPMorgan Chase boss offered his critique of a fictional, bizzaro-world Trump who didn’t echo Adolf Hitler in calling his political opponents “vermin” or claim that migrants are “poisoning the blood of America,” who never promised to be a dictator for a day, and who isn’t facing 91 felony charges for — among other things — staging a failed coup aimed at thwarting the peaceful transfer of power to Biden.
Dimon’s selective memory seems to begin and end with Trump cutting taxes for him, his corporation, and his golfing buddies. The streets of Davos were overflowing with futurists pondering a middle 21st century guided by artificial intelligence, but none of these public intellectuals wanted to spoil the party by bringing up the questionable human intelligence that is inexorably driving the Republican Party, and maybe the whole American Experiment, toward autocracy.
Another CNBC article from Davos suggested that corporate CEOs are utterly unfazed by a Trump 47 presidency, even with the growing talk of dictatorship. It reported that a “U.S. bank CEO privately expressed annoyance with media exaggeration of the threat of a Trump presidency, stressing he’s ‘all bark and no bite.’ The bank chief also dismissed Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election as bloviation. ’Hes going to win the presidency,’ the CEO predicted. ‘Many of his policies were right.’”
Excuse me? Had the invention of television not yet come to this bank CEO’s hometown on Jan. 6, 2021, when five people ultimately died in the wake of Trump’s “bloviation,” and when wounded cops received the bite marks that were unquestionably worse than POTUS 45′s ”bark?” Another corporate boss insisted their slightly crazy European hosts didn’t understand that America’s systems of checks and balances means that it — dictatorship —can’t happen here. The nation’s top capitalists seem too tunnel-focused on the next quarter’s profits to know their history, either of 2017-21, or the 20th century.
The truth is that there’s been a symbiotic relationship between Big Business and authoritarian governments that began practically the moment that Mussolini’s history-making march reached Rome in 1922. Over the last century, the world’s strongmen — from the fascists of the 1930s to the latter breed of generalissimo to today’s right-wing populist autocrats — have appealed to industrialists who believe order and stability boosts the bottom line, who share a mutual enemy in left-wing labor unions, and who want to see the trains run on time and don’t want to know who’s being loaded into cattle cars.
The history of German corporations and the rise of Nazism in the 1930s is a complicated one, still debated by historians. But there’s no question that some conglomerates — most famously, the arms manufacturer Krupp and the German chemical monopoly I.G. Farben — saw Hitler’s rise as a right-wing dictator as a way to crush the Communist movement and bring a certain kind of “order” to a nation discombobulated by the Weimar Republic. In 1933, with Hitler newly named as chancellor but the Nazi Party broke going into what would be his regime’s final election, the Fuhrer successfully convinced the industrialists to fork over the equivalent of $30 million in today’s dollars by pledging to end trade unions and by stating “private enterprise cannot be maintained in a democracy.”
The complicated but too-often comfortable relationship between German businesses and the Nazi regime eventually led to complicity in Hitler’s most horrific atrocities, such as Farben manufacturing Zyklon B, the poison used in gas chambers, to the use of Jewish slave labor during the Holocaust. It’s important to note the current authoritarian-curious mood of some U.S. CEOs is a long way yet from that kind of slippery ski slope. But it’s important for America’s everyday voters to understand that they must take the lead in saving democracy, because Big Business will not.
Indeed, it’s more than a little disturbing how little has changed over the last 90 years. As the comments in Davos reveal, too many CEOs refuse to accept their winnings in terms of either profits or surging stock prices under Biden, who is the latest Democratic president to see a thriving economy after his GOP predecessor presided over sluggish job growth.
On Wall Street, Trump’s promises to lock up his political enemies, free the Jan. 6 insurrectionists and launch a disruptive gulag of mass deportation don’t feel problematic, but Biden’s history-making act of joining Detroit autoworkers on the picket line — a down-payment on his promise to be the most pro-union president in U.S. history — was a deal-breaker. Ditto for the Democrat’s FDR-inspired social programs — some of which sneaked through a divided Congress, though many did not. In contrast, Trump is promising more tax cuts, the end of regulation, and a full embrace of fossil fuels. So what if a few eggs get broken by troops in Democratic-run cities or at a militarized border?
But then, when is corporate America on the right side of history? Also in 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was starting to pull the nation out of the Great Depression, some on Wall Street hatched a “Business Plot” to depose FDR. They approached Pennsylvania’s popular “Fighting Quaker,” Col. Smedley Butler, to lead disgruntled veterans in a coup. Butler said “no,” but nearly a century later they have discovered a willing Trump and his army of the aggrieved. Will democracy’s silent majority have enough troops to stop them this time?
The U.S. economy is booming under Biden, so why are many CEOs seemingly resigned to, if not openly rooting for, an autocratic Trump?
by Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
If there is such a thing as a global world order on this crazy mixed-up planet, the World Economic Forum in Davos is its every-January Super Bowl. And in 2024, the captains of industry who arrive by private jet to hear how some vague future will finally solve climate change, and our many other problems, for once had something in the present to celebrate under the spectacular shadow of the Swiss Alps.
Some 3,999 miles back home, the S&P 500 stock index skyrocketed to an all-time high, as Wall Street enthused over a new survey showing U.S. consumer sentiment took its biggest two-month jump in three decades. Those numbers are an inevitable result of months of falling gas prices, cooling inflation at the supermarket, the lowest unemployment numbers in over a half-century, and the aftermath of a free-spending Christmas season.
The U.S. presidential election that kicked off last Monday with Donald Trump’s landslide win in the GOP Iowa caucus was on the brain of every self-proclaimed, self-important “thought leader.” The forum’s chroniclers wrote that the off-the-record whispers were predictions that a Trump victory is likely in November. Then, one of Wall Street’s grand pooh-bahs said the quiet part out loud.
Jamie Dimon, heir to Wall Street’s most iconic names as longtime CEO of JPMorgan Chase, went on CNBC from Davos last week to warn Democrats — the party he says he “barely” belongs to even as he gives money to GOP also-ran Nikki Haley — they are making a mistake in denigrating the MAGA voters propelling the 45th president toward another Republican nomination. That’s not a new criticism, even from Democrats, but Dimon didn’t stop there. “I don’t think they are voting for Trump because of his family values,” Dimon said. “His tax reform worked.”
OK, before we get into the history of authoritarian strongmen and their business buddies, let’s talk about the absurd views of arguably the most powerful man in American finance. It’s not just that the specifics he cited to CNBC don’t jibe with the real world, where Trump’s tax policies increased deficits and mainly benefited Dimon’s tax bracket, and his dismal vision for NATO probably would have sacrificed Kyiv and God knows how much else of Eastern Europe to Vladimir Putin’s tanks.
But as an American brand of fascism marches forward, it was less what Dimon said than what he didn’t say. Addressing the investor class on its favorite channel, the JPMorgan Chase boss offered his critique of a fictional, bizzaro-world Trump who didn’t echo Adolf Hitler in calling his political opponents “vermin” or claim that migrants are “poisoning the blood of America,” who never promised to be a dictator for a day, and who isn’t facing 91 felony charges for — among other things — staging a failed coup aimed at thwarting the peaceful transfer of power to Biden.
Dimon’s selective memory seems to begin and end with Trump cutting taxes for him, his corporation, and his golfing buddies. The streets of Davos were overflowing with futurists pondering a middle 21st century guided by artificial intelligence, but none of these public intellectuals wanted to spoil the party by bringing up the questionable human intelligence that is inexorably driving the Republican Party, and maybe the whole American Experiment, toward autocracy.
Another CNBC article from Davos suggested that corporate CEOs are utterly unfazed by a Trump 47 presidency, even with the growing talk of dictatorship. It reported that a “U.S. bank CEO privately expressed annoyance with media exaggeration of the threat of a Trump presidency, stressing he’s ‘all bark and no bite.’ The bank chief also dismissed Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election as bloviation. ’Hes going to win the presidency,’ the CEO predicted. ‘Many of his policies were right.’”
Excuse me? Had the invention of television not yet come to this bank CEO’s hometown on Jan. 6, 2021, when five people ultimately died in the wake of Trump’s “bloviation,” and when wounded cops received the bite marks that were unquestionably worse than POTUS 45′s ”bark?” Another corporate boss insisted their slightly crazy European hosts didn’t understand that America’s systems of checks and balances means that it — dictatorship —
The truth is that there’s been a symbiotic relationship between Big Business and authoritarian governments that began practically the moment that Mussolini’s history-making march reached Rome in 1922. Over the last century, the world’s strongmen — from the fascists of the 1930s to the latter breed of generalissimo to today’s right-wing populist autocrats — have appealed to industrialists who believe order and stability boosts the bottom line, who share a mutual enemy in left-wing labor unions, and who want to see the trains run on time and don’t want to know who’s being loaded into cattle cars.
The history of German corporations and the rise of Nazism in the 1930s is a complicated one, still debated by historians. But there’s no question that some conglomerates — most famously, the arms manufacturer Krupp and the German chemical monopoly I.G. Farben — saw Hitler’s rise as a right-wing dictator as a way to crush the Communist movement and bring a certain kind of “order” to a nation discombobulated by the Weimar Republic. In 1933, with Hitler newly named as chancellor but the Nazi Party broke going into what would be his regime’s final election, the Fuhrer successfully convinced the industrialists to fork over the equivalent of $30 million in today’s dollars by pledging to end trade unions and by stating “private enterprise cannot be maintained in a democracy.”
The complicated but too-often comfortable relationship between German businesses and the Nazi regime eventually led to complicity in Hitler’s most horrific atrocities, such as Farben manufacturing Zyklon B, the poison used in gas chambers, to the use of Jewish slave labor during the Holocaust. It’s important to note the current authoritarian-curious mood of some U.S. CEOs is a long way yet from that kind of slippery ski slope. But it’s important for America’s everyday voters to understand that they must take the lead in saving democracy, because Big Business will not.
Indeed, it’s more than a little disturbing how little has changed over the last 90 years. As the comments in Davos reveal, too many CEOs refuse to accept their winnings in terms of either profits or surging stock prices under Biden, who is the latest Democratic president to see a thriving economy after his GOP predecessor presided over sluggish job growth.
On Wall Street, Trump’s promises to lock up his political enemies, free the Jan. 6 insurrectionists and launch a disruptive gulag of mass deportation don’t feel problematic, but Biden’s history-making act of joining Detroit autoworkers on the picket line — a down-payment on his promise to be the most pro-union president in U.S. history — was a deal-breaker. Ditto for the Democrat’s FDR-inspired social programs — some of which sneaked through a divided Congress, though many did not. In contrast, Trump is promising more tax cuts, the end of regulation, and a full embrace of fossil fuels. So what if a few eggs get broken by troops in Democratic-run cities or at a militarized border?
But then, when is corporate America on the right side of history? Also in 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was starting to pull the nation out of the Great Depression, some on Wall Street hatched a “Business Plot” to depose FDR. They approached Pennsylvania’s popular “Fighting Quaker,” Col. Smedley Butler, to lead disgruntled veterans in a coup. Butler said “no,” but nearly a century later they have discovered a willing Trump and his army of the aggrieved. Will democracy’s silent majority have enough troops to stop them this time?
DONALD TRUMP FAILS THE TEST OF ACCOUNTABILITY
Presidents show their true character during times of crisis or when inevitable mistakes happen. But before, during, and after his time in office, Trump has consistently shirked responsibility.
By The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
Being president of the United States is an awesome responsibility. In addition to swearing an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, presidents decide when to send soldiers into combat and oversee a federal government that employs almost three million people and spends $6 trillion a year.
But presidents show their true character during times of crisis or when mistakes inevitably happen. During Donald Trump’s one term in office, he repeatedly failed that character test.
That’s because when things go wrong, Trump never takes responsibility. It is a character flaw that endangers the country if Trump returns to the White House. It is just one reason why the Republican front-runner is unfit for office.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump blamed a long list that included China, the media, past presidents, blue states, and hospitals. After he misled the public and undermined the science, a study found that Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic caused thousands of needless deaths.
Yet, when asked about his role in the lack of testing, Trump said, “I don’t take responsibility at all.”
That sums up Trump’s MO before, during, and after his time in office.
In 2015, he blamed Mexico for sending criminals, drug dealers, and rapists to America. Before the 2016 election, Trump blamed people of color and those with low incomes for ruining the suburbs. That same year, he blamed George W. Bush for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. When a couple of dozen women came forward claiming Trump sexually assaulted them, he blamed the media.
After a 2017 march in Charlottesville, Va., led by the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis, left a woman dead and others injured, Trump blamed the violence on both sides. That same year, after a Navy SEAL died in a raid in Yemen, Trump blamed the generals.
In 2018, Trump again blamed the media for the rise in anger after a mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue. After General Motors cited Trump’s tariffs as a reason it was cutting jobs at five plants, he blamed the automaker for making “bad cars.”
Trump blamed OPEC for high gas prices that analysts said were caused by his tariffs. He refused to take blame for the impact those tariffs had on other businesses, saying the companies were poorly run. Trump later wondered if the pandemic was payback for his tariffs on China.
After taking credit for stock market gains, Trump blamed the Federal Reserve for a 2018 drop in share prices. In 2019, he again blamed the Fed for the sluggish economy and manufacturing slowdown.
Trump blamed the Mueller investigation into Russia’s election meddling on “treasonous critics” and former President Barack Obama. Contrary to Trump’s repeated false claims and Attorney General Bill Barr’s distortion of the Mueller report, the investigation found numerous links between Russia and the Trump campaign, along with evidence of obstruction.
After protests broke out following the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, Trump fanned the flames, then blamed the unrest on Democrats. Months later, he blamed Gold Star families for giving him COVID, even though he tested positive before meeting with them.
Before votes were counted, Trump claimed with no evidence that the 2020 election was rigged. He blamed Senate Democrats and big cities with large Black populations for stealing votes. Trump blamed his election loss on a fantastical conspiracy between “big media, big money, and big tech.”
Trump and his allies proceeded to blame his election loss on a kooky concoction that included Dominion Voting Systems, a deceased Venezuelan president, George Soros, state election officials, the U.S. Justice Department, the U.S. Supreme Court, and even Vice President Mike Pence.
After Trump fomented the deadly insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, he blamed Pence. After getting indicted for stealing classified documents, Trump, without evidence, blamed Joe Biden. He also blamed Biden for his indictment for trying to overturn the 2020 election. Trump used racial attacks to blame two Black prosecutors in New York and Georgia for those indictments.
Trump continues to blame his legal troubles on a deep state conspiracy, as if state and federal prosecutors in four venues got together to bring 91 criminal charges that include paying off an adult film star, attempting to overturn a state election, stealing classified documents, and attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election and block the peaceful transfer of power.
Many of Trump’s ardent supporters believe what he says instead of their own eyes and basic facts. But here’s the hard truth: Trump is like an incorrigible repeat offender who thinks he is above the law and refuses to take responsibility for his actions. Trump even blamed his wife for encouraging him to endorse failed Pennsylvania Senate candidate Mehmet Oz.
Trump’s sense of self-victimization was on display last week when a federal judge in New York threatened to eject the former president from court after he spoke out — repeating one of his oft-used, pity-seeking phrases: “witch hunt” — during the defamation trial involving a woman he was found to have sexually assaulted. The previous week, Trump defied a state judge in his civil fraud case by proceeding to give a rambling diatribe in which he whined, “I’m being persecuted.”
Trump’s lack of accountability stands in stark contrast to other presidents who faced the fire.
Following the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, President Biden said, “I take full responsibility for the decision.”
After the Iran-Contra scandal was exposed, whereby the U.S. illegally sold arms to Iran to fund a rebel group trying to overthrow a regime in Nicaragua, then-President Ronald Reagan said, “I am the one ultimately accountable to the American people.”
Days after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the White House issued a statement that said President John F. Kennedy “bears sole responsibility.”
Of course, former President Harry S. Truman famously kept a sign on his desk that read, “The buck stops here.”
The only time the buck stopped with Trump was when it went into his pocket. America can do better than an aggrieved, petulant president who blames everyone but himself.
Presidents show their true character during times of crisis or when inevitable mistakes happen. But before, during, and after his time in office, Trump has consistently shirked responsibility.
By The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
Being president of the United States is an awesome responsibility. In addition to swearing an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, presidents decide when to send soldiers into combat and oversee a federal government that employs almost three million people and spends $6 trillion a year.
But presidents show their true character during times of crisis or when mistakes inevitably happen. During Donald Trump’s one term in office, he repeatedly failed that character test.
That’s because when things go wrong, Trump never takes responsibility. It is a character flaw that endangers the country if Trump returns to the White House. It is just one reason why the Republican front-runner is unfit for office.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump blamed a long list that included China, the media, past presidents, blue states, and hospitals. After he misled the public and undermined the science, a study found that Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic caused thousands of needless deaths.
Yet, when asked about his role in the lack of testing, Trump said, “I don’t take responsibility at all.”
That sums up Trump’s MO before, during, and after his time in office.
In 2015, he blamed Mexico for sending criminals, drug dealers, and rapists to America. Before the 2016 election, Trump blamed people of color and those with low incomes for ruining the suburbs. That same year, he blamed George W. Bush for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. When a couple of dozen women came forward claiming Trump sexually assaulted them, he blamed the media.
After a 2017 march in Charlottesville, Va., led by the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis, left a woman dead and others injured, Trump blamed the violence on both sides. That same year, after a Navy SEAL died in a raid in Yemen, Trump blamed the generals.
In 2018, Trump again blamed the media for the rise in anger after a mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue. After General Motors cited Trump’s tariffs as a reason it was cutting jobs at five plants, he blamed the automaker for making “bad cars.”
Trump blamed OPEC for high gas prices that analysts said were caused by his tariffs. He refused to take blame for the impact those tariffs had on other businesses, saying the companies were poorly run. Trump later wondered if the pandemic was payback for his tariffs on China.
After taking credit for stock market gains, Trump blamed the Federal Reserve for a 2018 drop in share prices. In 2019, he again blamed the Fed for the sluggish economy and manufacturing slowdown.
Trump blamed the Mueller investigation into Russia’s election meddling on “treasonous critics” and former President Barack Obama. Contrary to Trump’s repeated false claims and Attorney General Bill Barr’s distortion of the Mueller report, the investigation found numerous links between Russia and the Trump campaign, along with evidence of obstruction.
After protests broke out following the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, Trump fanned the flames, then blamed the unrest on Democrats. Months later, he blamed Gold Star families for giving him COVID, even though he tested positive before meeting with them.
Before votes were counted, Trump claimed with no evidence that the 2020 election was rigged. He blamed Senate Democrats and big cities with large Black populations for stealing votes. Trump blamed his election loss on a fantastical conspiracy between “big media, big money, and big tech.”
Trump and his allies proceeded to blame his election loss on a kooky concoction that included Dominion Voting Systems, a deceased Venezuelan president, George Soros, state election officials, the U.S. Justice Department, the U.S. Supreme Court, and even Vice President Mike Pence.
After Trump fomented the deadly insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, he blamed Pence. After getting indicted for stealing classified documents, Trump, without evidence, blamed Joe Biden. He also blamed Biden for his indictment for trying to overturn the 2020 election. Trump used racial attacks to blame two Black prosecutors in New York and Georgia for those indictments.
Trump continues to blame his legal troubles on a deep state conspiracy, as if state and federal prosecutors in four venues got together to bring 91 criminal charges that include paying off an adult film star, attempting to overturn a state election, stealing classified documents, and attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election and block the peaceful transfer of power.
Many of Trump’s ardent supporters believe what he says instead of their own eyes and basic facts. But here’s the hard truth: Trump is like an incorrigible repeat offender who thinks he is above the law and refuses to take responsibility for his actions. Trump even blamed his wife for encouraging him to endorse failed Pennsylvania Senate candidate Mehmet Oz.
Trump’s sense of self-victimization was on display last week when a federal judge in New York threatened to eject the former president from court after he spoke out — repeating one of his oft-used, pity-seeking phrases: “witch hunt” — during the defamation trial involving a woman he was found to have sexually assaulted. The previous week, Trump defied a state judge in his civil fraud case by proceeding to give a rambling diatribe in which he whined, “I’m being persecuted.”
Trump’s lack of accountability stands in stark contrast to other presidents who faced the fire.
Following the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, President Biden said, “I take full responsibility for the decision.”
After the Iran-Contra scandal was exposed, whereby the U.S. illegally sold arms to Iran to fund a rebel group trying to overthrow a regime in Nicaragua, then-President Ronald Reagan said, “I am the one ultimately accountable to the American people.”
Days after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the White House issued a statement that said President John F. Kennedy “bears sole responsibility.”
Of course, former President Harry S. Truman famously kept a sign on his desk that read, “The buck stops here.”
The only time the buck stopped with Trump was when it went into his pocket. America can do better than an aggrieved, petulant president who blames everyone but himself.
HOUSE REPUBLICANS ARE PRACTICING POLITICAL NIHILISM
By Eugene Robinson, The Washington Post
If House Republicans refuse to fix the border crisis, nobody will be able to deny the obvious: The GOP is more interested in nursing grievances and stoking anger than actually solving problems. That’s exactly what Donald Trump has trained them to do.
Bipartisan Senate negotiators and the White House say they are close to a deal on legislation to alleviate what everyone agrees is an emergency. It would give Republicans much of what they want regarding the southern border — beefed-up security against illegal crossings, tightened asylum rules, provision for more detentions and expulsions, perhaps even limits on President Biden’s authority to “parole” certain groups of immigrants into the country.
The package would also approve billions of dollars in military aid for Ukraine, which the administration says is urgently needed but some House Republicans oppose. This is how bitterly contested issues are resolved in Washington: One side gets some wins and makes some concessions, the other side does the same, and both sides claim they got the better of the deal. And maybe, in the end, some good gets done.
But after Biden met with congressional leaders at the White House on Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) immediately threw doubt on the very idea of an agreement that addresses both the border and Ukraine. His position has been that the border question has to be resolved first, and that any solution has to be based on draconian House-passed legislation that would, among other things, require building 900 miles of Trump’s border wall. For both the Senate and Biden, Johnson’s demand is a non-starter.
Why would House Republicans balk at a chance to ease the crisis at the border that they’ve been braying about for years? Because they would rather have the issue as a cudgel for Trump, the likely GOP presidential nominee, to use against Biden in November.
“Let me tell you, I’m not willing to do too damn much right now to help a Democrat and to help Joe Biden’s approval rating,” Rep. Troy E. Nehls (R-Tex.) told CNN this month when asked about the idea of a border deal. “I will not help the Democrats try to improve this man’s dismal approval ratings. I’m not going to do it. Why would I?”
blurting out, uncensored, what the Republican Party really thinks. Last month, as the House approved an impeachment inquiry against Biden, GOP leaders bloviated about how they were taking the step more in sorrow than in anger. But Nehls told USA Today that his aim was to give the twice-impeached Trump “a little bit of ammo to fire back” in the general election campaign.
Partisanship is one thing, but what Republicans are practicing is something very different. It is political nihilism. It’s not about enacting policies or fulfilling responsibilities but, rather, about accentuating voters’ fears, anxieties and resentments — and doing whatever Trump wants them to do.
“I do not think we should do a Border Deal, at all,” Trump posted Wednesday on Truth Social, “unless we get EVERYTHING needed to shut down the INVASION of Millions & Millions of people, many from parts unknown, into our once great, but soon to be great again, Country!”
Trump’s pronouncement appeared designed to prevent any wobbling by Johnson following the White House meeting with Biden. The screed confirmed Rep. Jamie Raskin’s analysis: “Rather than joining Democrats and Biden in good-faith, bipartisan negotiations to make progress on immigration, they are taking orders from Donald Trump and actively obstructing a bipartisan border deal,” the Maryland Democrat said at a House Oversight and Accountability hearing this week.
It’s not just immigration. Some MAGA Republicans are also obstructing $60 billion in aid to Ukraine, which the White House says is desperately needed to sustain Kyiv’s resistance against invading Russian forces. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) has threatened to file a motion to oust Johnson as speaker if he agreed to the Ukraine funding bill — a move that would thrust the House, once again, into leaderless chaos.
And to what end? Not even Greene and her most unhinged colleagues can seriously think their extreme agenda, however thin it might be, could ever be accepted by the Democrats who control the Senate or their not-so-MAGA colleagues in Senate GOP leadership — to say nothing of Biden, who can veto any nonsense that reaches his desk.
If Republicans really cared about out-of-control spending or taking inventory of U.S. commitments abroad or easing the humanitarian crisis at the border, they would negotiate and compromise. Instead, they posture. They issue sound bites. Occasionally, they eat their own.
The GOP is a riot, not a party, and our national interests are being trampled.
By Eugene Robinson, The Washington Post
If House Republicans refuse to fix the border crisis, nobody will be able to deny the obvious: The GOP is more interested in nursing grievances and stoking anger than actually solving problems. That’s exactly what Donald Trump has trained them to do.
Bipartisan Senate negotiators and the White House say they are close to a deal on legislation to alleviate what everyone agrees is an emergency. It would give Republicans much of what they want regarding the southern border — beefed-up security against illegal crossings, tightened asylum rules, provision for more detentions and expulsions, perhaps even limits on President Biden’s authority to “parole” certain groups of immigrants into the country.
The package would also approve billions of dollars in military aid for Ukraine, which the administration says is urgently needed but some House Republicans oppose. This is how bitterly contested issues are resolved in Washington: One side gets some wins and makes some concessions, the other side does the same, and both sides claim they got the better of the deal. And maybe, in the end, some good gets done.
But after Biden met with congressional leaders at the White House on Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) immediately threw doubt on the very idea of an agreement that addresses both the border and Ukraine. His position has been that the border question has to be resolved first, and that any solution has to be based on draconian House-passed legislation that would, among other things, require building 900 miles of Trump’s border wall. For both the Senate and Biden, Johnson’s demand is a non-starter.
Why would House Republicans balk at a chance to ease the crisis at the border that they’ve been braying about for years? Because they would rather have the issue as a cudgel for Trump, the likely GOP presidential nominee, to use against Biden in November.
“Let me tell you, I’m not willing to do too damn much right now to help a Democrat and to help Joe Biden’s approval rating,” Rep. Troy E. Nehls (R-Tex.) told CNN this month when asked about the idea of a border deal. “I will not help the Democrats try to improve this man’s dismal approval ratings. I’m not going to do it. Why would I?”
blurting out, uncensored, what the Republican Party really thinks. Last month, as the House approved an impeachment inquiry against Biden, GOP leaders bloviated about how they were taking the step more in sorrow than in anger. But Nehls told USA Today that his aim was to give the twice-impeached Trump “a little bit of ammo to fire back” in the general election campaign.
Partisanship is one thing, but what Republicans are practicing is something very different. It is political nihilism. It’s not about enacting policies or fulfilling responsibilities but, rather, about accentuating voters’ fears, anxieties and resentments — and doing whatever Trump wants them to do.
“I do not think we should do a Border Deal, at all,” Trump posted Wednesday on Truth Social, “unless we get EVERYTHING needed to shut down the INVASION of Millions & Millions of people, many from parts unknown, into our once great, but soon to be great again, Country!”
Trump’s pronouncement appeared designed to prevent any wobbling by Johnson following the White House meeting with Biden. The screed confirmed Rep. Jamie Raskin’s analysis: “Rather than joining Democrats and Biden in good-faith, bipartisan negotiations to make progress on immigration, they are taking orders from Donald Trump and actively obstructing a bipartisan border deal,” the Maryland Democrat said at a House Oversight and Accountability hearing this week.
It’s not just immigration. Some MAGA Republicans are also obstructing $60 billion in aid to Ukraine, which the White House says is desperately needed to sustain Kyiv’s resistance against invading Russian forces. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) has threatened to file a motion to oust Johnson as speaker if he agreed to the Ukraine funding bill — a move that would thrust the House, once again, into leaderless chaos.
And to what end? Not even Greene and her most unhinged colleagues can seriously think their extreme agenda, however thin it might be, could ever be accepted by the Democrats who control the Senate or their not-so-MAGA colleagues in Senate GOP leadership — to say nothing of Biden, who can veto any nonsense that reaches his desk.
If Republicans really cared about out-of-control spending or taking inventory of U.S. commitments abroad or easing the humanitarian crisis at the border, they would negotiate and compromise. Instead, they posture. They issue sound bites. Occasionally, they eat their own.
The GOP is a riot, not a party, and our national interests are being trampled.
BIDEN’S RESPONSE TO THE AGE MEME: VIGOR
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
In response to endless carping about his age, Biden cannot change his birthdate, but he can project an image of vitality and vigor. Indeed, alert voters should have noticed by now the contrast between his cogent, policy-laden speeches and the increasingly unhinged, rambling screeds we get from the GOP front-runner. The contrast might sharpen as four-time-indicted former president Donald Trump launches more rants on more courthouse steps in the coming months.
In the new year, Biden already has made headway in blowing away the right-wing canard that he is enfeebled and out to lunch. The president’s strength and decisiveness in support of U.S. interests stand in stark contrast with Trump, who cozied up to dictators, undermined NATO and allegedly purloined national security secrets at the end of his presidency.
In the foreign policy realm, Biden answered the Houthis’ Red Sea attacks with military strikes. Decisive action and tough rhetoric undercut the claim that he is feeble. “The operation, short and limited to military targets, and in a nation that cannot control the piratical acts of an unwelcome group, falls well within the legal as well as the traditional requirements for the use of force by members of the international community,” military expert Tom Nichols wrote for the Atlantic. “So far, both American political parties, even with a bit of GOP grumbling, have made the right call to support action against the Houthis.” It didn’t hurt Biden that hysterical voices on his left flank made constitutionally unsupportable demands that he seek permission from Congress before acting.
Also, expect to see Biden’s whirlwind visits to war zones in Israel and Ukraine featured in more campaign ads and speeches. “Twice now President Joe Biden made the decision to visit active war zones not under U.S. military command,” professor and journalist Steven Beschloss wrote on Substack. “These trips, to Kyiv in February and to Tel Aviv … are without precedent in modern American history.” Beschloss added that voters can appreciate the “vigor and guts — and principle — it took to meet American allies in person to demonstrate American support, despite genuine danger.”
Punchy speeches with sharp barbs aimed at Trump also show the sort of instinct for the jugular rarely seen during Biden’s first three years in office. Delighting in calling Trump a loser, Biden no longer hides his contempt for his likely November opponent. During his speech last week at Mother Emanuel AME church in Charleston, S.C., Biden declared, “Let me say what others cannot: We must reject political violence in America. Always, not sometimes. Always. It’s never appropriate.” He added about Trump, “Losers are taught to concede when they lose. And he’s a loser.”
The Biden campaign has also embraced the “Brandon” meme, transforming an obscene chant into a winking affirmation of Biden’s strength. As Axios reported, “‘Dark Brandon’ — an online meme that portrays the 80-year-old president as a two-steps-ahead Machiavelli — is driving the Biden campaign’s merchandise sales.”
Meanwhile, Biden’s campaign now openly mocks Trump for “confused,” rambling utterances. And when late-night comics pick up the refrain, news outlets and voters alike begin to look for more instances of unhinged, incoherent tirades.
Collectively, the predominant “narrative” might shift to match reality. Biden is old but sharp; Trump is out of shape and out to lunch.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
In response to endless carping about his age, Biden cannot change his birthdate, but he can project an image of vitality and vigor. Indeed, alert voters should have noticed by now the contrast between his cogent, policy-laden speeches and the increasingly unhinged, rambling screeds we get from the GOP front-runner. The contrast might sharpen as four-time-indicted former president Donald Trump launches more rants on more courthouse steps in the coming months.
In the new year, Biden already has made headway in blowing away the right-wing canard that he is enfeebled and out to lunch. The president’s strength and decisiveness in support of U.S. interests stand in stark contrast with Trump, who cozied up to dictators, undermined NATO and allegedly purloined national security secrets at the end of his presidency.
In the foreign policy realm, Biden answered the Houthis’ Red Sea attacks with military strikes. Decisive action and tough rhetoric undercut the claim that he is feeble. “The operation, short and limited to military targets, and in a nation that cannot control the piratical acts of an unwelcome group, falls well within the legal as well as the traditional requirements for the use of force by members of the international community,” military expert Tom Nichols wrote for the Atlantic. “So far, both American political parties, even with a bit of GOP grumbling, have made the right call to support action against the Houthis.” It didn’t hurt Biden that hysterical voices on his left flank made constitutionally unsupportable demands that he seek permission from Congress before acting.
Also, expect to see Biden’s whirlwind visits to war zones in Israel and Ukraine featured in more campaign ads and speeches. “Twice now President Joe Biden made the decision to visit active war zones not under U.S. military command,” professor and journalist Steven Beschloss wrote on Substack. “These trips, to Kyiv in February and to Tel Aviv … are without precedent in modern American history.” Beschloss added that voters can appreciate the “vigor and guts — and principle — it took to meet American allies in person to demonstrate American support, despite genuine danger.”
Punchy speeches with sharp barbs aimed at Trump also show the sort of instinct for the jugular rarely seen during Biden’s first three years in office. Delighting in calling Trump a loser, Biden no longer hides his contempt for his likely November opponent. During his speech last week at Mother Emanuel AME church in Charleston, S.C., Biden declared, “Let me say what others cannot: We must reject political violence in America. Always, not sometimes. Always. It’s never appropriate.” He added about Trump, “Losers are taught to concede when they lose. And he’s a loser.”
The Biden campaign has also embraced the “Brandon” meme, transforming an obscene chant into a winking affirmation of Biden’s strength. As Axios reported, “‘Dark Brandon’ — an online meme that portrays the 80-year-old president as a two-steps-ahead Machiavelli — is driving the Biden campaign’s merchandise sales.”
Meanwhile, Biden’s campaign now openly mocks Trump for “confused,” rambling utterances. And when late-night comics pick up the refrain, news outlets and voters alike begin to look for more instances of unhinged, incoherent tirades.
Collectively, the predominant “narrative” might shift to match reality. Biden is old but sharp; Trump is out of shape and out to lunch.
DONALD TRUMP IS A CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER
The presidential election is about more than the traditional policy differences between two candidates. It’s about the kind of country we are going to live in and pass on to future generations.
By The Inquirer Editorial Board
The Trump Threat
Part one in an occasional series by The Inquirer Editorial Board about the risk posed by a second Trump presidency.
With the race for the White House formally beginning with the Iowa caucuses this week, America stands at a political precipice.
The November contest appears headed for a rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Most voters are uninspired by either candidate, but the choice is clear: Will voters choose democracy or a demagogue?
The stakes are high and the risks are great. America barely survived one Trump term. Another four years could do irrevocable damage.
Despite a chaotic first term that ended with an insurrection and four criminal indictments, Trump still has a hold on the majority of Republican voters. After eight years of driving the daily news cycle, Trump’s corrosive words and deeds have almost become normalized.
Trump spews so many reckless lies, threats, and hate that his norm-busting outrages often get lost or forgotten in the fire hose of information and misinformation coming at voters. Some people find Trump entertaining, while others like that he is crass and cruel. But voters — especially those tuned out or turned off to politics — must grasp the full import of a second Trump presidency.
That’s why The Inquirer Editorial Board plans to spend the next 10 months sounding the alarm that Trump remains a danger to our democracy. We plan to detail Trump’s many flaws and misdeeds while spelling out the risks of a second term, which the twice-impeached former president has made clear will be worse than his first four years.
Put simply, Trump is unfit for office.
While President Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, may not be the optimal choice for many voters, this election is bigger than the traditional policy differences between the two likely candidates. This is about the kind of country we are going to live in and pass on to future generations.
Indeed, the choice is stark:
Will we side with the better angels of our nature -
or elect a reckless tyrant seeking “retribution”?
Will we elect a president who upholds the Constitution,
or one who has suggested terminating it?
Will we elect a president who believes in the peaceful transfer of power,
or one who fomented a deadly insurrection?
Will we elect a president who believes in the rule of law,
or one who has been criminally indicted an unprecedented four times and is campaigning while out on bail?
Will we elect a president who works with U.S. allies,
or one who wants to leave NATO and is inexplicably enamored with war criminal Vladimir Putin?
Will we elect a president who confronts income inequality,
or one who kowtows to the ultrarich?
Will we elect a president who acknowledges racial inequality,
or one with a long history of racism?
Will we elect a president who appointed a record number of women to his cabinet,
or a philanderer who bragged about grabbing women by their genitals, paid off an adult film star, and was found guilty of raping a woman?
Will we elect a president who is supported by the military,
or one who insulted dead soldiers, called top generals “losers,” and suggested executing former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley?
Will we elect a president who aims to combat climate change,
or one who views the existential threat to our planet as a hoax?
Will we elect a president who reads the daily intelligence briefings,
or one who spent much of his time in office watching TV or golfing?
Will we elect a president who pays his taxes,
or one who engaged in shady schemes to dodge taxes for years and whose company was convicted of tax fraud?
Will we elect a president who supports an independent attorney general,
or one who would direct the U.S. Justice Department to investigate his enemies?
Will we elect a president who supports workers,
or one whose policies hurt them?
Will we elect a president who understands he is not above the law,
or one who brags about being a dictator?
Will we elect a president who is decent and honorable,
or a narcissistic bully who invokes the rhetoric of some of history’s most malicious figures?
Trump’s many character flaws are disturbing and divisive. More alarming is how so many Republican officials, religious leaders, and voters continue to support and enable him.
A Biden-Trump rematch will likely depend on turnout among Democrats, independents, and swing voters in a handful of states — including Pennsylvania. With the future of American democracy on the line, understanding Trump as a clear and present danger is paramount!
The presidential election is about more than the traditional policy differences between two candidates. It’s about the kind of country we are going to live in and pass on to future generations.
By The Inquirer Editorial Board
The Trump Threat
Part one in an occasional series by The Inquirer Editorial Board about the risk posed by a second Trump presidency.
With the race for the White House formally beginning with the Iowa caucuses this week, America stands at a political precipice.
The November contest appears headed for a rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Most voters are uninspired by either candidate, but the choice is clear: Will voters choose democracy or a demagogue?
The stakes are high and the risks are great. America barely survived one Trump term. Another four years could do irrevocable damage.
Despite a chaotic first term that ended with an insurrection and four criminal indictments, Trump still has a hold on the majority of Republican voters. After eight years of driving the daily news cycle, Trump’s corrosive words and deeds have almost become normalized.
Trump spews so many reckless lies, threats, and hate that his norm-busting outrages often get lost or forgotten in the fire hose of information and misinformation coming at voters. Some people find Trump entertaining, while others like that he is crass and cruel. But voters — especially those tuned out or turned off to politics — must grasp the full import of a second Trump presidency.
That’s why The Inquirer Editorial Board plans to spend the next 10 months sounding the alarm that Trump remains a danger to our democracy. We plan to detail Trump’s many flaws and misdeeds while spelling out the risks of a second term, which the twice-impeached former president has made clear will be worse than his first four years.
Put simply, Trump is unfit for office.
While President Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, may not be the optimal choice for many voters, this election is bigger than the traditional policy differences between the two likely candidates. This is about the kind of country we are going to live in and pass on to future generations.
Indeed, the choice is stark:
Will we side with the better angels of our nature -
or elect a reckless tyrant seeking “retribution”?
Will we elect a president who upholds the Constitution,
or one who has suggested terminating it?
Will we elect a president who believes in the peaceful transfer of power,
or one who fomented a deadly insurrection?
Will we elect a president who believes in the rule of law,
or one who has been criminally indicted an unprecedented four times and is campaigning while out on bail?
Will we elect a president who works with U.S. allies,
or one who wants to leave NATO and is inexplicably enamored with war criminal Vladimir Putin?
Will we elect a president who confronts income inequality,
or one who kowtows to the ultrarich?
Will we elect a president who acknowledges racial inequality,
or one with a long history of racism?
Will we elect a president who appointed a record number of women to his cabinet,
or a philanderer who bragged about grabbing women by their genitals, paid off an adult film star, and was found guilty of raping a woman?
Will we elect a president who is supported by the military,
or one who insulted dead soldiers, called top generals “losers,” and suggested executing former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley?
Will we elect a president who aims to combat climate change,
or one who views the existential threat to our planet as a hoax?
Will we elect a president who reads the daily intelligence briefings,
or one who spent much of his time in office watching TV or golfing?
Will we elect a president who pays his taxes,
or one who engaged in shady schemes to dodge taxes for years and whose company was convicted of tax fraud?
Will we elect a president who supports an independent attorney general,
or one who would direct the U.S. Justice Department to investigate his enemies?
Will we elect a president who supports workers,
or one whose policies hurt them?
Will we elect a president who understands he is not above the law,
or one who brags about being a dictator?
Will we elect a president who is decent and honorable,
or a narcissistic bully who invokes the rhetoric of some of history’s most malicious figures?
Trump’s many character flaws are disturbing and divisive. More alarming is how so many Republican officials, religious leaders, and voters continue to support and enable him.
A Biden-Trump rematch will likely depend on turnout among Democrats, independents, and swing voters in a handful of states — including Pennsylvania. With the future of American democracy on the line, understanding Trump as a clear and present danger is paramount!
THE MEDIA’S WORST LAPSE: REFUSING TO IDENTIFY TRUMP AS A CULT LEADER
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
What caught my eye
After missing the significance of the MAGA movement in 2016, innumerable mainstream outlets spent thousands of hours, gallons of ink and billions of pixels trying to understand “the Trump voter.” How had democracy failed them? What did the rest of us miss about these Americans? The journey to Rust Belt diners became a cliché amid the newfound fascination with aggrieved White working-class Americans. But the theory that such voters were economic casualties of globalization turned out to be false. Surveys and analyses generally found that racial resentment and cultural panic, not economic distress, fueled their affinity for a would-be strongman.
Unfortunately, patronizing excuses (e.g., “they feel disrespected”) for their cultlike attachment to a figure increasingly divorced from reality largely took the place of exacting reporting on the right-wing cult that swallowed a large part of the Republican Party. In an effort to maintain false equivalence and normalize Trump, many media outlets seemed to ignore that the much of the GOP left the universe of democratic (small-d) politics and was no longer a traditional democratic (again, small-d) party with an agenda, a governing philosophy, a set of beliefs. The result: Trump was normalized and a false equivalence between the parties was created.
Instead of reporting Trump’s wild assertions as legitimate arguments, media outlets should explain how Trump rallies are designed to instill anger and cultivate his hold on people who believe whatever hooey he spouts. How different are these events from what we see in grainy images of European fascist rallies in the 1930s? (When Trump apologists insist that tens of millions of people cannot be part of a cult, it’s critical to remember mass fascist movements that swept entire populations.) The appeals to emotion, the specter of a malicious enemy, the fear of societal decline, the fascination with violence and the elation just to be in the presence of the leader are telltale signs of frenetic fascist gatherings. Trump’s language (“poisoning the blood”) even mimics Hitler’s calls for racial purity.
Even as Trump shows his authoritarian colors and his rants become angrier, more unhinged and more incoherent, his followers still meekly accept inane assertions (e.g., convicted Jan. 6, 2021, rioters are “hostages,” magnets dissolve in water, wind turbines drive whales insane). More of the media should be covering this phenomenon as it would any right-wing authoritarian movement in a foreign country.
Though polls continue to show Trump’s iron grip on his followers, mainstream outlets spend far too little attention on why and how MAGA member cling to demonstrably false beliefs, excuse what should be inexcusable conduct and treat him as infallible. Outlets should routinely consult psychologists and historians to ask the vital questions: How do people abandon rationality? What drives their fury and anxiety? How does an authoritarian figure maintain his hold on followers? How do ideas of racial purity play into it? Media outlets fail news consumers when they do not explain the authoritarian playbook that Trump employs. Americans need media outlets to spell out what is happening.
“Authoritarian, not democratic dynamics, hold the key to Trump’s behavior as a candidate now and in the future,” historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote. “The main goals of his campaign events are not to advance policy proposals but rather to prop up his personality cult, circulate his lies, and emotionally retrain Americans to see violence as positive and even patriotic.”
Plenty of experts are available to dissect the phenomenon. Expert Steven Hassan, for example, explained to the Atlantic’s Peter Sagal that, as Sagal wrote, “the MAGA movement checks all the boxes of his ‘BITE’ model of cult mind control — behavior, information, thought, and emotional control.” Sagal continued, “Like all cult leaders, [Hassan] argues, Trump restricts the information his followers are allowed to accept; demands purity of belief (beliefs that can change from moment to moment, as per his whims and needs); and appeals to his followers through the conjuring of primal emotions — not just fear but also joy.” (Another expert, Daniella Mestyanek Young, explained: “The first rule of cults is: you’re never in a cult. The second rule of cults is: the cult will forgive any sin, except the sin of leaving. The third rule of cults is: even if he did it, that doesn’t mean he’s guilty.”)
A message from a mentally sound, serious leader (President Biden) cannot be equated with the message of an authoritarian who seeks absolute power through a web of disinformation and, if need be, violence. (When the media doesn’t grasp this, we get laughable headlines such as: “Clashing Over Jan. 6, Trump and Biden Show Reality Is at Stake in 2024.”)
Instead of probing why MAGA followers, despite all evidence to the contrary, deny that Trump was an insurrectionist and a proven liar, pollsters insist on asking Trump followers which candidate they think might better handle, for example, health care. The answer for Republicans (Trump! Trump!) has nothing to do with the question (Trump never had a health-care plan, you recall), and the question has nothing to do with the campaign.
The race between an ordinary democratic candidate and an unhinged fascist is not a normal American election. At stake is whether a democracy can protect itself from a malicious candidate with narcissistic tendencies or a rational electorate can beat back a dangerous, lawless cult of personality. Unfortunately, too many media outlets have not caught on or, worse, simply feign ignorance to avoid coming down on the side of democracy, rationality and truth.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
What caught my eye
After missing the significance of the MAGA movement in 2016, innumerable mainstream outlets spent thousands of hours, gallons of ink and billions of pixels trying to understand “the Trump voter.” How had democracy failed them? What did the rest of us miss about these Americans? The journey to Rust Belt diners became a cliché amid the newfound fascination with aggrieved White working-class Americans. But the theory that such voters were economic casualties of globalization turned out to be false. Surveys and analyses generally found that racial resentment and cultural panic, not economic distress, fueled their affinity for a would-be strongman.
Unfortunately, patronizing excuses (e.g., “they feel disrespected”) for their cultlike attachment to a figure increasingly divorced from reality largely took the place of exacting reporting on the right-wing cult that swallowed a large part of the Republican Party. In an effort to maintain false equivalence and normalize Trump, many media outlets seemed to ignore that the much of the GOP left the universe of democratic (small-d) politics and was no longer a traditional democratic (again, small-d) party with an agenda, a governing philosophy, a set of beliefs. The result: Trump was normalized and a false equivalence between the parties was created.
Instead of reporting Trump’s wild assertions as legitimate arguments, media outlets should explain how Trump rallies are designed to instill anger and cultivate his hold on people who believe whatever hooey he spouts. How different are these events from what we see in grainy images of European fascist rallies in the 1930s? (When Trump apologists insist that tens of millions of people cannot be part of a cult, it’s critical to remember mass fascist movements that swept entire populations.) The appeals to emotion, the specter of a malicious enemy, the fear of societal decline, the fascination with violence and the elation just to be in the presence of the leader are telltale signs of frenetic fascist gatherings. Trump’s language (“poisoning the blood”) even mimics Hitler’s calls for racial purity.
Even as Trump shows his authoritarian colors and his rants become angrier, more unhinged and more incoherent, his followers still meekly accept inane assertions (e.g., convicted Jan. 6, 2021, rioters are “hostages,” magnets dissolve in water, wind turbines drive whales insane). More of the media should be covering this phenomenon as it would any right-wing authoritarian movement in a foreign country.
Though polls continue to show Trump’s iron grip on his followers, mainstream outlets spend far too little attention on why and how MAGA member cling to demonstrably false beliefs, excuse what should be inexcusable conduct and treat him as infallible. Outlets should routinely consult psychologists and historians to ask the vital questions: How do people abandon rationality? What drives their fury and anxiety? How does an authoritarian figure maintain his hold on followers? How do ideas of racial purity play into it? Media outlets fail news consumers when they do not explain the authoritarian playbook that Trump employs. Americans need media outlets to spell out what is happening.
“Authoritarian, not democratic dynamics, hold the key to Trump’s behavior as a candidate now and in the future,” historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote. “The main goals of his campaign events are not to advance policy proposals but rather to prop up his personality cult, circulate his lies, and emotionally retrain Americans to see violence as positive and even patriotic.”
Plenty of experts are available to dissect the phenomenon. Expert Steven Hassan, for example, explained to the Atlantic’s Peter Sagal that, as Sagal wrote, “the MAGA movement checks all the boxes of his ‘BITE’ model of cult mind control — behavior, information, thought, and emotional control.” Sagal continued, “Like all cult leaders, [Hassan] argues, Trump restricts the information his followers are allowed to accept; demands purity of belief (beliefs that can change from moment to moment, as per his whims and needs); and appeals to his followers through the conjuring of primal emotions — not just fear but also joy.” (Another expert, Daniella Mestyanek Young, explained: “The first rule of cults is: you’re never in a cult. The second rule of cults is: the cult will forgive any sin, except the sin of leaving. The third rule of cults is: even if he did it, that doesn’t mean he’s guilty.”)
A message from a mentally sound, serious leader (President Biden) cannot be equated with the message of an authoritarian who seeks absolute power through a web of disinformation and, if need be, violence. (When the media doesn’t grasp this, we get laughable headlines such as: “Clashing Over Jan. 6, Trump and Biden Show Reality Is at Stake in 2024.”)
Instead of probing why MAGA followers, despite all evidence to the contrary, deny that Trump was an insurrectionist and a proven liar, pollsters insist on asking Trump followers which candidate they think might better handle, for example, health care. The answer for Republicans (Trump! Trump!) has nothing to do with the question (Trump never had a health-care plan, you recall), and the question has nothing to do with the campaign.
The race between an ordinary democratic candidate and an unhinged fascist is not a normal American election. At stake is whether a democracy can protect itself from a malicious candidate with narcissistic tendencies or a rational electorate can beat back a dangerous, lawless cult of personality. Unfortunately, too many media outlets have not caught on or, worse, simply feign ignorance to avoid coming down on the side of democracy, rationality and truth.
THE GREATEST THREAT POSED BY TRUMP
By David French, The New York Times
If Donald Trump storms through Iowa and easily seizes the G.O.P. nomination, as presumed, and then goes on to win back the presidency, his victory will trigger a wild political and legal melee. The primary motivating purpose of his campaign is vengeance. He’s told his base that he is their retribution and has promised to “totally obliterate” the deep state. If he faces protests, he may immediately invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy troops, under his command, to American cities.
Although we experienced a related melee during his first term, a second would be substantially worse. Instead of offering an internally divided administration, in which a variety of responsible aides and appointees struggled to contain Trump’s worst impulses, a second term would present him in his purest form. His MAGA base would replace the Federalist Society as the screener of his judicial appointments, and there are now a sufficient number of pure Trump sycophants to staff his White House from top to bottom.
I dread the division and conflict of a second Trump term, and I don’t minimize the possibility of Trump doing permanent political damage to the Republic. But the problem I’m most concerned about isn’t the political melee; it’s the ongoing cultural transformation of red America, a transformation that a second Trump term could well render unstoppable.
To put the matter as simply as possible: Eight years of bitter experience have taught us that supporting Trump degrades the character of his core supporters. There are still millions of reluctant Trump voters, people who’ve retained their kindness, integrity and good sense even as they cast a ballot for the past and almost certainly future G.O.P. nominee. I have friends and family members who vote for Trump, and I love them dearly. But the most enduring legacy of a second Trump term could well be the conviction on the part of millions of Americans that Trumpism isn’t just a temporary political expediency, but the model for Republican political success and — still worse — the way that God wants Christian believers to practice politics.
Already we can see the changes in individual character. In December, I wrote about the moral devolution of Rudy Giuliani and of the other MAGA men and women who have populated the highest echelons of the Trump movement. But what worries me even more is the change I see in ordinary Americans. I live in the heart of MAGA country, and Donald Trump is the single most culturally influential person here. It’s not close. He’s far more influential than any pastor, politician, coach or celebrity. He has changed people politically and also personally. It is common for those outside the Trump movement to describe their aunts or uncles or parents or grandparents as “lost.” They mean their relatives’ lives are utterly dominated by Trump, Trump’s media and Trump’s grievances.
You can go to social gatherings here in the South and hear people whisper to friends, “Don’t talk about politics in front of Dad. He’s out of control.” I know that rage and conspiracies aren’t unique to the right. During my litigation career, I frequently faced off against the worst excesses of the radical left. But never before have I seen extremism penetrate a vast American community so deeply, so completely and so comprehensively.
This isn’t just a subjective sensation. Polling data again and again backs up the reality that the right is abandoning decency, and doing so in the most alarming of ways. It began happening almost immediately with white evangelicals. In 2011, they were the American cohort least likely to agree that a politician could commit immoral acts in private yet “still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.” Yet in October 2016 — even before Trump’s upset victory over Hillary Clinton — white evangelicals had already changed their minds. They went from least likely to most likely to excuse the immoral behavior of politicians.
But that’s not the only change among Republicans. An increasing percentage are now tempted to embrace political violence. Last October, a startling 33 percent of Republicans (and an even larger 41 percent of pro-Trump Americans) agreed with the statement that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” That percentage is far higher than the (still troubling) 22 percent of independents and 13 percent of Democrats who shared the same view.
As the Iowa caucuses approached, Trump escalated his language, going so far as to call his political opponents “vermin” and declaring that immigrants entering America illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country.” The statement was so indefensible and repugnant that many expected it to hurt Trump. Yet a Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom Iowa Poll found that a 42 percent plurality of likely Iowa Republican caucusgoers said the statement would make them more likely to support Trump — a substantially greater percentage than the 28 percent who said it would make them less likely to support him.
While political violence is hardly exclusive to the right, the hostility and vitriol embedded in MAGA America is resulting in an escalating wave of threats and acts of intimidation. NBC News reported that on Christmas Day, Jack Smith, the special counsel in charge of two federal prosecutions of Trump, was “swatted.” On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported that Tanya S. Chutkan, the judge presiding over one of those two cases, was also recently swatted. Swatting — a grotesque tactic in which the police are called to respond to a nonexistent crime or threat at someone’s home — is a shockingly dangerous act that can threaten the victim’s life and property. The police will often descend in force on the home, anticipating a possible violent confrontation. In 2017, a swatting call over a video game dispute resulted in the death of an innocent man at his own front door.
But most consequential of all is the religious response to Trump. On Dec. 20, The Economist reported on the astonishing number of Christian Republicans who believe Donald Trump is God’s chosen man to save America. Writing in The Times just a few weeks later, my colleagues Ruth Graham and Charles Homans reported on the ways in which, during the Trump era, evangelicalism has become more cultural and political and less pious, theological or concerned with church attendance. Graham and Homans spoke, for instance, to a retired corrections officer named Cydney Hatfield. “I voted for Trump twice, and I’ll vote for him again,” she said. “He’s the only savior I can see.” Capitalizing on sentiments like these, Trump himself shared a blasphemous video modeled on Paul Harvey’s famous video “So God Made a Farmer,” that proclaims “God Made Trump.”
The result is a religious movement steeped in fanaticism but stripped of virtue. The fruit of the spirit described in Galatians in the New Testament — “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” — is absent from MAGA Christianity, replaced by the very “works of the flesh” the same passage warned against, including “hatreds, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambitions, dissensions” and “factions.”
But in the upside-down world of MAGA morality, vice is virtue and virtue is vice. My colleague Jane Coaston even coined a term, “vice signaling,” to describe how Trump’s core supporters convey their tribal allegiance. They’re often deliberately rude, transgressive or otherwise unpleasant, just to demonstrate how little they care about conventional moral norms.
For most of my life, conservative evangelicals (including me) have been fond of quoting John Adams’s 1798 letter to the Massachusetts Militia. It’s a critical founding document, one that forcefully argues that our Republic needs a virtuous citizenry to survive. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People,” he asserts. “It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
I’ve long appreciated that quote, and not because I believe that one must be religious to be moral or that religiosity invariably leads to morality. That’s obviously untrue. Rather, I’ve appreciated that quote because it recognizes the obligations of a free people in a constitutional republic to exercise their liberty toward virtuous purposes.
Absent public virtue, a republic can fall. And a Trump win in 2024 would absolutely convince countless Americans that virtue is for suckers, and vice is the key to victory. If Trump loses a second time, there is a chance he’ll end up a painful aberration in American politics, a depressing footnote in our national story. But if he wins again, the equation will change and history may record that he was not the culmination of a short-lived reactionary moment, but rather the harbinger of a greater darkness to come.
By David French, The New York Times
If Donald Trump storms through Iowa and easily seizes the G.O.P. nomination, as presumed, and then goes on to win back the presidency, his victory will trigger a wild political and legal melee. The primary motivating purpose of his campaign is vengeance. He’s told his base that he is their retribution and has promised to “totally obliterate” the deep state. If he faces protests, he may immediately invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy troops, under his command, to American cities.
Although we experienced a related melee during his first term, a second would be substantially worse. Instead of offering an internally divided administration, in which a variety of responsible aides and appointees struggled to contain Trump’s worst impulses, a second term would present him in his purest form. His MAGA base would replace the Federalist Society as the screener of his judicial appointments, and there are now a sufficient number of pure Trump sycophants to staff his White House from top to bottom.
I dread the division and conflict of a second Trump term, and I don’t minimize the possibility of Trump doing permanent political damage to the Republic. But the problem I’m most concerned about isn’t the political melee; it’s the ongoing cultural transformation of red America, a transformation that a second Trump term could well render unstoppable.
To put the matter as simply as possible: Eight years of bitter experience have taught us that supporting Trump degrades the character of his core supporters. There are still millions of reluctant Trump voters, people who’ve retained their kindness, integrity and good sense even as they cast a ballot for the past and almost certainly future G.O.P. nominee. I have friends and family members who vote for Trump, and I love them dearly. But the most enduring legacy of a second Trump term could well be the conviction on the part of millions of Americans that Trumpism isn’t just a temporary political expediency, but the model for Republican political success and — still worse — the way that God wants Christian believers to practice politics.
Already we can see the changes in individual character. In December, I wrote about the moral devolution of Rudy Giuliani and of the other MAGA men and women who have populated the highest echelons of the Trump movement. But what worries me even more is the change I see in ordinary Americans. I live in the heart of MAGA country, and Donald Trump is the single most culturally influential person here. It’s not close. He’s far more influential than any pastor, politician, coach or celebrity. He has changed people politically and also personally. It is common for those outside the Trump movement to describe their aunts or uncles or parents or grandparents as “lost.” They mean their relatives’ lives are utterly dominated by Trump, Trump’s media and Trump’s grievances.
You can go to social gatherings here in the South and hear people whisper to friends, “Don’t talk about politics in front of Dad. He’s out of control.” I know that rage and conspiracies aren’t unique to the right. During my litigation career, I frequently faced off against the worst excesses of the radical left. But never before have I seen extremism penetrate a vast American community so deeply, so completely and so comprehensively.
This isn’t just a subjective sensation. Polling data again and again backs up the reality that the right is abandoning decency, and doing so in the most alarming of ways. It began happening almost immediately with white evangelicals. In 2011, they were the American cohort least likely to agree that a politician could commit immoral acts in private yet “still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.” Yet in October 2016 — even before Trump’s upset victory over Hillary Clinton — white evangelicals had already changed their minds. They went from least likely to most likely to excuse the immoral behavior of politicians.
But that’s not the only change among Republicans. An increasing percentage are now tempted to embrace political violence. Last October, a startling 33 percent of Republicans (and an even larger 41 percent of pro-Trump Americans) agreed with the statement that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” That percentage is far higher than the (still troubling) 22 percent of independents and 13 percent of Democrats who shared the same view.
As the Iowa caucuses approached, Trump escalated his language, going so far as to call his political opponents “vermin” and declaring that immigrants entering America illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country.” The statement was so indefensible and repugnant that many expected it to hurt Trump. Yet a Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom Iowa Poll found that a 42 percent plurality of likely Iowa Republican caucusgoers said the statement would make them more likely to support Trump — a substantially greater percentage than the 28 percent who said it would make them less likely to support him.
While political violence is hardly exclusive to the right, the hostility and vitriol embedded in MAGA America is resulting in an escalating wave of threats and acts of intimidation. NBC News reported that on Christmas Day, Jack Smith, the special counsel in charge of two federal prosecutions of Trump, was “swatted.” On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported that Tanya S. Chutkan, the judge presiding over one of those two cases, was also recently swatted. Swatting — a grotesque tactic in which the police are called to respond to a nonexistent crime or threat at someone’s home — is a shockingly dangerous act that can threaten the victim’s life and property. The police will often descend in force on the home, anticipating a possible violent confrontation. In 2017, a swatting call over a video game dispute resulted in the death of an innocent man at his own front door.
But most consequential of all is the religious response to Trump. On Dec. 20, The Economist reported on the astonishing number of Christian Republicans who believe Donald Trump is God’s chosen man to save America. Writing in The Times just a few weeks later, my colleagues Ruth Graham and Charles Homans reported on the ways in which, during the Trump era, evangelicalism has become more cultural and political and less pious, theological or concerned with church attendance. Graham and Homans spoke, for instance, to a retired corrections officer named Cydney Hatfield. “I voted for Trump twice, and I’ll vote for him again,” she said. “He’s the only savior I can see.” Capitalizing on sentiments like these, Trump himself shared a blasphemous video modeled on Paul Harvey’s famous video “So God Made a Farmer,” that proclaims “God Made Trump.”
The result is a religious movement steeped in fanaticism but stripped of virtue. The fruit of the spirit described in Galatians in the New Testament — “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” — is absent from MAGA Christianity, replaced by the very “works of the flesh” the same passage warned against, including “hatreds, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambitions, dissensions” and “factions.”
But in the upside-down world of MAGA morality, vice is virtue and virtue is vice. My colleague Jane Coaston even coined a term, “vice signaling,” to describe how Trump’s core supporters convey their tribal allegiance. They’re often deliberately rude, transgressive or otherwise unpleasant, just to demonstrate how little they care about conventional moral norms.
For most of my life, conservative evangelicals (including me) have been fond of quoting John Adams’s 1798 letter to the Massachusetts Militia. It’s a critical founding document, one that forcefully argues that our Republic needs a virtuous citizenry to survive. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People,” he asserts. “It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
I’ve long appreciated that quote, and not because I believe that one must be religious to be moral or that religiosity invariably leads to morality. That’s obviously untrue. Rather, I’ve appreciated that quote because it recognizes the obligations of a free people in a constitutional republic to exercise their liberty toward virtuous purposes.
Absent public virtue, a republic can fall. And a Trump win in 2024 would absolutely convince countless Americans that virtue is for suckers, and vice is the key to victory. If Trump loses a second time, there is a chance he’ll end up a painful aberration in American politics, a depressing footnote in our national story. But if he wins again, the equation will change and history may record that he was not the culmination of a short-lived reactionary moment, but rather the harbinger of a greater darkness to come.
IN POLITICS, THERE ARE LIARS AND BETTER LIARS
By Kathleen Parker, The Washington Post
It’s a good thing Donald Trump doesn’t do campaign debates anymore. He couldn’t have survived Wednesday night’s liar-liar-pants-on-fire name-calling extravaganza between runner-up Nikki Haley, former ambassador to the United Nations and former governor of South Carolina, and third-place Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida.
Trump would have stalked off the stage, the clear winner in the liar sweepstakes. Instead, Haley and DeSantis argued between themselves for two exhausting and boring hours about who had lied most about this position or that policy.
Haley repeatedly referred viewers to DeSantisLies.com to check her opponents’ alleged prevarications, warning Drake University students: “Don’t turn this into a drinking game because you will be overserved by the end of the night.”
Such playfulness around the subject of lying is worrisome, as though lying is a prank, a harmless game of hyperbole. It risks normalizing deceit.
But lies are rarely harmless. Beyond disrespecting objective fact, lies undermine trust, which is essential to a properly functioning republic. Powerful liars like Trump count on this. He has never been coy about his ambitions for greater control over the country, and his demands for loyalty are legendary. He has made clear his disdain for the truth-tellers and for anyone who would contradict him.
Trump’s biggest lie, of course, is that he won the 2020 presidential election and that it was stolen. And anyone disputing this falsehood is a liar. When journalists attempt to point this out, their reports are dismissed as “fake news.” Trump is married to “his truth,” the cloyingly popular idea that “your truth” and “my truth” are distinct and subjective.
The vulnerability of a nation divided by the very meaning of truth can’t be overstated. When a proven liar reaches the most powerful office in the world, we’re in a world of trouble.
In his novel “1984,” George Orwell wrote: “And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed — if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’”
We got our first taste of Orwellian doublespeak from the Trump administration when presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway explained an epic discrepancy between the White House’s version of Trump’s inauguration audience — the largest in American history — and what our own eyes could see.
This is the precipice upon which we teeter while Trump leads the Republican fold. I will never understand how people either know he’s a liar and accept it or are too blinded by their truth to see what’s in front of their noses. Do his supporters not care about the truth — at all?
Not once this cycle has Trump appeared onstage to debate his challengers. He’s the ghost candidate who materializes and speaks at his own events, where he can be in total control. This is not, my friends, the democratic way.
What’s he hiding? Or, what is he hiding from? Scrutiny, that’s what. The follow-up question. Challenges to the sovereignty of “his truth,” which isn’t mine, for the record. But you knew that.
Trump, a former reality TV showman, can be entertaining at times, but a second round in the White House would be no joke. Polling has shown that Haley would soundly defeat Biden in the general election, while Trump lost to Biden in 2020 fair and square. Why would this November be different? Trump isn’t more popular than he was before.
If Trump cared about his country half as much as he cares about himself, he’d drop out and let Haley’s comet soar. But he would rather destroy everything in his path than surrender his ego to the rabble that still dares to demand truth.
By Kathleen Parker, The Washington Post
It’s a good thing Donald Trump doesn’t do campaign debates anymore. He couldn’t have survived Wednesday night’s liar-liar-pants-on-fire name-calling extravaganza between runner-up Nikki Haley, former ambassador to the United Nations and former governor of South Carolina, and third-place Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida.
Trump would have stalked off the stage, the clear winner in the liar sweepstakes. Instead, Haley and DeSantis argued between themselves for two exhausting and boring hours about who had lied most about this position or that policy.
Haley repeatedly referred viewers to DeSantisLies.com to check her opponents’ alleged prevarications, warning Drake University students: “Don’t turn this into a drinking game because you will be overserved by the end of the night.”
Such playfulness around the subject of lying is worrisome, as though lying is a prank, a harmless game of hyperbole. It risks normalizing deceit.
But lies are rarely harmless. Beyond disrespecting objective fact, lies undermine trust, which is essential to a properly functioning republic. Powerful liars like Trump count on this. He has never been coy about his ambitions for greater control over the country, and his demands for loyalty are legendary. He has made clear his disdain for the truth-tellers and for anyone who would contradict him.
Trump’s biggest lie, of course, is that he won the 2020 presidential election and that it was stolen. And anyone disputing this falsehood is a liar. When journalists attempt to point this out, their reports are dismissed as “fake news.” Trump is married to “his truth,” the cloyingly popular idea that “your truth” and “my truth” are distinct and subjective.
The vulnerability of a nation divided by the very meaning of truth can’t be overstated. When a proven liar reaches the most powerful office in the world, we’re in a world of trouble.
In his novel “1984,” George Orwell wrote: “And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed — if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’”
We got our first taste of Orwellian doublespeak from the Trump administration when presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway explained an epic discrepancy between the White House’s version of Trump’s inauguration audience — the largest in American history — and what our own eyes could see.
This is the precipice upon which we teeter while Trump leads the Republican fold. I will never understand how people either know he’s a liar and accept it or are too blinded by their truth to see what’s in front of their noses. Do his supporters not care about the truth — at all?
Not once this cycle has Trump appeared onstage to debate his challengers. He’s the ghost candidate who materializes and speaks at his own events, where he can be in total control. This is not, my friends, the democratic way.
What’s he hiding? Or, what is he hiding from? Scrutiny, that’s what. The follow-up question. Challenges to the sovereignty of “his truth,” which isn’t mine, for the record. But you knew that.
Trump, a former reality TV showman, can be entertaining at times, but a second round in the White House would be no joke. Polling has shown that Haley would soundly defeat Biden in the general election, while Trump lost to Biden in 2020 fair and square. Why would this November be different? Trump isn’t more popular than he was before.
If Trump cared about his country half as much as he cares about himself, he’d drop out and let Haley’s comet soar. But he would rather destroy everything in his path than surrender his ego to the rabble that still dares to demand truth.
THE QUESTION OF TRUMP’S CORRUPTION SHOULD BE FRONT AND CENTER
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Last week, House Democrats on the Committee on Oversight and Accountability released a bombshell report revealing the extent of President Donald Trump’s alleged corruption. “White House for Sale: How Princes, Prime Ministers, and Premiers Paid Off President Trump” documents “more than $7.8 million in payments from foreign states and their leaders, including some of the world’s most unsavory regimes.” And that is just what the committee was able to find.
The extent of Trump’s financial haul is astounding. “President Trump’s businesses received, at a minimum, $7.8 million in foreign payments from at least 20 countries during his presidency. These included payments from foreign governments and foreign government-owned or -controlled entities to properties owned by Donald Trump.” (This doesn’t include the millions of dollars pocketed by his daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, while they were in the White House.)
The identity of these foreign countries should raise legitimate national security concerns. Countries such as China, Saudi Arabia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malaysia, Albania and Kosovo “spent — often lavishly — on apartments and hotel stays at Donald Trump’s properties personally enriching President Trump while he made foreign policy decisions connected to their policy agendas with far-reaching ramifications for the United States.” This is precisely the sort of conduct that gravely concerned the framers of the Constitution.
One would expect such a gobsmacking report — indicative of the extent of four-times-indicted Trump’s alleged unconstitutional behavior (violating the emoluments clause, the report argues) and personal corruption — would have gotten extensive coverage. One would think it would spur reporters to question Republicans about their failure to stand up to Trump or their willingness to rein him in should he return to office. It did not.
We hardly need further proof that Trump aspires to be an authoritarian freed from the constraints of the Constitution. History tells us that authoritarians traditionally use power for personal gain, leading to a culture of personal corruption. Trump, who seems to want to join the club of corrupt despots such as Russian President Vladimir Putin, certainly fits the mold.
Trump’s money grab “threatened to obliterate a critical and defining principle of American democracy — namely, the strict separation of a president’s personal financial interests from those of the nation,” the report explains. “In establishing the presidency, the Framers emphasized that the President was not a term-limited king but a public servant whose duty was to serve the common good rather than personal financial interests.” It continues: “The U.S. Constitution emphatically and unambiguously rejected the monarchical system, requiring our elected chief executive to use the office solely to advance the interests of the American people, rather than their own personal financial and business interests.”
Previous presidents took their oaths seriously and declined to use the office as their personal piggy bank. “No other president had ever come close before to trying a rip-off like this simply based on vacuuming up foreign government money, which was the cardinal presidential offense and betrayal in the eyes of the Founders — an offense and betrayal made all the more striking here by the offender’s repeated laughable proclamations of ‘America First!’” the report says.
Republican leaders in Congress allowed this by refusing to exercise oversight and enforce the constitutional prohibition on receipt of foreign money. House Republicans such as then-Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) looked the other way. Trump and his allies’ stalled emoluments litigation, allowing him to depart office without ever facing legal consequences for his conduct or revealing the extent of his foreign gains. Republicans — who refused to remove him for other high crimes and misdemeanors — were never going to stop him.
If Congress dutifully enforces the emoluments clause, preventing other grifters from using the Oval Office for personal gain, we might have fewer grifters running for office. If Trump had been told in 2016 that he had to cease operating his business and refuse money from foreign governments, would he have even run for office?
But let’s get real: Republicans are too busy launching a baseless impeachment investigation against President Biden in the absence of any evidence he took a dime of foreign money to be concerned with a needed structural reform. The notion that they would set up an effective check to be used against the presidential candidate who the report indicates actually took foreign money while president is almost laughable. Sadly, we know the Republican leadership in Congress will not fulfill the most basic functions of governance: enforcing the Constitution and preventing foreign interference.
The willingness of many congressional Republicans to enable Trump and his family to make millions while serving in public office reaffirms that those lawmakers have become servants of a master incapable of curtailing egregious behavior. (Former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming bluntly told a crowd in New Hampshire on Friday, “It breaks my heart that a culture of corruption has overtaken Republicans in the Congress.”) Trump probably thinks he can act with impunity for good reason: Many congressional Republicans have proved unable to uphold their oaths when it requires standing up to him.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Last week, House Democrats on the Committee on Oversight and Accountability released a bombshell report revealing the extent of President Donald Trump’s alleged corruption. “White House for Sale: How Princes, Prime Ministers, and Premiers Paid Off President Trump” documents “more than $7.8 million in payments from foreign states and their leaders, including some of the world’s most unsavory regimes.” And that is just what the committee was able to find.
The extent of Trump’s financial haul is astounding. “President Trump’s businesses received, at a minimum, $7.8 million in foreign payments from at least 20 countries during his presidency. These included payments from foreign governments and foreign government-owned or -controlled entities to properties owned by Donald Trump.” (This doesn’t include the millions of dollars pocketed by his daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, while they were in the White House.)
The identity of these foreign countries should raise legitimate national security concerns. Countries such as China, Saudi Arabia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malaysia, Albania and Kosovo “spent — often lavishly — on apartments and hotel stays at Donald Trump’s properties personally enriching President Trump while he made foreign policy decisions connected to their policy agendas with far-reaching ramifications for the United States.” This is precisely the sort of conduct that gravely concerned the framers of the Constitution.
One would expect such a gobsmacking report — indicative of the extent of four-times-indicted Trump’s alleged unconstitutional behavior (violating the emoluments clause, the report argues) and personal corruption — would have gotten extensive coverage. One would think it would spur reporters to question Republicans about their failure to stand up to Trump or their willingness to rein him in should he return to office. It did not.
We hardly need further proof that Trump aspires to be an authoritarian freed from the constraints of the Constitution. History tells us that authoritarians traditionally use power for personal gain, leading to a culture of personal corruption. Trump, who seems to want to join the club of corrupt despots such as Russian President Vladimir Putin, certainly fits the mold.
Trump’s money grab “threatened to obliterate a critical and defining principle of American democracy — namely, the strict separation of a president’s personal financial interests from those of the nation,” the report explains. “In establishing the presidency, the Framers emphasized that the President was not a term-limited king but a public servant whose duty was to serve the common good rather than personal financial interests.” It continues: “The U.S. Constitution emphatically and unambiguously rejected the monarchical system, requiring our elected chief executive to use the office solely to advance the interests of the American people, rather than their own personal financial and business interests.”
Previous presidents took their oaths seriously and declined to use the office as their personal piggy bank. “No other president had ever come close before to trying a rip-off like this simply based on vacuuming up foreign government money, which was the cardinal presidential offense and betrayal in the eyes of the Founders — an offense and betrayal made all the more striking here by the offender’s repeated laughable proclamations of ‘America First!’” the report says.
Republican leaders in Congress allowed this by refusing to exercise oversight and enforce the constitutional prohibition on receipt of foreign money. House Republicans such as then-Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) looked the other way. Trump and his allies’ stalled emoluments litigation, allowing him to depart office without ever facing legal consequences for his conduct or revealing the extent of his foreign gains. Republicans — who refused to remove him for other high crimes and misdemeanors — were never going to stop him.
If Congress dutifully enforces the emoluments clause, preventing other grifters from using the Oval Office for personal gain, we might have fewer grifters running for office. If Trump had been told in 2016 that he had to cease operating his business and refuse money from foreign governments, would he have even run for office?
But let’s get real: Republicans are too busy launching a baseless impeachment investigation against President Biden in the absence of any evidence he took a dime of foreign money to be concerned with a needed structural reform. The notion that they would set up an effective check to be used against the presidential candidate who the report indicates actually took foreign money while president is almost laughable. Sadly, we know the Republican leadership in Congress will not fulfill the most basic functions of governance: enforcing the Constitution and preventing foreign interference.
The willingness of many congressional Republicans to enable Trump and his family to make millions while serving in public office reaffirms that those lawmakers have become servants of a master incapable of curtailing egregious behavior. (Former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming bluntly told a crowd in New Hampshire on Friday, “It breaks my heart that a culture of corruption has overtaken Republicans in the Congress.”) Trump probably thinks he can act with impunity for good reason: Many congressional Republicans have proved unable to uphold their oaths when it requires standing up to him.
THIS ELECTION YEAR IS UNLIKE ANY OTHER
By The New York Times Editorial Board
At the outset of this election year, with Donald Trump leading the race to be the Republican presidential nominee, Americans should pause to consider what a second Trump term would mean for our country and the world and to weigh the serious responsibility this election places on their shoulders.
By now, most American voters should have no illusions about who Mr. Trump is. During his many years as a real estate developer and a television personality, then as president and as a dominant figure in the Republican Party, Mr. Trump demonstrated a character and temperament that render him utterly unfit for high office.
As president, he wielded power carelessly and often cruelly and put his ego and his personal needs above the interests of his country. Now, as he campaigns again, his worst impulses remain as strong as ever — encouraging violence and lawlessness, exploiting fear and hate for political gain, undermining the rule of law and the Constitution, applauding dictators — and are escalating as he tries to regain power. He plots retribution, intent on eluding the institutional, legal and bureaucratic restraints that put limits on him in his first term.
Our purpose at the start of the new year, therefore, is to sound a warning.
Mr. Trump does not offer voters anything resembling a normal option of Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal, big government or small. He confronts America with a far more fateful choice: between the continuance of the United States as a nation dedicated to “the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” and a man who has proudly shown open disdain for the law and the protections and ideals of the Constitution.
If in 2016 various factions of the electorate were prepared to look beyond Mr. Trump’s bombast in the hope that he might deliver whatever it was they wanted without too much damage to the nation, today there is no mystery about what he will do should he win, about the sorts of people he will surround himself with and the personal and political goals he will pursue. There is no mystery, either, about the consequences for the world if America re-elects a leader who openly displays his contempt for its allies.
Mr. Trump’s four years in the White House did lasting damage to the presidency and to the nation. He deepened existing divisions among Americans, leaving the country dangerously polarized; he so demeaned public discourse that many Americans have become inured to lies, insults and personal attacks at the highest levels of leadership. His contempt for the rule of law raised concerns about the long-term stability of American democracy, and his absence of a moral compass threatened to corrode the ideals of national service.
The Republic weathered Mr. Trump’s presidency for a variety of reasons: his lack of prepared agenda, the disruptions of the Covid-19 pandemic and the efforts of appointees who tried to temper his most dangerous or unreasonable demands. Most important, it survived because of the people and institutions in his administration and in the Republican Party who proved strong enough to stand up to his efforts to undermine the peaceful transfer of power.
It is instructive in the aftermath of that administration to listen to the judgments of some of these officials on the president they served. John Kelly, a chief of staff to Mr. Trump, called him the “most flawed person I’ve ever met,” someone who could not understand why Americans admired those who sacrificed their lives in combat. Bill Barr, who served as attorney general, and Mark Esper, a former defense secretary, both said Mr. Trump repeatedly put his own interests over those of the country. Even the most loyal and conservative of them all, Vice President Mike Pence, who made the stand that helped provoke Mr. Trump and his followers to insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, saw through the man: “On that day, President Trump also demanded that I choose between him and the Constitution,” he said.
There will not be people like these in the White House should Mr. Trump be re-elected. The former president has no interest in being restrained, and he has surrounded himself with people who want to institutionalize the MAGA doctrine. According to reporting by the Times reporters Maggie Haberman, Charlie Savage and Jonathan Swan, Mr. Trump and his ideological allies have been planning for a second Trump term for many months already. Under the name Project 2025, one coalition of right-wing organizations has produced a thick handbook and recruited thousands of potential appointees in preparation for an all-out assault on the structures of American government and the democratic institutions that acted as checks on Mr. Trump’s power.
The project ties in with plans from Mr. Trump and his supporters to reclassify tens of thousands of federal workers so they can be fired if they do not buy fully into the Trump agenda. He also plans to strip the Justice Department of its independence in order to use it to wreak vengeance on those who, in his view, failed to concoct a victory for him in the 2020 election or otherwise didn’t support his unconstitutional demands. There is more, including threats by Mr. Trump to find ways to use federal troops against those who might protest his policies and practices. These ambitions demonstrate that the years out of office and the mounting legal challenges he faces have only sharpened his worst instincts.
Mr. Trump was impeached twice as president and since leaving office has been charged in four criminal cases — two related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, one over hush money paid to a porn star and another for hoarding classified documents after he left office and impeding the government’s efforts to retrieve them. No other sitting or former president has ever been indicted on criminal charges. Not only has Mr. Trump shown no remorse for these actions, he has given no sign that he understands these indictments to be anything but a political crusade meant to undermine him. He continues to claim that the Jan. 6 insurrection has been misrepresented. “There was love and unity,” he said in an interview last August. And he has suggested that, if re-elected, he could use his presidential powers to pardon himself.
Mr. Trump’s forays into foreign affairs remain dangerously misguided and incoherent. During his presidency, he displayed consistent admiration for autocratic leaders — including Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un — and contempt for our democratic allies. While in the White House, he repeatedly threatened to leave NATO, an alliance critical to the stability of Europe that he sees only as a drain on American resources; now his campaign website says, without elaborating, that he plans to “finish” the process of “fundamentally re-evaluating NATO’s purpose and NATO’s mission.”
He has announced his intention to abandon Ukraine, leaving it and its neighbors vulnerable to further Russian aggression. Encouraged by an American president, leaders who rule with an iron fist in Hungary, Israel, India and elsewhere would face far less moral or democratic pressure.
Mr. Trump has made clear his conviction that only “losers” accept legal, institutional or even constitutional constraints. He has promised vengeance against his political opponents, whom he has called “vermin” and threatened with execution. This is particularly disturbing at a time of heightened concern about political violence, with threats increasing against elected officials of both parties.
He has repeatedly demonstrated a deep disdain for the First Amendment and the basic principles of democracy, chief among them the right to freely express peaceful dissent from those in power without fear of retaliation, and he has made no secret of his readiness to expand the powers of the presidency, including the deployment of the military and the Justice Department, to have his way.
Democracy in the United States is stronger with a formidable conservative political movement to keep diversity of thought alive on important questions, such as the nation’s approaches to immigration, education, national security and fiscal responsibility. There should be room for real disagreement on any of these topics and many more — and there is a long tradition of it across the American experiment. But that is not what the former president is seeking.
Re-electing Mr. Trump would present serious dangers to our Republic and to the world. This is a time not to sit out but instead to re-engage. We appeal to Americans to set aside their political differences, grievances and party affiliations and to contemplate — as families, as parishes, as councils and clubs and as individuals — the real magnitude of the choice they will make in November.
By The New York Times Editorial Board
At the outset of this election year, with Donald Trump leading the race to be the Republican presidential nominee, Americans should pause to consider what a second Trump term would mean for our country and the world and to weigh the serious responsibility this election places on their shoulders.
By now, most American voters should have no illusions about who Mr. Trump is. During his many years as a real estate developer and a television personality, then as president and as a dominant figure in the Republican Party, Mr. Trump demonstrated a character and temperament that render him utterly unfit for high office.
As president, he wielded power carelessly and often cruelly and put his ego and his personal needs above the interests of his country. Now, as he campaigns again, his worst impulses remain as strong as ever — encouraging violence and lawlessness, exploiting fear and hate for political gain, undermining the rule of law and the Constitution, applauding dictators — and are escalating as he tries to regain power. He plots retribution, intent on eluding the institutional, legal and bureaucratic restraints that put limits on him in his first term.
Our purpose at the start of the new year, therefore, is to sound a warning.
Mr. Trump does not offer voters anything resembling a normal option of Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal, big government or small. He confronts America with a far more fateful choice: between the continuance of the United States as a nation dedicated to “the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” and a man who has proudly shown open disdain for the law and the protections and ideals of the Constitution.
If in 2016 various factions of the electorate were prepared to look beyond Mr. Trump’s bombast in the hope that he might deliver whatever it was they wanted without too much damage to the nation, today there is no mystery about what he will do should he win, about the sorts of people he will surround himself with and the personal and political goals he will pursue. There is no mystery, either, about the consequences for the world if America re-elects a leader who openly displays his contempt for its allies.
Mr. Trump’s four years in the White House did lasting damage to the presidency and to the nation. He deepened existing divisions among Americans, leaving the country dangerously polarized; he so demeaned public discourse that many Americans have become inured to lies, insults and personal attacks at the highest levels of leadership. His contempt for the rule of law raised concerns about the long-term stability of American democracy, and his absence of a moral compass threatened to corrode the ideals of national service.
The Republic weathered Mr. Trump’s presidency for a variety of reasons: his lack of prepared agenda, the disruptions of the Covid-19 pandemic and the efforts of appointees who tried to temper his most dangerous or unreasonable demands. Most important, it survived because of the people and institutions in his administration and in the Republican Party who proved strong enough to stand up to his efforts to undermine the peaceful transfer of power.
It is instructive in the aftermath of that administration to listen to the judgments of some of these officials on the president they served. John Kelly, a chief of staff to Mr. Trump, called him the “most flawed person I’ve ever met,” someone who could not understand why Americans admired those who sacrificed their lives in combat. Bill Barr, who served as attorney general, and Mark Esper, a former defense secretary, both said Mr. Trump repeatedly put his own interests over those of the country. Even the most loyal and conservative of them all, Vice President Mike Pence, who made the stand that helped provoke Mr. Trump and his followers to insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, saw through the man: “On that day, President Trump also demanded that I choose between him and the Constitution,” he said.
There will not be people like these in the White House should Mr. Trump be re-elected. The former president has no interest in being restrained, and he has surrounded himself with people who want to institutionalize the MAGA doctrine. According to reporting by the Times reporters Maggie Haberman, Charlie Savage and Jonathan Swan, Mr. Trump and his ideological allies have been planning for a second Trump term for many months already. Under the name Project 2025, one coalition of right-wing organizations has produced a thick handbook and recruited thousands of potential appointees in preparation for an all-out assault on the structures of American government and the democratic institutions that acted as checks on Mr. Trump’s power.
The project ties in with plans from Mr. Trump and his supporters to reclassify tens of thousands of federal workers so they can be fired if they do not buy fully into the Trump agenda. He also plans to strip the Justice Department of its independence in order to use it to wreak vengeance on those who, in his view, failed to concoct a victory for him in the 2020 election or otherwise didn’t support his unconstitutional demands. There is more, including threats by Mr. Trump to find ways to use federal troops against those who might protest his policies and practices. These ambitions demonstrate that the years out of office and the mounting legal challenges he faces have only sharpened his worst instincts.
Mr. Trump was impeached twice as president and since leaving office has been charged in four criminal cases — two related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, one over hush money paid to a porn star and another for hoarding classified documents after he left office and impeding the government’s efforts to retrieve them. No other sitting or former president has ever been indicted on criminal charges. Not only has Mr. Trump shown no remorse for these actions, he has given no sign that he understands these indictments to be anything but a political crusade meant to undermine him. He continues to claim that the Jan. 6 insurrection has been misrepresented. “There was love and unity,” he said in an interview last August. And he has suggested that, if re-elected, he could use his presidential powers to pardon himself.
Mr. Trump’s forays into foreign affairs remain dangerously misguided and incoherent. During his presidency, he displayed consistent admiration for autocratic leaders — including Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un — and contempt for our democratic allies. While in the White House, he repeatedly threatened to leave NATO, an alliance critical to the stability of Europe that he sees only as a drain on American resources; now his campaign website says, without elaborating, that he plans to “finish” the process of “fundamentally re-evaluating NATO’s purpose and NATO’s mission.”
He has announced his intention to abandon Ukraine, leaving it and its neighbors vulnerable to further Russian aggression. Encouraged by an American president, leaders who rule with an iron fist in Hungary, Israel, India and elsewhere would face far less moral or democratic pressure.
Mr. Trump has made clear his conviction that only “losers” accept legal, institutional or even constitutional constraints. He has promised vengeance against his political opponents, whom he has called “vermin” and threatened with execution. This is particularly disturbing at a time of heightened concern about political violence, with threats increasing against elected officials of both parties.
He has repeatedly demonstrated a deep disdain for the First Amendment and the basic principles of democracy, chief among them the right to freely express peaceful dissent from those in power without fear of retaliation, and he has made no secret of his readiness to expand the powers of the presidency, including the deployment of the military and the Justice Department, to have his way.
Democracy in the United States is stronger with a formidable conservative political movement to keep diversity of thought alive on important questions, such as the nation’s approaches to immigration, education, national security and fiscal responsibility. There should be room for real disagreement on any of these topics and many more — and there is a long tradition of it across the American experiment. But that is not what the former president is seeking.
Re-electing Mr. Trump would present serious dangers to our Republic and to the world. This is a time not to sit out but instead to re-engage. We appeal to Americans to set aside their political differences, grievances and party affiliations and to contemplate — as families, as parishes, as councils and clubs and as individuals — the real magnitude of the choice they will make in November.
IS TRUMP HELL?
By Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
These are the men that try The Times’s soul.
With the disreputable Donald Trump challenging the disfavored President Biden, the 2024 race has become the embodiment of Oscar Wilde’s witticism about fox hunting: “the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.”
Bleeding young and nonwhite voters, the president finally heeded Democrats urging him to “get out there,” as Nancy Pelosi put it, and throw some haymakers at Trump.
Biden flew to Pennsylvania on Friday to visit Valley Forge and make a pugnacious speech invoking an earlier moment when we were fighting against despotism and clinging to a dream of a democracy.
In a discontented winter during the American Revolution, George Washington tried to inspire his downtrodden troops at Valley Forge by having Thomas Paine’s “The American Crisis” read to them.
“These are the times that try men’s souls,” Paine wrote, adding, “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.”
As the voting to determine the next president gets underway, it is clear that the tyrannical Trump won’t be easily conquered. And that is our hell.
“You can’t love your country only when you win,” Biden said in his speech, making a forceful case that America, which dumped the mad King George, should not embrace the mad King Donald.
If we bow down to a wannabe dictator who loves dictators, who echoes the language of Nazi Germany, who egged on the mob on Jan. 6 and then rewrote the facts to “steal history” just as he tried to steal the election — what does that say about who we are, Biden wondered?
Rejecting Trump’s campaign of grievance, vengeance, malignance and connivance, the president said, “We never bow. We never bend. We speak of possibilities — not carnage. We’re not weighed down by grievances. We don’t foster fear. We don’t walk around as victims.”
On Thursday, the Biden-Harris campaign blasted out excerpts from a Margaret Sullivan column in The Guardian, upbraiding the media on its tendency to fall into “performative neutrality,” focusing too much on Biden’s presentation and poll numbers and not enough on stressing what a second Trump presidency would mean.
Journalists should not fear looking as if they’re “in the tank” for Biden if they zero in on Trump’s seditious behavior, Sullivan said; the media should worry less about the horse race than about underscoring that many of Trump’s threats are authoritarian.
She is right that the media must constantly remind itself not to use old tropes on a new trollop like Trump, particularly since the media is in a confluence of interest with Trump — as he himself has pointed out.
Thanks to Trump, journalists can be festooned with gold — lucrative book contracts, TV deals and speaking gigs. The man who enriched himself with millions from foreign states and royalty seeking favors from the United States has the power to enrich us, too. He’s a once-in-a-lifetime story, the outlandish star of an even bigger reality show than his last.
He put up a video on Truth Social on Friday touting the idea that God created him as a caretaker and “shepherd to mankind.” (It also chided Melania, showing her tripping and acting as if all she had to do was lunch with friends.) A narrator intones: “God said, ‘I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, fix this country, work all day, fight the Marxists, eat supper, then go to the Oval Office and stay past midnight at a meeting of the heads of state,’” topping off a hard week with Sunday church. “So God made Trump.” It was bound to happen: Trump playing divine victim, to pass himself off as Christlike or even hard-working. Both are equally untrue.
At his Friday afternoon speech in Sioux Center, Iowa, Trump resorted to his bully-boy ways, mocking Biden’s stutter.
I am not sure whether pounding away on the facts will work in a country with alternate realities. According to a new Washington Post/University of Maryland poll, 25 percent of Americans said it is “probably” or “definitely” true that the F.B.I. was behind Jan. 6. Among Republicans, The Post said, 34 percent said the F.B.I. “organized and encouraged the insurrection, compared with 30 percent of independents and 13 percent of Democrats.”
If people don’t know by now that Trump tried to overthrow the government he was running on Jan. 6; if they don’t know that the MAGA fanatics breaking into the Capitol, beating up cops and threatening to harm Pelosi and hang Mike Pence were criminals, not “patriots” and “hostages,” as Trump risibly calls them; if they don’t know that Trump created the radical Supreme Court that is stripping women of their rights, then they don’t want to know, or they just don’t care.
But the media must pound on. The duplicitous enablers at Fox News aside, journalists learned a lot in 2016 and have changed practices to better fence with Trump, fact-checking him more closely, engaging in defensive reporting, no longer covering every tweet like holy writ. Threats to democracy now count as a beat, just like schools and courts; The Times uses the rubric “Democracy Challenged.”
When Dick Cheney was a deranged vice president, I was not permitted to call him a liar in my column. But now The Times lets columnists call Trump a liar. We have learned to separate the man from the office. Just because someone sits in the hallowed White House doesn’t mean he deserves the respect of the office. Not if he’s ginning up a fake war or if he’s flirting with treason and white supremacy.
Still, the Biden-Harris campaign’s trumpeting of Sullivan’s column gives the impression that it expects the media to prop up Biden.
Biden has to press his own case and not rely on the media or Trump’s fatuousness to win the election for him.
People don’t want to vote against somebody; they want to vote for somebody.
The president must continue to be aggressive in convincing people he’s the best alternative; that, at 81, he’s not too old for the job; that he has solutions to stop the chaos on the border and relentless death in Gaza.
You do your job, Mr. President, and we’ll do ours.
By Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
These are the men that try The Times’s soul.
With the disreputable Donald Trump challenging the disfavored President Biden, the 2024 race has become the embodiment of Oscar Wilde’s witticism about fox hunting: “the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.”
Bleeding young and nonwhite voters, the president finally heeded Democrats urging him to “get out there,” as Nancy Pelosi put it, and throw some haymakers at Trump.
Biden flew to Pennsylvania on Friday to visit Valley Forge and make a pugnacious speech invoking an earlier moment when we were fighting against despotism and clinging to a dream of a democracy.
In a discontented winter during the American Revolution, George Washington tried to inspire his downtrodden troops at Valley Forge by having Thomas Paine’s “The American Crisis” read to them.
“These are the times that try men’s souls,” Paine wrote, adding, “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.”
As the voting to determine the next president gets underway, it is clear that the tyrannical Trump won’t be easily conquered. And that is our hell.
“You can’t love your country only when you win,” Biden said in his speech, making a forceful case that America, which dumped the mad King George, should not embrace the mad King Donald.
If we bow down to a wannabe dictator who loves dictators, who echoes the language of Nazi Germany, who egged on the mob on Jan. 6 and then rewrote the facts to “steal history” just as he tried to steal the election — what does that say about who we are, Biden wondered?
Rejecting Trump’s campaign of grievance, vengeance, malignance and connivance, the president said, “We never bow. We never bend. We speak of possibilities — not carnage. We’re not weighed down by grievances. We don’t foster fear. We don’t walk around as victims.”
On Thursday, the Biden-Harris campaign blasted out excerpts from a Margaret Sullivan column in The Guardian, upbraiding the media on its tendency to fall into “performative neutrality,” focusing too much on Biden’s presentation and poll numbers and not enough on stressing what a second Trump presidency would mean.
Journalists should not fear looking as if they’re “in the tank” for Biden if they zero in on Trump’s seditious behavior, Sullivan said; the media should worry less about the horse race than about underscoring that many of Trump’s threats are authoritarian.
She is right that the media must constantly remind itself not to use old tropes on a new trollop like Trump, particularly since the media is in a confluence of interest with Trump — as he himself has pointed out.
Thanks to Trump, journalists can be festooned with gold — lucrative book contracts, TV deals and speaking gigs. The man who enriched himself with millions from foreign states and royalty seeking favors from the United States has the power to enrich us, too. He’s a once-in-a-lifetime story, the outlandish star of an even bigger reality show than his last.
He put up a video on Truth Social on Friday touting the idea that God created him as a caretaker and “shepherd to mankind.” (It also chided Melania, showing her tripping and acting as if all she had to do was lunch with friends.) A narrator intones: “God said, ‘I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, fix this country, work all day, fight the Marxists, eat supper, then go to the Oval Office and stay past midnight at a meeting of the heads of state,’” topping off a hard week with Sunday church. “So God made Trump.” It was bound to happen: Trump playing divine victim, to pass himself off as Christlike or even hard-working. Both are equally untrue.
At his Friday afternoon speech in Sioux Center, Iowa, Trump resorted to his bully-boy ways, mocking Biden’s stutter.
I am not sure whether pounding away on the facts will work in a country with alternate realities. According to a new Washington Post/University of Maryland poll, 25 percent of Americans said it is “probably” or “definitely” true that the F.B.I. was behind Jan. 6. Among Republicans, The Post said, 34 percent said the F.B.I. “organized and encouraged the insurrection, compared with 30 percent of independents and 13 percent of Democrats.”
If people don’t know by now that Trump tried to overthrow the government he was running on Jan. 6; if they don’t know that the MAGA fanatics breaking into the Capitol, beating up cops and threatening to harm Pelosi and hang Mike Pence were criminals, not “patriots” and “hostages,” as Trump risibly calls them; if they don’t know that Trump created the radical Supreme Court that is stripping women of their rights, then they don’t want to know, or they just don’t care.
But the media must pound on. The duplicitous enablers at Fox News aside, journalists learned a lot in 2016 and have changed practices to better fence with Trump, fact-checking him more closely, engaging in defensive reporting, no longer covering every tweet like holy writ. Threats to democracy now count as a beat, just like schools and courts; The Times uses the rubric “Democracy Challenged.”
When Dick Cheney was a deranged vice president, I was not permitted to call him a liar in my column. But now The Times lets columnists call Trump a liar. We have learned to separate the man from the office. Just because someone sits in the hallowed White House doesn’t mean he deserves the respect of the office. Not if he’s ginning up a fake war or if he’s flirting with treason and white supremacy.
Still, the Biden-Harris campaign’s trumpeting of Sullivan’s column gives the impression that it expects the media to prop up Biden.
Biden has to press his own case and not rely on the media or Trump’s fatuousness to win the election for him.
People don’t want to vote against somebody; they want to vote for somebody.
The president must continue to be aggressive in convincing people he’s the best alternative; that, at 81, he’s not too old for the job; that he has solutions to stop the chaos on the border and relentless death in Gaza.
You do your job, Mr. President, and we’ll do ours.
THREE YEARS LATER, BEWARE DANGEROUS REVISIONISM OF JAN. 6
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
The third anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob comes amid troubling indicators about public opinion on that event. A Post-University of Maryland poll published this week shows a sizable share of Americans accept lies about the 2020 election and the insurrection that followed on Jan. 6, 2021. Only 62 percent say Joe Biden’s victory was legitimate, down from 69 percent two years ago, and far lower than after the contested 2000 election. One-third of U.S. adults say they believe there’s “solid evidence” of “widespread voter fraud” in the 2020 election. Regarding Jan. 6 itself, 28 percent say former president Donald Trump bears no responsibility, 21 percent say the people who stormed the Capitol were “mostly peaceful” and 25 percent say the FBI probably or definitely instigated the attack.
These are minority views, but that’s cold comfort. Disproportionate numbers of Republicans hold them, showing just how corrosive Mr. Trump’s repeated lies, amplified by a right-wing media echo chamber, have been. The devotion of the GOP base to this alternative history helps explain why Mr. Trump has avoided meaningful accountability, why he is still the front-runner, by far, for the Republican nomination — and how dangerous he could be back in power. Already, he promises “full pardons” and a government apology to many Jan. 6 rioters, plus “revenge” and “retribution” for unnamed others.
The truth must be told. Mr. Biden won the 2020 election, fair and square, and no credible evidence has emerged of widespread voter fraud. Mr. Trump, despite knowing that he lost, summoned supporters to Washington ahead of the certification of the election and told a crowd on the Ellipse that he’d go with them to the Capitol and that they needed to “fight like hell.” Mr. Trump relished watching on television as his supporters attacked the Capitol for 187 minutes and resisted pleas to stop them. As Vice President Mike Pence said later: “His reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day.”
More than 140 police officers were injured there that day. So far, 1,240 people have been charged with federal crimes related to Jan. 6, including 452 who were charged with assaulting law enforcement officers. More than 700 have been sentenced after receiving due process, including the right to a jury trial. FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, a Republican appointed by Mr. Trump, has testified categorically and under oath that there’s nothing to the “ludicrous” conspiracy theories that his agency played any role in urging people into the Capitol.
The Supreme Court agreed last month to hear challenges to a law that has been used to charge 332 people in connection with Jan. 6, which makes it a crime to obstruct or impede an official proceeding. Defense lawyers say the government has used it overly broadly. Even if the justices agree, however, it would leave convictions on other matters intact.
It’s simple political realism to acknowledge that the latest polling suggests that efforts to hold Mr. Trump accountable have fallen short. In 2021, 10 House Republicans voted to impeach him, and seven Senate Republicans voted to convict, for inciting the insurrection. But there weren’t enough votes to disqualify Mr. Trump from running again. In 2022, his favorability ratings fell amid the hearings of the House select committee investigating Jan. 6, which resulted in a damning 814-page report. However, criminal indictments against Mr. Trump in 2023, as justified as any might be on the legal merits, have turned into a rallying point for his backers: The Post-UMD poll showed that 41 percent of Americans, and 77 percent of Republicans, say they believe the Justice Department is unfairly targeting Mr. Trump for political reasons. It is unclear how potential election-year trials might affect the broader electorate.
For now, a mere 46 percent of Americans said Jan. 6 should disqualify Mr. Trump from the presidency and 33 percent said his conduct that day is “not relevant.” In between, 17 percent say Mr. Trump’s actions “cast doubts on his fitness for the job but are not disqualifying.” That segment could decide the election. What they, and all voters, must understand is that, just like in 2020, the 2024 elections will be free and fair. Audit after audit has shown the U.S. election system is secure, and none of Mr. Trump’s 2020 legal challenges panned out. They also need to understand the real chance that he could win, legitimately, but that there is still time, and an effective way — via the ballot box — to prevent that.
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
The third anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob comes amid troubling indicators about public opinion on that event. A Post-University of Maryland poll published this week shows a sizable share of Americans accept lies about the 2020 election and the insurrection that followed on Jan. 6, 2021. Only 62 percent say Joe Biden’s victory was legitimate, down from 69 percent two years ago, and far lower than after the contested 2000 election. One-third of U.S. adults say they believe there’s “solid evidence” of “widespread voter fraud” in the 2020 election. Regarding Jan. 6 itself, 28 percent say former president Donald Trump bears no responsibility, 21 percent say the people who stormed the Capitol were “mostly peaceful” and 25 percent say the FBI probably or definitely instigated the attack.
These are minority views, but that’s cold comfort. Disproportionate numbers of Republicans hold them, showing just how corrosive Mr. Trump’s repeated lies, amplified by a right-wing media echo chamber, have been. The devotion of the GOP base to this alternative history helps explain why Mr. Trump has avoided meaningful accountability, why he is still the front-runner, by far, for the Republican nomination — and how dangerous he could be back in power. Already, he promises “full pardons” and a government apology to many Jan. 6 rioters, plus “revenge” and “retribution” for unnamed others.
The truth must be told. Mr. Biden won the 2020 election, fair and square, and no credible evidence has emerged of widespread voter fraud. Mr. Trump, despite knowing that he lost, summoned supporters to Washington ahead of the certification of the election and told a crowd on the Ellipse that he’d go with them to the Capitol and that they needed to “fight like hell.” Mr. Trump relished watching on television as his supporters attacked the Capitol for 187 minutes and resisted pleas to stop them. As Vice President Mike Pence said later: “His reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day.”
More than 140 police officers were injured there that day. So far, 1,240 people have been charged with federal crimes related to Jan. 6, including 452 who were charged with assaulting law enforcement officers. More than 700 have been sentenced after receiving due process, including the right to a jury trial. FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, a Republican appointed by Mr. Trump, has testified categorically and under oath that there’s nothing to the “ludicrous” conspiracy theories that his agency played any role in urging people into the Capitol.
The Supreme Court agreed last month to hear challenges to a law that has been used to charge 332 people in connection with Jan. 6, which makes it a crime to obstruct or impede an official proceeding. Defense lawyers say the government has used it overly broadly. Even if the justices agree, however, it would leave convictions on other matters intact.
It’s simple political realism to acknowledge that the latest polling suggests that efforts to hold Mr. Trump accountable have fallen short. In 2021, 10 House Republicans voted to impeach him, and seven Senate Republicans voted to convict, for inciting the insurrection. But there weren’t enough votes to disqualify Mr. Trump from running again. In 2022, his favorability ratings fell amid the hearings of the House select committee investigating Jan. 6, which resulted in a damning 814-page report. However, criminal indictments against Mr. Trump in 2023, as justified as any might be on the legal merits, have turned into a rallying point for his backers: The Post-UMD poll showed that 41 percent of Americans, and 77 percent of Republicans, say they believe the Justice Department is unfairly targeting Mr. Trump for political reasons. It is unclear how potential election-year trials might affect the broader electorate.
For now, a mere 46 percent of Americans said Jan. 6 should disqualify Mr. Trump from the presidency and 33 percent said his conduct that day is “not relevant.” In between, 17 percent say Mr. Trump’s actions “cast doubts on his fitness for the job but are not disqualifying.” That segment could decide the election. What they, and all voters, must understand is that, just like in 2020, the 2024 elections will be free and fair. Audit after audit has shown the U.S. election system is secure, and none of Mr. Trump’s 2020 legal challenges panned out. They also need to understand the real chance that he could win, legitimately, but that there is still time, and an effective way — via the ballot box — to prevent that.
FEAR OF MAGA SHOULD NOT SWAY THE SUPREME COURTBy David French, The New York Times
It’s been just over two weeks since the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment disqualifies Donald Trump from holding the office of president of the United States. It stayed the effect of that ruling until this week. Pending further action from the Supreme Court of the United States — which Trump asked on Wednesday to overturn the ruling — the former president is off the Republican primary ballot in Colorado.
I spent way too much of my holiday vacation reading the legal and political commentary around the decision, and as I did so I found myself experiencing déjà vu. Since the rise of Trump, he and his movement have transgressed constitutional, legal and moral boundaries at will and then, when Americans attempt to impose consequences for those transgressions, Trump’s defenders and critics alike caution that the consequences will be “dangerous” or “destabilizing.”
There is already a “surge in violent threats” against the justices of the Colorado Supreme Court. The Yale Law School professor Samuel Moyn has argued that “rejecting Mr. Trump’s candidacy could well invite a repeat of the kind of violence that led to the prohibition on insurrectionists in public life in the first place.” Ian Bassin, a Protect Democracy co-founder, has suggested — and I agree — that even legal analysis of the 14th Amendment “is being colored by the analyst’s fear of how Trump and his supporters would react” to an adverse ruling.
This is where we are, and have now been for years: The Trump movement commits threats, violence and lies. And then it tries to escape accountability for those acts through more threats, more violence and more lies. At the heart of the “but the consequences" argument against disqualification is a confession that if we hold Trump accountable for his fomenting violence on Jan. 6, he might foment additional violence now.
Enough. It’s time to apply the plain language of the Constitution to Trump’s actions and remove him from the ballot — without fear of the consequences. Republics are not maintained by cowardice.
To understand the necessity of removing Trump, let’s go first to the relevant language from the 14th Amendment and then to some basic rules of legal interpretation. Here’s the language:
“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”
You don’t have to be a lawyer to comprehend those words. You simply need some basic familiarity with American civics, the English language and a couple of common-sense rules of thumb. First, when interpreting the Constitution, text is king. If the text is clear enough, there is no need for historical analysis. You don’t need to know a special “legal” version of the English language. Just apply the words on the page.
Second, it’s crucial to understand that many of the Constitution’s provisions are intentionally antidemocratic. The American republic is a democracy with guardrails. The Bill of Rights, for example, is a check on majoritarian tyranny. The American people can’t vote away your rights to speak, to exercise your religion or to due process. The Civil War Amendments, including the 14th Amendment, further expanded constitutional protections against majoritarian encroachment. Majorities can’t reimpose slavery, for example, nor can they take away your right to equal protection under the law.
So when a person critiques Section 3 as “undemocratic” or “undermining democracy,” your answer should be simple: Yes, it is undemocratic, exactly as it was intended to be. The amendments’ authors were worried that voters would send former Confederates right back into public office. If they had believed that the American electorate was wise enough not to vote for insurrectionists, they never would have drafted Section 3.
Moreover, you’ll note that the plain text of the amendment doesn’t require a court conviction for insurrection or rebellion. Again, this is intentional. The 14th Amendment originally applied to countless Confederate soldiers and continued to apply to them even after they were pardoned by President Andrew Johnson in 1868. It was not until the Amnesty Act of 1872 that most former Confederates were permitted to serve in office again.
Which brings us to Donald Trump, who is currently facing a host of federal and state criminal charges related to his plot to overturn a lawful election and retain power illegitimately. He wasn’t merely involved in legal subterfuge, including by pressuring public officials to alter vote totals. He summoned the mob, told them to march to the Capitol and enlisted them to “fight like hell.” (At the same event, Rudy Giuliani urged “trial by combat.”) When the attack on the Capitol was underway, he inflamed the crowd in real time by tweeting that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”
Yes, he also asked to the crowd to protest “peacefully and patriotically.” But as the Colorado Supreme Court affirmed, this “isolated reference” does not “inoculate” Trump, given “his exhortation, made nearly an hour later, to ‘fight like hell’ immediately before sending rallygoers to the Capitol.”
What do you call the effort to overthrow a lawfully elected government through a combination of violence and legal subterfuge? In its ruling, the Colorado Supreme Court reviewed a variety of colloquial and legal definitions of insurrection and reached a common-sense conclusion “that any definition of ‘insurrection’ for purposes of Section 3 would encompass a concerted and public use of force or threat of force by a group of people to hinder or prevent the U.S. government from taking the actions necessary to accomplish a peaceful transfer of power in this country.”
I have respect for those who argue that Jan. 6 was merely a riot and not a true “insurrection or rebellion,” but the clear and undisputed aims of the Trump scheme are what elevate his misconduct to rebellious status. The effort to steal the election wasn’t a mere protest. It represented an effort to change the government of the United States. I was open to Jonathan Chait’s argument that the term “insurrection” is not the “most precise” way to describe Jan. 6, but he lost me with this distinction: “Trump was not trying to seize and hold the Capitol nor declare a breakaway republic.”
It’s true that Trump wasn’t declaring a breakaway republic, but he was attempting to “seize and hold” far more than the Capitol. He was trying to illegally retain control of the executive branch of the government. His foot soldiers didn’t wear gray or deploy cannons, but they did storm the United States Capitol, something the Confederate Army could never accomplish.
There are also respectable arguments that the reference to “any office, civil or military, under the United States” does not include the president. As Kurt Lash wrote last month in The Times, “It would be odd to stuff the highest office in the land into a general provision that included everything from postmasters to toll takers.” He calls the text “ambiguous.”
But is it, really? As Steven Portnoy wrote in an excellent piece for ABC News, the question of whether the section applied to the president and vice president was raised in the ratification debates, and Senator Lot Morrill of Maine provided the answer: “Let me call the Senator’s attention to the words ‘or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States.’”
Remember, when reading the Constitution, words still retain their ordinary meaning, and the president is an officer under the United States by any conventional meaning of the term. In many ways, it would be fantastical to conclude otherwise. Is it really the case that insurrectionists are excluded from every office except the most powerful? One should not read constitutional provisions in a way that reaches facially absurd results.
Moreover, it’s important to note that none of the legal analysis I’ve offered above relies on any sort of progressive or liberal constitutional analysis. It’s all text and history, the essence of originalism. In fact, the most influential law review article arguing that Trump is disqualified is by William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, two of the most respected conservative legal minds in the United States.
So no, it would not be a stretch for a conservative Supreme Court to apply Section 3 to Trump. Nor is it too much to ask the court to intervene in a presidential contest or to issue decisions that have a profound and destabilizing effect on American politics. In 2000, the Supreme Court effectively decided a presidential election at the finish line, ending Al Gore’s bid in a narrow decision that was criticized by some as partisan in nature.
Moreover, in decisions ranging from Brown v. Board of Education to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the court has been quite willing to issue sweeping rulings that both inflame dissent and trigger political backlash. Fear of a negative public response cannot and must not cause the Supreme Court to turn its back on the plain text of the Constitution — especially when we are now facing the very crisis the amendment was intended to combat.
Indeed, the principal reason the fear of negative backlash is so strong and so widely articulated is the seditious nature of the Trump movement itself. When the Supreme Court ruled against Al Gore, there was no meaningful concern that he’d try to engineer a violent coup. But if the court rules against Trump, the nation will be told to brace for violence. That’s what seditionists do.
Republicans are rightly proud of their Civil War-era history. The Party of Lincoln, as it was known, helped save the Union, and it was the Party of Lincoln that passed the 14th Amendment and ratified it in statehouses across the land. The wisdom of the old Republican Party should now save us from the fecklessness and sedition of the new.
It’s been just over two weeks since the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment disqualifies Donald Trump from holding the office of president of the United States. It stayed the effect of that ruling until this week. Pending further action from the Supreme Court of the United States — which Trump asked on Wednesday to overturn the ruling — the former president is off the Republican primary ballot in Colorado.
I spent way too much of my holiday vacation reading the legal and political commentary around the decision, and as I did so I found myself experiencing déjà vu. Since the rise of Trump, he and his movement have transgressed constitutional, legal and moral boundaries at will and then, when Americans attempt to impose consequences for those transgressions, Trump’s defenders and critics alike caution that the consequences will be “dangerous” or “destabilizing.”
There is already a “surge in violent threats” against the justices of the Colorado Supreme Court. The Yale Law School professor Samuel Moyn has argued that “rejecting Mr. Trump’s candidacy could well invite a repeat of the kind of violence that led to the prohibition on insurrectionists in public life in the first place.” Ian Bassin, a Protect Democracy co-founder, has suggested — and I agree — that even legal analysis of the 14th Amendment “is being colored by the analyst’s fear of how Trump and his supporters would react” to an adverse ruling.
This is where we are, and have now been for years: The Trump movement commits threats, violence and lies. And then it tries to escape accountability for those acts through more threats, more violence and more lies. At the heart of the “but the consequences" argument against disqualification is a confession that if we hold Trump accountable for his fomenting violence on Jan. 6, he might foment additional violence now.
Enough. It’s time to apply the plain language of the Constitution to Trump’s actions and remove him from the ballot — without fear of the consequences. Republics are not maintained by cowardice.
To understand the necessity of removing Trump, let’s go first to the relevant language from the 14th Amendment and then to some basic rules of legal interpretation. Here’s the language:
“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”
You don’t have to be a lawyer to comprehend those words. You simply need some basic familiarity with American civics, the English language and a couple of common-sense rules of thumb. First, when interpreting the Constitution, text is king. If the text is clear enough, there is no need for historical analysis. You don’t need to know a special “legal” version of the English language. Just apply the words on the page.
Second, it’s crucial to understand that many of the Constitution’s provisions are intentionally antidemocratic. The American republic is a democracy with guardrails. The Bill of Rights, for example, is a check on majoritarian tyranny. The American people can’t vote away your rights to speak, to exercise your religion or to due process. The Civil War Amendments, including the 14th Amendment, further expanded constitutional protections against majoritarian encroachment. Majorities can’t reimpose slavery, for example, nor can they take away your right to equal protection under the law.
So when a person critiques Section 3 as “undemocratic” or “undermining democracy,” your answer should be simple: Yes, it is undemocratic, exactly as it was intended to be. The amendments’ authors were worried that voters would send former Confederates right back into public office. If they had believed that the American electorate was wise enough not to vote for insurrectionists, they never would have drafted Section 3.
Moreover, you’ll note that the plain text of the amendment doesn’t require a court conviction for insurrection or rebellion. Again, this is intentional. The 14th Amendment originally applied to countless Confederate soldiers and continued to apply to them even after they were pardoned by President Andrew Johnson in 1868. It was not until the Amnesty Act of 1872 that most former Confederates were permitted to serve in office again.
Which brings us to Donald Trump, who is currently facing a host of federal and state criminal charges related to his plot to overturn a lawful election and retain power illegitimately. He wasn’t merely involved in legal subterfuge, including by pressuring public officials to alter vote totals. He summoned the mob, told them to march to the Capitol and enlisted them to “fight like hell.” (At the same event, Rudy Giuliani urged “trial by combat.”) When the attack on the Capitol was underway, he inflamed the crowd in real time by tweeting that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”
Yes, he also asked to the crowd to protest “peacefully and patriotically.” But as the Colorado Supreme Court affirmed, this “isolated reference” does not “inoculate” Trump, given “his exhortation, made nearly an hour later, to ‘fight like hell’ immediately before sending rallygoers to the Capitol.”
What do you call the effort to overthrow a lawfully elected government through a combination of violence and legal subterfuge? In its ruling, the Colorado Supreme Court reviewed a variety of colloquial and legal definitions of insurrection and reached a common-sense conclusion “that any definition of ‘insurrection’ for purposes of Section 3 would encompass a concerted and public use of force or threat of force by a group of people to hinder or prevent the U.S. government from taking the actions necessary to accomplish a peaceful transfer of power in this country.”
I have respect for those who argue that Jan. 6 was merely a riot and not a true “insurrection or rebellion,” but the clear and undisputed aims of the Trump scheme are what elevate his misconduct to rebellious status. The effort to steal the election wasn’t a mere protest. It represented an effort to change the government of the United States. I was open to Jonathan Chait’s argument that the term “insurrection” is not the “most precise” way to describe Jan. 6, but he lost me with this distinction: “Trump was not trying to seize and hold the Capitol nor declare a breakaway republic.”
It’s true that Trump wasn’t declaring a breakaway republic, but he was attempting to “seize and hold” far more than the Capitol. He was trying to illegally retain control of the executive branch of the government. His foot soldiers didn’t wear gray or deploy cannons, but they did storm the United States Capitol, something the Confederate Army could never accomplish.
There are also respectable arguments that the reference to “any office, civil or military, under the United States” does not include the president. As Kurt Lash wrote last month in The Times, “It would be odd to stuff the highest office in the land into a general provision that included everything from postmasters to toll takers.” He calls the text “ambiguous.”
But is it, really? As Steven Portnoy wrote in an excellent piece for ABC News, the question of whether the section applied to the president and vice president was raised in the ratification debates, and Senator Lot Morrill of Maine provided the answer: “Let me call the Senator’s attention to the words ‘or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States.’”
Remember, when reading the Constitution, words still retain their ordinary meaning, and the president is an officer under the United States by any conventional meaning of the term. In many ways, it would be fantastical to conclude otherwise. Is it really the case that insurrectionists are excluded from every office except the most powerful? One should not read constitutional provisions in a way that reaches facially absurd results.
Moreover, it’s important to note that none of the legal analysis I’ve offered above relies on any sort of progressive or liberal constitutional analysis. It’s all text and history, the essence of originalism. In fact, the most influential law review article arguing that Trump is disqualified is by William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, two of the most respected conservative legal minds in the United States.
So no, it would not be a stretch for a conservative Supreme Court to apply Section 3 to Trump. Nor is it too much to ask the court to intervene in a presidential contest or to issue decisions that have a profound and destabilizing effect on American politics. In 2000, the Supreme Court effectively decided a presidential election at the finish line, ending Al Gore’s bid in a narrow decision that was criticized by some as partisan in nature.
Moreover, in decisions ranging from Brown v. Board of Education to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the court has been quite willing to issue sweeping rulings that both inflame dissent and trigger political backlash. Fear of a negative public response cannot and must not cause the Supreme Court to turn its back on the plain text of the Constitution — especially when we are now facing the very crisis the amendment was intended to combat.
Indeed, the principal reason the fear of negative backlash is so strong and so widely articulated is the seditious nature of the Trump movement itself. When the Supreme Court ruled against Al Gore, there was no meaningful concern that he’d try to engineer a violent coup. But if the court rules against Trump, the nation will be told to brace for violence. That’s what seditionists do.
Republicans are rightly proud of their Civil War-era history. The Party of Lincoln, as it was known, helped save the Union, and it was the Party of Lincoln that passed the 14th Amendment and ratified it in statehouses across the land. The wisdom of the old Republican Party should now save us from the fecklessness and sedition of the new.
TRUMP’S FINAL BATTLE HAS BEGUN
By Frank Bruni, The New York Times
Like many other Americans struggling to find scraps of calm and slivers of hope in this anxious era, I resolved a while back not to get overly excited about Donald Trump’s overexcited utterances. They’re often a showman’s cheap histrionics, a con man’s gaudy hyperbole.
But I can’t shake a grandiose prophecy that he made repeatedly last year, as he looked toward the 2024 presidential race. He took to calling it the “final battle.”
I first heard Trump use that phrase in March, when he addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference. I laughed at his indefatigable self-aggrandizement. He said it again weeks later at a rally in Waco, Texas, not far from where the deadly confrontation between the Branch Davidians and federal law enforcement officials took place. I cringed at his perversity.
But as he continued to rave biblically about this “final battle,” my reaction changed, and it surprised me: He just may be right. Not in his cartoonish description of that conflict — which pits him and his supporters against the godlessness, lawlessness, tyranny, reverse racism, communism, globalism and open borders of a lunatic left — but in terms of how profoundly meaningful the 2024 election could be, at least if he is the Republican presidential nominee. And if he wins it all? He will probably play dictator for much longer than a day, and the America that he molds to his self-interested liking may bear little resemblance to the country we've known and loved until now.
With the Iowa caucuses less than two weeks away, a rematch of Trump and Joe Biden is highly likely — and wouldn’t be anything close to the usual competition between “four more years” and a reasonably sane, relatively coherent change of direction and pace. We’re on the cusp of something much scarier. Trump’s fury, vengefulness and ambitions have metastasized since 2020. The ideologues aligned with him have worked out plans for a second Trump administration that are darker and more detailed than anything in the first. He seems better positioned, if elected, to slip free of the restraints and junk the norms that he didn’t manage to do away with before. Yesterday’s Trump was a Komodo dragon next to today’s Godzilla.
And Joe Biden, who campaigned in 2020 on a promise to unify the country and prides himself on bipartisanship, has recognized in his own way that “final battle” is apt. He has suggested that he is running again, at the age of 81, because the unendurable specter of Trump back in the White House leaves him no other choice. Trump and Biden don’t depict each other simply as bad alternatives for America. They describe each other as cataclysmic ones. This isn’t your usual negative partisanship, in which you try to win by stoking hatred of your opponent. It’s apocalyptic partisanship, in which your opponent is the agent of something like the End of Days.
Trump talks that way all the time, ranting that we’ll “no longer have a country” if Biden and other Democrats are in charge. Biden’s warning about Trump is equally blunt, and it could assume ever greater prominence as he calculates how to win re-election despite widespread economic apprehension, persistently low approval ratings and attacks on his age and acuity.
“Let’s be clear about what’s at stake in 2024,” he said at a campaign event in Boston last month. “Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans are determined to destroy American democracy.”
If the people on the losing side of an election believe that those on the winning side are digging the country’s graveyard, how do they accept and respect the results? The final battle we may be witnessing is between a governable and an ungovernable America, a faintly civil and a floridly uncivil one. And it wouldn’t necessarily end with a Trump defeat in November. It might just get uglier.
“There are people who don’t realize how dangerous 2024 could be,” Russell Moore, the editor in chief of Christianity Today and arguably Trump’s most prominent evangelical Christian critic, told me recently. “They’re assuming it’s a replay of 2020. I don’t think it is.”
He wondered about the rioting of Jan. 6, 2021, as a harbinger of worse political violence. He cited “the authoritarian rhetoric that’s coming from Trump.” He referred to the breadth of the chasm between MAGA America and the rest of it. When I asked him if he could think of any prior presidential elections suffused with this much dread and reciprocal disdain, he had to rewind more than 150 years, to the eve of the Civil War. “That’s the only precedent in American history I can see,” he said.
It’s certainly possible that over the 10 long months between now and Election Day, there will be surprises that set up a November election with different candidates, different issues and a different temperature than the ones in place at the moment. It’s also possible that our politicians’ heightened language and intense emotions don’t resonate with most American voters and won’t influence them.
“I see our political process pulling away from where people are on the ground,” said Danielle Allen, a professor of political philosophy, ethics and public policy at Harvard who is an advocate of better civics education and more constructive engagement in civic life. “The political process has become a kind of theatrical spectacle, and on the ground, since 2016, we’ve seen this incredible growth of grass-roots organizations working on all kinds of civic health. I think people are getting healthier — or have been — over the past seven years, and our politics doesn’t reflect that.” She noted that in a growing number of states, there are serious movements to do away with party primaries, a political reform intended to counter partisanship and produce more moderate, consensus winners.
But moderation and consensus are in no way part of Trump’s pitch, and if he’s on the ballot, striking his current Mephistophelian pose and taking his present Manichaean tack, voters are indeed being drawn into something that feels like a final battle or at least a definitive test — of the country’s belief in its institutions. Of its respect for diversity. Of its commitment to the law. Of its devotion to truth.
Do a majority of Americans still believe in the American project and the American dream as we’ve long mythologized them? Do they still see our country as a land of opportunity and immigrant ingenuity whose accomplishments and promise redeem its sins? Do we retain faith in a more bountiful tomorrow, or are we fighting over leftovers? Those questions hover with a special urgency over the 2024 election.
And that’s largely because of the perspective and agenda that Trump is asking voters to embrace. Even if the plans are bluster, the plea is a referendum on American values. He has said several times that immigrants “poison the blood” of our country, and a second Trump administration could involve the deportations of millions of undocumented immigrants annually and large detention camps. In his response to his indictments in four cases comprising 91 felony counts, he has insisted that the justice system is corrupt and vowed to overhaul it to his liking and use it to punish political foes. He praises autocrats, equating brutal repression with strength and divorcing morality from foreign policy. He unabashedly peddles conspiracy theories, spinning falsehoods when provable facts are inconvenient or unflattering. He’d have us all live in fiction, just as long as the narrative exalts him.
“When it comes to manipulating the information space, getting inside people’s heads, creating alternative realities and mass confusion — he’s as good as anyone since the 1930s, and you know who I’m talking about,” said Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of the 2021 book “The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.” Rauch characterized the stolen election claims by Trump and his enablers as “the most audacious and Russian-style disinformation attack on the United States that we’ve ever seen” and questioned whether, under a second Trump administration, we’d become a country “completely untethered from reality.”
We’d likely become a country with a new relationship to the rest of the world and a new attitude toward our history in it.
“The Western liberal international order is the work of three-quarters of a century of eminent statesmen and both parties,” said Mark Salter, who was a longtime senior aide to Senator John McCain, has written many books on American politics and collaborated with Cassidy Hutchinson on “Enough,” her best-selling 2023 memoir about her time in Trump’s White House. “It has brought us times of unexpected prosperity and liberty in the world. And somebody like Vivek Ramaswamy or Donald Trump has got a better idea? It’s just ludicrous.”
“I just have this feeling,” Salter told me, “that the next four years are going to be the most consequential four years in my lifetime.”
Are our most generous impulses doing battle with our most ungenerous ones? That’s one frame for the 2024 election, suggested by the nastiness of so many of Trump’s tirades versus the appeals to comity and common ground that Biden still works into his remarks, the compassion and kindness he still manages to project. He celebrates American diversity and rightly portrays it as a source of our strength. Trump — and, for that matter, Ron DeSantis and many others in the current generation of Republican leadership — casts it as a threat.
Trump speaks about persecuted Christians, persecuted white Americans, persecuted rural Americans. He beseeches them to exact vengeance. Where does that leave “the American civic institutions that we just expect to work,” the basketball leagues and Cub Scout troops in which political affiliation and partisan recrimination took a back seat to joint mission? They could well break down. “We’re already seeing this in school boards,” he said. “We see this when a high school doesn’t just have to cancel a play but disband its theater department.”
There’s a meanness in American life right now, and the way 2024 plays out could advance or arrest it. The outcome could also strain Americans’ confidence in our democracy in irreparable ways — and that’s not just because the Supreme Court may wind up determining Trump’s presence on the ballot, not just because the popular vote and the Electoral College could yield significantly different results, not just because any Trump loss would be attended by fresh cries of a “rigged” election and, perhaps, fresh incitements to violence.
It’s also because so many voters across the ideological spectrum are so keenly frustrated and deeply depressed by the political landscape of 2024. They behold a Supreme Court that enshrines and protects ethically challenged justices and, as in the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, seems wildly out of touch with the country. They have watched the House of Representatives devolve into a dysfunctional colosseum of dueling egos and wearying diatribes. They're presented with candidates who seem like default options rather than bold visionaries. And they feel increasingly estranged from their own government.
“That is so detrimental to our democracy,” said Stephanie Murphy, a moderate Florida Democrat who served in the House from 2017 to 2023 and was also one of the nine members of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 rioting. “Two-thirds of Americans don’t agree on almost anything, but two-thirds agree that they don’t want to see a Trump-Biden rematch, and that’s what they’re getting.” There will be no real Democratic presidential primary. The Republican presidential primary, to judge by the polling, is an exercise so pointless that Trump hasn’t bothered to show up for any of the four debates so far. “You’re further disenfranchising people,” Murphy said, and you’re fostering “disillusionment among the American electorate that their vote even matters.”
The irony is that in 2024, it will probably matter more than ever. How many Americans will see that, and how many will act on it? The final battle may be between resignation and determination, between a surrender of our ideals and the resolve to keep reaching for them.
By Frank Bruni, The New York Times
Like many other Americans struggling to find scraps of calm and slivers of hope in this anxious era, I resolved a while back not to get overly excited about Donald Trump’s overexcited utterances. They’re often a showman’s cheap histrionics, a con man’s gaudy hyperbole.
But I can’t shake a grandiose prophecy that he made repeatedly last year, as he looked toward the 2024 presidential race. He took to calling it the “final battle.”
I first heard Trump use that phrase in March, when he addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference. I laughed at his indefatigable self-aggrandizement. He said it again weeks later at a rally in Waco, Texas, not far from where the deadly confrontation between the Branch Davidians and federal law enforcement officials took place. I cringed at his perversity.
But as he continued to rave biblically about this “final battle,” my reaction changed, and it surprised me: He just may be right. Not in his cartoonish description of that conflict — which pits him and his supporters against the godlessness, lawlessness, tyranny, reverse racism, communism, globalism and open borders of a lunatic left — but in terms of how profoundly meaningful the 2024 election could be, at least if he is the Republican presidential nominee. And if he wins it all? He will probably play dictator for much longer than a day, and the America that he molds to his self-interested liking may bear little resemblance to the country we've known and loved until now.
With the Iowa caucuses less than two weeks away, a rematch of Trump and Joe Biden is highly likely — and wouldn’t be anything close to the usual competition between “four more years” and a reasonably sane, relatively coherent change of direction and pace. We’re on the cusp of something much scarier. Trump’s fury, vengefulness and ambitions have metastasized since 2020. The ideologues aligned with him have worked out plans for a second Trump administration that are darker and more detailed than anything in the first. He seems better positioned, if elected, to slip free of the restraints and junk the norms that he didn’t manage to do away with before. Yesterday’s Trump was a Komodo dragon next to today’s Godzilla.
And Joe Biden, who campaigned in 2020 on a promise to unify the country and prides himself on bipartisanship, has recognized in his own way that “final battle” is apt. He has suggested that he is running again, at the age of 81, because the unendurable specter of Trump back in the White House leaves him no other choice. Trump and Biden don’t depict each other simply as bad alternatives for America. They describe each other as cataclysmic ones. This isn’t your usual negative partisanship, in which you try to win by stoking hatred of your opponent. It’s apocalyptic partisanship, in which your opponent is the agent of something like the End of Days.
Trump talks that way all the time, ranting that we’ll “no longer have a country” if Biden and other Democrats are in charge. Biden’s warning about Trump is equally blunt, and it could assume ever greater prominence as he calculates how to win re-election despite widespread economic apprehension, persistently low approval ratings and attacks on his age and acuity.
“Let’s be clear about what’s at stake in 2024,” he said at a campaign event in Boston last month. “Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans are determined to destroy American democracy.”
If the people on the losing side of an election believe that those on the winning side are digging the country’s graveyard, how do they accept and respect the results? The final battle we may be witnessing is between a governable and an ungovernable America, a faintly civil and a floridly uncivil one. And it wouldn’t necessarily end with a Trump defeat in November. It might just get uglier.
“There are people who don’t realize how dangerous 2024 could be,” Russell Moore, the editor in chief of Christianity Today and arguably Trump’s most prominent evangelical Christian critic, told me recently. “They’re assuming it’s a replay of 2020. I don’t think it is.”
He wondered about the rioting of Jan. 6, 2021, as a harbinger of worse political violence. He cited “the authoritarian rhetoric that’s coming from Trump.” He referred to the breadth of the chasm between MAGA America and the rest of it. When I asked him if he could think of any prior presidential elections suffused with this much dread and reciprocal disdain, he had to rewind more than 150 years, to the eve of the Civil War. “That’s the only precedent in American history I can see,” he said.
It’s certainly possible that over the 10 long months between now and Election Day, there will be surprises that set up a November election with different candidates, different issues and a different temperature than the ones in place at the moment. It’s also possible that our politicians’ heightened language and intense emotions don’t resonate with most American voters and won’t influence them.
“I see our political process pulling away from where people are on the ground,” said Danielle Allen, a professor of political philosophy, ethics and public policy at Harvard who is an advocate of better civics education and more constructive engagement in civic life. “The political process has become a kind of theatrical spectacle, and on the ground, since 2016, we’ve seen this incredible growth of grass-roots organizations working on all kinds of civic health. I think people are getting healthier — or have been — over the past seven years, and our politics doesn’t reflect that.” She noted that in a growing number of states, there are serious movements to do away with party primaries, a political reform intended to counter partisanship and produce more moderate, consensus winners.
But moderation and consensus are in no way part of Trump’s pitch, and if he’s on the ballot, striking his current Mephistophelian pose and taking his present Manichaean tack, voters are indeed being drawn into something that feels like a final battle or at least a definitive test — of the country’s belief in its institutions. Of its respect for diversity. Of its commitment to the law. Of its devotion to truth.
Do a majority of Americans still believe in the American project and the American dream as we’ve long mythologized them? Do they still see our country as a land of opportunity and immigrant ingenuity whose accomplishments and promise redeem its sins? Do we retain faith in a more bountiful tomorrow, or are we fighting over leftovers? Those questions hover with a special urgency over the 2024 election.
And that’s largely because of the perspective and agenda that Trump is asking voters to embrace. Even if the plans are bluster, the plea is a referendum on American values. He has said several times that immigrants “poison the blood” of our country, and a second Trump administration could involve the deportations of millions of undocumented immigrants annually and large detention camps. In his response to his indictments in four cases comprising 91 felony counts, he has insisted that the justice system is corrupt and vowed to overhaul it to his liking and use it to punish political foes. He praises autocrats, equating brutal repression with strength and divorcing morality from foreign policy. He unabashedly peddles conspiracy theories, spinning falsehoods when provable facts are inconvenient or unflattering. He’d have us all live in fiction, just as long as the narrative exalts him.
“When it comes to manipulating the information space, getting inside people’s heads, creating alternative realities and mass confusion — he’s as good as anyone since the 1930s, and you know who I’m talking about,” said Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of the 2021 book “The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.” Rauch characterized the stolen election claims by Trump and his enablers as “the most audacious and Russian-style disinformation attack on the United States that we’ve ever seen” and questioned whether, under a second Trump administration, we’d become a country “completely untethered from reality.”
We’d likely become a country with a new relationship to the rest of the world and a new attitude toward our history in it.
“The Western liberal international order is the work of three-quarters of a century of eminent statesmen and both parties,” said Mark Salter, who was a longtime senior aide to Senator John McCain, has written many books on American politics and collaborated with Cassidy Hutchinson on “Enough,” her best-selling 2023 memoir about her time in Trump’s White House. “It has brought us times of unexpected prosperity and liberty in the world. And somebody like Vivek Ramaswamy or Donald Trump has got a better idea? It’s just ludicrous.”
“I just have this feeling,” Salter told me, “that the next four years are going to be the most consequential four years in my lifetime.”
Are our most generous impulses doing battle with our most ungenerous ones? That’s one frame for the 2024 election, suggested by the nastiness of so many of Trump’s tirades versus the appeals to comity and common ground that Biden still works into his remarks, the compassion and kindness he still manages to project. He celebrates American diversity and rightly portrays it as a source of our strength. Trump — and, for that matter, Ron DeSantis and many others in the current generation of Republican leadership — casts it as a threat.
Trump speaks about persecuted Christians, persecuted white Americans, persecuted rural Americans. He beseeches them to exact vengeance. Where does that leave “the American civic institutions that we just expect to work,” the basketball leagues and Cub Scout troops in which political affiliation and partisan recrimination took a back seat to joint mission? They could well break down. “We’re already seeing this in school boards,” he said. “We see this when a high school doesn’t just have to cancel a play but disband its theater department.”
There’s a meanness in American life right now, and the way 2024 plays out could advance or arrest it. The outcome could also strain Americans’ confidence in our democracy in irreparable ways — and that’s not just because the Supreme Court may wind up determining Trump’s presence on the ballot, not just because the popular vote and the Electoral College could yield significantly different results, not just because any Trump loss would be attended by fresh cries of a “rigged” election and, perhaps, fresh incitements to violence.
It’s also because so many voters across the ideological spectrum are so keenly frustrated and deeply depressed by the political landscape of 2024. They behold a Supreme Court that enshrines and protects ethically challenged justices and, as in the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, seems wildly out of touch with the country. They have watched the House of Representatives devolve into a dysfunctional colosseum of dueling egos and wearying diatribes. They're presented with candidates who seem like default options rather than bold visionaries. And they feel increasingly estranged from their own government.
“That is so detrimental to our democracy,” said Stephanie Murphy, a moderate Florida Democrat who served in the House from 2017 to 2023 and was also one of the nine members of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 rioting. “Two-thirds of Americans don’t agree on almost anything, but two-thirds agree that they don’t want to see a Trump-Biden rematch, and that’s what they’re getting.” There will be no real Democratic presidential primary. The Republican presidential primary, to judge by the polling, is an exercise so pointless that Trump hasn’t bothered to show up for any of the four debates so far. “You’re further disenfranchising people,” Murphy said, and you’re fostering “disillusionment among the American electorate that their vote even matters.”
The irony is that in 2024, it will probably matter more than ever. How many Americans will see that, and how many will act on it? The final battle may be between resignation and determination, between a surrender of our ideals and the resolve to keep reaching for them.
HOW TO STAND UP TO TRUMP
By Debbie Dingell, member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Michigan.
“Rot in hell.”
Those words were part of Donald Trump’s Christmas Day message, spewed at his political enemies. The next day, when I was asked during a CNN interview about the increased violence in this country, I responded honestly that I thought the former president’s message was wrong and divisive. I’m not afraid to say what I think, even when that means there may be unpleasant repercussions and threats from the former president and his supporters. A lot of us may face this type of conflict in the year ahead. I am particularly familiar with this, as Mr. Trump has targeted me in the past in ways that have been very difficult.
I was married to a great and wise man with whom I shared an incredible love for decades. I miss John every day. On the day that he died, in 2019, he dictated an op-ed to me that would be titled “My Last Words for America.” He observed, “In our modern political age, the presidential bully pulpit seems dedicated to sowing division and denigrating, often in the most irrelevant and infantile personal terms, the political opposition.” Months after his death, when I voted for the first articles of impeachment against President Trump, he launched into a brutal attack saying that John was “looking up” at me (implying he was in hell). That’s the Trump way — the cruelty is the point, yet that awareness doesn’t make it any less painful. We’re human. He knows that, and he thrives on it.
I am not seeking a fight with Mr. Trump. It’s not easy to tangle with him, especially after that experience involving John. But I do know that hateful rhetoric cannot be ignored or become normalized. We have to stand up to bullies in this country, and we have to call out indignities. My bluntness about “rot in hell” being unacceptable was my unfiltered reaction and I stand by it. In my view, the only way you can deal with bullies is to consistently call out their inexcusable behavior and stand in defense of those they choose to target. Trust me, I know it can wear you down — but we can’t grow tired, and we must push back on the hatred when we see it, calling it out, using language everyone understands and in ways that prevent it from seeping into our everyday lives and routines.
Being in Mr. Trump’s tunnel of hate is not enjoyable. Frankly, it’s often frightening. Like many of my colleagues, I have received hostile calls, antagonistic mail and death threats, and I have had people outside my home with weapons. And it reflects the vitriol, bullying, rage and threats we are witnessing across the country today — from our exchanges on social media to dialogue with each other and with those in our workplaces, schools, gathering places, families and communities. It’s a real danger to our democracy and our safety.
When I expressed my thoughts about his Christmas message, Mr. Trump took to Truth Social to go after me once again as a “loser.” Unfortunately, he also brought John into his rant. I can deal with being called names and subjected to the standard venom that we’ve all become familiar with in Mr. Trump’s social media attacks. But when he brings up John, it’s one of the things that hit me hardest. It would be easy to say his words don’t hurt, but they do. And I am sure he knows it.
But I cannot and will not be bullied or intimidated by anyone. Sometimes tyrants think women will cower. We cannot. We have the strength and courage to do what is right and fight for the betterment of our communities.
Mr. Trump’s style of politics — the disrespect, prejudice, name-calling and malice that too often get swept aside as his just calling it as he sees it — makes healthy debate and discussion virtually impossible. The word “congress” by definition means coming together. Government shouldn’t be about who can make the most noise; it’s about working together to find solutions. Take it from me: What Mr. Trump is doing isn’t honesty or candor, it’s ruthless and deliberate viciousness.
We can be sure Mr. Trump’s rhetoric will get only more fiery, discordant and divisive over the next year leading up to the election. We’ve already seen the dangerous and deadly consequences his words can have, and we cannot become complacent. This isn’t just about one man. We all face a choice in how we react to bullies, and we all have a responsibility to choose civility in the face of cruelty.
What I would encourage people to do, if attacked by Mr. Trump or his supporters, is to not be afraid to challenge the attack. Try to de-escalate the situation by presenting an alternative point of view calmly. Don’t let them bait you to descend to their level. Because that animosity is exacerbating the problem: We are watching very premeditated and carefully chosen words and actions by Mr. Trump that are stoking anger, further fueling a lack of trust in many institutions and creating a climate that is threatening democracy. Beware, the dangers are real.
I’m concerned by Mr. Trump’s pledges to rip health care away from Americans and to rule as a dictator, and by his applause of political violence. We need to hold people accountable for their words. I know that if John were here, he would tell me to do exactly what I’m doing now — to stand up and make my voice heard, and not back down. That’s what I’m going to continue to do, and I hope that as we look toward 2024, all our leaders, elected and aspiring, will join me.
By Debbie Dingell, member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Michigan.
“Rot in hell.”
Those words were part of Donald Trump’s Christmas Day message, spewed at his political enemies. The next day, when I was asked during a CNN interview about the increased violence in this country, I responded honestly that I thought the former president’s message was wrong and divisive. I’m not afraid to say what I think, even when that means there may be unpleasant repercussions and threats from the former president and his supporters. A lot of us may face this type of conflict in the year ahead. I am particularly familiar with this, as Mr. Trump has targeted me in the past in ways that have been very difficult.
I was married to a great and wise man with whom I shared an incredible love for decades. I miss John every day. On the day that he died, in 2019, he dictated an op-ed to me that would be titled “My Last Words for America.” He observed, “In our modern political age, the presidential bully pulpit seems dedicated to sowing division and denigrating, often in the most irrelevant and infantile personal terms, the political opposition.” Months after his death, when I voted for the first articles of impeachment against President Trump, he launched into a brutal attack saying that John was “looking up” at me (implying he was in hell). That’s the Trump way — the cruelty is the point, yet that awareness doesn’t make it any less painful. We’re human. He knows that, and he thrives on it.
I am not seeking a fight with Mr. Trump. It’s not easy to tangle with him, especially after that experience involving John. But I do know that hateful rhetoric cannot be ignored or become normalized. We have to stand up to bullies in this country, and we have to call out indignities. My bluntness about “rot in hell” being unacceptable was my unfiltered reaction and I stand by it. In my view, the only way you can deal with bullies is to consistently call out their inexcusable behavior and stand in defense of those they choose to target. Trust me, I know it can wear you down — but we can’t grow tired, and we must push back on the hatred when we see it, calling it out, using language everyone understands and in ways that prevent it from seeping into our everyday lives and routines.
Being in Mr. Trump’s tunnel of hate is not enjoyable. Frankly, it’s often frightening. Like many of my colleagues, I have received hostile calls, antagonistic mail and death threats, and I have had people outside my home with weapons. And it reflects the vitriol, bullying, rage and threats we are witnessing across the country today — from our exchanges on social media to dialogue with each other and with those in our workplaces, schools, gathering places, families and communities. It’s a real danger to our democracy and our safety.
When I expressed my thoughts about his Christmas message, Mr. Trump took to Truth Social to go after me once again as a “loser.” Unfortunately, he also brought John into his rant. I can deal with being called names and subjected to the standard venom that we’ve all become familiar with in Mr. Trump’s social media attacks. But when he brings up John, it’s one of the things that hit me hardest. It would be easy to say his words don’t hurt, but they do. And I am sure he knows it.
But I cannot and will not be bullied or intimidated by anyone. Sometimes tyrants think women will cower. We cannot. We have the strength and courage to do what is right and fight for the betterment of our communities.
Mr. Trump’s style of politics — the disrespect, prejudice, name-calling and malice that too often get swept aside as his just calling it as he sees it — makes healthy debate and discussion virtually impossible. The word “congress” by definition means coming together. Government shouldn’t be about who can make the most noise; it’s about working together to find solutions. Take it from me: What Mr. Trump is doing isn’t honesty or candor, it’s ruthless and deliberate viciousness.
We can be sure Mr. Trump’s rhetoric will get only more fiery, discordant and divisive over the next year leading up to the election. We’ve already seen the dangerous and deadly consequences his words can have, and we cannot become complacent. This isn’t just about one man. We all face a choice in how we react to bullies, and we all have a responsibility to choose civility in the face of cruelty.
What I would encourage people to do, if attacked by Mr. Trump or his supporters, is to not be afraid to challenge the attack. Try to de-escalate the situation by presenting an alternative point of view calmly. Don’t let them bait you to descend to their level. Because that animosity is exacerbating the problem: We are watching very premeditated and carefully chosen words and actions by Mr. Trump that are stoking anger, further fueling a lack of trust in many institutions and creating a climate that is threatening democracy. Beware, the dangers are real.
I’m concerned by Mr. Trump’s pledges to rip health care away from Americans and to rule as a dictator, and by his applause of political violence. We need to hold people accountable for their words. I know that if John were here, he would tell me to do exactly what I’m doing now — to stand up and make my voice heard, and not back down. That’s what I’m going to continue to do, and I hope that as we look toward 2024, all our leaders, elected and aspiring, will join me.
GOP IMMIGRATION DEMANDS WOULD DEGRADE, NOT STRENGTHEN, U.S. SECURITY
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
In the name of protecting national security, Republican lawmakers are demanding — and President Biden is reportedly considering — immigration measures that would chip away at our national security.
For months, GOP lawmakers have held hostage proposed military aid for Israel and Ukraine. There is bipartisan agreement that our allies need this funding and that it’s in the United States’ security interests to help them fend off terrorist and authoritarian forces themselves. But Republican leaders have determined that they will not release the money unless Biden agrees to sweeping, draconian changes to the U.S. immigration system.
What does safeguarding national security have to do with curbing immigration? For the most part, not much. But they are related in the sense that the measures Republicans want would undermine U.S. security.
Many of Republicans’ immigration demands involve gutting the asylum system, created after the atrocities of World War II to give persecuted people an organized process to apply for refuge. One measure, for instance, would essentially revive the Trump-era Title 42 order, which used the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to expel migrants without the opportunity to apply for asylum.
Agreeing to these measures would violate Biden’s 2020 campaign promises to restore integrity and humanity to the asylum system — promises he has arguably already been reneging on. They would also likely violate our international treaty obligations, which means breaking commitments we made to allies around the world decades ago.
What’s more, they might incentivize more unlawful repeat border crossings and create more chaos at the border, as we saw when earlier versions of the auto-expulsion policy was in place.
Another GOP demand that has received much less attention would have even further-reaching consequences: eliminating executive authority to grant class-based “humanitarian parole,” which allows noncitizens to temporarily enter or stay in the United States legally.
Presidential parole authority, a key pillar of the U.S. immigration system, has been in place since the 1950s. Since then, Democratic and Republican presidents alike have used it to help populations whose swift arrival to a haven was in the United States’ moral and geopolitical interests.
Among the populations granted parole over the decades: Cubans fleeing Fidel Castro; Hungarians in the aftermath of the 1956 uprising; Vietnamese allies and orphans as U.S. troops withdrew from Saigon; Jews persecuted by the Soviet Union; Iranians after their country’s Islamic revolution; and, more recently, Ukrainians escaping Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked war on their homeland, as well as Afghan allies evacuated as part of our withdrawal from America’s longest war.
Our ability to quickly respond to war, oppression and other humanitarian crises abroad is critical to our national security — especially when we need to evacuate allies who are endangered because they helped U.S. interests. Our global reputation matters: When we break our promises to protect those who have protected us, allies might be less willing to take the risk next time we ask for help.
Revoking presidential authority to make classes of people eligible for parole, as Republicans currently demand, also has the potential to worsen border security. Why? Because parole is an orderly, legal pathway to enter the United States. The easier it is to come here safely and legally, the less incentive there is to pay smugglers and sneak in illegally.
Indeed, Biden has deployed the parole system with exactly this in mind when creating programs for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans. Citizens from these countries can be granted advanced permission to enter, live and work in the United States for up to two years — if they pass security and health screenings, secure a private “sponsor” in the United States, and demonstrate urgent humanitarian need (among other criteria).
The programs have been phenomenally successful. They have helped assure that more immigrants can financially support themselves or rely on social and family networks until they get on their feet. What’s more, they have resulted in enormous declines in unlawful border crossings of people from eligible countries. For example, the number of Venezuelans arrested for illegally crossing the border fell 66 percent between September 2022 (the month before the Venezuelan parole program began) and July 2023.
That progress has since stalled because arbitrary caps on the number of people who can be paroled have led to huge backlogs, which nudges desperate people back toward illegal forms of entry. But rather than expanding upon these innovative programs, Republicans have been trying to ban them — first through lawsuits and now through extortion in the Ukraine-Israel aid negotiations.
There are things Congress could do if it actually wanted to improve border security. For example, it could send more resources to the border and immigration courts to speed up asylum screenings and adjudications. Instead, lawmakers are fixated on measures that would increase chaos at the border, sacrifice our moral standing and degrade our ability to defend ourselves around the world.
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
In the name of protecting national security, Republican lawmakers are demanding — and President Biden is reportedly considering — immigration measures that would chip away at our national security.
For months, GOP lawmakers have held hostage proposed military aid for Israel and Ukraine. There is bipartisan agreement that our allies need this funding and that it’s in the United States’ security interests to help them fend off terrorist and authoritarian forces themselves. But Republican leaders have determined that they will not release the money unless Biden agrees to sweeping, draconian changes to the U.S. immigration system.
What does safeguarding national security have to do with curbing immigration? For the most part, not much. But they are related in the sense that the measures Republicans want would undermine U.S. security.
Many of Republicans’ immigration demands involve gutting the asylum system, created after the atrocities of World War II to give persecuted people an organized process to apply for refuge. One measure, for instance, would essentially revive the Trump-era Title 42 order, which used the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to expel migrants without the opportunity to apply for asylum.
Agreeing to these measures would violate Biden’s 2020 campaign promises to restore integrity and humanity to the asylum system — promises he has arguably already been reneging on. They would also likely violate our international treaty obligations, which means breaking commitments we made to allies around the world decades ago.
What’s more, they might incentivize more unlawful repeat border crossings and create more chaos at the border, as we saw when earlier versions of the auto-expulsion policy was in place.
Another GOP demand that has received much less attention would have even further-reaching consequences: eliminating executive authority to grant class-based “humanitarian parole,” which allows noncitizens to temporarily enter or stay in the United States legally.
Presidential parole authority, a key pillar of the U.S. immigration system, has been in place since the 1950s. Since then, Democratic and Republican presidents alike have used it to help populations whose swift arrival to a haven was in the United States’ moral and geopolitical interests.
Among the populations granted parole over the decades: Cubans fleeing Fidel Castro; Hungarians in the aftermath of the 1956 uprising; Vietnamese allies and orphans as U.S. troops withdrew from Saigon; Jews persecuted by the Soviet Union; Iranians after their country’s Islamic revolution; and, more recently, Ukrainians escaping Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked war on their homeland, as well as Afghan allies evacuated as part of our withdrawal from America’s longest war.
Our ability to quickly respond to war, oppression and other humanitarian crises abroad is critical to our national security — especially when we need to evacuate allies who are endangered because they helped U.S. interests. Our global reputation matters: When we break our promises to protect those who have protected us, allies might be less willing to take the risk next time we ask for help.
Revoking presidential authority to make classes of people eligible for parole, as Republicans currently demand, also has the potential to worsen border security. Why? Because parole is an orderly, legal pathway to enter the United States. The easier it is to come here safely and legally, the less incentive there is to pay smugglers and sneak in illegally.
Indeed, Biden has deployed the parole system with exactly this in mind when creating programs for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans. Citizens from these countries can be granted advanced permission to enter, live and work in the United States for up to two years — if they pass security and health screenings, secure a private “sponsor” in the United States, and demonstrate urgent humanitarian need (among other criteria).
The programs have been phenomenally successful. They have helped assure that more immigrants can financially support themselves or rely on social and family networks until they get on their feet. What’s more, they have resulted in enormous declines in unlawful border crossings of people from eligible countries. For example, the number of Venezuelans arrested for illegally crossing the border fell 66 percent between September 2022 (the month before the Venezuelan parole program began) and July 2023.
That progress has since stalled because arbitrary caps on the number of people who can be paroled have led to huge backlogs, which nudges desperate people back toward illegal forms of entry. But rather than expanding upon these innovative programs, Republicans have been trying to ban them — first through lawsuits and now through extortion in the Ukraine-Israel aid negotiations.
There are things Congress could do if it actually wanted to improve border security. For example, it could send more resources to the border and immigration courts to speed up asylum screenings and adjudications. Instead, lawmakers are fixated on measures that would increase chaos at the border, sacrifice our moral standing and degrade our ability to defend ourselves around the world.
THE COLORADO RULING IS A REBUKE FOR THE AGES
By Jesse Wegman, The New York Times
How can it be that nearly three years after Donald Trump incited an insurrection to stay in office, interfering with the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in American history, he remains eligible for a second term as president? In a stunning ruling on Tuesday night, the Colorado Supreme Court answered that question: He can’t be allowed to run again.
The Colorado court’s 133-page decision said that he is not eligible to be on the state’s ballot for president under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bars from public office anyone who swore an oath to the Constitution and then engaged in or aided an insurrection against it. The Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was an insurrection, the court found, upholding part of a trial judge’s ruling from last month, and Mr. Trump engaged in it.
In so ruling, the court produced an epochal moment in American law and politics, a rebuke that will reverberate through the ages no matter whether the United States Supreme Court chooses to uphold it.
It’s no surprise that the opinion in Tuesday’s ruling, which was 4 to 3, reads like it was written in part for the history books. “We are mindful of the magnitude and weight of the questions now before us,” the majority said. “We are likewise mindful of our solemn duty to apply the law, without fear or favor, and without being swayed by public reaction to the decisions that the law mandates we reach.”
The court reversed another part of the trial judge’s ruling, which had said that Mr. Trump could remain on the ballot in Colorado because Section 3 does not explicitly refer to the office of president. It makes no sense, the court explained, that “Section 3 disqualifies every oath-breaking insurrectionist except the most powerful one and that it bars oath breakers from virtually every office, both state and federal, except the highest one in the land. Both results are inconsistent with the plain language and history of Section 3.”
There are plenty of caveats here. Courts in other states have already dismissed similar 14th Amendment challenges to Mr. Trump’s candidacy, which could diminish the practical impact of the Colorado ruling. The three dissenters raised concerns about a lack of due process at the trial level, questioning whether the action could be taken before Mr. Trump is convicted of insurrection. The U.S. Supreme Court may well reverse the decision on any number of grounds, including the question of whether the events of Jan. 6 constituted an “insurrection” or whether Mr. Trump “engaged” in it.
But all these concerns only amplify an important point: Shouldn’t both major parties insist on presidential candidates for whom such questions are not even remotely at issue?
I wish the answer to that was an easy yes. Instead, the Republican Party is on the cusp of anointing Mr. Trump for the third time in eight years. And for a terrifyingly large faction of voters, his leading role in the insurrection — not to mention the 91 felony counts he faces in four criminal trials and his open contempt for the rule of law — is not only not disqualifying; it’s one of his key selling points.
Faced with such a menace, what are the country’s institutions of government to do? It’s easy to say that Mr. Trump’s ultimate rejection should come at the hands of the voters, not the courts; I have been inclined toward that view myself. The obvious rejoinder is that an outright majority of voters already rejected Mr. Trump in 2020, and we know how that turned out: brutal violence, several deaths and the enduring myth of a stolen election. Why should we expect it to be different next time? If anything, the threats of chaos and violence by Mr. Trump and his allies have only grown bolder.
But there is a reason we have a written Constitution, and courts tasked with interpreting it. Not every decision in our system is left solely to voters. The 14th Amendment’s bar on insurrectionists serving in office, which was drafted to target former Confederates after the Civil War, “is a statement that certain things will be withdrawn from the terrain of electoral contest,” Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a former constitutional law professor, told me recently.
Voters still get to cast their ballots for nearly anyone they want, Mr. Raskin said. But “the framers of the 14th Amendment contemplated that there would be people who would be otherwise attractive to a certain portion of the population who must be kept off the ballot because they are a threat to the Republic. Their obnoxiousness is not within the normal course of American electoral politics.”
Mr. Trump’s appeal of the Colorado ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court would give the justices three Jan. 6-related cases on their docket, all demanding resolution well in advance of the 2024 election. (The other two involve Mr. Trump’s claim of immunity from prosecution and a challenge to a federal obstruction law used to prosecute many Jan. 6 attackers, as well as Mr. Trump.)
As the justices in Washington weigh these matters, they will no doubt be aware of the political unrest surrounding them. They know that Mr. Trump has built a large political following and is marshaling his followers to turn against the justice system for indicting him, to intimidate law enforcement officials and court personnel and anyone else who gets in his way. They are aware that he will whip his die-hard followers into a frenzy against the Supreme Court itself, just as he unleashed his followers to try to bend Congress to his will on Jan. 6.
The justices’ challenge will be to face all of this head-on rather than to run scared from it, as so many Republican lawmakers did on that day, when they continued objecting to the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral votes even after the bloody attack on their workplace. The justices’ challenge is to not twist the law in a craven effort to appease an authoritarian movement that sees violence as the answer, win or lose.
“This is the correct legal result,” Gerard Magliocca, a law professor at Indiana University and an expert on Section 3, told me about the Colorado ruling. “Whether it’s going to be the final result, or the result that is politically acceptable, is something else.”
For now, though, the constitutional bell has been rung in Colorado. A state supreme court has found that Donald Trump engaged in an insurrection in his efforts to overturn the 2020 election by inciting a violent mob to attack the Capitol and is therefore disqualified from serving again as president. Even if the ruling is eventually overturned, the bell cannot be unrung.
By Jesse Wegman, The New York Times
How can it be that nearly three years after Donald Trump incited an insurrection to stay in office, interfering with the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in American history, he remains eligible for a second term as president? In a stunning ruling on Tuesday night, the Colorado Supreme Court answered that question: He can’t be allowed to run again.
The Colorado court’s 133-page decision said that he is not eligible to be on the state’s ballot for president under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bars from public office anyone who swore an oath to the Constitution and then engaged in or aided an insurrection against it. The Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was an insurrection, the court found, upholding part of a trial judge’s ruling from last month, and Mr. Trump engaged in it.
In so ruling, the court produced an epochal moment in American law and politics, a rebuke that will reverberate through the ages no matter whether the United States Supreme Court chooses to uphold it.
It’s no surprise that the opinion in Tuesday’s ruling, which was 4 to 3, reads like it was written in part for the history books. “We are mindful of the magnitude and weight of the questions now before us,” the majority said. “We are likewise mindful of our solemn duty to apply the law, without fear or favor, and without being swayed by public reaction to the decisions that the law mandates we reach.”
The court reversed another part of the trial judge’s ruling, which had said that Mr. Trump could remain on the ballot in Colorado because Section 3 does not explicitly refer to the office of president. It makes no sense, the court explained, that “Section 3 disqualifies every oath-breaking insurrectionist except the most powerful one and that it bars oath breakers from virtually every office, both state and federal, except the highest one in the land. Both results are inconsistent with the plain language and history of Section 3.”
There are plenty of caveats here. Courts in other states have already dismissed similar 14th Amendment challenges to Mr. Trump’s candidacy, which could diminish the practical impact of the Colorado ruling. The three dissenters raised concerns about a lack of due process at the trial level, questioning whether the action could be taken before Mr. Trump is convicted of insurrection. The U.S. Supreme Court may well reverse the decision on any number of grounds, including the question of whether the events of Jan. 6 constituted an “insurrection” or whether Mr. Trump “engaged” in it.
But all these concerns only amplify an important point: Shouldn’t both major parties insist on presidential candidates for whom such questions are not even remotely at issue?
I wish the answer to that was an easy yes. Instead, the Republican Party is on the cusp of anointing Mr. Trump for the third time in eight years. And for a terrifyingly large faction of voters, his leading role in the insurrection — not to mention the 91 felony counts he faces in four criminal trials and his open contempt for the rule of law — is not only not disqualifying; it’s one of his key selling points.
Faced with such a menace, what are the country’s institutions of government to do? It’s easy to say that Mr. Trump’s ultimate rejection should come at the hands of the voters, not the courts; I have been inclined toward that view myself. The obvious rejoinder is that an outright majority of voters already rejected Mr. Trump in 2020, and we know how that turned out: brutal violence, several deaths and the enduring myth of a stolen election. Why should we expect it to be different next time? If anything, the threats of chaos and violence by Mr. Trump and his allies have only grown bolder.
But there is a reason we have a written Constitution, and courts tasked with interpreting it. Not every decision in our system is left solely to voters. The 14th Amendment’s bar on insurrectionists serving in office, which was drafted to target former Confederates after the Civil War, “is a statement that certain things will be withdrawn from the terrain of electoral contest,” Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a former constitutional law professor, told me recently.
Voters still get to cast their ballots for nearly anyone they want, Mr. Raskin said. But “the framers of the 14th Amendment contemplated that there would be people who would be otherwise attractive to a certain portion of the population who must be kept off the ballot because they are a threat to the Republic. Their obnoxiousness is not within the normal course of American electoral politics.”
Mr. Trump’s appeal of the Colorado ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court would give the justices three Jan. 6-related cases on their docket, all demanding resolution well in advance of the 2024 election. (The other two involve Mr. Trump’s claim of immunity from prosecution and a challenge to a federal obstruction law used to prosecute many Jan. 6 attackers, as well as Mr. Trump.)
As the justices in Washington weigh these matters, they will no doubt be aware of the political unrest surrounding them. They know that Mr. Trump has built a large political following and is marshaling his followers to turn against the justice system for indicting him, to intimidate law enforcement officials and court personnel and anyone else who gets in his way. They are aware that he will whip his die-hard followers into a frenzy against the Supreme Court itself, just as he unleashed his followers to try to bend Congress to his will on Jan. 6.
The justices’ challenge will be to face all of this head-on rather than to run scared from it, as so many Republican lawmakers did on that day, when they continued objecting to the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral votes even after the bloody attack on their workplace. The justices’ challenge is to not twist the law in a craven effort to appease an authoritarian movement that sees violence as the answer, win or lose.
“This is the correct legal result,” Gerard Magliocca, a law professor at Indiana University and an expert on Section 3, told me about the Colorado ruling. “Whether it’s going to be the final result, or the result that is politically acceptable, is something else.”
For now, though, the constitutional bell has been rung in Colorado. A state supreme court has found that Donald Trump engaged in an insurrection in his efforts to overturn the 2020 election by inciting a violent mob to attack the Capitol and is therefore disqualified from serving again as president. Even if the ruling is eventually overturned, the bell cannot be unrung.
BEHOLD, MAGA MAN
By David French, The New York Times
On Dec. 13, an election worker named Ruby Freeman took the stand in a Georgia courtroom and told the story of how her world was turned upside down by Rudy Giuliani. Three Decembers earlier, Giuliani shared a routine surveillance video of Ms. Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss, doing the routine yet vital work of counting 2020 presidential ballots at State Farm Arena in Atlanta.
But Giuliani’s description of the video was anything but routine. He falsely claimed that the footage was evidence of vote fraud. In that moment, everything changed for Freeman. As she said in her testimony, “Giuliani just messed me up, you know.” That’s a polite way of describing the horrors that followed. She faced an avalanche of threats, racist attacks and harassment at work and home. She had to leave her house — and then, after law enforcement officials found her name on a death list, the house of the friend she’d been staying with. Even now she’s afraid to walk in public without a mask.
The purpose of Freeman’s courtroom testimony was simple: to describe in detail how Giuliani’s lies had profoundly damaged her life. And make no mistake, Giuliani lied. He admitted that his statements were false back in July, and in August the court entered a default judgment against him, holding him liable for those falsehoods. The only question left for the jury was the amount of the damages. And Friday, the jury gave its answer: Giuliani now owes Freeman and Moss $148 million to compensate them for his cruel and obvious lies.
The verdict is against Giuliani alone. But make no mistake, MAGA was on trial in the courtroom — its methods, its morality and the means it uses to escape the consequences of its dreadful acts. That’s because Rudy Giuliani isn’t truly Rudy Giuliani any longer. In his long descent from a post-9/11 American hero to a mocked, derided and embattled criminal defendant (he has also been indicted in Fani Willis’s sprawling Georgia case), he became something else entirely. He became a MAGA Man.
I’m reminded of Sigourney Weaver’s famous line in “Ghostbusters”: “There is no Dana, only Zuul.” There is no Giuliani now, only Donald Trump.
There are many MAGA Men and MAGA Women in the modern G.O.P. To meet one is, in significant respects, to meet them all. The names roll off the tongue. Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, Kari Lake, Roger Stone, Marjorie Taylor Greene, John Eastman — the list could go on and on. And while they all have different stories before Trump, they share variations of the same story after Trump. Giuliani’s story, MAGA’s story, is theirs as well.
That’s what was most significant about his trial. It wasn’t the damage award, as substantial as it was. It’s the story, the tale that lays bare what a MAGA Man is.
The first thing you need to know about a MAGA Man like Giuliani is that he’s dishonest. Truthfulness is incompatible with Trumpism. Trump is a liar, and he demands fealty to his lies. So Giuliani’s task, as Trump’s lawyer, was to lie on his behalf, and lie he did. He even repeated his lies about Freeman and Moss — the same lies to which he’d already confessed — outside the courthouse during his trial.
A MAGA Man such as Giuliani supplements his lies with rage. To watch him pushing Trump’s election lies was to watch a man become unglued with anger. The rage merged with the lie. The rage helped make the lie stick. Why would a man like Giuliani, former prosecutor and hero mayor, be so angry if he hadn’t discovered true injustice? MAGA Men and Women are very good at using their credibility from the past to cover their lies in the present.
Amid the lies and rage, however, a MAGA Man like Giuliani also finds religion. But not in the way you might expect. No, MAGA Man is not sorry for what he’s done. Instead, he feels biblically persecuted. Freeman and Moss aren’t the real victims; he is. Moreover, he also knows that the base is religious and likes to hear its politicians talk about God.
Giuliani learned that lesson well. So during the trial, he compared himself to Christians in the Colosseum, battling the lions like the martyrs of old. He’s not alone in this, of course. Trump shared an image of Jesus sitting by his side as he stood trial. Stone got so religious that he claimed to see supernatural sights, including, he said, a “demonic portal” that’s “swirling like a cauldron” about the Biden White House.
One of the persistent debates in American life centers on how strictly we should judge the sins of our national past. Were those people who owned slaves or broke faith with Native Americans or passed the Chinese Exclusion Act merely products of their time? MAGA Men and MAGA Women will not have that excuse. They know there is a different way. Before Trump, many of them — whatever their flaws — lived very different lives. And few of them more so than Giuliani.
His trial and verdict write another page in the volume of truth that tells the real story of MAGA America. Every voter should know exactly who Trump is and what his movement is like. They should know what happened to Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. We should remember their names. But if a MAGA Man remembers, he does not care. Whoever he once was is gone. He serves a new master now.
By David French, The New York Times
On Dec. 13, an election worker named Ruby Freeman took the stand in a Georgia courtroom and told the story of how her world was turned upside down by Rudy Giuliani. Three Decembers earlier, Giuliani shared a routine surveillance video of Ms. Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss, doing the routine yet vital work of counting 2020 presidential ballots at State Farm Arena in Atlanta.
But Giuliani’s description of the video was anything but routine. He falsely claimed that the footage was evidence of vote fraud. In that moment, everything changed for Freeman. As she said in her testimony, “Giuliani just messed me up, you know.” That’s a polite way of describing the horrors that followed. She faced an avalanche of threats, racist attacks and harassment at work and home. She had to leave her house — and then, after law enforcement officials found her name on a death list, the house of the friend she’d been staying with. Even now she’s afraid to walk in public without a mask.
The purpose of Freeman’s courtroom testimony was simple: to describe in detail how Giuliani’s lies had profoundly damaged her life. And make no mistake, Giuliani lied. He admitted that his statements were false back in July, and in August the court entered a default judgment against him, holding him liable for those falsehoods. The only question left for the jury was the amount of the damages. And Friday, the jury gave its answer: Giuliani now owes Freeman and Moss $148 million to compensate them for his cruel and obvious lies.
The verdict is against Giuliani alone. But make no mistake, MAGA was on trial in the courtroom — its methods, its morality and the means it uses to escape the consequences of its dreadful acts. That’s because Rudy Giuliani isn’t truly Rudy Giuliani any longer. In his long descent from a post-9/11 American hero to a mocked, derided and embattled criminal defendant (he has also been indicted in Fani Willis’s sprawling Georgia case), he became something else entirely. He became a MAGA Man.
I’m reminded of Sigourney Weaver’s famous line in “Ghostbusters”: “There is no Dana, only Zuul.” There is no Giuliani now, only Donald Trump.
There are many MAGA Men and MAGA Women in the modern G.O.P. To meet one is, in significant respects, to meet them all. The names roll off the tongue. Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, Kari Lake, Roger Stone, Marjorie Taylor Greene, John Eastman — the list could go on and on. And while they all have different stories before Trump, they share variations of the same story after Trump. Giuliani’s story, MAGA’s story, is theirs as well.
That’s what was most significant about his trial. It wasn’t the damage award, as substantial as it was. It’s the story, the tale that lays bare what a MAGA Man is.
The first thing you need to know about a MAGA Man like Giuliani is that he’s dishonest. Truthfulness is incompatible with Trumpism. Trump is a liar, and he demands fealty to his lies. So Giuliani’s task, as Trump’s lawyer, was to lie on his behalf, and lie he did. He even repeated his lies about Freeman and Moss — the same lies to which he’d already confessed — outside the courthouse during his trial.
A MAGA Man such as Giuliani supplements his lies with rage. To watch him pushing Trump’s election lies was to watch a man become unglued with anger. The rage merged with the lie. The rage helped make the lie stick. Why would a man like Giuliani, former prosecutor and hero mayor, be so angry if he hadn’t discovered true injustice? MAGA Men and Women are very good at using their credibility from the past to cover their lies in the present.
Amid the lies and rage, however, a MAGA Man like Giuliani also finds religion. But not in the way you might expect. No, MAGA Man is not sorry for what he’s done. Instead, he feels biblically persecuted. Freeman and Moss aren’t the real victims; he is. Moreover, he also knows that the base is religious and likes to hear its politicians talk about God.
Giuliani learned that lesson well. So during the trial, he compared himself to Christians in the Colosseum, battling the lions like the martyrs of old. He’s not alone in this, of course. Trump shared an image of Jesus sitting by his side as he stood trial. Stone got so religious that he claimed to see supernatural sights, including, he said, a “demonic portal” that’s “swirling like a cauldron” about the Biden White House.
One of the persistent debates in American life centers on how strictly we should judge the sins of our national past. Were those people who owned slaves or broke faith with Native Americans or passed the Chinese Exclusion Act merely products of their time? MAGA Men and MAGA Women will not have that excuse. They know there is a different way. Before Trump, many of them — whatever their flaws — lived very different lives. And few of them more so than Giuliani.
His trial and verdict write another page in the volume of truth that tells the real story of MAGA America. Every voter should know exactly who Trump is and what his movement is like. They should know what happened to Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. We should remember their names. But if a MAGA Man remembers, he does not care. Whoever he once was is gone. He serves a new master now.
TRUMP QUOTES PUTIN CONDEMNING AMERICAN DEMOCRACY, PRAISES AUTOCRAT ORBAN
Trump also called Jan. 6 defendants “hostages” and again demonized immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country”
By Isaac Arnsdorf, The Washington Post
DURHAM, N.H. — Republican polling leader Donald Trump approvingly quoted autocrats Vladimir Putin of Russia and Viktor Orban of Hungary, part of an ongoing effort to deflect from his criminal prosecutions and spin alarms about eroding democracy against President Biden.
His speech at a presidential campaign rally here on Saturday also reprised dehumanizing language targeting immigrants that historians have likened to past authoritarians, including a reference that some civil rights advocates and experts in extremism have compared to Adolf Hitler’s fixation on blood purity.
And he used the term “hostages” to describe people charged with violent crimes in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the U.S. Capitol.
The comments came as experts, historians and political opponents have voiced growing alarm about Trump’s rhetoric, ideas and emerging plans for a second term, pointing to parallels to past and present authoritarian leaders.
“Donald Trump sees American democracy as a sham and he wants to convince his followers to see it that way too,” said Jennifer Mercieca, a professor at Texas A&M University who researches democracy and rhetoric. “Putin hates western values like democracy and the rule of law, so does Trump.”
Trump quoted Putin, the dictatorial Russia president who invaded neighboring Ukraine, criticizing the criminal charges against Trump, who is accused in four separate cases of falsifying business records in a hush money scheme, mishandling classified documents, and trying to overturn the 2020 election results. In the quotation, Putin agreed with Trump’s own attempts to portray the prosecutions as politically motivated.
“It shows the rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach others about democracy,” Trump quoted Putin saying in the speech. Trump added: “They’re all laughing at us.”
He went on to align himself with Orban, the Hungarian prime minister who has amassed functionally autocratic power through controlling the media and changing the country’s constitution. Orban has presented his leadership as a model of an “illiberal” state and has opposed immigration for leading to “mixed race” Europeans. Democratic world leaders have sought to isolate Orban for eroding civil liberties and bolstering ties with Putin.
But Trump called him “highly respected” and welcomed his praise as “the man who can save the Western world.”
In the speech, Trump also repeated his own inflammatory language against undocumented immigrants, by accusing them of “poisoning the blood of our country” — a phrase that immigrant groups and civil rights advocates have condemned as reminiscent as Hitler in his book “Mein Kampf,” in which he told Germans to “care for the purity of their own blood” by eliminating Jews.
The crowd of thousands in a college arena cheered Trump’s recitation of an anti-immigrant poem called “The Snake” that he has repeated on the campaign trail and popularized since the 2016 campaign.
And approaching the third anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, Trump came to the defense of alleged violent offenders who have been detained awaiting trial on the order of judges.
“I don’t call them prisoners, I call them hostages,” he said. “They’re hostages.”
The speech drew renewed criticism from Democrats. “Donald Trump is campaigning on an extreme MAGA agenda that would rip away hard-won freedoms from Americans — it’s as simple as that,” Democratic National Committee press secretary Sarafina Chitika said in a statement. “If he takes power, Trump will waste no time implementing his dangerous vision for America.”
Trump’s speech began with an economic focus, with a new tagline of “Better off with Trump” and a recitation of statistics comparing affordability under his presidency to now. But Trump became more animated as he returned to his material on immigration and the charges against him.
Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said that Trump “gave a great speech and knocked it out of the park” in front of a large crowd.
In a move that experts said could have the effect of confusing voters about the true dangers to democracy, Trump has begun deflecting from reports that he would seek revenge on his critics in a second term, accusing Biden of acting like a dictator because of the prosecutions against Trump. Two of the cases were brought by local prosecutors, and the two federal cases are being handled by a special counsel acting independently of the White House in accordance with Justice Department rules.
Without evidence, Trump has portrayed all four cases as a coordinated persecution against him because of his lead in primary and general-election polls. As he pushed that theme on Saturday, the slogan “BIDEN ATTACKS DEMOCRACY” flashed across the screen above him.
The speech ended with an instrumental track that Trump has continued using at rallies despite becoming associated with the QAnon online extremist movement.
Trump also called Jan. 6 defendants “hostages” and again demonized immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country”
By Isaac Arnsdorf, The Washington Post
DURHAM, N.H. — Republican polling leader Donald Trump approvingly quoted autocrats Vladimir Putin of Russia and Viktor Orban of Hungary, part of an ongoing effort to deflect from his criminal prosecutions and spin alarms about eroding democracy against President Biden.
His speech at a presidential campaign rally here on Saturday also reprised dehumanizing language targeting immigrants that historians have likened to past authoritarians, including a reference that some civil rights advocates and experts in extremism have compared to Adolf Hitler’s fixation on blood purity.
And he used the term “hostages” to describe people charged with violent crimes in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the U.S. Capitol.
The comments came as experts, historians and political opponents have voiced growing alarm about Trump’s rhetoric, ideas and emerging plans for a second term, pointing to parallels to past and present authoritarian leaders.
“Donald Trump sees American democracy as a sham and he wants to convince his followers to see it that way too,” said Jennifer Mercieca, a professor at Texas A&M University who researches democracy and rhetoric. “Putin hates western values like democracy and the rule of law, so does Trump.”
Trump quoted Putin, the dictatorial Russia president who invaded neighboring Ukraine, criticizing the criminal charges against Trump, who is accused in four separate cases of falsifying business records in a hush money scheme, mishandling classified documents, and trying to overturn the 2020 election results. In the quotation, Putin agreed with Trump’s own attempts to portray the prosecutions as politically motivated.
“It shows the rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach others about democracy,” Trump quoted Putin saying in the speech. Trump added: “They’re all laughing at us.”
He went on to align himself with Orban, the Hungarian prime minister who has amassed functionally autocratic power through controlling the media and changing the country’s constitution. Orban has presented his leadership as a model of an “illiberal” state and has opposed immigration for leading to “mixed race” Europeans. Democratic world leaders have sought to isolate Orban for eroding civil liberties and bolstering ties with Putin.
But Trump called him “highly respected” and welcomed his praise as “the man who can save the Western world.”
In the speech, Trump also repeated his own inflammatory language against undocumented immigrants, by accusing them of “poisoning the blood of our country” — a phrase that immigrant groups and civil rights advocates have condemned as reminiscent as Hitler in his book “Mein Kampf,” in which he told Germans to “care for the purity of their own blood” by eliminating Jews.
The crowd of thousands in a college arena cheered Trump’s recitation of an anti-immigrant poem called “The Snake” that he has repeated on the campaign trail and popularized since the 2016 campaign.
And approaching the third anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, Trump came to the defense of alleged violent offenders who have been detained awaiting trial on the order of judges.
“I don’t call them prisoners, I call them hostages,” he said. “They’re hostages.”
The speech drew renewed criticism from Democrats. “Donald Trump is campaigning on an extreme MAGA agenda that would rip away hard-won freedoms from Americans — it’s as simple as that,” Democratic National Committee press secretary Sarafina Chitika said in a statement. “If he takes power, Trump will waste no time implementing his dangerous vision for America.”
Trump’s speech began with an economic focus, with a new tagline of “Better off with Trump” and a recitation of statistics comparing affordability under his presidency to now. But Trump became more animated as he returned to his material on immigration and the charges against him.
Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said that Trump “gave a great speech and knocked it out of the park” in front of a large crowd.
In a move that experts said could have the effect of confusing voters about the true dangers to democracy, Trump has begun deflecting from reports that he would seek revenge on his critics in a second term, accusing Biden of acting like a dictator because of the prosecutions against Trump. Two of the cases were brought by local prosecutors, and the two federal cases are being handled by a special counsel acting independently of the White House in accordance with Justice Department rules.
Without evidence, Trump has portrayed all four cases as a coordinated persecution against him because of his lead in primary and general-election polls. As he pushed that theme on Saturday, the slogan “BIDEN ATTACKS DEMOCRACY” flashed across the screen above him.
The speech ended with an instrumental track that Trump has continued using at rallies despite becoming associated with the QAnon online extremist movement.
SUPREME CONTEMPT FOR WOMEN
By Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
The Irish expect the worst to happen at any moment. And they have what my colleague Dan Barry calls “a wry acceptance of mortality.”
Still, Ireland was shaken to its core in 2012 by the death of Savita Halappanavar, a beautiful, sparkling 31-year-old Indian immigrant, a dentist married to an Indian engineer. Savita was expecting her first child. She wore a new dress for the baby shower and prayed for the future. But that night she got sick. She went to a Galway hospital, where she was crushed to learn that her fetal membranes were bulging and her 17-week-old fetus would not survive.
Knowing her life was at stake, she begged the medical staff to remove the fetus. As Kitty Holland wrote in “Savita: The Tragedy That Shook a Nation,” a midwife explained to her, “It’s a Catholic thing. We don’t do it here.” Ireland had a long history of punishing women, sending them to religious asylums if they were pregnant out of wedlock or deemed “fallen.” Savita developed septic shock and died four days after her baby girl, whom she named Prasa, was stillborn.
That tragedy jolted the turbulent debate in Ireland about the right of women to control their bodies. Savita’s story was vividly evoked by women and men when I covered the 2018 referendum to revoke the Vatican-approved Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution, which made abortions illegal, even in cases of rape or incest. That draconian amendment had women selling their cars and going to loan sharks to get the money to fly to England for procedures. It stamped women with a Scarlet Letter and psychological trauma because they felt their country had turned its back on them.
I remember, as I reported on the vote, having a flash of gratitude that I lived in America and not Ireland. I thought to myself that I would hate living in such a benighted country shaped by religious fanatics.
But now I am. Religious fanatics on the Supreme Court have yanked America back to back alleys. American women are punished, branded with Scarlet Letters, forced to flee to get procedures.
And we have our own fraught case of a 31-year-old begging for a termination: Kate Cox, a married Texas mother of two who was thrilled to be pregnant until she was told that her fetus had a deadly chromosomal abnormality. Continuing the pregnancy could also keep Cox from getting pregnant again.
“I kept asking more questions, including how much time we might have with her if I continued the pregnancy,” Cox wrote in The Dallas Morning News. “The answer was maybe an hour — or at most, a week. Our baby would be in hospice care from the moment she is born if she were to be born alive.”
Cox, more than 20 weeks pregnant, had to leave Texas to have an abortion because the state’s boorish, mega-MAGA attorney general, Ken Paxton, gleefully threatened to prosecute “hospitals, doctors or anyone else” who helped her, even floating first-degree felony charges. The case has become so politically toxic that even the voluble Ted Cruz, who is running for re-election next year, has clammed up about it. The Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway, playing school nurse, warned Republicans on the Hill to talk less about banning abortion and more about the benefits of contraception.
I’m sure even Donald Trump, who was once pro-choice but now panders to evangelicals, has qualms about criminalizing abortion. It’s a political loser and could cost him the election if women are supermobilized. He called Ron DeSantis’s six-week abortion ban in Florida “a terrible thing and a terrible mistake.” Once Trump bragged about appointing the conservative justices on the court who were pivotal in overturning Roe v. Wade. But that won’t be a great sales pitch in the general election.
It is outrageous that such an important right in America was stripped away by a handful of cloistered, robed zealots, driven by religious doctrine, with no accountability.
But the Savonarola wing of the Supreme Court — all Catholics except Neil Gorsuch, who was raised Catholic and went to the same suburban Washington Catholic prep school as Brett Kavanaugh — could go to even more extreme lengths. The court announced Wednesday that it will consider curtailing the availability of a pill used to terminate first-trimester pregnancies. Soon, it’ll be mandating the rhythm method.
An explosive new Times article by Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak revealed that Justice Samuel Alito was even more underhanded than we knew as he plotted to engineer “a titanic shift in the law” by vitiating Roe. Conservative judges who assured the Senate that Roe was settled law in their confirmation hearings could barely wait until Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died to throw it in the constitutional rights rubbish bin.
The more we learn, the more infuriating it is that our lives and choices about our bodies are determined by conniving radicals. The Supreme Court is way, way out of order.
By Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
The Irish expect the worst to happen at any moment. And they have what my colleague Dan Barry calls “a wry acceptance of mortality.”
Still, Ireland was shaken to its core in 2012 by the death of Savita Halappanavar, a beautiful, sparkling 31-year-old Indian immigrant, a dentist married to an Indian engineer. Savita was expecting her first child. She wore a new dress for the baby shower and prayed for the future. But that night she got sick. She went to a Galway hospital, where she was crushed to learn that her fetal membranes were bulging and her 17-week-old fetus would not survive.
Knowing her life was at stake, she begged the medical staff to remove the fetus. As Kitty Holland wrote in “Savita: The Tragedy That Shook a Nation,” a midwife explained to her, “It’s a Catholic thing. We don’t do it here.” Ireland had a long history of punishing women, sending them to religious asylums if they were pregnant out of wedlock or deemed “fallen.” Savita developed septic shock and died four days after her baby girl, whom she named Prasa, was stillborn.
That tragedy jolted the turbulent debate in Ireland about the right of women to control their bodies. Savita’s story was vividly evoked by women and men when I covered the 2018 referendum to revoke the Vatican-approved Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution, which made abortions illegal, even in cases of rape or incest. That draconian amendment had women selling their cars and going to loan sharks to get the money to fly to England for procedures. It stamped women with a Scarlet Letter and psychological trauma because they felt their country had turned its back on them.
I remember, as I reported on the vote, having a flash of gratitude that I lived in America and not Ireland. I thought to myself that I would hate living in such a benighted country shaped by religious fanatics.
But now I am. Religious fanatics on the Supreme Court have yanked America back to back alleys. American women are punished, branded with Scarlet Letters, forced to flee to get procedures.
And we have our own fraught case of a 31-year-old begging for a termination: Kate Cox, a married Texas mother of two who was thrilled to be pregnant until she was told that her fetus had a deadly chromosomal abnormality. Continuing the pregnancy could also keep Cox from getting pregnant again.
“I kept asking more questions, including how much time we might have with her if I continued the pregnancy,” Cox wrote in The Dallas Morning News. “The answer was maybe an hour — or at most, a week. Our baby would be in hospice care from the moment she is born if she were to be born alive.”
Cox, more than 20 weeks pregnant, had to leave Texas to have an abortion because the state’s boorish, mega-MAGA attorney general, Ken Paxton, gleefully threatened to prosecute “hospitals, doctors or anyone else” who helped her, even floating first-degree felony charges. The case has become so politically toxic that even the voluble Ted Cruz, who is running for re-election next year, has clammed up about it. The Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway, playing school nurse, warned Republicans on the Hill to talk less about banning abortion and more about the benefits of contraception.
I’m sure even Donald Trump, who was once pro-choice but now panders to evangelicals, has qualms about criminalizing abortion. It’s a political loser and could cost him the election if women are supermobilized. He called Ron DeSantis’s six-week abortion ban in Florida “a terrible thing and a terrible mistake.” Once Trump bragged about appointing the conservative justices on the court who were pivotal in overturning Roe v. Wade. But that won’t be a great sales pitch in the general election.
It is outrageous that such an important right in America was stripped away by a handful of cloistered, robed zealots, driven by religious doctrine, with no accountability.
But the Savonarola wing of the Supreme Court — all Catholics except Neil Gorsuch, who was raised Catholic and went to the same suburban Washington Catholic prep school as Brett Kavanaugh — could go to even more extreme lengths. The court announced Wednesday that it will consider curtailing the availability of a pill used to terminate first-trimester pregnancies. Soon, it’ll be mandating the rhythm method.
An explosive new Times article by Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak revealed that Justice Samuel Alito was even more underhanded than we knew as he plotted to engineer “a titanic shift in the law” by vitiating Roe. Conservative judges who assured the Senate that Roe was settled law in their confirmation hearings could barely wait until Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died to throw it in the constitutional rights rubbish bin.
The more we learn, the more infuriating it is that our lives and choices about our bodies are determined by conniving radicals. The Supreme Court is way, way out of order.
WORST. CONGRESS. EVER.
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
A year ago, I assigned myself to the Capitol to cover the new House Republican majority, suspecting that this erratic crowd of lawmakers would provide some lively material.
They did not disappoint. What I could not have known then, however, was that this would turn out to be the most ineffective session of Congress in nearly a century — and quite possibly in all of American history.
The year began with chaos and incompetence. It ended with chaos and incompetence. In between were self-created crises and shocking moments of fratricide — interspersed with more chaos and incompetence.
“This will go down as ... the least productive Congress since the Great Depression,” Rep. Joe Neguse, Democrat of Colorado, observed this week as the Rules Committee marked up plans for an impeachment inquiry into President Biden for imaginary crimes.
Neguse almost certainly understates the case. While it’s true, as HuffPost’s Jonathan Nicholson pointed out, that Congress got even less done in 1931, this is only because it didn’t start its session that year until December. It seems probable that no Congress in American history has spent so much time accomplishing so little as this one.
What do House Republicans have to show the voters for their year in power? A bipartisan debt deal (on which they promptly reneged) to avoid a default crisis that they themselves created. A pair of temporary spending bills (both passed with mostly Democratic votes) to avert a government-shutdown crisis that they themselves created. The ouster of their speaker, nearly a month-long shutdown of the chamber as they sought another, and the expulsion of one of their members, who is now negotiating himself a plea deal.
Among the 22 bills in 2023 that became law as of this week was landmark legislation such as: H.R. 3672, “To designate the clinic of the Department of Veterans Affairs in Indian River, Michigan, as the ‘Pfc. Justin T. Paton Department of Veterans Affairs Clinic.’” Also, H.R. 5110, the “Protecting Hunting Heritage and Education Act,” which authorizes federal education funds “to purchase or use dangerous weapons” for instruction.
On Thursday, the House, exhausted from its labors, recessed for a three-week vacation, leaving behind a pile of urgent, unfinished business, including funds to arm Ukraine and fortify the southern border. When the lawmakers return, they will have just eight legislative days to pass something to avoid the latest government shutdown — on which they have made no progress so far. But before rushing home for the holidays, Republicans did manage to approve, in a party-line vote, a formal impeachment inquiry into Biden for imaginary crimes that even they could not identify.
“It’s been an up-and-down year,” Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana said in a year-end news conference. (He was half right.) “I know for those of you in the press, there’s never been a week where it was boring for you.” (This was true.) “Next year is going to be just as busy,” he went on. (That shouldn’t be hard.) He acknowledged, “There’s talk about how hard it’s been,” but he blamed the Democratic Senate for the inaction.
Nice try. This Senate, with a similar majority, was highly productive in the last Congress. And Congress, even under divided government, has routinely found ways to function — until this gang took over the House.
The final week was typical. In the Senate, Democrats and Republicans feverishly negotiated a compromise that would allow the United States to keep sending arms to help Ukraine fight off Russia’s invasion while also toughening U.S. border policies. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer pleaded with Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to keep his chamber in session so that the emergency spending package could be passed before year-end. Johnson refused — prompting Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell to say it would be “practically impossible” to pass the desperately needed bill.
Likewise, Johnson, who, as Punchbowl News noted, has proved to be “unwilling or unable to make tough decisions,” couldn’t decide which of two competing bills the House should pass to reauthorize a program known as Section 702 that falls under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and is vital to national security. So he scheduled House votes on both of them — which caused the House Republican Caucus to devolve Monday night into yet another round of bickering, with Rep. Warren Davidson (Ohio) accusing Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner of “f---ing lying.” Once again paralyzed, House GOP leaders yanked both bills from consideration on the floor. Instead, they moved on to the Duck Stamp Modernization Act of 2023 — no doubt a matter of great importance to waterfowl hunters.
The dysfunction shows every sign that it will continue in the new year. The House Freedom Caucus, whose members routinely kneecapped Republican leaders and derailed proceedings in the House in 2023, just elected as their new leader Rep. Bob Good (Va.), one of the most doctrinaire members of the caucus and one of the eight Republicans who ousted Kevin McCarthy as speaker. Davidson, in a letter to colleagues intercepted by Axios’s Juliegrace Brufke, alluded to Good’s bomb-throwing tendencies and asked that the group “prayerfully consider electing someone else.” They went with the legislative terrorist anyway.
As a holiday gift, Freedom Caucus members lobbed one more bomb on the final day of the session. They were furious that their various attempts to ignite culture wars over abortion policy and LGBTQ+ rights had been stripped from the annual National Defense Authorization Act in negotiations with the Senate. So Chip Roy (Tex.) and 22 other Republicans delayed its passage by forcing a vote to adjourn. The bill passed anyway — as usual, with mostly Democratic votes.
As the year ends, Ukraine will have to wait for more ammo. The federal government will have to wait for its 2024 funding to be settled. But there was one priority so urgent that it absolutely could not wait until after vacation, and it united every single Republican in the caucus. The day before skipping town, they voted in an entirely party-line vote of 221-212 to put the House on an all-but-inevitable course toward impeaching Biden for the high crime and misdemeanor of having a drug-addicted son.
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
A year ago, I assigned myself to the Capitol to cover the new House Republican majority, suspecting that this erratic crowd of lawmakers would provide some lively material.
They did not disappoint. What I could not have known then, however, was that this would turn out to be the most ineffective session of Congress in nearly a century — and quite possibly in all of American history.
The year began with chaos and incompetence. It ended with chaos and incompetence. In between were self-created crises and shocking moments of fratricide — interspersed with more chaos and incompetence.
“This will go down as ... the least productive Congress since the Great Depression,” Rep. Joe Neguse, Democrat of Colorado, observed this week as the Rules Committee marked up plans for an impeachment inquiry into President Biden for imaginary crimes.
Neguse almost certainly understates the case. While it’s true, as HuffPost’s Jonathan Nicholson pointed out, that Congress got even less done in 1931, this is only because it didn’t start its session that year until December. It seems probable that no Congress in American history has spent so much time accomplishing so little as this one.
What do House Republicans have to show the voters for their year in power? A bipartisan debt deal (on which they promptly reneged) to avoid a default crisis that they themselves created. A pair of temporary spending bills (both passed with mostly Democratic votes) to avert a government-shutdown crisis that they themselves created. The ouster of their speaker, nearly a month-long shutdown of the chamber as they sought another, and the expulsion of one of their members, who is now negotiating himself a plea deal.
Among the 22 bills in 2023 that became law as of this week was landmark legislation such as: H.R. 3672, “To designate the clinic of the Department of Veterans Affairs in Indian River, Michigan, as the ‘Pfc. Justin T. Paton Department of Veterans Affairs Clinic.’” Also, H.R. 5110, the “Protecting Hunting Heritage and Education Act,” which authorizes federal education funds “to purchase or use dangerous weapons” for instruction.
On Thursday, the House, exhausted from its labors, recessed for a three-week vacation, leaving behind a pile of urgent, unfinished business, including funds to arm Ukraine and fortify the southern border. When the lawmakers return, they will have just eight legislative days to pass something to avoid the latest government shutdown — on which they have made no progress so far. But before rushing home for the holidays, Republicans did manage to approve, in a party-line vote, a formal impeachment inquiry into Biden for imaginary crimes that even they could not identify.
“It’s been an up-and-down year,” Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana said in a year-end news conference. (He was half right.) “I know for those of you in the press, there’s never been a week where it was boring for you.” (This was true.) “Next year is going to be just as busy,” he went on. (That shouldn’t be hard.) He acknowledged, “There’s talk about how hard it’s been,” but he blamed the Democratic Senate for the inaction.
Nice try. This Senate, with a similar majority, was highly productive in the last Congress. And Congress, even under divided government, has routinely found ways to function — until this gang took over the House.
The final week was typical. In the Senate, Democrats and Republicans feverishly negotiated a compromise that would allow the United States to keep sending arms to help Ukraine fight off Russia’s invasion while also toughening U.S. border policies. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer pleaded with Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to keep his chamber in session so that the emergency spending package could be passed before year-end. Johnson refused — prompting Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell to say it would be “practically impossible” to pass the desperately needed bill.
Likewise, Johnson, who, as Punchbowl News noted, has proved to be “unwilling or unable to make tough decisions,” couldn’t decide which of two competing bills the House should pass to reauthorize a program known as Section 702 that falls under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and is vital to national security. So he scheduled House votes on both of them — which caused the House Republican Caucus to devolve Monday night into yet another round of bickering, with Rep. Warren Davidson (Ohio) accusing Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner of “f---ing lying.” Once again paralyzed, House GOP leaders yanked both bills from consideration on the floor. Instead, they moved on to the Duck Stamp Modernization Act of 2023 — no doubt a matter of great importance to waterfowl hunters.
The dysfunction shows every sign that it will continue in the new year. The House Freedom Caucus, whose members routinely kneecapped Republican leaders and derailed proceedings in the House in 2023, just elected as their new leader Rep. Bob Good (Va.), one of the most doctrinaire members of the caucus and one of the eight Republicans who ousted Kevin McCarthy as speaker. Davidson, in a letter to colleagues intercepted by Axios’s Juliegrace Brufke, alluded to Good’s bomb-throwing tendencies and asked that the group “prayerfully consider electing someone else.” They went with the legislative terrorist anyway.
As a holiday gift, Freedom Caucus members lobbed one more bomb on the final day of the session. They were furious that their various attempts to ignite culture wars over abortion policy and LGBTQ+ rights had been stripped from the annual National Defense Authorization Act in negotiations with the Senate. So Chip Roy (Tex.) and 22 other Republicans delayed its passage by forcing a vote to adjourn. The bill passed anyway — as usual, with mostly Democratic votes.
As the year ends, Ukraine will have to wait for more ammo. The federal government will have to wait for its 2024 funding to be settled. But there was one priority so urgent that it absolutely could not wait until after vacation, and it united every single Republican in the caucus. The day before skipping town, they voted in an entirely party-line vote of 221-212 to put the House on an all-but-inevitable course toward impeaching Biden for the high crime and misdemeanor of having a drug-addicted son.
WHEN REPUBLICANS CAST DOUBT ON TRUMP’S INTENT — AND ATE THEIR WORDS
The GOP has shrugged at the authoritarian turn in Trump’s rhetoric. History suggests they downplay his provocations at their peril.
By Aaron Blake, The Washington Post
As Donald Trump’s rhetoric has taken a turn for the authoritarian in the 2024 campaign, his party has largely stood back and stood by.
Republicans have shrugged at Trump’s pledge to make his second presidential term about retribution against his enemies. When he floated the “termination” of articles of the Constitution, they largely ignored it. The same went for his recent decision to invoke the “vermin” rhetoric of infamous fascists. And when he said recently that he would be a dictator but only on Day One of a second term, they dismissed it as a mere joke — just before he doubled down. He appeared serious; the joke was on them.
As that last example shows, people disregard Trump’s provocations at their peril. Yes, he says lots of things, often for effect. He loves to tempt censorious critics to overreact so they can be accused of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
But there are also plenty of instances of Republicans downplaying or casting doubt on Trump’s actual intentions, only to be made to eat those words. The downside of Republicans’ agreement to take him seriously rather than literally is that sometimes, in some very serious circumstances, he means what he says. And sometimes when Republicans have offered assurances that Trump would adjust his behavior, he’s done anything but.
Here are some key examples.
Firing Robert Mueller
What Republicans said
When Trump repeatedly attacked Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel in charge of the Russia investigation, Republicans begged off the idea that legislation was needed to protect Mueller, because Trump wouldn’t actually fire him.
According to Mueller’s report, Trump tried to have Mueller fired. It said that in June 2017, Trump directed White House Counsel Donald McGahn “to call the Acting Attorney General and say that the Special Counsel had conflicts of interest and must be removed.”
McGahn declined to carry out the directive, believing it would be akin to Richard M. Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre.
Trying to stay in office
What Republicans said
With Trump playing up voter fraud both before and after the 2020 election and declining to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, many Republicans cast doubt on the idea that it would mean anything, practically speaking.
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Weeks before the 2020 presidential election, congressional Republicans said President Trump would accept the election result. (Video: JM Rieger/The Washington Post)
Trump rallied his supporters behind the idea that the election had been stolen, culminating in the violent and historic Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol after a Trump rally. He also tried to get Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the results that day, and he still falsely maintains the election was stolen.
Seeking foreign election help
What Republicans said
When Trump has talked about taking foreign help in his elections, some allies have downplayed it.
When he asked Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s “missing” emails in 2016, former House speaker Newt Gingrich and Trump’s campaign insisted it was a joke.
When Trump told ABC News in mid-2019 that he would probably take foreign election help and not report it to the FBI, some in the GOP criticized him, but others shrugged it off.
Despite the rebukes that he did receive in these instances — even from Republicans — Trump proceeded a month after the ABC interview to withhold aid from Ukraine and pressure its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, as he sought dirt on the Bidens. The situation led to his first impeachment.
By October, he also publicly called for China to investigate the Bidens. (An informal White House adviser later said that he personally inquired with the Chinese about Hunter Biden the same week.)
And despite the claims that Trump was joking about hacking Clinton’s emails in 2016, a later indictment stated that Russian government hackers the same day attacked the email accounts of Clinton campaign staffers.
Learning his lessons from impeachments
What Republicans said
When Trump faced accountability for his controversial actions with two impeachments, senators who were critical but voted to acquit him wagered that he would nonetheless be chastened.
What Trump did
Trump’s actions after the 2020 election did not suggest a man who was chastened by being impeached the first time, and he was impeached again, with more members of his party voting to convict than had the first time. After the second impeachment, Trump repeatedly failed to return classified documents when the government came calling for them, earning him one of his four criminal indictments.
He has also continued to promote violent rhetoric, despite his supporters having turned violent on Jan. 6.
The GOP has shrugged at the authoritarian turn in Trump’s rhetoric. History suggests they downplay his provocations at their peril.
By Aaron Blake, The Washington Post
As Donald Trump’s rhetoric has taken a turn for the authoritarian in the 2024 campaign, his party has largely stood back and stood by.
Republicans have shrugged at Trump’s pledge to make his second presidential term about retribution against his enemies. When he floated the “termination” of articles of the Constitution, they largely ignored it. The same went for his recent decision to invoke the “vermin” rhetoric of infamous fascists. And when he said recently that he would be a dictator but only on Day One of a second term, they dismissed it as a mere joke — just before he doubled down. He appeared serious; the joke was on them.
As that last example shows, people disregard Trump’s provocations at their peril. Yes, he says lots of things, often for effect. He loves to tempt censorious critics to overreact so they can be accused of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
But there are also plenty of instances of Republicans downplaying or casting doubt on Trump’s actual intentions, only to be made to eat those words. The downside of Republicans’ agreement to take him seriously rather than literally is that sometimes, in some very serious circumstances, he means what he says. And sometimes when Republicans have offered assurances that Trump would adjust his behavior, he’s done anything but.
Here are some key examples.
Firing Robert Mueller
What Republicans said
When Trump repeatedly attacked Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel in charge of the Russia investigation, Republicans begged off the idea that legislation was needed to protect Mueller, because Trump wouldn’t actually fire him.
- “I don’t think he would do that,” Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) said.
- “I don’t think that’s going to happen,” then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said.
- “I’ve got zero concerns that the president or his team is going to fire Mueller,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said.
- “I don’t think the president is going to do anything to Bob Mueller,” then-Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) said.
- “I can tell you firing Mueller is not something that he is considering and not something that he’s talking about,” then-Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) said.
According to Mueller’s report, Trump tried to have Mueller fired. It said that in June 2017, Trump directed White House Counsel Donald McGahn “to call the Acting Attorney General and say that the Special Counsel had conflicts of interest and must be removed.”
McGahn declined to carry out the directive, believing it would be akin to Richard M. Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre.
Trying to stay in office
What Republicans said
With Trump playing up voter fraud both before and after the 2020 election and declining to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, many Republicans cast doubt on the idea that it would mean anything, practically speaking.
- “There will be an orderly transition just as there has been every four years since 1792,” McConnell said.
- “He says crazy stuff. We’ve always had a peaceful transition of power. It’s not going to change,” then-Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) said.
- Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) called the talk “preposterous.” “He stokes the fire sometimes,” Braun added. “If you took it seriously, it would be alarming. And I don’t think that that’s the case.”
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Weeks before the 2020 presidential election, congressional Republicans said President Trump would accept the election result. (Video: JM Rieger/The Washington Post)
- “I can assure you, it will be peaceful,” Graham said.
- “I think that the president will accept the result,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said.
- “Let me be very clear to you: It will be peaceful. I know you want to create a hypothetical,” then-House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said.
- “I’ve been asked the same question at least a hundred times in the past week: If the president loses, will he participate in a peaceful transition of power? … I am happy to answer: Yes,” former acting Trump White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney wrote in a Nov. 7, 2020, Wall Street Journal op-ed titled, “If He Loses, Trump Will Concede Gracefully.”
Trump rallied his supporters behind the idea that the election had been stolen, culminating in the violent and historic Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol after a Trump rally. He also tried to get Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the results that day, and he still falsely maintains the election was stolen.
Seeking foreign election help
What Republicans said
When Trump has talked about taking foreign help in his elections, some allies have downplayed it.
When he asked Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s “missing” emails in 2016, former House speaker Newt Gingrich and Trump’s campaign insisted it was a joke.
When Trump told ABC News in mid-2019 that he would probably take foreign election help and not report it to the FBI, some in the GOP criticized him, but others shrugged it off.
- “Look, that’s Trump,” then-Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.) said. “There’s nothing sinister about it; it was off the cuff.”
- “That was a hypothetical, and I think it’s an overreaction to the whole thing,” then-Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) said.
- McCarthy declined to condemn Trump’s comments and added, “I know this president would not want any foreign government interfering in this election.”
Despite the rebukes that he did receive in these instances — even from Republicans — Trump proceeded a month after the ABC interview to withhold aid from Ukraine and pressure its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, as he sought dirt on the Bidens. The situation led to his first impeachment.
By October, he also publicly called for China to investigate the Bidens. (An informal White House adviser later said that he personally inquired with the Chinese about Hunter Biden the same week.)
And despite the claims that Trump was joking about hacking Clinton’s emails in 2016, a later indictment stated that Russian government hackers the same day attacked the email accounts of Clinton campaign staffers.
Learning his lessons from impeachments
What Republicans said
When Trump faced accountability for his controversial actions with two impeachments, senators who were critical but voted to acquit him wagered that he would nonetheless be chastened.
- “I believe that the president has learned from this case,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said about Trump’s first impeachment, over Ukraine. “The president has been impeached. That’s a pretty big lesson.”
- “I think he’s learned that he has to be maybe a little more judicious and careful, the way he’s phrasing certain things,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) said.
- “If a call like that gets you an impeachment, I would think he would think twice before he did it again,” then-Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said.
What Trump did
Trump’s actions after the 2020 election did not suggest a man who was chastened by being impeached the first time, and he was impeached again, with more members of his party voting to convict than had the first time. After the second impeachment, Trump repeatedly failed to return classified documents when the government came calling for them, earning him one of his four criminal indictments.
He has also continued to promote violent rhetoric, despite his supporters having turned violent on Jan. 6.
THE SUPREME COURT SHOULD NOT ALLOW TRUMP TO PLAY THE JUSTICE SYSTEM
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
The essential moment in Jack Smith’s 2020 election obstruction case against Donald Trump might have arrived — and, oddly, the substance of the charges has nothing to do with it. The special counsel this week filed a motion asking the Supreme Court to speedily review the former president’s claims that he is immune from prosecution, rather than allow an appeals court to do so first. The strategy is gutsy, but it might be necessary to get the case to trial before the general election — and that is a wholly legitimate goal for Mr. Trump’s prosecutor.
Mr. Smith has asked the justices to grant him what’s known as certiorari before judgment. This is an extraordinary request, but the special counsel is hardly summoning a legal theory out of thin air. The Supreme Court has embraced the procedure in many cases involving national crises, including in United States v. Nixon, when President Richard M. Nixon refused to turn over his infamous audiotapes. That’s because, as a long line of law recognizes, the public is as entitled to the fair administration of justice as anyone standing trial. Part of what makes this case extraordinary is Mr. Trump’s unique potential to force a halt to the prosecution. Even when defendants use delay as a courtroom tactic, they typically still have to face prosecutors at some point.
By ignoring that timing in a case with the peaceful transition of power at its heart, the courts would allow themselves to be manipulated by a politician using his status as a candidate to avoid accountability. The gambit to prevent District Court Judge Tanya S. Chutkan from meeting a March 4 trial date, by appealing her rejection of Mr. Trump’s immunity defense, is only the latest delay tactic by the Trump legal team. The former president’s allies and his lawyers appear to believe his surest route to escaping accountability is to win reelection before a jury manages to convict him, then instructing the Justice Department to drop its cases. The Supreme Court would show that the justice system won’t be tricked if, instead, the justices ensured the case is tried on the merits.
The merits, as it turns out, aren’t too difficult to assess. A D.C. Circuit panel has already decided that a president’s civil immunity for actions taken while in office is limited when those actions are taken not in the president’s role as president, but in his role as a reelection seeker — as when Mr. Trump gave his Jan. 6, 2021, speech urging supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol. The argument that a president is free from criminal liability during his tenure, meanwhile, has next to nothing to support it in doctrine or in history. There’s a reason, after all, that Nixon required a pardon from Gerald Ford, and that Bill Clinton gave up his law license as part of a deal to avoid prosecution following his perjury scandal.
This makes sense: A president’s duties will never require him to break the law, much less to do so intentionally. What’s more, much of the conduct described in the indictment, such as pressuring electors to defect or urging Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” cannot be construed to be inside the scope of the executive’s official duties.
Mr. Trump also argues that charging him based on the same violations for which he was impeached by the House and acquitted by the Senate would constitute double jeopardy. Yet the Constitution’s Impeachment Judgments clause says that if a president is convicted by the Senate, he can still be tried in a court of law. Reading this backward to suggest that if a president isn’t convicted by the Senate, he can’t be tried in a court of law defies common sense. The Framers clearly designed impeachment to serve a distinct purpose from prosecution.
The Supreme Court should grant the special counsel the speedy hearing he has asked for, because of the public interest in a decision that is quick, carefully considered and, crucially, final. If it does not the justices should at least instruct lower courts to move briskly, after which they should promptly choose once and for all whether to review the case. This procedural matter will swallow up the substance of the case unless the courts decide not to let it.
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
The essential moment in Jack Smith’s 2020 election obstruction case against Donald Trump might have arrived — and, oddly, the substance of the charges has nothing to do with it. The special counsel this week filed a motion asking the Supreme Court to speedily review the former president’s claims that he is immune from prosecution, rather than allow an appeals court to do so first. The strategy is gutsy, but it might be necessary to get the case to trial before the general election — and that is a wholly legitimate goal for Mr. Trump’s prosecutor.
Mr. Smith has asked the justices to grant him what’s known as certiorari before judgment. This is an extraordinary request, but the special counsel is hardly summoning a legal theory out of thin air. The Supreme Court has embraced the procedure in many cases involving national crises, including in United States v. Nixon, when President Richard M. Nixon refused to turn over his infamous audiotapes. That’s because, as a long line of law recognizes, the public is as entitled to the fair administration of justice as anyone standing trial. Part of what makes this case extraordinary is Mr. Trump’s unique potential to force a halt to the prosecution. Even when defendants use delay as a courtroom tactic, they typically still have to face prosecutors at some point.
By ignoring that timing in a case with the peaceful transition of power at its heart, the courts would allow themselves to be manipulated by a politician using his status as a candidate to avoid accountability. The gambit to prevent District Court Judge Tanya S. Chutkan from meeting a March 4 trial date, by appealing her rejection of Mr. Trump’s immunity defense, is only the latest delay tactic by the Trump legal team. The former president’s allies and his lawyers appear to believe his surest route to escaping accountability is to win reelection before a jury manages to convict him, then instructing the Justice Department to drop its cases. The Supreme Court would show that the justice system won’t be tricked if, instead, the justices ensured the case is tried on the merits.
The merits, as it turns out, aren’t too difficult to assess. A D.C. Circuit panel has already decided that a president’s civil immunity for actions taken while in office is limited when those actions are taken not in the president’s role as president, but in his role as a reelection seeker — as when Mr. Trump gave his Jan. 6, 2021, speech urging supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol. The argument that a president is free from criminal liability during his tenure, meanwhile, has next to nothing to support it in doctrine or in history. There’s a reason, after all, that Nixon required a pardon from Gerald Ford, and that Bill Clinton gave up his law license as part of a deal to avoid prosecution following his perjury scandal.
This makes sense: A president’s duties will never require him to break the law, much less to do so intentionally. What’s more, much of the conduct described in the indictment, such as pressuring electors to defect or urging Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” cannot be construed to be inside the scope of the executive’s official duties.
Mr. Trump also argues that charging him based on the same violations for which he was impeached by the House and acquitted by the Senate would constitute double jeopardy. Yet the Constitution’s Impeachment Judgments clause says that if a president is convicted by the Senate, he can still be tried in a court of law. Reading this backward to suggest that if a president isn’t convicted by the Senate, he can’t be tried in a court of law defies common sense. The Framers clearly designed impeachment to serve a distinct purpose from prosecution.
The Supreme Court should grant the special counsel the speedy hearing he has asked for, because of the public interest in a decision that is quick, carefully considered and, crucially, final. If it does not the justices should at least instruct lower courts to move briskly, after which they should promptly choose once and for all whether to review the case. This procedural matter will swallow up the substance of the case unless the courts decide not to let it.
THE PLOT TO UNDERMINE THE U.S. TAX CODE, USING THE SUPREME COURT
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
For decades, the American right has been trying to gut the U.S. tax system, especially provisions borne by the richest Americans. But lately the multi-front war on government financing has tried to enlist a new ally: the U.S. Supreme Court.
Some of the anti-tax movement’s splashiest advances are well-known. Most obviously: Several rounds of multi-trillion-dollar tax cuts, signed into law by Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump. They and their anti-tax allies assured the public that such overhauls would pay for themselves. Instead, the measures worsened the shortfall between what the government spends and what it brings in.
Meanwhile, Republicans have undermined the government’s ability to collect taxes that do remain on the books. They have done so by slashing funding for the Internal Revenue Service, thereby reducing enforcement capacity and audit rates, especially of corporations and the highest earners. Each year hundreds of billions of dollars of taxes that are legally owed go unpaid; cutting the budget of the IRS further would mean leaving even more money on the table. Yet the GOP-controlled House has made defunding the tax police a top priority this year.
Now enter Moore v. United States, which the Supreme Court heard last week.
If other battles in the war on taxes are about constraining the government’s ability to collect taxes, this case is about constraining Congress’s ability to write tax law in the first place — and has the potential to blow up huge swaths of the existing tax code and preempt future reforms.
The Moore case, argued and supported by conservative anti-tax groups, challenges a provision of the 2017 Trump tax cuts. You might wonder why this ideological contingent might object to Trump’s tax law since it generally wanted it to pass. The answer is it objects to the law’s one-time repatriation tax of corporate profits held abroad, part of the GOP’s transition to an arguably more generous corporate tax system.
The plaintiffs argue that this transition tax is unconstitutional, using a convoluted argument about whether they ever “realized” the income being taxed. The case is complicated, as tax cases usually are. The main thing to know is that it’s widely seen as a stalking horse to prevent a wealth tax, which some Democrats have proposed.
But, depending on how the justices rule, they could easily bulldoze much of the rest of the tax code, too. Even supporters and architects of the Trump tax law have voiced concerns about this.
“A lot of the tax code would be unconstitutional if that thing prevailed,” former House speaker Paul D. Ryan said at a Brookings Institution event that I moderated recently. “I’m not for a wealth tax, but I think if you use this as the argument to spike a wealth tax, you’re going to basically get rid of, I don’t know, a third of the tax code.”
During oral arguments, the justices seemed hesitant to upend the entire tax code. But the U.S. tax system is sufficiently complex and interconnected — and the justices sufficiently inexperienced with tax law (the high court rarely accepts such cases) — that they might not even realize which threads could unravel it. Tax experts have warned that the justices might think they’re crafting a narrow ruling but still inadvertently spawn litigation against other tax provisions or create opportunities for new tax shelters. (This has basically happened before.)
“I suspect the court will go out of its way to say they don’t mean to undermine existing taxes, or other measures created to avoid abusing the tax system,” Michael J. Graetz, a law professor and author of a forthcoming book about the anti-tax movement, told me in a phone interview. “But it’s hard to know how much damage the court might do without having an opinion in front of you.”
Indeed, other big-ticket tax cases are already waiting on the Moore decision. Some tax advisers have suggested to clients that they preemptively file refund claims for taxes they’d already paid — in some cases, for taxes beyond just the repatriation tax at issue before the court, such as taxes on income from partnerships or other pass-through entities.
Striking down the transition tax alone would cost the government hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade. If other parts of the tax code fall too, the cost could be in the trillions.
And this isn’t the only litigation affecting the government’s ability to fund itself. Other recent rulings have constrained the IRS’s ability to issue “guidance” about, for example, disclosure of tax shelters. Another, broader case coming before the Supreme Court next month could upend the executive branch’s ability to write tax regulations.
All these efforts have two things in common: One is that they are designed to “starve the beast” — that is, reduce the revenue coming into Treasury’s coffers. The second is that the beneficiaries of resulting changes to tax law are disproportionately those with the deepest pockets.
In a few days, the country will notch the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. The spirit of that foundational event persists — except that now anti-government types aren’t merely dumping a bit of tea; they’re working to dump virtually all the country’s tax money, too.
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
For decades, the American right has been trying to gut the U.S. tax system, especially provisions borne by the richest Americans. But lately the multi-front war on government financing has tried to enlist a new ally: the U.S. Supreme Court.
Some of the anti-tax movement’s splashiest advances are well-known. Most obviously: Several rounds of multi-trillion-dollar tax cuts, signed into law by Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump. They and their anti-tax allies assured the public that such overhauls would pay for themselves. Instead, the measures worsened the shortfall between what the government spends and what it brings in.
Meanwhile, Republicans have undermined the government’s ability to collect taxes that do remain on the books. They have done so by slashing funding for the Internal Revenue Service, thereby reducing enforcement capacity and audit rates, especially of corporations and the highest earners. Each year hundreds of billions of dollars of taxes that are legally owed go unpaid; cutting the budget of the IRS further would mean leaving even more money on the table. Yet the GOP-controlled House has made defunding the tax police a top priority this year.
Now enter Moore v. United States, which the Supreme Court heard last week.
If other battles in the war on taxes are about constraining the government’s ability to collect taxes, this case is about constraining Congress’s ability to write tax law in the first place — and has the potential to blow up huge swaths of the existing tax code and preempt future reforms.
The Moore case, argued and supported by conservative anti-tax groups, challenges a provision of the 2017 Trump tax cuts. You might wonder why this ideological contingent might object to Trump’s tax law since it generally wanted it to pass. The answer is it objects to the law’s one-time repatriation tax of corporate profits held abroad, part of the GOP’s transition to an arguably more generous corporate tax system.
The plaintiffs argue that this transition tax is unconstitutional, using a convoluted argument about whether they ever “realized” the income being taxed. The case is complicated, as tax cases usually are. The main thing to know is that it’s widely seen as a stalking horse to prevent a wealth tax, which some Democrats have proposed.
But, depending on how the justices rule, they could easily bulldoze much of the rest of the tax code, too. Even supporters and architects of the Trump tax law have voiced concerns about this.
“A lot of the tax code would be unconstitutional if that thing prevailed,” former House speaker Paul D. Ryan said at a Brookings Institution event that I moderated recently. “I’m not for a wealth tax, but I think if you use this as the argument to spike a wealth tax, you’re going to basically get rid of, I don’t know, a third of the tax code.”
During oral arguments, the justices seemed hesitant to upend the entire tax code. But the U.S. tax system is sufficiently complex and interconnected — and the justices sufficiently inexperienced with tax law (the high court rarely accepts such cases) — that they might not even realize which threads could unravel it. Tax experts have warned that the justices might think they’re crafting a narrow ruling but still inadvertently spawn litigation against other tax provisions or create opportunities for new tax shelters. (This has basically happened before.)
“I suspect the court will go out of its way to say they don’t mean to undermine existing taxes, or other measures created to avoid abusing the tax system,” Michael J. Graetz, a law professor and author of a forthcoming book about the anti-tax movement, told me in a phone interview. “But it’s hard to know how much damage the court might do without having an opinion in front of you.”
Indeed, other big-ticket tax cases are already waiting on the Moore decision. Some tax advisers have suggested to clients that they preemptively file refund claims for taxes they’d already paid — in some cases, for taxes beyond just the repatriation tax at issue before the court, such as taxes on income from partnerships or other pass-through entities.
Striking down the transition tax alone would cost the government hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade. If other parts of the tax code fall too, the cost could be in the trillions.
And this isn’t the only litigation affecting the government’s ability to fund itself. Other recent rulings have constrained the IRS’s ability to issue “guidance” about, for example, disclosure of tax shelters. Another, broader case coming before the Supreme Court next month could upend the executive branch’s ability to write tax regulations.
All these efforts have two things in common: One is that they are designed to “starve the beast” — that is, reduce the revenue coming into Treasury’s coffers. The second is that the beneficiaries of resulting changes to tax law are disproportionately those with the deepest pockets.
In a few days, the country will notch the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. The spirit of that foundational event persists — except that now anti-government types aren’t merely dumping a bit of tea; they’re working to dump virtually all the country’s tax money, too.
D.C. CIRCUIT LARGELY BACKS UP CHUTKAN AND CURBS TRUMP’S THREATS
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit handed down a critical opinion on Friday largely sustaining U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan’s order preventing four-times-indicted former president Donald Trump from threatening witnesses, court personnel and attorneys — and using his participation in the 2024 election to delay his trial. In doing so, the panel made clear that Trump’s attempt to play the victim of court interference in his campaign will not work, thereby upholding the rule of law.
After indictment on felony charges, a criminal defendant can lose certain rights, such as the right to possess a gun. When that person is allowed out on bail, further rights can be curtailed. Passports (hence the right to travel) can be taken away. And defendants can lose the right to engage in behavior that threatens the fair administration of justice — including intimidation of witnesses and contamination of the jury pool. This basic framework applies to Trump just as it does to every criminal defendant, the D.C. Circuit held.
The D.C. Circuit’s opinion upheld Chutkan’s order prohibiting Trump from making statements about “(1) counsel in the case other than the Special Counsel, (2) members of the court’s staff and counsel’s staffs, or (3) the family members of any counsel or staff member — if those statements are made with the intent to materially interfere with, or to cause others to materially interfere with, counsel’s or staff’s work in this criminal case, or with the knowledge that such interference is highly likely to result.” There is nothing remotely violative of Trump’s First Amendment rights in barring this type of speech for a person indicted on felony charges out on bail.
Though Trump has a right to a fair trial, he has no right to insist, the panel held, upon “a trial prejudiced in his favor.” Put differently, the people also have a right to a fair trial, not one caught up in a “carnival atmosphere.” As the panel underscored, the Supreme Court has long held that a trial participant’s speech can be restricted to avoid material prejudice. (“In particular, the public has a compelling interest in ensuring that the criminal proceeding against Mr. Trump is not obstructed, hindered, or tainted, but is fairly conducted and resolved according to the judgment of an impartial jury based on only the evidence introduced in the courtroom.”)
case, the D.C. Circuit held that the district court “had the authority to restrain those aspects of Mr. Trump’s speech that present a significant and imminent risk to the fair and orderly administration of justice, and that no less restrictive alternatives would adequately address that risk.” Given that Trump has “repeatedly attacked those involved in this case through threatening public statements, as well as messaging daggered at likely witnesses and their testimony,” the appellate judges affirmed Chutkan’s ruling to the extent that it prohibits him from attacking reasonably foreseeable witnesses’ participation in trial.
Likewise, threats about counsel and staff “designed to generate alarm and dread, and to trigger extraordinary safety precautions, will necessarily hinder the trial process and slow the administration of justice.” Those, too, are banned (except with regard to special counsel Jack Smith personally). Regarding counsel and court personnel, remarks made “with either the intent to materially interfere with their work or the knowledge that such interference is highly likely to result” can be properly barred. (Requiring a finding of intent might give Trump an opening to drive his rhetorical bus through, but the court’s ruling demonstrates extreme care in protecting First Amendment rights, an effective way of fending off Supreme Court review.)
Perhaps most important, the panel noted that Trump’s suggestion to postpone the trial until after the election would create a perverse incentive, allowing his threats, attacks and incitement to accumulate. Moreover, the court made clear he will be free to talk up a storm for many months before the election because “the general election is almost a year away, and will long postdate the trial in this case.”
Leave no doubt: The D.C. Circuit is not going to allow him to escape trial before the election. As former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann put it, “The Trump criminal cases are existential examples of the legal aphorism that ‘justice delayed is justice denied.’ Judicial speed is not a nicety; it is a necessity to have legal accountability.”
This decision goes a long way toward preventing Trump from sabotaging the trial — and it bolsters equal justice under the law. In restoring restrictions on Trump, the court had Chutkan’s back “in every important way,” former federal prosecutor and legal commentator Harry Litman said on MSNBC. With a scalpel, not an ax, the D.C. Circuit protected the trial system without making Trump a First Amendment martyr.
Though Trump is a presidential candidate, he is “also an indicted criminal defendant, and he must stand trial in a courtroom under the same procedures that govern all other criminal defendants,” the court held. “That is what the rule of law means.” And it’s that principle that stands between us and the authoritarian nightmare a second Trump term would bring.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit handed down a critical opinion on Friday largely sustaining U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan’s order preventing four-times-indicted former president Donald Trump from threatening witnesses, court personnel and attorneys — and using his participation in the 2024 election to delay his trial. In doing so, the panel made clear that Trump’s attempt to play the victim of court interference in his campaign will not work, thereby upholding the rule of law.
After indictment on felony charges, a criminal defendant can lose certain rights, such as the right to possess a gun. When that person is allowed out on bail, further rights can be curtailed. Passports (hence the right to travel) can be taken away. And defendants can lose the right to engage in behavior that threatens the fair administration of justice — including intimidation of witnesses and contamination of the jury pool. This basic framework applies to Trump just as it does to every criminal defendant, the D.C. Circuit held.
The D.C. Circuit’s opinion upheld Chutkan’s order prohibiting Trump from making statements about “(1) counsel in the case other than the Special Counsel, (2) members of the court’s staff and counsel’s staffs, or (3) the family members of any counsel or staff member — if those statements are made with the intent to materially interfere with, or to cause others to materially interfere with, counsel’s or staff’s work in this criminal case, or with the knowledge that such interference is highly likely to result.” There is nothing remotely violative of Trump’s First Amendment rights in barring this type of speech for a person indicted on felony charges out on bail.
Though Trump has a right to a fair trial, he has no right to insist, the panel held, upon “a trial prejudiced in his favor.” Put differently, the people also have a right to a fair trial, not one caught up in a “carnival atmosphere.” As the panel underscored, the Supreme Court has long held that a trial participant’s speech can be restricted to avoid material prejudice. (“In particular, the public has a compelling interest in ensuring that the criminal proceeding against Mr. Trump is not obstructed, hindered, or tainted, but is fairly conducted and resolved according to the judgment of an impartial jury based on only the evidence introduced in the courtroom.”)
case, the D.C. Circuit held that the district court “had the authority to restrain those aspects of Mr. Trump’s speech that present a significant and imminent risk to the fair and orderly administration of justice, and that no less restrictive alternatives would adequately address that risk.” Given that Trump has “repeatedly attacked those involved in this case through threatening public statements, as well as messaging daggered at likely witnesses and their testimony,” the appellate judges affirmed Chutkan’s ruling to the extent that it prohibits him from attacking reasonably foreseeable witnesses’ participation in trial.
Likewise, threats about counsel and staff “designed to generate alarm and dread, and to trigger extraordinary safety precautions, will necessarily hinder the trial process and slow the administration of justice.” Those, too, are banned (except with regard to special counsel Jack Smith personally). Regarding counsel and court personnel, remarks made “with either the intent to materially interfere with their work or the knowledge that such interference is highly likely to result” can be properly barred. (Requiring a finding of intent might give Trump an opening to drive his rhetorical bus through, but the court’s ruling demonstrates extreme care in protecting First Amendment rights, an effective way of fending off Supreme Court review.)
Perhaps most important, the panel noted that Trump’s suggestion to postpone the trial until after the election would create a perverse incentive, allowing his threats, attacks and incitement to accumulate. Moreover, the court made clear he will be free to talk up a storm for many months before the election because “the general election is almost a year away, and will long postdate the trial in this case.”
Leave no doubt: The D.C. Circuit is not going to allow him to escape trial before the election. As former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann put it, “The Trump criminal cases are existential examples of the legal aphorism that ‘justice delayed is justice denied.’ Judicial speed is not a nicety; it is a necessity to have legal accountability.”
This decision goes a long way toward preventing Trump from sabotaging the trial — and it bolsters equal justice under the law. In restoring restrictions on Trump, the court had Chutkan’s back “in every important way,” former federal prosecutor and legal commentator Harry Litman said on MSNBC. With a scalpel, not an ax, the D.C. Circuit protected the trial system without making Trump a First Amendment martyr.
Though Trump is a presidential candidate, he is “also an indicted criminal defendant, and he must stand trial in a courtroom under the same procedures that govern all other criminal defendants,” the court held. “That is what the rule of law means.” And it’s that principle that stands between us and the authoritarian nightmare a second Trump term would bring.
CHINA’S CYBER ARMY IS INVADING CRITICAL U.S. SERVICES
A utility in Hawaii, a West Coast port and a pipeline are among the victims in the past year, officials say
By Ellen Nakashima and Joseph Menn, The Washington Post
The Chinese military is ramping up its ability to disrupt key American infrastructure, including power and water utilities as well as communications and transportation systems, according to U.S. officials and industry security officials.
Hackers affiliated with China’s People’s Liberation Army have burrowed into the computer systems of about two dozen critical entities over the past year, these experts said.
The intrusions are part of a broader effort to develop ways to sow panic and chaos or snarl logistics in the event of a U.S.-China conflict in the Pacific, they said.
Among the victims are a water utility in Hawaii, a major West Coast port and at least one oil and gas pipeline, people familiar with the incidents told The Washington Post. The hackers also attempted to break into the operator of Texas’s power grid, which operates independently from electrical systems in the rest of the country.
Several entities outside the United States, including electric utilities, also have been victimized by the hackers, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.
None of the intrusions affected industrial control systems that operate pumps, pistons or any critical function, or caused a disruption, U.S. officials said. But they said the attention to Hawaii, which is home to the Pacific Fleet, and to at least one port as well as logistics centers suggests the Chinese military wants the ability to complicate U.S. efforts to ship troops and equipment to the region if a conflict breaks out over Taiwan.
These previously undisclosed details help fill out a picture of a cyber campaign dubbed Volt Typhoon, first detected about a year ago by the U.S. government, as the United States and China struggle to stabilize a relationship more antagonistic now than it has been in decades. Chinese military commanders refused for more than a year to speak to American counterparts even as close-call intercepts by Chinese fighter jets of U.S. spy planes surged in the western Pacific. President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed only last month to restore those communication channels.
“It is very clear that Chinese attempts to compromise critical infrastructure are in part to pre-position themselves to be able to disrupt or destroy that critical infrastructure in the event of a conflict, to either prevent the United States from being able to project power into Asia or to cause societal chaos inside the United States — to affect our decision-making around a crisis,” said Brandon Wales, executive director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). “That is a significant change from Chinese cyber activity from seven to 10 years ago that was focused primarily on political and economic espionage.”
Morgan Adamski, director of the National Security Agency’s Cybersecurity Collaboration Center, confirmed in an email that Volt Typhoon activity “appears to be focused on targets within the Indo-Pacific region, to include Hawaii.”
The disclosures to The Post build on the annual threat assessment in February by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which warned that China “almost certainly is capable” of launching cyberattacks that would disrupt U.S. critical infrastructure, including oil and gas pipelines and rail systems.
“If Beijing feared that a major conflict with the United States were imminent, it almost certainly would consider undertaking aggressive cyber operations against U.S. homeland critical infrastructure and military assets worldwide,” the assessment said.
Some of the victims compromised by Volt Typhoon were smaller companies and organizations across a range of sectors and “not necessarily those that would have an immediate relevant connection to a critical function upon which many Americans depend,” said Eric Goldstein, CISA’s executive assistant director. This may have been “opportunistic targeting ... based upon where they can gain access” — a way to get a toehold into a supply chain in the hopes of one day moving into larger, more-critical customers, he said.
Chinese military officers have described in internal documents how they might use cyber tools or “network warfare” in a conflict, said McReynolds, who has seen some of the writings. He said military strategists speak of synchronizing air and missile strikes with disruption of command-and-control networks, critical infrastructure, satellite networks and military logistics systems.
They have talked about these tools applying in amphibious invasions, he said. “This is stuff they pretty clearly see as relevant to a Taiwan scenario,” he said, “though they don’t explicitly say this is how we’re going to take over Taiwan.”
This is far from China’s first foray into hacking critical infrastructure. In 2012, a Canadian company, Telvent, whose software remotely operated major natural gas pipelines in North America, notified customers that a sophisticated hacker had breached its firewalls and stolen data relating to industrial control systems. The cybersecurity firm Mandiant traced the breach to a prolific PLA hacking group, Unit 61398. Five members of the unit were indicted in 2014 on charges of hacking U.S. companies.
At the time, the U.S. government wasn’t sure whether China’s aim was to collect intelligence or pre-position itself to disrupt. Today, based on intelligence collection and the fact that the facilities targeted have little intelligence of political or economic value, U.S. officials say it’s clear that the only reason to penetrate them is to be able to conduct disruptive or destructive actions later.
The U.S. government has long sought to improve coordination with the private sector, which owns most of the nation’s critical infrastructure, and with tech companies that can detect cyberthreats. Companies such as Microsoft share anonymized information about adversary tactics, indicators that a system has been compromised, and mitigations, said CISA’s Goldstein. Generally, these companies are not seeing the hacker’s presence within the customers’ networks, but rather are detecting it through communications to the servers the hacker is using to direct the attack, he said.
In some cases, the victims themselves seek assistance from CISA. In others, Goldstein said, CISA is alerted by a software or communications vendor to a victim and the government must seek a court order to compel the vendor to reveal the victim’s identity.
In May, Microsoft said it had found Volt Typhoon infiltrating critical infrastructure in Guam and elsewhere, listing a number of sectors. Those included telecommunications firms, according to people familiar with the matter. The hacks were especially concerning, analysts said, because Guam is the closest U.S. territory to the contested Taiwan Strait.
The intrusions into sectors like water and energy systems come as the Biden administration has sought to strengthen industries’ ability to defend themselves by issuing mandatory cybersecurity rules. In the summer of 2021, the administration rolled out first-ever oil and gas pipeline cyber regulations. In March, the Environmental Protection Agency announced a requirement for states to report on cyberthreats in their public water system audits. Soon after, however, three states sued the administration, charging regulatory overreach.
A utility in Hawaii, a West Coast port and a pipeline are among the victims in the past year, officials say
By Ellen Nakashima and Joseph Menn, The Washington Post
The Chinese military is ramping up its ability to disrupt key American infrastructure, including power and water utilities as well as communications and transportation systems, according to U.S. officials and industry security officials.
Hackers affiliated with China’s People’s Liberation Army have burrowed into the computer systems of about two dozen critical entities over the past year, these experts said.
The intrusions are part of a broader effort to develop ways to sow panic and chaos or snarl logistics in the event of a U.S.-China conflict in the Pacific, they said.
Among the victims are a water utility in Hawaii, a major West Coast port and at least one oil and gas pipeline, people familiar with the incidents told The Washington Post. The hackers also attempted to break into the operator of Texas’s power grid, which operates independently from electrical systems in the rest of the country.
Several entities outside the United States, including electric utilities, also have been victimized by the hackers, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.
None of the intrusions affected industrial control systems that operate pumps, pistons or any critical function, or caused a disruption, U.S. officials said. But they said the attention to Hawaii, which is home to the Pacific Fleet, and to at least one port as well as logistics centers suggests the Chinese military wants the ability to complicate U.S. efforts to ship troops and equipment to the region if a conflict breaks out over Taiwan.
These previously undisclosed details help fill out a picture of a cyber campaign dubbed Volt Typhoon, first detected about a year ago by the U.S. government, as the United States and China struggle to stabilize a relationship more antagonistic now than it has been in decades. Chinese military commanders refused for more than a year to speak to American counterparts even as close-call intercepts by Chinese fighter jets of U.S. spy planes surged in the western Pacific. President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed only last month to restore those communication channels.
“It is very clear that Chinese attempts to compromise critical infrastructure are in part to pre-position themselves to be able to disrupt or destroy that critical infrastructure in the event of a conflict, to either prevent the United States from being able to project power into Asia or to cause societal chaos inside the United States — to affect our decision-making around a crisis,” said Brandon Wales, executive director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). “That is a significant change from Chinese cyber activity from seven to 10 years ago that was focused primarily on political and economic espionage.”
Morgan Adamski, director of the National Security Agency’s Cybersecurity Collaboration Center, confirmed in an email that Volt Typhoon activity “appears to be focused on targets within the Indo-Pacific region, to include Hawaii.”
The disclosures to The Post build on the annual threat assessment in February by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which warned that China “almost certainly is capable” of launching cyberattacks that would disrupt U.S. critical infrastructure, including oil and gas pipelines and rail systems.
“If Beijing feared that a major conflict with the United States were imminent, it almost certainly would consider undertaking aggressive cyber operations against U.S. homeland critical infrastructure and military assets worldwide,” the assessment said.
Some of the victims compromised by Volt Typhoon were smaller companies and organizations across a range of sectors and “not necessarily those that would have an immediate relevant connection to a critical function upon which many Americans depend,” said Eric Goldstein, CISA’s executive assistant director. This may have been “opportunistic targeting ... based upon where they can gain access” — a way to get a toehold into a supply chain in the hopes of one day moving into larger, more-critical customers, he said.
Chinese military officers have described in internal documents how they might use cyber tools or “network warfare” in a conflict, said McReynolds, who has seen some of the writings. He said military strategists speak of synchronizing air and missile strikes with disruption of command-and-control networks, critical infrastructure, satellite networks and military logistics systems.
They have talked about these tools applying in amphibious invasions, he said. “This is stuff they pretty clearly see as relevant to a Taiwan scenario,” he said, “though they don’t explicitly say this is how we’re going to take over Taiwan.”
This is far from China’s first foray into hacking critical infrastructure. In 2012, a Canadian company, Telvent, whose software remotely operated major natural gas pipelines in North America, notified customers that a sophisticated hacker had breached its firewalls and stolen data relating to industrial control systems. The cybersecurity firm Mandiant traced the breach to a prolific PLA hacking group, Unit 61398. Five members of the unit were indicted in 2014 on charges of hacking U.S. companies.
At the time, the U.S. government wasn’t sure whether China’s aim was to collect intelligence or pre-position itself to disrupt. Today, based on intelligence collection and the fact that the facilities targeted have little intelligence of political or economic value, U.S. officials say it’s clear that the only reason to penetrate them is to be able to conduct disruptive or destructive actions later.
The U.S. government has long sought to improve coordination with the private sector, which owns most of the nation’s critical infrastructure, and with tech companies that can detect cyberthreats. Companies such as Microsoft share anonymized information about adversary tactics, indicators that a system has been compromised, and mitigations, said CISA’s Goldstein. Generally, these companies are not seeing the hacker’s presence within the customers’ networks, but rather are detecting it through communications to the servers the hacker is using to direct the attack, he said.
In some cases, the victims themselves seek assistance from CISA. In others, Goldstein said, CISA is alerted by a software or communications vendor to a victim and the government must seek a court order to compel the vendor to reveal the victim’s identity.
In May, Microsoft said it had found Volt Typhoon infiltrating critical infrastructure in Guam and elsewhere, listing a number of sectors. Those included telecommunications firms, according to people familiar with the matter. The hacks were especially concerning, analysts said, because Guam is the closest U.S. territory to the contested Taiwan Strait.
The intrusions into sectors like water and energy systems come as the Biden administration has sought to strengthen industries’ ability to defend themselves by issuing mandatory cybersecurity rules. In the summer of 2021, the administration rolled out first-ever oil and gas pipeline cyber regulations. In March, the Environmental Protection Agency announced a requirement for states to report on cyberthreats in their public water system audits. Soon after, however, three states sued the administration, charging regulatory overreach.
THE TEXAS ABORTION CASE BLOWS UP THE ABORTION BAN RATIONALE
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Abortion rights activists, medical professionals and ordinary women warned the Supreme Court in advance of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision: Legislatures cannot dictate medical decisions without creating horrendous injustices and medical travesties. A recent case from Texas, which has a ban on abortions after six weeks, leaves no doubt about the merits of that argument. The Texas case undermines the rationale for abortion bans and adds to Republicans’ political liability on an issue uppermost in the minds of many voters.
As the Texas Tribune aptly put it, “For the first time in at least 50 years, a judge has intervened to allow an adult woman to terminate her pregnancy.” The woman, Kate Cox, was forced to seek relief because Texas’s six-week ban makes an exception only to save the life of the mother. “At 20 weeks pregnant, Cox learned her fetus had full trisomy 18, a chromosomal abnormality that is almost always fatal before birth or soon after,” the Tribune reported. “Cox and her husband desperately wanted to have this baby, but her doctors said continuing the nonviable pregnancy posed a risk to her health and future fertility, according to a historic lawsuit filed Tuesday.”
The judge, confronted with a real person and a specific medical trauma that defied the ideological straitjacket right-wing lawmakers constructed, sided with Cox on Thursday. “The idea that Ms. Cox wants desperately to be a parent, and this law might actually cause her to lose that ability is shocking and would be a genuine miscarriage of justice,” Travis County District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble held. On Friday night, however, the Texas Supreme Court stepped in to order a stay of Gamble’s ruling, throwing Cox into limbo again.
Whatever the eventual outcome, the lower court’s finding that strict application of the law would defy the interests of justice and simple humanity will reverberate throughout the country in innumerable situations. What about a woman whose ectopic pregnancy puts her health at risk, or a “normal pregnancy” that has dire health consequences for a woman with high blood pressure? What about a 12-year-old rape victim who might suffer permanent injury if forced to carry the rapist’s fetus to term?
There are hundreds upon hundreds of situations involving fact-specific medical complications for a pregnant woman. These cannot, without violating our fundamental sense of justice and decency, be predetermined by a bunch of politicians (mostly White, mostly male and many medically illiterate) without regard to the wishes of the woman involved.
None of this should detract from the rights of any woman to decide with her doctor for reasons she deems fit (e.g., lack of resources, age, other children, emotional turmoil) to end a pregnancy. But it does underscore that a ban that strips virtually all reasons for an abortion is a cruel, inhumane affront to women.
The Texas case has far-reaching ramifications. Any state ban presents doctors, patients and judges with an untenable decision: Violate the law, or violate the essential humanity and well-being of a woman? Voters, who have approved an unbroken string of seven abortion measures (the latest in Ohio) on state ballots and who tell pollsters in higher numbers than ever that they support abortion rights, know this basic truth.
Republicans, still in denial about the overwhelming unpopularity of their position and the handicap it places on their candidates, likely will confront this issue in virtually every race up and down the ballot. Democrats who leaned into the issue in 2022 and 2023 won handily. They show no inclination they will hold back in the 2024 elections.
At the presidential level, where GOP candidates keep touting a national ban, abortion might again be a decisive issue. President Biden’s campaign certainly believes so. “This story is shocking, it’s horrifying, and it’s heartbreaking — it’s also becoming all too commonplace in America because of Donald Trump,” Biden’s campaign said in a written statement after the Texas decision. “As Trump proudly brags, it was his Supreme Court picks who provided the deciding votes to overturn Roe v. Wade, allowing Republican extremists across the country to pass draconian bans that are hurting women and threatening doctors.” The campaign reiterated that if “Trump or other Republicans running for president get to the White House, they will try to ban abortion nationwide and the dystopian reality that women like Kate Cox in Texas are facing could be the reality everywhere.”
Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. sneered in his majority opinion that reversed nearly 50 years of abortion rights precedent, “Women are not without electoral or political power.” Neither are men, who also support abortion rights. Moreover, if Dobbs attempted to get the courts “out of” the abortion issue, it has failed miserably.
To the contrary, bans have opened a Pandora’s box of litigation as doctors, courts and women try to make sense of laws ill-suited to determine medical decisions. Courts will be more deeply involved than ever as vague and unworkable laws come before them and as women such as Cox seek refuge in the courts. Dobbs has only enmeshed courts more deeply in difficult health-care decisions.
As abortion rights activists predicted, Republicans remained trapped in a dilemma of their own making. Having catered to extreme antiabortion forces and backed extreme and unworkable abortion bans in a slew of states and nationally, they cannot retreat from their stance without infuriating their base. Seeing the political wreckage in the wake of Dobbs, they are unable to step away from a policy that is wildly out of step with a large majority of Americans. They should prepare to reap the political whirlwind in 2024.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Abortion rights activists, medical professionals and ordinary women warned the Supreme Court in advance of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision: Legislatures cannot dictate medical decisions without creating horrendous injustices and medical travesties. A recent case from Texas, which has a ban on abortions after six weeks, leaves no doubt about the merits of that argument. The Texas case undermines the rationale for abortion bans and adds to Republicans’ political liability on an issue uppermost in the minds of many voters.
As the Texas Tribune aptly put it, “For the first time in at least 50 years, a judge has intervened to allow an adult woman to terminate her pregnancy.” The woman, Kate Cox, was forced to seek relief because Texas’s six-week ban makes an exception only to save the life of the mother. “At 20 weeks pregnant, Cox learned her fetus had full trisomy 18, a chromosomal abnormality that is almost always fatal before birth or soon after,” the Tribune reported. “Cox and her husband desperately wanted to have this baby, but her doctors said continuing the nonviable pregnancy posed a risk to her health and future fertility, according to a historic lawsuit filed Tuesday.”
The judge, confronted with a real person and a specific medical trauma that defied the ideological straitjacket right-wing lawmakers constructed, sided with Cox on Thursday. “The idea that Ms. Cox wants desperately to be a parent, and this law might actually cause her to lose that ability is shocking and would be a genuine miscarriage of justice,” Travis County District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble held. On Friday night, however, the Texas Supreme Court stepped in to order a stay of Gamble’s ruling, throwing Cox into limbo again.
Whatever the eventual outcome, the lower court’s finding that strict application of the law would defy the interests of justice and simple humanity will reverberate throughout the country in innumerable situations. What about a woman whose ectopic pregnancy puts her health at risk, or a “normal pregnancy” that has dire health consequences for a woman with high blood pressure? What about a 12-year-old rape victim who might suffer permanent injury if forced to carry the rapist’s fetus to term?
There are hundreds upon hundreds of situations involving fact-specific medical complications for a pregnant woman. These cannot, without violating our fundamental sense of justice and decency, be predetermined by a bunch of politicians (mostly White, mostly male and many medically illiterate) without regard to the wishes of the woman involved.
None of this should detract from the rights of any woman to decide with her doctor for reasons she deems fit (e.g., lack of resources, age, other children, emotional turmoil) to end a pregnancy. But it does underscore that a ban that strips virtually all reasons for an abortion is a cruel, inhumane affront to women.
The Texas case has far-reaching ramifications. Any state ban presents doctors, patients and judges with an untenable decision: Violate the law, or violate the essential humanity and well-being of a woman? Voters, who have approved an unbroken string of seven abortion measures (the latest in Ohio) on state ballots and who tell pollsters in higher numbers than ever that they support abortion rights, know this basic truth.
Republicans, still in denial about the overwhelming unpopularity of their position and the handicap it places on their candidates, likely will confront this issue in virtually every race up and down the ballot. Democrats who leaned into the issue in 2022 and 2023 won handily. They show no inclination they will hold back in the 2024 elections.
At the presidential level, where GOP candidates keep touting a national ban, abortion might again be a decisive issue. President Biden’s campaign certainly believes so. “This story is shocking, it’s horrifying, and it’s heartbreaking — it’s also becoming all too commonplace in America because of Donald Trump,” Biden’s campaign said in a written statement after the Texas decision. “As Trump proudly brags, it was his Supreme Court picks who provided the deciding votes to overturn Roe v. Wade, allowing Republican extremists across the country to pass draconian bans that are hurting women and threatening doctors.” The campaign reiterated that if “Trump or other Republicans running for president get to the White House, they will try to ban abortion nationwide and the dystopian reality that women like Kate Cox in Texas are facing could be the reality everywhere.”
Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. sneered in his majority opinion that reversed nearly 50 years of abortion rights precedent, “Women are not without electoral or political power.” Neither are men, who also support abortion rights. Moreover, if Dobbs attempted to get the courts “out of” the abortion issue, it has failed miserably.
To the contrary, bans have opened a Pandora’s box of litigation as doctors, courts and women try to make sense of laws ill-suited to determine medical decisions. Courts will be more deeply involved than ever as vague and unworkable laws come before them and as women such as Cox seek refuge in the courts. Dobbs has only enmeshed courts more deeply in difficult health-care decisions.
As abortion rights activists predicted, Republicans remained trapped in a dilemma of their own making. Having catered to extreme antiabortion forces and backed extreme and unworkable abortion bans in a slew of states and nationally, they cannot retreat from their stance without infuriating their base. Seeing the political wreckage in the wake of Dobbs, they are unable to step away from a policy that is wildly out of step with a large majority of Americans. They should prepare to reap the political whirlwind in 2024.
WHITE HOUSE TARGETS DRUG PATENTS IN LATEST EFFORT TO LOWER PRICES
By Washington Post Staff
The White House on Thursday announced its latest gambit to lower U.S. drug prices: a plan to step in and license patent rights to other manufacturers when certain drugs’ prices are too high.
Under the proposed framework, which relies on the White House’s new legal interpretation of a 43-year-old federal law, the high price of a taxpayer-funded drug will be a factor in determining when to invoke a regulatory power known as “march-in rights,” senior officials said.
“The agency that funded the research can then license the invention to a competitor that is able and willing to make it available on reasonable terms,” Neera Tanden, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, told reporters Wednesday. “Fundamentally, we are establishing that price can now be a factor in determining … when the federal government can march-in to ensure that we have lower prices.”
President Biden also released a short video where he said the administration was working “toward ending price-gouging, so you don’t have to pay more for medicines than you need.”
The authority to license a drug’s patent rights to another manufacturer has never been invoked for drugs, and White House officials said they had not yet targeted any high-price pharmaceuticals. Officials characterized the move as part of Biden’s ongoing efforts to lower the price of drugs, which includes provisions in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act that allow the federal government to directly negotiate the prices of popular drugs used by patients covered through the federal government’s Medicare program for older Americans.
Thursday’s announcement comes after the Biden administration conducted a nearly year-long review of its legal authorities under the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, which laid out rules on who owns the intellectual property from federally funded research. Advocates and some lawmakers, including Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), have argued that the law’s provisions permit federal agencies to use march-in authority on numerous high-priced drugs the agencies helped develop.
The National Institutes of Health this year rejected an appeal to use march-in rights on a high-priced prostate cancer drug, Xtandi, which costs more than $160,000 for one year of treatment in the United States but is sold for a fraction of that price in other countries. The NIH’s decision on Xtandi sparked a fight with Sanders, the chair of the Senate’s health committee, who delayed the confirmation hearing for a new NIH director this year until the White House privately pledged to him that it would pursue new drug-pricing measures.
The administration will seek comments on its proposed framework for when to invoke march-in rights. The framework was issued by the Department of Commerce and published in the Federal Register on Thursday morning. Advocates said they were waiting on the final framework, which is expected to be completed next year, to determine how effective the policy would be.
Invoking march-in rights could be “a check on profiteering,” depending on how aggressively the Biden administration chooses to use the authority, said Peter Maybarduk, who directs the access-to-medicines group at the consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen and supports using march-in rights. “Drugmakers should be on notice that unreasonable pricing could cost them their monopoly.”
Biden has increasingly campaigned on his efforts to tackle high drug prices, with the White House citing polls that most American adults support the president’s policies. About 8 in 10 Democrats and nearly 7 in 10 Republicans have said there has not been enough government action to lower the price of drugs, according to polling conducted in July by KFF, a nonpartisan health policy group.
Experts on Wednesday said they expected the Biden administration’s new interpretation of the Bayh-Dole Act would face legal challenges from drugmakers, who have fiercely opposed efforts to invoke march-in rights for high-priced drugs. The pharmaceutical industry is already battling the Biden administration’s plan to negotiate the prices of prescription drugs in the Medicare program.
The Biden administration on Thursday also announced additional efforts to crack down on high drug prices. Officials said the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission would undertake new efforts to scrutinize anti-competitive practices in health care.
By Washington Post Staff
The White House on Thursday announced its latest gambit to lower U.S. drug prices: a plan to step in and license patent rights to other manufacturers when certain drugs’ prices are too high.
Under the proposed framework, which relies on the White House’s new legal interpretation of a 43-year-old federal law, the high price of a taxpayer-funded drug will be a factor in determining when to invoke a regulatory power known as “march-in rights,” senior officials said.
“The agency that funded the research can then license the invention to a competitor that is able and willing to make it available on reasonable terms,” Neera Tanden, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, told reporters Wednesday. “Fundamentally, we are establishing that price can now be a factor in determining … when the federal government can march-in to ensure that we have lower prices.”
President Biden also released a short video where he said the administration was working “toward ending price-gouging, so you don’t have to pay more for medicines than you need.”
The authority to license a drug’s patent rights to another manufacturer has never been invoked for drugs, and White House officials said they had not yet targeted any high-price pharmaceuticals. Officials characterized the move as part of Biden’s ongoing efforts to lower the price of drugs, which includes provisions in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act that allow the federal government to directly negotiate the prices of popular drugs used by patients covered through the federal government’s Medicare program for older Americans.
Thursday’s announcement comes after the Biden administration conducted a nearly year-long review of its legal authorities under the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, which laid out rules on who owns the intellectual property from federally funded research. Advocates and some lawmakers, including Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), have argued that the law’s provisions permit federal agencies to use march-in authority on numerous high-priced drugs the agencies helped develop.
The National Institutes of Health this year rejected an appeal to use march-in rights on a high-priced prostate cancer drug, Xtandi, which costs more than $160,000 for one year of treatment in the United States but is sold for a fraction of that price in other countries. The NIH’s decision on Xtandi sparked a fight with Sanders, the chair of the Senate’s health committee, who delayed the confirmation hearing for a new NIH director this year until the White House privately pledged to him that it would pursue new drug-pricing measures.
The administration will seek comments on its proposed framework for when to invoke march-in rights. The framework was issued by the Department of Commerce and published in the Federal Register on Thursday morning. Advocates said they were waiting on the final framework, which is expected to be completed next year, to determine how effective the policy would be.
Invoking march-in rights could be “a check on profiteering,” depending on how aggressively the Biden administration chooses to use the authority, said Peter Maybarduk, who directs the access-to-medicines group at the consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen and supports using march-in rights. “Drugmakers should be on notice that unreasonable pricing could cost them their monopoly.”
Biden has increasingly campaigned on his efforts to tackle high drug prices, with the White House citing polls that most American adults support the president’s policies. About 8 in 10 Democrats and nearly 7 in 10 Republicans have said there has not been enough government action to lower the price of drugs, according to polling conducted in July by KFF, a nonpartisan health policy group.
Experts on Wednesday said they expected the Biden administration’s new interpretation of the Bayh-Dole Act would face legal challenges from drugmakers, who have fiercely opposed efforts to invoke march-in rights for high-priced drugs. The pharmaceutical industry is already battling the Biden administration’s plan to negotiate the prices of prescription drugs in the Medicare program.
The Biden administration on Thursday also announced additional efforts to crack down on high drug prices. Officials said the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission would undertake new efforts to scrutinize anti-competitive practices in health care.
GOP’S BLOCKING OF UKRAINE AID WOULD BE A NATIONAL SECURITY DEBACLE
Should Russia emerge triumphant, it will comprise the most critical strategic defeat for the United States since the end of the Cold War.
by Trudy Rubin, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Is it really possible that the GOP is about to kneecap Ukraine on the battlefield by cutting off all U.S. military aid to Kyiv?
Are Republican legislators, who constantly trumpet their patriotism, really prepared to stab America in the back (a phrase often politically abused but wholly accurate here) by handing Russian President Vladimir Putin a huge potential victory at a terrifying cost to U.S. security?
Yes, and yes.
On the eve of a crucial Senate vote on funding weapons for Ukraine, it appeared that GOP members would block the aid. “We are on the verge of stopping funding,” I was recently told by Sen. Chris Coons. The Delaware Democrat is among the sane legislators working hard to prevent this debacle.
“Without congressional action by the end of the year,” wrote President Joe Biden’s top budget official, Shalanda Young, to congressional leadership, “we will run out of resources to procure more weapons and equipment for Ukraine and to provide equipment from U.S. military stocks.”
So let me puncture one by one the arguments Republicans are using to justify their blinkered determination to undermine Kyiv — and then address what Biden should do to push back.
Linking Ukraine aid to border policy
Led by House Speaker Mike Johnson, the GOP has tied Ukraine funding to “transformative change” in U.S. policy on the southern border. Yes, a revamping of border policy is needed, but it will require difficult bipartisan negotiations. Yet, by making Ukraine aid “dependent upon enactment” of draconian border changes, Johnson shows he isn’t serious about either crisis. (Many GOP senators, notably Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, support Ukraine aid, but have bowed to the House linkage with immigration reform.)
Handing Putin a strategic victory
Johnson and his MAGA backers display an amazing indifference to the security costs of handing Putin a potential victory over Ukraine. Perhaps they have drunk the Kool-Aid of Donald Trump’s promise to solve the Ukraine issue within 24 hours by making a deal with Putin — i.e., by conceding to him the Ukrainian territory that Russia has occupied, which will destroy Ukraine as an independent country.
Should Putin emerge triumphant, this will comprise the most critical strategic defeat for the United States since the end of the Cold War. Ukraine’s collapse, abetted by the U.S., would confirm that the West has no stomach to push back against Putin’s efforts to rebuild Russia’s empire, including partial territorial grabs of neighboring countries and interference in other regions. China, Iran, and North Korea will be watching closely.
Moreover, the U.S. betrayal of Ukraine would strengthen the assessment by America’s friends and enemies that Washington is no longer an ally that can be trusted, thereby undermining America’s alliances in Europe and Asia.
Nor will the Europeans, who now provide more aid to Ukraine than the United States, be able to provide the key weapons systems produced in this country. As Sen. Coons pointed out, U.S. leadership is critical in keeping the Western alliance together in supporting Ukraine. “If we back off, many of the other countries will find reasons to back off,” he said. “If we continue to lead, others will follow.”
None of this seems to trouble the MAGA crowd.
Misguided charges of corruption
GOP gripes on Ukraine go beyond border policy, raising the issue of corruption in Kyiv. Yet they never mention that the Pentagon has multiple systems to check where the money goes, nor that the bulk of the funding previously authorized by Congress comes right back to the United States. The funds mostly go to purchase updated U.S. weapons systems, while the Ukrainians get the older systems the Pentagon is phasing out.
Giving Ukraine the weapons for victory
The delay in delivering F-16 fighter jets — and training pilots — has left Kyiv without necessary air support and defense of its ground forces. Despite the Pentagon’s claims that it has no ATACMS to spare, Lockheed Martin has an active production line manufacturing 500 in fiscal year 2024, with most or all of them being exported to countries that are not at war.
“Even a couple of dozen could make a huge difference,” I was told by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Bradley Bowman, a weapons and security expert. While not a silver bullet, ATACMS could do real damage to the Kerch Bridge linking Russian territory to Crimea and put Putin on the back foot.
While President Biden deserves credit for his strong support of Ukraine, he needs to clarify why it is so important for Kyiv to drive the Russians out, and provide the weapons for it to do so. That is the key to pushing back against the blinkered MAGA crowd who would rather see Putin win.
Should Russia emerge triumphant, it will comprise the most critical strategic defeat for the United States since the end of the Cold War.
by Trudy Rubin, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Is it really possible that the GOP is about to kneecap Ukraine on the battlefield by cutting off all U.S. military aid to Kyiv?
Are Republican legislators, who constantly trumpet their patriotism, really prepared to stab America in the back (a phrase often politically abused but wholly accurate here) by handing Russian President Vladimir Putin a huge potential victory at a terrifying cost to U.S. security?
Yes, and yes.
On the eve of a crucial Senate vote on funding weapons for Ukraine, it appeared that GOP members would block the aid. “We are on the verge of stopping funding,” I was recently told by Sen. Chris Coons. The Delaware Democrat is among the sane legislators working hard to prevent this debacle.
“Without congressional action by the end of the year,” wrote President Joe Biden’s top budget official, Shalanda Young, to congressional leadership, “we will run out of resources to procure more weapons and equipment for Ukraine and to provide equipment from U.S. military stocks.”
So let me puncture one by one the arguments Republicans are using to justify their blinkered determination to undermine Kyiv — and then address what Biden should do to push back.
Linking Ukraine aid to border policy
Led by House Speaker Mike Johnson, the GOP has tied Ukraine funding to “transformative change” in U.S. policy on the southern border. Yes, a revamping of border policy is needed, but it will require difficult bipartisan negotiations. Yet, by making Ukraine aid “dependent upon enactment” of draconian border changes, Johnson shows he isn’t serious about either crisis. (Many GOP senators, notably Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, support Ukraine aid, but have bowed to the House linkage with immigration reform.)
Handing Putin a strategic victory
Johnson and his MAGA backers display an amazing indifference to the security costs of handing Putin a potential victory over Ukraine. Perhaps they have drunk the Kool-Aid of Donald Trump’s promise to solve the Ukraine issue within 24 hours by making a deal with Putin — i.e., by conceding to him the Ukrainian territory that Russia has occupied, which will destroy Ukraine as an independent country.
Should Putin emerge triumphant, this will comprise the most critical strategic defeat for the United States since the end of the Cold War. Ukraine’s collapse, abetted by the U.S., would confirm that the West has no stomach to push back against Putin’s efforts to rebuild Russia’s empire, including partial territorial grabs of neighboring countries and interference in other regions. China, Iran, and North Korea will be watching closely.
Moreover, the U.S. betrayal of Ukraine would strengthen the assessment by America’s friends and enemies that Washington is no longer an ally that can be trusted, thereby undermining America’s alliances in Europe and Asia.
Nor will the Europeans, who now provide more aid to Ukraine than the United States, be able to provide the key weapons systems produced in this country. As Sen. Coons pointed out, U.S. leadership is critical in keeping the Western alliance together in supporting Ukraine. “If we back off, many of the other countries will find reasons to back off,” he said. “If we continue to lead, others will follow.”
None of this seems to trouble the MAGA crowd.
Misguided charges of corruption
GOP gripes on Ukraine go beyond border policy, raising the issue of corruption in Kyiv. Yet they never mention that the Pentagon has multiple systems to check where the money goes, nor that the bulk of the funding previously authorized by Congress comes right back to the United States. The funds mostly go to purchase updated U.S. weapons systems, while the Ukrainians get the older systems the Pentagon is phasing out.
Giving Ukraine the weapons for victory
The delay in delivering F-16 fighter jets — and training pilots — has left Kyiv without necessary air support and defense of its ground forces. Despite the Pentagon’s claims that it has no ATACMS to spare, Lockheed Martin has an active production line manufacturing 500 in fiscal year 2024, with most or all of them being exported to countries that are not at war.
“Even a couple of dozen could make a huge difference,” I was told by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Bradley Bowman, a weapons and security expert. While not a silver bullet, ATACMS could do real damage to the Kerch Bridge linking Russian territory to Crimea and put Putin on the back foot.
While President Biden deserves credit for his strong support of Ukraine, he needs to clarify why it is so important for Kyiv to drive the Russians out, and provide the weapons for it to do so. That is the key to pushing back against the blinkered MAGA crowd who would rather see Putin win.
TRUMP’S BIGGEST LOSS YET: NO IMMUNITY
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan on Friday issued a stunning rebuke to four-times indicted former president Donald Trump, rejecting his motion to dismiss his Jan. 6, 2021, charges on absolute immunity and other specious constitutional grounds. The ruling came just hours after an appellate court rejected Trump’s immunity claim in a parallel civil case.
Chutkan’s ruling might turn out to be the most consequential legal defeat yet for Trump and quite possibly a decisive turning point in the 2024 presidential election.
In dispensing with Trump’s criminal immunity claim, Chutkan held emphatically, “The Constitution’s text, structure, and history do not support that contention. No court — or any other branch of government — has ever accepted it. And this court will not so hold.” She continued, “Whatever immunities a sitting President may enjoy, the United States has only one Chief Executive at a time, and that position does not confer a lifelong ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ pass.” She added, “Former Presidents enjoy no special conditions on their federal criminal liability. Defendant may be subject to federal investigation, indictment, prosecution, conviction, and punishment for any criminal acts undertaken while in office.”
Chutkan, looking at the text and structure of the Constitution and relevant history, made clear that in a criminal case, Trump has even less claim to immunity than would a sitting president in a civil case as set out in Nixon v. Fitzgerald. Unlike a civil suit for a sitting president, there is no concern here that prosecution would interfere with any official duties; moreover, the risk of “vexatious litigation” is greatly reduced because of protections afforded criminal defendants. (“In short, the concerns discussed in the civil context of Fitzgerald find no meaningful purchase here,” Chutkan wrote.)
In affirming the public interest in prosecution, Chutkan deftly quoted George Washington: “The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government.” As for historical precedent, she noted that no claim of absolute immunity from criminal prosecution has ever been sustained (largely because no president, other than the pardoned Richard M. Nixon, has been credibly accused of felonies in office).
“Judge Chutkan’s ruling is, quite simply, as solid as a rock and as piercing as tempered steel,” constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe told me. “Aided by the D.C. Circuit’s unanimous rejection just hours earlier of Mr. Trump’s parallel but somewhat stronger claim in the civil liability context, Judge Chutkan has now rendered a devastating blow to the former president’s pretensions to what she rightly dismissed as a kinglike prerogative, one that our entire system of government rebels against.”
Chutkan also dispensed with Trump’s bogus First Amendment claims, holding that he is not being prosecuted for speech but for attempting to overthrow the election. Speech in furtherance of criminal activity is not protected, she noted. Likewise, the case does not represent viewpoint discrimination nor an attempt to criminalize a call for government action because, again, he is being prosecuted not for his views but for his illegal efforts to reverse the election.
Chutkan then rejected Trump’s inane claim of double jeopardy based on his impeachment trial. First-year law students understand that impeachment concerns only the ability to retain and run for office; the criminal justice system operates separate and apart from impeachment in service of different aims.
Finally, Chutkan rejected the argument that the due process clause prevents prosecution because the statutes at issue are “so vague — and difficult to administer — that defendants lacked notice of how it would be applied in any given case.” It’s comical for a former president to say he didn’t have warning of laws he was sworn to uphold. In any event, Chutkan explained that the statutes at issue don’t “require the Executive or Judicial Branch to ‘guess’ at the prohibited conduct. … Nor does finding that the Indictment complies with due process require the court to create a novel judicial construction of any statute.”
Her decision takes on even more importance given the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit’s parallel decision in the civil case. Given its ruling in the civil case (in which more protections for Trump arguably apply), the appellate court in all likelihood would quickly affirm Chutkan’s ruling. As for further review to the Supreme Court, Tribe sees “no basis for the Court to come to Mr. Trump’s rescue, given the carefully limited reasoning of the district court’s opinion and the absence of any precedent or principle cutting in the former president’s favor.”
Moreover, Tribe told me that Chutkan helped “shield her ruling from reversal by emphasizing all the things she’s not deciding.” In fending off possible Supreme Court review, she not only emphasized that Trump might still be able to sustain his claims based on evidence presented at trial (a surefire way to dissuade the Supreme Court from taking up the case now) but also enumerated all the fact-intensive issues left to be decided (another way of waving off the high court):
“[The court] does not decide whether former Presidents retain absolute criminal immunity from non-federal prosecutions, or whether sitting Presidents are entitled to greater immunity than former ones. Similarly, the court expresses no opinion on the additional constitutional questions attendant to Defendant’s assertion that former Presidents retain absolute criminal immunity for acts ‘within the outer perimeter of the President’s official’ responsibility. … Even if the court were to accept that assertion, it could not grant Defendant immunity here without resolving several separate and disputed constitutional questions of first impression, including: whether the President’s duty to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed’ includes within its ‘outer perimeter’ at least five different forms of indicted conduct; whether inquiring into the President’s purpose for undertaking each form of that allegedly criminal conduct is constitutionally permissible in an immunity analysis, and whether any Presidential conduct ‘intertwined’ with otherwise constitutionally immune actions also receives criminal immunity. … Because it concludes that former Presidents do not possess absolute federal criminal immunity for any acts committed while in office, however, the court need not reach those additional constitutional issues, and it expresses no opinion on them.”
That’s as effective a way of discouraging Supreme Court review as one might ever see.
Chutkan’s ruling, coupled with the circuit court’s decision, represents a devastating blow to Trump’s attempt to evade accountability for Jan. 6. As Tribe put it, the decision might well have “shatter[ed] the last hope of the former president for avoiding the fate of running for the presidency as a convicted felon, a position in which much of his current support in the polls is bound to dissolve.” (Polling certainly bears out the conclusion that conviction as opposed to indictment would seriously hobble his election chances.)
Friday’s decisions open a relatively clear glide path to Trump’s March 4 trial, the very thing Trump has struggled to avoid. Within months, he will face prosecution by a capable Justice Department team armed with devastating facts and clear law before a competent judge.
Trump’s strategy to forestall justice by recapturing the presidency looks more and more like a pipe dream. That is unalloyed good news for our democracy.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan on Friday issued a stunning rebuke to four-times indicted former president Donald Trump, rejecting his motion to dismiss his Jan. 6, 2021, charges on absolute immunity and other specious constitutional grounds. The ruling came just hours after an appellate court rejected Trump’s immunity claim in a parallel civil case.
Chutkan’s ruling might turn out to be the most consequential legal defeat yet for Trump and quite possibly a decisive turning point in the 2024 presidential election.
In dispensing with Trump’s criminal immunity claim, Chutkan held emphatically, “The Constitution’s text, structure, and history do not support that contention. No court — or any other branch of government — has ever accepted it. And this court will not so hold.” She continued, “Whatever immunities a sitting President may enjoy, the United States has only one Chief Executive at a time, and that position does not confer a lifelong ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ pass.” She added, “Former Presidents enjoy no special conditions on their federal criminal liability. Defendant may be subject to federal investigation, indictment, prosecution, conviction, and punishment for any criminal acts undertaken while in office.”
Chutkan, looking at the text and structure of the Constitution and relevant history, made clear that in a criminal case, Trump has even less claim to immunity than would a sitting president in a civil case as set out in Nixon v. Fitzgerald. Unlike a civil suit for a sitting president, there is no concern here that prosecution would interfere with any official duties; moreover, the risk of “vexatious litigation” is greatly reduced because of protections afforded criminal defendants. (“In short, the concerns discussed in the civil context of Fitzgerald find no meaningful purchase here,” Chutkan wrote.)
In affirming the public interest in prosecution, Chutkan deftly quoted George Washington: “The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government.” As for historical precedent, she noted that no claim of absolute immunity from criminal prosecution has ever been sustained (largely because no president, other than the pardoned Richard M. Nixon, has been credibly accused of felonies in office).
“Judge Chutkan’s ruling is, quite simply, as solid as a rock and as piercing as tempered steel,” constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe told me. “Aided by the D.C. Circuit’s unanimous rejection just hours earlier of Mr. Trump’s parallel but somewhat stronger claim in the civil liability context, Judge Chutkan has now rendered a devastating blow to the former president’s pretensions to what she rightly dismissed as a kinglike prerogative, one that our entire system of government rebels against.”
Chutkan also dispensed with Trump’s bogus First Amendment claims, holding that he is not being prosecuted for speech but for attempting to overthrow the election. Speech in furtherance of criminal activity is not protected, she noted. Likewise, the case does not represent viewpoint discrimination nor an attempt to criminalize a call for government action because, again, he is being prosecuted not for his views but for his illegal efforts to reverse the election.
Chutkan then rejected Trump’s inane claim of double jeopardy based on his impeachment trial. First-year law students understand that impeachment concerns only the ability to retain and run for office; the criminal justice system operates separate and apart from impeachment in service of different aims.
Finally, Chutkan rejected the argument that the due process clause prevents prosecution because the statutes at issue are “so vague — and difficult to administer — that defendants lacked notice of how it would be applied in any given case.” It’s comical for a former president to say he didn’t have warning of laws he was sworn to uphold. In any event, Chutkan explained that the statutes at issue don’t “require the Executive or Judicial Branch to ‘guess’ at the prohibited conduct. … Nor does finding that the Indictment complies with due process require the court to create a novel judicial construction of any statute.”
Her decision takes on even more importance given the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit’s parallel decision in the civil case. Given its ruling in the civil case (in which more protections for Trump arguably apply), the appellate court in all likelihood would quickly affirm Chutkan’s ruling. As for further review to the Supreme Court, Tribe sees “no basis for the Court to come to Mr. Trump’s rescue, given the carefully limited reasoning of the district court’s opinion and the absence of any precedent or principle cutting in the former president’s favor.”
Moreover, Tribe told me that Chutkan helped “shield her ruling from reversal by emphasizing all the things she’s not deciding.” In fending off possible Supreme Court review, she not only emphasized that Trump might still be able to sustain his claims based on evidence presented at trial (a surefire way to dissuade the Supreme Court from taking up the case now) but also enumerated all the fact-intensive issues left to be decided (another way of waving off the high court):
“[The court] does not decide whether former Presidents retain absolute criminal immunity from non-federal prosecutions, or whether sitting Presidents are entitled to greater immunity than former ones. Similarly, the court expresses no opinion on the additional constitutional questions attendant to Defendant’s assertion that former Presidents retain absolute criminal immunity for acts ‘within the outer perimeter of the President’s official’ responsibility. … Even if the court were to accept that assertion, it could not grant Defendant immunity here without resolving several separate and disputed constitutional questions of first impression, including: whether the President’s duty to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed’ includes within its ‘outer perimeter’ at least five different forms of indicted conduct; whether inquiring into the President’s purpose for undertaking each form of that allegedly criminal conduct is constitutionally permissible in an immunity analysis, and whether any Presidential conduct ‘intertwined’ with otherwise constitutionally immune actions also receives criminal immunity. … Because it concludes that former Presidents do not possess absolute federal criminal immunity for any acts committed while in office, however, the court need not reach those additional constitutional issues, and it expresses no opinion on them.”
That’s as effective a way of discouraging Supreme Court review as one might ever see.
Chutkan’s ruling, coupled with the circuit court’s decision, represents a devastating blow to Trump’s attempt to evade accountability for Jan. 6. As Tribe put it, the decision might well have “shatter[ed] the last hope of the former president for avoiding the fate of running for the presidency as a convicted felon, a position in which much of his current support in the polls is bound to dissolve.” (Polling certainly bears out the conclusion that conviction as opposed to indictment would seriously hobble his election chances.)
Friday’s decisions open a relatively clear glide path to Trump’s March 4 trial, the very thing Trump has struggled to avoid. Within months, he will face prosecution by a capable Justice Department team armed with devastating facts and clear law before a competent judge.
Trump’s strategy to forestall justice by recapturing the presidency looks more and more like a pipe dream. That is unalloyed good news for our democracy.
SUPPOSED ‘MODERATES’ LIKE NIKKI HALEY WOULD BLOW UP GOVERNMENT, TOO
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
It’s tempting to believe most Republican presidential candidates — including the latest media darling, former ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley — are more “moderate” than front-runner Donald Trump. And if your low-bar definition of “moderate” is “unlikely to foment an insurrection,” then sure.
But when it comes to how they’d actually govern, many of their policy proposals are essentially a warmed-over Trump agenda. Among them: plans to dismantle the federal government’s basic functions and abilities to serve regular Americans.
Trump often speaks of “draining the swamp.” When Trump was president, this mostly meant draining the government of experts whose work he found inconvenient — such as those tasked with measuring the impact of his tax cuts or safeguarding the integrity of the 2020 election. He blew up a prestigious statistical agency, for instance, after it produced research he didn’t like, and on his way out the door, he laid the groundwork for a broader purge of civil servants.
Other GOP presidential hopefuls have now echoed Trump’s attacks on the “deep state” and promised purges of their own.
Businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, for instance, has promised to arbitrarily fire every civil servant whose Social Security number ends in an odd digit. More disturbingly, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s approach to domesticating “these deep state people” includes a pledge to “start slitting throats on Day One” — never mind that public workers at all levels of government are already at heightened risk of violent attacks.
Even Haley, who’s supposed to be the grown-up, “moderate” alternative to these histrionic boys, has offered her own more genteel-sounding version of the proposal. She has pledged to impose a “term limit” on all civil servants, so that every public worker would be fired after a maximum of five years.
Not just elected officials in Congress or the Senate. Everyone in federal government.
This sounds like a clever idea until you think about it for, oh, two seconds. It means we’d have to purge and replace every single air traffic controller every five years. Also all the nuclear physicists working for the Energy Department and rocket scientists at NASA, whose depth of expertise can’t easily be recreated on a five-year deadline.
Add to this list food-safety inspectors, who assess sanitary conditions at slaughterhouses. Statisticians who tabulate labor-market data. Epidemiologists who track outbreaks. Arabic and Farsi speakers throughout our intelligence services.
And everyone else who has some valuable, specialized expertise, and who, because of a sense of duty and belief in their public mission, is willing to tolerate constant denigration from elected officials and lower pay than they could receive in the private sector.
Proposals like Haley’s, in short, are a good way to destroy the basic machinery of government. Not the good “creative destruction” kind of destruction, either. It’s just demolition, involving expulsion of as many subject-matter experts as possible — including those who keep our country safe and our drinking water clean and whose skills are hard to replicate at the price we pay.
That’s not the only way Haley, among other supposed Republican moderates, plans to sabotage the broader functioning of government.
Like other candidates, Haley has promised to claw back Internal Revenue Service money dedicated to upgrading customer service and catching more wealthy tax cheats.
Defunding the IRS would have two major consequences. First, it would lead to a more frustrating experience for normal taxpayers merely trying to comply with the law (so, most Americans). Second, it would mean less revenue coming in to fund everything else the federal government does — including border security, law enforcement and other functions even Republicans concede are necessary.
Another proposal: Haley wants to have Congress vote on every federal rule and regulation. Once again, this has the gloss of thoughtfulness, until you do the briefest of homework about its likely consequences.
Congress already has the right to pass new laws (obviously) and to rescind regulations it dislikes. But it can barely get its act together to keep the lights on. Do you really want to require lawmakers to vote on every bit of minutiae usually left to subject-matter experts, such as aviation safety standards or the technical specs for mammography equipment? There are thousands of these rules issued each year.
But maybe it’s just easier for presidential contenders to run on a platform that government doesn’t work — and then, once in office, ensure that it never will again.
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
It’s tempting to believe most Republican presidential candidates — including the latest media darling, former ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley — are more “moderate” than front-runner Donald Trump. And if your low-bar definition of “moderate” is “unlikely to foment an insurrection,” then sure.
But when it comes to how they’d actually govern, many of their policy proposals are essentially a warmed-over Trump agenda. Among them: plans to dismantle the federal government’s basic functions and abilities to serve regular Americans.
Trump often speaks of “draining the swamp.” When Trump was president, this mostly meant draining the government of experts whose work he found inconvenient — such as those tasked with measuring the impact of his tax cuts or safeguarding the integrity of the 2020 election. He blew up a prestigious statistical agency, for instance, after it produced research he didn’t like, and on his way out the door, he laid the groundwork for a broader purge of civil servants.
Other GOP presidential hopefuls have now echoed Trump’s attacks on the “deep state” and promised purges of their own.
Businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, for instance, has promised to arbitrarily fire every civil servant whose Social Security number ends in an odd digit. More disturbingly, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s approach to domesticating “these deep state people” includes a pledge to “start slitting throats on Day One” — never mind that public workers at all levels of government are already at heightened risk of violent attacks.
Even Haley, who’s supposed to be the grown-up, “moderate” alternative to these histrionic boys, has offered her own more genteel-sounding version of the proposal. She has pledged to impose a “term limit” on all civil servants, so that every public worker would be fired after a maximum of five years.
Not just elected officials in Congress or the Senate. Everyone in federal government.
This sounds like a clever idea until you think about it for, oh, two seconds. It means we’d have to purge and replace every single air traffic controller every five years. Also all the nuclear physicists working for the Energy Department and rocket scientists at NASA, whose depth of expertise can’t easily be recreated on a five-year deadline.
Add to this list food-safety inspectors, who assess sanitary conditions at slaughterhouses. Statisticians who tabulate labor-market data. Epidemiologists who track outbreaks. Arabic and Farsi speakers throughout our intelligence services.
And everyone else who has some valuable, specialized expertise, and who, because of a sense of duty and belief in their public mission, is willing to tolerate constant denigration from elected officials and lower pay than they could receive in the private sector.
Proposals like Haley’s, in short, are a good way to destroy the basic machinery of government. Not the good “creative destruction” kind of destruction, either. It’s just demolition, involving expulsion of as many subject-matter experts as possible — including those who keep our country safe and our drinking water clean and whose skills are hard to replicate at the price we pay.
That’s not the only way Haley, among other supposed Republican moderates, plans to sabotage the broader functioning of government.
Like other candidates, Haley has promised to claw back Internal Revenue Service money dedicated to upgrading customer service and catching more wealthy tax cheats.
Defunding the IRS would have two major consequences. First, it would lead to a more frustrating experience for normal taxpayers merely trying to comply with the law (so, most Americans). Second, it would mean less revenue coming in to fund everything else the federal government does — including border security, law enforcement and other functions even Republicans concede are necessary.
Another proposal: Haley wants to have Congress vote on every federal rule and regulation. Once again, this has the gloss of thoughtfulness, until you do the briefest of homework about its likely consequences.
Congress already has the right to pass new laws (obviously) and to rescind regulations it dislikes. But it can barely get its act together to keep the lights on. Do you really want to require lawmakers to vote on every bit of minutiae usually left to subject-matter experts, such as aviation safety standards or the technical specs for mammography equipment? There are thousands of these rules issued each year.
But maybe it’s just easier for presidential contenders to run on a platform that government doesn’t work — and then, once in office, ensure that it never will again.
BIDEN TURNS UP PRESSURE ON CORPORATE ‘PRICE GOUGING’ AS 2024 NEARS
By Jeff Stein, The Washington Post
President Biden blasted corporate “price gouging” more forcefully this week than ever before, reflecting a renewed administration effort to respond to widespread voter discontent over the economy as next year’s election looms.
In remarks Monday, Biden struck his most populist tone yet in assailing firms for not lowering prices even as supply chains have healed. “Let me be clear: To any corporation that has not brought their prices back down — even as inflation has come down, even [as] supply chains have been rebuilt — it’s time to stop the price gouging,” he said in a speech about supply chains.
On Thursday, he followed up those comments with a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, reiterating that message.
Biden’s approach was buttressed by a federal report this week that corporate profits jumped in the most recent quarter, although they had been expected to decline. Corporate profits exceeded labor costs in the most recent quarter as part of inflation for the first time in 18 months, according to Mike Konczal, director of macroeconomic analysis at the Roosevelt Institute, a center-left think tank. In the most recent quarter, corporate profits accounted for slightly more than 15 percent of national income, representing a substantial increase from last year, when corporations earned close to $3 trillion in profit.
White House aides say the president’s remarks are part of a broader effort to pressure large companies to do more to lower prices when they can. One White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe administration thinking, pointed out that producer prices cooled markedly in October, with some firms seeing their costs decline without resulting in lower prices for consumers.
It is unclear how aggressive the president will be in his attempt to jawbone corporations over price gouging, and the White House declined to comment when asked if Biden would aim to identify specific corporations for criticism. Still, the White House official highlighted the actions of Walmart, which recently announced lower costs.
“The president will aggressively use the bully pulpit to call out the fact some companies are not passing on savings to American consumers,” the White House official said. “Even though the pandemic disruptions are behind us, some companies are keeping margins very high and his view is that some of those savings should be passed on.”
Biden has taken some steps — criticizing consolidation in the agricultural sector and the oil industry, for instance, and launching an initiative aimed at cracking down on “junk fees” across a range of industries. But many on the left have wanted him to go further.
“Americans are really upset about this: The polling on this is substantial, particularly among independents. Everything suggests this is the right strategy for the White House both substantively and politically,” Owens said.
Still, Konczal, of the Roosevelt Institute, pointed to data showing that corporate profits are at or near record highs for the last half-century — and defended the president’s attempts to call attention to that trend.
“It’s a really good time for us to think through why there are such high levels of corporate profits even as inflation is normalizing and supply chains are coming back online,” Konczal said. “It’s worthy of attention.”
By Jeff Stein, The Washington Post
President Biden blasted corporate “price gouging” more forcefully this week than ever before, reflecting a renewed administration effort to respond to widespread voter discontent over the economy as next year’s election looms.
In remarks Monday, Biden struck his most populist tone yet in assailing firms for not lowering prices even as supply chains have healed. “Let me be clear: To any corporation that has not brought their prices back down — even as inflation has come down, even [as] supply chains have been rebuilt — it’s time to stop the price gouging,” he said in a speech about supply chains.
On Thursday, he followed up those comments with a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, reiterating that message.
Biden’s approach was buttressed by a federal report this week that corporate profits jumped in the most recent quarter, although they had been expected to decline. Corporate profits exceeded labor costs in the most recent quarter as part of inflation for the first time in 18 months, according to Mike Konczal, director of macroeconomic analysis at the Roosevelt Institute, a center-left think tank. In the most recent quarter, corporate profits accounted for slightly more than 15 percent of national income, representing a substantial increase from last year, when corporations earned close to $3 trillion in profit.
White House aides say the president’s remarks are part of a broader effort to pressure large companies to do more to lower prices when they can. One White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe administration thinking, pointed out that producer prices cooled markedly in October, with some firms seeing their costs decline without resulting in lower prices for consumers.
It is unclear how aggressive the president will be in his attempt to jawbone corporations over price gouging, and the White House declined to comment when asked if Biden would aim to identify specific corporations for criticism. Still, the White House official highlighted the actions of Walmart, which recently announced lower costs.
“The president will aggressively use the bully pulpit to call out the fact some companies are not passing on savings to American consumers,” the White House official said. “Even though the pandemic disruptions are behind us, some companies are keeping margins very high and his view is that some of those savings should be passed on.”
Biden has taken some steps — criticizing consolidation in the agricultural sector and the oil industry, for instance, and launching an initiative aimed at cracking down on “junk fees” across a range of industries. But many on the left have wanted him to go further.
“Americans are really upset about this: The polling on this is substantial, particularly among independents. Everything suggests this is the right strategy for the White House both substantively and politically,” Owens said.
Still, Konczal, of the Roosevelt Institute, pointed to data showing that corporate profits are at or near record highs for the last half-century — and defended the president’s attempts to call attention to that trend.
“It’s a really good time for us to think through why there are such high levels of corporate profits even as inflation is normalizing and supply chains are coming back online,” Konczal said. “It’s worthy of attention.”
WITH TRUMP MOVING CLOSER TO RENOMINATION, REWRITING JAN. 6 ATTACK GAINS URGENCY
By Philip Bump, The Washington Post
There is no mystery about the Capitol riot. There is nothing intangible, no unseen engine for what occurred. There is no uncertainty about what happened and why.
But because everything about what unfolded on Jan. 6, 2021, implicates the cultural leader of the Republican Party — and because pretending that a mystery exists benefits him — we approach the third anniversary of that day with renewed efforts to rewrite its history.
Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election and very obviously refused to accept it. Any questions about the legitimacy of the vote — stoked by Trump for years — evaporated within weeks, if not days. Many of his allies shifted to vague arguments about how the system was working against him. But Trump didn’t. He argued that there was fraud covered up by Trump haters and, with increasing desperation, demanded that his supporters in Washington and elsewhere rise to his defense.
A few hours after a heated Oval Office argument in which his team tried to figure out how to retain power, he shared a post on social media calling for supporters to come to Washington on Jan. 6. The day’s protest, he promised, would “be wild.” This message itself comes up repeatedly when looking at the triggers for participants to be at the Capitol on that day.
Thousands came. Trump, still trying to figure out how to block the certification of Joe Biden’s election, gave a speech to the crowd making more false claims about fraud, including debunked ones, and encouraged people to march to the Capitol. They did. There was a riot. People died. Scores of police officers were assaulted. A few hours later, Trump’s loss was formalized.
In short, the day’s violence was carried out by Trump supporters and supporters of Trump’s politics. They were there not only because Trump specified that day and place as the location of a “protest” but because he’d relentlessly argued that a protest was needed. The intent was explicitly to challenge the results of the 2020 election. That Trump used the word “peacefully” once in his speech is no more exculpatory than the fact that thousands of Trump supporters weren’t violent and didn’t enter the Capitol. There was violence and there were violent actors; they were there because Trump refused to accept that voters had rejected him.
There was a point at which this might have understandably seemed like the coda to Trump’s tenure in politics. Trump lost the election and then stoked a violent response to the transfer of power. History books, if not Hollywood, suggest an epilogue in which he spends his remaining years exiled to the wilderness.
But he was never exiled. Less than two weeks after Trump’s departure from Washington, the leader of the House Republican conference, seeking to solidify his own power, paid the former president a sycophantic visit. Since 2015, Republicans had figured out that even valid criticisms of Trump could be pivoted to his and their advantage, and the riot was no different. So they did and, 1,000 days after the riot, Trump found himself the clear front-runner for the Republican 2024 presidential nomination.
This adds new urgency to efforts by Trump’s allies to neutralize his response to the 2020 election as a political issue. Trump’s opponents, including President Biden, have focused on Trump’s rejection of the election results — on his efforts to sideline democracy — as a central reason to oppose him in 2024. There’s evidence that many voters view 2024 through this lens. While many of the right’s defenses of Trump center on the short-term rewards of allying with his rhetoric, some of them are obviously more tactical.
These defenses take a number of forms.
The most deluded centers on the idea that the riot was not actually a function of Trump supporters or a desire to see Trump retain power. Two alternative culprits are generally proposed: federal agents or left-wing actors.
The latter idea was voiced immediately after the riot and was quickly debunked. But it lingers: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who’s selling a book, told Donald Trump Jr. on a recent podcast that “nobody could tell me that those were Trump supporters” and that she believes “they were antifa — [Black Lives Matter] rioters.”
There’s no evidence of this at all. In fact, it defies any logic. For Greene, though, this is a long-held argument. During the riot itself, she texted White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to tell him that she and others “think they are Antifa … [d]ressed like Trump supporters.” Of course, that was about 90 minutes after she’d texted Meadows to exhort him to “[p]lease tell the President to calm people[.] This isn’t the way to solve anything.”
Greene’s response to Jan. 6 has been nearly as fungible and opportunistic as Trump’s. The rioters were antifa — except that those being held for committing acts of violence are also political prisoners being targeted for their Trump support by a nefarious Joe Biden.
This argument depends on a useful glossing over of what detainees actually did. Many of those who are in prison agreed to plea deals — which is to say they admitted guilt. Others were convicted of assaults on police officers. Others still were members of groups such as the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers who actively planned to disrupt the transition of power or to aid Trump in doing so. Lumping them all together as victims of a punitive state makes it much easier to ignore what they actually did.
It also makes it easier to cast Trump himself as the target of Deep State hostility. This has been his line for years, of course, but it gained new heft after the multiple indictments obtained against him this year. Many Trump supporters think he’s being unfairly targeted by leftist prosecutors; it’s hardly a stretch to suggest that this extends back to the weeks before Jan. 6, 2021. There’s no more evidence (much less logical reason) to support the idea that federal agents triggered the riot than there is to believe antifa did it. But every time someone is incorrectly identified as a federal agent or just asks questions about it, new space is introduced for Trump to argue that this is all meant to impede his power.
Elevation of doubt is at the heart of so much of this. You don’t need to know precisely what federal agent provocateur made Jan. 6 happen, but if you’re open to the idea that perhaps one did, you’re probably less compelled by arguments that Trump posed or poses a threat to democracy. If you are convinced that the House select committee investigating the riot was trying to take down Trump, it becomes easier to wave away the evidence presented that showed Trump’s culpability. And then, by extension, shrug at the similar or overlapping evidence from special counsel Jack Smith.
Elevation of doubt, in fact, offers its own political rewards. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) recently announced that he would make available thousands of hours of security footage from the Capitol on that day — footage that has already been used to suggest both that nefarious, non-Trump actors were involved and that the day’s violence was overstated, given that much of the footage shows nothing but empty corridors. Cameras in the aft section of the Titanic would have shown tranquil scenes, too, until they were submerged.
Republican voices in opposition to reframing the aftermath of the 2020 election are becoming more scarce.
“Everyone who makes the argument that January 6 was an unguided tour of the Capitol is lying to America,” Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “Everyone who says that the prisoners who are being prosecuted right now for their involvement in January 6, that they are somehow political prisoners or that they didn’t commit crimes, those folks are lying to America.”
Buck may feel more free to say these true things because he announced that he would not seek reelection. Former Wyoming representative Liz Cheney (R) was free to challenge Sen. Mike Lee’s (R-Utah) misinformation about Capitol security footage because she no longer needs to appeal to Republican voters. Lee does.
No one is happier to elevate doubt about the Capitol riot than Trump, of course. He’s floated pardoning those involved in the violence, reinforcing the idea that they — like him, of course! — are being unfairly targeted. He’s argued that the day’s events were not his fault and attacked critics who suggest otherwise.
Put another way: What Trump is doing now, 340-odd days before the 2024 general election, is amplifying self-serving falsehoods and finding a hungry audience for them. This is also precisely what he was doing in the weeks before the Capitol riot.
By Philip Bump, The Washington Post
There is no mystery about the Capitol riot. There is nothing intangible, no unseen engine for what occurred. There is no uncertainty about what happened and why.
But because everything about what unfolded on Jan. 6, 2021, implicates the cultural leader of the Republican Party — and because pretending that a mystery exists benefits him — we approach the third anniversary of that day with renewed efforts to rewrite its history.
Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election and very obviously refused to accept it. Any questions about the legitimacy of the vote — stoked by Trump for years — evaporated within weeks, if not days. Many of his allies shifted to vague arguments about how the system was working against him. But Trump didn’t. He argued that there was fraud covered up by Trump haters and, with increasing desperation, demanded that his supporters in Washington and elsewhere rise to his defense.
A few hours after a heated Oval Office argument in which his team tried to figure out how to retain power, he shared a post on social media calling for supporters to come to Washington on Jan. 6. The day’s protest, he promised, would “be wild.” This message itself comes up repeatedly when looking at the triggers for participants to be at the Capitol on that day.
Thousands came. Trump, still trying to figure out how to block the certification of Joe Biden’s election, gave a speech to the crowd making more false claims about fraud, including debunked ones, and encouraged people to march to the Capitol. They did. There was a riot. People died. Scores of police officers were assaulted. A few hours later, Trump’s loss was formalized.
In short, the day’s violence was carried out by Trump supporters and supporters of Trump’s politics. They were there not only because Trump specified that day and place as the location of a “protest” but because he’d relentlessly argued that a protest was needed. The intent was explicitly to challenge the results of the 2020 election. That Trump used the word “peacefully” once in his speech is no more exculpatory than the fact that thousands of Trump supporters weren’t violent and didn’t enter the Capitol. There was violence and there were violent actors; they were there because Trump refused to accept that voters had rejected him.
There was a point at which this might have understandably seemed like the coda to Trump’s tenure in politics. Trump lost the election and then stoked a violent response to the transfer of power. History books, if not Hollywood, suggest an epilogue in which he spends his remaining years exiled to the wilderness.
But he was never exiled. Less than two weeks after Trump’s departure from Washington, the leader of the House Republican conference, seeking to solidify his own power, paid the former president a sycophantic visit. Since 2015, Republicans had figured out that even valid criticisms of Trump could be pivoted to his and their advantage, and the riot was no different. So they did and, 1,000 days after the riot, Trump found himself the clear front-runner for the Republican 2024 presidential nomination.
This adds new urgency to efforts by Trump’s allies to neutralize his response to the 2020 election as a political issue. Trump’s opponents, including President Biden, have focused on Trump’s rejection of the election results — on his efforts to sideline democracy — as a central reason to oppose him in 2024. There’s evidence that many voters view 2024 through this lens. While many of the right’s defenses of Trump center on the short-term rewards of allying with his rhetoric, some of them are obviously more tactical.
These defenses take a number of forms.
The most deluded centers on the idea that the riot was not actually a function of Trump supporters or a desire to see Trump retain power. Two alternative culprits are generally proposed: federal agents or left-wing actors.
The latter idea was voiced immediately after the riot and was quickly debunked. But it lingers: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who’s selling a book, told Donald Trump Jr. on a recent podcast that “nobody could tell me that those were Trump supporters” and that she believes “they were antifa — [Black Lives Matter] rioters.”
There’s no evidence of this at all. In fact, it defies any logic. For Greene, though, this is a long-held argument. During the riot itself, she texted White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to tell him that she and others “think they are Antifa … [d]ressed like Trump supporters.” Of course, that was about 90 minutes after she’d texted Meadows to exhort him to “[p]lease tell the President to calm people[.] This isn’t the way to solve anything.”
Greene’s response to Jan. 6 has been nearly as fungible and opportunistic as Trump’s. The rioters were antifa — except that those being held for committing acts of violence are also political prisoners being targeted for their Trump support by a nefarious Joe Biden.
This argument depends on a useful glossing over of what detainees actually did. Many of those who are in prison agreed to plea deals — which is to say they admitted guilt. Others were convicted of assaults on police officers. Others still were members of groups such as the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers who actively planned to disrupt the transition of power or to aid Trump in doing so. Lumping them all together as victims of a punitive state makes it much easier to ignore what they actually did.
It also makes it easier to cast Trump himself as the target of Deep State hostility. This has been his line for years, of course, but it gained new heft after the multiple indictments obtained against him this year. Many Trump supporters think he’s being unfairly targeted by leftist prosecutors; it’s hardly a stretch to suggest that this extends back to the weeks before Jan. 6, 2021. There’s no more evidence (much less logical reason) to support the idea that federal agents triggered the riot than there is to believe antifa did it. But every time someone is incorrectly identified as a federal agent or just asks questions about it, new space is introduced for Trump to argue that this is all meant to impede his power.
Elevation of doubt is at the heart of so much of this. You don’t need to know precisely what federal agent provocateur made Jan. 6 happen, but if you’re open to the idea that perhaps one did, you’re probably less compelled by arguments that Trump posed or poses a threat to democracy. If you are convinced that the House select committee investigating the riot was trying to take down Trump, it becomes easier to wave away the evidence presented that showed Trump’s culpability. And then, by extension, shrug at the similar or overlapping evidence from special counsel Jack Smith.
Elevation of doubt, in fact, offers its own political rewards. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) recently announced that he would make available thousands of hours of security footage from the Capitol on that day — footage that has already been used to suggest both that nefarious, non-Trump actors were involved and that the day’s violence was overstated, given that much of the footage shows nothing but empty corridors. Cameras in the aft section of the Titanic would have shown tranquil scenes, too, until they were submerged.
Republican voices in opposition to reframing the aftermath of the 2020 election are becoming more scarce.
“Everyone who makes the argument that January 6 was an unguided tour of the Capitol is lying to America,” Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “Everyone who says that the prisoners who are being prosecuted right now for their involvement in January 6, that they are somehow political prisoners or that they didn’t commit crimes, those folks are lying to America.”
Buck may feel more free to say these true things because he announced that he would not seek reelection. Former Wyoming representative Liz Cheney (R) was free to challenge Sen. Mike Lee’s (R-Utah) misinformation about Capitol security footage because she no longer needs to appeal to Republican voters. Lee does.
No one is happier to elevate doubt about the Capitol riot than Trump, of course. He’s floated pardoning those involved in the violence, reinforcing the idea that they — like him, of course! — are being unfairly targeted. He’s argued that the day’s events were not his fault and attacked critics who suggest otherwise.
Put another way: What Trump is doing now, 340-odd days before the 2024 general election, is amplifying self-serving falsehoods and finding a hungry audience for them. This is also precisely what he was doing in the weeks before the Capitol riot.
EFFORTS TO KILL OBAMACARE MADE IT POPULAR. TRUMP SAYS HE’LL TRY AGAIN.
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
Unable to come up with new policy ideas, former president Donald Trump has returned to playing the greatest hits. A case in point: He is once again threatening to repeal Obamacare.
It’s hard to think of a more wrongheaded campaign promise than this, on both political and policy grounds.
To be sure, there was once a time when destroying Obamacare, a.k.a. the Affordable Care Act, was a winning issue for Republicans. For the first few years after the marquee health-care law passed in 2010, many voters despised it. The law’s favorability was underwater in almost every poll for the first six years of its existence.
Such disdain had relatively little to do with what the law actually did. Yes, there was a small slice of the population angered by the loss of cheap, threadbare health coverage that was being phased out. A few other critics had philosophical objections to the law’s objectives — i.e., whether the government should even try to guarantee universal access to insurance, or to specific kinds of health-care services.
But for the most part, it was the GOP’s fearmongering campaigns that gave the law a black eye. Obamacare was a technical and complicated suite of programs, and government complexity is generally an opportunity for demagogues. So demagogue Republicans did, convincing Americans that this scary new statute would kill not only jobs and federal budgets, but somehow even your beloved grandma, too. (Remember “death panels”?)
None of these things came to pass. And while the Obamacare brand might have been unpopular, most of Obamacare’s actual provisions were well-liked. Nearly every major plank of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) — such as guaranteeing coverage to people with preexisting conditions, expanding Medicaid, and allowing children to stay on their parents’ insurance plans for longer — was and continues to be favored by the public.
It took a while for Americans to connect the dots between the law’s name and its popular provisions. Specifically, it took a potent threat of repeal, when Republicans gained control of the presidency in 2017 to go along with majorities in both chambers of Congress. The GOP repeatedly tried to “repeal and replace” the law, but could not come up with anything that would prevent millions of Americans from losing care.
Ultimately, Republicans were unable to muster the votes to dislodge the ACA. What they did do was scare voters straight about what losing it would mean. Ever since these failed efforts, Obamacare has consistently garnered more favorable than unfavorable views from the public (59 percent to 40 percent in the most recent KFF poll, from May).
This has been an unequivocal boon to Democrats, who regained control of the House after the 2018 midterms largely by promising to safeguard health coverage. Red states have also increasingly been hopping on the ACA bandwagon, often as a result of popular-ballot measures to expand Medicaid.
Most Republican politicians have now figured out that talking about health care is a political liability, so they’ve shut up about it. In the 2022 midterms, for instance, health care was the second-most-frequently featured topic in Democrats’ campaign ads (behind abortion); in Republicans’ ads, health care did not even crack the top 20 issues, according to data from AdImpact.
Trump hasn’t gotten the message, though. Over the weekend, he declared on social media that the failure to terminate Obamacare during his presidency “was a low point for the Republican Party, but we should never give up!”
Trump is right about one thing: Voters remain unhappy about the health-care status quo. A majority of Americans from both parties say health costs are a major problem for the country.
Not everyone who wants insurance is able to purchase it, and many who have insurance are still struggling with out-of-pocket costs. Some of these challenges are because of shortcomings in the drafting of the ACA; others are a consequence of the GOP’s relentless sabotage efforts.
If you’re wondering who is actually trying to fix such problems, though, don’t look to Republican politicians, who remain reluctant to talk about health care even when directly asked. Definitely don’t look to Trump, whose secret plan to replace Obamacare with “something terrific,” remains, alas, perpetually two weeks away.
Instead, look to President Biden, who’s implemented a bunch of little-noticed, technical measures to improve Americans’ access to care and lower their costs.
Biden has patched the “family glitch,” a long-standing affordability problem with employer-sponsored health plans. He has reversed some of Trump’s efforts to undermine individual-market plans. Under the president’s leadership, Congress has also expanded premium tax credits available for individual health plans. This means many more Americans do not have to pay anything for their health insurance, at least through 2025.
What’s more, stymied only by a couple of uncooperative Democratic senators, Biden brought Congress tantalizingly close last year to concluding the unfinished business of Obamacare: making eligibility for health coverage virtually universal, as is already the case in all other rich countries.
If Trump wants to make yet another election about health care, well, have at it. But if voters who appreciate the Affordable Care Act evaluate the candidates’ actual records, Biden deserves to win by a landslide.
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
Unable to come up with new policy ideas, former president Donald Trump has returned to playing the greatest hits. A case in point: He is once again threatening to repeal Obamacare.
It’s hard to think of a more wrongheaded campaign promise than this, on both political and policy grounds.
To be sure, there was once a time when destroying Obamacare, a.k.a. the Affordable Care Act, was a winning issue for Republicans. For the first few years after the marquee health-care law passed in 2010, many voters despised it. The law’s favorability was underwater in almost every poll for the first six years of its existence.
Such disdain had relatively little to do with what the law actually did. Yes, there was a small slice of the population angered by the loss of cheap, threadbare health coverage that was being phased out. A few other critics had philosophical objections to the law’s objectives — i.e., whether the government should even try to guarantee universal access to insurance, or to specific kinds of health-care services.
But for the most part, it was the GOP’s fearmongering campaigns that gave the law a black eye. Obamacare was a technical and complicated suite of programs, and government complexity is generally an opportunity for demagogues. So demagogue Republicans did, convincing Americans that this scary new statute would kill not only jobs and federal budgets, but somehow even your beloved grandma, too. (Remember “death panels”?)
None of these things came to pass. And while the Obamacare brand might have been unpopular, most of Obamacare’s actual provisions were well-liked. Nearly every major plank of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) — such as guaranteeing coverage to people with preexisting conditions, expanding Medicaid, and allowing children to stay on their parents’ insurance plans for longer — was and continues to be favored by the public.
It took a while for Americans to connect the dots between the law’s name and its popular provisions. Specifically, it took a potent threat of repeal, when Republicans gained control of the presidency in 2017 to go along with majorities in both chambers of Congress. The GOP repeatedly tried to “repeal and replace” the law, but could not come up with anything that would prevent millions of Americans from losing care.
Ultimately, Republicans were unable to muster the votes to dislodge the ACA. What they did do was scare voters straight about what losing it would mean. Ever since these failed efforts, Obamacare has consistently garnered more favorable than unfavorable views from the public (59 percent to 40 percent in the most recent KFF poll, from May).
This has been an unequivocal boon to Democrats, who regained control of the House after the 2018 midterms largely by promising to safeguard health coverage. Red states have also increasingly been hopping on the ACA bandwagon, often as a result of popular-ballot measures to expand Medicaid.
Most Republican politicians have now figured out that talking about health care is a political liability, so they’ve shut up about it. In the 2022 midterms, for instance, health care was the second-most-frequently featured topic in Democrats’ campaign ads (behind abortion); in Republicans’ ads, health care did not even crack the top 20 issues, according to data from AdImpact.
Trump hasn’t gotten the message, though. Over the weekend, he declared on social media that the failure to terminate Obamacare during his presidency “was a low point for the Republican Party, but we should never give up!”
Trump is right about one thing: Voters remain unhappy about the health-care status quo. A majority of Americans from both parties say health costs are a major problem for the country.
Not everyone who wants insurance is able to purchase it, and many who have insurance are still struggling with out-of-pocket costs. Some of these challenges are because of shortcomings in the drafting of the ACA; others are a consequence of the GOP’s relentless sabotage efforts.
If you’re wondering who is actually trying to fix such problems, though, don’t look to Republican politicians, who remain reluctant to talk about health care even when directly asked. Definitely don’t look to Trump, whose secret plan to replace Obamacare with “something terrific,” remains, alas, perpetually two weeks away.
Instead, look to President Biden, who’s implemented a bunch of little-noticed, technical measures to improve Americans’ access to care and lower their costs.
Biden has patched the “family glitch,” a long-standing affordability problem with employer-sponsored health plans. He has reversed some of Trump’s efforts to undermine individual-market plans. Under the president’s leadership, Congress has also expanded premium tax credits available for individual health plans. This means many more Americans do not have to pay anything for their health insurance, at least through 2025.
What’s more, stymied only by a couple of uncooperative Democratic senators, Biden brought Congress tantalizingly close last year to concluding the unfinished business of Obamacare: making eligibility for health coverage virtually universal, as is already the case in all other rich countries.
If Trump wants to make yet another election about health care, well, have at it. But if voters who appreciate the Affordable Care Act evaluate the candidates’ actual records, Biden deserves to win by a landslide.
TRUMP HAS A MASTER PLAN FOR DESTROYING THE ‘DEEP STATE’
By Donald P. Moynihan, professor of public policy at Georgetown and an expert on the administrative state.
I study government bureaucracies. This is not normally a key political issue. Right now, it is, and everyone should be paying attention.
Donald Trump, the former president and current candidate, puts it in apocalyptic terms: “Either the deep state destroys America or we destroy the deep state.” This is not an empty threat. He has a real and plausible plan to utterly transform American government. It will undermine the quality of that government and it will threaten our democracy.
A second Trump administration would be very different from the first. Mr. Trump’s blueprint for amassing power has been developed by a constellation of conservative organizations that surround him, led by the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025. This plan would elevate personal fealty to Mr. Trump as the central value in government employment, processes and institutions.
It has three major parts.
The first is to put Trump loyalists into appointment positions. Mr. Trump believed that “the resistance” to his presidency included his own appointees. Unlike in 2016, he now has a deep bench of loyalists. The Heritage Foundation and dozens of other Trump-aligned organizations are screening candidates to create 20,000 potential MAGA appointees. They will be placed in every agency across government, including the agencies responsible for protecting the environment, regulating workplace safety, collecting taxes, determining immigration policy, maintaining safety net programs, representing American interests overseas and ensuring the impartial rule of law.
These are not conservatives reluctantly serving Mr. Trump out of a sense of patriotic duty, but those enthusiastic about helping a twice-impeached president who tried to overturn the results of an election. An influx of appointees like this would come at a cost to the rest of us. Political science research that examines the effects of politicization on federal agencies shows that political appointees, especially inexperienced ones, are associated with lower performance in government and less responsiveness to the public and to Congress.
The second part of the Trump plan is to terrify career civil servants into submission. To do so, he would reimpose an executive order that he signed but never implemented at the end of his first administration. The Schedule F order would allow him to convert many of these officials into political appointees.
Schedule F would be the most profound change to the civil service system since its creation in 1883. Presidents can currently fill about 4,000 political appointment positions at the federal level. This already makes the United States an outlier among similar democracies, in terms of the degree of politicization of the government. The authors of Schedule F have suggested it would be used to turn another 50,000 officials — with deep experience of how to run every major federal program we rely on — into appointees. Other Republican presidential candidates have also pledged to use Schedule F aggressively. Ron DeSantis, for example, promised that as president he would “start slitting throats on Day 1.”
Schedule F would be a catastrophe for government performance. Merit-based government personnel systems perform better than more politicized bureaucracies. Under the first Trump administration, career officials were more likely to quit when sidelined by political appointees.
Schedule F would also damage democracy. The framers included a requirement, in the Constitution itself, that public officials swear an oath of loyalty to the Constitution, a reminder to public employees that their deepest loyalty is to something greater than whoever occupies the White House or Congress. By using Schedule F to demand personal loyalty, Mr. Trump would make it harder for them to keep that oath.
When he was president, his administration frequently targeted officials for abuse, denial of promotions or investigations for their perceived disloyalty. In a second administration, he would simply fire them. Trump loyalists reportedly have lists ready of civil servants who will be fired because they were not deemed cooperative enough during his first term.
The third part of Mr. Trump’s authoritarian blueprint is to create a legal framework that would allow him to use government resources to protect himself, attack his political enemies and force through his policy goals without congressional approval. Internal government lawyers can block illegal or unconstitutional actions. Reporters for The New York Times have uncovered a plan to place Trump loyalists in those key positions.
This is not about conservatism. Mr. Trump grew disillusioned with conservative Federalist Society lawyers, despite drawing on them to stock his judicial nominations. It is about finding lawyers willing to create a legal rationale for his authoritarian impulses. Examples from Mr. Trump’s time in office include Mark Paoletta, the former general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget, who approved Mr. Trump’s illegal withholding of aid to Ukraine. Or Jeffery Clark, who almost became Mr. Trump’s acting attorney general when his superiors refused to advance Mr. Trump’s false claims of election fraud.
Mr. Clark is now under indictment for a “criminal attempt to communicate false statements and writings” to Georgia state officials. But he continues to lay the groundwork for a second Trump term. He has made the case for the president using military forces for domestic law enforcement. He has also written a legal analysis arguing that “the U.S. Justice Department is not independent,” while Mr. Paoletta told The Times, “I believe a president doesn’t need to be so hands-off with the D.O.J.” If government lawyers will not defend norms of Justice Department independence, Mr. Trump will use the department to shield himself from legal accountability and to pursue his enemies.
We sometimes think of democracy as merely the act of voting. But the operation of government is also democracy in action, a measure of how well the social contract between the citizen and the state is being kept. When values like transparency, legality, honesty, due process, fealty to the Constitution and competence are threatened in government offices, so too is our democracy. These democratic values would be eviscerated if Mr. Trump returns to power with an army of loyalists applying novel legal theories and imposing a political code of silence on potential holdouts.
American bureaucracy is often slow and cumbersome. The civil service system in particular is in need of modernization. But it is also suffused with democratic checks that limit the abuse of centralized power. This is why Mr. Trump and his supporters are so precisely targeting the administrative state, taking advantage of an antipathy toward Washington that both parties have long nurtured. If Mr. Trump has a chance to implement his various plans, expect a weaker American government, worse public services and the dismantling of limits on presidential power.
By Donald P. Moynihan, professor of public policy at Georgetown and an expert on the administrative state.
I study government bureaucracies. This is not normally a key political issue. Right now, it is, and everyone should be paying attention.
Donald Trump, the former president and current candidate, puts it in apocalyptic terms: “Either the deep state destroys America or we destroy the deep state.” This is not an empty threat. He has a real and plausible plan to utterly transform American government. It will undermine the quality of that government and it will threaten our democracy.
A second Trump administration would be very different from the first. Mr. Trump’s blueprint for amassing power has been developed by a constellation of conservative organizations that surround him, led by the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025. This plan would elevate personal fealty to Mr. Trump as the central value in government employment, processes and institutions.
It has three major parts.
The first is to put Trump loyalists into appointment positions. Mr. Trump believed that “the resistance” to his presidency included his own appointees. Unlike in 2016, he now has a deep bench of loyalists. The Heritage Foundation and dozens of other Trump-aligned organizations are screening candidates to create 20,000 potential MAGA appointees. They will be placed in every agency across government, including the agencies responsible for protecting the environment, regulating workplace safety, collecting taxes, determining immigration policy, maintaining safety net programs, representing American interests overseas and ensuring the impartial rule of law.
These are not conservatives reluctantly serving Mr. Trump out of a sense of patriotic duty, but those enthusiastic about helping a twice-impeached president who tried to overturn the results of an election. An influx of appointees like this would come at a cost to the rest of us. Political science research that examines the effects of politicization on federal agencies shows that political appointees, especially inexperienced ones, are associated with lower performance in government and less responsiveness to the public and to Congress.
The second part of the Trump plan is to terrify career civil servants into submission. To do so, he would reimpose an executive order that he signed but never implemented at the end of his first administration. The Schedule F order would allow him to convert many of these officials into political appointees.
Schedule F would be the most profound change to the civil service system since its creation in 1883. Presidents can currently fill about 4,000 political appointment positions at the federal level. This already makes the United States an outlier among similar democracies, in terms of the degree of politicization of the government. The authors of Schedule F have suggested it would be used to turn another 50,000 officials — with deep experience of how to run every major federal program we rely on — into appointees. Other Republican presidential candidates have also pledged to use Schedule F aggressively. Ron DeSantis, for example, promised that as president he would “start slitting throats on Day 1.”
Schedule F would be a catastrophe for government performance. Merit-based government personnel systems perform better than more politicized bureaucracies. Under the first Trump administration, career officials were more likely to quit when sidelined by political appointees.
Schedule F would also damage democracy. The framers included a requirement, in the Constitution itself, that public officials swear an oath of loyalty to the Constitution, a reminder to public employees that their deepest loyalty is to something greater than whoever occupies the White House or Congress. By using Schedule F to demand personal loyalty, Mr. Trump would make it harder for them to keep that oath.
When he was president, his administration frequently targeted officials for abuse, denial of promotions or investigations for their perceived disloyalty. In a second administration, he would simply fire them. Trump loyalists reportedly have lists ready of civil servants who will be fired because they were not deemed cooperative enough during his first term.
The third part of Mr. Trump’s authoritarian blueprint is to create a legal framework that would allow him to use government resources to protect himself, attack his political enemies and force through his policy goals without congressional approval. Internal government lawyers can block illegal or unconstitutional actions. Reporters for The New York Times have uncovered a plan to place Trump loyalists in those key positions.
This is not about conservatism. Mr. Trump grew disillusioned with conservative Federalist Society lawyers, despite drawing on them to stock his judicial nominations. It is about finding lawyers willing to create a legal rationale for his authoritarian impulses. Examples from Mr. Trump’s time in office include Mark Paoletta, the former general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget, who approved Mr. Trump’s illegal withholding of aid to Ukraine. Or Jeffery Clark, who almost became Mr. Trump’s acting attorney general when his superiors refused to advance Mr. Trump’s false claims of election fraud.
Mr. Clark is now under indictment for a “criminal attempt to communicate false statements and writings” to Georgia state officials. But he continues to lay the groundwork for a second Trump term. He has made the case for the president using military forces for domestic law enforcement. He has also written a legal analysis arguing that “the U.S. Justice Department is not independent,” while Mr. Paoletta told The Times, “I believe a president doesn’t need to be so hands-off with the D.O.J.” If government lawyers will not defend norms of Justice Department independence, Mr. Trump will use the department to shield himself from legal accountability and to pursue his enemies.
We sometimes think of democracy as merely the act of voting. But the operation of government is also democracy in action, a measure of how well the social contract between the citizen and the state is being kept. When values like transparency, legality, honesty, due process, fealty to the Constitution and competence are threatened in government offices, so too is our democracy. These democratic values would be eviscerated if Mr. Trump returns to power with an army of loyalists applying novel legal theories and imposing a political code of silence on potential holdouts.
American bureaucracy is often slow and cumbersome. The civil service system in particular is in need of modernization. But it is also suffused with democratic checks that limit the abuse of centralized power. This is why Mr. Trump and his supporters are so precisely targeting the administrative state, taking advantage of an antipathy toward Washington that both parties have long nurtured. If Mr. Trump has a chance to implement his various plans, expect a weaker American government, worse public services and the dismantling of limits on presidential power.
THE ROOTS OF TRUMP’S RAGE
By Thomas B. Edsall, The New York Times
Brian Klaas, a political scientist at University College London, captured the remarkable nature of the 2024 presidential election in an Oct. 1 essay, “The Case for Amplifying Trump’s Insanity.”
Klaas argued that the presidential contest now pits
“a 77-year-old racist, misogynist bigot who has been found liable for rape, who incited a deadly, violent insurrection aimed at overturning a democratic election, who has committed mass fraud for personal enrichment, who is facing 91 separate counts of felony criminal charges against him and who has overtly discussed his authoritarian strategies for governing if he returns to power”
against “an 80-year-old with mainstream Democratic Party views who sometimes misspeaks or trips.”
“One of those two candidates,” Klaas noted, “faces relentless newspaper columns and TV pundit ‘takes’ arguing that he should drop out of the race. (Spoiler alert: It’s somehow not the racist authoritarian sexual abuse fraudster facing 91 felony charges).”
Klaas asked:
“What is going on? How is it possible that the leading candidate to become president of the United States can float the prospect of executing a general and the media response is … crickets?”
How is it possible that it’s not front page news when a man who soon may return to power calls for law enforcement to kill people for minor crimes? And why do so few people question Trump’s mental acuity rather than Biden’s, when Trump proposes delusional, unhinged plans for forest management and warns his supporters that Biden is going to lead us into World War II (which would require a time machine), or wrongly claims that he defeated Barack Obama in 2016?
The media, Klaas argued, has adopted a policy in covering Donald Trump of “Don’t amplify him! You’re just spreading his message.”
In Klaas’s view, newspapers and television have succumbed to what he called the “banality of crazy,” ignoring “even the most dangerous policy proposals by an authoritarian who is on the cusp of once again becoming the most powerful man in the world — precisely because it happens, like clockwork, almost every day.”
This approach, according to Klaas,
“has backfired. It’s bad for democracy. The “don’t amplify him” argument is disastrous. We need to amplify Trump’s vile rhetoric more, because it will turn persuadable voters off to his cruel message.”
Looking over the eight and a half years during which Trump has been directly engaged in presidential politics, it’s not as if there had been no warning signs.
Three months after Trump took office, in April 2017, a conference called A Duty to Warn was held at the Yale School of Medicine.
The conference resulted in a best-selling book, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.” A sampling of the chapter titles gives the flavor:
“Our Witness to Malignant Normality,” by Robert Jay Lifton.
“Unbridled and Extreme Hedonism: How the Leader of the Free World Has Proven Time and Again That He Is Unfit for Duty,” by Philip Zimbardo and Rosemary Sword.
“Pathological Narcissism and Politics: a Lethal Combination,” by Craig Malkin.
In a review of that book, as well as “Twilight of American Sanity: a Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump” and “Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, a 500-Year History,” Carlos Lozada, now a Times Opinion columnist, wrote in The Washington Post that the political elite in Washington was increasingly concerned about Trump’s mind-set:
“I think he’s crazy,” Senator Jack Reed (D-R.I.) confided to his colleague Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) in a July exchange inadvertently caught on a microphone. “I’m worried,” she replied …. Even some Republicans have grown more blunt, with Senator Bob Corker (Tenn.) recently suggesting that Trump “has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence" to succeed as president.
The warnings that Trump is dangerous and unstable began well before his 2016 election and have become increasingly urgent.
These warnings came during the 2016 primary and general campaigns, continued throughout Trump’s four years in the White House and remain relentless as he gets older and more delusional about the outcome of the 2020 election.
I asked some of those who first warned about the dangers Trump poses what their views are now.
Leonard L. Glass, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, emailed me:
“He acts like he’s impervious, “a very stable genius,” but we know he is rageful, grandiose, vengeful, impulsive, devoid of empathy, boastful, inciting of violence and thin-skinned. At times it seems as if he cannot control himself or his hateful speech. We need to wonder if these are the precursors of a major deterioration in his character defenses.”
Glass continued:
“If Trump — in adopting language that he cannot help knowing replicates that of Hitler (especially the references to opponents as “vermin” and “poisoning the blood of our country”), we have to wonder if he has crossed into “new terrain.” That terrain, driven by grandiosity and dread of exposure (e.g., at the trials) could signal the emergence of an even less constrained, more overtly vicious and remorseless Trump who, should he regain the presidency, would, indeed act like the authoritarians he praises. Absent conscientious aides who could contain him (as they barely did last time), this could lead to the literal shedding of American blood on American soil by a man who believes he is “the only one” and the one, some believe, is a purifying agent of God and in whom they see no evil nor do they doubt.”
In recent months, Trump has continued to add to the portrait Glass paints of him.
In March he told loyalists in Waco, Texas:
“I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”
“With you at my side,” Trump went on to say,
“we will totally obliterate the deep state, we will banish the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, and we will cast out the communists and Marxists, we will throw off the corrupt political class, we will beat the Democrats, we will rout the fake news media, we will stand up to the RINOs, and we will defeat Joe Biden and every single Democrat.”
At the California Republican Convention on Sept. 29, Trump told the gathering that under his administration, shoplifters would be subject to extrajudicial execution: “We will immediately stop all the pillaging and theft. Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store.”
Trump has continued to forge ahead, pledging to a crowd of supporters in Claremont, N.H., on Nov. 11: “We will root out the communists, Marxist fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible — they’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.”
Nothing captures Trump’s megalomania and narcissism more vividly than his openly declared agenda, should he win back the White House next year.
On Nov. 6, Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey and Devlin Barrett reported in The Washington Post that Trump “wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office, including his former chief of staff John F. Kelly and former attorney general William P. Barr, as well as his ex-attorney Ty Cobb and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley.”
Trump, The Post noted, dismissed federal criminal indictments as “third-world-country stuff, ‘arrest your opponent,’” then claimed that the indictments gave him license, if re-elected, to do the same thing: “I can do that, too.”
A week later, my Times colleagues Maggie Haberman, Charlie Savage and Jonathan Swann, quoted Trump in “How Trump and His Allies Plan to Wield Power in 2025”: “I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family,” adding, “I will totally obliterate the deep state.”
In an earlier story, Haberman, Savage and Swan reported that Trump allies are preparing to reissue an executive order known as Schedule F, which Trump promulgated at the end of his presidency but which never went into effect.
Schedule F, the reporters wrote,
“would have empowered his administration to strip job protections from many career federal employees — who are supposed to be hired based on merit and cannot be arbitrarily fired. While the order said agencies should not hire or fire Schedule F employees based on political affiliation, it effectively would have made these employees more like political appointees who can be fired at will.”
Schedule F would politicize posts in the senior civil service authorized to oversee the implementation of policy, replacing job security with the empowerment of the administration to hire and fire as it chose, a topic I wrote about in an earlier column.
I asked Joshua D. Miller, a professor of psychology at the University of Georgia, “whether he thought Trump’s “vermin” comment represented a tipping point, an escalation in his willingness to attack opponents. Miller replied by email: “My bet is we’re seeing the same basic traits, but their manifestation has been ratcheted up by the stress of his legal problems and also by some sense of invulnerability in that he has yet to face any dire consequences for his previous behavior.”
Miller wrote that he has
“long thought that Trump’s narcissism was actually distracting us from his psychopathic traits. I view the two as largely the same but with psychopathy bringing problems with disinhibition (impulsivity, failure to delay gratification, irresponsibility, etc.) to the table, and Trump seems rather high on those traits, along with those related to narcissism (e.g., entitlement, exploitativeness), pathological lying, grandiosity, etc.).”
I asked Donald R. Lynam, a professor of psychology at Purdue, the same question, and he emailed his reply: “The escalation is quite consistent with grandiose narcissism. Trump is reacting more and more angrily to what he perceives as his unfair treatment and failure to be admired, appreciated and adored in the way that he believes is his due.”
Grandiose narcissists, Lynam continued, “feel they are special and that normal rules don’t apply to them. They require attention and admiration.” He added, “This behavior is also consistent with psychopathy, which is pretty much grandiose narcissism plus poor impulse control.”
Most of the specialists I contacted see Trump’s recent behavior and public comments as part of an evolving process.
“Trump is an aging malignant narcissist,” Aaron L. Pincus, a professor of psychology at Penn State, wrote in an email. “As he ages, he appears to be losing impulse control and is slipping cognitively. So we are seeing a more unfiltered version of his pathology. Quite dangerous.”
In addition, Pincus continued, “Trump seems increasingly paranoid, which can also be a reflection of his aging brain and mental decline.”
The result? “Greater hostility and less ability to reflect on the implications and consequences of his behavior.”
Edwin B. Fisher, a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina, made the case in an email that Trump’s insistence on the validity of his own distorted claims has created a vicious circle, pressuring him to limit his close relations to those willing to confirm his beliefs:
His isolation is much of his own making. The enormous pressures he puts on others for confirmation and unquestioning loyalty and his harsh, often vicious responses to perceived disloyalty lead to a strong, accelerating dynamic of more and more pressure for loyalty, harsher and harsher judgment of the disloyal and greater and greater shrinking of pool of supporters.
At the same time, Fisher continued, Trump is showing signs of cognitive deterioration,
“the confusion of Sioux Falls and Sioux City, several times referring to having beaten and/or now running against Obama or the odd garbling of words on a number of occasions for it seems like about a year now. Add to these the tremendous pressure and threat he is under, and you have, if you will, a trifecta of danger — lifelong habit, threat and possible cognitive decline. They each exacerbate the other two.”
Fisher noted that he anticipated the movement toward increased isolation in his 2017 contribution to “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump”:
Reflecting the interplay of personal and social, narcissistic concerns for self and a preoccupation with power may initially shape and limit those invited to the narcissistic leader’s social network, with sensitivity to slights and angry reactions to them further eroding that network.
This process of exclusion, Fisher wrote, becomes self-reinforcing:
A disturbing feature of this kind of dynamic is that it tends to feed on itself. The more the individual selects for those who flatter him and avoid confrontation and the more those who have affronted and been castigated fall away, the narrower and more homogenous his network becomes, further flattering the individual but eventually becoming a thin precipice. President Nixon, drunk and reportedly conversing with the pictures on the White House walls and praying with Henry Kissinger during his last nights in office, comes to mind.
Craig Malkin, a lecturer in psychology at Harvard Medical School, raised a separate concern in an email responding to my inquiry:
“If the evidence emerging proves true — that Trump knew he lost and continued to push the big lie anyway — his character problems go well beyond simple narcissism and reach troubling levels of psychopathy. And psychopaths are far more concerned with their own power than preserving truth, democracy or even lives.”
In 2019, leaked memos written by Britain’s ambassador to the United States, Kim Darroch, warned British leaders that the Trump presidency could “crash and burn” and “end in disgrace,” adding: “We don’t really believe this administration is going to become substantially more normal, less dysfunctional, less unpredictable, less faction riven, less diplomatically clumsy and inept.”
In 2020, Pew Research reported in “Trump Ratings Remain Low Around Globe” that:
“Trump receives largely negative reviews from publics around the world. Across 32 countries surveyed by Pew Research Center, a median of 64 percent say they do not have confidence in Trump to do the right thing in world affairs, while just 29 percent express confidence in the American leader. Anti-Trump sentiments are especially common in Western Europe: Roughly three in four or more lack confidence in Trump in Germany, Sweden, France, Spain and the Netherlands.”
A recent editorial in The Economist carried the headline “Donald Trump Poses the Biggest Danger to the World in 2024.” “A second Trump term,” the editorial concluded:
“would be a watershed in a way the first was not. Victory would confirm his most destructive instincts about power. His plans would encounter less resistance. And because America will have voted him in while knowing the worst, its moral authority would decline. The election will be decided by tens of thousands of voters in just a handful of states. In 2024 the fate of the world will depend on their ballots.”
Klaas of University College London concluded that a crucial factor in Trump’s political survival is the failure of the media in this country to recognize that the single most important story in the presidential election, a story that should dominate all others, is the enormous threat Trump poses:
“The man who, as president, incited a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol in order to overturn an election is again openly fomenting political violence while explicitly endorsing authoritarian strategies should he return to power. That is the story of the 2024 election. Everything else is just window dressing.”
By Thomas B. Edsall, The New York Times
Brian Klaas, a political scientist at University College London, captured the remarkable nature of the 2024 presidential election in an Oct. 1 essay, “The Case for Amplifying Trump’s Insanity.”
Klaas argued that the presidential contest now pits
“a 77-year-old racist, misogynist bigot who has been found liable for rape, who incited a deadly, violent insurrection aimed at overturning a democratic election, who has committed mass fraud for personal enrichment, who is facing 91 separate counts of felony criminal charges against him and who has overtly discussed his authoritarian strategies for governing if he returns to power”
against “an 80-year-old with mainstream Democratic Party views who sometimes misspeaks or trips.”
“One of those two candidates,” Klaas noted, “faces relentless newspaper columns and TV pundit ‘takes’ arguing that he should drop out of the race. (Spoiler alert: It’s somehow not the racist authoritarian sexual abuse fraudster facing 91 felony charges).”
Klaas asked:
“What is going on? How is it possible that the leading candidate to become president of the United States can float the prospect of executing a general and the media response is … crickets?”
How is it possible that it’s not front page news when a man who soon may return to power calls for law enforcement to kill people for minor crimes? And why do so few people question Trump’s mental acuity rather than Biden’s, when Trump proposes delusional, unhinged plans for forest management and warns his supporters that Biden is going to lead us into World War II (which would require a time machine), or wrongly claims that he defeated Barack Obama in 2016?
The media, Klaas argued, has adopted a policy in covering Donald Trump of “Don’t amplify him! You’re just spreading his message.”
In Klaas’s view, newspapers and television have succumbed to what he called the “banality of crazy,” ignoring “even the most dangerous policy proposals by an authoritarian who is on the cusp of once again becoming the most powerful man in the world — precisely because it happens, like clockwork, almost every day.”
This approach, according to Klaas,
“has backfired. It’s bad for democracy. The “don’t amplify him” argument is disastrous. We need to amplify Trump’s vile rhetoric more, because it will turn persuadable voters off to his cruel message.”
Looking over the eight and a half years during which Trump has been directly engaged in presidential politics, it’s not as if there had been no warning signs.
Three months after Trump took office, in April 2017, a conference called A Duty to Warn was held at the Yale School of Medicine.
The conference resulted in a best-selling book, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.” A sampling of the chapter titles gives the flavor:
“Our Witness to Malignant Normality,” by Robert Jay Lifton.
“Unbridled and Extreme Hedonism: How the Leader of the Free World Has Proven Time and Again That He Is Unfit for Duty,” by Philip Zimbardo and Rosemary Sword.
“Pathological Narcissism and Politics: a Lethal Combination,” by Craig Malkin.
In a review of that book, as well as “Twilight of American Sanity: a Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump” and “Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, a 500-Year History,” Carlos Lozada, now a Times Opinion columnist, wrote in The Washington Post that the political elite in Washington was increasingly concerned about Trump’s mind-set:
“I think he’s crazy,” Senator Jack Reed (D-R.I.) confided to his colleague Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) in a July exchange inadvertently caught on a microphone. “I’m worried,” she replied …. Even some Republicans have grown more blunt, with Senator Bob Corker (Tenn.) recently suggesting that Trump “has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence" to succeed as president.
The warnings that Trump is dangerous and unstable began well before his 2016 election and have become increasingly urgent.
These warnings came during the 2016 primary and general campaigns, continued throughout Trump’s four years in the White House and remain relentless as he gets older and more delusional about the outcome of the 2020 election.
I asked some of those who first warned about the dangers Trump poses what their views are now.
Leonard L. Glass, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, emailed me:
“He acts like he’s impervious, “a very stable genius,” but we know he is rageful, grandiose, vengeful, impulsive, devoid of empathy, boastful, inciting of violence and thin-skinned. At times it seems as if he cannot control himself or his hateful speech. We need to wonder if these are the precursors of a major deterioration in his character defenses.”
Glass continued:
“If Trump — in adopting language that he cannot help knowing replicates that of Hitler (especially the references to opponents as “vermin” and “poisoning the blood of our country”), we have to wonder if he has crossed into “new terrain.” That terrain, driven by grandiosity and dread of exposure (e.g., at the trials) could signal the emergence of an even less constrained, more overtly vicious and remorseless Trump who, should he regain the presidency, would, indeed act like the authoritarians he praises. Absent conscientious aides who could contain him (as they barely did last time), this could lead to the literal shedding of American blood on American soil by a man who believes he is “the only one” and the one, some believe, is a purifying agent of God and in whom they see no evil nor do they doubt.”
In recent months, Trump has continued to add to the portrait Glass paints of him.
In March he told loyalists in Waco, Texas:
“I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”
“With you at my side,” Trump went on to say,
“we will totally obliterate the deep state, we will banish the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, and we will cast out the communists and Marxists, we will throw off the corrupt political class, we will beat the Democrats, we will rout the fake news media, we will stand up to the RINOs, and we will defeat Joe Biden and every single Democrat.”
At the California Republican Convention on Sept. 29, Trump told the gathering that under his administration, shoplifters would be subject to extrajudicial execution: “We will immediately stop all the pillaging and theft. Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store.”
Trump has continued to forge ahead, pledging to a crowd of supporters in Claremont, N.H., on Nov. 11: “We will root out the communists, Marxist fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible — they’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.”
Nothing captures Trump’s megalomania and narcissism more vividly than his openly declared agenda, should he win back the White House next year.
On Nov. 6, Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey and Devlin Barrett reported in The Washington Post that Trump “wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office, including his former chief of staff John F. Kelly and former attorney general William P. Barr, as well as his ex-attorney Ty Cobb and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley.”
Trump, The Post noted, dismissed federal criminal indictments as “third-world-country stuff, ‘arrest your opponent,’” then claimed that the indictments gave him license, if re-elected, to do the same thing: “I can do that, too.”
A week later, my Times colleagues Maggie Haberman, Charlie Savage and Jonathan Swann, quoted Trump in “How Trump and His Allies Plan to Wield Power in 2025”: “I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family,” adding, “I will totally obliterate the deep state.”
In an earlier story, Haberman, Savage and Swan reported that Trump allies are preparing to reissue an executive order known as Schedule F, which Trump promulgated at the end of his presidency but which never went into effect.
Schedule F, the reporters wrote,
“would have empowered his administration to strip job protections from many career federal employees — who are supposed to be hired based on merit and cannot be arbitrarily fired. While the order said agencies should not hire or fire Schedule F employees based on political affiliation, it effectively would have made these employees more like political appointees who can be fired at will.”
Schedule F would politicize posts in the senior civil service authorized to oversee the implementation of policy, replacing job security with the empowerment of the administration to hire and fire as it chose, a topic I wrote about in an earlier column.
I asked Joshua D. Miller, a professor of psychology at the University of Georgia, “whether he thought Trump’s “vermin” comment represented a tipping point, an escalation in his willingness to attack opponents. Miller replied by email: “My bet is we’re seeing the same basic traits, but their manifestation has been ratcheted up by the stress of his legal problems and also by some sense of invulnerability in that he has yet to face any dire consequences for his previous behavior.”
Miller wrote that he has
“long thought that Trump’s narcissism was actually distracting us from his psychopathic traits. I view the two as largely the same but with psychopathy bringing problems with disinhibition (impulsivity, failure to delay gratification, irresponsibility, etc.) to the table, and Trump seems rather high on those traits, along with those related to narcissism (e.g., entitlement, exploitativeness), pathological lying, grandiosity, etc.).”
I asked Donald R. Lynam, a professor of psychology at Purdue, the same question, and he emailed his reply: “The escalation is quite consistent with grandiose narcissism. Trump is reacting more and more angrily to what he perceives as his unfair treatment and failure to be admired, appreciated and adored in the way that he believes is his due.”
Grandiose narcissists, Lynam continued, “feel they are special and that normal rules don’t apply to them. They require attention and admiration.” He added, “This behavior is also consistent with psychopathy, which is pretty much grandiose narcissism plus poor impulse control.”
Most of the specialists I contacted see Trump’s recent behavior and public comments as part of an evolving process.
“Trump is an aging malignant narcissist,” Aaron L. Pincus, a professor of psychology at Penn State, wrote in an email. “As he ages, he appears to be losing impulse control and is slipping cognitively. So we are seeing a more unfiltered version of his pathology. Quite dangerous.”
In addition, Pincus continued, “Trump seems increasingly paranoid, which can also be a reflection of his aging brain and mental decline.”
The result? “Greater hostility and less ability to reflect on the implications and consequences of his behavior.”
Edwin B. Fisher, a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina, made the case in an email that Trump’s insistence on the validity of his own distorted claims has created a vicious circle, pressuring him to limit his close relations to those willing to confirm his beliefs:
His isolation is much of his own making. The enormous pressures he puts on others for confirmation and unquestioning loyalty and his harsh, often vicious responses to perceived disloyalty lead to a strong, accelerating dynamic of more and more pressure for loyalty, harsher and harsher judgment of the disloyal and greater and greater shrinking of pool of supporters.
At the same time, Fisher continued, Trump is showing signs of cognitive deterioration,
“the confusion of Sioux Falls and Sioux City, several times referring to having beaten and/or now running against Obama or the odd garbling of words on a number of occasions for it seems like about a year now. Add to these the tremendous pressure and threat he is under, and you have, if you will, a trifecta of danger — lifelong habit, threat and possible cognitive decline. They each exacerbate the other two.”
Fisher noted that he anticipated the movement toward increased isolation in his 2017 contribution to “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump”:
Reflecting the interplay of personal and social, narcissistic concerns for self and a preoccupation with power may initially shape and limit those invited to the narcissistic leader’s social network, with sensitivity to slights and angry reactions to them further eroding that network.
This process of exclusion, Fisher wrote, becomes self-reinforcing:
A disturbing feature of this kind of dynamic is that it tends to feed on itself. The more the individual selects for those who flatter him and avoid confrontation and the more those who have affronted and been castigated fall away, the narrower and more homogenous his network becomes, further flattering the individual but eventually becoming a thin precipice. President Nixon, drunk and reportedly conversing with the pictures on the White House walls and praying with Henry Kissinger during his last nights in office, comes to mind.
Craig Malkin, a lecturer in psychology at Harvard Medical School, raised a separate concern in an email responding to my inquiry:
“If the evidence emerging proves true — that Trump knew he lost and continued to push the big lie anyway — his character problems go well beyond simple narcissism and reach troubling levels of psychopathy. And psychopaths are far more concerned with their own power than preserving truth, democracy or even lives.”
In 2019, leaked memos written by Britain’s ambassador to the United States, Kim Darroch, warned British leaders that the Trump presidency could “crash and burn” and “end in disgrace,” adding: “We don’t really believe this administration is going to become substantially more normal, less dysfunctional, less unpredictable, less faction riven, less diplomatically clumsy and inept.”
In 2020, Pew Research reported in “Trump Ratings Remain Low Around Globe” that:
“Trump receives largely negative reviews from publics around the world. Across 32 countries surveyed by Pew Research Center, a median of 64 percent say they do not have confidence in Trump to do the right thing in world affairs, while just 29 percent express confidence in the American leader. Anti-Trump sentiments are especially common in Western Europe: Roughly three in four or more lack confidence in Trump in Germany, Sweden, France, Spain and the Netherlands.”
A recent editorial in The Economist carried the headline “Donald Trump Poses the Biggest Danger to the World in 2024.” “A second Trump term,” the editorial concluded:
“would be a watershed in a way the first was not. Victory would confirm his most destructive instincts about power. His plans would encounter less resistance. And because America will have voted him in while knowing the worst, its moral authority would decline. The election will be decided by tens of thousands of voters in just a handful of states. In 2024 the fate of the world will depend on their ballots.”
Klaas of University College London concluded that a crucial factor in Trump’s political survival is the failure of the media in this country to recognize that the single most important story in the presidential election, a story that should dominate all others, is the enormous threat Trump poses:
“The man who, as president, incited a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol in order to overturn an election is again openly fomenting political violence while explicitly endorsing authoritarian strategies should he return to power. That is the story of the 2024 election. Everything else is just window dressing.”
A JUDGE SAYS TRUMP INCITED INSURRECTION. OTHER JUDGES HAVE COME CLOSE.
A Colorado judge is the first to rule specifically on incitement, but she is not the first to lay blame at Trump’s feet for Jan. 6
By Aaron Blake, The Washington Post
The effort to get Donald Trump removed from the 2024 ballot over Jan. 6 has thus far failed to achieve its stated objective. But late Friday, it did notch a major victory: A judge ruled that while the former president can’t be disqualified, he did incite an insurrection.
A relatively low-level state court judge in Colorado issued the ruling, but it’s still a remarkable historic document.
And it has been a long time coming.
Denver District Judge Sarah B. Wallace’s ruling said that Trump’s conduct met the standard for disqualification under the 14th Amendment — that he “engaged in insurrection” — but that the amendment doesn’t apply to the president.
Wallace walked through the evidence for the first component of her finding in detail over 102 pages. She focused on the timeline of Trump’s conduct on Jan. 6, 2021 — which she said showed that Trump desired this outcome. And she documented his history of promoting and legitimizing political violence — which she said helps prove he incited the riot.
“The Court concludes that Trump acted with the specific intent to incite political violence and direct it at the Capitol with the purpose of disrupting the electoral certification,” Wallace wrote.
She added that Trump’s “inaction during the violence and his later endorsement of the violence corroborates the evidence that his intent was to incite violence on January 6, 2021 based on his conduct leading up to and on January 6, 2021.”
Among her other key findings:
Wallace is the first judge to rule that Trump incited the insurrection. (Trump was impeached by the House for incitement but later acquitted by the Senate, despite historic numbers of Republicans voting against him.)
Wallace is hardly the first judge to lay blame at Trump’s feet, however. Indeed, many judges have gestured in this general direction, including some Republican-appointed ones. They just weren’t tasked with deciding the incitement question, specifically.
The other big ruling on this front came last year from U.S. District Judge David O. Carter. He ruled in March 2022 in a case involving Trump lawyer John Eastman that Trump probably broke the law. Carter’s ruling said it was “more likely than not that President Trump corruptly attempted to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021.”
While Carter was focused more broadly on Trump’s efforts to obstruct Congress’s actions that day, he called the plot “a coup in search of a legal theory.” He said it “spurred violent attacks on the seat of our nation’s government” and “led to the deaths of several law enforcement officers.”
U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta, in a case involving Trump’s Jan. 6 civil liability, likened Trump’s speech on the Ellipse before the Jan. 6 riot to “telling an excited mob that corn-dealers starve the poor in front of the corn-dealer’s home.” He said that Trump’s speech “can reasonably be viewed as a call for collective action.”
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, in a criminal case against a Jan. 6 defendant, noted that the “steady drumbeat that inspired” the defendant hadn’t gone away, including via the “near-daily fulminations of the former President.” In another case, she cited the “incendiary statements at the rally … which absolutely, quite clearly and deliberately, stoked the flames of fear and discontent and explicitly encouraged those at the rally to go to the Capitol and fight” to stop the certification.
U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras ruled that Jan. 6 involved events “spurred by then President Trump and a number of his prominent allies who bear much responsibility for what occurred on that day.”
And perhaps most strikingly, Republican-appointed U.S. District Judge John D. Bates ruled in another Jan. 6 case that while Trump’s comments were facially just about protesting, “one might conclude that the context implies that he was urging protestors to do something more — perhaps to enter the Capitol building and stop the certification.”
A Colorado judge has now concluded Trump intended just that.
And while his dual Jan. 6 indictments don’t deal specifically with the incitement question, we’ll soon learn how much fault other courts lay directly at his feet.
A Colorado judge is the first to rule specifically on incitement, but she is not the first to lay blame at Trump’s feet for Jan. 6
By Aaron Blake, The Washington Post
The effort to get Donald Trump removed from the 2024 ballot over Jan. 6 has thus far failed to achieve its stated objective. But late Friday, it did notch a major victory: A judge ruled that while the former president can’t be disqualified, he did incite an insurrection.
A relatively low-level state court judge in Colorado issued the ruling, but it’s still a remarkable historic document.
And it has been a long time coming.
Denver District Judge Sarah B. Wallace’s ruling said that Trump’s conduct met the standard for disqualification under the 14th Amendment — that he “engaged in insurrection” — but that the amendment doesn’t apply to the president.
Wallace walked through the evidence for the first component of her finding in detail over 102 pages. She focused on the timeline of Trump’s conduct on Jan. 6, 2021 — which she said showed that Trump desired this outcome. And she documented his history of promoting and legitimizing political violence — which she said helps prove he incited the riot.
“The Court concludes that Trump acted with the specific intent to incite political violence and direct it at the Capitol with the purpose of disrupting the electoral certification,” Wallace wrote.
She added that Trump’s “inaction during the violence and his later endorsement of the violence corroborates the evidence that his intent was to incite violence on January 6, 2021 based on his conduct leading up to and on January 6, 2021.”
Among her other key findings:
- “Trump cultivated a culture that embraced political violence through his consistent endorsement of the same. He responded to growing threats of violence and intimidation in the lead-up to the certification by amplifying his false claims of election fraud.”
- “He convened a large crowd on the date of the certification in Washington, D.C., focused them on the certification process, told them their country was being stolen from them, called for strength and action, and directed them to the Capitol where the certification was about to take place.”
- “[T]he Court has found that Trump was aware that his supporters were willing to engage in political violence and that they would respond to his calls for them to do so.”
- She ruled that Trump’s inaction during the riot didn’t itself constitute engaging in insurrection, but that it was evidence “that he intended for the crowd to engage in violence when he sent them to the Capitol ‘to fight like hell.’”
- She wrote that Trump’s 2:24 p.m. tweet on Jan. 6 attacking Vice President Mike Pence, an hour after he had been informed of unrest at the Capitol according to a White House employee’s testimony, “caused further violence at the Capitol.”
- She said Trump’s comments after the fact show he “endorsed and intended the actions of the mob on January 6, 2021.”
Wallace is the first judge to rule that Trump incited the insurrection. (Trump was impeached by the House for incitement but later acquitted by the Senate, despite historic numbers of Republicans voting against him.)
Wallace is hardly the first judge to lay blame at Trump’s feet, however. Indeed, many judges have gestured in this general direction, including some Republican-appointed ones. They just weren’t tasked with deciding the incitement question, specifically.
The other big ruling on this front came last year from U.S. District Judge David O. Carter. He ruled in March 2022 in a case involving Trump lawyer John Eastman that Trump probably broke the law. Carter’s ruling said it was “more likely than not that President Trump corruptly attempted to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021.”
While Carter was focused more broadly on Trump’s efforts to obstruct Congress’s actions that day, he called the plot “a coup in search of a legal theory.” He said it “spurred violent attacks on the seat of our nation’s government” and “led to the deaths of several law enforcement officers.”
U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta, in a case involving Trump’s Jan. 6 civil liability, likened Trump’s speech on the Ellipse before the Jan. 6 riot to “telling an excited mob that corn-dealers starve the poor in front of the corn-dealer’s home.” He said that Trump’s speech “can reasonably be viewed as a call for collective action.”
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, in a criminal case against a Jan. 6 defendant, noted that the “steady drumbeat that inspired” the defendant hadn’t gone away, including via the “near-daily fulminations of the former President.” In another case, she cited the “incendiary statements at the rally … which absolutely, quite clearly and deliberately, stoked the flames of fear and discontent and explicitly encouraged those at the rally to go to the Capitol and fight” to stop the certification.
U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras ruled that Jan. 6 involved events “spurred by then President Trump and a number of his prominent allies who bear much responsibility for what occurred on that day.”
And perhaps most strikingly, Republican-appointed U.S. District Judge John D. Bates ruled in another Jan. 6 case that while Trump’s comments were facially just about protesting, “one might conclude that the context implies that he was urging protestors to do something more — perhaps to enter the Capitol building and stop the certification.”
A Colorado judge has now concluded Trump intended just that.
And while his dual Jan. 6 indictments don’t deal specifically with the incitement question, we’ll soon learn how much fault other courts lay directly at his feet.
MANY FORMER TRUMP AIDES SAY HE SHOULDN’T BE PRESIDENT. WILL IT MATTER?
Critics are grappling with how they can puncture Trump’s candidacy in 2024 and whether their voices will have any impact
By Josh Dawsey, The Washington Post
John F. Kelly, the longest-serving chief of staff in President Donald Trump’s White House, watches Trump dominate the GOP primary with increasing despair.
“What’s going on in the country that a single person thinks this guy would still be a good president when he’s said the things he’s said and done the things he’s done?” Kelly said in a recent interview. “It’s beyond my comprehension he has the support he has.”
Kelly, a retired four-star general, said he didn’t know what to do — or what he could do — to help people see it his way.
“I came out and told people the awful things he said about wounded soldiers, and it didn’t have half a day’s bounce. You had his attorney general Bill Barr come out, and not a half a day’s bounce. If anything, his numbers go up. It might even move the needle in the wrong direction. I think we’re in a dangerous zone in our country,” he said.
No president has ever attracted more public detractors who were formerly in his inner circle. They are closely watching his rise — cruising in the GOP nomination contest and, in most polls, tying or even leading President Biden in a general election matchup — with alarm. Among them are his former vice president, top military advisers, lawyers, some members of his Cabinet, economic advisers, press officials and campaign aides, some of whom are working for other candidates.
Among their reasons for opposing a second Trump term, they cite the 91 criminal charges against him, his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, his false claims of election fraud, his incendiary rhetoric in office, his desire to weaponize the Justice Department, his chaotic management style, his likely personnel choices in a second term, and his affinity for dictators.
Interviews with 16 former Trump advisers — some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss their former boss — show they are grappling with how they can puncture Trump’s candidacy in 2024, whether they can or should coordinate with one another and whether their voices will even matter.
Additionally, more than a dozen people once in his employ could end up taking the stand and providing testimony as part of multiple criminal trials, according to people with knowledge of the cases and court documents.
At the same time, even some who have publicly declared Trump unfit for office have said they would still support him over Biden in 2024.
So far, Trump has surged toward the GOP nomination even as former aides critical of him have blanketed the airwaves, giving scathing speeches, testifying on camera in front of congressional committees and penning books — shaking off the kinds of condemnations that could mortally wound another politician.
Every president has the occasional critic from within his administration. Scott McClellan, former press secretary in the George W. Bush White House, rattled his former colleagues with a scathing look behind the scenes. Former defense secretary Robert Gates offered a harsh critique of President Barack Obama’s judgments that was used as a cudgel by Obama’s critics.
What makes Trump different is how many former aides have come out against him, said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian, and how vituperative their criticisms have been. Their motives are varied, and while some are fueled by genuine concerns, others, he said, are driven by a new incentive structure. Some of the attacks could also be undercut because voters see the former aides as enablers who are now simply looking to reclaim their reputations.
“You can get paid for a Washington insider book that dishes dirt; there’s been a corrosion of loyalty towards presidents. It wasn’t always that way,” Brinkley said. “And you have a lot of people who want to be decontaminated from Trump because he’s become a symbol of authoritarianism.”
Some Democrats and Republicans say attacks on Trump’s character and behavior have been ineffective because voters have heard similar criticism for eight years. “Everyone knows who Trump is,” said one person close to the former president, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe campaign strategy. “It’s not like you’re going to say he’s a bad person, and someone is going to change their mind immediately.”
Ahead of the 2020 election, Democrats learned through focus groups that attacks on Trump’s character did not work as well with independent voters as attacks on his record, according to a prominent Democrat briefed on the work conducted by the Democratic National Committee. Repeatedly, voters said they knew who Trump was and his personal shortcomings did not dissuade them.
Still, what also makes Trump different is the way in which some former advisers speak about him — not griping over a policy disagreement or a personnel choice — but over his fitness to be president and what he might do in a second term.
Former White House counsel Ty Cobb, who defended Trump during the probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election and once was seen as a loyal soldier, said it was imperative for people to vote against Trump.
“He has never cared about America, its citizens, its future or anything but himself. In fact, as history well shows from his divisive lies, as well as from his unrestrained contempt for the rule of law and his related crimes, his conduct and mere existence have hastened the demise of democracy and of the nation,” Cobb wrote in an email. “Our adversaries and our allies both recognize that even his potential reelection diminishes America on the world stage and ensures continued acceleration of the domestic decline we are currently enduring. If that reelection actually happens, the consequences will extinguish what, if anything, remains of the American Dream.”
John Bolton, his former national security adviser, said he had grown frustrated watching many of the Trump attacks fail. Bolton wrote a best-selling book that was sharply critical of Trump on national security; Trump wanted him investigated and charged for writing it.
Bolton said he once hoped to argue Trump wasn’t electable.
“So many things that I thought would be telling arguments about Trump — his character, you name it — have proven ineffective,” Bolton said. “The only thing that’s left is Trump’s not fit to be president. He doesn’t have a conservative philosophy. He follows his own personal interest, and that’s not what you need in a president.”
Stephanie Grisham, who worked on the 2016 campaign and then as press secretary to Trump and chief of staff to Melania Trump, said she fears his ascent to the White House. She said a lot of former advisers are weighing what to do — and discussing it with one another.
“Anytime you speak out, all the haters come out and say you’re just disgruntled. All the Democrats come out and say it’s too little, too late. I do think that’s where so many people are,” she said.
More important, Grisham said, is the backlash that comes with Trump attacking you — or his supporters turning on you.
“It’s actual threats for your safety and your family. As we get closer to the election, it’s only going to get more intense. Why am I putting my family and my friends through this if we’re now going to get threats?” Grisham said.
There were calls trying to organize opposition to Trump after he left the White House that fell apart once the group splintered over internal disagreements, Grisham said. Some of the members didn’t get along, and the calls soon stopped, she said.
Grisham said she hoped a group of former aides would come together next year, led by officials like Kelly and Attorney General William P. Barr, but it would take organization and money. Interviews with nine other former aides indicated that no such group currently exists.
Former vice president Mike Pence is not planning to take a public role for or against Trump, according to people close to him. Others close to many former Cabinet officials say they will be silent. Elaine Chao, the former transportation secretary who resigned, Jim Mattis, the former defense secretary, and others have signaled they do not relish a big fight with Trump even as they don’t want him to be the nominee. Former defense secretary Mark T. Esper, who has sometimes leveled criticisms at Trump, did not respond to requests for comment.
Another prominent former official said he was debating whether speaking out would lead to clients dropping him. “If I thought it would make a difference, I’d be more willing to do it. But you’re taking a lot of financial risks, and I haven’t seen any evidence it really matters,” this person said.
A third former official said that many were considering speaking out if Trump became the nominee and was in a position to win. “You want to remind people at the last minute what kind of crazy they might be getting again. I don’t think it works until it’s September or October.”
Some aides say they don’t want Trump to be president again but are loath to be viewed as helping a Democrat. Members of that group, including Barr, have argued Trump is both unfit to serve and has probably committed crimes — but that they still may vote for him over a Democrat.
Critics are grappling with how they can puncture Trump’s candidacy in 2024 and whether their voices will have any impact
By Josh Dawsey, The Washington Post
John F. Kelly, the longest-serving chief of staff in President Donald Trump’s White House, watches Trump dominate the GOP primary with increasing despair.
“What’s going on in the country that a single person thinks this guy would still be a good president when he’s said the things he’s said and done the things he’s done?” Kelly said in a recent interview. “It’s beyond my comprehension he has the support he has.”
Kelly, a retired four-star general, said he didn’t know what to do — or what he could do — to help people see it his way.
“I came out and told people the awful things he said about wounded soldiers, and it didn’t have half a day’s bounce. You had his attorney general Bill Barr come out, and not a half a day’s bounce. If anything, his numbers go up. It might even move the needle in the wrong direction. I think we’re in a dangerous zone in our country,” he said.
No president has ever attracted more public detractors who were formerly in his inner circle. They are closely watching his rise — cruising in the GOP nomination contest and, in most polls, tying or even leading President Biden in a general election matchup — with alarm. Among them are his former vice president, top military advisers, lawyers, some members of his Cabinet, economic advisers, press officials and campaign aides, some of whom are working for other candidates.
Among their reasons for opposing a second Trump term, they cite the 91 criminal charges against him, his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, his false claims of election fraud, his incendiary rhetoric in office, his desire to weaponize the Justice Department, his chaotic management style, his likely personnel choices in a second term, and his affinity for dictators.
Interviews with 16 former Trump advisers — some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss their former boss — show they are grappling with how they can puncture Trump’s candidacy in 2024, whether they can or should coordinate with one another and whether their voices will even matter.
Additionally, more than a dozen people once in his employ could end up taking the stand and providing testimony as part of multiple criminal trials, according to people with knowledge of the cases and court documents.
At the same time, even some who have publicly declared Trump unfit for office have said they would still support him over Biden in 2024.
So far, Trump has surged toward the GOP nomination even as former aides critical of him have blanketed the airwaves, giving scathing speeches, testifying on camera in front of congressional committees and penning books — shaking off the kinds of condemnations that could mortally wound another politician.
Every president has the occasional critic from within his administration. Scott McClellan, former press secretary in the George W. Bush White House, rattled his former colleagues with a scathing look behind the scenes. Former defense secretary Robert Gates offered a harsh critique of President Barack Obama’s judgments that was used as a cudgel by Obama’s critics.
What makes Trump different is how many former aides have come out against him, said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian, and how vituperative their criticisms have been. Their motives are varied, and while some are fueled by genuine concerns, others, he said, are driven by a new incentive structure. Some of the attacks could also be undercut because voters see the former aides as enablers who are now simply looking to reclaim their reputations.
“You can get paid for a Washington insider book that dishes dirt; there’s been a corrosion of loyalty towards presidents. It wasn’t always that way,” Brinkley said. “And you have a lot of people who want to be decontaminated from Trump because he’s become a symbol of authoritarianism.”
Some Democrats and Republicans say attacks on Trump’s character and behavior have been ineffective because voters have heard similar criticism for eight years. “Everyone knows who Trump is,” said one person close to the former president, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe campaign strategy. “It’s not like you’re going to say he’s a bad person, and someone is going to change their mind immediately.”
Ahead of the 2020 election, Democrats learned through focus groups that attacks on Trump’s character did not work as well with independent voters as attacks on his record, according to a prominent Democrat briefed on the work conducted by the Democratic National Committee. Repeatedly, voters said they knew who Trump was and his personal shortcomings did not dissuade them.
Still, what also makes Trump different is the way in which some former advisers speak about him — not griping over a policy disagreement or a personnel choice — but over his fitness to be president and what he might do in a second term.
Former White House counsel Ty Cobb, who defended Trump during the probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election and once was seen as a loyal soldier, said it was imperative for people to vote against Trump.
“He has never cared about America, its citizens, its future or anything but himself. In fact, as history well shows from his divisive lies, as well as from his unrestrained contempt for the rule of law and his related crimes, his conduct and mere existence have hastened the demise of democracy and of the nation,” Cobb wrote in an email. “Our adversaries and our allies both recognize that even his potential reelection diminishes America on the world stage and ensures continued acceleration of the domestic decline we are currently enduring. If that reelection actually happens, the consequences will extinguish what, if anything, remains of the American Dream.”
John Bolton, his former national security adviser, said he had grown frustrated watching many of the Trump attacks fail. Bolton wrote a best-selling book that was sharply critical of Trump on national security; Trump wanted him investigated and charged for writing it.
Bolton said he once hoped to argue Trump wasn’t electable.
“So many things that I thought would be telling arguments about Trump — his character, you name it — have proven ineffective,” Bolton said. “The only thing that’s left is Trump’s not fit to be president. He doesn’t have a conservative philosophy. He follows his own personal interest, and that’s not what you need in a president.”
Stephanie Grisham, who worked on the 2016 campaign and then as press secretary to Trump and chief of staff to Melania Trump, said she fears his ascent to the White House. She said a lot of former advisers are weighing what to do — and discussing it with one another.
“Anytime you speak out, all the haters come out and say you’re just disgruntled. All the Democrats come out and say it’s too little, too late. I do think that’s where so many people are,” she said.
More important, Grisham said, is the backlash that comes with Trump attacking you — or his supporters turning on you.
“It’s actual threats for your safety and your family. As we get closer to the election, it’s only going to get more intense. Why am I putting my family and my friends through this if we’re now going to get threats?” Grisham said.
There were calls trying to organize opposition to Trump after he left the White House that fell apart once the group splintered over internal disagreements, Grisham said. Some of the members didn’t get along, and the calls soon stopped, she said.
Grisham said she hoped a group of former aides would come together next year, led by officials like Kelly and Attorney General William P. Barr, but it would take organization and money. Interviews with nine other former aides indicated that no such group currently exists.
Former vice president Mike Pence is not planning to take a public role for or against Trump, according to people close to him. Others close to many former Cabinet officials say they will be silent. Elaine Chao, the former transportation secretary who resigned, Jim Mattis, the former defense secretary, and others have signaled they do not relish a big fight with Trump even as they don’t want him to be the nominee. Former defense secretary Mark T. Esper, who has sometimes leveled criticisms at Trump, did not respond to requests for comment.
Another prominent former official said he was debating whether speaking out would lead to clients dropping him. “If I thought it would make a difference, I’d be more willing to do it. But you’re taking a lot of financial risks, and I haven’t seen any evidence it really matters,” this person said.
A third former official said that many were considering speaking out if Trump became the nominee and was in a position to win. “You want to remind people at the last minute what kind of crazy they might be getting again. I don’t think it works until it’s September or October.”
Some aides say they don’t want Trump to be president again but are loath to be viewed as helping a Democrat. Members of that group, including Barr, have argued Trump is both unfit to serve and has probably committed crimes — but that they still may vote for him over a Democrat.
JOE BIDEN: THE U.S. WON’T BACK DOWN FROM THE CHALLENGE OF PUTIN AND HAMAS
By Joe Biden, president of the United States.
Today, the world faces an inflection point, where the choices we make — including in the crises in Europe and the Middle East — will determine the direction of our future for generations to come.
What will our world look like on the other side of these conflicts?
Will we deny Hamas the ability to carry out pure, unadulterated evil? Will Israelis and Palestinians one day live side by side in peace, with two states for two peoples?
Will we hold Vladimir Putin accountable for his aggression, so the people of Ukraine can live free and Europe remains an anchor for global peace and security?
And the overarching question: Will we relentlessly pursue our positive vision for the future, or will we allow those who do not share our values to drag the world to a more dangerous and divided place?
Both Putin and Hamas are fighting to wipe a neighboring democracy off the map. And both Putin and Hamas hope to collapse broader regional stability and integration and take advantage of the ensuing disorder. America cannot, and will not, let that happen. For our own national security interests — and for the good of the entire world.
The United States is the essential nation. We rally allies and partners to stand up to aggressors and make progress toward a brighter, more peaceful future. The world looks to us to solve the problems of our time. That is the duty of leadership, and America will lead. For if we walk away from the challenges of today, the risk of conflict could spread, and the costs to address them will only rise. We will not let that happen.
That conviction is at the root of my approach to supporting the people of Ukraine as they continue to defend their freedom against Putin’s brutal war.
We know from two world wars in the past century that when aggression in Europe goes unanswered, the crisis does not burn itself out. It draws America in directly. That’s why our commitment to Ukraine today is an investment in our own security. It prevents a broader conflict tomorrow.
We are keeping American troops out of this war by supporting the brave Ukrainians defending their freedom and homeland. We are providing them with weapons and economic assistance to stop Putin’s drive for conquest, before the conflict spreads farther.
The United States is not doing this alone. More than 50 nations have joined us to ensure that Ukraine has what it needs to defend itself. Our partners are shouldering much of the economic responsibility for supporting Ukraine. We have also built a stronger and more united NATO, which enhances our security through the strength of our allies, while making clear that we will defend every inch of NATO territory to deter further Russian aggression. Our allies in Asia are standing with us as well to support Ukraine and hold Putin accountable, because they understand that stability in Europe and in the Indo-Pacific are inherently connected.
We have also seen throughout history how conflicts in the Middle East can unleash consequences around the globe.
We stand firmly with the Israeli people as they defend themselves against the murderous nihilism of Hamas. On Oct. 7, Hamas slaughtered 1,200 people, including 35 American citizens, in the worst atrocity committed against the Jewish people in a single day since the Holocaust. Infants and toddlers, mothers and fathers, grandparents, people with disabilities, even Holocaust survivors were maimed and murdered. Entire families were massacred in their homes. Young people were gunned down at a music festival. Bodies riddled with bullets and burned beyond recognition. And for over a month, the families of more than 200 hostages taken by Hamas, including babies and Americans, have been living in hell, anxiously waiting to discover whether their loved ones are alive or dead. At the time of this writing, my team and I are working hour by hour, doing everything we can to get the hostages released.
And while Israelis are still in shock and suffering the trauma of this attack, Hamas has promised that it will relentlessly try to repeat Oct. 7. It has said very clearly that it will not stop.
The Palestinian people deserve a state of their own and a future free from Hamas. I, too, am heartbroken by the images out of Gaza and the deaths of many thousands of civilians, including children. Palestinian children are crying for lost parents. Parents are writing their child’s name on their hand or leg so they can be identified if the worst happens. Palestinian nurses and doctors are trying desperately to save every precious life they possibly can, with little to no resources. Every innocent Palestinian life lost is a tragedy that rips apart families and communities.
Our goal should not be simply to stop the war for today — it should be to end the war forever, break the cycle of unceasing violence, and build something stronger in Gaza and across the Middle East so that history does not keep repeating itself.
Just weeks before Oct. 7, I met in New York with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The main subject of that conversation was a set of substantial commitments that would help both Israel and the Palestinian territories better integrate into the broader Middle East. That is also the idea behind the innovative economic corridor that will connect India to Europe through the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel, which I announced together with partners at the Group of 20 summit in India in early September. Stronger integration between countries creates predictable markets and draws greater investment. Better regional connection — including physical and economic infrastructure — supports higher employment and more opportunities for young people. That’s what we have been working to realize in the Middle East. It is a future that has no place for Hamas’s violence and hate, and I believe that attempting to destroy the hope for that future is one reason that Hamas instigated this crisis.
This much is clear: A two-state solution is the only way to ensure the long-term security of both the Israeli and Palestinian people. Though right now it may seem like that future has never been further away, this crisis has made it more imperative than ever.
A two-state solution — two peoples living side by side with equal measures of freedom, opportunity and dignity — is where the road to peace must lead. Reaching it will take commitments from Israelis and Palestinians, as well as from the United States and our allies and partners. That work must start now.
To that end, the United States has proposed basic principles for how to move forward from this crisis, to give the world a foundation on which to build.
To start, Gaza must never again be used as a platform for terrorism. There must be no forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, no reoccupation, no siege or blockade, and no reduction in territory. And after this war is over, the voices of Palestinian people and their aspirations must be at the center of post-crisis governance in Gaza.
As we strive for peace, Gaza and the West Bank should be reunited under a single governance structure, ultimately under a revitalized Palestinian Authority, as we all work toward a two-state solution. I have been emphatic with Israel’s leaders that extremist violence against Palestinians in the West Bank must stop and that those committing the violence must be held accountable. The United States is prepared to take our own steps, including issuing visa bans against extremists attacking civilians in the West Bank.
The international community must commit resources to support the people of Gaza in the immediate aftermath of this crisis, including interim security measures, and establish a reconstruction mechanism to sustainably meet Gaza’s long-term needs. And it is imperative that no terrorist threats ever again emanate from Gaza or the West Bank.
If we can agree on these first steps, and take them together, we can begin to imagine a different future. In the months ahead, the United States will redouble our efforts to establish a more peaceful, integrated and prosperous Middle East — a region where a day like Oct. 7 is unthinkable.
In the meantime, we will continue working to prevent this conflict from spreading and escalating further. I ordered two U.S. carrier groups to the region to enhance deterrence. We are going after Hamas and those who finance and facilitate its terrorism, levying multiple rounds of sanctions to degrade Hamas’s financial structure, cutting it off from outside funding and blocking access to new funding channels, including via social media. I have also been clear that the United States will do what is necessary to defend U.S. troops and personnel stationed across the Middle East — and we have responded multiple times to the strikes against us.
I also immediately traveled to Israel — the first American president to do so during wartime — to show solidarity with the Israeli people and reaffirm to the world that the United States has Israel’s back. Israel must defend itself. That is its right. And while in Tel Aviv, I also counseled Israelis against letting their hurt and rage mislead them into making mistakes we ourselves have made in the past.
From the very beginning, my administration has called for respecting international humanitarian law, minimizing the loss of innocent lives and prioritizing the protection of civilians. Following Hamas’s attack on Israel, aid to Gaza was cut off, and food, water and medicine reserves dwindled rapidly. As part of my travel to Israel, I worked closely with the leaders of Israel and Egypt to reach an agreement to restart the delivery of essential humanitarian assistance to Gazans. Within days, trucks with supplies again began to cross the border. Today, nearly 100 aid trucks enter Gaza from Egypt each day, and we continue working to increase the flow of assistance manyfold. I’ve also advocated for humanitarian pauses in the conflict to permit civilians to depart areas of active fighting and to help ensure that aid reaches those in need. Israel took the additional step to create two humanitarian corridors and implement daily four-hour pauses in the fighting in northern Gaza to allow Palestinian civilians to flee to safer areas in the south.
This stands in stark opposition to Hamas’s terrorist strategy: hide among Palestinian civilians. Use children and innocents as human shields. Position terrorist tunnels beneath hospitals, schools, mosques and residential buildings. Maximize the death and suffering of innocent people — Israeli and Palestinian. If Hamas cared at all for Palestinian lives, it would release all the hostages, give up arms, and surrender the leaders and those responsible for Oct. 7.
As long as Hamas clings to its ideology of destruction, a cease-fire is not peace. To Hamas’s members, every cease-fire is time they exploit to rebuild their stockpile of rockets, reposition fighters and restart the killing by attacking innocents again. An outcome that leaves Hamas in control of Gaza would once more perpetuate its hate and deny Palestinian civilians the chance to build something better for themselves.
And here at home, in moments when fear and suspicion, anger and rage run hard, we have to work even harder to hold on to the values that make us who we are. We’re a nation of religious freedom and freedom of expression. We all have a right to debate and disagree and peacefully protest, but without fear of being targeted at schools or workplaces or elsewhere in our communities.
In recent years, too much hate has been given too much oxygen, fueling racism and an alarming rise in antisemitism in America. That has intensified in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks. Jewish families worry about being targeted in school, while wearing symbols of their faith on the street or otherwise going about their daily lives. At the same time, too many Muslim Americans, Arab Americans and Palestinian Americans, and so many other communities, are outraged and hurting, fearing the resurgence of the Islamophobia and distrust we saw after 9/11.
We can’t stand by when hate rears its head. We must, without equivocation, denounce antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of hate and bias. We must renounce violence and vitriol and see each other not as enemies but as fellow Americans.
In a moment of so much violence and suffering — in Ukraine, Israel, Gaza and so many other places — it can be difficult to imagine that something different is possible. But we must never forget the lesson learned time and again throughout our history: Out of great tragedy and upheaval, enormous progress can come. More hope. More freedom. Less rage. Less grievance. Less war. We must not lose our resolve to pursue those goals, because now is when clear vision, big ideas and political courage are needed most. That is the strategy that my administration will continue to lead — in the Middle East, Europe and around the globe. Every step we take toward that future is progress that makes the world safer and the United States of America more secure.
By Joe Biden, president of the United States.
Today, the world faces an inflection point, where the choices we make — including in the crises in Europe and the Middle East — will determine the direction of our future for generations to come.
What will our world look like on the other side of these conflicts?
Will we deny Hamas the ability to carry out pure, unadulterated evil? Will Israelis and Palestinians one day live side by side in peace, with two states for two peoples?
Will we hold Vladimir Putin accountable for his aggression, so the people of Ukraine can live free and Europe remains an anchor for global peace and security?
And the overarching question: Will we relentlessly pursue our positive vision for the future, or will we allow those who do not share our values to drag the world to a more dangerous and divided place?
Both Putin and Hamas are fighting to wipe a neighboring democracy off the map. And both Putin and Hamas hope to collapse broader regional stability and integration and take advantage of the ensuing disorder. America cannot, and will not, let that happen. For our own national security interests — and for the good of the entire world.
The United States is the essential nation. We rally allies and partners to stand up to aggressors and make progress toward a brighter, more peaceful future. The world looks to us to solve the problems of our time. That is the duty of leadership, and America will lead. For if we walk away from the challenges of today, the risk of conflict could spread, and the costs to address them will only rise. We will not let that happen.
That conviction is at the root of my approach to supporting the people of Ukraine as they continue to defend their freedom against Putin’s brutal war.
We know from two world wars in the past century that when aggression in Europe goes unanswered, the crisis does not burn itself out. It draws America in directly. That’s why our commitment to Ukraine today is an investment in our own security. It prevents a broader conflict tomorrow.
We are keeping American troops out of this war by supporting the brave Ukrainians defending their freedom and homeland. We are providing them with weapons and economic assistance to stop Putin’s drive for conquest, before the conflict spreads farther.
The United States is not doing this alone. More than 50 nations have joined us to ensure that Ukraine has what it needs to defend itself. Our partners are shouldering much of the economic responsibility for supporting Ukraine. We have also built a stronger and more united NATO, which enhances our security through the strength of our allies, while making clear that we will defend every inch of NATO territory to deter further Russian aggression. Our allies in Asia are standing with us as well to support Ukraine and hold Putin accountable, because they understand that stability in Europe and in the Indo-Pacific are inherently connected.
We have also seen throughout history how conflicts in the Middle East can unleash consequences around the globe.
We stand firmly with the Israeli people as they defend themselves against the murderous nihilism of Hamas. On Oct. 7, Hamas slaughtered 1,200 people, including 35 American citizens, in the worst atrocity committed against the Jewish people in a single day since the Holocaust. Infants and toddlers, mothers and fathers, grandparents, people with disabilities, even Holocaust survivors were maimed and murdered. Entire families were massacred in their homes. Young people were gunned down at a music festival. Bodies riddled with bullets and burned beyond recognition. And for over a month, the families of more than 200 hostages taken by Hamas, including babies and Americans, have been living in hell, anxiously waiting to discover whether their loved ones are alive or dead. At the time of this writing, my team and I are working hour by hour, doing everything we can to get the hostages released.
And while Israelis are still in shock and suffering the trauma of this attack, Hamas has promised that it will relentlessly try to repeat Oct. 7. It has said very clearly that it will not stop.
The Palestinian people deserve a state of their own and a future free from Hamas. I, too, am heartbroken by the images out of Gaza and the deaths of many thousands of civilians, including children. Palestinian children are crying for lost parents. Parents are writing their child’s name on their hand or leg so they can be identified if the worst happens. Palestinian nurses and doctors are trying desperately to save every precious life they possibly can, with little to no resources. Every innocent Palestinian life lost is a tragedy that rips apart families and communities.
Our goal should not be simply to stop the war for today — it should be to end the war forever, break the cycle of unceasing violence, and build something stronger in Gaza and across the Middle East so that history does not keep repeating itself.
Just weeks before Oct. 7, I met in New York with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The main subject of that conversation was a set of substantial commitments that would help both Israel and the Palestinian territories better integrate into the broader Middle East. That is also the idea behind the innovative economic corridor that will connect India to Europe through the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel, which I announced together with partners at the Group of 20 summit in India in early September. Stronger integration between countries creates predictable markets and draws greater investment. Better regional connection — including physical and economic infrastructure — supports higher employment and more opportunities for young people. That’s what we have been working to realize in the Middle East. It is a future that has no place for Hamas’s violence and hate, and I believe that attempting to destroy the hope for that future is one reason that Hamas instigated this crisis.
This much is clear: A two-state solution is the only way to ensure the long-term security of both the Israeli and Palestinian people. Though right now it may seem like that future has never been further away, this crisis has made it more imperative than ever.
A two-state solution — two peoples living side by side with equal measures of freedom, opportunity and dignity — is where the road to peace must lead. Reaching it will take commitments from Israelis and Palestinians, as well as from the United States and our allies and partners. That work must start now.
To that end, the United States has proposed basic principles for how to move forward from this crisis, to give the world a foundation on which to build.
To start, Gaza must never again be used as a platform for terrorism. There must be no forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, no reoccupation, no siege or blockade, and no reduction in territory. And after this war is over, the voices of Palestinian people and their aspirations must be at the center of post-crisis governance in Gaza.
As we strive for peace, Gaza and the West Bank should be reunited under a single governance structure, ultimately under a revitalized Palestinian Authority, as we all work toward a two-state solution. I have been emphatic with Israel’s leaders that extremist violence against Palestinians in the West Bank must stop and that those committing the violence must be held accountable. The United States is prepared to take our own steps, including issuing visa bans against extremists attacking civilians in the West Bank.
The international community must commit resources to support the people of Gaza in the immediate aftermath of this crisis, including interim security measures, and establish a reconstruction mechanism to sustainably meet Gaza’s long-term needs. And it is imperative that no terrorist threats ever again emanate from Gaza or the West Bank.
If we can agree on these first steps, and take them together, we can begin to imagine a different future. In the months ahead, the United States will redouble our efforts to establish a more peaceful, integrated and prosperous Middle East — a region where a day like Oct. 7 is unthinkable.
In the meantime, we will continue working to prevent this conflict from spreading and escalating further. I ordered two U.S. carrier groups to the region to enhance deterrence. We are going after Hamas and those who finance and facilitate its terrorism, levying multiple rounds of sanctions to degrade Hamas’s financial structure, cutting it off from outside funding and blocking access to new funding channels, including via social media. I have also been clear that the United States will do what is necessary to defend U.S. troops and personnel stationed across the Middle East — and we have responded multiple times to the strikes against us.
I also immediately traveled to Israel — the first American president to do so during wartime — to show solidarity with the Israeli people and reaffirm to the world that the United States has Israel’s back. Israel must defend itself. That is its right. And while in Tel Aviv, I also counseled Israelis against letting their hurt and rage mislead them into making mistakes we ourselves have made in the past.
From the very beginning, my administration has called for respecting international humanitarian law, minimizing the loss of innocent lives and prioritizing the protection of civilians. Following Hamas’s attack on Israel, aid to Gaza was cut off, and food, water and medicine reserves dwindled rapidly. As part of my travel to Israel, I worked closely with the leaders of Israel and Egypt to reach an agreement to restart the delivery of essential humanitarian assistance to Gazans. Within days, trucks with supplies again began to cross the border. Today, nearly 100 aid trucks enter Gaza from Egypt each day, and we continue working to increase the flow of assistance manyfold. I’ve also advocated for humanitarian pauses in the conflict to permit civilians to depart areas of active fighting and to help ensure that aid reaches those in need. Israel took the additional step to create two humanitarian corridors and implement daily four-hour pauses in the fighting in northern Gaza to allow Palestinian civilians to flee to safer areas in the south.
This stands in stark opposition to Hamas’s terrorist strategy: hide among Palestinian civilians. Use children and innocents as human shields. Position terrorist tunnels beneath hospitals, schools, mosques and residential buildings. Maximize the death and suffering of innocent people — Israeli and Palestinian. If Hamas cared at all for Palestinian lives, it would release all the hostages, give up arms, and surrender the leaders and those responsible for Oct. 7.
As long as Hamas clings to its ideology of destruction, a cease-fire is not peace. To Hamas’s members, every cease-fire is time they exploit to rebuild their stockpile of rockets, reposition fighters and restart the killing by attacking innocents again. An outcome that leaves Hamas in control of Gaza would once more perpetuate its hate and deny Palestinian civilians the chance to build something better for themselves.
And here at home, in moments when fear and suspicion, anger and rage run hard, we have to work even harder to hold on to the values that make us who we are. We’re a nation of religious freedom and freedom of expression. We all have a right to debate and disagree and peacefully protest, but without fear of being targeted at schools or workplaces or elsewhere in our communities.
In recent years, too much hate has been given too much oxygen, fueling racism and an alarming rise in antisemitism in America. That has intensified in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks. Jewish families worry about being targeted in school, while wearing symbols of their faith on the street or otherwise going about their daily lives. At the same time, too many Muslim Americans, Arab Americans and Palestinian Americans, and so many other communities, are outraged and hurting, fearing the resurgence of the Islamophobia and distrust we saw after 9/11.
We can’t stand by when hate rears its head. We must, without equivocation, denounce antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of hate and bias. We must renounce violence and vitriol and see each other not as enemies but as fellow Americans.
In a moment of so much violence and suffering — in Ukraine, Israel, Gaza and so many other places — it can be difficult to imagine that something different is possible. But we must never forget the lesson learned time and again throughout our history: Out of great tragedy and upheaval, enormous progress can come. More hope. More freedom. Less rage. Less grievance. Less war. We must not lose our resolve to pursue those goals, because now is when clear vision, big ideas and political courage are needed most. That is the strategy that my administration will continue to lead — in the Middle East, Europe and around the globe. Every step we take toward that future is progress that makes the world safer and the United States of America more secure.
DEMOCRATS ARE THE TRUE MAJORITY IN THE HOUSE
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Many adjectives have been deployed to describe House Republicans. Hapless. Thuggish. Clownish. Ineffective. But the most politically descriptive: Minority.
After all, a minority party cannot pass major legislation its leadership deems necessary. That has happened now three times: once on the debt ceiling and twice to keep the government open. Democrats, who have fewer seats, are effectively delivering what meager results the House has accomplished under Republican speakers.
At various times in the House leadership struggle, Acela-corridor pundits pleaded with Democrats to help Republicans out of their leaderless mess. Without getting anything in return, they were expected to contribute votes to a speaker who would then be deemed illegitimate by the MAGA extremists because of the Democrats’ support. Fortunately, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) resisted the foolish pleas.
And now, Jeffries has the best of both worlds. He’s not responsible for electing a speaker whose Christian fundamentalist views and financial questions make him a weight around the necks of Republicans in swing districts. He can castigate Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) for his noxious views and effectively produce legislation that does not compromise Democrats’ minimum standards. At a Wednesday news conference, Jeffries emphasized, “House Republicans are unable to govern on their own. Period, full stop, no further observation necessary.”
You don’t have to take Jeffries’s word for it. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) bellowed from the floor that his Republican colleagues couldn’t “explain to me one material, meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done.”
Republicans just do not have a majority that can govern.
So who is governing? Democrats. That is essentially what happened with the funding bill. Aside from the split timelines (an obvious gimmick intended to distract clueless Republicans), Democrats got everything they wanted in the spending bill. Republicans didn’t. No massive social spending cuts and no abortion riders or other poison pills.
Jeffries told reporters on Wednesday, “House Democrats came into this week with three principal objectives with respect to the continuing resolution.” He explained: “First, no spending cuts. Mission accomplished. Second, no extreme right-wing policy changes. Mission accomplished. Third, no government shutdown. Mission accomplished.”
Democrats exposed that Republicans, or at least Johnson and his closest allies, do not have the stomach for a shutdown. Therefore, with all the cards, Democrats deftly played the hand they were dealt.
So what comes next? At the bare minimum, the House will repeat the spending exercise twice more, once for each half of the spending arrangement. There is zero reason to think Republicans can actually pass full-blown appropriations bills for military construction, veterans affairs, transportation, housing and the Energy Department before Jan. 19, and the rest before Feb. 2. So, Democrats again will vote to prevent a shutdown and extend the government’s operations by weeks or months.
However, Democrats might well be able to do more than that, even without the mathematical majority. The governing majority they put together for the spending bills (virtually all Democrats plus 127 Republicans) can be deployed for other purposes.
In December, for example, the Senate could send over a bill reflecting some or all of President Biden’s supplemental spending priorities, including more spending for immigration control and aid for Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan. Johnson and his MAGA caucus are likely to resist that, given that many have decided to run interference for Russian President Vladimir Putin and that others prefer to exploit the border situation without offering any of their own solutions. However, it only takes 218 members to execute a motion to discharge. That’s far fewer than the 336 combined Republican and Democratic votes that passed the spending bill. Surely some of the endangered Republicans from districts Biden won don’t want to be stuck voting against these items.
Even Johnson, previously a foe of more Ukraine spending, has been signaling he could support it. Whether he combines it with Israel funding or sends it to the floor separately (or has it thrust upon him through a discharge petition), it certainly seems there would be enough votes to pass the desperately needed aid, even if a majority of the votes are supplied by Democrats. He could also shore up aid to Taiwan, which confronts China, Republicans’ favored international foe.
Beyond keeping the government lights on and supporting our allies when the world is ablaze, there might be little else the House could manage. Democrats nevertheless can claim to have protected the entire legislative output of Biden’s first two years and, one hopes, to have upheld our international responsibilities against the MAGA isolationists. (They’ve also tied Republicans’ “investigations” in knots, depriving Republicans of a single talking point from dozens of hearings and scores of baseless charges.)
Now, imagine what Democrats could do if they had the mathematical majority. You can bet that will be part of their pitch in 2024.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Many adjectives have been deployed to describe House Republicans. Hapless. Thuggish. Clownish. Ineffective. But the most politically descriptive: Minority.
After all, a minority party cannot pass major legislation its leadership deems necessary. That has happened now three times: once on the debt ceiling and twice to keep the government open. Democrats, who have fewer seats, are effectively delivering what meager results the House has accomplished under Republican speakers.
At various times in the House leadership struggle, Acela-corridor pundits pleaded with Democrats to help Republicans out of their leaderless mess. Without getting anything in return, they were expected to contribute votes to a speaker who would then be deemed illegitimate by the MAGA extremists because of the Democrats’ support. Fortunately, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) resisted the foolish pleas.
And now, Jeffries has the best of both worlds. He’s not responsible for electing a speaker whose Christian fundamentalist views and financial questions make him a weight around the necks of Republicans in swing districts. He can castigate Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) for his noxious views and effectively produce legislation that does not compromise Democrats’ minimum standards. At a Wednesday news conference, Jeffries emphasized, “House Republicans are unable to govern on their own. Period, full stop, no further observation necessary.”
You don’t have to take Jeffries’s word for it. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) bellowed from the floor that his Republican colleagues couldn’t “explain to me one material, meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done.”
Republicans just do not have a majority that can govern.
So who is governing? Democrats. That is essentially what happened with the funding bill. Aside from the split timelines (an obvious gimmick intended to distract clueless Republicans), Democrats got everything they wanted in the spending bill. Republicans didn’t. No massive social spending cuts and no abortion riders or other poison pills.
Jeffries told reporters on Wednesday, “House Democrats came into this week with three principal objectives with respect to the continuing resolution.” He explained: “First, no spending cuts. Mission accomplished. Second, no extreme right-wing policy changes. Mission accomplished. Third, no government shutdown. Mission accomplished.”
Democrats exposed that Republicans, or at least Johnson and his closest allies, do not have the stomach for a shutdown. Therefore, with all the cards, Democrats deftly played the hand they were dealt.
So what comes next? At the bare minimum, the House will repeat the spending exercise twice more, once for each half of the spending arrangement. There is zero reason to think Republicans can actually pass full-blown appropriations bills for military construction, veterans affairs, transportation, housing and the Energy Department before Jan. 19, and the rest before Feb. 2. So, Democrats again will vote to prevent a shutdown and extend the government’s operations by weeks or months.
However, Democrats might well be able to do more than that, even without the mathematical majority. The governing majority they put together for the spending bills (virtually all Democrats plus 127 Republicans) can be deployed for other purposes.
In December, for example, the Senate could send over a bill reflecting some or all of President Biden’s supplemental spending priorities, including more spending for immigration control and aid for Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan. Johnson and his MAGA caucus are likely to resist that, given that many have decided to run interference for Russian President Vladimir Putin and that others prefer to exploit the border situation without offering any of their own solutions. However, it only takes 218 members to execute a motion to discharge. That’s far fewer than the 336 combined Republican and Democratic votes that passed the spending bill. Surely some of the endangered Republicans from districts Biden won don’t want to be stuck voting against these items.
Even Johnson, previously a foe of more Ukraine spending, has been signaling he could support it. Whether he combines it with Israel funding or sends it to the floor separately (or has it thrust upon him through a discharge petition), it certainly seems there would be enough votes to pass the desperately needed aid, even if a majority of the votes are supplied by Democrats. He could also shore up aid to Taiwan, which confronts China, Republicans’ favored international foe.
Beyond keeping the government lights on and supporting our allies when the world is ablaze, there might be little else the House could manage. Democrats nevertheless can claim to have protected the entire legislative output of Biden’s first two years and, one hopes, to have upheld our international responsibilities against the MAGA isolationists. (They’ve also tied Republicans’ “investigations” in knots, depriving Republicans of a single talking point from dozens of hearings and scores of baseless charges.)
Now, imagine what Democrats could do if they had the mathematical majority. You can bet that will be part of their pitch in 2024.
FROM AIRLINES TO TICKET SELLERS, COMPANIES FIGHT U.S. TO KEEP JUNK FEES
An array of powerful moneyed lobbyists have warred with the Biden administration over its new regulatory crackdown as they scramble to protect their profits
By Tony Romm, The Washington Post
Frustrated with airlines that charge passengers steep fees to check bags and change flights, President Biden last fall embarked on a campaign to crack down on the practice — and force companies to show the full price of travel before people pay for their tickets.
Fliers rejoiced, flooding the Department of Transportation with letters urging it to adopt the policy. Airlines including American, Delta and United, however, did not seem so enthused.
It would be too difficult to disclose the charges more clearly, warned Doug Mullen, the deputy general counsel at Airlines for America, an industry lobbying group representing the three carriers. Testifying at a federal hearing in March, he said the new policy would only cause customers “confusion and frustration” — and, besides, the extra costs for bags and other services historically have resulted in “very few complaints.”
Since then, the Biden administration has broadened its efforts to expose or eliminate “junk fees” throughout the economy, touching off a groundswell of opposition from airlines, auto dealers, banks, credit card companies, cable giants, property owners and ticket sellers that hope to preserve their profits.
Behind the scenes, these corporations have fought vigorously to thwart even the most basic rules that would require them to be more transparent about hidden charges, according to a Washington Post review of federal lobbying records and hundreds of filings submitted to government agencies. The fees together may cost Americans at least $64 billion annually, according to a rough White House estimate, underscoring its efforts to deliver financial relief to families grappling with high prices.
Over the past year, federal regulators have tried to limit credit card late fees in a bid to protect the most cash-strapped borrowers from penalties they cannot easily pay. But the companies that issue those cards — and reaped over $14.5 billion in fees last year — have aggressively fought back, foreshadowing a lawsuit against the government to come.
Charter, Comcast and other cable giants similarly have warred with Washington through their lobbying groups, bucking federal efforts to ensure they present accurate, complete data about service charges. So have some casinos, insurers and the owners of large apartment buildings, which have fiercely fought new federal regulations that might punish them if they conceal their true prices.
Some ticket sellers have called for new rules that would require them to display the full, total price of a performance up front, including any service fees. But some companies still do not fully adhere to the practice: Ticketmaster, for example, only does so for some shows, though its parent company, LiveNation, promised the White House to be more transparent earlier this year.
‘They don’t like being taken for suckers’
For Biden, the regulatory push marks one facet of a broader battle against soaring prices, three years after the coronavirus pandemic sent the cost of groceries, gas, rents and other goods soaring. The administration views some of those price spikes as the result of corporate profiteering, as companies look to squeeze their customers in a bid to pump their bottom lines.
The concern prompted the president starting last year to target “junk fees,” taking aim at airlines, cable companies, hotels and ticket brokers that charge consumers for services they do not want, need or expect to pay for.
“We know that junk fees resonate with American consumers. They don’t like being taken for suckers,” said Lael Brainard, the director of the White House National Economic Council. “And we’re going to continue our efforts to make sure that across all industries consumers have the right to see all-in pricing right up front.”
Much of that work has occurred at the Federal Trade Commission, the independent government agency that polices deceptive corporate behavior. This month, the FTC unveiled a proposal that would require hotels, landlords, ticket brokers and other companies to disclose extra charges up front to consumers. The draft rules do not outlaw all fees, but they would prohibit firms from hiding or misrepresenting the charges, opening the door for the government to penalize businesses that do not comply.
“Consumers have become fed up with these hidden fees,” said Samuel Levine, the director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the FTC. “If a consumer is led to believe something costs $10, and it costs $20, they’ve been misled.”
The announcement drew sharp rebukes from a wide array of industries, many of which have sought to block the watchdog agency’s efforts since it first announced its inquiry last year.
The fees have proved lucrative for credit card issuers, which reaped more than $130 billion last year in these charges plus interest on unpaid balances, according to an October report from the CFPB. That prompted the agency to propose limiting late fees, which could drop to $8 per missed payment. Companies could charge more, but they would face heightened federal scrutiny.
Tens of thousands of credit card holders have cheered the bureau since it unveiled its plans, which arrived on the heels of its efforts to limit bank overdraft fees and penalize companies, including Wells Fargo, for surprising their customers with unexpected charges. Facing a similar crackdown, a wide array of financial institutions quickly mounted a vigorous defense, with some arguing it would pose a “moral hazard” if cardholders were not penalized for lateness.
The CFPB expects to finalize its credit card fee limit early next year. In the meantime, the vociferous opposition has underscored a harsh reality: Even the most popular acts of government threaten to become mired in intractable legal fights, potentially delaying or denying financial relief to Americans.
“Consumers might not benefit while the issue is in litigation, which can last for years,” said John Breyault, a vice president of public policy at the National Consumers League.
Even before they targeted junk fees, the nation’s two consumer protection watchdogs faced a slew of lawsuits that saw judges curtail their authorities to act. With the CFPB, lenders challenged its constitutionality in a case awaiting a Supreme Court ruling. The FTC, meanwhile, suffered a blow when a majority of the justices nullified one of its powers to fine corporate wrongdoers.
‘Companies are making billions of junk fees’
Amid a torrent of legal threats, Biden has repeatedly called on Congress to pass a comprehensive bill that sets the rules for when and how companies can charge extra fees. But even some of the more popular, bipartisan efforts to promote price transparency have faltered in an ever-divided, heavily lobbied Capitol.
A proposal from two unlikely allies, Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas), would mandate that ticket sellers show their full prices upfront. The duo released the Ticket Act this summer, after a public outcry about major outages and steep fees on Ticketmaster sales for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour.But the bill remains stuck in the upper chamber after Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) blocked a vote out of a belief that such regulation is unnecessary, according to two legislative aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe his stance.
The inaction has emboldened some states, including California, to adopt their own laws, while Biden has tried to use the power of the Oval Office to pressure companies into changing their practices even without new legislation.
In June, the president secured a commitment from an array of companies, including Ticketmaster, to more clearly show their service fees to consumers. Speaking at a White House roundtable that month, Biden heralded the announcement as “real transparency,” stressing it “leads to more competition” and “brings down costs for working Americans.”
In practice, though, the Ticketmaster policy has proven more complex: Only concerts listed for sale starting in late September show the full price of a ticket, including fees, by default. That full price only applies to venues owned by Live Nation, not the fuller array of performances sold through Ticketmaster. In those cases, the company requires users to check a box to see a full price for shows, with the option hidden behind a menu where customers may not think to look. As a result, fans who wish to see popular artists like Doja Cat and Kesha this year may still see price spikes once they reach the checkout page.
Wall, the Live Nation executive, said Ticketmaster cannot force other venues to display fees for a show by default. He said it would also be “difficult and disruptive” to change the way it prices performances that started selling tickets before the company implemented its new pledge to the White House.
Some critics still faulted Ticketmaster for its approach: Chuck Bell, a program director at Consumer Reports, lamented that it “goes against the spirit” of the company’s promise to the administration. Last month, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) faulted LiveNation and Ticketmaster in a public letter, noting that it is “still too difficult for consumers to find the all-in price of a ticket before checkout.”
The White House has reserved most of its ire for top airlines, lambasting them for a raft of fees that Biden has described as costly and unfair. In his State of the Union address, the president explicitly blasted major carriers for charging families extra to sit next to each other, prompting companies including American, Alaska and Frontier to end the practice soon after.
The Department of Transportation has also tried to set new rules around how airlines process refunds and handle flight cancellations, and the ways they charge fees to check bags, change flights and more. The effort at times has sparked widespread resistance from an industry that reaped nearly $7 billion in baggage fees just last year, government figures show.
Under the early draft proposal, airlines like American, Delta, United and Southwest would have to display the “all-in” cost of a flight, including any fees, before passengers see their final invoice. The transparency rules could also apply to travel search engines, like Google or Kayak, which allow fliers to look up flight options across many carriers at once, though the agency has not finalized the scope of its regulations.
“You should know the full cost of your ticket right when you’re comparison shopping to begin with,” Biden said last September, noting it would help families “pick the ticket that actually is the best deal for you.” Like much of the administration’s work, the plan would not outlaw any of the fees, since the agency lacks such authority.
Asked about the industry resistance, the agency could not comment on specific claims since it has not finalized its rules, which are expected next year. But Jen Howard, the top competition official at the Department of Transportation, stressed it is “important consumers know what they’re getting into upfront.”
“Companies are making billions off of junk fees,” she added.
An array of powerful moneyed lobbyists have warred with the Biden administration over its new regulatory crackdown as they scramble to protect their profits
By Tony Romm, The Washington Post
Frustrated with airlines that charge passengers steep fees to check bags and change flights, President Biden last fall embarked on a campaign to crack down on the practice — and force companies to show the full price of travel before people pay for their tickets.
Fliers rejoiced, flooding the Department of Transportation with letters urging it to adopt the policy. Airlines including American, Delta and United, however, did not seem so enthused.
It would be too difficult to disclose the charges more clearly, warned Doug Mullen, the deputy general counsel at Airlines for America, an industry lobbying group representing the three carriers. Testifying at a federal hearing in March, he said the new policy would only cause customers “confusion and frustration” — and, besides, the extra costs for bags and other services historically have resulted in “very few complaints.”
Since then, the Biden administration has broadened its efforts to expose or eliminate “junk fees” throughout the economy, touching off a groundswell of opposition from airlines, auto dealers, banks, credit card companies, cable giants, property owners and ticket sellers that hope to preserve their profits.
Behind the scenes, these corporations have fought vigorously to thwart even the most basic rules that would require them to be more transparent about hidden charges, according to a Washington Post review of federal lobbying records and hundreds of filings submitted to government agencies. The fees together may cost Americans at least $64 billion annually, according to a rough White House estimate, underscoring its efforts to deliver financial relief to families grappling with high prices.
Over the past year, federal regulators have tried to limit credit card late fees in a bid to protect the most cash-strapped borrowers from penalties they cannot easily pay. But the companies that issue those cards — and reaped over $14.5 billion in fees last year — have aggressively fought back, foreshadowing a lawsuit against the government to come.
Charter, Comcast and other cable giants similarly have warred with Washington through their lobbying groups, bucking federal efforts to ensure they present accurate, complete data about service charges. So have some casinos, insurers and the owners of large apartment buildings, which have fiercely fought new federal regulations that might punish them if they conceal their true prices.
Some ticket sellers have called for new rules that would require them to display the full, total price of a performance up front, including any service fees. But some companies still do not fully adhere to the practice: Ticketmaster, for example, only does so for some shows, though its parent company, LiveNation, promised the White House to be more transparent earlier this year.
‘They don’t like being taken for suckers’
For Biden, the regulatory push marks one facet of a broader battle against soaring prices, three years after the coronavirus pandemic sent the cost of groceries, gas, rents and other goods soaring. The administration views some of those price spikes as the result of corporate profiteering, as companies look to squeeze their customers in a bid to pump their bottom lines.
The concern prompted the president starting last year to target “junk fees,” taking aim at airlines, cable companies, hotels and ticket brokers that charge consumers for services they do not want, need or expect to pay for.
“We know that junk fees resonate with American consumers. They don’t like being taken for suckers,” said Lael Brainard, the director of the White House National Economic Council. “And we’re going to continue our efforts to make sure that across all industries consumers have the right to see all-in pricing right up front.”
Much of that work has occurred at the Federal Trade Commission, the independent government agency that polices deceptive corporate behavior. This month, the FTC unveiled a proposal that would require hotels, landlords, ticket brokers and other companies to disclose extra charges up front to consumers. The draft rules do not outlaw all fees, but they would prohibit firms from hiding or misrepresenting the charges, opening the door for the government to penalize businesses that do not comply.
“Consumers have become fed up with these hidden fees,” said Samuel Levine, the director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the FTC. “If a consumer is led to believe something costs $10, and it costs $20, they’ve been misled.”
The announcement drew sharp rebukes from a wide array of industries, many of which have sought to block the watchdog agency’s efforts since it first announced its inquiry last year.
The fees have proved lucrative for credit card issuers, which reaped more than $130 billion last year in these charges plus interest on unpaid balances, according to an October report from the CFPB. That prompted the agency to propose limiting late fees, which could drop to $8 per missed payment. Companies could charge more, but they would face heightened federal scrutiny.
Tens of thousands of credit card holders have cheered the bureau since it unveiled its plans, which arrived on the heels of its efforts to limit bank overdraft fees and penalize companies, including Wells Fargo, for surprising their customers with unexpected charges. Facing a similar crackdown, a wide array of financial institutions quickly mounted a vigorous defense, with some arguing it would pose a “moral hazard” if cardholders were not penalized for lateness.
The CFPB expects to finalize its credit card fee limit early next year. In the meantime, the vociferous opposition has underscored a harsh reality: Even the most popular acts of government threaten to become mired in intractable legal fights, potentially delaying or denying financial relief to Americans.
“Consumers might not benefit while the issue is in litigation, which can last for years,” said John Breyault, a vice president of public policy at the National Consumers League.
Even before they targeted junk fees, the nation’s two consumer protection watchdogs faced a slew of lawsuits that saw judges curtail their authorities to act. With the CFPB, lenders challenged its constitutionality in a case awaiting a Supreme Court ruling. The FTC, meanwhile, suffered a blow when a majority of the justices nullified one of its powers to fine corporate wrongdoers.
‘Companies are making billions of junk fees’
Amid a torrent of legal threats, Biden has repeatedly called on Congress to pass a comprehensive bill that sets the rules for when and how companies can charge extra fees. But even some of the more popular, bipartisan efforts to promote price transparency have faltered in an ever-divided, heavily lobbied Capitol.
A proposal from two unlikely allies, Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas), would mandate that ticket sellers show their full prices upfront. The duo released the Ticket Act this summer, after a public outcry about major outages and steep fees on Ticketmaster sales for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour.But the bill remains stuck in the upper chamber after Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) blocked a vote out of a belief that such regulation is unnecessary, according to two legislative aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe his stance.
The inaction has emboldened some states, including California, to adopt their own laws, while Biden has tried to use the power of the Oval Office to pressure companies into changing their practices even without new legislation.
In June, the president secured a commitment from an array of companies, including Ticketmaster, to more clearly show their service fees to consumers. Speaking at a White House roundtable that month, Biden heralded the announcement as “real transparency,” stressing it “leads to more competition” and “brings down costs for working Americans.”
In practice, though, the Ticketmaster policy has proven more complex: Only concerts listed for sale starting in late September show the full price of a ticket, including fees, by default. That full price only applies to venues owned by Live Nation, not the fuller array of performances sold through Ticketmaster. In those cases, the company requires users to check a box to see a full price for shows, with the option hidden behind a menu where customers may not think to look. As a result, fans who wish to see popular artists like Doja Cat and Kesha this year may still see price spikes once they reach the checkout page.
Wall, the Live Nation executive, said Ticketmaster cannot force other venues to display fees for a show by default. He said it would also be “difficult and disruptive” to change the way it prices performances that started selling tickets before the company implemented its new pledge to the White House.
Some critics still faulted Ticketmaster for its approach: Chuck Bell, a program director at Consumer Reports, lamented that it “goes against the spirit” of the company’s promise to the administration. Last month, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) faulted LiveNation and Ticketmaster in a public letter, noting that it is “still too difficult for consumers to find the all-in price of a ticket before checkout.”
The White House has reserved most of its ire for top airlines, lambasting them for a raft of fees that Biden has described as costly and unfair. In his State of the Union address, the president explicitly blasted major carriers for charging families extra to sit next to each other, prompting companies including American, Alaska and Frontier to end the practice soon after.
The Department of Transportation has also tried to set new rules around how airlines process refunds and handle flight cancellations, and the ways they charge fees to check bags, change flights and more. The effort at times has sparked widespread resistance from an industry that reaped nearly $7 billion in baggage fees just last year, government figures show.
Under the early draft proposal, airlines like American, Delta, United and Southwest would have to display the “all-in” cost of a flight, including any fees, before passengers see their final invoice. The transparency rules could also apply to travel search engines, like Google or Kayak, which allow fliers to look up flight options across many carriers at once, though the agency has not finalized the scope of its regulations.
“You should know the full cost of your ticket right when you’re comparison shopping to begin with,” Biden said last September, noting it would help families “pick the ticket that actually is the best deal for you.” Like much of the administration’s work, the plan would not outlaw any of the fees, since the agency lacks such authority.
Asked about the industry resistance, the agency could not comment on specific claims since it has not finalized its rules, which are expected next year. But Jen Howard, the top competition official at the Department of Transportation, stressed it is “important consumers know what they’re getting into upfront.”
“Companies are making billions off of junk fees,” she added.
WHAT HOUSE REPUBLICANS WANT TO DO TO PUBLIC EDUCATION FUNDING
By Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post
Here’s what key House Republicans are proposing to do with federal public education funding for fiscal year 2024: slash it, especially programs aimed to help students who live in poverty, English language learners and immigrants and young children. They also want to make sure that not a dime is spent on any lesson connected to critical race theory or to support diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives created by President Biden.
The priorities for 2024 education funding were spelled out in HR 5894, the biggest domestic funding bill for the departments of labor, education and health and human services. It was approved this week by a House committee and sent to the full House for consideration, but a planned vote this week was postponed when right-wing Republicans refused to consider more legislation because they were angry that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) passed a bill with Democratic votes to keep the government open.
House Democrats — and possibly some moderate Republicans — will balk at some of the deep education cuts proposed in the legislation, as will the Democratic-led Senate. But the education priorities in the bill show where the Republican leadership stands on federal funding for public education and what they might do if they win control of Congress and the White House in 2024.
The Republican legislation would (among other things):
President Biden has proposed a 2024 budget that seeks to increase Education Department spending by nearly 14 percent ($10.8 billion) and boost Title 1 spending.
Democrats blasted the legislation — which also makes cuts in the departments of labor, health and human services and other related agencies — saying that it “decimates support for children in K-12 elementary schools and early-childhood education and “abandons college students and low-income workers trying to improve their lives through higher education or job training.” A coalition of 54 education, civil rights, immigration, and other advocacy organizations wrote a letter to oppose the bill, saying if it were passed as written and became law it would “devastate America’s education system at a time when students are struggling to recover from the covid pandemic to the detriment of students, educators, families, and the country as a whole.”
The Republican bill also says no federal funds it appropriates can be used to “carry out any program, project, or activity” that “promotes or advances” critical race theory, which is a college level scholarly tool set for examining systemic racism in the United States. Republicans have made it the focus of what is called the new “culture wars,” passing laws in some states restricting how teachers can talk about race and racism.
The bill also bars any of its appropriated funding to “implement, administer, apply, enforce, or carry out” executive orders that President Biden has signed to further racial equity. It references three executive orders signed by Biden.
His Jan. 20, 2021, order called for the federal government to adopt a “comprehensive approach to advancing equity for all, including people of color and others who have been historically underserved, marginalized, and adversely affected.” A June 25, 2021 executive order to advance diversity, equity and inclusion in the federal workforce, and a Feb. 16 executive order called for extending the reach of the first two orders, in part by requiring department and agency heads to create equity teams that coordinate the implementation of equity initiatives.
The Republican bill also seeks to:
For the first time since 2012, it keeps level the maximum Pell Grant, funding provided to millions of students from low-income families to help them pay for college at a time of rising tuition costs, and fails to increase funding to the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, the primary federal program to help students with disabilities, even though Congress pays for far less of the cost than it had promised when it became law.
By Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post
Here’s what key House Republicans are proposing to do with federal public education funding for fiscal year 2024: slash it, especially programs aimed to help students who live in poverty, English language learners and immigrants and young children. They also want to make sure that not a dime is spent on any lesson connected to critical race theory or to support diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives created by President Biden.
The priorities for 2024 education funding were spelled out in HR 5894, the biggest domestic funding bill for the departments of labor, education and health and human services. It was approved this week by a House committee and sent to the full House for consideration, but a planned vote this week was postponed when right-wing Republicans refused to consider more legislation because they were angry that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) passed a bill with Democratic votes to keep the government open.
House Democrats — and possibly some moderate Republicans — will balk at some of the deep education cuts proposed in the legislation, as will the Democratic-led Senate. But the education priorities in the bill show where the Republican leadership stands on federal funding for public education and what they might do if they win control of Congress and the White House in 2024.
The Republican legislation would (among other things):
- Cut Education Department funding 28 percent cut ($22.5 billion)
- Cut by 80 percent ($14.7 billion) for Title I, a program which is intended to support schools with high percentages of students who live in poverty and which is at the heart of the federal K-12 education law called the Every Student Succeeds Act. Critics said this cut, if enacted, could lead to the loss of 220,000 teachers from classrooms serving low-income students.
- Eliminate funding ($2.2 billion) for state grants that support programs that improve teacher and principal quality.
- Eliminate funding ($1.2 billion) for Federal Work Study, which provides part-time jobs for students with financial need so they can earn money to help them pay for college
- Eliminate funding ($890 million) for a program that supports 5 million English language learners
President Biden has proposed a 2024 budget that seeks to increase Education Department spending by nearly 14 percent ($10.8 billion) and boost Title 1 spending.
Democrats blasted the legislation — which also makes cuts in the departments of labor, health and human services and other related agencies — saying that it “decimates support for children in K-12 elementary schools and early-childhood education and “abandons college students and low-income workers trying to improve their lives through higher education or job training.” A coalition of 54 education, civil rights, immigration, and other advocacy organizations wrote a letter to oppose the bill, saying if it were passed as written and became law it would “devastate America’s education system at a time when students are struggling to recover from the covid pandemic to the detriment of students, educators, families, and the country as a whole.”
The Republican bill also says no federal funds it appropriates can be used to “carry out any program, project, or activity” that “promotes or advances” critical race theory, which is a college level scholarly tool set for examining systemic racism in the United States. Republicans have made it the focus of what is called the new “culture wars,” passing laws in some states restricting how teachers can talk about race and racism.
The bill also bars any of its appropriated funding to “implement, administer, apply, enforce, or carry out” executive orders that President Biden has signed to further racial equity. It references three executive orders signed by Biden.
His Jan. 20, 2021, order called for the federal government to adopt a “comprehensive approach to advancing equity for all, including people of color and others who have been historically underserved, marginalized, and adversely affected.” A June 25, 2021 executive order to advance diversity, equity and inclusion in the federal workforce, and a Feb. 16 executive order called for extending the reach of the first two orders, in part by requiring department and agency heads to create equity teams that coordinate the implementation of equity initiatives.
The Republican bill also seeks to:
- Eliminate funding ($139 million) for magnet schools
- Eliminate funding ($87 million) in social and emotional learning grants
- Eliminate funding ($75 million) for a program that provides campus-based child care for low-income parents in secondary education
- Cut $50 million from a program that supports full-service community schools, which provide wraparound services for students and their families
- Eliminate funding ($50 million) for research and development infrastructure grants that go to historically Black colleges and universities, tribal colleges and universities and minority serving institutions
- Cut $35 million from the Office for Civil Rights
For the first time since 2012, it keeps level the maximum Pell Grant, funding provided to millions of students from low-income families to help them pay for college at a time of rising tuition costs, and fails to increase funding to the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, the primary federal program to help students with disabilities, even though Congress pays for far less of the cost than it had promised when it became law.
WHEN IT COMES TO DISDAIN FOR DEMOCRACY, TRUMP HAS COMPANY
By Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times
It makes perfect sense to treat Donald Trump as the most immediate threat to the future of American democracy. He has an ambitious plan to turn the office of the presidency into an instrument of “revenge” against his political enemies and other supposedly undesirable groups.
But while we keep our eyes on Trump and his allies and enablers, it is also important not to lose sight of the fact that antidemocratic attitudes run deep within the Republican Party. In particular, there appears to be a view among many Republicans that the only vote worth respecting is a vote for the party and its interests. A vote against them is a vote that doesn’t count.
This is not a new phenomenon. We saw a version of it on at least two occasions in 2018. In Florida, a nearly two-thirds majority of voters backed a state constitutional amendment to effectively end felon disenfranchisement. The voters of Florida were as clear as voters could possibly be: If you’ve served your time, you deserve your ballot.
Rather than heed the voice of the people, Florida Republicans immediately set out to render it moot. They passed, and Gov. Ron DeSantis signed, a bill that more or less nullified the amendment by imposing an almost impossible set of requirements for former felons to meet. Specifically, eligible voters had to pay any outstanding fees or fines that were on the books before their rights could be restored. Except there was no central record of those fees or fines, and the state did not have to tell former felons what they owed, if anything. You could try to vote, but you risked arrest, conviction and even jail time.
In Wisconsin, that same year, voters put Tony Evers, a Democrat, into the governor’s mansion, breaking eight years of Republican control. The Republican-led Legislature did not have the power to overturn the election results, but the impenetrable, ultra-gerrymandered majority could use its authority to strip as much power from the governor as possible, blocking, among other things, his ability to withdraw from a state lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act — one of the things he campaigned on. Wisconsin voters would have their new governor, but he’d be as weak as Republicans could possibly make him.
It almost goes without saying that we should include the former president’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election as another example of the willingness of the Republican Party to reject any electoral outcome that doesn’t fall in its favor. And although we’ve only had a few elections this year, it doesn’t take much effort to find more of the same.
I’ve already written about the attempt among Wisconsin Republicans to nullify the results of a heated race for a seat on the state Supreme Court. Voters overwhelmingly backed the more liberal candidate for the seat, Janet Protasiewicz, giving the court the votes needed to overturn the gerrymander that keeps Wisconsin Republicans in power in the Legislature even after they lose a majority of votes statewide.
In response, Wisconsin Republicans floated an effort to impeach the new justice on a trumped-up charge of bias. The party eventually backed down in the face of national outrage — and the danger that any attempt to remove Protasiewicz might backfire electorally in the future. But the party’s reflexive move to attempt to cancel the will of the electorate says everything you need to know about the relationship of the Wisconsin Republican Party to democracy.
Ohio Republicans seem to share the same attitude toward voters who choose not to back Republican priorities. As in Wisconsin, the Ohio Legislature is so gerrymandered in favor of the Republican Party that it would take a once-in-a-century supermajority of Democratic votes to dislodge it from power. Most lawmakers in the state have nothing to fear from voters who might disagree with their actions.
It was in part because of this gerrymander that abortion rights proponents in the state focused their efforts on a ballot initiative. The Ohio Legislature may have been dead set on ending abortion access in the state — in 2019, the Republican majority passed a so-called heartbeat bill banning abortion after six weeks — but Ohio voters were not.
Aware that most of the voters in their state supported abortion rights, and unwilling to try to persuade them that an abortion ban was the best policy for the state, Ohio Republicans first tried to rig the game. In August, the Legislature asked voters to weigh in on a new supermajority requirement for ballot initiatives to amend the State Constitution. If approved, this requirement would have stopped the abortion rights amendment in its tracks.
It failed. And last week, Ohioans voted overwhelmingly to write reproductive rights into their State Constitution, repudiating their gerrymandered, anti-choice legislature. Or so they thought.
Not one full day after the vote, four Republican state representatives announced that they intended to do everything in their power to nullify the amendment and give lawmakers total discretion to ban abortion as they see fit. “This initiative failed to mention a single, specific law,” their statement reads. “We will do everything in our power to prevent our laws from being removed upon perception of intent. We were elected to protect the most vulnerable in our state, and we will continue that work.”
Notice the language: “our power” and “our laws.” There is no awareness here that the people of Ohio are sovereign and that their vote to amend the State Constitution holds greater authority than the judgment of a small group of legislators. This group may not like the fact that Ohioans have declared the Republican abortion ban null and void, but that is democracy. If these lawmakers want to advance their efforts to restrict abortion, they first need to persuade the people.
To many Republicans, unfortunately, persuasion is anathema. There is no use making an argument since you might lose. Instead, the game is to create a system in which, heads or tails, you always win.
That’s why Republican legislatures across the country have embraced partisan gerrymanders so powerful that they undermine the claim to democratic government in the states in question. That’s why Republicans in places like North Carolina have adopted novel and dubious legal arguments about state power, the upshot of which is that they concentrate power in the hands of these gerrymandered state legislatures, giving them total authority over elections and electoral outcomes. And that’s why, months before voting begins in the Republican presidential contest, much of the party has already embraced a presidential candidate who promises to prosecute and persecute his political opponents.
One of the basic ideas of democracy is that nothing is final. Defeats can become victories and victories can become defeats. Governments change, laws change, and, most important, the people change. No majority is the majority, and there’s always the chance that new configurations of groups and interests will produce new outcomes.
For this to work, however, we — as citizens — have to believe it can work. Cultivating this faith is no easy task. We have to have confidence in our ability to talk to one another, to work with one another, to persuade one another. We have to see one another, in some sense, as equals, each of us entitled to a place in this society.
It seems to me that too many Republicans have lost that faith.
By Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times
It makes perfect sense to treat Donald Trump as the most immediate threat to the future of American democracy. He has an ambitious plan to turn the office of the presidency into an instrument of “revenge” against his political enemies and other supposedly undesirable groups.
But while we keep our eyes on Trump and his allies and enablers, it is also important not to lose sight of the fact that antidemocratic attitudes run deep within the Republican Party. In particular, there appears to be a view among many Republicans that the only vote worth respecting is a vote for the party and its interests. A vote against them is a vote that doesn’t count.
This is not a new phenomenon. We saw a version of it on at least two occasions in 2018. In Florida, a nearly two-thirds majority of voters backed a state constitutional amendment to effectively end felon disenfranchisement. The voters of Florida were as clear as voters could possibly be: If you’ve served your time, you deserve your ballot.
Rather than heed the voice of the people, Florida Republicans immediately set out to render it moot. They passed, and Gov. Ron DeSantis signed, a bill that more or less nullified the amendment by imposing an almost impossible set of requirements for former felons to meet. Specifically, eligible voters had to pay any outstanding fees or fines that were on the books before their rights could be restored. Except there was no central record of those fees or fines, and the state did not have to tell former felons what they owed, if anything. You could try to vote, but you risked arrest, conviction and even jail time.
In Wisconsin, that same year, voters put Tony Evers, a Democrat, into the governor’s mansion, breaking eight years of Republican control. The Republican-led Legislature did not have the power to overturn the election results, but the impenetrable, ultra-gerrymandered majority could use its authority to strip as much power from the governor as possible, blocking, among other things, his ability to withdraw from a state lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act — one of the things he campaigned on. Wisconsin voters would have their new governor, but he’d be as weak as Republicans could possibly make him.
It almost goes without saying that we should include the former president’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election as another example of the willingness of the Republican Party to reject any electoral outcome that doesn’t fall in its favor. And although we’ve only had a few elections this year, it doesn’t take much effort to find more of the same.
I’ve already written about the attempt among Wisconsin Republicans to nullify the results of a heated race for a seat on the state Supreme Court. Voters overwhelmingly backed the more liberal candidate for the seat, Janet Protasiewicz, giving the court the votes needed to overturn the gerrymander that keeps Wisconsin Republicans in power in the Legislature even after they lose a majority of votes statewide.
In response, Wisconsin Republicans floated an effort to impeach the new justice on a trumped-up charge of bias. The party eventually backed down in the face of national outrage — and the danger that any attempt to remove Protasiewicz might backfire electorally in the future. But the party’s reflexive move to attempt to cancel the will of the electorate says everything you need to know about the relationship of the Wisconsin Republican Party to democracy.
Ohio Republicans seem to share the same attitude toward voters who choose not to back Republican priorities. As in Wisconsin, the Ohio Legislature is so gerrymandered in favor of the Republican Party that it would take a once-in-a-century supermajority of Democratic votes to dislodge it from power. Most lawmakers in the state have nothing to fear from voters who might disagree with their actions.
It was in part because of this gerrymander that abortion rights proponents in the state focused their efforts on a ballot initiative. The Ohio Legislature may have been dead set on ending abortion access in the state — in 2019, the Republican majority passed a so-called heartbeat bill banning abortion after six weeks — but Ohio voters were not.
Aware that most of the voters in their state supported abortion rights, and unwilling to try to persuade them that an abortion ban was the best policy for the state, Ohio Republicans first tried to rig the game. In August, the Legislature asked voters to weigh in on a new supermajority requirement for ballot initiatives to amend the State Constitution. If approved, this requirement would have stopped the abortion rights amendment in its tracks.
It failed. And last week, Ohioans voted overwhelmingly to write reproductive rights into their State Constitution, repudiating their gerrymandered, anti-choice legislature. Or so they thought.
Not one full day after the vote, four Republican state representatives announced that they intended to do everything in their power to nullify the amendment and give lawmakers total discretion to ban abortion as they see fit. “This initiative failed to mention a single, specific law,” their statement reads. “We will do everything in our power to prevent our laws from being removed upon perception of intent. We were elected to protect the most vulnerable in our state, and we will continue that work.”
Notice the language: “our power” and “our laws.” There is no awareness here that the people of Ohio are sovereign and that their vote to amend the State Constitution holds greater authority than the judgment of a small group of legislators. This group may not like the fact that Ohioans have declared the Republican abortion ban null and void, but that is democracy. If these lawmakers want to advance their efforts to restrict abortion, they first need to persuade the people.
To many Republicans, unfortunately, persuasion is anathema. There is no use making an argument since you might lose. Instead, the game is to create a system in which, heads or tails, you always win.
That’s why Republican legislatures across the country have embraced partisan gerrymanders so powerful that they undermine the claim to democratic government in the states in question. That’s why Republicans in places like North Carolina have adopted novel and dubious legal arguments about state power, the upshot of which is that they concentrate power in the hands of these gerrymandered state legislatures, giving them total authority over elections and electoral outcomes. And that’s why, months before voting begins in the Republican presidential contest, much of the party has already embraced a presidential candidate who promises to prosecute and persecute his political opponents.
One of the basic ideas of democracy is that nothing is final. Defeats can become victories and victories can become defeats. Governments change, laws change, and, most important, the people change. No majority is the majority, and there’s always the chance that new configurations of groups and interests will produce new outcomes.
For this to work, however, we — as citizens — have to believe it can work. Cultivating this faith is no easy task. We have to have confidence in our ability to talk to one another, to work with one another, to persuade one another. We have to see one another, in some sense, as equals, each of us entitled to a place in this society.
It seems to me that too many Republicans have lost that faith.
I WILL FIGHT ANYONE WHO SAYS CONGRESSIONAL REPUBLICANS ARE COMPETENT
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
Reasonable people can disagree about which member of Congress was most unreasonable this week.
Was it Kevin McCarthy? After one of the eight Republican backbenchers who ousted the former speaker claimed McCarthy sucker-punched him in the kidneys, causing “a lot of pain,” the California Republican responded by saying that “if I kidney-punched someone, they would be on the ground.”
Was it Sen. Markwayne Mullin? At a hearing of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, the Oklahoma Republican challenged one of the witnesses to “stand your butt up” and fight him then and there in the committee room. “In a fight, I’m gonna bite,” the senator said in a podcast after the incident. “And I don’t care where I bite, by the way.”
Was it James Comer? The Kentucky Republican, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, exploded at an otherwise sleepy hearing on the General Services Administration, repeatedly shouting “bulls---” at a junior Democratic member of the committee and telling him: “No, I’m not going to give you your time back! … You look like a Smurf!"
Was it perennial winner Marjorie Taylor Greene? After eight fellow Republicans thwarted her attempt to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, one of them said Greene lacks “maturity.” Greene responded by telling her 2.8 million followers on X that the man who called her immature was a “p---y” who does not have testicles.
Or was it late-entrant George Santos? On Thursday, the House Ethics Committee said the New York Republican had “brought severe discredit upon the House” and that it had uncovered “additional uncharged and unlawful conduct” beyond the 23 charges he already faces. Santos responded by claiming he was being “stoned by those who have flaws themselves” — and by calling for a constitutional convention. He dropped his reelection bid, as he prepares a possible move from the House to the big house.
There is one thing about which there can be no debate: This is what Republican governance looks like in the year 2023. It has been one kidney punch after another to competent leadership.
The week began with Greene’s failed attempt on the House floor to impeach Mayorkas. It continued with a failed initial attempt to bring a temporary spending patch to the floor to keep the federal government open for another 60 days. And it ended in a yet another failed vote on the floor, in which 19 Republicans blocked GOP leaders from beginning debate on the annual Commerce, Justice and Science appropriations bill. In the past, it was unheard of for lawmakers to defy their own party leaders on such routine procedural votes. This year, it is commonplace.
After this last failure, which followed similar failures on the floor in recent weeks to pass four other appropriations bills because of intra-GOP squabbles, House leaders called off further votes for the week and sent lawmakers home early for Thanksgiving to “cool off,” as the new speaker, Mike Johnson, put it.
Six weeks ago, House Republicans ousted McCarthy because he relied on Democratic votes to pass a “clean” temporary spending bill to keep the government open without demanding spending cuts. They shut the House down for 22 days while they found a new speaker.
Now, Johnson (R-La.) has passed exactly the same sort of “clean” temporary bill that cost McCarthy his job. And once again, GOP leadership came crawling to Democrats to supply most of the votes. After all the trauma, House Republicans are right back where they started.
As Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-N.D.) put it to Politico: “It’s the same clown car with a different driver.”
“We’ve had enough!” Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), head of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, told reporters on Wednesday after he and his colleagues shut the House down yet again by blocking debate on the latest spending bill. “We’re not going to be part of the failure theater anymore.”
After the House called off votes for the rest of the week, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.), a Freedom Caucus member, held the floor for 55 minutes, railing against his own newly elected leadership. “What in the hell are we doing in this chamber?” he demanded. “I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing — one — that I can go campaign on and say we did. One!” he shouted.
There were no takers.
A Cabinet-level officer has not been impeached since 1876. House Republicans would very much like to change that, but they don’t yet have the votes. That might be because they haven’t produced evidence of high crimes or misdemeanors by Mayorkas — only evidence that he is implementing President Biden’s policies, which they do not like.
Greene used a “privileged resolution” (a maneuver seldom used in the past but also commonplace in this Congress) to force a snap vote on Monday night on impeaching the secretary without completing an impeachment inquiry. As lawmakers carried on conversations, the House clerk read Greene’s venomous resolution about “willful admittance of … terrorists”; “the invasion of approximately 10,000,000 illegals”; “border crosser[s] who have invaded”; “gotaways”; and even “illegal people.”
After such white-nationalist bromides, 200 other Republicans sided with Greene. Among them was Rep. Tony Gonzales (Tex.), who had earlier called his fellow Republicans’ border policies “un-Christian.” But now that Gonzales is facing primary challengers backed by members of the House Freedom Caucus, he held a news conference at which he said was “honored” to stand with his “good friend” Greene and thank her “for her leadership.”
I asked Gonzales about all of Greene’s “invasion” talk, which she repeated at the news conference. “I, I, uh — 435 members, we all have different styles,” he replied.
After her impeachment resolution went down, Greene railed, in a video posted on social media, against Republicans on the Judiciary Committee who thwarted her. “If we have people serving on Judiciary Committee that don’t believe in impeachment, then why are they on this committee?” she demanded.
One of those lawmakers, Rep. Darrell Issa (Calif.), told a few of us on Tuesday morning that Greene “lacks the maturity and the experience to understand what she was asking.” This prompted Greene’s allegation that Issa “lacks” part of the male anatomy.
Greene confronted Mayorkas on Wednesday as he testified before the Homeland Security committee and told him, “You can honorably resign, or we are going to impeach you — and it’s happening very, very soon.”
But before Greene could force another vote on impeaching Mayorkas, she had more crazy to attend to. At the same hearing on Wednesday, she demanded that the FBI, which she erroneously asserted was part of the Department of Homeland Security, “stop targeting innocent grandmothers and veterans who walked through the Capitol on January 6th” as part of an “event.”
Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana, another Republican on the panel, joined in the insurrection insanity. He alleged (with an accompanying poster) that he had identified two “ghost buses,” painted white, that were “nefarious in nature and were filled with FBI informants dressed as Trump supporters deployed onto our Capitol on January 6th.”
Your party is drowning in disinformation and conspiracy theories. Who you gonna call?
Ghost buses.
Maybe Rep. Tim Burchett had it coming. Speaking with a few of us outside the GOP caucus meeting on Tuesday morning in the Capitol basement, the Tennessee Republican, one of the eight who helped oust McCarthy, renewed his accusation that McCarthy “lied to me.”
As the caucus meeting broke up, Burchett was talking with NPR’s Claudia Grisales in the hallway when “McCarthy shoved Burchett,” Grisales recounted, and Burchett “lunged towards me.”
Burchett chased after McCarthy, yelling “You got no guts” and “you’re pathetic, man.” He then gave a series of interviews on the Capitol steps, telling CNN’s Manu Raju that it was “a clean shot to the kidneys.”
As Burchett finished the interview, Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) walked over and pretended to shove the startled Burchett.
McCarthy denied he intentionally hit Burchett, but McCarthy antagonist Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) immediately filed a complaint with the House Ethics Committee saying the former speaker “assaulted Representative Tim Burchett.” Gaetz, the target of an Ethics Committee inquiry into alleged sexual misconduct, said the panel should be “interviewing, under oath, the alleged assailant.”
Informed by reporters that Gaetz had filed the complaint, McCarthy responded with a smile: “I think Ethics is a good place for Gaetz to be.”
The Senate has been a relative bastion of tranquility and sanity this year. But there are exceptions. One is Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.). Since February, the former college football coach has blocked more than 400 military nominations in protest against the Pentagon’s abortion policies. A few Republicans have gone to the floor repeatedly to force him to object to the nominations, one by one, for hours at a time. This week, they kept him there until 3:44 a.m. Thursday.
Tuberville refuses to budge, no matter how much damage he does to military readiness and officer retention. “The only thing in this world I honor more than our military is the Constitution,” said the man who in 2020 claimed that the three branches of government were “the House, the Senate, and the executive.”
Now, however, Mullin is trying to dethrone Tuberville as the most pugilistic Republican in the Senate. As McCarthy was allegedly elbowing Burchett’s kidneys, Mullin, on the other side of the Rotunda, was threatening to do even worse to Teamsters president Sean O’Brien over the witness’s past trash talk on social media.
“If you want to run your mouth, we can be two consenting adults. We can finish it here,” said Mullin, a McCarthy friend who graduated from the House to the Senate in January.
“Okay, that’s fine. Perfect,” O’Brien answered.
“You want to do it right now?”
“I’d love to do it right now.”
“Well stand your butt up right now then.”
“You stand your butt up, big guy.”
Chairman Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) intervened. “Sit down!” he admonished Mullin. “You’re a United States senator.”
Mullin, a former wrestler and mixed martial arts fighter, told reporters he had no regrets about his behavior. “How do you not handle it that way?” he asked.
Shortly thereafter, at an otherwise sleepy House Oversight Committee hearing, Moskowitz needled Comer over a recent Daily Beast article accusing the chairman of having the same sort of family business dealings and conflicts of interest that he wants to impeach Biden for. Comer nearly went all Markwayne Mullin on the “Smurf.” (Moskowitz was wearing a light blue suit and tie.)
The article asserts that Comer and his brother operated a “shell company,” that “Comer channeled extra money to his brother, seemingly from nothing,” and that Comer had family agriculture interests at the same time he “held important positions in agriculture oversight.”
Comer went on a rambling, sputtering diatribe. “My father, who was a dentist, had some farmland. … All this bullshit … dumb, financially illiterate people. … I’m one of the largest landowners. … You’ve already been proven a liar. … I will sit with Hunter Biden and Jim Biden, and we can go over our LLCs.”
“Mr. Chairman,” Moskowitz observed, “this seems to have gotten under your skin.”
Comer went on Fox News that night to explain his defensive outburst to Sean Hannity. “I wasn’t going to sit there and let Moskowitz lie about me and my family,” said the man who has spent the year peddling similar innuendo and outright lies about the “Biden crime family.”
When Moody’s Investors Service lowered its outlook last week on the U.S. government’s creditworthiness, it specifically cited Washington dysfunction: “renewed debt limit brinkmanship, the first ouster of a House Speaker in U.S. history, prolonged inability of Congress to select a new House Speaker, and increased threats of another partial government shutdown due to Congress’ inability to agree on budgetary appropriations.”
Johnson ignored all that, instead putting out a statement blaming the Moody’s action on “President Biden and Democrats.” He then led the House through another week of dysfunction.
The speaker introduced a temporary extension of government funding, adopting a tiered approach with multiple expiration dates that had been proposed by the House Freedom Caucus. Members of the Freedom Caucus immediately trashed the plan. Johnson met with the caucus on Monday night to try to sway them. The group issued a statement on Tuesday morning saying Johnson’s plan “contains ... not a single meaningful win for the American people.”
“Not much of a honeymoon in this job,” Johnson said on CNBC.
The House Rules Committee also took up the proposal on Monday afternoon; five hours later, it adjourned without voting on it. Republicans didn’t even have the votes to bring the proposal to the House floor for a debate.
At Tuesday morning’s caucus meeting, Republicans found themselves in a familiar state of paralysis. “The Republican conference is a colorful group,” Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.) told us, “and we’ve got between 20 and 40 who find it almost impossible to get to yes.”
Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) blamed the trouble on the “immature man child,” Gaetz, for ousting McCarthy. Van Orden, known for his screaming outbursts directed at teenage legislative pages and others, complained that his colleagues “act out of emotion rather than logic.”
At a news conference, Fox News’s Chad Pergram pointed out that Johnson hadn’t satisfied the “arch conservatives” in his party who were accusing him of surrendering to Democrats.
“I’m one of the arch conservatives,” Johnson pleaded. But he argued that “you’ve got to fight fights that you can win.”
At the same news conference, Majority Whip Tom Emmer (Minn.) urged, “Now is the time for House Republicans to stay united as a team.”
Members of the Freedom Caucus then went to the House floor and threatened to block GOP leaders from taking up that day’s spending bill, for the departments of Labor and Health and Human Services. A group of 10 hard-liners withheld their votes — forcing Johnson to hold the vote open while he cajoled them in the center aisle; eventually, they relented.
Because Johnson couldn’t get Republican votes to take up the government-funding resolution under normal procedures, he instead had to suspend the rules and pass it with a two-thirds majority. This meant that Democrats would have to bail him out — just as they had McCarthy.
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) taunted during the floor debate: “It is the Democrats who have come to save America and to stop this dastardly shutdown.”
It was true. Two-hundred nine of 211 Democrats voted for Johnson’s 60-day stopgap. But 93 Republicans voted against it — three more than the number who opposed McCarthy’s 45-day stopgap in September before they booted him from the speakership.
Will Johnson, after three weeks on the job, now face the same fate?
Unlikely, for a simple reason: House Republicans have now proved beyond all doubt that absolutely no one can govern them.
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
Reasonable people can disagree about which member of Congress was most unreasonable this week.
Was it Kevin McCarthy? After one of the eight Republican backbenchers who ousted the former speaker claimed McCarthy sucker-punched him in the kidneys, causing “a lot of pain,” the California Republican responded by saying that “if I kidney-punched someone, they would be on the ground.”
Was it Sen. Markwayne Mullin? At a hearing of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, the Oklahoma Republican challenged one of the witnesses to “stand your butt up” and fight him then and there in the committee room. “In a fight, I’m gonna bite,” the senator said in a podcast after the incident. “And I don’t care where I bite, by the way.”
Was it James Comer? The Kentucky Republican, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, exploded at an otherwise sleepy hearing on the General Services Administration, repeatedly shouting “bulls---” at a junior Democratic member of the committee and telling him: “No, I’m not going to give you your time back! … You look like a Smurf!"
Was it perennial winner Marjorie Taylor Greene? After eight fellow Republicans thwarted her attempt to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, one of them said Greene lacks “maturity.” Greene responded by telling her 2.8 million followers on X that the man who called her immature was a “p---y” who does not have testicles.
Or was it late-entrant George Santos? On Thursday, the House Ethics Committee said the New York Republican had “brought severe discredit upon the House” and that it had uncovered “additional uncharged and unlawful conduct” beyond the 23 charges he already faces. Santos responded by claiming he was being “stoned by those who have flaws themselves” — and by calling for a constitutional convention. He dropped his reelection bid, as he prepares a possible move from the House to the big house.
There is one thing about which there can be no debate: This is what Republican governance looks like in the year 2023. It has been one kidney punch after another to competent leadership.
The week began with Greene’s failed attempt on the House floor to impeach Mayorkas. It continued with a failed initial attempt to bring a temporary spending patch to the floor to keep the federal government open for another 60 days. And it ended in a yet another failed vote on the floor, in which 19 Republicans blocked GOP leaders from beginning debate on the annual Commerce, Justice and Science appropriations bill. In the past, it was unheard of for lawmakers to defy their own party leaders on such routine procedural votes. This year, it is commonplace.
After this last failure, which followed similar failures on the floor in recent weeks to pass four other appropriations bills because of intra-GOP squabbles, House leaders called off further votes for the week and sent lawmakers home early for Thanksgiving to “cool off,” as the new speaker, Mike Johnson, put it.
Six weeks ago, House Republicans ousted McCarthy because he relied on Democratic votes to pass a “clean” temporary spending bill to keep the government open without demanding spending cuts. They shut the House down for 22 days while they found a new speaker.
Now, Johnson (R-La.) has passed exactly the same sort of “clean” temporary bill that cost McCarthy his job. And once again, GOP leadership came crawling to Democrats to supply most of the votes. After all the trauma, House Republicans are right back where they started.
As Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-N.D.) put it to Politico: “It’s the same clown car with a different driver.”
“We’ve had enough!” Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), head of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, told reporters on Wednesday after he and his colleagues shut the House down yet again by blocking debate on the latest spending bill. “We’re not going to be part of the failure theater anymore.”
After the House called off votes for the rest of the week, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.), a Freedom Caucus member, held the floor for 55 minutes, railing against his own newly elected leadership. “What in the hell are we doing in this chamber?” he demanded. “I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing — one — that I can go campaign on and say we did. One!” he shouted.
There were no takers.
A Cabinet-level officer has not been impeached since 1876. House Republicans would very much like to change that, but they don’t yet have the votes. That might be because they haven’t produced evidence of high crimes or misdemeanors by Mayorkas — only evidence that he is implementing President Biden’s policies, which they do not like.
Greene used a “privileged resolution” (a maneuver seldom used in the past but also commonplace in this Congress) to force a snap vote on Monday night on impeaching the secretary without completing an impeachment inquiry. As lawmakers carried on conversations, the House clerk read Greene’s venomous resolution about “willful admittance of … terrorists”; “the invasion of approximately 10,000,000 illegals”; “border crosser[s] who have invaded”; “gotaways”; and even “illegal people.”
After such white-nationalist bromides, 200 other Republicans sided with Greene. Among them was Rep. Tony Gonzales (Tex.), who had earlier called his fellow Republicans’ border policies “un-Christian.” But now that Gonzales is facing primary challengers backed by members of the House Freedom Caucus, he held a news conference at which he said was “honored” to stand with his “good friend” Greene and thank her “for her leadership.”
I asked Gonzales about all of Greene’s “invasion” talk, which she repeated at the news conference. “I, I, uh — 435 members, we all have different styles,” he replied.
After her impeachment resolution went down, Greene railed, in a video posted on social media, against Republicans on the Judiciary Committee who thwarted her. “If we have people serving on Judiciary Committee that don’t believe in impeachment, then why are they on this committee?” she demanded.
One of those lawmakers, Rep. Darrell Issa (Calif.), told a few of us on Tuesday morning that Greene “lacks the maturity and the experience to understand what she was asking.” This prompted Greene’s allegation that Issa “lacks” part of the male anatomy.
Greene confronted Mayorkas on Wednesday as he testified before the Homeland Security committee and told him, “You can honorably resign, or we are going to impeach you — and it’s happening very, very soon.”
But before Greene could force another vote on impeaching Mayorkas, she had more crazy to attend to. At the same hearing on Wednesday, she demanded that the FBI, which she erroneously asserted was part of the Department of Homeland Security, “stop targeting innocent grandmothers and veterans who walked through the Capitol on January 6th” as part of an “event.”
Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana, another Republican on the panel, joined in the insurrection insanity. He alleged (with an accompanying poster) that he had identified two “ghost buses,” painted white, that were “nefarious in nature and were filled with FBI informants dressed as Trump supporters deployed onto our Capitol on January 6th.”
Your party is drowning in disinformation and conspiracy theories. Who you gonna call?
Ghost buses.
Maybe Rep. Tim Burchett had it coming. Speaking with a few of us outside the GOP caucus meeting on Tuesday morning in the Capitol basement, the Tennessee Republican, one of the eight who helped oust McCarthy, renewed his accusation that McCarthy “lied to me.”
As the caucus meeting broke up, Burchett was talking with NPR’s Claudia Grisales in the hallway when “McCarthy shoved Burchett,” Grisales recounted, and Burchett “lunged towards me.”
Burchett chased after McCarthy, yelling “You got no guts” and “you’re pathetic, man.” He then gave a series of interviews on the Capitol steps, telling CNN’s Manu Raju that it was “a clean shot to the kidneys.”
As Burchett finished the interview, Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) walked over and pretended to shove the startled Burchett.
McCarthy denied he intentionally hit Burchett, but McCarthy antagonist Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) immediately filed a complaint with the House Ethics Committee saying the former speaker “assaulted Representative Tim Burchett.” Gaetz, the target of an Ethics Committee inquiry into alleged sexual misconduct, said the panel should be “interviewing, under oath, the alleged assailant.”
Informed by reporters that Gaetz had filed the complaint, McCarthy responded with a smile: “I think Ethics is a good place for Gaetz to be.”
The Senate has been a relative bastion of tranquility and sanity this year. But there are exceptions. One is Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.). Since February, the former college football coach has blocked more than 400 military nominations in protest against the Pentagon’s abortion policies. A few Republicans have gone to the floor repeatedly to force him to object to the nominations, one by one, for hours at a time. This week, they kept him there until 3:44 a.m. Thursday.
Tuberville refuses to budge, no matter how much damage he does to military readiness and officer retention. “The only thing in this world I honor more than our military is the Constitution,” said the man who in 2020 claimed that the three branches of government were “the House, the Senate, and the executive.”
Now, however, Mullin is trying to dethrone Tuberville as the most pugilistic Republican in the Senate. As McCarthy was allegedly elbowing Burchett’s kidneys, Mullin, on the other side of the Rotunda, was threatening to do even worse to Teamsters president Sean O’Brien over the witness’s past trash talk on social media.
“If you want to run your mouth, we can be two consenting adults. We can finish it here,” said Mullin, a McCarthy friend who graduated from the House to the Senate in January.
“Okay, that’s fine. Perfect,” O’Brien answered.
“You want to do it right now?”
“I’d love to do it right now.”
“Well stand your butt up right now then.”
“You stand your butt up, big guy.”
Chairman Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) intervened. “Sit down!” he admonished Mullin. “You’re a United States senator.”
Mullin, a former wrestler and mixed martial arts fighter, told reporters he had no regrets about his behavior. “How do you not handle it that way?” he asked.
Shortly thereafter, at an otherwise sleepy House Oversight Committee hearing, Moskowitz needled Comer over a recent Daily Beast article accusing the chairman of having the same sort of family business dealings and conflicts of interest that he wants to impeach Biden for. Comer nearly went all Markwayne Mullin on the “Smurf.” (Moskowitz was wearing a light blue suit and tie.)
The article asserts that Comer and his brother operated a “shell company,” that “Comer channeled extra money to his brother, seemingly from nothing,” and that Comer had family agriculture interests at the same time he “held important positions in agriculture oversight.”
Comer went on a rambling, sputtering diatribe. “My father, who was a dentist, had some farmland. … All this bullshit … dumb, financially illiterate people. … I’m one of the largest landowners. … You’ve already been proven a liar. … I will sit with Hunter Biden and Jim Biden, and we can go over our LLCs.”
“Mr. Chairman,” Moskowitz observed, “this seems to have gotten under your skin.”
Comer went on Fox News that night to explain his defensive outburst to Sean Hannity. “I wasn’t going to sit there and let Moskowitz lie about me and my family,” said the man who has spent the year peddling similar innuendo and outright lies about the “Biden crime family.”
When Moody’s Investors Service lowered its outlook last week on the U.S. government’s creditworthiness, it specifically cited Washington dysfunction: “renewed debt limit brinkmanship, the first ouster of a House Speaker in U.S. history, prolonged inability of Congress to select a new House Speaker, and increased threats of another partial government shutdown due to Congress’ inability to agree on budgetary appropriations.”
Johnson ignored all that, instead putting out a statement blaming the Moody’s action on “President Biden and Democrats.” He then led the House through another week of dysfunction.
The speaker introduced a temporary extension of government funding, adopting a tiered approach with multiple expiration dates that had been proposed by the House Freedom Caucus. Members of the Freedom Caucus immediately trashed the plan. Johnson met with the caucus on Monday night to try to sway them. The group issued a statement on Tuesday morning saying Johnson’s plan “contains ... not a single meaningful win for the American people.”
“Not much of a honeymoon in this job,” Johnson said on CNBC.
The House Rules Committee also took up the proposal on Monday afternoon; five hours later, it adjourned without voting on it. Republicans didn’t even have the votes to bring the proposal to the House floor for a debate.
At Tuesday morning’s caucus meeting, Republicans found themselves in a familiar state of paralysis. “The Republican conference is a colorful group,” Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.) told us, “and we’ve got between 20 and 40 who find it almost impossible to get to yes.”
Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) blamed the trouble on the “immature man child,” Gaetz, for ousting McCarthy. Van Orden, known for his screaming outbursts directed at teenage legislative pages and others, complained that his colleagues “act out of emotion rather than logic.”
At a news conference, Fox News’s Chad Pergram pointed out that Johnson hadn’t satisfied the “arch conservatives” in his party who were accusing him of surrendering to Democrats.
“I’m one of the arch conservatives,” Johnson pleaded. But he argued that “you’ve got to fight fights that you can win.”
At the same news conference, Majority Whip Tom Emmer (Minn.) urged, “Now is the time for House Republicans to stay united as a team.”
Members of the Freedom Caucus then went to the House floor and threatened to block GOP leaders from taking up that day’s spending bill, for the departments of Labor and Health and Human Services. A group of 10 hard-liners withheld their votes — forcing Johnson to hold the vote open while he cajoled them in the center aisle; eventually, they relented.
Because Johnson couldn’t get Republican votes to take up the government-funding resolution under normal procedures, he instead had to suspend the rules and pass it with a two-thirds majority. This meant that Democrats would have to bail him out — just as they had McCarthy.
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) taunted during the floor debate: “It is the Democrats who have come to save America and to stop this dastardly shutdown.”
It was true. Two-hundred nine of 211 Democrats voted for Johnson’s 60-day stopgap. But 93 Republicans voted against it — three more than the number who opposed McCarthy’s 45-day stopgap in September before they booted him from the speakership.
Will Johnson, after three weeks on the job, now face the same fate?
Unlikely, for a simple reason: House Republicans have now proved beyond all doubt that absolutely no one can govern them.
SHAME ISN’T WORKING. GEORGE SANTOS MUST GO.
By Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post
Rep. George Santos has had all the process he is due — and all the donor-financed Botox he deserves.
With the release by the House Ethics Committee of a damning report that offered new details about Santos’s endless lies and sordid self-dealing, the New York Republican must be expelled as soon as possible. Santos poses a test that even this House should be able to summon the will to pass, and his belated declaration that he will not seek election to a second term is entirely inadequate to the appalling circumstances of his conduct.
Before the ethics report, the question of how his fellow lawmakers should deal with Santos presented a tough case. He faces federal indictment on multiple felony charges, and it has been clear since even before Santos was sworn in that he was elected under false pretenses. Pretty much everything he told voters about his background was a lie, and his self-serving assertions that he is somehow the victim of a smear campaign, not the perpetrator of a massive fraud on his constituents, only deepen his culpability.
And yet, expulsion from the House is a drastic measure, one the Constitution wisely requires be accomplished by a two-thirds majority. The House has resorted to that step just five times — ousting three members for joining the Confederacy and, more recently, two others who were convicted of criminal offenses. So, it was understandable earlier this month that lawmakers of both parties balked at voting to expel Santos.
“This would be a terrible precedent to set,” Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.) said at the time, “expelling people who have not been convicted of a crime and without internal due process.”
“I can think of four or five Democratic members the Republicans would like to expel without any criminal conviction or adverse ethics findings tomorrow simply because they hate their politics,” Raskin added. “Indeed, the same New York Republicans who want to expel Santos now because he is a complete political albatross for them acted to vigorously defend him in the spring because they wanted his vote for their party on the floor. If members are not going to be expelled for purely political reasons, we need to stick to due process and the rule of law.” Good for Raskin, and the 30 other Democrats who voted with him.
If New York Republicans had a vested interest in seeking to oust Santos, others, including new House Speaker Mike Johnson (La.), were not coy about conflating matters of due process and political survival. “We have a four-seat majority in the House,” Johnson told Fox News’s Sean Hannity. “We have no margin for error, and so George Santos is due due process, right?” No, he’s entitled to due process whatever the margin, not simply because it’s politically expedient.
Now, the due process argument has evaporated with the Ethics Committee’s unsparing conclusion that there is “substantial evidence” Santos violated the law and that his conduct “warrants public condemnation, is beneath the dignity of the office, and has brought severe discredit upon the House.” Indeed, the panel’s Republican chair plans to introduce an expulsion resolution.
As the report lays out, Santos “sought to fraudulently exploit every aspect of his House candidacy for his own personal financial profit. He blatantly stole from his campaign. He deceived donors into providing what they thought were contributions to his campaign but were in fact payments for his personal benefit. He reported fictitious loans to his political committees to induce donors and party committees to make further contributions to his campaign — and then diverted more campaign money to himself as purported ‘repayments’ of those fictitious loans.”
The details are sordid bordering on satire. Santos spent thousands in campaign funds at spas, including for multiple Botox treatments. He used campaign funds to pay for a Las Vegas trip at a time when he told campaign staff he was on his honeymoon. He had $20,000 in campaign funds transferred to his company, then tapped the money to make $6,000 worth of purchases at Ferragamo, withdraw $800 from an ATM at a casino and pay his rent. He set up a political consulting firm, solicited contributions from supporters and then diverted $50,000 into his personal accounts, and used the money for, among other things, a $4,127.80 purchase at Hermes and “smaller purchases at Only Fans,” an adult website.
If any doubts remained about whether he deserves expulsion, Santos dispelled them with a self-serving post on X, formerly known as Twitter. Santos decried the bipartisan report as a “disgusting politicized smear that shows the depths of how low our federal government has sunk. Everyone who participated in this grave miscarriage of Justice should all be ashamed of themselves.
Shame is not in the Santos lexicon. At this stage, the dangerous precedent would be set by allowing him to remain.
By Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post
Rep. George Santos has had all the process he is due — and all the donor-financed Botox he deserves.
With the release by the House Ethics Committee of a damning report that offered new details about Santos’s endless lies and sordid self-dealing, the New York Republican must be expelled as soon as possible. Santos poses a test that even this House should be able to summon the will to pass, and his belated declaration that he will not seek election to a second term is entirely inadequate to the appalling circumstances of his conduct.
Before the ethics report, the question of how his fellow lawmakers should deal with Santos presented a tough case. He faces federal indictment on multiple felony charges, and it has been clear since even before Santos was sworn in that he was elected under false pretenses. Pretty much everything he told voters about his background was a lie, and his self-serving assertions that he is somehow the victim of a smear campaign, not the perpetrator of a massive fraud on his constituents, only deepen his culpability.
And yet, expulsion from the House is a drastic measure, one the Constitution wisely requires be accomplished by a two-thirds majority. The House has resorted to that step just five times — ousting three members for joining the Confederacy and, more recently, two others who were convicted of criminal offenses. So, it was understandable earlier this month that lawmakers of both parties balked at voting to expel Santos.
“This would be a terrible precedent to set,” Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.) said at the time, “expelling people who have not been convicted of a crime and without internal due process.”
“I can think of four or five Democratic members the Republicans would like to expel without any criminal conviction or adverse ethics findings tomorrow simply because they hate their politics,” Raskin added. “Indeed, the same New York Republicans who want to expel Santos now because he is a complete political albatross for them acted to vigorously defend him in the spring because they wanted his vote for their party on the floor. If members are not going to be expelled for purely political reasons, we need to stick to due process and the rule of law.” Good for Raskin, and the 30 other Democrats who voted with him.
If New York Republicans had a vested interest in seeking to oust Santos, others, including new House Speaker Mike Johnson (La.), were not coy about conflating matters of due process and political survival. “We have a four-seat majority in the House,” Johnson told Fox News’s Sean Hannity. “We have no margin for error, and so George Santos is due due process, right?” No, he’s entitled to due process whatever the margin, not simply because it’s politically expedient.
Now, the due process argument has evaporated with the Ethics Committee’s unsparing conclusion that there is “substantial evidence” Santos violated the law and that his conduct “warrants public condemnation, is beneath the dignity of the office, and has brought severe discredit upon the House.” Indeed, the panel’s Republican chair plans to introduce an expulsion resolution.
As the report lays out, Santos “sought to fraudulently exploit every aspect of his House candidacy for his own personal financial profit. He blatantly stole from his campaign. He deceived donors into providing what they thought were contributions to his campaign but were in fact payments for his personal benefit. He reported fictitious loans to his political committees to induce donors and party committees to make further contributions to his campaign — and then diverted more campaign money to himself as purported ‘repayments’ of those fictitious loans.”
The details are sordid bordering on satire. Santos spent thousands in campaign funds at spas, including for multiple Botox treatments. He used campaign funds to pay for a Las Vegas trip at a time when he told campaign staff he was on his honeymoon. He had $20,000 in campaign funds transferred to his company, then tapped the money to make $6,000 worth of purchases at Ferragamo, withdraw $800 from an ATM at a casino and pay his rent. He set up a political consulting firm, solicited contributions from supporters and then diverted $50,000 into his personal accounts, and used the money for, among other things, a $4,127.80 purchase at Hermes and “smaller purchases at Only Fans,” an adult website.
If any doubts remained about whether he deserves expulsion, Santos dispelled them with a self-serving post on X, formerly known as Twitter. Santos decried the bipartisan report as a “disgusting politicized smear that shows the depths of how low our federal government has sunk. Everyone who participated in this grave miscarriage of Justice should all be ashamed of themselves.
Shame is not in the Santos lexicon. At this stage, the dangerous precedent would be set by allowing him to remain.
THE TRIFECTA THAT COULD SINK TRUMP’S FAVORITE DEFENSE
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
In exchange for reduced charges and stay-out-of-jail cards in the massive Georgia state criminal case arising from former president Donald Trump’s attempt to subvert the 2020 election, former Trump attorneys Jenna Ellis, Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell and Atlanta bail bondsman Scott Hall delivered statements concerning their knowledge of facts critical to the prosecution’s case.
Excerpts of those statements were leaked this week. Based on what has been revealed, having such figures testify at trial will go a long way toward eviscerating any argument that Trump merely relied on “advice of counsel” and could undermine Trump’s expected defense that he lacked criminal intent.
Ellis claimed that on Dec. 19, 2020, she told Trump aide Dan Scavino that Trump was running out of options. According to Ellis, Scavino replied, “Well, we don’t care, and we’re not going to leave.” He reiterated, “The boss is not going to leave under any circumstances. We are just going to stay in power.”
Such testimony might create problems for Scavino, who has not been charged, in tying him to the alleged “criminal enterprise” that is at the heart of the Georgia case. Moreover, if Scavino was accurately relating Trump’s thinking — and can testify to statements made in his presence — any Trump claim that he lacked the requisite intent would go out the window.
Moreover, as Just Security co-founder Ryan Goodman noted, this testimony is consistent with another key witness’s account. He pointed to Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony about Trump finding out on Dec. 11, 2020, that he lost the Supreme Court case: “I don’t want people to know we lost, Mark [Meadows]. This is embarrassing. Figure it out. We need to figure it out.” Again, if Trump knew he lost, the prosecution practically has a slam dunk on proving criminal intent. (Goodman also reminded us that after the last case was lost on Dec. 11, 2020, Trump’s campaign lawyers “bowed out” of any effort to reverse the results.)
To be clear, Trump’s “I thought I won” is no defense. Even if he believed that, it would not excuse alleged illegal actions ranging from acquiring phony electors to attempting to disrupt an official proceeding. However, evidence that he knew he lost and was intent on staying anyway certainly would help prove “corrupt intent” beyond a reasonable doubt.
Meanwhile, as The Post reported, “Chesebro disclosed in his recorded statement that at a previously unreported White House meeting, he briefed Trump on election challenges in Arizona and summarized a memo in which he offered advice on assembling alternate slates of electors in key battleground states to cast ballots for Trump despite Biden’s victories in those states.” That testimony would undermine any defense claim that Trump did not know about the elector plan or that the “alternate” slate contradicted the actual results.
For her part, Powell buried the advice of counsel defense. She acknowledged that Trump paid attention to Rudy Giuliani and her, despite her lack of election law experience, “because we were the only ones willing to support his effort to sustain the White House. I mean, everybody else was telling him to pack up and go.”
In short, a slew of lawyers (including Eric Herschmann and Jeffrey Rosen, according to testimony provided to the Jan. 6 House select committee) was telling Trump that the plan to come up with phony electors and get then-Vice President Mike Pence to throw out Joe Biden’s electoral votes was insane. Trump cannot pick and choose which lawyers to listen to and then claim he cannot be convicted because he relied on his attorneys’ advice.
Keep in mind that the phony-elector scheme is also front and center in the federal Jan. 6, 2021, case set to go to trial March 4. All three witnesses can be called in that case to testify; any deviation from their proffers would put their plea deals in jeopardy and expose them to perjury charges.
Other Georgia defendants, including Giuliani, Jeffrey Clark and Mark Meadows, have to be worried. Norman Eisen and Amy Lee Copeland wrote last month for the New York Times, “Ms. Ellis was most closely associated with Mr. Giuliani, appearing by his side in Georgia and across the country. If her court appearance last week is any indication, she will be a compelling guide to his alleged misconduct.” That seems to have been prescient.
Most Republicans would rather not consider the possibility that their MAGA base will nominate Trump for president only to see him shortly thereafter convicted of serious crimes concerning his alleged attempted coup. Trump enjoys the presumption of innocence in court, but Republicans’ determination to ignore the real possibility their nominee would go to voters in November 2024 as a felon borders on political delusion.
The latest evidence from the lips of Trump’s own lawyers makes his conviction that much more likely — and suggests his nomination would be an act of political suicide. Republicans seem bent on going down that path. Well, they will not be able to say they weren’t warned.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
In exchange for reduced charges and stay-out-of-jail cards in the massive Georgia state criminal case arising from former president Donald Trump’s attempt to subvert the 2020 election, former Trump attorneys Jenna Ellis, Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell and Atlanta bail bondsman Scott Hall delivered statements concerning their knowledge of facts critical to the prosecution’s case.
Excerpts of those statements were leaked this week. Based on what has been revealed, having such figures testify at trial will go a long way toward eviscerating any argument that Trump merely relied on “advice of counsel” and could undermine Trump’s expected defense that he lacked criminal intent.
Ellis claimed that on Dec. 19, 2020, she told Trump aide Dan Scavino that Trump was running out of options. According to Ellis, Scavino replied, “Well, we don’t care, and we’re not going to leave.” He reiterated, “The boss is not going to leave under any circumstances. We are just going to stay in power.”
Such testimony might create problems for Scavino, who has not been charged, in tying him to the alleged “criminal enterprise” that is at the heart of the Georgia case. Moreover, if Scavino was accurately relating Trump’s thinking — and can testify to statements made in his presence — any Trump claim that he lacked the requisite intent would go out the window.
Moreover, as Just Security co-founder Ryan Goodman noted, this testimony is consistent with another key witness’s account. He pointed to Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony about Trump finding out on Dec. 11, 2020, that he lost the Supreme Court case: “I don’t want people to know we lost, Mark [Meadows]. This is embarrassing. Figure it out. We need to figure it out.” Again, if Trump knew he lost, the prosecution practically has a slam dunk on proving criminal intent. (Goodman also reminded us that after the last case was lost on Dec. 11, 2020, Trump’s campaign lawyers “bowed out” of any effort to reverse the results.)
To be clear, Trump’s “I thought I won” is no defense. Even if he believed that, it would not excuse alleged illegal actions ranging from acquiring phony electors to attempting to disrupt an official proceeding. However, evidence that he knew he lost and was intent on staying anyway certainly would help prove “corrupt intent” beyond a reasonable doubt.
Meanwhile, as The Post reported, “Chesebro disclosed in his recorded statement that at a previously unreported White House meeting, he briefed Trump on election challenges in Arizona and summarized a memo in which he offered advice on assembling alternate slates of electors in key battleground states to cast ballots for Trump despite Biden’s victories in those states.” That testimony would undermine any defense claim that Trump did not know about the elector plan or that the “alternate” slate contradicted the actual results.
For her part, Powell buried the advice of counsel defense. She acknowledged that Trump paid attention to Rudy Giuliani and her, despite her lack of election law experience, “because we were the only ones willing to support his effort to sustain the White House. I mean, everybody else was telling him to pack up and go.”
In short, a slew of lawyers (including Eric Herschmann and Jeffrey Rosen, according to testimony provided to the Jan. 6 House select committee) was telling Trump that the plan to come up with phony electors and get then-Vice President Mike Pence to throw out Joe Biden’s electoral votes was insane. Trump cannot pick and choose which lawyers to listen to and then claim he cannot be convicted because he relied on his attorneys’ advice.
Keep in mind that the phony-elector scheme is also front and center in the federal Jan. 6, 2021, case set to go to trial March 4. All three witnesses can be called in that case to testify; any deviation from their proffers would put their plea deals in jeopardy and expose them to perjury charges.
Other Georgia defendants, including Giuliani, Jeffrey Clark and Mark Meadows, have to be worried. Norman Eisen and Amy Lee Copeland wrote last month for the New York Times, “Ms. Ellis was most closely associated with Mr. Giuliani, appearing by his side in Georgia and across the country. If her court appearance last week is any indication, she will be a compelling guide to his alleged misconduct.” That seems to have been prescient.
Most Republicans would rather not consider the possibility that their MAGA base will nominate Trump for president only to see him shortly thereafter convicted of serious crimes concerning his alleged attempted coup. Trump enjoys the presumption of innocence in court, but Republicans’ determination to ignore the real possibility their nominee would go to voters in November 2024 as a felon borders on political delusion.
The latest evidence from the lips of Trump’s own lawyers makes his conviction that much more likely — and suggests his nomination would be an act of political suicide. Republicans seem bent on going down that path. Well, they will not be able to say they weren’t warned.
WHY IS TRUMP TALKING JUST LIKE HITLER?
by Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Trump isn’t just blatantly copying Hitler’s fascist language, but stealing his ideas, too
Fascism doesn’t occur naturally in human nature. Somebody had to invent it, and no one played a greater role than Benito Mussolini, an Italian World War I veteran who saw that a new kind of politics could arise from the charred ashes and bitter resentments of men traumatized by a conflict that had just killed 20 million. A vain and violent man, Il Duce taught Donald Trump how to strut on stage, posed shirtless generations before Vladimir Putin, and clung to power after 1922′s March on Rome by whipping up hate against leftists he described as vermin.
Adolf Hitler picked up the ball from his 1920s hero Mussolini and ran with it — taking antisemitism to new lows by comparing Jews to filthy animals and parasites, years before his Nazi regime killed 6 million of them. After seizing power in 1933, the German Führer told a Czech minister that “vermin must be destroyed. The Jews are our sworn enemies, and at the end of this year, there will not be a Jew left in Germany.” His gutter language was adopted by the Third Reich’s writers and editorial cartoonists who often depicted Jews as rodents, targets for elimination.
Maybe Trump was paying his own warped tribute to Hitler — the ultimate disgruntled war vet — when he chose Veterans Day to visit Claremont, N.H., and deliver an address that sounded just like a page ripped from a book of the German dictator’s speeches that his first wife Ivana famously claimed the future 45th president of the United States kept by his bedside.
“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” said Trump, only days after a flurry of one-year-before-the-2024-election polls showed his campaign for another term moving ahead of President Joe Biden. He told voters in the key primary state that “the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within.” He repeated the “vermin” bit on his Truth Social website, lest anyone missed it.
Trump’s “vermin” rant — and its seemingly deliberate echo of the 20th century’s worst tyrants — will be remembered as something of a turning point. Although the embarrassingly timid New York Times nearly whiffed (”Trump Takes Veterans Day Speech In a Very Different Direction” was the initial headline from editors terrified of calling fascism by its name), by Monday multiple media outlets were expressing an appropriate level of horror over remarks by the GOP’s all-but-certain nominee, and what they mean for American democracy.
Still, I think the media is missing something about Trump and his campaign as it grinds inexorably toward Milwaukee and maybe 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. What may be forever known as “the vermin speech” was not the only time that Trump, aided by his past and future propaganda ministers like Stephen Miller, have plagiarized Hitler in ways that cannot be accidental.
As Trump did on Saturday, Hitler famously rallied his Nazi Party supporters to take on “the enemy within.” In a recent campaign stop, the ex-president repeated a line hailing “One people, one family, one glorious nation” — a fairly blatant lift from the German autocrat’s invocation of “One people, one realm, one leader.” The GOP frontrunner, in an escalation of his anti-immigrant rhetoric, also said not long ago that migrants to the southern border “are poisoning the blood of our country,” a deafening echo of Hitler’s riffs on “blood poisoning” in Mein Kampf. (A Trump spokesman called it “a normal phrase that’s used in everyday life.”)
“I study the breakdown of democracy, and I don’t know how to say this more clearly: We are sleepwalking towards authoritarianism,” Brian Klaas, political scientist at University College London and writer, said Monday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, noting the rise in fascist rhetoric can’t be considered a coincidence.
It’s not. To the contrary, the intentionality here is stunning. Most of us in “It Can’t Happen Here” America not only believe that our exceptionalism will magically and forever protect us from dictatorship, but also that anyone who tries to implement fascism will take a stealth approach, hoping to sneak his diabolical plan past a wise, democracy-loving electorate. But Trump is being deliberate. He desires not just to make himself a dictator, but to brag and mock us while he’s doing it.
How else to explain that not only is Trump talking like Hitler and Mussolini, but he has overt plans to act like them after Jan. 20, 2025. The latest example was reported in the same edition of the Times as the Veterans Day speech: a scheme to round up thousands if not millions of undocumented immigrants from coast to coast and place them in concentration camps, awaiting mass deportation. While Trump’s worst ideas in his first term were often thwarted by more responsible public servants, the 2.0 model has a plan to install thousands of loyalists throughout the government — including a Justice Department where Trump seeks prosecution of anyone who wronged him.
Is this plot to nuke the American Experiment really leading in the polls? It might be. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump recently pointed to data that 38% of Americans think “that things in the U.S. had gone so far off track that we need a leader who would break rules in order to fix the country’s direction.” Millions more — from CEOs wondering if dictatorship is better for the bottom line to Times editors afraid they might melt at the word “fascism” — can’t or won’t speak up. There are also millions of us determined to stop Trump’s tyranny, or die trying — but we have a lot of work to do.
For now, Team Trump is rubbing it in our face. Campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said Monday that people comparing his boss’s rhetoric to Hitler and Mussolini “are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.” (He later clarified he meant to say their “sad, miserable existence” instead of their “entire existence” — as if that’s better.)
From somewhere intolerably warm, a bare-chested Il Duce surely crossed his arms, looked up, and smiled.
by Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Trump isn’t just blatantly copying Hitler’s fascist language, but stealing his ideas, too
Fascism doesn’t occur naturally in human nature. Somebody had to invent it, and no one played a greater role than Benito Mussolini, an Italian World War I veteran who saw that a new kind of politics could arise from the charred ashes and bitter resentments of men traumatized by a conflict that had just killed 20 million. A vain and violent man, Il Duce taught Donald Trump how to strut on stage, posed shirtless generations before Vladimir Putin, and clung to power after 1922′s March on Rome by whipping up hate against leftists he described as vermin.
Adolf Hitler picked up the ball from his 1920s hero Mussolini and ran with it — taking antisemitism to new lows by comparing Jews to filthy animals and parasites, years before his Nazi regime killed 6 million of them. After seizing power in 1933, the German Führer told a Czech minister that “vermin must be destroyed. The Jews are our sworn enemies, and at the end of this year, there will not be a Jew left in Germany.” His gutter language was adopted by the Third Reich’s writers and editorial cartoonists who often depicted Jews as rodents, targets for elimination.
Maybe Trump was paying his own warped tribute to Hitler — the ultimate disgruntled war vet — when he chose Veterans Day to visit Claremont, N.H., and deliver an address that sounded just like a page ripped from a book of the German dictator’s speeches that his first wife Ivana famously claimed the future 45th president of the United States kept by his bedside.
“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” said Trump, only days after a flurry of one-year-before-the-2024-election polls showed his campaign for another term moving ahead of President Joe Biden. He told voters in the key primary state that “the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within.” He repeated the “vermin” bit on his Truth Social website, lest anyone missed it.
Trump’s “vermin” rant — and its seemingly deliberate echo of the 20th century’s worst tyrants — will be remembered as something of a turning point. Although the embarrassingly timid New York Times nearly whiffed (”Trump Takes Veterans Day Speech In a Very Different Direction” was the initial headline from editors terrified of calling fascism by its name), by Monday multiple media outlets were expressing an appropriate level of horror over remarks by the GOP’s all-but-certain nominee, and what they mean for American democracy.
Still, I think the media is missing something about Trump and his campaign as it grinds inexorably toward Milwaukee and maybe 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. What may be forever known as “the vermin speech” was not the only time that Trump, aided by his past and future propaganda ministers like Stephen Miller, have plagiarized Hitler in ways that cannot be accidental.
As Trump did on Saturday, Hitler famously rallied his Nazi Party supporters to take on “the enemy within.” In a recent campaign stop, the ex-president repeated a line hailing “One people, one family, one glorious nation” — a fairly blatant lift from the German autocrat’s invocation of “One people, one realm, one leader.” The GOP frontrunner, in an escalation of his anti-immigrant rhetoric, also said not long ago that migrants to the southern border “are poisoning the blood of our country,” a deafening echo of Hitler’s riffs on “blood poisoning” in Mein Kampf. (A Trump spokesman called it “a normal phrase that’s used in everyday life.”)
“I study the breakdown of democracy, and I don’t know how to say this more clearly: We are sleepwalking towards authoritarianism,” Brian Klaas, political scientist at University College London and writer, said Monday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, noting the rise in fascist rhetoric can’t be considered a coincidence.
It’s not. To the contrary, the intentionality here is stunning. Most of us in “It Can’t Happen Here” America not only believe that our exceptionalism will magically and forever protect us from dictatorship, but also that anyone who tries to implement fascism will take a stealth approach, hoping to sneak his diabolical plan past a wise, democracy-loving electorate. But Trump is being deliberate. He desires not just to make himself a dictator, but to brag and mock us while he’s doing it.
How else to explain that not only is Trump talking like Hitler and Mussolini, but he has overt plans to act like them after Jan. 20, 2025. The latest example was reported in the same edition of the Times as the Veterans Day speech: a scheme to round up thousands if not millions of undocumented immigrants from coast to coast and place them in concentration camps, awaiting mass deportation. While Trump’s worst ideas in his first term were often thwarted by more responsible public servants, the 2.0 model has a plan to install thousands of loyalists throughout the government — including a Justice Department where Trump seeks prosecution of anyone who wronged him.
Is this plot to nuke the American Experiment really leading in the polls? It might be. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump recently pointed to data that 38% of Americans think “that things in the U.S. had gone so far off track that we need a leader who would break rules in order to fix the country’s direction.” Millions more — from CEOs wondering if dictatorship is better for the bottom line to Times editors afraid they might melt at the word “fascism” — can’t or won’t speak up. There are also millions of us determined to stop Trump’s tyranny, or die trying — but we have a lot of work to do.
For now, Team Trump is rubbing it in our face. Campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said Monday that people comparing his boss’s rhetoric to Hitler and Mussolini “are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.” (He later clarified he meant to say their “sad, miserable existence” instead of their “entire existence” — as if that’s better.)
From somewhere intolerably warm, a bare-chested Il Duce surely crossed his arms, looked up, and smiled.
TRUMP WANTS US TO KNOW HE WILL STOP AT NOTHING IN 2025
By Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times
Over the past few weeks, we’ve gotten a pretty good idea of what Donald Trump would do if given a second chance in the White House. And it is neither exaggeration nor hyperbole to say that it looks an awful lot like a set of plans meant to give the former president the power and unchecked authority of a strongman.
Trump would purge the federal government of as many civil servants as possible. In their place, he would install an army of political and ideological loyalists whose fealty to Trump’s interests would stand far and above their commitment to either the rule of law or the Constitution.
With the help of these unscrupulous allies, Trump plans to turn the Department of Justice against his political opponents, prosecuting his critics and rivals. He would use the military to crush protests under the Insurrection Act — which he hoped to do during the summer of 2020 — and turn the power of the federal government against his perceived enemies.
“If I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say, ‘Go down and indict them.’ They’d be out of business. They’d be out of the election,” Trump said in a recent interview on the Spanish-language network Univision.
As the former president wrote in a disturbing and authoritarian-minded Veterans Day message to supporters (itself echoing a speech he delivered that same day to supporters in New Hampshire): “We pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American dream.”
Trump has other plans as well. As several of my Times colleagues reported last week, he hopes to institute a program of mass detainment and deportation of undocumented immigrants. His aides have already drawn up plans for new detention centers at the U.S.-Mexico border, where anyone suspected of illegal entry would be held until authorities have settled the person’s immigration status.
Given the former president’s rhetoric attacking political enemies and other supposedly undesirable groups, like the homeless — Trump has said that the government should “remove” homeless Americans and put them in tents on “large parcels of inexpensive land in the outer reaches of the cities” — there’s little doubt that some citizens would find themselves in these large and sprawling camps.
Included in this effort to rid the United States of as many immigrants as possible is a proposal to target people here legally — like green-card holders or people on student visas — who harbor supposedly “jihadist sympathies” or espouse views deemed anti-American. Trump also intends to circumvent the 14th Amendment so that he can end birthright citizenship for the children of unauthorized immigrants.
In the past, Trump has gestured at seeking a third term in office after serving a second four-year term in the White House. “We are going to win four more years,” Trump said during his 2020 campaign. “And then after that, we’ll go for another four years because they spied on my campaign. We should get a redo of four years.” This, too, would violate the Constitution, but then, in a world in which Trump gets his way on his authoritarian agenda, the Constitution — and the rule of law — would already be a dead letter.
It might be tempting to dismiss the former president’s rhetoric and plans as either jokes or the ravings of a lunatic who may eventually find himself in jail. But to borrow an overused phrase, it is important to take the words of both presidents and presidential candidates seriously as well as literally.
They may fail — in fact, they often do — but presidents try to keep their campaign promises and act on their campaign plans. In a rebuke to those who urged us not to take him literally in 2016, we saw Trump attempt to do what he said he would do during his first term in office. He said he would “build a wall,” and he tried to build a wall. He said he would try to keep Muslims out of the country, and he tried to keep Muslims out of the country. He said he would do as much as he could to restrict immigration from Mexico, and he did as much as he could, and then some, to restrict immigration from Mexico.
He even suggested, in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, that he would reject an election defeat. Four years later, he lost his bid for re-election. We know what happened next.
In addition to Trump’s words, which we should treat as a reliable guide to his actions, desires and preoccupations, we have his allies, who are as open in their contempt for democracy as Trump is. Ensconced at institutions like the Heritage Foundation and the Claremont Institute, Trump’s political and ideological allies have made no secret of their desire to install a reactionary Caesar at the head of the American state.
As Damon Linker noted this month in his essay on these figures for Times Opinion, they exist to give “Republican elites permission and encouragement to do things that just a few years ago would have been considered unthinkable.”
Americans are obsessed with hidden meanings and secret revelations. This is why many of us are taken with the tell-all memoirs of political operatives or historical materials like the Nixon tapes. We often pay the most attention to those things that have been hidden from view. But the mundane truth of American politics is that much of what we want to know is in plain view. You don’t have to search hard or seek it out; you just have to listen.
And Donald Trump is telling us, loud and clear, that he wants to end American democracy as we know it.
By Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times
Over the past few weeks, we’ve gotten a pretty good idea of what Donald Trump would do if given a second chance in the White House. And it is neither exaggeration nor hyperbole to say that it looks an awful lot like a set of plans meant to give the former president the power and unchecked authority of a strongman.
Trump would purge the federal government of as many civil servants as possible. In their place, he would install an army of political and ideological loyalists whose fealty to Trump’s interests would stand far and above their commitment to either the rule of law or the Constitution.
With the help of these unscrupulous allies, Trump plans to turn the Department of Justice against his political opponents, prosecuting his critics and rivals. He would use the military to crush protests under the Insurrection Act — which he hoped to do during the summer of 2020 — and turn the power of the federal government against his perceived enemies.
“If I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say, ‘Go down and indict them.’ They’d be out of business. They’d be out of the election,” Trump said in a recent interview on the Spanish-language network Univision.
As the former president wrote in a disturbing and authoritarian-minded Veterans Day message to supporters (itself echoing a speech he delivered that same day to supporters in New Hampshire): “We pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American dream.”
Trump has other plans as well. As several of my Times colleagues reported last week, he hopes to institute a program of mass detainment and deportation of undocumented immigrants. His aides have already drawn up plans for new detention centers at the U.S.-Mexico border, where anyone suspected of illegal entry would be held until authorities have settled the person’s immigration status.
Given the former president’s rhetoric attacking political enemies and other supposedly undesirable groups, like the homeless — Trump has said that the government should “remove” homeless Americans and put them in tents on “large parcels of inexpensive land in the outer reaches of the cities” — there’s little doubt that some citizens would find themselves in these large and sprawling camps.
Included in this effort to rid the United States of as many immigrants as possible is a proposal to target people here legally — like green-card holders or people on student visas — who harbor supposedly “jihadist sympathies” or espouse views deemed anti-American. Trump also intends to circumvent the 14th Amendment so that he can end birthright citizenship for the children of unauthorized immigrants.
In the past, Trump has gestured at seeking a third term in office after serving a second four-year term in the White House. “We are going to win four more years,” Trump said during his 2020 campaign. “And then after that, we’ll go for another four years because they spied on my campaign. We should get a redo of four years.” This, too, would violate the Constitution, but then, in a world in which Trump gets his way on his authoritarian agenda, the Constitution — and the rule of law — would already be a dead letter.
It might be tempting to dismiss the former president’s rhetoric and plans as either jokes or the ravings of a lunatic who may eventually find himself in jail. But to borrow an overused phrase, it is important to take the words of both presidents and presidential candidates seriously as well as literally.
They may fail — in fact, they often do — but presidents try to keep their campaign promises and act on their campaign plans. In a rebuke to those who urged us not to take him literally in 2016, we saw Trump attempt to do what he said he would do during his first term in office. He said he would “build a wall,” and he tried to build a wall. He said he would try to keep Muslims out of the country, and he tried to keep Muslims out of the country. He said he would do as much as he could to restrict immigration from Mexico, and he did as much as he could, and then some, to restrict immigration from Mexico.
He even suggested, in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, that he would reject an election defeat. Four years later, he lost his bid for re-election. We know what happened next.
In addition to Trump’s words, which we should treat as a reliable guide to his actions, desires and preoccupations, we have his allies, who are as open in their contempt for democracy as Trump is. Ensconced at institutions like the Heritage Foundation and the Claremont Institute, Trump’s political and ideological allies have made no secret of their desire to install a reactionary Caesar at the head of the American state.
As Damon Linker noted this month in his essay on these figures for Times Opinion, they exist to give “Republican elites permission and encouragement to do things that just a few years ago would have been considered unthinkable.”
Americans are obsessed with hidden meanings and secret revelations. This is why many of us are taken with the tell-all memoirs of political operatives or historical materials like the Nixon tapes. We often pay the most attention to those things that have been hidden from view. But the mundane truth of American politics is that much of what we want to know is in plain view. You don’t have to search hard or seek it out; you just have to listen.
And Donald Trump is telling us, loud and clear, that he wants to end American democracy as we know it.
THE ELUSIVE ‘MODERATE’ REPUBLICANS WOULD OWN A SHUTDOWN
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Some House Republicans want to include aid to Ukraine and Israel in the funding bill to avoid a shutdown on Friday. Others want to include only aid to Israel. Speaker Mike Johnson’s idea: Include neither. Neither does it include social spending cuts that MAGA members demanded.
That pretty much sums up the unserious, fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants approach to a job for which the Louisiana Republican was unqualified and unprepared to occupy. (As CNN observed, “Johnson is hugely inexperienced and has no pedigree in manipulating his party’s fractious majority or in finding legislative tricks that can unglue votes.”)
The Post reported that in formulating his head-scratching scheme, Johnson tried to “appease the hard right while trying not to alienate the centrists.” However, his “two-tiered funding schedule that does not include other demands from across the GOP conference, like steep budget cuts, a border security proposal and funding for Israel or Ukraine … angered the hard right, puzzled the middle and was mocked by the White House.”
Well, that’s the sort of gambit you get when you put a Christian nationalist with no legislative expertise in the job. But we should be clear: The blame for another possible shutdown rests not merely with the speaker and the hard-liners who cheered him on but also with the rest of the caucus, the ones who feign to be “moderate” or “normal” Republicans.
Time and again, they have acted as if they were powerless to outvote the nuttiest members of the caucus. They refused to look for common ground with Democrats after Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) lost the speaker’s gavel. They went along with the right-wing’s choice of ill-equipped Johnson. They have never showed any inclination to pry loose a reasonable spending bill through a motion to discharge.
These cowering Republicans, especially the 18 Republicans sitting in seats from districts President Biden won in 2020, know they are in trouble. In late September, for example, weeks before the first shutdown deadline, Rep. Michael Lawler (R-N.Y.) insisted in an interview with the New York Times, “We’re going to have to find areas of agreement. … And for the handful of people that are unwilling to do that, it’s frankly destructive to the country and really harmful to the American people.” So what did he do? He went along with Johnson’s selection. Perhaps he is one of the “handful” unable to look out for the country’s well-being.
Likewise, at the end of September, Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) was out urging Republicans to work with Democrats to avoid a shutdown. Instead, he stuck with the far right, did not make a concerted effort to reach a deal with Democrats and voted for Johnson. Had he done what he’d urged, there might have been a bipartisan deal to put the funding issue to bed and a competent speaker able to differentiate between his religious views and constitutional obligations.
Then there is Rep. Thomas H. Kean (R-N.J.), who ran as a moderate in the mold of his father, a former governor. “Congressman Kean and the rest of the Biden 18 must make a choice: Will they stand with the American people, decency, and democracy here, and around the world, or will they choose Trumpism, and chaos,” Reed Galen, a co-founder of the anti-MAGA Lincoln Project, said in a news release before Johnson was selected. “They have a responsibility to their constituents to support the institution by finding other choices for Speaker. It’s time for these 18 to put America before politics and finally say enough is enough. Election deniers, conspiracy theorists, and unprincipled autocrats should not rule over the U.S. House of Representatives.” But sure enough, Kean also threw his lot in with Johnson, who sits on the precipice of a shutdown.
Even if Johnson’s plan makes it through the rules committee and passes on the floor, it is far from clear that the Senate’s Democratic majority (or, frankly, many in the Republican caucus that held out for Ukraine aid last time) will go along with Johnson’s scheme. On Monday, the White House issued veto threats for both of the spending bills.
And so, again, a shutdown looms. You can bet the Mike Lawlers, Don Bacons and Tom Keans will bemoan their colleagues’ extremism. But if dysfunction is their concern, they had best look in the mirror. Any number of them could have headed off this possible debacle. They chose instead to be partisan loyalists.
Voters should remember next November when they are looking to blame officials who cannot seem to get anything done.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Some House Republicans want to include aid to Ukraine and Israel in the funding bill to avoid a shutdown on Friday. Others want to include only aid to Israel. Speaker Mike Johnson’s idea: Include neither. Neither does it include social spending cuts that MAGA members demanded.
That pretty much sums up the unserious, fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants approach to a job for which the Louisiana Republican was unqualified and unprepared to occupy. (As CNN observed, “Johnson is hugely inexperienced and has no pedigree in manipulating his party’s fractious majority or in finding legislative tricks that can unglue votes.”)
The Post reported that in formulating his head-scratching scheme, Johnson tried to “appease the hard right while trying not to alienate the centrists.” However, his “two-tiered funding schedule that does not include other demands from across the GOP conference, like steep budget cuts, a border security proposal and funding for Israel or Ukraine … angered the hard right, puzzled the middle and was mocked by the White House.”
Well, that’s the sort of gambit you get when you put a Christian nationalist with no legislative expertise in the job. But we should be clear: The blame for another possible shutdown rests not merely with the speaker and the hard-liners who cheered him on but also with the rest of the caucus, the ones who feign to be “moderate” or “normal” Republicans.
Time and again, they have acted as if they were powerless to outvote the nuttiest members of the caucus. They refused to look for common ground with Democrats after Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) lost the speaker’s gavel. They went along with the right-wing’s choice of ill-equipped Johnson. They have never showed any inclination to pry loose a reasonable spending bill through a motion to discharge.
These cowering Republicans, especially the 18 Republicans sitting in seats from districts President Biden won in 2020, know they are in trouble. In late September, for example, weeks before the first shutdown deadline, Rep. Michael Lawler (R-N.Y.) insisted in an interview with the New York Times, “We’re going to have to find areas of agreement. … And for the handful of people that are unwilling to do that, it’s frankly destructive to the country and really harmful to the American people.” So what did he do? He went along with Johnson’s selection. Perhaps he is one of the “handful” unable to look out for the country’s well-being.
Likewise, at the end of September, Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) was out urging Republicans to work with Democrats to avoid a shutdown. Instead, he stuck with the far right, did not make a concerted effort to reach a deal with Democrats and voted for Johnson. Had he done what he’d urged, there might have been a bipartisan deal to put the funding issue to bed and a competent speaker able to differentiate between his religious views and constitutional obligations.
Then there is Rep. Thomas H. Kean (R-N.J.), who ran as a moderate in the mold of his father, a former governor. “Congressman Kean and the rest of the Biden 18 must make a choice: Will they stand with the American people, decency, and democracy here, and around the world, or will they choose Trumpism, and chaos,” Reed Galen, a co-founder of the anti-MAGA Lincoln Project, said in a news release before Johnson was selected. “They have a responsibility to their constituents to support the institution by finding other choices for Speaker. It’s time for these 18 to put America before politics and finally say enough is enough. Election deniers, conspiracy theorists, and unprincipled autocrats should not rule over the U.S. House of Representatives.” But sure enough, Kean also threw his lot in with Johnson, who sits on the precipice of a shutdown.
Even if Johnson’s plan makes it through the rules committee and passes on the floor, it is far from clear that the Senate’s Democratic majority (or, frankly, many in the Republican caucus that held out for Ukraine aid last time) will go along with Johnson’s scheme. On Monday, the White House issued veto threats for both of the spending bills.
And so, again, a shutdown looms. You can bet the Mike Lawlers, Don Bacons and Tom Keans will bemoan their colleagues’ extremism. But if dysfunction is their concern, they had best look in the mirror. Any number of them could have headed off this possible debacle. They chose instead to be partisan loyalists.
Voters should remember next November when they are looking to blame officials who cannot seem to get anything done.
THE SUPREME COURT’S ETHICS CODE AMOUNTS TO ‘YOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME’
By Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post
It’s better to have a code of conduct for Supreme Court justices than not to have one. That’s the most that can be said for the document the justices issued Monday — belated, grudging and inadequate to the task of restoring the court’s tattered reputation.
For the most part, the code would not have prevented, nor would it punish or otherwise address, the episodes that have so alarmed the public. Not Justice Clarence Thomas’s acceptance of, and failure to disclose, luxury vacations and travel from Dallas billionaire Harlan Crow. Not his failure to recuse himself from Jan. 6-related cases despite his wife’s involvement in challenging the election results. Not Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s undisclosed travel to an Alaskan fishing trip on the private jet of a hedge fund tycoon with business before the court.
I could go on, but you get the point. It’s difficult, maybe even impossible, to legislate good judgment or prevent the culture of ingrained entitlement that these episodes expose. No code of conduct can substitute for common sense and a basic understanding of how unseemly these episodes appear to a public that believes justices shouldn’t profit from their lofty positions or scoop up goodies not available to ordinary mortals.
But no code of conduct is meaningful without a mechanism for enforcement and accountability that is completely absent from the new document. Lacking that, there is every reason to believe that this behavior will persist, that spotty and reluctant compliance with ethics and disclosure rules will continue, and that the court’s reputation will suffer accordingly.
The new document bristles with the court’s resentment at the position in which it finds itself — and it casts the blame on a misinformed public, not the justices themselves. “The absence of a Code,” it notes, “has led in recent years to the misunderstanding that the Justices of this Court, unlike all other jurists in this country, regard themselves as unrestricted by any ethics rules.”
There are a few nuggets of improvement buried within the document’s 14 pages. For instance, Thomas’s defenders justified his acceptance of tuition payments from Crow for his grandnephew — whom he was raising “as a son” — on the hyper-legalistic grounds that federal ethics rules did not cover this relationship and it was therefore not a “reportable gift.” The new code addresses that insupportable deficiency, providing that “a ‘member of the Justice’s family’ means any relative of a Justice by blood, adoption, or marriage, or any person treated by a Justice as a member of the Justice’s family.” This is good.
The code’s split-the-difference treatment of justices’ involvement in fundraising events for “law-related or other nonprofit organizations” is more questionable. It affirmatively permits justices to participate in such activities, clearing the way for episodes such as Thomas’s attendance at donor events for the conservative Koch network. This remains unwise and unnecessary.
At the same time, the code provides that justices “should not knowingly be a speaker, a guest of honor, or featured on the program of such event. In general, an event is a ‘fundraising event’ if proceeds from the event exceed its costs or if donations are solicited in connection with the event.” If taken seriously, that would seem to bar justices from speaking, as several have, at the annual Federalist Society dinner. If so, good on that, too.
The biggest omission is the glaring absence of accountability. This is a “you’re not the boss of me” code, up to each individual justice to self-administer — an approach that would be more tolerable had some justices not already proved themselves to be tone-deaf and negligent, or worse, in complying with the rules.
The court needs to safeguard its independence, so it is, admittedly, tricky to figure out how to craft an enforcement mechanism. But there are smart ways to set up a system that protects the judiciary without sacrificing accountability. One smart approach would be to establish a panel of judges, perhaps retired jurists, who could examine ethics complaints and issues of compliance. Another, as former Justice Department inspector general Glenn Fine has urged, would be an inspector general who could do the same.
But a code without oversight is mere window-dressing. First-year law students learn the word “precatory” — meaning “expressing a hope or wish.” For example, my will may express my desire that my children cooperate in the disposition of my assets. It is merely precatory, not binding. That is where the justices would like to leave their ethics code, as a hope or wish that they all behave appropriately. Experience teaches the inadequacy of that aspiration.
By Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post
It’s better to have a code of conduct for Supreme Court justices than not to have one. That’s the most that can be said for the document the justices issued Monday — belated, grudging and inadequate to the task of restoring the court’s tattered reputation.
For the most part, the code would not have prevented, nor would it punish or otherwise address, the episodes that have so alarmed the public. Not Justice Clarence Thomas’s acceptance of, and failure to disclose, luxury vacations and travel from Dallas billionaire Harlan Crow. Not his failure to recuse himself from Jan. 6-related cases despite his wife’s involvement in challenging the election results. Not Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s undisclosed travel to an Alaskan fishing trip on the private jet of a hedge fund tycoon with business before the court.
I could go on, but you get the point. It’s difficult, maybe even impossible, to legislate good judgment or prevent the culture of ingrained entitlement that these episodes expose. No code of conduct can substitute for common sense and a basic understanding of how unseemly these episodes appear to a public that believes justices shouldn’t profit from their lofty positions or scoop up goodies not available to ordinary mortals.
But no code of conduct is meaningful without a mechanism for enforcement and accountability that is completely absent from the new document. Lacking that, there is every reason to believe that this behavior will persist, that spotty and reluctant compliance with ethics and disclosure rules will continue, and that the court’s reputation will suffer accordingly.
The new document bristles with the court’s resentment at the position in which it finds itself — and it casts the blame on a misinformed public, not the justices themselves. “The absence of a Code,” it notes, “has led in recent years to the misunderstanding that the Justices of this Court, unlike all other jurists in this country, regard themselves as unrestricted by any ethics rules.”
There are a few nuggets of improvement buried within the document’s 14 pages. For instance, Thomas’s defenders justified his acceptance of tuition payments from Crow for his grandnephew — whom he was raising “as a son” — on the hyper-legalistic grounds that federal ethics rules did not cover this relationship and it was therefore not a “reportable gift.” The new code addresses that insupportable deficiency, providing that “a ‘member of the Justice’s family’ means any relative of a Justice by blood, adoption, or marriage, or any person treated by a Justice as a member of the Justice’s family.” This is good.
The code’s split-the-difference treatment of justices’ involvement in fundraising events for “law-related or other nonprofit organizations” is more questionable. It affirmatively permits justices to participate in such activities, clearing the way for episodes such as Thomas’s attendance at donor events for the conservative Koch network. This remains unwise and unnecessary.
At the same time, the code provides that justices “should not knowingly be a speaker, a guest of honor, or featured on the program of such event. In general, an event is a ‘fundraising event’ if proceeds from the event exceed its costs or if donations are solicited in connection with the event.” If taken seriously, that would seem to bar justices from speaking, as several have, at the annual Federalist Society dinner. If so, good on that, too.
The biggest omission is the glaring absence of accountability. This is a “you’re not the boss of me” code, up to each individual justice to self-administer — an approach that would be more tolerable had some justices not already proved themselves to be tone-deaf and negligent, or worse, in complying with the rules.
The court needs to safeguard its independence, so it is, admittedly, tricky to figure out how to craft an enforcement mechanism. But there are smart ways to set up a system that protects the judiciary without sacrificing accountability. One smart approach would be to establish a panel of judges, perhaps retired jurists, who could examine ethics complaints and issues of compliance. Another, as former Justice Department inspector general Glenn Fine has urged, would be an inspector general who could do the same.
But a code without oversight is mere window-dressing. First-year law students learn the word “precatory” — meaning “expressing a hope or wish.” For example, my will may express my desire that my children cooperate in the disposition of my assets. It is merely precatory, not binding. That is where the justices would like to leave their ethics code, as a hope or wish that they all behave appropriately. Experience teaches the inadequacy of that aspiration.
TRUMP CALLS POLITICAL ENEMIES ‘VERMIN,’ ECHOING DICTATORS HITLER, MUSSOLINI
On Veterans Day, the former president vowed to “root out” his liberal opponents, drawing backlash from historians who say his rhetoric is reminiscent of authoritarians
By Marianne LeVine, The Washington Post
Former president Donald Trump denigrated his domestic opponents and critics during a Veterans Day speech Saturday, calling those on the other side of the aisle “vermin” and suggesting that they pose a greater threat to the United States than countries such as Russia, China or North Korea. That language is drawing rebuke from historians, who compared it to that of authoritarian leaders.
“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” Trump said toward the end of his speech, repeating his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. “They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream.”
Trump went on further to state: “the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within. Because if you have a capable, competent, smart, tough leader, Russia, China, North Korea, they’re not going to want to play with us.”
The former president’s speech in Claremont, N.H., echoed his message of vengeance and grievance, as he called himself a “very proud election denier” and decried his legal entanglements, once again attacking the judge in a New York civil trial and re-upping his attacks on special counsel Jack Smith. In the speech, Trump once again portrayed himself as a victim of a political system that is out to get him and his supporters.
Yet Trump’s use of the word “vermin” both in his speech and in a Truth Social post on Saturday drew particular backlash.
“The language is the language that dictators use to instill fear,” said Timothy Naftali, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. “When you dehumanize an opponent, you strip them of their constitutional rights to participate securely in a democracy because you’re saying they’re not human. That’s what dictators do.”
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian at New York University, said in an email to The Washington Post that “calling people 'vermin’ was used effectively by Hitler and Mussolini to dehumanize people and encourage their followers to engage in violence.”
“Trump is also using projection: note that he mentions all kinds of authoritarians ‘communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left’ to set himself up as the deliverer of freedom,” Ben-Ghiat said. “Mussolini promised freedom to his people too and then declared dictatorship.”
Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesman, told The Post “those who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”
Trump also received widespread criticism and condemnation recently from groups such as the Anti-Defamation League for saying in an interview that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Domingo Garcia, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, the oldest Hispanic civil rights group in the country, said at the time that Trump’s comments about blood indicate his language is “getting more extreme,” comparing it to Nazi propaganda about Jewish people.
Trump’s divisive rhetoric comes as he remains the clear polling leader in the dwindling GOP primary field and as he and his allies have already started to plot ways for the federal government to punish his critics and opponents should he win back the White House next November. The Post recently reported that Trump — who faces 91 charges across four criminal cases — is naming the people he wants to investigate and prosecute, and his associates are drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office, which would allow him to deploy the military in response to civil demonstrations.
In addition to attacking the “radical left,” he also spent part of the New Hampshire speech lashing out at a New York judge overseeing his civil fraud case, calling New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) a “disaster” and reiterating his descriptions of Smith as “deranged.” Smith has brought two indictments against Trump: one in a case charging Trump with illegally hoarding classified documents and the other alleging he sought to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power by seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election, leading to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“The Trump-hating prosecutor in the case, his wife and family despise me much more than he does and I think he’s about a ten,” he said. “They’re about a 15, on a scale of ten. … He’s a disgrace to America.”
On Veterans Day, the former president vowed to “root out” his liberal opponents, drawing backlash from historians who say his rhetoric is reminiscent of authoritarians
By Marianne LeVine, The Washington Post
Former president Donald Trump denigrated his domestic opponents and critics during a Veterans Day speech Saturday, calling those on the other side of the aisle “vermin” and suggesting that they pose a greater threat to the United States than countries such as Russia, China or North Korea. That language is drawing rebuke from historians, who compared it to that of authoritarian leaders.
“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” Trump said toward the end of his speech, repeating his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. “They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream.”
Trump went on further to state: “the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within. Because if you have a capable, competent, smart, tough leader, Russia, China, North Korea, they’re not going to want to play with us.”
The former president’s speech in Claremont, N.H., echoed his message of vengeance and grievance, as he called himself a “very proud election denier” and decried his legal entanglements, once again attacking the judge in a New York civil trial and re-upping his attacks on special counsel Jack Smith. In the speech, Trump once again portrayed himself as a victim of a political system that is out to get him and his supporters.
Yet Trump’s use of the word “vermin” both in his speech and in a Truth Social post on Saturday drew particular backlash.
“The language is the language that dictators use to instill fear,” said Timothy Naftali, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. “When you dehumanize an opponent, you strip them of their constitutional rights to participate securely in a democracy because you’re saying they’re not human. That’s what dictators do.”
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian at New York University, said in an email to The Washington Post that “calling people 'vermin’ was used effectively by Hitler and Mussolini to dehumanize people and encourage their followers to engage in violence.”
“Trump is also using projection: note that he mentions all kinds of authoritarians ‘communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left’ to set himself up as the deliverer of freedom,” Ben-Ghiat said. “Mussolini promised freedom to his people too and then declared dictatorship.”
Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesman, told The Post “those who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”
Trump also received widespread criticism and condemnation recently from groups such as the Anti-Defamation League for saying in an interview that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Domingo Garcia, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, the oldest Hispanic civil rights group in the country, said at the time that Trump’s comments about blood indicate his language is “getting more extreme,” comparing it to Nazi propaganda about Jewish people.
Trump’s divisive rhetoric comes as he remains the clear polling leader in the dwindling GOP primary field and as he and his allies have already started to plot ways for the federal government to punish his critics and opponents should he win back the White House next November. The Post recently reported that Trump — who faces 91 charges across four criminal cases — is naming the people he wants to investigate and prosecute, and his associates are drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office, which would allow him to deploy the military in response to civil demonstrations.
In addition to attacking the “radical left,” he also spent part of the New Hampshire speech lashing out at a New York judge overseeing his civil fraud case, calling New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) a “disaster” and reiterating his descriptions of Smith as “deranged.” Smith has brought two indictments against Trump: one in a case charging Trump with illegally hoarding classified documents and the other alleging he sought to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power by seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election, leading to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“The Trump-hating prosecutor in the case, his wife and family despise me much more than he does and I think he’s about a ten,” he said. “They’re about a 15, on a scale of ten. … He’s a disgrace to America.”
‘GIVE ‘EM, HELL, JOE!’ HOW HARRY TRUMAN SHOWED BIDEN A WAY TO WIN IN 2024
High inflation, a Moscow dictator, an exhausted electorate — Harry Truman somehow won in 1948, and created lessons for Joe Biden.
by Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
He was an accidental president — a Democratic ex-senator and vice president, thrust into the Oval Office in a chaotic time — and almost every political pundit and journalist insisted he could not win another term. Runaway inflation, especially at the supermarket, had already led to GOP gains in midterms some dubbed “the beefsteak election.” There was a spike in labor unrest at home, and a menacing dictator in Moscow threatened world peace.
American voters were exhausted by years of disruption. There was even an active effort to displace the incumbent president at the top of the ticket, to head off disaster that fall. When that didn’t happen, third-party candidates loomed on the left and the right. The polling numbers for the Democrat were so dismal that one leading firm even stopped doing surveys a month before Election Day.
That proved to be a big mistake, albeit not as famous as the Election Night screw-up by editors at the conservative-minded Chicago Tribune, who produced the big-type erroneous headline, “Dewey Defeats Truman.” Harry Truman — facing a sea of supposedly insurmountable obstacles that would look painfully familiar to today’s President Joe Biden — won that 1948 election over the GOP’s Thomas Dewey by a solid margin.
What’s especially striking about the comparison between a monumental election that just marked its 75th anniversary and today is that the laws of political science haven’t changed as much as you think. The then-novel strategies cooked up by Truman’s kitchen cabinet of advisers — making the vote less about the 33rd president and more about an unpopular Republican brand, with a focus on energizing the Democratic base — look like the best hand Biden can play in 2024.
Whether the Delawarean, who turns 81 later this month, can pull it off may decide the difference between an American 21st century of democracy or dictatorship.
The political world, from TV talking heads to anxious tweeters on Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter, has been struggling to make sense of Biden’s chances with just under a year until that do-or-die 2024 vote. Two major data points last week seemed wildly contradictory.
On one hand, Biden’s popularity, and his poll numbers against the all-but-certain GOP nominee — an increasingly dictatorial sounding Donald Trump — are dropping. The much-discussed New York Times/Siena College poll showing the 45th president topping the 46th in five of the six swing states likely to decide the election — matched by other new polls showing Trump pulling ahead — is not destiny, but a loud alarm bell for Democrats to get to work.
Yet last Tuesday, poll-panicked Dems suddenly had something to celebrate. A series of off-year election triumphs in swing states and even red states like Kentucky, where a Democratic governor was reelected, and Ohio, where an abortion-rights amendment won big, showed just how toxic the post-and-pre-Trump GOP brand has become for voters. Many reject the assault on women’s rights and the book-banning culture at the core of Republicanism.
A lot of folks looked at those results and concluded that the Biden polling numbers are bunk. I don’t agree. I think the president has real problems with a) millions of casual, less politically engaged voters who only show up every four years and who think Biden is too old or blame him for chaotic current events and b) core past supporters including under-30 voters or Black and Latino men finding fault with Biden’s record on issues like the war in Gaza.
Truman was vice president when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in 1945, near the end of World War II. Truman decided to run for a full term of his own, and he announced his candidacy on March 8, 1948.Read moreUncredited / AP
The specifics aren’t the same, but the incumbent’s bleak scenario would have looked familiar to Truman, who’d seen his approval rating plummet from over 80% in 1945 after FDR’s death thrust him into the Oval Office to just 35% in the pre-election year of 1947, in part because of post-war consumer inflation that peaked at a 20% annual rate.
The Harry Truman analogy is a bit ironic because for much of Biden’s nearly three years in the White House, the nattering nabobs of political history have instead been asking whether the 46th POTUS is channeling the original New Deal Democrat, HST’s predecessor Franklin Roosevelt. Biden’s push for an expanded social-welfare state, major infrastructure work, and stronger labor unions has certainly echoed FDR’s 1930s agenda, albeit with mixed success on Capitol Hill. And a global rise in authoritarianism and militarism that threatened democracy in Europe and elsewhere also looks familiar today.
But what seems clear now is that the challenges Biden faced coming out of a worldwide pandemic — inflation, a workforce demanding its fair share in a return-to-work economy, an anxious and uneasy electorate — looks more like 1947 than 1933. So how on earth did Truman — with a perception problem not that he was too old for the White House but too small, an accidental president — get reelected? And did he leave lessons for Biden, 75 years later?
Looking back, 1948 was a game-changing election — including the first political conventions beamed into America’s living rooms on TV, as mass media including radio and newspapers played a greater role. Team Truman seemed to understand the new landscape better than the beleaguered Dewey, an overly cautious, boring candidate — famously described by Alice Roosevelt Longworth as “the bridegroom atop a wedding cake” — whose staid campaign was better suited for the turn of the 20th century. Truman’s top political advisers, James Rowe and Clark Clifford — crafted a battle plan called “The Politics of 1948.” Team Biden would do well to read it now.
There are three Truman takeaways that should be invaluable for Biden:
The ‘do-nothing’ Congress. The Truman campaign turned the conventional wisdom — that a presidential election is always a referendum on the incumbent — on its head. Rather than run on his record, the plain-spoken Missourian worked hard to reassemble the winning FDR New Deal coalition with a relentless focus on the Republican Party that had seized control of Capitol Hill in the 1946 midterms. He attacked “the worst Congress” and later “a do-nothing Congress” captured by special interests. And he electrified delegates at 1948′s fractured Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia by calling lawmakers into a special summer session, where Republicans’ refusal to pass popular bills like national health care played right into Truman’s hands.
Today, it’s clear that Biden made an early mistake in hoping that a rebranding of the economy’s strongpoints, including record low unemployment, as “Bidenomics” would move voters more focused on higher prices and soaring rents. Meanwhile, the current House of Representatives — now under Christian nationalist extremist Mike Johnson after months of chaos, struggling to keep the government open — ought to inspire nostalgia for the run-of-the-mill conservatives of Truman’s era. The highly toxic brand of 2023′s Republican Party is what propelled last week’s Democratic wins. Biden — who seems to have wrongly thought Trump would be crushed by his mountain of legal woes — needs to make the do-nothing-or-worse Republicans and the dictatorial danger of Trump his 2024 focus.
Focus on the base. One thing truly groundbreaking about Truman’s “Politics of 1948″ memo was its almost prehistoric emphasis on the need to energize the Democrats’ most loyal core voters rather than the harder task of winning over swing voters. Rowe’s plan for HST aimed to excite big-city African Americans, unionized blue-collar workers and farmers who had been the heart and soul of FDR’s unprecedented four straight election victories. That meant writing off other voting blocs, including the Deep South that had been at the core of Democratic strategy since the Civil War but which in 1948 was going for third-party segregationist Strom Thurmond. Forgetting the South and wooing urban Black voters freed Truman to integrate the armed forces, which helped in key Northern states.
Like Truman, Biden’s challenge in going into 2024 is not to reinvent the wheel — Democrats have won the popular presidential vote in seven of the last eight elections — but to boost enthusiasm and turnout among the coalition that produced those million-vote margins. Today, that includes white voters in cities and suburbs with college degrees, Black and brown voters, and young people of all stripes, among others. Truman outsmarted Dewey by designing campaign trips that intensely targeted the places he needed to win, and Biden must do the same.
‘Give ‘em, hell!’ In the White House, Truman may have shrunk in comparison to the larger-than-life Roosevelt, but crisscrossing America by train in the summer and fall of 1948, his combative style honed in Kansas City’s notorious machine politics suddenly struck a chord with the restive electorate. “We’re going to give ‘em hell,” Truman declared in boarding his whistle-stop express in mid-September. A campaign slogan — and a winning vibe — was born. The growing shouts of “Give ‘em hell, Harry!” from the swelling crowds meant more than any public-opinion poll.
Biden — despite his lifelong struggles with stuttering, and now his advancing age — can be Truman-esque when he is truly unleashed on the campaign trail. “Is there ever anything America set its mind to as a nation that we’ve done together and we haven’t succeeded?” Biden asked union autoworkers celebrating a new contract in Illinois last week, before, uncharacteristically, lashing out at Trump by name. His energized audience booed and someone shouted “send him to jail!” Biden was giving ‘em hell, and his crowd was eating it up.
Times change, but commonalities abound. Voters fret about the economy, but what brings them to the polls is a threat to their fundamental rights. Three-quarters of a century ago, the No. 1 human-rights issue was Jim Crow segregation. Last Tuesday’s election shows that in the 2020s, nothing has motivated voters more than the threat to women’s reproductive rights since the GOP’s handpicked Supreme Court overturned the Roe v. Wade ruling in 2022, as well as the freedom of speech assaults by conservative groups like Moms for Liberty.
Until now, Democrats haven’t fully figured out how to translate that anger into energy into Biden’s reelection, but it can be done. Plans to put abortion-rights referenda on the ballot in key states like Nevada or Florida will help. Team Biden needs to spotlight Trump’s frequent boasts that he’s personally responsible for ending Roe v. Wade through his radical Supreme Court picks.
Abortion rights can be a winning issue. So can voter revulsion at the poisonous GOP brand and growing legitimate fears of dictatorship, which should trump any qualms over Biden’s age. The history of how Biden wins in 2024 was written in 1948. Give ‘em hell, Joe!
High inflation, a Moscow dictator, an exhausted electorate — Harry Truman somehow won in 1948, and created lessons for Joe Biden.
by Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
He was an accidental president — a Democratic ex-senator and vice president, thrust into the Oval Office in a chaotic time — and almost every political pundit and journalist insisted he could not win another term. Runaway inflation, especially at the supermarket, had already led to GOP gains in midterms some dubbed “the beefsteak election.” There was a spike in labor unrest at home, and a menacing dictator in Moscow threatened world peace.
American voters were exhausted by years of disruption. There was even an active effort to displace the incumbent president at the top of the ticket, to head off disaster that fall. When that didn’t happen, third-party candidates loomed on the left and the right. The polling numbers for the Democrat were so dismal that one leading firm even stopped doing surveys a month before Election Day.
That proved to be a big mistake, albeit not as famous as the Election Night screw-up by editors at the conservative-minded Chicago Tribune, who produced the big-type erroneous headline, “Dewey Defeats Truman.” Harry Truman — facing a sea of supposedly insurmountable obstacles that would look painfully familiar to today’s President Joe Biden — won that 1948 election over the GOP’s Thomas Dewey by a solid margin.
What’s especially striking about the comparison between a monumental election that just marked its 75th anniversary and today is that the laws of political science haven’t changed as much as you think. The then-novel strategies cooked up by Truman’s kitchen cabinet of advisers — making the vote less about the 33rd president and more about an unpopular Republican brand, with a focus on energizing the Democratic base — look like the best hand Biden can play in 2024.
Whether the Delawarean, who turns 81 later this month, can pull it off may decide the difference between an American 21st century of democracy or dictatorship.
The political world, from TV talking heads to anxious tweeters on Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter, has been struggling to make sense of Biden’s chances with just under a year until that do-or-die 2024 vote. Two major data points last week seemed wildly contradictory.
On one hand, Biden’s popularity, and his poll numbers against the all-but-certain GOP nominee — an increasingly dictatorial sounding Donald Trump — are dropping. The much-discussed New York Times/Siena College poll showing the 45th president topping the 46th in five of the six swing states likely to decide the election — matched by other new polls showing Trump pulling ahead — is not destiny, but a loud alarm bell for Democrats to get to work.
Yet last Tuesday, poll-panicked Dems suddenly had something to celebrate. A series of off-year election triumphs in swing states and even red states like Kentucky, where a Democratic governor was reelected, and Ohio, where an abortion-rights amendment won big, showed just how toxic the post-and-pre-Trump GOP brand has become for voters. Many reject the assault on women’s rights and the book-banning culture at the core of Republicanism.
A lot of folks looked at those results and concluded that the Biden polling numbers are bunk. I don’t agree. I think the president has real problems with a) millions of casual, less politically engaged voters who only show up every four years and who think Biden is too old or blame him for chaotic current events and b) core past supporters including under-30 voters or Black and Latino men finding fault with Biden’s record on issues like the war in Gaza.
Truman was vice president when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in 1945, near the end of World War II. Truman decided to run for a full term of his own, and he announced his candidacy on March 8, 1948.Read moreUncredited / AP
The specifics aren’t the same, but the incumbent’s bleak scenario would have looked familiar to Truman, who’d seen his approval rating plummet from over 80% in 1945 after FDR’s death thrust him into the Oval Office to just 35% in the pre-election year of 1947, in part because of post-war consumer inflation that peaked at a 20% annual rate.
The Harry Truman analogy is a bit ironic because for much of Biden’s nearly three years in the White House, the nattering nabobs of political history have instead been asking whether the 46th POTUS is channeling the original New Deal Democrat, HST’s predecessor Franklin Roosevelt. Biden’s push for an expanded social-welfare state, major infrastructure work, and stronger labor unions has certainly echoed FDR’s 1930s agenda, albeit with mixed success on Capitol Hill. And a global rise in authoritarianism and militarism that threatened democracy in Europe and elsewhere also looks familiar today.
But what seems clear now is that the challenges Biden faced coming out of a worldwide pandemic — inflation, a workforce demanding its fair share in a return-to-work economy, an anxious and uneasy electorate — looks more like 1947 than 1933. So how on earth did Truman — with a perception problem not that he was too old for the White House but too small, an accidental president — get reelected? And did he leave lessons for Biden, 75 years later?
Looking back, 1948 was a game-changing election — including the first political conventions beamed into America’s living rooms on TV, as mass media including radio and newspapers played a greater role. Team Truman seemed to understand the new landscape better than the beleaguered Dewey, an overly cautious, boring candidate — famously described by Alice Roosevelt Longworth as “the bridegroom atop a wedding cake” — whose staid campaign was better suited for the turn of the 20th century. Truman’s top political advisers, James Rowe and Clark Clifford — crafted a battle plan called “The Politics of 1948.” Team Biden would do well to read it now.
There are three Truman takeaways that should be invaluable for Biden:
The ‘do-nothing’ Congress. The Truman campaign turned the conventional wisdom — that a presidential election is always a referendum on the incumbent — on its head. Rather than run on his record, the plain-spoken Missourian worked hard to reassemble the winning FDR New Deal coalition with a relentless focus on the Republican Party that had seized control of Capitol Hill in the 1946 midterms. He attacked “the worst Congress” and later “a do-nothing Congress” captured by special interests. And he electrified delegates at 1948′s fractured Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia by calling lawmakers into a special summer session, where Republicans’ refusal to pass popular bills like national health care played right into Truman’s hands.
Today, it’s clear that Biden made an early mistake in hoping that a rebranding of the economy’s strongpoints, including record low unemployment, as “Bidenomics” would move voters more focused on higher prices and soaring rents. Meanwhile, the current House of Representatives — now under Christian nationalist extremist Mike Johnson after months of chaos, struggling to keep the government open — ought to inspire nostalgia for the run-of-the-mill conservatives of Truman’s era. The highly toxic brand of 2023′s Republican Party is what propelled last week’s Democratic wins. Biden — who seems to have wrongly thought Trump would be crushed by his mountain of legal woes — needs to make the do-nothing-or-worse Republicans and the dictatorial danger of Trump his 2024 focus.
Focus on the base. One thing truly groundbreaking about Truman’s “Politics of 1948″ memo was its almost prehistoric emphasis on the need to energize the Democrats’ most loyal core voters rather than the harder task of winning over swing voters. Rowe’s plan for HST aimed to excite big-city African Americans, unionized blue-collar workers and farmers who had been the heart and soul of FDR’s unprecedented four straight election victories. That meant writing off other voting blocs, including the Deep South that had been at the core of Democratic strategy since the Civil War but which in 1948 was going for third-party segregationist Strom Thurmond. Forgetting the South and wooing urban Black voters freed Truman to integrate the armed forces, which helped in key Northern states.
Like Truman, Biden’s challenge in going into 2024 is not to reinvent the wheel — Democrats have won the popular presidential vote in seven of the last eight elections — but to boost enthusiasm and turnout among the coalition that produced those million-vote margins. Today, that includes white voters in cities and suburbs with college degrees, Black and brown voters, and young people of all stripes, among others. Truman outsmarted Dewey by designing campaign trips that intensely targeted the places he needed to win, and Biden must do the same.
‘Give ‘em, hell!’ In the White House, Truman may have shrunk in comparison to the larger-than-life Roosevelt, but crisscrossing America by train in the summer and fall of 1948, his combative style honed in Kansas City’s notorious machine politics suddenly struck a chord with the restive electorate. “We’re going to give ‘em hell,” Truman declared in boarding his whistle-stop express in mid-September. A campaign slogan — and a winning vibe — was born. The growing shouts of “Give ‘em hell, Harry!” from the swelling crowds meant more than any public-opinion poll.
Biden — despite his lifelong struggles with stuttering, and now his advancing age — can be Truman-esque when he is truly unleashed on the campaign trail. “Is there ever anything America set its mind to as a nation that we’ve done together and we haven’t succeeded?” Biden asked union autoworkers celebrating a new contract in Illinois last week, before, uncharacteristically, lashing out at Trump by name. His energized audience booed and someone shouted “send him to jail!” Biden was giving ‘em hell, and his crowd was eating it up.
Times change, but commonalities abound. Voters fret about the economy, but what brings them to the polls is a threat to their fundamental rights. Three-quarters of a century ago, the No. 1 human-rights issue was Jim Crow segregation. Last Tuesday’s election shows that in the 2020s, nothing has motivated voters more than the threat to women’s reproductive rights since the GOP’s handpicked Supreme Court overturned the Roe v. Wade ruling in 2022, as well as the freedom of speech assaults by conservative groups like Moms for Liberty.
Until now, Democrats haven’t fully figured out how to translate that anger into energy into Biden’s reelection, but it can be done. Plans to put abortion-rights referenda on the ballot in key states like Nevada or Florida will help. Team Biden needs to spotlight Trump’s frequent boasts that he’s personally responsible for ending Roe v. Wade through his radical Supreme Court picks.
Abortion rights can be a winning issue. So can voter revulsion at the poisonous GOP brand and growing legitimate fears of dictatorship, which should trump any qualms over Biden’s age. The history of how Biden wins in 2024 was written in 1948. Give ‘em hell, Joe!
A WASTELAND: POLITICAL COVERAGE IGNORES THE THREAT TO DEMOCRACY
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Last week demonstrated the sorry state of political coverage in this country. The fixation on early, non-predictive polling and endless speculation that President Biden might step away from the 2024 race (contrary to all evidence) created an endless cycle of frenzied coverage, none of it informative about democracy, the issues or the threat of an authoritarian regime in a second Trump presidency. No major American news outlet has been immune.
Consider the obsessive coverage of a single New York Times-Siena College poll a full year before the election (touting four-times indicted former president Donald Trump as leading in five of six swing states, although only one was outside the poll’s margin of error). The Times built its political coverage around it for days. Virtually every cable news show featured it. (Full disclosure: I am an MSNBC contributor.) Other outlets focused on it. Roundtables gathered to discuss it. The coverage assumed the poll to be gospel — accurate, productive, important — and then used it as evidence that Biden is toast. (A majority of national polls, by the way, show Biden tied with or slightly ahead of Trump.)
But consider how utterly meaningless this poll truly was. First, it’s a year from the election. Go back to 2011 and 2012, and you would see the same hysterical predictions, from the same sort of premature polling, anticipating then-President Barack Obama’s political demise. Second, many other polls, including a highly reputable Pennsylvania poll, show Biden doing quite well in swing states. (As others have pointed out, even a Republican poll had Biden tied in Nevada, not losing by 10 points).
The Times poll had obvious anomalies (e.g., showing Trump trailing by one point among younger voters; Trump winning 22 percent of Black voters; Biden leading in Wisconsin by 2 but trailing in Nevada by 11 points?). Those findings don’t appear in other polling. But to put that in proper context would have killed innumerable news cycles. (By contrast, when The Post came up with a national poll, clearly an outlier, it said so.)
And sure enough, after fixating on the poll, the political coverage focused on “some” Democrats who were really nervous about reelection — largely because of the poll! (The easiest job in political reporting: finding nervous Democrats.) Some Democrats are not nervous; many Republicans are petrified about the perils of electing Trump. But these truisms are not apparently newsworthy.
Remarkably, all of this comes a year after many pollsters and analysts insisted the country was facing a red wave in the 2022 midterm elections. It might just be that polling is becoming less predictive of how voters behave — even though more and more commentary globs onto any survey that might gin up ratings.
Of course, the red wave never happened. Democrats gained one seat in the Senate might have held the House if not for redistricting subsequently invalidated or under review, and defeated a slew of MAGA candidates for governor, secretary of state and attorney general. One would think a modicum of restraint and humility might now guide coverage when predicting the downfall of Biden and his party.
Reality hit again on Tuesday. Voters in Ohio voted overwhelmingly to codify abortion access in the state constitution. A Democratic governor won reelection in deep-red Kentucky. Republican Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves barely won — akin to a Democrat squeaking by in a California race. In Virginia, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin (over whom the media endlessly fawns despite his radical views) staked his career on winning Republican majorities in both state houses with the promise of new abortion restrictions. Democrats not only held the state Senate, but they also flipped the House of Delegates.
Tuesday night, cable news panelists appeared to be at a loss to explain Democrats’ triumph. Well, for the umpteenth time, we see that polling isn’t all that predictive. Aside from low-response rates and flawed modeling, polls simply don’t reflect how voters think. (Actual voters might scowl about Biden and all incumbents but crawl over glass to keep abortion-banning MAGA extremists out of power.)
Had the political chin-strokers been paying attention, they might not have been surprised Democrats did so well. Despite excessively negative coverage of the Biden presidency, Democrats have been on a roll. In addition to their midterm wins, Democrats had won all six ballot races on abortion, elected a progressive justice to the Wisconsin Supreme Court (in a race focused on abortion) and vastly overperformed in special elections.
Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic consultant who debunked the red wave, wrote after Tuesday’s results:
Of the 16 most recent national polls on 538, Biden leads or is tied in 9, a majority, and the average of them all is a tie race. Of the 7 polls where Trump leads 3 are Republican pollsters. So to be clear about what this all means - there is no conclusive evidence the race has swung against Joe Biden and the Democrats; there is no conclusive evidence the war in Gaza is hurting him; that what we have right now is a close, competitive election with the Democratic coalition wandering a bit a year before the election, as to be expected, giving us a lot of work to do; and finally, their guy, Trump, likely to become further degraded over the next 12 months giving us a chance to not just win in 2024 but win decisively.
That’s at least as plausible a take as the “Biden is doomed!” drumbeat we get from most pundits.
Laughably, the purveyors of “Biden is doomed” coverage will insist voters like Democrats but not Biden. That wouldn’t explain why voters didn’t vent their supposed anti-Biden anger in 2022. (Tying Democrats to Biden didn’t work in this election, either.) Other pundits insisted that election results don’t matter(!); instead, stick with their flawed punditry.
It’s past time to reevaluate political coverage. Polling fixation is unenlightening if not misleading. (Maybe get out of the crystal-ball business entirely?) Pundits insist the GOP debates without Trump are really important, but there’s no evidence they have affected the race. Nevertheless, endless analysis bookends the dismal affairs.
Political coverage could be different. Cover what is happening, including abortion rights organizing, job creation in the heartland, political activism among young people, internal migration’s affect on states and demographic changes since 2020. News outlets could provide insight into campaign operations such as political organizing, message testing and surrogate effectiveness. That would be interesting.
Many media outlets after Jan. 6, 2021, vowed to focus more on threats to democracy. (Occasionally, they do; but it doesn’t dominate coverage, as polling does). However, most are stuck in overhyped horse-race coverage and endless chatter over meaningless Republican debates.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Last week demonstrated the sorry state of political coverage in this country. The fixation on early, non-predictive polling and endless speculation that President Biden might step away from the 2024 race (contrary to all evidence) created an endless cycle of frenzied coverage, none of it informative about democracy, the issues or the threat of an authoritarian regime in a second Trump presidency. No major American news outlet has been immune.
Consider the obsessive coverage of a single New York Times-Siena College poll a full year before the election (touting four-times indicted former president Donald Trump as leading in five of six swing states, although only one was outside the poll’s margin of error). The Times built its political coverage around it for days. Virtually every cable news show featured it. (Full disclosure: I am an MSNBC contributor.) Other outlets focused on it. Roundtables gathered to discuss it. The coverage assumed the poll to be gospel — accurate, productive, important — and then used it as evidence that Biden is toast. (A majority of national polls, by the way, show Biden tied with or slightly ahead of Trump.)
But consider how utterly meaningless this poll truly was. First, it’s a year from the election. Go back to 2011 and 2012, and you would see the same hysterical predictions, from the same sort of premature polling, anticipating then-President Barack Obama’s political demise. Second, many other polls, including a highly reputable Pennsylvania poll, show Biden doing quite well in swing states. (As others have pointed out, even a Republican poll had Biden tied in Nevada, not losing by 10 points).
The Times poll had obvious anomalies (e.g., showing Trump trailing by one point among younger voters; Trump winning 22 percent of Black voters; Biden leading in Wisconsin by 2 but trailing in Nevada by 11 points?). Those findings don’t appear in other polling. But to put that in proper context would have killed innumerable news cycles. (By contrast, when The Post came up with a national poll, clearly an outlier, it said so.)
And sure enough, after fixating on the poll, the political coverage focused on “some” Democrats who were really nervous about reelection — largely because of the poll! (The easiest job in political reporting: finding nervous Democrats.) Some Democrats are not nervous; many Republicans are petrified about the perils of electing Trump. But these truisms are not apparently newsworthy.
Remarkably, all of this comes a year after many pollsters and analysts insisted the country was facing a red wave in the 2022 midterm elections. It might just be that polling is becoming less predictive of how voters behave — even though more and more commentary globs onto any survey that might gin up ratings.
Of course, the red wave never happened. Democrats gained one seat in the Senate might have held the House if not for redistricting subsequently invalidated or under review, and defeated a slew of MAGA candidates for governor, secretary of state and attorney general. One would think a modicum of restraint and humility might now guide coverage when predicting the downfall of Biden and his party.
Reality hit again on Tuesday. Voters in Ohio voted overwhelmingly to codify abortion access in the state constitution. A Democratic governor won reelection in deep-red Kentucky. Republican Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves barely won — akin to a Democrat squeaking by in a California race. In Virginia, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin (over whom the media endlessly fawns despite his radical views) staked his career on winning Republican majorities in both state houses with the promise of new abortion restrictions. Democrats not only held the state Senate, but they also flipped the House of Delegates.
Tuesday night, cable news panelists appeared to be at a loss to explain Democrats’ triumph. Well, for the umpteenth time, we see that polling isn’t all that predictive. Aside from low-response rates and flawed modeling, polls simply don’t reflect how voters think. (Actual voters might scowl about Biden and all incumbents but crawl over glass to keep abortion-banning MAGA extremists out of power.)
Had the political chin-strokers been paying attention, they might not have been surprised Democrats did so well. Despite excessively negative coverage of the Biden presidency, Democrats have been on a roll. In addition to their midterm wins, Democrats had won all six ballot races on abortion, elected a progressive justice to the Wisconsin Supreme Court (in a race focused on abortion) and vastly overperformed in special elections.
Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic consultant who debunked the red wave, wrote after Tuesday’s results:
Of the 16 most recent national polls on 538, Biden leads or is tied in 9, a majority, and the average of them all is a tie race. Of the 7 polls where Trump leads 3 are Republican pollsters. So to be clear about what this all means - there is no conclusive evidence the race has swung against Joe Biden and the Democrats; there is no conclusive evidence the war in Gaza is hurting him; that what we have right now is a close, competitive election with the Democratic coalition wandering a bit a year before the election, as to be expected, giving us a lot of work to do; and finally, their guy, Trump, likely to become further degraded over the next 12 months giving us a chance to not just win in 2024 but win decisively.
That’s at least as plausible a take as the “Biden is doomed!” drumbeat we get from most pundits.
Laughably, the purveyors of “Biden is doomed” coverage will insist voters like Democrats but not Biden. That wouldn’t explain why voters didn’t vent their supposed anti-Biden anger in 2022. (Tying Democrats to Biden didn’t work in this election, either.) Other pundits insisted that election results don’t matter(!); instead, stick with their flawed punditry.
It’s past time to reevaluate political coverage. Polling fixation is unenlightening if not misleading. (Maybe get out of the crystal-ball business entirely?) Pundits insist the GOP debates without Trump are really important, but there’s no evidence they have affected the race. Nevertheless, endless analysis bookends the dismal affairs.
Political coverage could be different. Cover what is happening, including abortion rights organizing, job creation in the heartland, political activism among young people, internal migration’s affect on states and demographic changes since 2020. News outlets could provide insight into campaign operations such as political organizing, message testing and surrogate effectiveness. That would be interesting.
Many media outlets after Jan. 6, 2021, vowed to focus more on threats to democracy. (Occasionally, they do; but it doesn’t dominate coverage, as polling does). However, most are stuck in overhyped horse-race coverage and endless chatter over meaningless Republican debates.
BIDEN ADMINISTRATION SEEKS TO CRACK DOWN ON PRIVATE MEDICARE HEALTH PLANS
By Amy Goldstein, The Washington Post
is proposing a fresh crackdown on private health plans that have grown to cover half of the people on Medicare, restricting marketing practices as part of an effort to help consumers in the federal insurance system for older and disabled Americans get the health services they need.
Under a draft rule issued Monday by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Medicare Advantage plans would be required to work harder to encourage customers to make use of extra benefits available to them, rather than the companies merely invoking them as a selling point.
The proposal also would help Americans with Medicare drug benefits gain access to biosimilars, less expensive versions of biologic drugs made from living cells or other organisms.
Older Americans choosing Medicare coverage “should not be subject to practices playing fast and loose with marketing rules,” Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said during a Monday press briefing to outline the proposal.
The proposed rule marks the second time in a year that the administration has sought to stiffen regulation of Medicare Advantage, the private-sector version of Medicare that has soared in popularity in recent years. Late last year, HHS proposed a different set of changes that mainly focused on restricting predatory marketing practices, including deceptive advertising, by insurance brokers and agents trying to sell the private health plans to people on Medicare. That rule became final in April.
As President Biden seeks a second term in office, his senior aides are portraying the proposal as an aspect of the “kitchen-table economics” they are hoping will appeal to voters in the election a year from now.
Medicare Advantage was created in 2003 as part of the same federal law that added prescription drug benefits to Medicare for the first time since the vast insurance program came into existence in the 1960s as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society.” The traditional version of Medicare allows people 65 and older and those with disabilities to choose their own doctors and pay monthly premiums for outpatient care. The managed-care plans in the privatized version often offer extra benefits popular with older patients, such as vision and hearing services, but those plans usually restrict patients to a narrower network of health-care practitioners who have signed up to accept patients in a given plan.
When Medicare Advantage was created, replacing a few earlier forms of managed-care Medicare, the Republicans who held a majority in both chambers of Congress insisted the government pay the private plans more than the reimbursement rates under original Medicare, as an incentive for more plans to take part.
The incentive has succeeded. For the first time this year, Medicare Advantage enrollment accounts for slightly more than half of all Medicare beneficiaries — nearly 31 million people with the private plans — and the typical person on Medicare has about 40 private health plans from which to choose, a record number of options, according to KFF, a nonpartisan health-policy organization.
As its popularity has grown, the privatized version of Medicare has attracted increasing scrutiny, including from congressional Democrats.
“This builds on underlying concerns about confusion in the marketplace and aggressive marketing by insurers,” said Tricia Neuman, a senior vice president at the health policy organization KFF who directs its program on Medicare policy.
Specifically, the proposed rules would establish guardrails more firmly restricting the compensation of insurance agents and brokers who advise Medicare customers, setting a fixed amount for such advice, no matter which plan a consumer chose. Currently, there are caps but some companies pay agents and brokers lavish extras, such as golf trips for steering business to them, Lael Brainard, director of the White House National Economic Council, told reporters during Monday’s briefing.
In addition, the rule change would require private health plans to notify individual Medicare customers halfway through a year what supplemental benefits remain available to them. According to an HHS fact sheet, a typical Medicare Advantage plan offers 23 health benefits not found in traditional Medicare, but usage is low. The proposal’s goal is to “ensure that the large federal investment of taxpayer dollars in these benefits is actually making its way to beneficiaries and are not primarily used as a marketing ploy,” the HHS document says.
Another facet of the proposal would require private Medicare health plans to expand access to mental health services by expanding the supply of behavioral health practitioners in offices and clinics, including marriage and family therapists and addiction treatment specialists.
The rule change would also affect coverage under Medicare Part D, as the program’s drug benefits are known. The proposal would go further than current federal rules in requiring plans selling the prescription drug coverage to help patients more readily gain coverage of biosimilar products.
The proposed changes announced Monday are being issued during the annual Medicare enrollment period, which runs from mid-October to December 7. The proposal will be open for public comments for 60 days. A final version would take effect sometime next year, in time for next fall’s enrollment period for 2025 Medicare coverage.
By Amy Goldstein, The Washington Post
is proposing a fresh crackdown on private health plans that have grown to cover half of the people on Medicare, restricting marketing practices as part of an effort to help consumers in the federal insurance system for older and disabled Americans get the health services they need.
Under a draft rule issued Monday by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Medicare Advantage plans would be required to work harder to encourage customers to make use of extra benefits available to them, rather than the companies merely invoking them as a selling point.
The proposal also would help Americans with Medicare drug benefits gain access to biosimilars, less expensive versions of biologic drugs made from living cells or other organisms.
Older Americans choosing Medicare coverage “should not be subject to practices playing fast and loose with marketing rules,” Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said during a Monday press briefing to outline the proposal.
The proposed rule marks the second time in a year that the administration has sought to stiffen regulation of Medicare Advantage, the private-sector version of Medicare that has soared in popularity in recent years. Late last year, HHS proposed a different set of changes that mainly focused on restricting predatory marketing practices, including deceptive advertising, by insurance brokers and agents trying to sell the private health plans to people on Medicare. That rule became final in April.
As President Biden seeks a second term in office, his senior aides are portraying the proposal as an aspect of the “kitchen-table economics” they are hoping will appeal to voters in the election a year from now.
Medicare Advantage was created in 2003 as part of the same federal law that added prescription drug benefits to Medicare for the first time since the vast insurance program came into existence in the 1960s as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society.” The traditional version of Medicare allows people 65 and older and those with disabilities to choose their own doctors and pay monthly premiums for outpatient care. The managed-care plans in the privatized version often offer extra benefits popular with older patients, such as vision and hearing services, but those plans usually restrict patients to a narrower network of health-care practitioners who have signed up to accept patients in a given plan.
When Medicare Advantage was created, replacing a few earlier forms of managed-care Medicare, the Republicans who held a majority in both chambers of Congress insisted the government pay the private plans more than the reimbursement rates under original Medicare, as an incentive for more plans to take part.
The incentive has succeeded. For the first time this year, Medicare Advantage enrollment accounts for slightly more than half of all Medicare beneficiaries — nearly 31 million people with the private plans — and the typical person on Medicare has about 40 private health plans from which to choose, a record number of options, according to KFF, a nonpartisan health-policy organization.
As its popularity has grown, the privatized version of Medicare has attracted increasing scrutiny, including from congressional Democrats.
“This builds on underlying concerns about confusion in the marketplace and aggressive marketing by insurers,” said Tricia Neuman, a senior vice president at the health policy organization KFF who directs its program on Medicare policy.
Specifically, the proposed rules would establish guardrails more firmly restricting the compensation of insurance agents and brokers who advise Medicare customers, setting a fixed amount for such advice, no matter which plan a consumer chose. Currently, there are caps but some companies pay agents and brokers lavish extras, such as golf trips for steering business to them, Lael Brainard, director of the White House National Economic Council, told reporters during Monday’s briefing.
In addition, the rule change would require private health plans to notify individual Medicare customers halfway through a year what supplemental benefits remain available to them. According to an HHS fact sheet, a typical Medicare Advantage plan offers 23 health benefits not found in traditional Medicare, but usage is low. The proposal’s goal is to “ensure that the large federal investment of taxpayer dollars in these benefits is actually making its way to beneficiaries and are not primarily used as a marketing ploy,” the HHS document says.
Another facet of the proposal would require private Medicare health plans to expand access to mental health services by expanding the supply of behavioral health practitioners in offices and clinics, including marriage and family therapists and addiction treatment specialists.
The rule change would also affect coverage under Medicare Part D, as the program’s drug benefits are known. The proposal would go further than current federal rules in requiring plans selling the prescription drug coverage to help patients more readily gain coverage of biosimilar products.
The proposed changes announced Monday are being issued during the annual Medicare enrollment period, which runs from mid-October to December 7. The proposal will be open for public comments for 60 days. A final version would take effect sometime next year, in time for next fall’s enrollment period for 2025 Medicare coverage.
THE ONE AUDIENCE TRUMP CAN’T HOODWINK
By Jesse Wegman, The New York Times
The witness stand in Justice Arthur Engoron’s courtroom at 60 Centre Street, in Lower Manhattan, is an ordinary wood-paneled box off to the side of the bench. But for Donald Trump, who is on trial for fraudulently overvaluing his New York real estate assets, it might as well be a cage of kryptonite.
When he was in it, as he was for much of the day on Monday, the former president was deprived of what may be his most effective superpower: his ability to speak without consequence, without factual basis, without shame and, often, without end.
That signature rambling filibuster has propelled Mr. Trump through every venture of his life, from real estate to reality television to the American presidency. He relies on it to control the room, to manipulate the crowd and to avoid addressing any topic he doesn’t want to. He says it all, loudly and repeatedly, and never answers the real question.
That doesn’t work in court, where the judge is in charge, the rules of evidence are in effect and the witness has sworn to tell the whole truth. Justice Engoron illustrated this over and over on Monday during Mr. Trump’s testimony, which deliberately meandered from the questions the prosecution was asking in order to blunt their effect.
“This is not a political rally,” the judge said. “I don’t want editorializing. We’ll be here forever.”
At another point, as Mr. Trump was musing about Scotland’s oil reserves, the judge had enough. “Irrelevant, irrelevant,” he said. “Answer the question.”
Five words! That’s all it took to shut up Mr. Trump. Call it magic, or call it the rules of civil procedure. The point is that every word you say in court matters, and they can also count against you if you’re not careful. This is serious business: people’s reputations, fortunes and even their lives are on the line. Specifically, the Trump Organization could lose its ability to do business in New York, and Mr. Trump faces a penalty of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Despite spending countless hours in and around courtrooms during his unusually litigious life, Mr. Trump still seems not to fully grasp this truth. Or, as with all other rules that bind the rest of us, he appears to think it doesn’t apply to him. On Monday he fought valiantly to control the narrative — claiming that he was being treated unfairly, that his net worth is far higher than anyone realizes and that Letitia James, the New York attorney general, who brought the fraud case, is a “political hack.” Justice Engoron thwarted him at nearly every turn, forcing him to answer, or at least respond to, the state lawyer’s direct questions.
But in the moments he was able to seize the floor, Mr. Trump could not help himself, compulsively admitting that he was involved in approving the fraudulent financial statements submitted to banks — something his lawyers were no doubt hoping he wouldn’t say. Justice Engoron is not likely to forget those remarks when issuing his verdict.
The forgetting was done by Mr. Trump, whose excuse for not vetting his company’s financial statements more closely in 2021 was that he was busy “keeping our country safe” as president. “Just to clarify the record, you weren’t president in 2021, correct?” the state’s lawyer asked. Mr. Trump acknowledged that he was not.
Whatever the outcome of the trial (and the judge has already found as a matter of fact that the Trump properties were fraudulently overvalued), even this hint of accountability — “answer the question” — comes as a breath of fresh air to a country that has endured the past eight years of Mr. Trump’s consequence-free romp through American government and society.
Outside the courtroom, Mr. Trump’s lawyers appeared flustered by their inability to help their fabulist client run the show or to manage him. “The only thing they want are facts that are bad for Trump,” one lawyer, Alina Habba, said to the assembled media.
Well, yes. That’s how litigation works: The state makes its best case using facts and arguments that are bad for the defendant, while the defendant’s lawyers do their best to poke holes in that case.
At one point, Mr. Trump called the trial “silly” because, he claimed, no victims were involved. He seems to feel it’s fine to break New York’s financial laws if the banks do not complain. In his mind, he is the only victim, the perennial quarry of a ruthless Democratic establishment.
Rather than interminably complain, Mr. Trump might consider using this trial as practice. Over the coming months, he is scheduled to face four more trials — and unlike the one in New York City, the charges are not civil. If he thinks it’s unfair to be fined millions of dollars or barred from doing business, wait until he finds out how it feels to be a convicted criminal.
By Jesse Wegman, The New York Times
The witness stand in Justice Arthur Engoron’s courtroom at 60 Centre Street, in Lower Manhattan, is an ordinary wood-paneled box off to the side of the bench. But for Donald Trump, who is on trial for fraudulently overvaluing his New York real estate assets, it might as well be a cage of kryptonite.
When he was in it, as he was for much of the day on Monday, the former president was deprived of what may be his most effective superpower: his ability to speak without consequence, without factual basis, without shame and, often, without end.
That signature rambling filibuster has propelled Mr. Trump through every venture of his life, from real estate to reality television to the American presidency. He relies on it to control the room, to manipulate the crowd and to avoid addressing any topic he doesn’t want to. He says it all, loudly and repeatedly, and never answers the real question.
That doesn’t work in court, where the judge is in charge, the rules of evidence are in effect and the witness has sworn to tell the whole truth. Justice Engoron illustrated this over and over on Monday during Mr. Trump’s testimony, which deliberately meandered from the questions the prosecution was asking in order to blunt their effect.
“This is not a political rally,” the judge said. “I don’t want editorializing. We’ll be here forever.”
At another point, as Mr. Trump was musing about Scotland’s oil reserves, the judge had enough. “Irrelevant, irrelevant,” he said. “Answer the question.”
Five words! That’s all it took to shut up Mr. Trump. Call it magic, or call it the rules of civil procedure. The point is that every word you say in court matters, and they can also count against you if you’re not careful. This is serious business: people’s reputations, fortunes and even their lives are on the line. Specifically, the Trump Organization could lose its ability to do business in New York, and Mr. Trump faces a penalty of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Despite spending countless hours in and around courtrooms during his unusually litigious life, Mr. Trump still seems not to fully grasp this truth. Or, as with all other rules that bind the rest of us, he appears to think it doesn’t apply to him. On Monday he fought valiantly to control the narrative — claiming that he was being treated unfairly, that his net worth is far higher than anyone realizes and that Letitia James, the New York attorney general, who brought the fraud case, is a “political hack.” Justice Engoron thwarted him at nearly every turn, forcing him to answer, or at least respond to, the state lawyer’s direct questions.
But in the moments he was able to seize the floor, Mr. Trump could not help himself, compulsively admitting that he was involved in approving the fraudulent financial statements submitted to banks — something his lawyers were no doubt hoping he wouldn’t say. Justice Engoron is not likely to forget those remarks when issuing his verdict.
The forgetting was done by Mr. Trump, whose excuse for not vetting his company’s financial statements more closely in 2021 was that he was busy “keeping our country safe” as president. “Just to clarify the record, you weren’t president in 2021, correct?” the state’s lawyer asked. Mr. Trump acknowledged that he was not.
Whatever the outcome of the trial (and the judge has already found as a matter of fact that the Trump properties were fraudulently overvalued), even this hint of accountability — “answer the question” — comes as a breath of fresh air to a country that has endured the past eight years of Mr. Trump’s consequence-free romp through American government and society.
Outside the courtroom, Mr. Trump’s lawyers appeared flustered by their inability to help their fabulist client run the show or to manage him. “The only thing they want are facts that are bad for Trump,” one lawyer, Alina Habba, said to the assembled media.
Well, yes. That’s how litigation works: The state makes its best case using facts and arguments that are bad for the defendant, while the defendant’s lawyers do their best to poke holes in that case.
At one point, Mr. Trump called the trial “silly” because, he claimed, no victims were involved. He seems to feel it’s fine to break New York’s financial laws if the banks do not complain. In his mind, he is the only victim, the perennial quarry of a ruthless Democratic establishment.
Rather than interminably complain, Mr. Trump might consider using this trial as practice. Over the coming months, he is scheduled to face four more trials — and unlike the one in New York City, the charges are not civil. If he thinks it’s unfair to be fined millions of dollars or barred from doing business, wait until he finds out how it feels to be a convicted criminal.
TRUMP AND ALLIES PLOT REVENGE, JUSTICE DEPARTMENT CONTROL IN A SECOND TERM
Advisers have also discussed deploying the military to quell potential unrest on Inauguration Day. Critics have called the ideas under consideration dangerous and unconstitutional.
By Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey, and, Devlin Barrett
Donald Trump and his allies have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute and his associates drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.
In private, Trump has told advisers and friends in recent months that he wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office, including his former chief of staff, John Kelly, and former attorney general William P. Barr, as well as his ex-attorney Ty Cobb and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley, according to people who have talked to him, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Trump has also talked of prosecuting officials at the FBI and Justice Department, a person familiar with the matter said.
In public, Trump has vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” President Biden and his family. The former president has frequently made corruption accusations against them that are not supported by available evidence.
To facilitate Trump’s ability to direct Justice Department actions, his associates have been drafting plans to dispense with 50 years of policy and practice intended to shield criminal prosecutions from political considerations. Critics have called such ideas dangerous and unconstitutional.
“It would resemble a banana republic if people came into office and started going after their opponents willy-nilly,” said Saikrishna Prakash, a constitutional law professor at the University of Virginia who studies executive power. “It’s hardly something we should aspire to.”
Much of the planning for a second term has been unofficially outsourced to a partnership of right-wing think tanks in Washington. Dubbed “Project 2025,” the group is developing a plan, to include draft executive orders, that would deploy the military domestically under the Insurrection Act, according to a person involved in those conversations and internal communications reviewed by The Washington Post. The law, last updated in 1871, authorizes the president to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement.
The proposal was identified in internal discussions as an immediate priority, the communications showed. In the final year of his presidency, some of Trump’s supporters urged him to invoke the Insurrection Act to put down unrest after the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, but he never did it. Trump has publicly expressed regret about not deploying more federal force and said he would not hesitate to do so in the future.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung did not answer questions about specific actions under discussion. “President Trump is focused on crushing his opponents in the primary election and then going on to beat Crooked Joe Biden,” Cheung said. “President Trump has always stood for law and order, and protecting the Constitution.”
The discussions underway reflect Trump’s determination to harness the power of the presidency to exact revenge on those who have challenged or criticized him if he returns to the White House. The former president has frequently threatened to take punitive steps against his perceived enemies, arguing that doing so would be justified by the current prosecutions against him. Trump has claimed without evidence that the criminal charges he is facing — a total of 91 across four state and federal indictments — were made up to damage him politically.
“This is third-world-country stuff, ‘arrest your opponent,’” Trump said at a campaign stop in New Hampshire in October. “And that means I can do that, too.”
Special counsel Jack Smith, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Biden have all said that Smith’s prosecution decisions were made independently of the White House, in accordance with department rules on special counsels.
Trump, the clear polling leader in the GOP race, has made “retribution” a central theme of his campaign, seeking to intertwine his own legal defense with a call for payback against perceived slights and offenses to right-wing Americans. He repeatedly tells his supporters that he is being persecuted on their behalf and holds out a 2024 victory as a shared redemption at their enemies’ expense.
‘He is going to go after people that have turned on him’
It is unclear what alleged crimes or evidence Trump would claim to justify investigating his named targets.
Kelly said he would expect Trump to investigate him because since his term as chief of staff ended, he has publicly criticized Trump, including by alleging that he called dead service members “suckers.” Kelly added, “There is no question in my mind he is going to go after people that have turned on him.”
turned critic, has contradicted the former president’s false claims about the 2020 election and called him “a very petty individual who will always put his interests ahead of the country’s.” Asked about Trump’s interest in prosecuting him, Barr deadpanned, “I’m quivering in my boots.”
“Trump himself is more likely to rot in jail than anyone on his alleged list,” said Cobb, who accused Trump of “stifling truth, making threats and bullying weaklings into doing his bidding.”
Milley did not comment.
Other modern presidents since the Watergate scandal — when Richard M. Nixon tried to suppress the FBI’s investigation into his campaign’s spying and sabotage against Democrats — have sought to separate politics from law enforcement. Presidents of both parties have imposed a White House policy restricting communications with prosecutors. An effort under the George W. Bush administration to remove U.S. attorneys for political reasons led to high-level resignations and a criminal investigation.
Rod J. Rosenstein, the Trump-appointed deputy attorney general who oversaw the investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into Russian interference in the 2016 election, said a politically ordered prosecution would violate the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under law and could cause judges to dismiss the charges. That constitutional defense has rarely been raised in U.S. history, Rosenstein said.
“Making prosecutorial decisions in a nonpartisan manner is essential to democracy,” Rosenstein said. “The White House should not be meddling in individual cases for political reasons.”
But Trump allies such as Russ Vought, his former budget director who now leads the Center for Renewing America, are actively repudiating the modern tradition of a measure of independence for the Department of Justice, arguing that such independence is not based in law or the Constitution. Vought is in regular contact with Trump and would be expected to hold a major position in a second term.
“You don’t need a statutory change at all, you need a mind-set change,” Vought said in an interview. “You need an attorney general and a White House Counsel’s Office that don’t view themselves as trying to protect the department from the president.”
A fixation on prosecuting enemies
As president, Kelly said, Trump would often suggest prosecuting his political enemies, or at least having the FBI investigate them. Kelly said he would not pass along the requests to the Justice Department but would alert the White House Counsel’s Office. Usually, they would ignore the orders, he said, and wait for Trump to move on. In a second term, Trump’s aides could respond to such requests differently, he said.
“The lesson the former president learned from his first term is don’t put guys like me … in those jobs,” Kelly said. “The lesson he learned was to find sycophants.”
Although aides have worked on plans for some other agencies, Trump has taken a particular interest in the Justice Department. In conversations about a potential second term, Trump has made picking an attorney general his number one priority, according a Trump adviser.
“Given his recent trials and tribulations, one would think he’s going to pick up the plan for the Department of Justice before doing some light reading of a 500-page white paper on reforming the EPA,” said Matt Mowers, a former Trump White House adviser.
Jeffrey Clark, a fellow at Vought’s think tank, is leading the work on the Insurrection Act under Project 2025. The Post has reported that Clark is one of six unnamed co-conspirators whose actions are described in Trump’s indictment in the federal election interference case.
Clark was also charged in Fulton County, Georgia, with violating the state anti-racketeering law and attempting to create a false statement, as part of the district attorney’s case accusing Trump and co-conspirators of interfering in the 2020 election. Clark has pleaded not guilty. As a Justice Department official after the 2020 election, Clark pressured superiors to investigate nonexistent election crimes and to encourage state officials to submit phony certificates to the electoral college, according to the indictment.
In one conversation described in the federal indictment, a deputy White House counsel warned Clark that Trump’s refusing to leave office would lead to “riots in every major city.” Clark responded, according to the indictment, “That’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”
Clark had dinner with Trump during a visit to his Bedminster, N.J, golf club this summer. He also went to Mar-a-Lago on Wednesday for a screening of a new Dinesh D’Souza movie that uses falsehoods, misleading interviews and dramatizations to allege federal persecution of Jan. 6 rioters and Christians. Also attending were fringe allies such as Stephen K. Bannon, Roger Stone, Laura Loomer and Michael Flynn.
“I think that the supposedly independent DOJ is an illusion,” Clark said in an interview. Through a spokeswoman he did not respond to follow-up questions about his work on the Insurrection Act.
Clark’s involvement with Project 2025 has alarmed some other conservative lawyers who view him as an unqualified choice to take a senior leadership role at the department, according to a conservative lawyer who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks.
Project 2025 director Paul Dans stood by Clark in a statement. “We are grateful for Jeff Clark’s willingness to share his insights from having worked at high levels in government during trying times,” he said.
How a second Trump term would differ from the first
There is a heated debate in conservative legal circles about how to interact with Trump as the likely nominee. Many in Trump’s circle have disparaged what they view as institutionalist Republican lawyers, particularly those associated with the Federalist Society. Some Trump advisers consider these individuals too soft and accommodating to make the kind of changes within agencies that they want to see happen in a second Trump administration.
Trump has told advisers that he is looking for lawyers who are loyal to him to serve in a second term — complaining about his White House Counsel’s Office unwillingness to go along with some of his ideas in his first term or help him in his bid to overturn his 2020 election defeat.
In repeated comments to advisers and lawyers around him, Trump has said his biggest regrets were naming Jeff Sessions and Barr as his attorneys general and listening to others — he often cites the “Federalist Society” — who wanted him to name lawyers with impressive pedigrees and Ivy League credentials to senior Justice Department positions. He has mentioned to several lawyers who have defended him on TV or attacked Biden that they would be a good candidate for attorney general, according to people familiar with his comments.
The overall vision that Trump, his campaign and outside allies are now discussing for a second term would differ from his first in terms of how quickly and forcefully officials would move to execute his orders. Alumni involved in the current planning generally fault a slow start, bureaucratic resistance and litigation for hindering the president’s agenda in his first term, and they are determined to avoid those hurdles, if given a second chance, by concentrating more power in West Wing and selecting appointees who will carry out Trump’s demands.
Those groups are in discussions with Trump’s campaign advisers and occasionally the candidate himself, sometimes circulating policy papers or draft executive orders, according to people familiar with the situation.
“No one is opposed to them putting together ideas, but it’s not us,” a campaign adviser said. “These groups say they’ll have the whole transition planned. Some of those people I’m sure are good and Trump will appoint, but it’s not what is on his mind right now. I’m sure he’d be fine with some of their orders.”
Trump’s core group of West Wing advisers for a second term is widely expected to include Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s hard-line immigration policies including family separation, who has gone on to challenge Biden administration policies in court through a conservative organization called America First Legal. Miller did not respond to requests for comment.
Alumni have also saved lists of previous appointees who would not be welcome in a second Trump administration, as well as career officers they viewed as uncooperative and would seek to fire based on an executive order to weaken civil service protections.
For other appointments, Trump would be able to draw on lineups of personnel prepared by Project 2025. Dans, a former Office of Personnel Management chief of staff, likened the database to a “conservative LinkedIn,” allowing applicants to present their resumes on public profiles, while also providing a shared workspace for Heritage and partner organizations to vet the candidates and make recommendations.
“We don’t want careerists, we don’t want people here who are opportunists,” he said. “We want conservative warriors.”
Advisers have also discussed deploying the military to quell potential unrest on Inauguration Day. Critics have called the ideas under consideration dangerous and unconstitutional.
By Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey, and, Devlin Barrett
Donald Trump and his allies have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute and his associates drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.
In private, Trump has told advisers and friends in recent months that he wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office, including his former chief of staff, John Kelly, and former attorney general William P. Barr, as well as his ex-attorney Ty Cobb and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley, according to people who have talked to him, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Trump has also talked of prosecuting officials at the FBI and Justice Department, a person familiar with the matter said.
In public, Trump has vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” President Biden and his family. The former president has frequently made corruption accusations against them that are not supported by available evidence.
To facilitate Trump’s ability to direct Justice Department actions, his associates have been drafting plans to dispense with 50 years of policy and practice intended to shield criminal prosecutions from political considerations. Critics have called such ideas dangerous and unconstitutional.
“It would resemble a banana republic if people came into office and started going after their opponents willy-nilly,” said Saikrishna Prakash, a constitutional law professor at the University of Virginia who studies executive power. “It’s hardly something we should aspire to.”
Much of the planning for a second term has been unofficially outsourced to a partnership of right-wing think tanks in Washington. Dubbed “Project 2025,” the group is developing a plan, to include draft executive orders, that would deploy the military domestically under the Insurrection Act, according to a person involved in those conversations and internal communications reviewed by The Washington Post. The law, last updated in 1871, authorizes the president to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement.
The proposal was identified in internal discussions as an immediate priority, the communications showed. In the final year of his presidency, some of Trump’s supporters urged him to invoke the Insurrection Act to put down unrest after the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, but he never did it. Trump has publicly expressed regret about not deploying more federal force and said he would not hesitate to do so in the future.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung did not answer questions about specific actions under discussion. “President Trump is focused on crushing his opponents in the primary election and then going on to beat Crooked Joe Biden,” Cheung said. “President Trump has always stood for law and order, and protecting the Constitution.”
The discussions underway reflect Trump’s determination to harness the power of the presidency to exact revenge on those who have challenged or criticized him if he returns to the White House. The former president has frequently threatened to take punitive steps against his perceived enemies, arguing that doing so would be justified by the current prosecutions against him. Trump has claimed without evidence that the criminal charges he is facing — a total of 91 across four state and federal indictments — were made up to damage him politically.
“This is third-world-country stuff, ‘arrest your opponent,’” Trump said at a campaign stop in New Hampshire in October. “And that means I can do that, too.”
Special counsel Jack Smith, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Biden have all said that Smith’s prosecution decisions were made independently of the White House, in accordance with department rules on special counsels.
Trump, the clear polling leader in the GOP race, has made “retribution” a central theme of his campaign, seeking to intertwine his own legal defense with a call for payback against perceived slights and offenses to right-wing Americans. He repeatedly tells his supporters that he is being persecuted on their behalf and holds out a 2024 victory as a shared redemption at their enemies’ expense.
‘He is going to go after people that have turned on him’
It is unclear what alleged crimes or evidence Trump would claim to justify investigating his named targets.
Kelly said he would expect Trump to investigate him because since his term as chief of staff ended, he has publicly criticized Trump, including by alleging that he called dead service members “suckers.” Kelly added, “There is no question in my mind he is going to go after people that have turned on him.”
turned critic, has contradicted the former president’s false claims about the 2020 election and called him “a very petty individual who will always put his interests ahead of the country’s.” Asked about Trump’s interest in prosecuting him, Barr deadpanned, “I’m quivering in my boots.”
“Trump himself is more likely to rot in jail than anyone on his alleged list,” said Cobb, who accused Trump of “stifling truth, making threats and bullying weaklings into doing his bidding.”
Milley did not comment.
Other modern presidents since the Watergate scandal — when Richard M. Nixon tried to suppress the FBI’s investigation into his campaign’s spying and sabotage against Democrats — have sought to separate politics from law enforcement. Presidents of both parties have imposed a White House policy restricting communications with prosecutors. An effort under the George W. Bush administration to remove U.S. attorneys for political reasons led to high-level resignations and a criminal investigation.
Rod J. Rosenstein, the Trump-appointed deputy attorney general who oversaw the investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into Russian interference in the 2016 election, said a politically ordered prosecution would violate the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under law and could cause judges to dismiss the charges. That constitutional defense has rarely been raised in U.S. history, Rosenstein said.
“Making prosecutorial decisions in a nonpartisan manner is essential to democracy,” Rosenstein said. “The White House should not be meddling in individual cases for political reasons.”
But Trump allies such as Russ Vought, his former budget director who now leads the Center for Renewing America, are actively repudiating the modern tradition of a measure of independence for the Department of Justice, arguing that such independence is not based in law or the Constitution. Vought is in regular contact with Trump and would be expected to hold a major position in a second term.
“You don’t need a statutory change at all, you need a mind-set change,” Vought said in an interview. “You need an attorney general and a White House Counsel’s Office that don’t view themselves as trying to protect the department from the president.”
A fixation on prosecuting enemies
As president, Kelly said, Trump would often suggest prosecuting his political enemies, or at least having the FBI investigate them. Kelly said he would not pass along the requests to the Justice Department but would alert the White House Counsel’s Office. Usually, they would ignore the orders, he said, and wait for Trump to move on. In a second term, Trump’s aides could respond to such requests differently, he said.
“The lesson the former president learned from his first term is don’t put guys like me … in those jobs,” Kelly said. “The lesson he learned was to find sycophants.”
Although aides have worked on plans for some other agencies, Trump has taken a particular interest in the Justice Department. In conversations about a potential second term, Trump has made picking an attorney general his number one priority, according a Trump adviser.
“Given his recent trials and tribulations, one would think he’s going to pick up the plan for the Department of Justice before doing some light reading of a 500-page white paper on reforming the EPA,” said Matt Mowers, a former Trump White House adviser.
Jeffrey Clark, a fellow at Vought’s think tank, is leading the work on the Insurrection Act under Project 2025. The Post has reported that Clark is one of six unnamed co-conspirators whose actions are described in Trump’s indictment in the federal election interference case.
Clark was also charged in Fulton County, Georgia, with violating the state anti-racketeering law and attempting to create a false statement, as part of the district attorney’s case accusing Trump and co-conspirators of interfering in the 2020 election. Clark has pleaded not guilty. As a Justice Department official after the 2020 election, Clark pressured superiors to investigate nonexistent election crimes and to encourage state officials to submit phony certificates to the electoral college, according to the indictment.
In one conversation described in the federal indictment, a deputy White House counsel warned Clark that Trump’s refusing to leave office would lead to “riots in every major city.” Clark responded, according to the indictment, “That’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”
Clark had dinner with Trump during a visit to his Bedminster, N.J, golf club this summer. He also went to Mar-a-Lago on Wednesday for a screening of a new Dinesh D’Souza movie that uses falsehoods, misleading interviews and dramatizations to allege federal persecution of Jan. 6 rioters and Christians. Also attending were fringe allies such as Stephen K. Bannon, Roger Stone, Laura Loomer and Michael Flynn.
“I think that the supposedly independent DOJ is an illusion,” Clark said in an interview. Through a spokeswoman he did not respond to follow-up questions about his work on the Insurrection Act.
Clark’s involvement with Project 2025 has alarmed some other conservative lawyers who view him as an unqualified choice to take a senior leadership role at the department, according to a conservative lawyer who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks.
Project 2025 director Paul Dans stood by Clark in a statement. “We are grateful for Jeff Clark’s willingness to share his insights from having worked at high levels in government during trying times,” he said.
How a second Trump term would differ from the first
There is a heated debate in conservative legal circles about how to interact with Trump as the likely nominee. Many in Trump’s circle have disparaged what they view as institutionalist Republican lawyers, particularly those associated with the Federalist Society. Some Trump advisers consider these individuals too soft and accommodating to make the kind of changes within agencies that they want to see happen in a second Trump administration.
Trump has told advisers that he is looking for lawyers who are loyal to him to serve in a second term — complaining about his White House Counsel’s Office unwillingness to go along with some of his ideas in his first term or help him in his bid to overturn his 2020 election defeat.
In repeated comments to advisers and lawyers around him, Trump has said his biggest regrets were naming Jeff Sessions and Barr as his attorneys general and listening to others — he often cites the “Federalist Society” — who wanted him to name lawyers with impressive pedigrees and Ivy League credentials to senior Justice Department positions. He has mentioned to several lawyers who have defended him on TV or attacked Biden that they would be a good candidate for attorney general, according to people familiar with his comments.
The overall vision that Trump, his campaign and outside allies are now discussing for a second term would differ from his first in terms of how quickly and forcefully officials would move to execute his orders. Alumni involved in the current planning generally fault a slow start, bureaucratic resistance and litigation for hindering the president’s agenda in his first term, and they are determined to avoid those hurdles, if given a second chance, by concentrating more power in West Wing and selecting appointees who will carry out Trump’s demands.
Those groups are in discussions with Trump’s campaign advisers and occasionally the candidate himself, sometimes circulating policy papers or draft executive orders, according to people familiar with the situation.
“No one is opposed to them putting together ideas, but it’s not us,” a campaign adviser said. “These groups say they’ll have the whole transition planned. Some of those people I’m sure are good and Trump will appoint, but it’s not what is on his mind right now. I’m sure he’d be fine with some of their orders.”
Trump’s core group of West Wing advisers for a second term is widely expected to include Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s hard-line immigration policies including family separation, who has gone on to challenge Biden administration policies in court through a conservative organization called America First Legal. Miller did not respond to requests for comment.
Alumni have also saved lists of previous appointees who would not be welcome in a second Trump administration, as well as career officers they viewed as uncooperative and would seek to fire based on an executive order to weaken civil service protections.
For other appointments, Trump would be able to draw on lineups of personnel prepared by Project 2025. Dans, a former Office of Personnel Management chief of staff, likened the database to a “conservative LinkedIn,” allowing applicants to present their resumes on public profiles, while also providing a shared workspace for Heritage and partner organizations to vet the candidates and make recommendations.
“We don’t want careerists, we don’t want people here who are opportunists,” he said. “We want conservative warriors.”
THE PEOPLE’S HOUSE IS BACK IN BUSINESS — AND CRAZIER THAN EVER
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
So you thought the election of a new speaker might calm the chaos and fratricide among House Republicans?
Oh, my sweet summer child.
This week, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) forced a vote in the House on censuring Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) on accusations of being antisemitic. It was funny enough that Congresswoman Jewish Space Lasers herself was accusing somebody else of being antisemitic. But her censure resolution was so over the top — it accused Tlaib of “leading an insurrection” — that 23 Republicans joined all Democrats in tabling it.
After the vote, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) said via X, formerly Twitter, that the censure resolution “was deeply flawed and made legally and factually unverified claims, including the claim of leading an ‘insurrection’.”
Greene shot back on social media: “You voted to kick me out of the freedom caucus, but keep CNN wannabe Ken Buck and vaping groping Lauren Boebert and you voted with the Democrats to protect Terrorist Tlaib.”
To unpack this Greene crazy: Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) has criticized fellow Republicans’ plan to impeach President Biden without any evidence, and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) was kicked out of a Denver performance of the musical “Beetlejuice” with her date after causing a disturbance that involved both vaping and groping.
Asked about this accusation from Greene, Roy told the Hill’s Mychael Schnell: “Tell her to go chase so-called Jewish space lasers if she wants to spend time on that sort of thing.”
To this, Greene replied with a new post: “Oh shut up Colonel Sanders, you’re not even from Texas, more like the DMV.” Roy, who grew up in Northern Virginia, has a white goatee not unlike the whiskers on the chin of the late founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Ladies and gentlemen, the People’s House is back in business.
In the nine days since Republicans pulled Mike Johnson from the back benches, the new speaker has presided over a second failed attempt to expel indicted Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.), the introduction of not one but two resolutions to censure Tlaib, and a resolution to censure Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) for pulling a fire alarm during a vote. Johnson managed to turn an area of near-unanimous support into a partisan brouhaha by making funds to help Israel defend itself against Hamas contingent on a provision making it easier for the wealthy to cheat on their taxes. With just two weeks to go until the federal government runs out of funding, Johnson is floating a cockamamie “laddered” approach that would replace the looming shutdown threat with 12 new shutdown threats.
If this is the new speaker’s idea of a functioning House, maybe having the House speakerless and inoperative for 22 days wasn’t so bad after all.
The internecine feuding in the GOP resumed immediately after Johnson’s elevation. Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason T. Smith (Mo.) publicly blasted Rep. Matt Gaetz (Fla.) for causing the crisis by filing the motion to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy (Calif.). Gaetz responded — by, some speculated, insinuating on social media that Smith is gay. Smith “called me a liar,” Gaetz wrote. “It’s a somewhat predictable projection. Because he lives a lie every day.” Gaetz declined to elaborate.
James Comer (R-Ky.) stepped up his efforts to impeach Biden with the panel’s announcement that “Joe Biden received $40,000 in laundered China money.” Bank records indicate it was actually repayment of a loan Biden made to his brother when the current president was a private citizen.
Comer’s wild allegations keep crumbling upon scrutiny, which might explain why he said of his impeachment inquiry: “I don’t know that I want to hold any more hearings, to be honest with you.” He prefers closed-door depositions, which he can selectively leak to create false impressions.
Buck pointed to his colleagues’ allergy to facts when he announced this week that he was retiring from Congress. “Too many Republican leaders are lying to America, claiming that the 2020 election was stolen, describing January 6 as an unguided tour of the Capitol and asserting that the ensuing prosecutions are a weaponization of our justice system,” Buck said in a video explaining why he was quitting. Of these “self-serving lies,” he continued: “These insidious narratives breed widespread cynicism and erode Americans’ confidence in the rule of law. It is impossible for the Republican Party to confront our problems and offer a course correction for the future while being obsessively fixated on retribution and vengeance for contrived injustices of the past.”
Johnson’s response to all this: more self-serving lies. In his first interview as speaker, he told Fox News’s Sean Hannity that “it looks and smells a lot like” Biden received bribes. He also said Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas had “committed impeachable offenses” and agreed with Hannity that Biden has experienced “cognitive decline.” (At a subsequent news conference, Johnson maintained that the impeachment inquiry, which Comer and others are using as a fundraising tool, is “outside the scope of politics.”)
“People are curious. What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?” Johnson said to Hannity. “Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.”
What about the bit about bearing false witness, Mr. Speaker?
Johnson was caught in another whopper by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office this week. Republicans claimed that their bill offering $14.5 billion in aid to Israel was “offset” by cutting the same amount from the IRS. But the CBO forecast that the cuts to the IRS would actually cost the federal government an additional $12.5 billion — as reduced enforcement makes it easier for people to cheat on their taxes.
“Only in Washington when you cut spending do they call it an increase in the deficit,” Johnson responded to the CBO.
Only in Louisiana, apparently, do they think that if you stop collecting taxes, your tax receipts will increase.
Johnson has continued moving spending bills through the House along party lines, at levels that violate the bipartisan budget deal enacted this year. In the Senate, by contrast, a package of spending bills passed this week on a broadly bipartisan vote of 82-15. Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, admonished her House counterparts “to get serious about governing, get back to the spending agreement they negotiated, and work with us to finalize bipartisan bills.”
But that isn’t going to happen. The House “chaos caucus,” which ousted McCarthy and turned the lights out in the chamber for 22 days, has found its man. Johnson is well on his way to being a chaos speaker.
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
So you thought the election of a new speaker might calm the chaos and fratricide among House Republicans?
Oh, my sweet summer child.
This week, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) forced a vote in the House on censuring Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) on accusations of being antisemitic. It was funny enough that Congresswoman Jewish Space Lasers herself was accusing somebody else of being antisemitic. But her censure resolution was so over the top — it accused Tlaib of “leading an insurrection” — that 23 Republicans joined all Democrats in tabling it.
After the vote, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) said via X, formerly Twitter, that the censure resolution “was deeply flawed and made legally and factually unverified claims, including the claim of leading an ‘insurrection’.”
Greene shot back on social media: “You voted to kick me out of the freedom caucus, but keep CNN wannabe Ken Buck and vaping groping Lauren Boebert and you voted with the Democrats to protect Terrorist Tlaib.”
To unpack this Greene crazy: Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) has criticized fellow Republicans’ plan to impeach President Biden without any evidence, and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) was kicked out of a Denver performance of the musical “Beetlejuice” with her date after causing a disturbance that involved both vaping and groping.
Asked about this accusation from Greene, Roy told the Hill’s Mychael Schnell: “Tell her to go chase so-called Jewish space lasers if she wants to spend time on that sort of thing.”
To this, Greene replied with a new post: “Oh shut up Colonel Sanders, you’re not even from Texas, more like the DMV.” Roy, who grew up in Northern Virginia, has a white goatee not unlike the whiskers on the chin of the late founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Ladies and gentlemen, the People’s House is back in business.
In the nine days since Republicans pulled Mike Johnson from the back benches, the new speaker has presided over a second failed attempt to expel indicted Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.), the introduction of not one but two resolutions to censure Tlaib, and a resolution to censure Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) for pulling a fire alarm during a vote. Johnson managed to turn an area of near-unanimous support into a partisan brouhaha by making funds to help Israel defend itself against Hamas contingent on a provision making it easier for the wealthy to cheat on their taxes. With just two weeks to go until the federal government runs out of funding, Johnson is floating a cockamamie “laddered” approach that would replace the looming shutdown threat with 12 new shutdown threats.
If this is the new speaker’s idea of a functioning House, maybe having the House speakerless and inoperative for 22 days wasn’t so bad after all.
The internecine feuding in the GOP resumed immediately after Johnson’s elevation. Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason T. Smith (Mo.) publicly blasted Rep. Matt Gaetz (Fla.) for causing the crisis by filing the motion to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy (Calif.). Gaetz responded — by, some speculated, insinuating on social media that Smith is gay. Smith “called me a liar,” Gaetz wrote. “It’s a somewhat predictable projection. Because he lives a lie every day.” Gaetz declined to elaborate.
James Comer (R-Ky.) stepped up his efforts to impeach Biden with the panel’s announcement that “Joe Biden received $40,000 in laundered China money.” Bank records indicate it was actually repayment of a loan Biden made to his brother when the current president was a private citizen.
Comer’s wild allegations keep crumbling upon scrutiny, which might explain why he said of his impeachment inquiry: “I don’t know that I want to hold any more hearings, to be honest with you.” He prefers closed-door depositions, which he can selectively leak to create false impressions.
Buck pointed to his colleagues’ allergy to facts when he announced this week that he was retiring from Congress. “Too many Republican leaders are lying to America, claiming that the 2020 election was stolen, describing January 6 as an unguided tour of the Capitol and asserting that the ensuing prosecutions are a weaponization of our justice system,” Buck said in a video explaining why he was quitting. Of these “self-serving lies,” he continued: “These insidious narratives breed widespread cynicism and erode Americans’ confidence in the rule of law. It is impossible for the Republican Party to confront our problems and offer a course correction for the future while being obsessively fixated on retribution and vengeance for contrived injustices of the past.”
Johnson’s response to all this: more self-serving lies. In his first interview as speaker, he told Fox News’s Sean Hannity that “it looks and smells a lot like” Biden received bribes. He also said Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas had “committed impeachable offenses” and agreed with Hannity that Biden has experienced “cognitive decline.” (At a subsequent news conference, Johnson maintained that the impeachment inquiry, which Comer and others are using as a fundraising tool, is “outside the scope of politics.”)
“People are curious. What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?” Johnson said to Hannity. “Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.”
What about the bit about bearing false witness, Mr. Speaker?
Johnson was caught in another whopper by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office this week. Republicans claimed that their bill offering $14.5 billion in aid to Israel was “offset” by cutting the same amount from the IRS. But the CBO forecast that the cuts to the IRS would actually cost the federal government an additional $12.5 billion — as reduced enforcement makes it easier for people to cheat on their taxes.
“Only in Washington when you cut spending do they call it an increase in the deficit,” Johnson responded to the CBO.
Only in Louisiana, apparently, do they think that if you stop collecting taxes, your tax receipts will increase.
Johnson has continued moving spending bills through the House along party lines, at levels that violate the bipartisan budget deal enacted this year. In the Senate, by contrast, a package of spending bills passed this week on a broadly bipartisan vote of 82-15. Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, admonished her House counterparts “to get serious about governing, get back to the spending agreement they negotiated, and work with us to finalize bipartisan bills.”
But that isn’t going to happen. The House “chaos caucus,” which ousted McCarthy and turned the lights out in the chamber for 22 days, has found its man. Johnson is well on his way to being a chaos speaker.
PA. NEEDS TO DO MORE TO DEFEND PUBLIC HEALTH FROM SHALE GAS
Gov. Josh Shapiro, the Department of Health, the Department of Environmental Protection, and members of the General Assembly must publicly acknowledge the health harms associated with shale gas.
by Alison L. Steele, For The Inquirer Alison L. Steele is executive director of the Environmental Health Project, a nonprofit organization that has worked to defend public health in the face of oil and gas development for more than 10 years.
Earlier this year, the University of Pittsburgh released the results from three studies focusing on the health impacts on people who live near shale gas operations — sometimes called fracking — in Southwestern Pennsylvania. The results of these studies showed that Pennsylvania must do more to defend the health of residents, not just in areas of heavy industrial activity, but all across the commonwealth.
The University of Pittsburgh studies reinforce the scientific consensus that shale gas development is unsafe, especially for vulnerable populations like children, the elderly, pregnant individuals, and those with existing health conditions. According to our team’s latest count, more than two dozen studies now show a link between shale gas and health impacts on residents living close by. Additional research reinforces that shale gas correlates with poor health outcomes for people living near this heavy industry.
Approximately 1.5 million Pennsylvanians reside within a half mile of oil and gas wells, compressors, and processors. Health impacts from living near shale gas development include a higher risk of asthma and other respiratory illnesses, heart disease and heart attacks, birth defects and preterm deliveries, mental health issues, and cancer.
Shale gas poses other serious health impacts across the globe. Methane, the primary component of shale gas, is responsible for at least 25% of the climate warming we are experiencing today. Climate change has serious health consequences through increases in destructive storms, heat waves, floods, fires, and insect-borne diseases.
To date, Pennsylvania’s governing bodies have failed to respond in a meaningful way to the health harms associated with shale gas development. Given the findings of these new studies and others, Pennsylvania leaders must take swift action to protect the health of our neighbors. Gov. Josh Shapiro, the Department of Health, the Department of Environmental Protection, and members of the General Assembly must publicly acknowledge the health harms associated with shale gas. They should also commit to supporting, at a minimum, the recommendations put forth by the 43rd statewide grand jury on the shale gas industry.
The Environmental Health Project recommends expanding protective buffers around shale gas facilities in Pennsylvania from the currently required 500 feet to at least 1 kilometer (about 0.6 miles) from small facilities, and 2 kilometers (about 1.25 miles) from large facilities, schools, nursing homes, and other structures accommodating vulnerable populations. The industry should not be allowed exemptions or waivers from these distances for any reason. There is no setback distance that has been established as “safe” for nearby communities.
Prior to permitting new infrastructure, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection should analyze aggregate emissions — all sources of air pollution in a given area — to accurately assess existing air quality concerns and to limit shale gas development in areas that are already burdened with pollution.
Additionally, the legislature must fully fund agencies like the Department of Health and the Department of Environmental Protection so that they can do their job of preserving Pennsylvania’s resources and protecting the health of residents.
Further, shale gas operators must be held accountable for leaking toxic pollution that harms residents and hastens climate change. Operators must be compelled to publicly disclose all chemicals used in drilling and hydraulic fracturing before they are used on-site, as recommended in the grand jury report. Pennsylvania must also close hazardous waste loopholes and require safer transport of the contaminated waste created from fracking sites.
Finally, we must focus our full attention on a “just” transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energies. A just transition means a world where workers are trained in the growing and well-paying renewable energy sector while pollution is minimized in existing industry. By doing so, all Pennsylvanians will breathe healthier air, drink purer water, and eat food grown in cleaner soil. Hospital visits and outpatient procedures related to impacts from shale gas development will decline, saving health-care costs in the long run.
These actions must begin today if we are to have any hope of saving lives and reducing health impacts from shale gas development across Pennsylvania.
Gov. Josh Shapiro, the Department of Health, the Department of Environmental Protection, and members of the General Assembly must publicly acknowledge the health harms associated with shale gas.
by Alison L. Steele, For The Inquirer Alison L. Steele is executive director of the Environmental Health Project, a nonprofit organization that has worked to defend public health in the face of oil and gas development for more than 10 years.
Earlier this year, the University of Pittsburgh released the results from three studies focusing on the health impacts on people who live near shale gas operations — sometimes called fracking — in Southwestern Pennsylvania. The results of these studies showed that Pennsylvania must do more to defend the health of residents, not just in areas of heavy industrial activity, but all across the commonwealth.
The University of Pittsburgh studies reinforce the scientific consensus that shale gas development is unsafe, especially for vulnerable populations like children, the elderly, pregnant individuals, and those with existing health conditions. According to our team’s latest count, more than two dozen studies now show a link between shale gas and health impacts on residents living close by. Additional research reinforces that shale gas correlates with poor health outcomes for people living near this heavy industry.
Approximately 1.5 million Pennsylvanians reside within a half mile of oil and gas wells, compressors, and processors. Health impacts from living near shale gas development include a higher risk of asthma and other respiratory illnesses, heart disease and heart attacks, birth defects and preterm deliveries, mental health issues, and cancer.
Shale gas poses other serious health impacts across the globe. Methane, the primary component of shale gas, is responsible for at least 25% of the climate warming we are experiencing today. Climate change has serious health consequences through increases in destructive storms, heat waves, floods, fires, and insect-borne diseases.
To date, Pennsylvania’s governing bodies have failed to respond in a meaningful way to the health harms associated with shale gas development. Given the findings of these new studies and others, Pennsylvania leaders must take swift action to protect the health of our neighbors. Gov. Josh Shapiro, the Department of Health, the Department of Environmental Protection, and members of the General Assembly must publicly acknowledge the health harms associated with shale gas. They should also commit to supporting, at a minimum, the recommendations put forth by the 43rd statewide grand jury on the shale gas industry.
The Environmental Health Project recommends expanding protective buffers around shale gas facilities in Pennsylvania from the currently required 500 feet to at least 1 kilometer (about 0.6 miles) from small facilities, and 2 kilometers (about 1.25 miles) from large facilities, schools, nursing homes, and other structures accommodating vulnerable populations. The industry should not be allowed exemptions or waivers from these distances for any reason. There is no setback distance that has been established as “safe” for nearby communities.
Prior to permitting new infrastructure, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection should analyze aggregate emissions — all sources of air pollution in a given area — to accurately assess existing air quality concerns and to limit shale gas development in areas that are already burdened with pollution.
Additionally, the legislature must fully fund agencies like the Department of Health and the Department of Environmental Protection so that they can do their job of preserving Pennsylvania’s resources and protecting the health of residents.
Further, shale gas operators must be held accountable for leaking toxic pollution that harms residents and hastens climate change. Operators must be compelled to publicly disclose all chemicals used in drilling and hydraulic fracturing before they are used on-site, as recommended in the grand jury report. Pennsylvania must also close hazardous waste loopholes and require safer transport of the contaminated waste created from fracking sites.
Finally, we must focus our full attention on a “just” transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energies. A just transition means a world where workers are trained in the growing and well-paying renewable energy sector while pollution is minimized in existing industry. By doing so, all Pennsylvanians will breathe healthier air, drink purer water, and eat food grown in cleaner soil. Hospital visits and outpatient procedures related to impacts from shale gas development will decline, saving health-care costs in the long run.
These actions must begin today if we are to have any hope of saving lives and reducing health impacts from shale gas development across Pennsylvania.
MIKE JOHNSON JUST CONFIRMED HOW UNSERIOUS HE IS
By David Firestone, The New York Times
It didn’t take long for the new House speaker, Mike Johnson, to demonstrate to the world that he will not be a serious partner for American allies or for those who still believe that governing is not a petty little game.
On Monday, only five days after being elevated to one of the most important leadership roles in the country, he upended a major foreign aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, meekly obeying those Republican House members who see their main role as disengaging from the world and taking self-destructive potshots at Democrats. Nothing in Mr. Johnson’s record suggested he might try to shore up America’s leadership in the world, but his actions show that his new position has not added any gravitas to his thinking; he’s just pandering to his cronies in the far right wing.
Specifically, he stripped money for Ukraine and Taiwan from the $105 billion package requested by President Biden, leaving only the $14.3 billion the administration wants to send to Israel. But then he imposed a condition on the Israel money: Mr. Biden must agree to cut the same amount out of the money the Internal Revenue Service uses to chase down high-income tax cheats. So essentially the U.S. can protect Israel as long as it also protects rich white-collar criminals.
The I.R.S., of course, has nothing to do with the war between Israel and Hamas, but it has everything to do with the Republican desire to score political points whenever possible. Ever since Mr. Biden won $80 billion for stronger I.R.S. enforcement in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, Republicans have made that money a target, exploiting the agency’s Sheriff of Nottingham public image by trying to delude ordinary taxpayers into believing the extra funds meant the agency was coming after them.
But the aim of the extra enforcement was always the wealthy, whose complex tax fraud schemes cost the Treasury billions every year. Reducing the I.R.S. budget would actually widen the deficit, the opposite of what Republicans claim they care about. The Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that if the I.R.S. enforcement budget is cut by $25 billion, as some Senate Republicans have proposed, it would cost $49 billion in revenue from auditing the rich and widen the 10-year deficit by nearly $24 billion.
Another study published this year by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that every additional dollar spent on auditing high-income taxpayers yielded $12 in new revenue for the Treasury. By that calculation, Mr. Johnson’s stunt could cost the country $171.6 billion. This year, Republicans forced Mr. Biden to cut $20 billion from the I.R.S. as part of the price for avoiding a debt default; having shown that the White House would agree to chip away at a top priority to prevent a crisis, they are returning to the same playbook.
But in the end, the I.R.S. cut isn’t really going to happen, as House Republicans know, because Mr. Johnson’s bill will die in the Senate, where many leading Republicans already oppose it. Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, has made it clear the final bill will have to include money for Ukraine, and hawks like Lindsey Graham of South Carolina have said the Ukraine money was related to Israel’s war against Hamas.
“Hamas was just hosted by the Russians in Moscow,” Mr. Graham said, adding, about Ukraine, “I think breaking them out sends the wrong signal.”
Other Republicans, like Senator Mitt Romney of Utah and Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina, agreed with the White House that cutting the I.R.S. budget made little sense in the context of national security.
But making sense isn’t really Mr. Johnson’s game. He’s got a few calculations going on that show the kind of cynical strategic planning that currently passes for politics in the House. By throwing in the I.R.S. cut, he gets to show the same extremists who deposed his predecessor that he can play rough with the White House. The move will presumably get some House Democrats to vote against the bill, and then Republicans can run misleading attack ads saying those Democrats oppose aid to Israel, as many members are already anticipating.
“The new Republican speaker has chosen to put a poison pill” in the aid bill, Representative Ritchie Torres, Democrat of New York, told Axios. “The politicizing of Israel in a time of war is nothing short of disgraceful.”
And then, assuming the bill does pass the House, Mr. Johnson will then get a seat at the table to negotiate with the Senate and the White House on the final legislation. If the House can’t pass anything, it will have less leverage in determining the final amount of aid.
If Mr. Johnson has substantive objections to helping Ukraine and Israel that justify the legislative impediments he is constructing, he should state what they are. There is room for a debate over conditions that could be imposed on military aid for Israel, including a detailed plan to protect civilians in the Gaza campaign or, as my colleague Thomas Friedman has suggested, an agreement not to construct one new settlement in the West Bank outside of existing settlement blocs and to rebuild the Palestinian Authority and the two-state solution at the expense of Hamas.
But that would require a serious discussion with serious people. And Mr. Johnson has now shown that he has no place in that room.
By David Firestone, The New York Times
It didn’t take long for the new House speaker, Mike Johnson, to demonstrate to the world that he will not be a serious partner for American allies or for those who still believe that governing is not a petty little game.
On Monday, only five days after being elevated to one of the most important leadership roles in the country, he upended a major foreign aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, meekly obeying those Republican House members who see their main role as disengaging from the world and taking self-destructive potshots at Democrats. Nothing in Mr. Johnson’s record suggested he might try to shore up America’s leadership in the world, but his actions show that his new position has not added any gravitas to his thinking; he’s just pandering to his cronies in the far right wing.
Specifically, he stripped money for Ukraine and Taiwan from the $105 billion package requested by President Biden, leaving only the $14.3 billion the administration wants to send to Israel. But then he imposed a condition on the Israel money: Mr. Biden must agree to cut the same amount out of the money the Internal Revenue Service uses to chase down high-income tax cheats. So essentially the U.S. can protect Israel as long as it also protects rich white-collar criminals.
The I.R.S., of course, has nothing to do with the war between Israel and Hamas, but it has everything to do with the Republican desire to score political points whenever possible. Ever since Mr. Biden won $80 billion for stronger I.R.S. enforcement in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, Republicans have made that money a target, exploiting the agency’s Sheriff of Nottingham public image by trying to delude ordinary taxpayers into believing the extra funds meant the agency was coming after them.
But the aim of the extra enforcement was always the wealthy, whose complex tax fraud schemes cost the Treasury billions every year. Reducing the I.R.S. budget would actually widen the deficit, the opposite of what Republicans claim they care about. The Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that if the I.R.S. enforcement budget is cut by $25 billion, as some Senate Republicans have proposed, it would cost $49 billion in revenue from auditing the rich and widen the 10-year deficit by nearly $24 billion.
Another study published this year by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that every additional dollar spent on auditing high-income taxpayers yielded $12 in new revenue for the Treasury. By that calculation, Mr. Johnson’s stunt could cost the country $171.6 billion. This year, Republicans forced Mr. Biden to cut $20 billion from the I.R.S. as part of the price for avoiding a debt default; having shown that the White House would agree to chip away at a top priority to prevent a crisis, they are returning to the same playbook.
But in the end, the I.R.S. cut isn’t really going to happen, as House Republicans know, because Mr. Johnson’s bill will die in the Senate, where many leading Republicans already oppose it. Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, has made it clear the final bill will have to include money for Ukraine, and hawks like Lindsey Graham of South Carolina have said the Ukraine money was related to Israel’s war against Hamas.
“Hamas was just hosted by the Russians in Moscow,” Mr. Graham said, adding, about Ukraine, “I think breaking them out sends the wrong signal.”
Other Republicans, like Senator Mitt Romney of Utah and Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina, agreed with the White House that cutting the I.R.S. budget made little sense in the context of national security.
But making sense isn’t really Mr. Johnson’s game. He’s got a few calculations going on that show the kind of cynical strategic planning that currently passes for politics in the House. By throwing in the I.R.S. cut, he gets to show the same extremists who deposed his predecessor that he can play rough with the White House. The move will presumably get some House Democrats to vote against the bill, and then Republicans can run misleading attack ads saying those Democrats oppose aid to Israel, as many members are already anticipating.
“The new Republican speaker has chosen to put a poison pill” in the aid bill, Representative Ritchie Torres, Democrat of New York, told Axios. “The politicizing of Israel in a time of war is nothing short of disgraceful.”
And then, assuming the bill does pass the House, Mr. Johnson will then get a seat at the table to negotiate with the Senate and the White House on the final legislation. If the House can’t pass anything, it will have less leverage in determining the final amount of aid.
If Mr. Johnson has substantive objections to helping Ukraine and Israel that justify the legislative impediments he is constructing, he should state what they are. There is room for a debate over conditions that could be imposed on military aid for Israel, including a detailed plan to protect civilians in the Gaza campaign or, as my colleague Thomas Friedman has suggested, an agreement not to construct one new settlement in the West Bank outside of existing settlement blocs and to rebuild the Palestinian Authority and the two-state solution at the expense of Hamas.
But that would require a serious discussion with serious people. And Mr. Johnson has now shown that he has no place in that room.
HOW TRUMP’S VERBAL SLIPS COULD WEAKEN HIS ATTACKS ON BIDEN’S AGE
Donald Trump, 77, has relentlessly attacked President Biden, 80, as too old for office. But the former president himself has had a series of gaffes that go beyond his usual freewheeling style.
By Michael C. Bender and Michael Gold, The New York Times
One of Donald J. Trump’s new comedic bits at his rallies features him impersonating the current commander in chief with an over-the-top caricature mocking President Biden’s age.
But his recent campaign events have also featured less deliberate stumbles. Mr. Trump has had a string of unforced gaffes, garble and general disjointedness that go beyond his usual discursive nature, and that his Republican rivals are pointing to as signs of his declining performance.
On Sunday in Sioux City, Iowa, Mr. Trump wrongly thanked supporters of Sioux Falls, a South Dakota town about 75 miles away, correcting himself only after being pulled aside onstage and informed of the error.
It was strikingly similar to a fictional scene that Mr. Trump acted out earlier this month, pretending to be Mr. Biden mistaking Iowa for Idaho and needing an aide to straighten him out.
In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has also told supporters not to vote, and claimed to have defeated President Barack Obama in an election. He has praised the collective intellect of an Iranian-backed militant group that has long been an enemy of both Israel and the United States, and repeatedly mispronounced the name of the armed group that rules Gaza.
“This is a different Donald Trump than 2015 and ’16 — lost the zip on his fastball,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida told reporters last week while campaigning in New Hampshire.
“In 2016, he was freewheeling, he’s out there barnstorming the country,” Mr. DeSantis added. “Now, it’s just a different guy. And it’s sad to see.”
It is unclear if Mr. Trump’s recent slips are connected to his age. He has long relied on an unorthodox speaking style that has served as one of his chief political assets, establishing him, improbably, among the most effective communicators in American politics.
But as the 2024 race for the White House heats up, Mr. Trump’s increased verbal blunders threaten to undermine one of Republicans’ most potent avenues of attack, and the entire point of
During a Sept. 15 speech in Washington, a moment after declaring Mr. Biden “cognitively impaired, in no condition to lead,” the former president warned that America was on the verge of World War II, which ended in 1945.
In the same speech, he boasted about presidential polls showing him leading Mr. Obama, who is not, in fact, running for an illegal third term in office. He erroneously referred to Mr. Obama again during an anecdote about winning the 2016 presidential race.
“We did it with Obama,” Mr. Trump said. “We won an election that everybody said couldn’t be won, we beat …” He paused for a beat as he seemed to realize his mistake. “Hillary Clinton.”
At a Florida rally on Oct. 11, days after a brutal terrorist attack that killed hundreds of Israelis, Mr. Trump criticized the country for being unprepared, lashing out at its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Mr. Trump appears to have soured on Mr. Netanyahu, once a close ally, after the Israeli leader congratulated Mr. Biden for winning the 2020 election.
In the same speech, Mr. Trump relied on an inaccurate timeline of events in the Middle East to criticize Mr. Biden’s handling of foreign affairs and, in the process, drew headlines for praising Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group.
Last week, while speaking to supporters at a rally in New Hampshire, Mr. Trump praised Viktor Orban, the strongman prime minister of Hungary, but referred to him as “the leader of Turkey,” a country hundreds of miles away. He quickly corrected himself.
At another point in the same speech, Mr. Trump jumped into a confusing riff that ended with him telling supporters, “You don’t have to vote — don’t worry about voting,” adding, “We’ve got plenty of votes.”
Mr. Cheung, the Trump campaign spokesman, said the former president was “clearly talking about election integrity and making sure only legal votes are counted.”
In a speech on Saturday, Mr. Trump sounded as if he were talking about hummus when he mispronounced Hamas (huh-maas), the Islamist group that governs the Gaza Strip and carried out one of the largest attacks on Israel in decades on Oct. 7.
The former president’s pronunciation drew the attention of the Biden campaign, which posted the video clip on social media, noting that Mr. Trump sounded “confused.”
But even Republican rivals have sensed an opening on the age issue against Mr. Trump, who has maintained an unshakable hold on the party despite a political record that would in years past have compelled conservatives to consider another standard-bearer. Mr. Trump lost control of Congress as president; was voted out of the White House; failed to help deliver a “red wave” of victories in the midterm elections last year; and, this year, drew 91 felony charges over four criminal cases.
Donald Trump, 77, has relentlessly attacked President Biden, 80, as too old for office. But the former president himself has had a series of gaffes that go beyond his usual freewheeling style.
By Michael C. Bender and Michael Gold, The New York Times
One of Donald J. Trump’s new comedic bits at his rallies features him impersonating the current commander in chief with an over-the-top caricature mocking President Biden’s age.
But his recent campaign events have also featured less deliberate stumbles. Mr. Trump has had a string of unforced gaffes, garble and general disjointedness that go beyond his usual discursive nature, and that his Republican rivals are pointing to as signs of his declining performance.
On Sunday in Sioux City, Iowa, Mr. Trump wrongly thanked supporters of Sioux Falls, a South Dakota town about 75 miles away, correcting himself only after being pulled aside onstage and informed of the error.
It was strikingly similar to a fictional scene that Mr. Trump acted out earlier this month, pretending to be Mr. Biden mistaking Iowa for Idaho and needing an aide to straighten him out.
In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has also told supporters not to vote, and claimed to have defeated President Barack Obama in an election. He has praised the collective intellect of an Iranian-backed militant group that has long been an enemy of both Israel and the United States, and repeatedly mispronounced the name of the armed group that rules Gaza.
“This is a different Donald Trump than 2015 and ’16 — lost the zip on his fastball,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida told reporters last week while campaigning in New Hampshire.
“In 2016, he was freewheeling, he’s out there barnstorming the country,” Mr. DeSantis added. “Now, it’s just a different guy. And it’s sad to see.”
It is unclear if Mr. Trump’s recent slips are connected to his age. He has long relied on an unorthodox speaking style that has served as one of his chief political assets, establishing him, improbably, among the most effective communicators in American politics.
But as the 2024 race for the White House heats up, Mr. Trump’s increased verbal blunders threaten to undermine one of Republicans’ most potent avenues of attack, and the entire point of
During a Sept. 15 speech in Washington, a moment after declaring Mr. Biden “cognitively impaired, in no condition to lead,” the former president warned that America was on the verge of World War II, which ended in 1945.
In the same speech, he boasted about presidential polls showing him leading Mr. Obama, who is not, in fact, running for an illegal third term in office. He erroneously referred to Mr. Obama again during an anecdote about winning the 2016 presidential race.
“We did it with Obama,” Mr. Trump said. “We won an election that everybody said couldn’t be won, we beat …” He paused for a beat as he seemed to realize his mistake. “Hillary Clinton.”
At a Florida rally on Oct. 11, days after a brutal terrorist attack that killed hundreds of Israelis, Mr. Trump criticized the country for being unprepared, lashing out at its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Mr. Trump appears to have soured on Mr. Netanyahu, once a close ally, after the Israeli leader congratulated Mr. Biden for winning the 2020 election.
In the same speech, Mr. Trump relied on an inaccurate timeline of events in the Middle East to criticize Mr. Biden’s handling of foreign affairs and, in the process, drew headlines for praising Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group.
Last week, while speaking to supporters at a rally in New Hampshire, Mr. Trump praised Viktor Orban, the strongman prime minister of Hungary, but referred to him as “the leader of Turkey,” a country hundreds of miles away. He quickly corrected himself.
At another point in the same speech, Mr. Trump jumped into a confusing riff that ended with him telling supporters, “You don’t have to vote — don’t worry about voting,” adding, “We’ve got plenty of votes.”
Mr. Cheung, the Trump campaign spokesman, said the former president was “clearly talking about election integrity and making sure only legal votes are counted.”
In a speech on Saturday, Mr. Trump sounded as if he were talking about hummus when he mispronounced Hamas (huh-maas), the Islamist group that governs the Gaza Strip and carried out one of the largest attacks on Israel in decades on Oct. 7.
The former president’s pronunciation drew the attention of the Biden campaign, which posted the video clip on social media, noting that Mr. Trump sounded “confused.”
But even Republican rivals have sensed an opening on the age issue against Mr. Trump, who has maintained an unshakable hold on the party despite a political record that would in years past have compelled conservatives to consider another standard-bearer. Mr. Trump lost control of Congress as president; was voted out of the White House; failed to help deliver a “red wave” of victories in the midterm elections last year; and, this year, drew 91 felony charges over four criminal cases.
TRUMP’S LOOMING DICTATORSHIP IS THE ONLY REAL WINNER IN HOUSE SPEAKER DEBACLE
Trump got everything he wanted in the speaker disaster on Capitol Hill, smashing public faith that democracy can work.
by Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
The very first thing Louisiana Rep. Mike Johnson did after an exhausted House Republican caucus picked him late Tuesday night as their next speaker, ending the three-week fiasco that has shut down Capitol Hill, was to stage a group portrait of modern American fascism.
They crowded onto a small stage — fellow Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise, the “David Duke without the baggage” who wasn’t conservative enough for today’s GOP; New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, whose congratulatory tweets for this month’s prior, four-hour speaker-elects had played out like Mafia kisses; and Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert, the Beetlejuice fan who stayed all the way to the end of this political horror show.
The cruelty seemed the point for the next few minutes as the leadership of the U.S. House of Representatives channeled its inner goon squad, shouting down and booing the free press and creating a bullying pulpit to strut and preen for a faraway audience of the only viewer who matters in this former political party turned authoritarian cult: their strongman, Donald Trump.
“We’re not doing any policy tonight,” Johnson — who 14 hours later would be officially anointed the 56th speaker of the House — said at the pep rally that only looked like a news conference. It wasn’t clear if that was his response to the laudably persistent ABC News reporter Rachel Scott, who tried valiantly to press the Louisianan on Ukraine aid and his role in 2020′s Big Lie of election fraud, or his broader mission statement for Republicans in Congress.
The Johnson victory mob let out a chorus of boos and laughed in mocking, bullying tones when ABC’s Scott dared to press the incoming speaker over his prominent role in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election result. One voice rose above the din — that of North Carolina Rep. Virginia Foxx, 80, whose grandmotherly countenance added shock value to her shrill shrieks toward Scott to “Shut up! … Shut up!” Foxx is chair of the House education committee.
I mourn for America’s schoolchildren while praying that Foxx and her colleagues won’t influence what those students will learn about the importance of a free press.
At least the appalling late-night scene gave the U.S. electorate a real glimpse of what fascism actually looks like close up: dripping contempt for policy, for free and fair elections, and the First Amendment. It also conveyed the power and influence of the man who wasn’t there but whose intimidation loomed over it all: the 45th (and would-be 47th) president.
Even as he sat in (or stormed out of) a Manhattan courtroom this week in the first of his multiple trials for fraud, election interference, and mishandling America’s secrets — and took a $10,000 fine for his blatant intimidation tactics — Trump was the only real winner in the three-week D.C. debacle that left the federal government paralyzed in a time of crisis, both foreign and domestic. His meddling sparked the rise of extreme Christian nationalist, homophobe, and election denier Johnson as Washington’s highest-ranking Republican, now second-in-line for the presidency.
Trump won his own red October through dictatorial domination and humiliation, crushing the speakership hopes of any candidate who’d dared to deviate, even slightly, from the party line that centers on the ex-president’s dangerous falsehood that he was victorious in the 2020 election when, in reality, President Joe Biden got seven million more votes. He won by keeping the media’s gaze on Capitol Hill and away from the GOP’s imploding effort at staging a competitive presidential primary, as well as his deteriorating position in the courtroom.
But mainly, Trump won by successfully cementing the idea that the nation’s Capitol is ungovernable under the weight of constant and unbearable political chaos, thus setting up his 2024 case that only an autocratic strongman — a “Red Caesar” handed dictatorial power to override the stumbling blocks of constitutional democracy — can fix it.
Pulling strings from hundreds of miles away, using the keypad on his mobile phone as his dagger, Trump over the last week has shown the destructive power of his intimidation regime, despite its limitations. The Mar-a-Lago exile might not have the juice to get an ally like his bullying mini-me, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, elected speaker, but it was easy for Trump to unify Capitol Hill Republicans through fear.
Ronald Reagan — a fearsome right-winger in the 1980s who now seems like Abe Lincoln compared with today’s MAGA mess — said famously, “The person who agrees with you 80% of the time is a friend and an ally, not a 20% traitor.” How quaint. In Trump’s GOP, only 99% agreement will have you looking over your shoulder like Leon Trotsky on the run from a Stalinist USSR.
Consider Minnesota Rep. Tom Emmer, the GOP majority whip popular enough with his colleagues to become their speaker-designate for a few hours this week. I won’t call him poor Tom Emmer: He’s a garden-variety ultraconservative who not only didn’t denounce Trump’s Big Lie but abetted it, signing on to a frivolous lawsuit aiming to block the transfer of power to Biden. Yet, in our modern People’s Front of Judea, Emmer was enough of an apostate — voting to certify Biden’s election victory and for a gay marriage bill, even (gasp!) expressing sympathy for the family of George Floyd after he was murdered by a police officer in his home state — for Trump to put out a contract on him.
Like all who hope to rise in the MAGA cult that the former Republican Party has become, Emmer made the traditional ring-kissing phone call to the movement’s generalissimo over the week, but Trump — apparently still simmering that Emmer had criticized his attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021 — wasn’t having it. He attacked the Minnesotan on his Truth Social platform as a “Globalist RINO” and even worked the phones with his closest House allies, ensuring Emmer would not get the required 217 votes.
According to Politico, the ex-president boasted to a friend in the Mafia-style that his mentor Roy Cohn had taught him: “He’s done. It’s over. I killed him.” He also posted a text he’s received from a Tennessee congressman: “All candidates now 100 percent trump.”
And so, rising from the ashes of this political pyre is Johnson, a suitable apparatchik whose 100% MAGA approval rating includes his Jan. 6 vote to throw out the Pennsylvania presidential ballots that were cast by me and my friends and family, and whose soft Shreveport accent and nerd-dad big glasses make him a kind of Mr. Rogers of homophobic extremism, a Jim Jordan without the rampaging testosterone.
There is a whole separate column to be written about how Johnson is without question the most dangerous person ever to lead one of the three branches of American government, due to the extremism of his Christian nationalism. The four-term congressman does not believe in our country’s founding principle of separation of church and state. And among the views Johnson would force on the United States would be the total end of women’s reproductive rights and a full undoing of LGBTQ liberation, fueled by his radical views opposing abortion because women need to pump more “able-bodied workers” into the economy and that healthy gay relationships are “a dangerous lifestyle.” Then there’s Johnson’s climate denial, bought and paid for by Louisiana’s Big Oil.
Johnson’s out-of-the-mainstream views are alarming, yet that isn’t the real danger of his speakership. Realistically, Johnson won’t be able to ban gay marriage or abortion, but the unyielding right-wing radicalism of both the new speaker and the rank-and-file members who put him there is a recipe for governmental gridlock, including a possible shutdown in less than three weeks. The only guarantee with Speaker Johnson is more chaos.
And chaos is the ultimate goal, much more so than Johnson’s unattainable theocracy. The utter breakdown of functional governance that seems all but certain under the new speaker is aimed at the masses of less-engaged and less-informed voters likely to grow so sick and tired of the sound and fury that they will clamor for Trump’s promises of authoritarian order. It’s the playbook as written by Trump consigliere Steve Bannon, who encouraged the ouster of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy and told associates that ”chaos and destruction” are necessary for his goal of “national rebirth.”
The looming disaster of Johnson’s speakership will be icing on the melting cake of upheaval — in the Middle East, or Ukraine, or the supermarket checkout — that many voters will blame on Biden even if the real culprits are the likes of Vladimir Putin and a diseased bat in Wuhan. The polls continue to show Trump — despite his indictments and increasingly bizarre behavior on the campaign trail — in a dead heat with Biden, aided by voters who remember 2017-2020 as relatively calm and aren’t focused on Trump’s promises to destroy federal governance, free the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, or sic the U.S. Justice Department on his enemies.
Those laughing, smirking, mocking white faces that went before the cameras Tuesday night on Capitol Hill provided the team picture for the theocratic minority rule these MAGA Trumpists hope to impose on the rest of us on Jan. 20, 2025. And it might just happen if the silent majority that still believes in democracy listens to Virginia Foxx, and just shuts up.
Trump got everything he wanted in the speaker disaster on Capitol Hill, smashing public faith that democracy can work.
by Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
The very first thing Louisiana Rep. Mike Johnson did after an exhausted House Republican caucus picked him late Tuesday night as their next speaker, ending the three-week fiasco that has shut down Capitol Hill, was to stage a group portrait of modern American fascism.
They crowded onto a small stage — fellow Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise, the “David Duke without the baggage” who wasn’t conservative enough for today’s GOP; New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, whose congratulatory tweets for this month’s prior, four-hour speaker-elects had played out like Mafia kisses; and Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert, the Beetlejuice fan who stayed all the way to the end of this political horror show.
The cruelty seemed the point for the next few minutes as the leadership of the U.S. House of Representatives channeled its inner goon squad, shouting down and booing the free press and creating a bullying pulpit to strut and preen for a faraway audience of the only viewer who matters in this former political party turned authoritarian cult: their strongman, Donald Trump.
“We’re not doing any policy tonight,” Johnson — who 14 hours later would be officially anointed the 56th speaker of the House — said at the pep rally that only looked like a news conference. It wasn’t clear if that was his response to the laudably persistent ABC News reporter Rachel Scott, who tried valiantly to press the Louisianan on Ukraine aid and his role in 2020′s Big Lie of election fraud, or his broader mission statement for Republicans in Congress.
The Johnson victory mob let out a chorus of boos and laughed in mocking, bullying tones when ABC’s Scott dared to press the incoming speaker over his prominent role in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election result. One voice rose above the din — that of North Carolina Rep. Virginia Foxx, 80, whose grandmotherly countenance added shock value to her shrill shrieks toward Scott to “Shut up! … Shut up!” Foxx is chair of the House education committee.
I mourn for America’s schoolchildren while praying that Foxx and her colleagues won’t influence what those students will learn about the importance of a free press.
At least the appalling late-night scene gave the U.S. electorate a real glimpse of what fascism actually looks like close up: dripping contempt for policy, for free and fair elections, and the First Amendment. It also conveyed the power and influence of the man who wasn’t there but whose intimidation loomed over it all: the 45th (and would-be 47th) president.
Even as he sat in (or stormed out of) a Manhattan courtroom this week in the first of his multiple trials for fraud, election interference, and mishandling America’s secrets — and took a $10,000 fine for his blatant intimidation tactics — Trump was the only real winner in the three-week D.C. debacle that left the federal government paralyzed in a time of crisis, both foreign and domestic. His meddling sparked the rise of extreme Christian nationalist, homophobe, and election denier Johnson as Washington’s highest-ranking Republican, now second-in-line for the presidency.
Trump won his own red October through dictatorial domination and humiliation, crushing the speakership hopes of any candidate who’d dared to deviate, even slightly, from the party line that centers on the ex-president’s dangerous falsehood that he was victorious in the 2020 election when, in reality, President Joe Biden got seven million more votes. He won by keeping the media’s gaze on Capitol Hill and away from the GOP’s imploding effort at staging a competitive presidential primary, as well as his deteriorating position in the courtroom.
But mainly, Trump won by successfully cementing the idea that the nation’s Capitol is ungovernable under the weight of constant and unbearable political chaos, thus setting up his 2024 case that only an autocratic strongman — a “Red Caesar” handed dictatorial power to override the stumbling blocks of constitutional democracy — can fix it.
Pulling strings from hundreds of miles away, using the keypad on his mobile phone as his dagger, Trump over the last week has shown the destructive power of his intimidation regime, despite its limitations. The Mar-a-Lago exile might not have the juice to get an ally like his bullying mini-me, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, elected speaker, but it was easy for Trump to unify Capitol Hill Republicans through fear.
Ronald Reagan — a fearsome right-winger in the 1980s who now seems like Abe Lincoln compared with today’s MAGA mess — said famously, “The person who agrees with you 80% of the time is a friend and an ally, not a 20% traitor.” How quaint. In Trump’s GOP, only 99% agreement will have you looking over your shoulder like Leon Trotsky on the run from a Stalinist USSR.
Consider Minnesota Rep. Tom Emmer, the GOP majority whip popular enough with his colleagues to become their speaker-designate for a few hours this week. I won’t call him poor Tom Emmer: He’s a garden-variety ultraconservative who not only didn’t denounce Trump’s Big Lie but abetted it, signing on to a frivolous lawsuit aiming to block the transfer of power to Biden. Yet, in our modern People’s Front of Judea, Emmer was enough of an apostate — voting to certify Biden’s election victory and for a gay marriage bill, even (gasp!) expressing sympathy for the family of George Floyd after he was murdered by a police officer in his home state — for Trump to put out a contract on him.
Like all who hope to rise in the MAGA cult that the former Republican Party has become, Emmer made the traditional ring-kissing phone call to the movement’s generalissimo over the week, but Trump — apparently still simmering that Emmer had criticized his attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021 — wasn’t having it. He attacked the Minnesotan on his Truth Social platform as a “Globalist RINO” and even worked the phones with his closest House allies, ensuring Emmer would not get the required 217 votes.
According to Politico, the ex-president boasted to a friend in the Mafia-style that his mentor Roy Cohn had taught him: “He’s done. It’s over. I killed him.” He also posted a text he’s received from a Tennessee congressman: “All candidates now 100 percent trump.”
And so, rising from the ashes of this political pyre is Johnson, a suitable apparatchik whose 100% MAGA approval rating includes his Jan. 6 vote to throw out the Pennsylvania presidential ballots that were cast by me and my friends and family, and whose soft Shreveport accent and nerd-dad big glasses make him a kind of Mr. Rogers of homophobic extremism, a Jim Jordan without the rampaging testosterone.
There is a whole separate column to be written about how Johnson is without question the most dangerous person ever to lead one of the three branches of American government, due to the extremism of his Christian nationalism. The four-term congressman does not believe in our country’s founding principle of separation of church and state. And among the views Johnson would force on the United States would be the total end of women’s reproductive rights and a full undoing of LGBTQ liberation, fueled by his radical views opposing abortion because women need to pump more “able-bodied workers” into the economy and that healthy gay relationships are “a dangerous lifestyle.” Then there’s Johnson’s climate denial, bought and paid for by Louisiana’s Big Oil.
Johnson’s out-of-the-mainstream views are alarming, yet that isn’t the real danger of his speakership. Realistically, Johnson won’t be able to ban gay marriage or abortion, but the unyielding right-wing radicalism of both the new speaker and the rank-and-file members who put him there is a recipe for governmental gridlock, including a possible shutdown in less than three weeks. The only guarantee with Speaker Johnson is more chaos.
And chaos is the ultimate goal, much more so than Johnson’s unattainable theocracy. The utter breakdown of functional governance that seems all but certain under the new speaker is aimed at the masses of less-engaged and less-informed voters likely to grow so sick and tired of the sound and fury that they will clamor for Trump’s promises of authoritarian order. It’s the playbook as written by Trump consigliere Steve Bannon, who encouraged the ouster of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy and told associates that ”chaos and destruction” are necessary for his goal of “national rebirth.”
The looming disaster of Johnson’s speakership will be icing on the melting cake of upheaval — in the Middle East, or Ukraine, or the supermarket checkout — that many voters will blame on Biden even if the real culprits are the likes of Vladimir Putin and a diseased bat in Wuhan. The polls continue to show Trump — despite his indictments and increasingly bizarre behavior on the campaign trail — in a dead heat with Biden, aided by voters who remember 2017-2020 as relatively calm and aren’t focused on Trump’s promises to destroy federal governance, free the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, or sic the U.S. Justice Department on his enemies.
Those laughing, smirking, mocking white faces that went before the cameras Tuesday night on Capitol Hill provided the team picture for the theocratic minority rule these MAGA Trumpists hope to impose on the rest of us on Jan. 20, 2025. And it might just happen if the silent majority that still believes in democracy listens to Virginia Foxx, and just shuts up.
REPUBLICAN RADICALIZATION TAKES ITS TOLL
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
The findings in this year’s Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) annual American Values Survey are a disturbing reminder that, regardless of the political fortunes of four-time-indicted former president Donald Trump, the MAGA movement he spawned has radicalized millions of Americans.
The poll, conducted in partnership with the Brookings Institution, surveyed more than 2,500 Americans on everything from trans rights to QAnon to racism.
The survey’s great value comes as a warning about the radicalization and alienation of a segment of the major parties’ followers. “Today, nearly a quarter of Americans (23%) agree that ‘because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country,’ up from 15% in 2021,” the survey found. “PRRI has asked this question in eight separate surveys since March 2021. This is the first time support for political violence has peaked above 20%.” A full third of Republicans believe this, compared with 13 percent of Democrats. Meanwhile, QAnon believers have jumped from 14 percent of Americans to 23 percent, with Republicans twice as likely as Democrats to buy into the extreme conspiracy theory.
Clearly, authoritarianism has made greater inroads among Republicans than other groups. “About half of Republicans (48%) agree with the need for a leader who is willing to break some rules, compared with four in ten independents (38%) and three in ten Democrats (29%).”
Meanwhile, in a positive sign of public sanity, “Overwhelming majorities of Americans today support teaching the good and the bad of American history, trust public school teachers to select appropriate curriculum, and strongly oppose the banning of books that discuss slavery or the banning of Advanced Placement (AP) African American History.” Moreover, “A solid majority of Americans also oppose banning social and emotional learning programs in public schools.” Though some Republicans have made “anti-wokeism” a key requirement of their political identity, their message is deeply unpopular. “Fewer than one in ten Americans favor the banning of books that include depictions of slavery from being taught in public schools (7%), compared with 88% who oppose such bans.”
Sixty percent say abortion should be legal in most or all cases, compared with 37 percent who say it should be illegal in most or all cases. In a political reversal, “Democrats are now significantly more likely than Republicans to say their support for a candidate hinges on the candidate’s position on abortion,” 50 percent vs. 38 percent.
With their sympathies for authoritarianism, radical ideology and banning abortion, many Republicans, especially the GOP’s main base of White evangelical Christians, are out of step with the rest of the country. For example: “White evangelical Protestants stand out as the major religious group most opposed to the legality of abortion (75%).” That is a far higher percentage than for any other religious group, and only 17 percent of religiously unaffiliated Americans support criminalization of abortion.
Many in the GOP fold rely on getting information from right-wing propaganda outlets that push the “big lie.” (Disclosure: I am an MSNBC contributor.) “More than six in ten Republicans (63%) continue to say that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, compared with 31% of independents and 6% of Democrats. Two-thirds of Americans who most trust Fox News (65%) and nearly all Americans who most trust far-right news outlets (92%) believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.”
Unsurprisingly, the partisan gap when it comes to Trump’s legal conduct is enormous:
Six in ten Americans (60%) agree with the statement that it is likely that former president Donald Trump broke the law to try to stay in power after losing the 2020 election, while 38% disagree.
About one-quarter of Republicans (27%), compared with 60% of independents and 92% of Democrats, believe Trump broke the law to try to stay in power. Americans who most trust Fox News (26%) or far-right news outlets (3%) are least likely to believe Trump broke the law to stay in power after losing the election, compared with a slim majority of Americans who do not watch TV news (52%) and eight in ten Americans (80%) who most trust mainstream news.
Many Republicans are also outliers when it comes to the continuing effects of racism:
A majority (53%) of Americans agree that generations of slavery and discrimination against Black people and Native Americans have given white people unfair economic advantages, compared with 41% who disagree. Majorities of Republicans (65%) and independents (40%) disagree with this statement, compared with only 22% of Democrats.
White Christian subgroups are significantly more likely than other religious groups to disagree with this statement. About two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants (65%) ... disagree that the legacy of slavery and discrimination against minorities has created unfair economic advantages for white people.
Most frightening is how many Republicans buy into white Christian nationalism, a racist ideology that rejects the basic premise of our democracy: “All men are created equal.” One-third of Americans but 52 percent of Republicans agree that “God intended America to be a new promised land where European Christians could create a society that could be an example to the rest of the world.” The number is even higher among White evangelical Protestants (54 percent). Americans who subscribe to white Christian nationalism are more than twice as likely as other Americans to say true patriots might have to resort to violence to save the country.
In a related question, 75 percent of Republicans think the Founders wanted America to be a Christian nation with Western European values.
Though three-quarters of Americans say democracy is at stake in the next election, only slightly more (57 percent) say Trump’s election threatens democracy than say President Biden’s reelection threatens democracy (53 percent). There is an inescapable racial element at work:
More than two-thirds of Black Americans (70%) and Hispanic Americans (67%) say the reelection of Trump poses a threat to American democracy. White Americans are divided about Trump being a threat to democracy (51% agree vs. 47% disagree). By contrast, nearly six in ten white Americans (59%) and 52% of Hispanic Americans, but only one-third of Black Americans (34%), say the reelection of Biden poses a threat to democracy.
Taking a step back, the overall picture here is a country that is inclusive, respectful of religious differences, pro-democracy and supportive of women’s rights — except when it comes to the largely Republican, mostly White evangelical Christians who reject these fundamental ideas.
When a sizable portion of one of the major political parties, aided by a right-wing propaganda machine and infused with religious fervor, rejects the basis for multiracial, multicultural democracy, we face a severe crisis. Even if Trump does not return to the White House, this radicalized segment will not disappear. How we reintegrate millions of Americans into reality-based, pro-democracy politics in a diverse country remains the great challenge of our time
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
The findings in this year’s Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) annual American Values Survey are a disturbing reminder that, regardless of the political fortunes of four-time-indicted former president Donald Trump, the MAGA movement he spawned has radicalized millions of Americans.
The poll, conducted in partnership with the Brookings Institution, surveyed more than 2,500 Americans on everything from trans rights to QAnon to racism.
The survey’s great value comes as a warning about the radicalization and alienation of a segment of the major parties’ followers. “Today, nearly a quarter of Americans (23%) agree that ‘because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country,’ up from 15% in 2021,” the survey found. “PRRI has asked this question in eight separate surveys since March 2021. This is the first time support for political violence has peaked above 20%.” A full third of Republicans believe this, compared with 13 percent of Democrats. Meanwhile, QAnon believers have jumped from 14 percent of Americans to 23 percent, with Republicans twice as likely as Democrats to buy into the extreme conspiracy theory.
Clearly, authoritarianism has made greater inroads among Republicans than other groups. “About half of Republicans (48%) agree with the need for a leader who is willing to break some rules, compared with four in ten independents (38%) and three in ten Democrats (29%).”
Meanwhile, in a positive sign of public sanity, “Overwhelming majorities of Americans today support teaching the good and the bad of American history, trust public school teachers to select appropriate curriculum, and strongly oppose the banning of books that discuss slavery or the banning of Advanced Placement (AP) African American History.” Moreover, “A solid majority of Americans also oppose banning social and emotional learning programs in public schools.” Though some Republicans have made “anti-wokeism” a key requirement of their political identity, their message is deeply unpopular. “Fewer than one in ten Americans favor the banning of books that include depictions of slavery from being taught in public schools (7%), compared with 88% who oppose such bans.”
Sixty percent say abortion should be legal in most or all cases, compared with 37 percent who say it should be illegal in most or all cases. In a political reversal, “Democrats are now significantly more likely than Republicans to say their support for a candidate hinges on the candidate’s position on abortion,” 50 percent vs. 38 percent.
With their sympathies for authoritarianism, radical ideology and banning abortion, many Republicans, especially the GOP’s main base of White evangelical Christians, are out of step with the rest of the country. For example: “White evangelical Protestants stand out as the major religious group most opposed to the legality of abortion (75%).” That is a far higher percentage than for any other religious group, and only 17 percent of religiously unaffiliated Americans support criminalization of abortion.
Many in the GOP fold rely on getting information from right-wing propaganda outlets that push the “big lie.” (Disclosure: I am an MSNBC contributor.) “More than six in ten Republicans (63%) continue to say that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, compared with 31% of independents and 6% of Democrats. Two-thirds of Americans who most trust Fox News (65%) and nearly all Americans who most trust far-right news outlets (92%) believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.”
Unsurprisingly, the partisan gap when it comes to Trump’s legal conduct is enormous:
Six in ten Americans (60%) agree with the statement that it is likely that former president Donald Trump broke the law to try to stay in power after losing the 2020 election, while 38% disagree.
About one-quarter of Republicans (27%), compared with 60% of independents and 92% of Democrats, believe Trump broke the law to try to stay in power. Americans who most trust Fox News (26%) or far-right news outlets (3%) are least likely to believe Trump broke the law to stay in power after losing the election, compared with a slim majority of Americans who do not watch TV news (52%) and eight in ten Americans (80%) who most trust mainstream news.
Many Republicans are also outliers when it comes to the continuing effects of racism:
A majority (53%) of Americans agree that generations of slavery and discrimination against Black people and Native Americans have given white people unfair economic advantages, compared with 41% who disagree. Majorities of Republicans (65%) and independents (40%) disagree with this statement, compared with only 22% of Democrats.
White Christian subgroups are significantly more likely than other religious groups to disagree with this statement. About two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants (65%) ... disagree that the legacy of slavery and discrimination against minorities has created unfair economic advantages for white people.
Most frightening is how many Republicans buy into white Christian nationalism, a racist ideology that rejects the basic premise of our democracy: “All men are created equal.” One-third of Americans but 52 percent of Republicans agree that “God intended America to be a new promised land where European Christians could create a society that could be an example to the rest of the world.” The number is even higher among White evangelical Protestants (54 percent). Americans who subscribe to white Christian nationalism are more than twice as likely as other Americans to say true patriots might have to resort to violence to save the country.
In a related question, 75 percent of Republicans think the Founders wanted America to be a Christian nation with Western European values.
Though three-quarters of Americans say democracy is at stake in the next election, only slightly more (57 percent) say Trump’s election threatens democracy than say President Biden’s reelection threatens democracy (53 percent). There is an inescapable racial element at work:
More than two-thirds of Black Americans (70%) and Hispanic Americans (67%) say the reelection of Trump poses a threat to American democracy. White Americans are divided about Trump being a threat to democracy (51% agree vs. 47% disagree). By contrast, nearly six in ten white Americans (59%) and 52% of Hispanic Americans, but only one-third of Black Americans (34%), say the reelection of Biden poses a threat to democracy.
Taking a step back, the overall picture here is a country that is inclusive, respectful of religious differences, pro-democracy and supportive of women’s rights — except when it comes to the largely Republican, mostly White evangelical Christians who reject these fundamental ideas.
When a sizable portion of one of the major political parties, aided by a right-wing propaganda machine and infused with religious fervor, rejects the basis for multiracial, multicultural democracy, we face a severe crisis. Even if Trump does not return to the White House, this radicalized segment will not disappear. How we reintegrate millions of Americans into reality-based, pro-democracy politics in a diverse country remains the great challenge of our time
JOHNSON PLAYED LEADING ROLE IN EFFORT TO OVERTURN 2020 ELECTION
Representative Mike Johnson recruited House Republicans to back a lawsuit to overturn the results, and he was a key architect of his party’s objections to certifying President Biden’s victory.
By Luke Broadwater and Steve Eder, The New York Times
If Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio was the most prominent public face of the congressional effort to fight the results of the 2020 election, his mentee, Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana, was a silent but pivotal partner.
Now, Mr. Johnson, 51, is speaker, and new attention is focused on his behind-the-scenes role in attempting to overturn the election results on behalf of former President Donald J. Trump.
A social conservative, Mr. Johnson played a leading role in recruiting House Republicans to sign a legal brief supporting a lawsuit seeking to overturn the 2020 election results.
In December 2020, Mr. Johnson collected signatures for a legal brief in support of a Texas lawsuit attempting throw out the results in four battleground states won by Mr. Biden.
The Supreme Court ultimately rejected the suit, but not before Mr. Johnson convinced more than 60 percent of House Republicans to sign onto the effort. He did so by telling them the initiative had been personally blessed by Mr. Trump, and the former president was “anxiously awaiting” to see who in Congress would step up to the plate to defend him.
A constitutional lawyer, Mr. Johnson also was a key architect of Republicans’ objections to certifying the victory of then President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Jan. 6, 2021. Many Republicans in Congress relied on his arguments.
On the eve of the Jan. 6 votes, he presented colleagues with arguments they could use to oppose the will of the voters without embracing conspiracy theories and the lies of widespread fraud pushed by Mr. Trump. Mr. Johnson instead faulted the way some states had changed voting procedures during the pandemic, saying it was unconstitutional.
After a mob of Mr. Trump’s supporters, believing the election was rigged, stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, injuring about 150 police officers, Mr. Johnson condemned the violence. But he defended the actions of congressional Republicans in objecting to Mr. Biden’s victory.
He wrote a two-page memo of talking points meant to buck up Republicans, and lamented that the violence had almost eclipsed his careful arguments. “Most of the country has also never heard the principled reason,” he wrote.
Over a year later, on “Truth Be Told,” the Christian podcast he hosts with his wife, Kelly, Mr. Johnson continued to argue he and his colleagues had been right to object to the election results:
“The slates of electors were produced by a clearly unconstitutional process, period,” he said.
Mr. Johnson came to Congress in 2017 with support from the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, though he has never joined the group.
In an interview this year, he referred to Mr. Jordan, a co-founder of the Freedom Caucus, as a “very close friend” who “has been a mentor to me since I got here.”
Mr. Johnson said Mr. Jordan called him when he was running for office, because “he knew I was a conservative,” contributed money to his campaign and invited him to Washington for a meeting with him and other Freedom Caucus members.
“He started providing advice to me,” Mr. Johnson said. “So now we’ve become very close.”
Mr. Johnson has also made a close ally of Mr. Trump, and he served on Mr. Trump’s impeachment defense team.
On Nov. 8, 2020, Mr. Johnson was onstage at a northwest Louisiana church speaking about Christianity in America when Mr. Trump called. Mr. Johnson had been in touch with the president’s team on his myriad legal challenges seeking to overturn the results, “to restore the integrity of our election process,” according to a Facebook post by Mr. Johnson recounting the exchange.
“We have to keep fighting for that, Mike,” he said Mr. Trump told him.
“Indeed we do, sir!” Mr. Johnson said he replied.
Representative Mike Johnson recruited House Republicans to back a lawsuit to overturn the results, and he was a key architect of his party’s objections to certifying President Biden’s victory.
By Luke Broadwater and Steve Eder, The New York Times
If Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio was the most prominent public face of the congressional effort to fight the results of the 2020 election, his mentee, Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana, was a silent but pivotal partner.
Now, Mr. Johnson, 51, is speaker, and new attention is focused on his behind-the-scenes role in attempting to overturn the election results on behalf of former President Donald J. Trump.
A social conservative, Mr. Johnson played a leading role in recruiting House Republicans to sign a legal brief supporting a lawsuit seeking to overturn the 2020 election results.
In December 2020, Mr. Johnson collected signatures for a legal brief in support of a Texas lawsuit attempting throw out the results in four battleground states won by Mr. Biden.
The Supreme Court ultimately rejected the suit, but not before Mr. Johnson convinced more than 60 percent of House Republicans to sign onto the effort. He did so by telling them the initiative had been personally blessed by Mr. Trump, and the former president was “anxiously awaiting” to see who in Congress would step up to the plate to defend him.
A constitutional lawyer, Mr. Johnson also was a key architect of Republicans’ objections to certifying the victory of then President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Jan. 6, 2021. Many Republicans in Congress relied on his arguments.
On the eve of the Jan. 6 votes, he presented colleagues with arguments they could use to oppose the will of the voters without embracing conspiracy theories and the lies of widespread fraud pushed by Mr. Trump. Mr. Johnson instead faulted the way some states had changed voting procedures during the pandemic, saying it was unconstitutional.
After a mob of Mr. Trump’s supporters, believing the election was rigged, stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, injuring about 150 police officers, Mr. Johnson condemned the violence. But he defended the actions of congressional Republicans in objecting to Mr. Biden’s victory.
He wrote a two-page memo of talking points meant to buck up Republicans, and lamented that the violence had almost eclipsed his careful arguments. “Most of the country has also never heard the principled reason,” he wrote.
Over a year later, on “Truth Be Told,” the Christian podcast he hosts with his wife, Kelly, Mr. Johnson continued to argue he and his colleagues had been right to object to the election results:
“The slates of electors were produced by a clearly unconstitutional process, period,” he said.
Mr. Johnson came to Congress in 2017 with support from the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, though he has never joined the group.
In an interview this year, he referred to Mr. Jordan, a co-founder of the Freedom Caucus, as a “very close friend” who “has been a mentor to me since I got here.”
Mr. Johnson said Mr. Jordan called him when he was running for office, because “he knew I was a conservative,” contributed money to his campaign and invited him to Washington for a meeting with him and other Freedom Caucus members.
“He started providing advice to me,” Mr. Johnson said. “So now we’ve become very close.”
Mr. Johnson has also made a close ally of Mr. Trump, and he served on Mr. Trump’s impeachment defense team.
On Nov. 8, 2020, Mr. Johnson was onstage at a northwest Louisiana church speaking about Christianity in America when Mr. Trump called. Mr. Johnson had been in touch with the president’s team on his myriad legal challenges seeking to overturn the results, “to restore the integrity of our election process,” according to a Facebook post by Mr. Johnson recounting the exchange.
“We have to keep fighting for that, Mike,” he said Mr. Trump told him.
“Indeed we do, sir!” Mr. Johnson said he replied.
TRUMP’S LATEST ATTACK ON WITNESSES IS ONE OF HIS MOST BRAZEN
Analysis by Aaron Blake, The Washington Post
Donald Trump has finally begun to face consequences for the kinds of attacks on the judicial process and key figures that some experts wager would not be tolerated from another criminal defendant.
But he has greeted a pending decision about a gag order by making one of his most direct attacks against potential witnesses against him — and one of his most direct challenges to judges who dare try to rein him in.
ABC News reported Tuesday night that special counsel Jack Smith has granted former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows immunity as he delivers key testimony in Trump’s federal election interference case. Meadows’s lawyer disputed the report.
Trump responded by issuing a broadside not just against a potentially cooperating Meadows, but seemingly — by extension — allies who have cut deals in recent days in his other election interference case, in Fulton County, Ga.
Trump on Truth Social said he doubted Meadows would say the things ABC reported he did.
“BUT,” Trump added, “when you really think about it, after being hounded like a dog for three years, told you’ll be going to jail for the rest of your life … If you say BAD THINGS about that terrible ‘MONSTER,’ DONALD J. TRUMP, we won’t put you in prison, you can keep your family and your wealth, and, perhaps, if you can make up some really horrible ‘STUFF’ [about] him, we may very well erect a statue of you in the middle of our decaying and now very violent Capital, Washington, D.C. Some people would make that deal, but they are weaklings and cowards, and so bad for the future our Failing Nation.”
Trump’s comments would seem to transparently violate the limited gag order that U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan issued in Trump’s federal case but later suspended while Trump’s legal team appeals the decision. (The government is due to weigh in Wednesday and will surely include Trump’s most recent comments.)
Whether the comments violate the conditions of Trump’s pretrial release is the critical question. Trump signed a form in August acknowledging that it would be a crime to “intimidate or attempt to intimidate a witness, victim, juror, informant, or officer of the court.”
The suspended gag order barred Trump from addressing potential witnesses’ roles in the case. Trump in his Tuesday post also called Smith “deranged” yet again, despite Chutkan’s having explicitly cited that attack as being beyond the pale.
“I cannot imagine any other criminal case in which a defendant is permitted to call the prosecutor ‘deranged’ or ‘a thug,’ Chutkan said Oct. 16, “and I will not permit it here simply because the defendant is running a political campaign.”
Trump is clearly intent upon testing what Chutkan will permit. His new post, after all, goes further than many, if not all, of his past comments about potential witnesses:
Where the new comments differ from these is in how direct and potentially broadly felt they are.
Here, Trump is responding directly to a report that a key witness was testifying in ways that could harm Trump. He did that with Pence, but in that case, Trump’s legal team has cited the fact that Trump is campaigning against Pence for president — something Chutkan has acknowledged complicates matters.
On Oct. 24 former Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis pleaded guilty to illegally conspiring to overturn the former president’s 2020 election loss in Georgia. (Video: Fulton County Superior Court)
Trump is also signaling that he will publicly call into question the testimony of cooperating witnesses by claiming they were effectively forced to say untrue things because of legal pressure — for example, “make up some really horrible ‘STUFF.’” And his comments could certainly be read to pertain not just to Meadows, but to the likes of Powell and fellow Trump-aligned lawyers Kenneth Chesebro and Jenna Ellis, who also recently cut plea deals that will require them to testify truthfully.
Trump would argue he’s just talking about a situation in which they would provide untrue testimony, but he’s inviting everyone to view those who flip against him as suspect — as “weaklings and cowards.”
It’s difficult to see how that implicit threat of public opprobrium wouldn’t weigh on these witnesses and others who might cut their own deals, which is an increasingly major subplot in the Fulton County case.
What’s apparent is that Trump isn’t going to stop doing this and will probably just keep upping the ante. The big question is when a judge might decide that, whatever the drawbacks of severely sanctioning a presidential candidate and leader of a major political party, the alternative could be even worse.
Analysis by Aaron Blake, The Washington Post
Donald Trump has finally begun to face consequences for the kinds of attacks on the judicial process and key figures that some experts wager would not be tolerated from another criminal defendant.
But he has greeted a pending decision about a gag order by making one of his most direct attacks against potential witnesses against him — and one of his most direct challenges to judges who dare try to rein him in.
ABC News reported Tuesday night that special counsel Jack Smith has granted former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows immunity as he delivers key testimony in Trump’s federal election interference case. Meadows’s lawyer disputed the report.
Trump responded by issuing a broadside not just against a potentially cooperating Meadows, but seemingly — by extension — allies who have cut deals in recent days in his other election interference case, in Fulton County, Ga.
Trump on Truth Social said he doubted Meadows would say the things ABC reported he did.
“BUT,” Trump added, “when you really think about it, after being hounded like a dog for three years, told you’ll be going to jail for the rest of your life … If you say BAD THINGS about that terrible ‘MONSTER,’ DONALD J. TRUMP, we won’t put you in prison, you can keep your family and your wealth, and, perhaps, if you can make up some really horrible ‘STUFF’ [about] him, we may very well erect a statue of you in the middle of our decaying and now very violent Capital, Washington, D.C. Some people would make that deal, but they are weaklings and cowards, and so bad for the future our Failing Nation.”
Trump’s comments would seem to transparently violate the limited gag order that U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan issued in Trump’s federal case but later suspended while Trump’s legal team appeals the decision. (The government is due to weigh in Wednesday and will surely include Trump’s most recent comments.)
Whether the comments violate the conditions of Trump’s pretrial release is the critical question. Trump signed a form in August acknowledging that it would be a crime to “intimidate or attempt to intimidate a witness, victim, juror, informant, or officer of the court.”
The suspended gag order barred Trump from addressing potential witnesses’ roles in the case. Trump in his Tuesday post also called Smith “deranged” yet again, despite Chutkan’s having explicitly cited that attack as being beyond the pale.
“I cannot imagine any other criminal case in which a defendant is permitted to call the prosecutor ‘deranged’ or ‘a thug,’ Chutkan said Oct. 16, “and I will not permit it here simply because the defendant is running a political campaign.”
Trump is clearly intent upon testing what Chutkan will permit. His new post, after all, goes further than many, if not all, of his past comments about potential witnesses:
- Trump at one point urged a witness not to testify in Fulton County.
- He has disputed former vice president Mike Pence’s reported testimony.
- He has broadly attacked potential witnesses like former attorney general William P. Barr and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman — even invoking the death penalty in the latter case — while not citing their testimony.
- He recently called a key emerging witness in his classified-documents case a “red headed weirdo.”
- He recently claimed Sidney Powell “WAS NOT MY ATTORNEY” — despite his past comments to the contrary — shortly after she cut a plea deal in the Fulton County case.
- Less than 24 hours after a magistrate judge warned him against witness tampering in August, Trump offered a vague post saying, “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”
Where the new comments differ from these is in how direct and potentially broadly felt they are.
Here, Trump is responding directly to a report that a key witness was testifying in ways that could harm Trump. He did that with Pence, but in that case, Trump’s legal team has cited the fact that Trump is campaigning against Pence for president — something Chutkan has acknowledged complicates matters.
On Oct. 24 former Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis pleaded guilty to illegally conspiring to overturn the former president’s 2020 election loss in Georgia. (Video: Fulton County Superior Court)
Trump is also signaling that he will publicly call into question the testimony of cooperating witnesses by claiming they were effectively forced to say untrue things because of legal pressure — for example, “make up some really horrible ‘STUFF.’” And his comments could certainly be read to pertain not just to Meadows, but to the likes of Powell and fellow Trump-aligned lawyers Kenneth Chesebro and Jenna Ellis, who also recently cut plea deals that will require them to testify truthfully.
Trump would argue he’s just talking about a situation in which they would provide untrue testimony, but he’s inviting everyone to view those who flip against him as suspect — as “weaklings and cowards.”
It’s difficult to see how that implicit threat of public opprobrium wouldn’t weigh on these witnesses and others who might cut their own deals, which is an increasingly major subplot in the Fulton County case.
What’s apparent is that Trump isn’t going to stop doing this and will probably just keep upping the ante. The big question is when a judge might decide that, whatever the drawbacks of severely sanctioning a presidential candidate and leader of a major political party, the alternative could be even worse.
REPUBLICANS HAVE TURNED VICE INTO VIRTUE
By David French, The New York Times
It’s hard to overstate the extent to which our nation’s absurd Jim Jordan moment encapsulates the deep dysfunction of the political right in the United States.
There’s of course all the chaos and incompetence of the Trumpist Republican Party, on display for the world to see. An extremist faction of the House deposed their own party’s speaker of the House without a successor, and now — in the midst of multiplying international crises — the House is rudderless. In fact, it’s worse than rudderless. As I write this newsletter it’s in a state of utter confusion.
But there’s also a deeper reality at play here, one that goes well beyond simple incompetence. The Republican base admires Jordan because it thinks he is tough. It perceives him as a man of courage and strength. He is not. Instead, he is a symbol of the way in which Trumpist Republicans have corrupted the concept of courage itself.
To understand what courage is supposed to be, I turn to a definition from C.S. Lewis: “Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality.” It’s a beautiful formulation, one that encompasses both the moral and physical realms and declares that courage is inseparable from virtue.
Lewis’s definition presents us with the sobering realization that we don’t truly know if we possess a virtue unless and until it is tested. We can believe we’re honest, but we won’t know we’re truly honest unless we have the courage to tell the truth when the truth will cost us something we value. We can believe we’re brave, but we don’t know if we are until we show it when we face a genuine physical risk.
When I meet a virtuous person, I also know that I’m meeting a person of real courage. A lifetime of virtue is impossible absent courage. Conversely, when I see a person consumed with vice, I also know that I’m likely in the presence of a coward, a person whose commitments to virtue could not survive the tests of life.
Now contrast the Lewis vision of courage with the courage or toughness lionized on the MAGA right. From the beginning of the Trump era, the entire concept of courage was divorced from virtue and completely fused with two terrible vices: groveling subservience and overt aggression.
The subservience, of course, is to the demands of Donald Trump, the right-wing media or the angry Republican base. The command is clear: Do what we say. Hate who we hate. But how can anyone think that such obedience equals courage? Because in this upside-down world, aggression is equated with toughness and bullying is exalted as bravery.
Few politicians personify this distortion of courage into cowardice better than Jim Jordan, and it is a sign of the decline of the Republican Party that he was even considered for the speaker’s chair, much less a few votes away from becoming the most powerful Republican elected official in the nation, second in line to the presidency.
Is there anything that qualifies him for the position other than his subservience and aggression? His legislative record is extraordinarily thin. As Aaron Blake meticulously documented in The Washington Post, during Jordan’s 16 years in Congress, he hasn’t passed a single bill of his own. According to the Center for Effective Lawmaking, he’s consistently one of the least-effective members in the entire Republican Party.
What is Jim Jordan good at, exactly? He’s a Donald Trump apologist, a performative pugilist and a Fox News fixture. The liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America collected data showing that as of this month, Jordan had been on Fox 565 times since August 2017, including 268 appearances in weekday prime time. In a party that now prizes performance over policy, each of these Fox appearances builds his résumé far more than legislation ever could.
But for sheer subservient aggression, nothing matches his enthusiastic participation in Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election. The final report of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol calls him a “significant player” in Trump’s scheme.
As the committee records, “On Jan. 2, 2021, Representative Jordan led a conference call in which he, President Trump, and other Members of Congress discussed strategies for delaying the January 6th joint session.” On Jan. 5, “Jordan texted Mark Meadows, passing along advice that Vice President Pence should ‘call out all the electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all.’” He spoke to Trump at least twice on Jan. 6 itself and voted against certifying the election results, even after the Trump mob stormed the Capitol. In 2022, he defied a Select Committee subpoena.
Never forget that this reckless aggression was all in service of some of the most absurd conspiracy theories and legal arguments in modern American political history. Every Republican who voted against certifying the presidential election was the very definition of a coward. When the virtue of integrity reached its testing point, they collapsed. But, bizarrely enough, they often collapsed with a swagger, casting themselves as tough even as they capitulated to the demands of a corrupt president and a frenzied mob.
That MAGA aggression has spilled over to the speaker fight itself. As The Times reported on Saturday, “lawmakers and activists” close to Jordan “have taken to social media and the airwaves to blast the Republicans they believe are blocking his path to victory and encourage voters to browbeat them into supporting Mr. Jordan.”
The pressure campaign includes Sean Hannity, a Fox prime-time host and wannabe Republican kingmaker. Representatives from his show sent messages to Republican holdouts transparently designed to pressure them into voting for Jordan. Politico’s Olivia Beavers reported that the pressure campaign even reached the wife of Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska. She received personal text messages threatening Bacon’s career, including a message that said: “Your husband will not hold any political office ever again. What a disappointment and failure he is.”
On Wednesday afternoon, the pressure campaign began to reach its inevitable conclusion: death threats. Steve Womack of Arkansas told The Washington Post that his staff has been “cussed out” and “threatened.” Marionnette Miller-Meeks of Iowa issued a statement claiming that she’d received “credible death threats and a barrage of threatening calls” after she voted against Jordan.
Roughly 30 minutes after Miller-Meeks’s statement, Jordan finally condemned threats against his colleagues. By then, however, it was too late to repair the damage. Eight years into the MAGA era, Republicans should know exactly what happens when they launch a public pressure campaign. Threats follow MAGA pressure like night follows day.
I’ve written a series of newsletters on the culture of MAGA America, including how it combines rage and joy to build community, how it exploits civic ignorance to denigrate its opponents, how its corruption is contagious and how it fosters and feeds a dark caricature of working-class values that warps its populist base. Even so, few elements of right-wing political culture are more toxic than the way it turns vice into virtue and derides the very idea of character in politics.
But all is not lost. Just as key conservative jurists joined with their liberal counterparts to reject Trump’s absurd election challenges, key Republican leaders refused to bend the knee to the mob on Jan. 6. And it was conservative lawyers who blew the whistle on Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s corruption. A remnant of courageous Republicans stood against Jim Jordan’s campaign for speaker of the House and twice rejected his bid.
They did more than reject Jordan. They directly rejected the MAGA bullies Jordan unleashed. As Aaron Blake reported, several Republican members of Congress have directly condemned the tactics of the MAGA right. Representatives Steve Womack of Arkansas, Kay Granger of Texas, Jen Kiggans of Virginia, Carlos Giménez of Florida and Marionnette Miller-Meeks have all denounced the pressure campaign. And John Rutherford of Florida blamed Jordan directly for the threats and acts of intimidation. He told The Washington Post’s Jaqueline Alemany that Jordan’s “absolutely responsible for it” and that “nobody likes to have their arm twisted.”
Their courage wasn’t wasted. On Thursday morning, The Times reported that Jordan wouldn’t immediately seek a third floor vote. Instead, he would “endorse a plan to empower Representative Patrick T. McHenry of North Carolina” to act as a temporary speaker until Jan. 3. At the same time, however, Jordan isn’t exactly standing down. Under his plan, he’d continue to act as “speaker designee,” which would permit him to continue whipping votes for his speaker bid, a preposterous idea that would undermine the temporary speaker every day that Jordan worked to sit in his chair.
I’m grateful for the stand of a few stalwart Republicans. But their small number is one reason I remain profoundly concerned. We’ve watched pressure campaigns work on the right for eight long years, until the people who continue to resist dwindled to an ever-smaller minority — a minority strong enough to help block the worst excesses of the MAGA G.O.P. but far too weak to cleanse the Republican Party of its profound moral rot.
The battle over the next speaker is yet another proxy fight for the soul of the American right, and the fact that a man like Jim Jordan has come so close to such extraordinary power is proof that the rot runs deep. Only a very small minority of elected Republicans have passed the test. Signs of courage remain, but as long as men like Jim Jordan and Donald Trump run the G.O.P., the bullies still reign.
By David French, The New York Times
It’s hard to overstate the extent to which our nation’s absurd Jim Jordan moment encapsulates the deep dysfunction of the political right in the United States.
There’s of course all the chaos and incompetence of the Trumpist Republican Party, on display for the world to see. An extremist faction of the House deposed their own party’s speaker of the House without a successor, and now — in the midst of multiplying international crises — the House is rudderless. In fact, it’s worse than rudderless. As I write this newsletter it’s in a state of utter confusion.
But there’s also a deeper reality at play here, one that goes well beyond simple incompetence. The Republican base admires Jordan because it thinks he is tough. It perceives him as a man of courage and strength. He is not. Instead, he is a symbol of the way in which Trumpist Republicans have corrupted the concept of courage itself.
To understand what courage is supposed to be, I turn to a definition from C.S. Lewis: “Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality.” It’s a beautiful formulation, one that encompasses both the moral and physical realms and declares that courage is inseparable from virtue.
Lewis’s definition presents us with the sobering realization that we don’t truly know if we possess a virtue unless and until it is tested. We can believe we’re honest, but we won’t know we’re truly honest unless we have the courage to tell the truth when the truth will cost us something we value. We can believe we’re brave, but we don’t know if we are until we show it when we face a genuine physical risk.
When I meet a virtuous person, I also know that I’m meeting a person of real courage. A lifetime of virtue is impossible absent courage. Conversely, when I see a person consumed with vice, I also know that I’m likely in the presence of a coward, a person whose commitments to virtue could not survive the tests of life.
Now contrast the Lewis vision of courage with the courage or toughness lionized on the MAGA right. From the beginning of the Trump era, the entire concept of courage was divorced from virtue and completely fused with two terrible vices: groveling subservience and overt aggression.
The subservience, of course, is to the demands of Donald Trump, the right-wing media or the angry Republican base. The command is clear: Do what we say. Hate who we hate. But how can anyone think that such obedience equals courage? Because in this upside-down world, aggression is equated with toughness and bullying is exalted as bravery.
Few politicians personify this distortion of courage into cowardice better than Jim Jordan, and it is a sign of the decline of the Republican Party that he was even considered for the speaker’s chair, much less a few votes away from becoming the most powerful Republican elected official in the nation, second in line to the presidency.
Is there anything that qualifies him for the position other than his subservience and aggression? His legislative record is extraordinarily thin. As Aaron Blake meticulously documented in The Washington Post, during Jordan’s 16 years in Congress, he hasn’t passed a single bill of his own. According to the Center for Effective Lawmaking, he’s consistently one of the least-effective members in the entire Republican Party.
What is Jim Jordan good at, exactly? He’s a Donald Trump apologist, a performative pugilist and a Fox News fixture. The liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America collected data showing that as of this month, Jordan had been on Fox 565 times since August 2017, including 268 appearances in weekday prime time. In a party that now prizes performance over policy, each of these Fox appearances builds his résumé far more than legislation ever could.
But for sheer subservient aggression, nothing matches his enthusiastic participation in Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election. The final report of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol calls him a “significant player” in Trump’s scheme.
As the committee records, “On Jan. 2, 2021, Representative Jordan led a conference call in which he, President Trump, and other Members of Congress discussed strategies for delaying the January 6th joint session.” On Jan. 5, “Jordan texted Mark Meadows, passing along advice that Vice President Pence should ‘call out all the electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all.’” He spoke to Trump at least twice on Jan. 6 itself and voted against certifying the election results, even after the Trump mob stormed the Capitol. In 2022, he defied a Select Committee subpoena.
Never forget that this reckless aggression was all in service of some of the most absurd conspiracy theories and legal arguments in modern American political history. Every Republican who voted against certifying the presidential election was the very definition of a coward. When the virtue of integrity reached its testing point, they collapsed. But, bizarrely enough, they often collapsed with a swagger, casting themselves as tough even as they capitulated to the demands of a corrupt president and a frenzied mob.
That MAGA aggression has spilled over to the speaker fight itself. As The Times reported on Saturday, “lawmakers and activists” close to Jordan “have taken to social media and the airwaves to blast the Republicans they believe are blocking his path to victory and encourage voters to browbeat them into supporting Mr. Jordan.”
The pressure campaign includes Sean Hannity, a Fox prime-time host and wannabe Republican kingmaker. Representatives from his show sent messages to Republican holdouts transparently designed to pressure them into voting for Jordan. Politico’s Olivia Beavers reported that the pressure campaign even reached the wife of Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska. She received personal text messages threatening Bacon’s career, including a message that said: “Your husband will not hold any political office ever again. What a disappointment and failure he is.”
On Wednesday afternoon, the pressure campaign began to reach its inevitable conclusion: death threats. Steve Womack of Arkansas told The Washington Post that his staff has been “cussed out” and “threatened.” Marionnette Miller-Meeks of Iowa issued a statement claiming that she’d received “credible death threats and a barrage of threatening calls” after she voted against Jordan.
Roughly 30 minutes after Miller-Meeks’s statement, Jordan finally condemned threats against his colleagues. By then, however, it was too late to repair the damage. Eight years into the MAGA era, Republicans should know exactly what happens when they launch a public pressure campaign. Threats follow MAGA pressure like night follows day.
I’ve written a series of newsletters on the culture of MAGA America, including how it combines rage and joy to build community, how it exploits civic ignorance to denigrate its opponents, how its corruption is contagious and how it fosters and feeds a dark caricature of working-class values that warps its populist base. Even so, few elements of right-wing political culture are more toxic than the way it turns vice into virtue and derides the very idea of character in politics.
But all is not lost. Just as key conservative jurists joined with their liberal counterparts to reject Trump’s absurd election challenges, key Republican leaders refused to bend the knee to the mob on Jan. 6. And it was conservative lawyers who blew the whistle on Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s corruption. A remnant of courageous Republicans stood against Jim Jordan’s campaign for speaker of the House and twice rejected his bid.
They did more than reject Jordan. They directly rejected the MAGA bullies Jordan unleashed. As Aaron Blake reported, several Republican members of Congress have directly condemned the tactics of the MAGA right. Representatives Steve Womack of Arkansas, Kay Granger of Texas, Jen Kiggans of Virginia, Carlos Giménez of Florida and Marionnette Miller-Meeks have all denounced the pressure campaign. And John Rutherford of Florida blamed Jordan directly for the threats and acts of intimidation. He told The Washington Post’s Jaqueline Alemany that Jordan’s “absolutely responsible for it” and that “nobody likes to have their arm twisted.”
Their courage wasn’t wasted. On Thursday morning, The Times reported that Jordan wouldn’t immediately seek a third floor vote. Instead, he would “endorse a plan to empower Representative Patrick T. McHenry of North Carolina” to act as a temporary speaker until Jan. 3. At the same time, however, Jordan isn’t exactly standing down. Under his plan, he’d continue to act as “speaker designee,” which would permit him to continue whipping votes for his speaker bid, a preposterous idea that would undermine the temporary speaker every day that Jordan worked to sit in his chair.
I’m grateful for the stand of a few stalwart Republicans. But their small number is one reason I remain profoundly concerned. We’ve watched pressure campaigns work on the right for eight long years, until the people who continue to resist dwindled to an ever-smaller minority — a minority strong enough to help block the worst excesses of the MAGA G.O.P. but far too weak to cleanse the Republican Party of its profound moral rot.
The battle over the next speaker is yet another proxy fight for the soul of the American right, and the fact that a man like Jim Jordan has come so close to such extraordinary power is proof that the rot runs deep. Only a very small minority of elected Republicans have passed the test. Signs of courage remain, but as long as men like Jim Jordan and Donald Trump run the G.O.P., the bullies still reign.
DONALD TRUMP IS GOING TO GET SOMEONE KILLED
By Jeffrey Toobin, the author of “Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism.”
Donald Trump’s life has been a master class in the evasion of consequences. Six of his businesses have declared bankruptcy, but he is still acclaimed as a business visionary; he’s been married three times but is still beloved by evangelicals; he’s been impeached twice but remains a leading candidate for president. For years, Mr. Trump’s critics have believed that a moment of accountability was just over the horizon, thanks to, say, a Bob Woodward takedown or a Robert Mueller investigation; disappointment followed.
Now Mr. Trump confronts another moment of apparent peril as he begins to face his accusers in criminal and civil court proceedings. The verdicts in these cases remain months away, but he is reacting in apparent confidence that the consequences of his actions will, as ever, turn out well for him. But it’s equally important to ask how Mr. Trump’s response to his latest predicament will affect others, especially those who are now targets of his wrath.
Over the past two weeks, the judges in Mr. Trump’s civil fraud case in New York and his criminal prosecution in Washington have issued limited gag orders forbidding him to try to intimidate witnesses and other participants in the trials. Mr. Trump is appealing at least one of the orders, but even if he abides by them, which is by no means certain, the directives do not prohibit the vast range of threats and attacks Mr. Trump has made and shows every sign of continuing to make. The former president’s current language is an imminent threat to his rhetorical targets and those around them.
Mr. Trump has always employed invective as a political tool, but as his days of courtroom reckoning have arrived, his rhetoric has grown more menacing. He’s suggested that Gen. Mark Milley, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, could have been executed; that shoplifters should be shot; that the judge’s clerk in the civil case against him is Senator Chuck Schumer’s girlfriend; and that “you ought to go after” the state attorney general who is prosecuting him. In language evoking Nazi eugenics, he has accused immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Mr. Trump’s adversaries often look to the courts for relief, but there’s no remedy there for his tirades. The First Amendment protects all but the most explicit incitements to violence, so Mr. Trump has little reason to fear that prosecutors will bring charges against him for those remarks.
The most notorious moment of Mr. Trump’s presidency also demonstrated the limits of relying on the courts as a meaningful check on his provocations. In his speech on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021, he urged his supporters to “fight like hell,” and many did just that at the Capitol. But they paid a price, and he didn’t. In yet another example of his life without consequences, more than 1,000 people have been charged for their conduct on Jan. 6, and many if not most of them broke the law because they thought that’s what the president at the time wanted. Still, the special counsel Jack Smith refrained from charging Mr. Trump with inciting the violence, undoubtedly because of the Constitution’s broad protection for freedom of speech. Incitements like Mr. Trump’s, even if they are not crimes in themselves, can have dangerous consequences, as they did on Jan. 6.
Angry people, especially those predisposed to violence, can be set off by encouragement that falls well short of the legal standard for criminal incitement. To see the consequences of such constitutionally protected provocation, one need only look to the case of Timothy McVeigh, who set off the bomb at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people on April 19, 1995. More than a decade before the attack, when Mr. McVeigh was still in high school, he first read “The Turner Diaries,” a novel about a right-wing rebellion against the federal government. Earl Turner, the hero and narrator of the novel, ignites a civil war by setting off a truck bomb next to the F.B.I. building in Washington — which planted the idea for what Mr. McVeigh later did in Oklahoma City. After Bill Clinton took office in 1993, Mr. McVeigh’s revulsion at the new president prompted him to move the idea from the back of his mind to a definite plan of attack.
Mr. McVeigh was specifically outraged by the F.B.I.’s raid on the Branch Davidian complex, near Waco, Texas, which led to the death of 82 Branch Davidians and four federal agents and ended on April 19, 1993, and by Mr. Clinton’s signing of a ban on assault weapons, which took place the following year.
Mr. McVeigh’s anger was boiling at a time of incendiary political language in the mid-1990s, when, for example, Newt Gingrich, who would go on to become speaker of the House in 1995, said: “People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz. I see evil all around me every day.” In particular, on his long drives across the country, Mr. McVeigh became a dedicated listener to Rush Limbaugh, whose radio talk show was in its heyday. Mr. Limbaugh was saying things like, “The second violent American revolution is just about — I got my fingers about a quarter of an inch apart — is just about that far away.” Of course, all of this rhetoric, from the words of the novel to those of Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Limbaugh, was protected by the First Amendment.
One person who understood the possible connection between the language on the airwaves and the violence it spawned was Mr. Clinton, who had seen repeated examples of extreme right-wing violence during his days as governor of Arkansas. In a speech shortly after the Oklahoma City bombing, Mr. Clinton said, “We hear so many loud and angry voices in America today whose sole goal seems to be to try to keep some people as paranoid as possible and the rest of us all torn up and upset with each other.” He went on: “They spread hate. They leave the impression that, by their very words, that violence is acceptable … I’m sure you are now seeing the reports of some things that are regularly said over the airwaves in America today. Well, people like that who want to share our freedoms must know that their bitter words can have consequences.”
Then as now, from Mr. Limbaugh to Mr. Trump, the act of calling out their provocations produces the same cries of wounded innocence. In response to Mr. Clinton’s speech, Mr. Limbaugh denounced “irresponsible attempts to categorize and demonize those who had nothing to do with this. … There is absolutely no connection between these nuts and mainstream conservatism in America today.” Mr. Trump used the same rhetorical dodge regarding his responsibility for the violence he fomented on Jan. 6. In his answer to the report of the congressional committee that investigated the attack on the Capitol, he said in a post on his Truth Social website: “The unselect committee did not produce a single shred of evidence that I in any way intended or wanted violence at our Capitol. The evidence does not exist because the claim is baseless and a monstrous lie.”
Mr. Trump, like Mr. Limbaugh before him, uses the Constitution’s broad protections for inflammatory speech as a shield against any sort of accountability. The implicit argument is that unless a criminal prosecution establishes a direct causal link between his words and the violence that follows, then there is no connection at all. But that isn’t true, nor can it be. Mr. Clinton was just reflecting common sense when he said, “Words can have consequences,” and Mr. McVeigh’s story illustrates the effect that constitutionally protected words can have. But Mr. Trump never acknowledges that his words have any outcome other than those he chooses to recognize.
The temptation with Mr. Trump, for President Biden and others, has always been to ignore the former president’s more outrageous statements in favor of the high (or at least higher) road. But that restraint is a disservice to the public and, in all likelihood, bad politics, too. If Mr. Trump isn’t called out for his encouragement of violence before it takes place, that will bolster his proclamations of innocence when the worst happens; he shouldn’t have that opportunity. Mr. Trump’s statements pose an immediate danger to the targets of his rage and the public at large. It’s Mr. Biden’s responsibility, as well as a political opportunity, to issue that warning.
Mr. Trump has never respected the norms of political behavior, and there’s little reason to think gag orders will provide meaningful discipline, either. As on Jan. 6, his supporters shed traditional rules as well. The day is fast approaching when someone picks up a gun or builds a bomb and then seeks to follow through on Mr. Trump’s words. If and when that happens, he will say that he did not specifically direct or cause the violence, and he will probably escape without criminal charges — but the blood will be on his hands.
By Jeffrey Toobin, the author of “Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism.”
Donald Trump’s life has been a master class in the evasion of consequences. Six of his businesses have declared bankruptcy, but he is still acclaimed as a business visionary; he’s been married three times but is still beloved by evangelicals; he’s been impeached twice but remains a leading candidate for president. For years, Mr. Trump’s critics have believed that a moment of accountability was just over the horizon, thanks to, say, a Bob Woodward takedown or a Robert Mueller investigation; disappointment followed.
Now Mr. Trump confronts another moment of apparent peril as he begins to face his accusers in criminal and civil court proceedings. The verdicts in these cases remain months away, but he is reacting in apparent confidence that the consequences of his actions will, as ever, turn out well for him. But it’s equally important to ask how Mr. Trump’s response to his latest predicament will affect others, especially those who are now targets of his wrath.
Over the past two weeks, the judges in Mr. Trump’s civil fraud case in New York and his criminal prosecution in Washington have issued limited gag orders forbidding him to try to intimidate witnesses and other participants in the trials. Mr. Trump is appealing at least one of the orders, but even if he abides by them, which is by no means certain, the directives do not prohibit the vast range of threats and attacks Mr. Trump has made and shows every sign of continuing to make. The former president’s current language is an imminent threat to his rhetorical targets and those around them.
Mr. Trump has always employed invective as a political tool, but as his days of courtroom reckoning have arrived, his rhetoric has grown more menacing. He’s suggested that Gen. Mark Milley, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, could have been executed; that shoplifters should be shot; that the judge’s clerk in the civil case against him is Senator Chuck Schumer’s girlfriend; and that “you ought to go after” the state attorney general who is prosecuting him. In language evoking Nazi eugenics, he has accused immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Mr. Trump’s adversaries often look to the courts for relief, but there’s no remedy there for his tirades. The First Amendment protects all but the most explicit incitements to violence, so Mr. Trump has little reason to fear that prosecutors will bring charges against him for those remarks.
The most notorious moment of Mr. Trump’s presidency also demonstrated the limits of relying on the courts as a meaningful check on his provocations. In his speech on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021, he urged his supporters to “fight like hell,” and many did just that at the Capitol. But they paid a price, and he didn’t. In yet another example of his life without consequences, more than 1,000 people have been charged for their conduct on Jan. 6, and many if not most of them broke the law because they thought that’s what the president at the time wanted. Still, the special counsel Jack Smith refrained from charging Mr. Trump with inciting the violence, undoubtedly because of the Constitution’s broad protection for freedom of speech. Incitements like Mr. Trump’s, even if they are not crimes in themselves, can have dangerous consequences, as they did on Jan. 6.
Angry people, especially those predisposed to violence, can be set off by encouragement that falls well short of the legal standard for criminal incitement. To see the consequences of such constitutionally protected provocation, one need only look to the case of Timothy McVeigh, who set off the bomb at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people on April 19, 1995. More than a decade before the attack, when Mr. McVeigh was still in high school, he first read “The Turner Diaries,” a novel about a right-wing rebellion against the federal government. Earl Turner, the hero and narrator of the novel, ignites a civil war by setting off a truck bomb next to the F.B.I. building in Washington — which planted the idea for what Mr. McVeigh later did in Oklahoma City. After Bill Clinton took office in 1993, Mr. McVeigh’s revulsion at the new president prompted him to move the idea from the back of his mind to a definite plan of attack.
Mr. McVeigh was specifically outraged by the F.B.I.’s raid on the Branch Davidian complex, near Waco, Texas, which led to the death of 82 Branch Davidians and four federal agents and ended on April 19, 1993, and by Mr. Clinton’s signing of a ban on assault weapons, which took place the following year.
Mr. McVeigh’s anger was boiling at a time of incendiary political language in the mid-1990s, when, for example, Newt Gingrich, who would go on to become speaker of the House in 1995, said: “People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz. I see evil all around me every day.” In particular, on his long drives across the country, Mr. McVeigh became a dedicated listener to Rush Limbaugh, whose radio talk show was in its heyday. Mr. Limbaugh was saying things like, “The second violent American revolution is just about — I got my fingers about a quarter of an inch apart — is just about that far away.” Of course, all of this rhetoric, from the words of the novel to those of Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Limbaugh, was protected by the First Amendment.
One person who understood the possible connection between the language on the airwaves and the violence it spawned was Mr. Clinton, who had seen repeated examples of extreme right-wing violence during his days as governor of Arkansas. In a speech shortly after the Oklahoma City bombing, Mr. Clinton said, “We hear so many loud and angry voices in America today whose sole goal seems to be to try to keep some people as paranoid as possible and the rest of us all torn up and upset with each other.” He went on: “They spread hate. They leave the impression that, by their very words, that violence is acceptable … I’m sure you are now seeing the reports of some things that are regularly said over the airwaves in America today. Well, people like that who want to share our freedoms must know that their bitter words can have consequences.”
Then as now, from Mr. Limbaugh to Mr. Trump, the act of calling out their provocations produces the same cries of wounded innocence. In response to Mr. Clinton’s speech, Mr. Limbaugh denounced “irresponsible attempts to categorize and demonize those who had nothing to do with this. … There is absolutely no connection between these nuts and mainstream conservatism in America today.” Mr. Trump used the same rhetorical dodge regarding his responsibility for the violence he fomented on Jan. 6. In his answer to the report of the congressional committee that investigated the attack on the Capitol, he said in a post on his Truth Social website: “The unselect committee did not produce a single shred of evidence that I in any way intended or wanted violence at our Capitol. The evidence does not exist because the claim is baseless and a monstrous lie.”
Mr. Trump, like Mr. Limbaugh before him, uses the Constitution’s broad protections for inflammatory speech as a shield against any sort of accountability. The implicit argument is that unless a criminal prosecution establishes a direct causal link between his words and the violence that follows, then there is no connection at all. But that isn’t true, nor can it be. Mr. Clinton was just reflecting common sense when he said, “Words can have consequences,” and Mr. McVeigh’s story illustrates the effect that constitutionally protected words can have. But Mr. Trump never acknowledges that his words have any outcome other than those he chooses to recognize.
The temptation with Mr. Trump, for President Biden and others, has always been to ignore the former president’s more outrageous statements in favor of the high (or at least higher) road. But that restraint is a disservice to the public and, in all likelihood, bad politics, too. If Mr. Trump isn’t called out for his encouragement of violence before it takes place, that will bolster his proclamations of innocence when the worst happens; he shouldn’t have that opportunity. Mr. Trump’s statements pose an immediate danger to the targets of his rage and the public at large. It’s Mr. Biden’s responsibility, as well as a political opportunity, to issue that warning.
Mr. Trump has never respected the norms of political behavior, and there’s little reason to think gag orders will provide meaningful discipline, either. As on Jan. 6, his supporters shed traditional rules as well. The day is fast approaching when someone picks up a gun or builds a bomb and then seeks to follow through on Mr. Trump’s words. If and when that happens, he will say that he did not specifically direct or cause the violence, and he will probably escape without criminal charges — but the blood will be on his hands.
PUTIN IS HELPING HAMAS TO HURT THE WEST
By Josh Rogin, The Washington Post
When Russian President Vladimir Putin finally called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday, he said Russia was trying “to help normalize the situation” in the Gaza Strip, according to the Kremlin. But Moscow has little interest in helping Israel. Russia is on the side of Hamas and its patron, Iran — in part to undermine the United States and its allies.
The timing of the attack could not have been better for Putin, who coincidentally was celebrating his birthday on Oct. 7, when hundreds of Hamas terrorists entered Israel and slaughtered more the 1,300 civilians. Russia’s main foreign policy goal right now is to distract the world from its ongoing invasion and atrocities in Ukraine. Specifically, Moscow is pushing for an end to U.S. military assistance to Ukraine, which is hanging by a thin thread in Congress. The crisis in Israel aids these efforts. Moscow’s interest is in stoking it, not solving it.
While there is no clear evidence that Russian leaders knew about the Hamas attacks in advance, the Kremlin is working hard to take advantage. Russia has stepped up its support for Hamas diplomatically and in the propaganda war; it’s also seizing the opportunity to ramp up its violence in Ukraine while the world is distracted. On Oct. 8, senior Hamas official Ali Baraka praised Russia’s assistance in an interview with Russia Today, a state-controlled media outlet.
“There are countries that support us politically. Even Russia sympathizes with us,” he said. “Russia is happy that America is getting embroiled in the Palestinian war. It eases the pressure on the Russians in Ukraine. One war eases the pressure in another war. So, we’re not alone on the battlefield.”
Russia’s true level of actual military support to Hamas is hard to pin down, but there are several telltale signs. Baraka said Hamas possessed Russian licenses to produce the Kalashnikov rifles and ammunition its terrorists used in the assault. Ukrainian officials have claimed that Russia’s mercenary firm Wagner helped train Hamas soldiers. Meanwhile, Palestinian terrorist groups reportedly launder illicit funds through a Moscow-based crypto exchange.
Reports of direct Russian military support for Hamas remain unconfirmed, U.S. officials told me. But the military collaboration between Russia and Iran in Ukraine also seems to have benefited Hamas. Iranian and Russian cooperation on armed drones has flourished during the Ukraine war. Now, Hamas is using similar drones against Israeli targets in new ways.
More overtly, Moscow has turned its massive propaganda and foreign influence operation into a pro-Hamas, anti-Western disinformation machine. Even before the war, Russian media was pushing the notion that U.S. arms for Ukraine have somehow ended up in the hands of terrorists plotting against Israel. After the attack, Pro-Russia videos of murky origins circulated that accused Ukraine of arming Hamas, disguised as fake BBC reports.
Russian officials and propaganda outlets have unanimously blamed the United States for the current violence in Israel, and pointed to Washington’s attention on Ukraine to explain the U.S. government’s supposed neglect of rising Middle East tensions.
“These Kremlin narratives target Western audiences to drive a wedge in military support for Ukraine, seek to demoralize Ukrainian society by claiming Ukraine will lose international support, and intend to reassure Russian domestic audiences that the international society will ignore Ukraine’s war effort,” stated a report by the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank.
Of course, the relationship between Russia and Hamas is not new. Putin first invited Hamas leaders to Moscow in 2006, and Hamas delegations have been visiting Moscow ever since. Russia has never declared Hamas to be a terrorist organization, and has long taken a pro-Palestinian stance diplomatically.
But the new war breaks the recent trend of cordial, even businesslike relations between Russia and Israel. Israel had shied away from overtly helping Ukraine because it needed Russia’s acquiescence to strike targets inside Syria. Now, Russia seems fully committed to helping Hamas and Iran, especially in the diplomatic arena.
On Oct. 13, Russia put forth a draft resolution in the U.N. Security Council that calls for an immediate cease-fire and condemns all acts of terrorism — but does not mention Hamas. Russia’s U.N. ambassador gave a speech Saturday blaming the United States for the “looming war” in the Middle East and condemning Israeli attacks against Palestinian civilians.
“I think that many people will agree with me that this is a vivid example of the failure of United States policy in the Middle East,” Putin said.
Putin’s focus of blame on the United States, rather than the terrorists, shows his hand. His priority is not solving the crisis, but rather tying it to his greater war against the West. It is crucial to recognize that Russia, Iran and Hamas are all working together against the United States, Europe, Ukraine and Israel.
As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a speech to NATO last week, “the only difference is that there is a terrorist organization that attacked Israel, and here is a terrorist state that attacked Ukraine.”
President Biden will soon request new emergency funding for both Israel and Ukraine. Congress must approve both parts of the package — and quickly. If the United States abandons Ukraine by cutting off aid, Putin’s strategy will have succeeded.
By Josh Rogin, The Washington Post
When Russian President Vladimir Putin finally called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday, he said Russia was trying “to help normalize the situation” in the Gaza Strip, according to the Kremlin. But Moscow has little interest in helping Israel. Russia is on the side of Hamas and its patron, Iran — in part to undermine the United States and its allies.
The timing of the attack could not have been better for Putin, who coincidentally was celebrating his birthday on Oct. 7, when hundreds of Hamas terrorists entered Israel and slaughtered more the 1,300 civilians. Russia’s main foreign policy goal right now is to distract the world from its ongoing invasion and atrocities in Ukraine. Specifically, Moscow is pushing for an end to U.S. military assistance to Ukraine, which is hanging by a thin thread in Congress. The crisis in Israel aids these efforts. Moscow’s interest is in stoking it, not solving it.
While there is no clear evidence that Russian leaders knew about the Hamas attacks in advance, the Kremlin is working hard to take advantage. Russia has stepped up its support for Hamas diplomatically and in the propaganda war; it’s also seizing the opportunity to ramp up its violence in Ukraine while the world is distracted. On Oct. 8, senior Hamas official Ali Baraka praised Russia’s assistance in an interview with Russia Today, a state-controlled media outlet.
“There are countries that support us politically. Even Russia sympathizes with us,” he said. “Russia is happy that America is getting embroiled in the Palestinian war. It eases the pressure on the Russians in Ukraine. One war eases the pressure in another war. So, we’re not alone on the battlefield.”
Russia’s true level of actual military support to Hamas is hard to pin down, but there are several telltale signs. Baraka said Hamas possessed Russian licenses to produce the Kalashnikov rifles and ammunition its terrorists used in the assault. Ukrainian officials have claimed that Russia’s mercenary firm Wagner helped train Hamas soldiers. Meanwhile, Palestinian terrorist groups reportedly launder illicit funds through a Moscow-based crypto exchange.
Reports of direct Russian military support for Hamas remain unconfirmed, U.S. officials told me. But the military collaboration between Russia and Iran in Ukraine also seems to have benefited Hamas. Iranian and Russian cooperation on armed drones has flourished during the Ukraine war. Now, Hamas is using similar drones against Israeli targets in new ways.
More overtly, Moscow has turned its massive propaganda and foreign influence operation into a pro-Hamas, anti-Western disinformation machine. Even before the war, Russian media was pushing the notion that U.S. arms for Ukraine have somehow ended up in the hands of terrorists plotting against Israel. After the attack, Pro-Russia videos of murky origins circulated that accused Ukraine of arming Hamas, disguised as fake BBC reports.
Russian officials and propaganda outlets have unanimously blamed the United States for the current violence in Israel, and pointed to Washington’s attention on Ukraine to explain the U.S. government’s supposed neglect of rising Middle East tensions.
“These Kremlin narratives target Western audiences to drive a wedge in military support for Ukraine, seek to demoralize Ukrainian society by claiming Ukraine will lose international support, and intend to reassure Russian domestic audiences that the international society will ignore Ukraine’s war effort,” stated a report by the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank.
Of course, the relationship between Russia and Hamas is not new. Putin first invited Hamas leaders to Moscow in 2006, and Hamas delegations have been visiting Moscow ever since. Russia has never declared Hamas to be a terrorist organization, and has long taken a pro-Palestinian stance diplomatically.
But the new war breaks the recent trend of cordial, even businesslike relations between Russia and Israel. Israel had shied away from overtly helping Ukraine because it needed Russia’s acquiescence to strike targets inside Syria. Now, Russia seems fully committed to helping Hamas and Iran, especially in the diplomatic arena.
On Oct. 13, Russia put forth a draft resolution in the U.N. Security Council that calls for an immediate cease-fire and condemns all acts of terrorism — but does not mention Hamas. Russia’s U.N. ambassador gave a speech Saturday blaming the United States for the “looming war” in the Middle East and condemning Israeli attacks against Palestinian civilians.
“I think that many people will agree with me that this is a vivid example of the failure of United States policy in the Middle East,” Putin said.
Putin’s focus of blame on the United States, rather than the terrorists, shows his hand. His priority is not solving the crisis, but rather tying it to his greater war against the West. It is crucial to recognize that Russia, Iran and Hamas are all working together against the United States, Europe, Ukraine and Israel.
As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a speech to NATO last week, “the only difference is that there is a terrorist organization that attacked Israel, and here is a terrorist state that attacked Ukraine.”
President Biden will soon request new emergency funding for both Israel and Ukraine. Congress must approve both parts of the package — and quickly. If the United States abandons Ukraine by cutting off aid, Putin’s strategy will have succeeded.
IF EVER A DEFENDANT DESERVED A GAG ORDER, IT’S DONALD TRUMP
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Special counsel Jack Smith moved last month for U.S. District Court Judge Tanya S. Chutkan to impose a limited gag order on four-times indicted former president Donald Trump. Since that filing, the argument for restrictions on Trump’s outbursts has only gotten stronger.
On Tuesday, a judge handed down a gag order.
In asking for a gag order in the election interference case in D.C., Smith and other prosecutors argued, “Since the indictment in this case, the defendant has spread disparaging and inflammatory public posts on Truth Social on a near-daily basis.” They added, “The defendant’s recent extrajudicial statements are intended to undermine public confidence in an institution — the judicial system — and to undermine confidence in and intimidate individuals — the court, the jury pool, witnesses and prosecutors.”
Smith and his team delineated statements that fit each category. They asked the court to “issue a special order governing such matters as extrajudicial statements by parties, witnesses and attorneys likely to interfere with the rights of the accused to a fair trial by an impartial jury.”
The order would apply only to “(a) statements regarding the identity, testimony, or credibility of prospective witnesses; and (b) statements about any party, witness, attorney, court personnel, or potential jurors that are disparaging and inflammatory, or intimidating.” In opposing the motion, Trump effectively claims the right to disparage, threaten and intimidate any party, witness, attorney, court personnel or potential jurors.
Trump subsequently proved the necessity of such an order. He suggested former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark A. Milley, a witness identified in the indictment, should be executed. He told his followers via social media that he had purchased a Glock, an assertion quickly walked back because it would have violated the terms of the order that allowed him to avoid pretrial detention. (Smith explained: “The defendant either purchased a gun in violation of the law and his conditions of release, or seeks to benefit from his supporters’ mistaken belief that he did so.”)
On Monday, in a civil proceeding in New York, Trump lashed out at New York Attorney General Letitia James, calling her a racist and telling the public, “You ought to go after this attorney general.”
After Trump raised a false rumor and insulted the court clerk on Tuesday, Judge Arthur Engoron decided he had had enough. “Personal attacks on members on my court staff are unacceptable, inappropriate, and I won’t tolerate it,” he said. He ordered both parties to avoid posting anything about his staff.
After the Milley threat but before the New York threats, Smith filed his reply brief. “Donald Trump is a criminal defendant like any other. And as this court has correctly stated, it has an obligation to protect the integrity of these proceedings from prejudicial interference,” Smith argued. “The defendant is publicly maligning witnesses and very intentionally commenting on the specific topics of their potential testimony at trial. In the context of a pending criminal case and trial, it is not the solution to the defendant’s improper and prejudicial statements to encourage a ‘hearty public debate’ in the media regarding witnesses and the merits of the case — it is the problem.”
Smith asserted that a gag order would limit only “the defendant’s use of his candidacy as a cover for making prejudicial public statements about this case — and there is no legitimate need for the defendant, in the course of his campaign, to attack known witnesses regarding the substance of their anticipated testimony or otherwise engage in materially prejudicial commentary in violation of the proposed order.”
If this were any other American, even another candidate for office, the court would be compelled to act. But we have heard the apologists for Trump: The Justice Department and courts are trampling on Trump’s First Amendment right and “interfering” with the 2024 election. A gag order would make matters worse.
Implicit is the recognition that Trump’s campaign is about maligning the judicial system, casting aspersions on the rule of law and threatening people. But, of course, a perverse campaign strategy cannot be deployed as an excuse for wreaking havoc on the judicial system.
The former president’s defenders appear to believe Trump should derive special treatment by virtue of his decision to run for office, a blatant attempt to cast any prosecution as political persecution. Their argument gives the back of the hand to the principle that there is one standard for all in our judicial system. Worse, these Trump enablers cavalierly ignore the very real danger he poses to judges, prosecutors, court personnel and witnesses. It amounts to legal nihilism that places Trump’s desire to return to office above the interests of the rule of law and the safety of others.
Judge Chutkan probably will bend over backward to avoid even the appearance of unfairness. She might, for example, require lawyers to review his Truth Social posts mentioning her, prosecutors, witnesses or the jury. But allowing Trump to continue unimpeded would be reckless, as Judge Engoron recognized.
Unless Chutkan wants to adopt Trump’s notion that he can intimidate whomever he pleases and attack at will the fabric of the judicial system, Chutkan must do something akin to Engoron’s gag order. We either have a system in which the rule of law applies to all, or we don’t.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Special counsel Jack Smith moved last month for U.S. District Court Judge Tanya S. Chutkan to impose a limited gag order on four-times indicted former president Donald Trump. Since that filing, the argument for restrictions on Trump’s outbursts has only gotten stronger.
On Tuesday, a judge handed down a gag order.
In asking for a gag order in the election interference case in D.C., Smith and other prosecutors argued, “Since the indictment in this case, the defendant has spread disparaging and inflammatory public posts on Truth Social on a near-daily basis.” They added, “The defendant’s recent extrajudicial statements are intended to undermine public confidence in an institution — the judicial system — and to undermine confidence in and intimidate individuals — the court, the jury pool, witnesses and prosecutors.”
Smith and his team delineated statements that fit each category. They asked the court to “issue a special order governing such matters as extrajudicial statements by parties, witnesses and attorneys likely to interfere with the rights of the accused to a fair trial by an impartial jury.”
The order would apply only to “(a) statements regarding the identity, testimony, or credibility of prospective witnesses; and (b) statements about any party, witness, attorney, court personnel, or potential jurors that are disparaging and inflammatory, or intimidating.” In opposing the motion, Trump effectively claims the right to disparage, threaten and intimidate any party, witness, attorney, court personnel or potential jurors.
Trump subsequently proved the necessity of such an order. He suggested former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark A. Milley, a witness identified in the indictment, should be executed. He told his followers via social media that he had purchased a Glock, an assertion quickly walked back because it would have violated the terms of the order that allowed him to avoid pretrial detention. (Smith explained: “The defendant either purchased a gun in violation of the law and his conditions of release, or seeks to benefit from his supporters’ mistaken belief that he did so.”)
On Monday, in a civil proceeding in New York, Trump lashed out at New York Attorney General Letitia James, calling her a racist and telling the public, “You ought to go after this attorney general.”
After Trump raised a false rumor and insulted the court clerk on Tuesday, Judge Arthur Engoron decided he had had enough. “Personal attacks on members on my court staff are unacceptable, inappropriate, and I won’t tolerate it,” he said. He ordered both parties to avoid posting anything about his staff.
After the Milley threat but before the New York threats, Smith filed his reply brief. “Donald Trump is a criminal defendant like any other. And as this court has correctly stated, it has an obligation to protect the integrity of these proceedings from prejudicial interference,” Smith argued. “The defendant is publicly maligning witnesses and very intentionally commenting on the specific topics of their potential testimony at trial. In the context of a pending criminal case and trial, it is not the solution to the defendant’s improper and prejudicial statements to encourage a ‘hearty public debate’ in the media regarding witnesses and the merits of the case — it is the problem.”
Smith asserted that a gag order would limit only “the defendant’s use of his candidacy as a cover for making prejudicial public statements about this case — and there is no legitimate need for the defendant, in the course of his campaign, to attack known witnesses regarding the substance of their anticipated testimony or otherwise engage in materially prejudicial commentary in violation of the proposed order.”
If this were any other American, even another candidate for office, the court would be compelled to act. But we have heard the apologists for Trump: The Justice Department and courts are trampling on Trump’s First Amendment right and “interfering” with the 2024 election. A gag order would make matters worse.
Implicit is the recognition that Trump’s campaign is about maligning the judicial system, casting aspersions on the rule of law and threatening people. But, of course, a perverse campaign strategy cannot be deployed as an excuse for wreaking havoc on the judicial system.
The former president’s defenders appear to believe Trump should derive special treatment by virtue of his decision to run for office, a blatant attempt to cast any prosecution as political persecution. Their argument gives the back of the hand to the principle that there is one standard for all in our judicial system. Worse, these Trump enablers cavalierly ignore the very real danger he poses to judges, prosecutors, court personnel and witnesses. It amounts to legal nihilism that places Trump’s desire to return to office above the interests of the rule of law and the safety of others.
Judge Chutkan probably will bend over backward to avoid even the appearance of unfairness. She might, for example, require lawyers to review his Truth Social posts mentioning her, prosecutors, witnesses or the jury. But allowing Trump to continue unimpeded would be reckless, as Judge Engoron recognized.
Unless Chutkan wants to adopt Trump’s notion that he can intimidate whomever he pleases and attack at will the fabric of the judicial system, Chutkan must do something akin to Engoron’s gag order. We either have a system in which the rule of law applies to all, or we don’t.
MCCARTHY OUSTER EXPOSES THE REPUBLICAN PARTY’S DESTRUCTIVE TENDENCIES
By voting to expel Kevin McCarthy as House speaker, Republicans ground the work of Congress to a halt and revealed the danger of governing by chaos By Dan Balz, The Washington Post
Nine months into their reign as the majority party in the House, Republicans have brought the legislative body to a halt and themselves to an inflection point. By ousting Rep. Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) as speaker and exposing anew the destructive tendencies of their most extreme members, Republicans now risk being returned to minority status by voters in next year’s election.
From the day they were all sworn in this January, their grip on power was tenuous, far more so than almost anyone was predicting a year ago when talk of a red-wave election was in vogue. They did win the majority in the 2022 midterm elections, but by the narrowest of margins in a surprising under-performance. To succeed as legislators, they needed cohesion, discipline and leadership. Instead, they produced chaos under a speaker who was so weakened after getting the job that he could not lead effectively.
One other factor has brought the House Republicans to this point. That is the person and example of Donald Trump, the former president. Trump put governing by chaos on steroids (if one can call what he did governing) and in doing so produced a group of Mini-Mes, symbolized most by the politician who brought down McCarthy on Tuesday, Rep. Matt Gaetz (Fla.). This is the kind of leadership the party now offers the country.
On Monday night, a photo was posted on X, formerly Twitter, of Gaetz on the steps of the Capitol surrounded by an enormous scrum of reporters and cameras. As someone noted, this was what the Florida Republican always dreamed up, the brightest of spotlights. He embodied the worst of performative politics, which have come to typify this era. The rewards — fame, television time and adulation of the base — now go to those who shout the loudest rather than those who do the most good for the country.
McCarthy was not the first recent speaker to find his leadership hectored by a rebellious faction on the right. Two of his predecessors, former speakers John A. Boehner (Ohio) and Paul D. Ryan (Wis.) eventually departed in disgust. McCarthy was tossed out — the first speaker ever to suffer that humiliation after the shortest tenure in history.
Nor is he the first Republican speaker in recent times to fall in the wake of missteps. Newt Gingrich (Ga.) quit the post after his party suffered a defeat in the 1998 midterm election during an impeachment proceeding against President Bill Clinton that lacked public support.
The arrival of the tea party class after the big 2010 victory signaled a change in attitude among elected Republicans. They were members who were elected with the expressed purpose of gumming up the gears of government. They came to stop things from happening, not to make them happen.
Back then, McCarthy was one of a trio of “young guns,” youthful rising stars among House Republicans. Ryan was another and a third was former representative Eric Cantor (Va.). Now all three have been felled, Cantor in a 2014 primary election that caught him by surprise and Ryan after growing weary from fights with Trump and hard-right rebels.
Of the three, McCarthy’s defeat was the most ignominious. Ahead of Tuesday’s floor vote that brought him down, McCarthy had vowed to keep fighting. After the vote, rather than face another humiliation by trying to regain his post, McCarthy announced he would step aside, leaving the Republican conference in even more disarray, with no consensus successor in sight and business in the House now ground to a halt for a week as Republicans try to regroup.
McCarthy learned no lessons from either President Biden or former speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). During Biden’s first two years in office, when Democrats had a slender majority in the House and no margin for error in the Senate, the president found ways to produce bipartisan support for legislation when possible and used party-line discipline when he could not corral Republican votes.
Like McCarthy, Pelosi governed with a small majority and faced internal divisions in her caucus. But she was the strongest speaker in modern times, and her ability to exercise power kept Democrats on a path forward. Biden and Pelosi suffered some setbacks, but both, with the experience gained over years in leadership positions, found ways to succeed.
Neither, however, faced quite what McCarthy confronted when, on the 15th ballot in January, he was elected to the post for which he had hungered for years. In his case, he lacked ballast — a politician for which power was the principal goal, rather than a vision and convictions about why he wanted that power.
Veteran Republicans watched Tuesday’s events unfold with a sense of both déjà vu and disgust. For Gaetz and the other Republicans who assured McCarthy’s ouster, this was a short-term victory. They struck the king and, for now, killed him. But they have no obvious second chapter.
It’s not that some of their goals — reining in spending or tightening up the U.S.-Mexico border — are wholly without merit. Yet they are unwilling to acknowledge the obvious — that at a time when they control neither the White House nor the Senate, and have such a narrow majority in the House, they must cooperate with Democrats to get anything passed, and to do that they must accept less than they want.
That seems like civics 101, but it’s more than just the rebels in the House who resist that course. A recent Economist/YouGov poll showed that more Republican rank-and-file say they want their representatives to stand on principle “no matter what” than say they would rather they compromise to get things done. That is a recipe for stalemate and disappointment, and so theatrics become attractive. Democrats, by 3-1, said they favor compromise to get things done.
McCarthy spent last week trying to pull his conference together to produce a spending bill that, even if doomed in the Senate, would have shown that Republicans could agree on something. When he suddenly shifted course on Saturday and moved a short-term spending bill through the House with the help of Democrats, a bill that was quickly approved by the Senate, he may have guaranteed his ouster. Good luck to whoever emerges as the next Republican speaker.
Rep. Bob Good (Va.), one of Gaetz’s chief allies in the move to push McCarthy out, told CNN’s Manu Raju on Tuesday evening that what happened on Tuesday was a “blow to the status quo.” That’s a mild way of describing what he and a few of his colleagues did.
The blow was far more to the status of the Republican Party. And what is the party today? It is a party whose leader for its presidential nomination sits in a New York courtroom, who faces four other trials for criminal indictments ahead, and who promises vengeance and retribution if elected in 2024. It is also a party with a tight group of rebels in the House who have shown that they can make turmoil the order of the day in Congress.
That doesn’t mean Republicans will lose the election in 2024, given how closely divided the country remains politically. But nothing that happened on Tuesday can be seen as helpful in achieving that goal.
By voting to expel Kevin McCarthy as House speaker, Republicans ground the work of Congress to a halt and revealed the danger of governing by chaos By Dan Balz, The Washington Post
Nine months into their reign as the majority party in the House, Republicans have brought the legislative body to a halt and themselves to an inflection point. By ousting Rep. Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) as speaker and exposing anew the destructive tendencies of their most extreme members, Republicans now risk being returned to minority status by voters in next year’s election.
From the day they were all sworn in this January, their grip on power was tenuous, far more so than almost anyone was predicting a year ago when talk of a red-wave election was in vogue. They did win the majority in the 2022 midterm elections, but by the narrowest of margins in a surprising under-performance. To succeed as legislators, they needed cohesion, discipline and leadership. Instead, they produced chaos under a speaker who was so weakened after getting the job that he could not lead effectively.
One other factor has brought the House Republicans to this point. That is the person and example of Donald Trump, the former president. Trump put governing by chaos on steroids (if one can call what he did governing) and in doing so produced a group of Mini-Mes, symbolized most by the politician who brought down McCarthy on Tuesday, Rep. Matt Gaetz (Fla.). This is the kind of leadership the party now offers the country.
On Monday night, a photo was posted on X, formerly Twitter, of Gaetz on the steps of the Capitol surrounded by an enormous scrum of reporters and cameras. As someone noted, this was what the Florida Republican always dreamed up, the brightest of spotlights. He embodied the worst of performative politics, which have come to typify this era. The rewards — fame, television time and adulation of the base — now go to those who shout the loudest rather than those who do the most good for the country.
McCarthy was not the first recent speaker to find his leadership hectored by a rebellious faction on the right. Two of his predecessors, former speakers John A. Boehner (Ohio) and Paul D. Ryan (Wis.) eventually departed in disgust. McCarthy was tossed out — the first speaker ever to suffer that humiliation after the shortest tenure in history.
Nor is he the first Republican speaker in recent times to fall in the wake of missteps. Newt Gingrich (Ga.) quit the post after his party suffered a defeat in the 1998 midterm election during an impeachment proceeding against President Bill Clinton that lacked public support.
The arrival of the tea party class after the big 2010 victory signaled a change in attitude among elected Republicans. They were members who were elected with the expressed purpose of gumming up the gears of government. They came to stop things from happening, not to make them happen.
Back then, McCarthy was one of a trio of “young guns,” youthful rising stars among House Republicans. Ryan was another and a third was former representative Eric Cantor (Va.). Now all three have been felled, Cantor in a 2014 primary election that caught him by surprise and Ryan after growing weary from fights with Trump and hard-right rebels.
Of the three, McCarthy’s defeat was the most ignominious. Ahead of Tuesday’s floor vote that brought him down, McCarthy had vowed to keep fighting. After the vote, rather than face another humiliation by trying to regain his post, McCarthy announced he would step aside, leaving the Republican conference in even more disarray, with no consensus successor in sight and business in the House now ground to a halt for a week as Republicans try to regroup.
McCarthy learned no lessons from either President Biden or former speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). During Biden’s first two years in office, when Democrats had a slender majority in the House and no margin for error in the Senate, the president found ways to produce bipartisan support for legislation when possible and used party-line discipline when he could not corral Republican votes.
Like McCarthy, Pelosi governed with a small majority and faced internal divisions in her caucus. But she was the strongest speaker in modern times, and her ability to exercise power kept Democrats on a path forward. Biden and Pelosi suffered some setbacks, but both, with the experience gained over years in leadership positions, found ways to succeed.
Neither, however, faced quite what McCarthy confronted when, on the 15th ballot in January, he was elected to the post for which he had hungered for years. In his case, he lacked ballast — a politician for which power was the principal goal, rather than a vision and convictions about why he wanted that power.
Veteran Republicans watched Tuesday’s events unfold with a sense of both déjà vu and disgust. For Gaetz and the other Republicans who assured McCarthy’s ouster, this was a short-term victory. They struck the king and, for now, killed him. But they have no obvious second chapter.
It’s not that some of their goals — reining in spending or tightening up the U.S.-Mexico border — are wholly without merit. Yet they are unwilling to acknowledge the obvious — that at a time when they control neither the White House nor the Senate, and have such a narrow majority in the House, they must cooperate with Democrats to get anything passed, and to do that they must accept less than they want.
That seems like civics 101, but it’s more than just the rebels in the House who resist that course. A recent Economist/YouGov poll showed that more Republican rank-and-file say they want their representatives to stand on principle “no matter what” than say they would rather they compromise to get things done. That is a recipe for stalemate and disappointment, and so theatrics become attractive. Democrats, by 3-1, said they favor compromise to get things done.
McCarthy spent last week trying to pull his conference together to produce a spending bill that, even if doomed in the Senate, would have shown that Republicans could agree on something. When he suddenly shifted course on Saturday and moved a short-term spending bill through the House with the help of Democrats, a bill that was quickly approved by the Senate, he may have guaranteed his ouster. Good luck to whoever emerges as the next Republican speaker.
Rep. Bob Good (Va.), one of Gaetz’s chief allies in the move to push McCarthy out, told CNN’s Manu Raju on Tuesday evening that what happened on Tuesday was a “blow to the status quo.” That’s a mild way of describing what he and a few of his colleagues did.
The blow was far more to the status of the Republican Party. And what is the party today? It is a party whose leader for its presidential nomination sits in a New York courtroom, who faces four other trials for criminal indictments ahead, and who promises vengeance and retribution if elected in 2024. It is also a party with a tight group of rebels in the House who have shown that they can make turmoil the order of the day in Congress.
That doesn’t mean Republicans will lose the election in 2024, given how closely divided the country remains politically. But nothing that happened on Tuesday can be seen as helpful in achieving that goal.
MCCARTHY’S GONE. REPUBLICAN DYSFUNCTION IS HERE TO STAY.
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
At 4:45 p.m., the gavel fell on Kevin McCarthy’s speakership.
“The Office of Speaker of the House of the United States House of Representatives is hereby declared vacant,” the presiding officer, Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.), announced after the 216-210 vote to oust McCarthy.
From the front row of the gallery, I heard gasps from the floor. And then, from the Republican side of the chamber, a lone woman’s voice: “Now what?”
McCarthy, whose only evident ideology as speaker had been personal ambition, has secured his place in history: the only speaker in U.S. history to be voted out by his peers. His chaotic nine months in the job was the shortest tenure since that of Michael C. Kerr in 1876, as the Bulwark’s Tim Miller pointed out. But Kerr’s speakership ended because he died of tuberculosis. McCarthy, by contrast, was knifed by his fellow Republicans.
This is why Tuesday’s events are much larger than McCarthy, for they made it clear, if there had been any doubt, that the Republican Party has lost the ability to govern.
McCarthy’s term began in chaos, with his 15 rounds of balloting. It lurched from crisis to manufactured crisis, with a needless debt ceiling showdown, failed votes and pulled bills on the floor, recriminations and name-calling in Republican caucus meetings, the launch of impeachment proceedings on fabricated charges, and last week’s near-shutdown of the government. Now, it is ending in chaos, with Republicans openly savaging each other on the House floor and all legislative functions ceasing while the majority party tries to pick its next leader.
Under continuity of government procedures — designed for terrorist decapitation of the government rather than partisan zealots offing their own speaker — a predesignated speaker pro tempore took temporary control of the house. That man, revealed to be Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), did the only thing he could. “It would be prudent to first recess,” he told the body, so that leaderless lawmakers could “meet and discuss the path forward.” The House won’t return for an entire week.
Good luck with that. It doesn’t really matter who Republicans choose to replace McCarthy, who announced late Tuesday that he won’t run again. Nobody will succeed in that role because the party itself is ungovernable.
McCarthy’s final day as speaker proceeded like the others before it — in a leadership vacuum.
It was clear that there were more than enough hard-liners supporting Rep. Matt Gaetz’s (R-Fla.) motion to vacate that McCarthy would need some Democratic votes to keep the speakership. But he offered Democrats nothing for those votes. This sealed McCarthy’s fate. Democrats unified against McCarthy at their own caucus meeting, after which the Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.), made it official by saying it was up to Republicans alone “to end the House Republican Civil War.”
On the House floor, the Republican combatants seemed ill-equipped to defuse the latest crisis they had created. Indicted Rep. George Santos (N.Y.) lifted up his sweater to reveal to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) his SpongeBob SquarePants tie. Rep. Lauren Boebert (Colo.) played with her infant grandson.
“We need a speaker who will fight for something — anything — besides just staying or becoming speaker,” said Rep. Bob Good (Va.), one of the rebels.
McCarthy snickered and whispered with the member seated to his right, Rep. Juan Ciscomani (R-Ariz.).
Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), the genial chairman of the Rules and Administration committee, pleaded with those who are “willing to plunge this body into chaos and this country into uncertainty.”
Retorted Gaetz: “Chaos is Speaker McCarthy! Chaos is somebody who we cannot trust with their word.”
McCarthy drummed the armrest while Gaetz spoke, put on reading glasses and perused his phone, then resumed whispering and chuckling with Ciscomani.
Republicans laughed, booed and heckled Gaetz as he spoke. Rep. Mike Garcia (Calif.) called the rebels “Republicans running with scissors and supported by Democrats.”
Rep. Tom McClintock (Calif.), warning of a “paralyzed” House, said, “Democrats will revel in Republican dysfunction and the public will rightly be repulsed.” Foreseeing “grave danger” to the country, he prayed: “Dear God, grant us the wisdom to see it.”
Gaetz (only Good and Rep. Andy Biggs joined his side in the debate) parried his GOP colleagues with one-liners. When Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (N.Y.) improbably claimed that “this Republican majority has exceeded all expectations,” Gaetz quipped: “If this House of Representatives has exceeded all expectations, then we definitely need higher expectations.”
Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.) spoke bitterly of Gaetz, using his motion to vacate to raise campaign cash. “It’s disgusting,” he said, and cries of “shame!” came from the Republican side. “We need to stand behind the greatest speaker in modern history!” Graves proposed, producing guffaws from the Democrats.
Replied Gaetz: “I take no lecture on asking patriotic Americans to weigh in and contribute to this fight from those who would grovel and bend knee for the lobbyists and special interests who own our leadership.” As his fellow Republicans jeered, he added: “Boo all you want!”
“You’re no martyr!” a Republican heckled.
No, he’s not. Gaetz, with his arched eyebrows and slicked back hair, looks the part of a cartoon villain. He’s more of a street thug than a legislator, and in his seven years in Congress, he has done nothing but tear things down.
But this street thug made quick work of McCarthy. As the clerk called the roll, the doomed speaker, sitting in the same seat he occupied during January’s 15 ballots, could be seen sitting silently, staring straight ahead.
It’s just a matter of time until Gaetz — and the many others like him — render McCarthy’s successor a failure, too. This is all they know how to do.
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
At 4:45 p.m., the gavel fell on Kevin McCarthy’s speakership.
“The Office of Speaker of the House of the United States House of Representatives is hereby declared vacant,” the presiding officer, Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.), announced after the 216-210 vote to oust McCarthy.
From the front row of the gallery, I heard gasps from the floor. And then, from the Republican side of the chamber, a lone woman’s voice: “Now what?”
McCarthy, whose only evident ideology as speaker had been personal ambition, has secured his place in history: the only speaker in U.S. history to be voted out by his peers. His chaotic nine months in the job was the shortest tenure since that of Michael C. Kerr in 1876, as the Bulwark’s Tim Miller pointed out. But Kerr’s speakership ended because he died of tuberculosis. McCarthy, by contrast, was knifed by his fellow Republicans.
This is why Tuesday’s events are much larger than McCarthy, for they made it clear, if there had been any doubt, that the Republican Party has lost the ability to govern.
McCarthy’s term began in chaos, with his 15 rounds of balloting. It lurched from crisis to manufactured crisis, with a needless debt ceiling showdown, failed votes and pulled bills on the floor, recriminations and name-calling in Republican caucus meetings, the launch of impeachment proceedings on fabricated charges, and last week’s near-shutdown of the government. Now, it is ending in chaos, with Republicans openly savaging each other on the House floor and all legislative functions ceasing while the majority party tries to pick its next leader.
Under continuity of government procedures — designed for terrorist decapitation of the government rather than partisan zealots offing their own speaker — a predesignated speaker pro tempore took temporary control of the house. That man, revealed to be Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), did the only thing he could. “It would be prudent to first recess,” he told the body, so that leaderless lawmakers could “meet and discuss the path forward.” The House won’t return for an entire week.
Good luck with that. It doesn’t really matter who Republicans choose to replace McCarthy, who announced late Tuesday that he won’t run again. Nobody will succeed in that role because the party itself is ungovernable.
McCarthy’s final day as speaker proceeded like the others before it — in a leadership vacuum.
It was clear that there were more than enough hard-liners supporting Rep. Matt Gaetz’s (R-Fla.) motion to vacate that McCarthy would need some Democratic votes to keep the speakership. But he offered Democrats nothing for those votes. This sealed McCarthy’s fate. Democrats unified against McCarthy at their own caucus meeting, after which the Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.), made it official by saying it was up to Republicans alone “to end the House Republican Civil War.”
On the House floor, the Republican combatants seemed ill-equipped to defuse the latest crisis they had created. Indicted Rep. George Santos (N.Y.) lifted up his sweater to reveal to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) his SpongeBob SquarePants tie. Rep. Lauren Boebert (Colo.) played with her infant grandson.
“We need a speaker who will fight for something — anything — besides just staying or becoming speaker,” said Rep. Bob Good (Va.), one of the rebels.
McCarthy snickered and whispered with the member seated to his right, Rep. Juan Ciscomani (R-Ariz.).
Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), the genial chairman of the Rules and Administration committee, pleaded with those who are “willing to plunge this body into chaos and this country into uncertainty.”
Retorted Gaetz: “Chaos is Speaker McCarthy! Chaos is somebody who we cannot trust with their word.”
McCarthy drummed the armrest while Gaetz spoke, put on reading glasses and perused his phone, then resumed whispering and chuckling with Ciscomani.
Republicans laughed, booed and heckled Gaetz as he spoke. Rep. Mike Garcia (Calif.) called the rebels “Republicans running with scissors and supported by Democrats.”
Rep. Tom McClintock (Calif.), warning of a “paralyzed” House, said, “Democrats will revel in Republican dysfunction and the public will rightly be repulsed.” Foreseeing “grave danger” to the country, he prayed: “Dear God, grant us the wisdom to see it.”
Gaetz (only Good and Rep. Andy Biggs joined his side in the debate) parried his GOP colleagues with one-liners. When Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (N.Y.) improbably claimed that “this Republican majority has exceeded all expectations,” Gaetz quipped: “If this House of Representatives has exceeded all expectations, then we definitely need higher expectations.”
Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.) spoke bitterly of Gaetz, using his motion to vacate to raise campaign cash. “It’s disgusting,” he said, and cries of “shame!” came from the Republican side. “We need to stand behind the greatest speaker in modern history!” Graves proposed, producing guffaws from the Democrats.
Replied Gaetz: “I take no lecture on asking patriotic Americans to weigh in and contribute to this fight from those who would grovel and bend knee for the lobbyists and special interests who own our leadership.” As his fellow Republicans jeered, he added: “Boo all you want!”
“You’re no martyr!” a Republican heckled.
No, he’s not. Gaetz, with his arched eyebrows and slicked back hair, looks the part of a cartoon villain. He’s more of a street thug than a legislator, and in his seven years in Congress, he has done nothing but tear things down.
But this street thug made quick work of McCarthy. As the clerk called the roll, the doomed speaker, sitting in the same seat he occupied during January’s 15 ballots, could be seen sitting silently, staring straight ahead.
It’s just a matter of time until Gaetz — and the many others like him — render McCarthy’s successor a failure, too. This is all they know how to do.
WHY MAGA WANTS TO BETRAY UKRAINE
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
So the federal government wasn’t shut down over the weekend, although we may have to go through this whole drama again in six weeks. Kevin McCarthy, the speaker of the House, ended up doing the obvious: bringing a funding bill to the floor that could pass only with Democratic votes, because the hard-liners in his own party wouldn’t agree to anything feasible. And the bill didn’t include any of the spending cuts Republicans have been demanding, except for one big, bad thing: a cutoff of aid to Ukraine.
Democrats appear to have agreed to this bill because they expect to get a separate vote on Ukraine aid; President Biden has indicated that he believes he has a deal with McCarthy to that effect. I hope they’re right.
But why did things turn out this way? Michael Strain of the right-leaning (but mostly not MAGA) American Enterprise Institute has called the fiscal confrontation the “‘Seinfeld’ shutdown” — that is, a shutdown about nothing. That’s a good line, but if we’re going to do popular culture references, I think it might be better to call it the “Network” shutdown, as in people shouting “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!”
Nothing short of a coup can satisfy this inchoate rage. But McCarthy evidently thought he could reduce the backlash against his deal with Democrats by betraying, or at least pretending to betray, Ukraine. That’s clearly something MAGA wants. But why?
Whatever anti-Ukraine voices like Elon Musk may pretend, it’s not about the money.
Right-wing hard-liners, both in Congress and outside, claim to be upset about the amount we’re spending supporting Ukraine. But if they really cared about the financial burden of aid, they’d make the minimal effort required to get the numbers right. No, aid to Ukraine isn’t undermining the future of Social Security or making it impossible to secure our border or consuming 40 percent of America’s G.D.P.
How much are we actually spending supporting Ukraine? In the 18 months after the Russian invasion, U.S. aid totaled $77 billion. That may sound like a lot. It is a lot compared with the tiny sums we usually allocate to foreign aid. But total federal outlays are currently running at more than $6 trillion a year, or more than $9 trillion every 18 months, so Ukraine aid accounts for less than 1 percent of federal spending (and less than 0.3 percent of G.D.P.). The military portion of that spending is equal to less than 5 percent of America’s defense budget.
Incidentally, the United States is by no means bearing the burden of aiding Ukraine alone. In the past, Donald Trump and others have complained that European nations aren’t spending enough on their own defense. But when it comes to Ukraine, European countries and institutions collectively have made substantially larger aid commitments than we have. Notably, most of Europe, including France, Germany and Britain, has promised aid that is higher as a percentage of G.D.P. than the U.S. commitment.
But back to the costs of aiding Ukraine: Given how small a budget item that aid is, claims that aid to Ukraine somehow makes it impossible to do other necessary things, such as securing the border, are nonsense. MAGA types aren’t known for getting their numbers right or, for that matter, caring whether they get their numbers right, but I doubt that even they really believe that the monetary costs of helping Ukraine are insupportable.
And the benefits of aiding a beleaguered democracy are huge. Remember, before the war, Russia was widely viewed as a major military power, which a majority of Americans saw as a critical threat (and whose nonwoke military some Republicans exalted). That power has now been humbled.
Ukraine’s unexpectedly successful resistance to Russian aggression has also put other autocratic regimes that might have been tempted to engage in wars of conquest on notice that democracies aren’t that easy to overrun. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Russia’s failures in Ukraine have surely reduced the chances that China will invade Taiwan.
Finally, what even Republicans used to call the free world has clearly been strengthened. NATO has risen to the occasion, confounding the cynics, and is adding members. Western weapons have proved their effectiveness.
Those are big payoffs for outlays that are a small fraction of what we spent in Iraq and Afghanistan, and let’s not forget that Ukrainians are doing the fighting and dying. Why, then, do MAGA politicians want to cut Ukraine off?
The answer is, unfortunately, obvious. Whatever Republican hard-liners may say, they want Putin to win. They view the Putin regime’s cruelty and repression as admirable features that America should emulate. They support a wannabe dictator at home and are sympathetic to actual dictators abroad.
So pay no attention to all those complaints about how much we’re spending in Ukraine. They aren’t justified by the actual cost of aid, and the people claiming to be worried about the cost don’t really care about the money. What they are, basically, is enemies of democracy, both abroad and at home.
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
So the federal government wasn’t shut down over the weekend, although we may have to go through this whole drama again in six weeks. Kevin McCarthy, the speaker of the House, ended up doing the obvious: bringing a funding bill to the floor that could pass only with Democratic votes, because the hard-liners in his own party wouldn’t agree to anything feasible. And the bill didn’t include any of the spending cuts Republicans have been demanding, except for one big, bad thing: a cutoff of aid to Ukraine.
Democrats appear to have agreed to this bill because they expect to get a separate vote on Ukraine aid; President Biden has indicated that he believes he has a deal with McCarthy to that effect. I hope they’re right.
But why did things turn out this way? Michael Strain of the right-leaning (but mostly not MAGA) American Enterprise Institute has called the fiscal confrontation the “‘Seinfeld’ shutdown” — that is, a shutdown about nothing. That’s a good line, but if we’re going to do popular culture references, I think it might be better to call it the “Network” shutdown, as in people shouting “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!”
Nothing short of a coup can satisfy this inchoate rage. But McCarthy evidently thought he could reduce the backlash against his deal with Democrats by betraying, or at least pretending to betray, Ukraine. That’s clearly something MAGA wants. But why?
Whatever anti-Ukraine voices like Elon Musk may pretend, it’s not about the money.
Right-wing hard-liners, both in Congress and outside, claim to be upset about the amount we’re spending supporting Ukraine. But if they really cared about the financial burden of aid, they’d make the minimal effort required to get the numbers right. No, aid to Ukraine isn’t undermining the future of Social Security or making it impossible to secure our border or consuming 40 percent of America’s G.D.P.
How much are we actually spending supporting Ukraine? In the 18 months after the Russian invasion, U.S. aid totaled $77 billion. That may sound like a lot. It is a lot compared with the tiny sums we usually allocate to foreign aid. But total federal outlays are currently running at more than $6 trillion a year, or more than $9 trillion every 18 months, so Ukraine aid accounts for less than 1 percent of federal spending (and less than 0.3 percent of G.D.P.). The military portion of that spending is equal to less than 5 percent of America’s defense budget.
Incidentally, the United States is by no means bearing the burden of aiding Ukraine alone. In the past, Donald Trump and others have complained that European nations aren’t spending enough on their own defense. But when it comes to Ukraine, European countries and institutions collectively have made substantially larger aid commitments than we have. Notably, most of Europe, including France, Germany and Britain, has promised aid that is higher as a percentage of G.D.P. than the U.S. commitment.
But back to the costs of aiding Ukraine: Given how small a budget item that aid is, claims that aid to Ukraine somehow makes it impossible to do other necessary things, such as securing the border, are nonsense. MAGA types aren’t known for getting their numbers right or, for that matter, caring whether they get their numbers right, but I doubt that even they really believe that the monetary costs of helping Ukraine are insupportable.
And the benefits of aiding a beleaguered democracy are huge. Remember, before the war, Russia was widely viewed as a major military power, which a majority of Americans saw as a critical threat (and whose nonwoke military some Republicans exalted). That power has now been humbled.
Ukraine’s unexpectedly successful resistance to Russian aggression has also put other autocratic regimes that might have been tempted to engage in wars of conquest on notice that democracies aren’t that easy to overrun. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Russia’s failures in Ukraine have surely reduced the chances that China will invade Taiwan.
Finally, what even Republicans used to call the free world has clearly been strengthened. NATO has risen to the occasion, confounding the cynics, and is adding members. Western weapons have proved their effectiveness.
Those are big payoffs for outlays that are a small fraction of what we spent in Iraq and Afghanistan, and let’s not forget that Ukrainians are doing the fighting and dying. Why, then, do MAGA politicians want to cut Ukraine off?
The answer is, unfortunately, obvious. Whatever Republican hard-liners may say, they want Putin to win. They view the Putin regime’s cruelty and repression as admirable features that America should emulate. They support a wannabe dictator at home and are sympathetic to actual dictators abroad.
So pay no attention to all those complaints about how much we’re spending in Ukraine. They aren’t justified by the actual cost of aid, and the people claiming to be worried about the cost don’t really care about the money. What they are, basically, is enemies of democracy, both abroad and at home.
JOHN KELLY’S FULL-THROATED CONFIRMATION OF TRUMP’S UGLIEST COMMENTS, PARSED
Kelly finally went on the record to make clear that, yes, Trump did say those things about veterans and wounded soldiers
By Aaron Blake, The Washington Post
Among the many controversies Donald Trump has courted during his time in politics, perhaps none engender the kinds of emotions as his comments — and reported comments — denigrating veterans and the war-wounded. But some of the most serious reports about what he’s said have gone largely unconfirmed by key players.
That changed in a major way on Monday.
Former Trump White House chief of staff John F. Kelly delivered a blistering statement to CNN’s Jake Tapper that, for the first time, served to confirm years-old comments attributed to Trump and for which Kelly was present.
Kelly, like many former top Trump administration officials, has criticized Trump somewhat in the past, but his new statement takes things to another level and fills out the picture of some of Trump’s ugliest alleged comments.
Let’s take Kelly’s statement from CNN, piece by piece.
“What can I add that has not already been said?” Kelly said, calling Trump a “person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’”
Kelly’s reference to “being tortured as POWs” is an obvious reference to the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), whose war-hero status Trump publicly cast doubt upon during the 2016 campaign, saying: “I like people that weren’t captured.”
But “suckers” and “there is nothing in it for them” — in quotation marks — refer to Jeffrey Goldberg’s 2020 Atlantic piece. It quoted Trump using the former word to refer to the 1,800 Marines who died at Belleau Wood in France during World War I. It also quoted him saying something similar to the latter while standing next to the grave of Kelly’s own son, who was killed in Afghanistan.
Kelly was described in the story as being present for each remark, but he declined to comment at the time. A close Kelly ally and former top White House aide later said that he — the ally, not Kelly — hadn’t personally heard Trump use the word “suckers” and suggested the reporting had “conflated” certain events. But here is Kelly himself confirming Trump said these things.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung responded Monday night: “John Kelly has totally clowned himself with these debunked stories he’s made up because he didn’t serve his president well while working as chief of staff.”
“A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family — for all Gold Star families — on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.”
The first part refers to a 2022 book from Susan B. Glasser and Peter Baker which quoted Trump saying — again, in the presence of Kelly — that he didn’t want “any wounded guys” in his big Independence Day parade.
The second refers to Trump’s public comments during the 2016 Democratic National Convention, attacking a Gold Star family that had been critical of him.
(Kelly, notably, later defended Trump after a Democratic congresswoman cited insensitive comments allegedly made to a Gold Star family during a private phone call. But Kelly also seemed to confirm the nature of Trump’s comments on the call.)
The part about “losers” and not wanting to visit gravesites is again confirming of the 2020 Atlantic piece, in which Trump allegedly said: “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.”
The White House at the time flatly denied this. Trump himself added: “To think that I would make statements negative to our military and fallen heroes when nobody has done what I’ve done” for the military was “a total lie. … It’s a disgrace.”
A man who was present for these key events now effectively says that it not only happened, but that it happened over and over again.
(Another recent story from Goldberg described Trump telling the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, in 2019, that “no one wants to see that, the wounded” after a severely injured Army captain sang “God Bless America” at an event. Trump allegedly told Milley not to have the man appear in public again. Trump has denied the remarks.)
“A person who is not truthful regarding his position on the protection of unborn life, on women, on minorities, on evangelical Christians, on Jews, on working men and women.”
This is where the statement starts going beyond veterans and mere confirmation of things already reported. Kelly suggests Trump doesn’t just denigrate veterans, but also holds very different views than he portrays publicly about these issues and groups — and perhaps denigrates them, too.
It’s the kind of comment that seems to invite further elaboration.
“A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. A person who cavalierly suggests that a selfless warrior who has served his country for 40 years in peacetime and war should lose his life for treason — in expectation that someone will take action.”
Again, the subtext here is striking. This refers to Trump’s recent comments accusing Milley of treason. Trump added that Milley’s actions were “so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!”
Kelly’s comment that Trump was saying this “in expectation that someone will take action” sure sounds like he is accusing Trump of attempting to incite violence against now-retired Milley.
“A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.”
“There is nothing more that can be said,” Kelly concluded. “God help us.”
Kelly has criticized Trump before, but his starkest comments have often been reported secondhand. You can now add him to the list of former top aides warning in some very strong terms about another Trump term — and effectively labeling Trump a clear and present danger.
Kelly finally went on the record to make clear that, yes, Trump did say those things about veterans and wounded soldiers
By Aaron Blake, The Washington Post
Among the many controversies Donald Trump has courted during his time in politics, perhaps none engender the kinds of emotions as his comments — and reported comments — denigrating veterans and the war-wounded. But some of the most serious reports about what he’s said have gone largely unconfirmed by key players.
That changed in a major way on Monday.
Former Trump White House chief of staff John F. Kelly delivered a blistering statement to CNN’s Jake Tapper that, for the first time, served to confirm years-old comments attributed to Trump and for which Kelly was present.
Kelly, like many former top Trump administration officials, has criticized Trump somewhat in the past, but his new statement takes things to another level and fills out the picture of some of Trump’s ugliest alleged comments.
Let’s take Kelly’s statement from CNN, piece by piece.
“What can I add that has not already been said?” Kelly said, calling Trump a “person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’”
Kelly’s reference to “being tortured as POWs” is an obvious reference to the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), whose war-hero status Trump publicly cast doubt upon during the 2016 campaign, saying: “I like people that weren’t captured.”
But “suckers” and “there is nothing in it for them” — in quotation marks — refer to Jeffrey Goldberg’s 2020 Atlantic piece. It quoted Trump using the former word to refer to the 1,800 Marines who died at Belleau Wood in France during World War I. It also quoted him saying something similar to the latter while standing next to the grave of Kelly’s own son, who was killed in Afghanistan.
Kelly was described in the story as being present for each remark, but he declined to comment at the time. A close Kelly ally and former top White House aide later said that he — the ally, not Kelly — hadn’t personally heard Trump use the word “suckers” and suggested the reporting had “conflated” certain events. But here is Kelly himself confirming Trump said these things.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung responded Monday night: “John Kelly has totally clowned himself with these debunked stories he’s made up because he didn’t serve his president well while working as chief of staff.”
“A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family — for all Gold Star families — on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.”
The first part refers to a 2022 book from Susan B. Glasser and Peter Baker which quoted Trump saying — again, in the presence of Kelly — that he didn’t want “any wounded guys” in his big Independence Day parade.
The second refers to Trump’s public comments during the 2016 Democratic National Convention, attacking a Gold Star family that had been critical of him.
(Kelly, notably, later defended Trump after a Democratic congresswoman cited insensitive comments allegedly made to a Gold Star family during a private phone call. But Kelly also seemed to confirm the nature of Trump’s comments on the call.)
The part about “losers” and not wanting to visit gravesites is again confirming of the 2020 Atlantic piece, in which Trump allegedly said: “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.”
The White House at the time flatly denied this. Trump himself added: “To think that I would make statements negative to our military and fallen heroes when nobody has done what I’ve done” for the military was “a total lie. … It’s a disgrace.”
A man who was present for these key events now effectively says that it not only happened, but that it happened over and over again.
(Another recent story from Goldberg described Trump telling the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, in 2019, that “no one wants to see that, the wounded” after a severely injured Army captain sang “God Bless America” at an event. Trump allegedly told Milley not to have the man appear in public again. Trump has denied the remarks.)
“A person who is not truthful regarding his position on the protection of unborn life, on women, on minorities, on evangelical Christians, on Jews, on working men and women.”
This is where the statement starts going beyond veterans and mere confirmation of things already reported. Kelly suggests Trump doesn’t just denigrate veterans, but also holds very different views than he portrays publicly about these issues and groups — and perhaps denigrates them, too.
It’s the kind of comment that seems to invite further elaboration.
“A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. A person who cavalierly suggests that a selfless warrior who has served his country for 40 years in peacetime and war should lose his life for treason — in expectation that someone will take action.”
Again, the subtext here is striking. This refers to Trump’s recent comments accusing Milley of treason. Trump added that Milley’s actions were “so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!”
Kelly’s comment that Trump was saying this “in expectation that someone will take action” sure sounds like he is accusing Trump of attempting to incite violence against now-retired Milley.
“A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.”
“There is nothing more that can be said,” Kelly concluded. “God help us.”
Kelly has criticized Trump before, but his starkest comments have often been reported secondhand. You can now add him to the list of former top aides warning in some very strong terms about another Trump term — and effectively labeling Trump a clear and present danger.
A MAGA GUNMAN IN NEW MEXICO AND ‘THE END OF POLITICS’ IN AMERICA
Donald Trump's increasingly violent vision is coming through loud and clear to supporters like the MAGA gunman in New Mexico.
by Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
He is becoming the Wolfman Jack of political violence and strongman fascism in America, blasting his hate-filled rants at the 21st-century equivalent of 150,000 watts, on a frequency that clears the mighty Mississippi and hurdles the Rocky Mountains and lands in small towns and far-flung cities — his ugly riffs on executing U.S. generals or threatening judges or shutting down news outlets cheered and shared by an audience that’s counted in the millions.
When Donald Trump howls into his metaphorical microphone, it’s on a frequency that gets picked up by the likes of Ryan Martinez, a 23-year-old man living in Sandia Park, N.M., a small-town suburb of Albuquerque. Martinez’s Facebook page says he’s a graduate of Los Lunas High School, and, according to the Albuquerque Journal, his bio reads: “(expletive) The Chinese Communist Party and (expletive) Joe Biden. TRUMP WON. (pre-law major).”
The legal education — if that part is real — could come in handy for Martinez, whose social media profile also includes Trumpian rants about the Big Lie of election fraud, as well as a photo of his political idol with North Korean dictator Kim Jung Un. On Thursday, the young Trump fan, wearing his “Make America Great Again” hat, went to nearby Española as a counterprotester against Indigenous New Mexicans and left-wing allies angry over the county government’s plan to reinstall a controversial statue of a Spanish conquistador, Juan de Oñate.
Martinez reportedly argued with and baited the largely Native American protesters at the event before a scuffle broke out, knocking off Martinez’s red cap. As captured vividly by an Albuquerque photojournalist, the young man then pulled out a handgun and began shooting, striking and wounding an out-of-state environmental activist and member of the Hopi tribe named Jacob Johns. Police who arrested Martinez said he laughed and smirked through an interview.
It’s small consolation that no one was killed during Martinez’s rampage. Hardly the first episode of political violence tied closely to the MAGA movement, it surely will not be the last. Especially when this fish stinks from the head. The New Mexico shooting marked the end of a week in which Donald Trump repeatedly celebrated violence, making it clear that death, injury and intimidation isn’t a side effect of his authoritarian push to return to the White House, but the primary disease.
The overwhelming front-runner for the GOP 2024 presidential nomination even visited South Carolina’s Palmetto State Armory, a massive gun emporium that was in the news just weeks earlier for selling an AR-15 to a racist gunman who etched a swastika onto the handle and used it to hunt down Black people in a Dollar General store, killing three of them. That fact didn’t deter the four-times-indicted Trump, who held and admired a Glock pistol burnished with his own image and sent mixed signals about whether he was buying it, alarming federal prosecutors.
Trump’s celebration of gun culture was sandwiched between some stunning remarks. The first was an assault on the nation’s outgoing Joint Chiefs chair, Gen. Mark Milley, in which he ranted that a Milley phone call with Chinese brass while Trump was melting down after his 2020 election was “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!” On Friday, the would-be 47th president told California Republicans that shoplifters should be shot and killed and then celebrated another act of violence by a supporter, 2022′s hammer attack that nearly killed Paul Pelosi, husband of the former Democratic House leader.
“We’ll stand up to crazy Nancy Pelosi, who ruined San Francisco — how’s her husband doing, anybody know?” Trump told a state party convention. “And she’s against building a wall at our border, even though she has a wall around her house — which obviously didn’t do a very good job.” The crowd laughed and Trump smirked — just like Martinez, the New Mexico shooter.
Trump is playing a dangerous game, and there is a name for it: Stochastic terrorism. The cries for vengeance and violent retribution from the leader of the MAGA movement aren’t a message to anyone in specific but rather a bat signal to everyone who can hear his voice, whether it’s armed and troubled young men like Martinez or the Jacksonville gunman, or the angry mob that responded on Jan. 6, 2021, after Trump tweeted, “Will be wild!”
This undercurrent of violence and rage has always been there — Trump was urging fans to “knock the crap out of” hecklers when he first ran in 2015 — but it is increasingly front and center as MAGA evolves from a cult of personality around a reality-TV star into a full-blown fascist-style movement. After Trump’s South Carolina gun shop excursion, NYU professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on dictators, wrote that now “his brand is violence, and his rallies and other events sell that violence, presenting it as the preferred way to resolve differences in society and as the only way to move history forward.”
The gunplay in New Mexico was a powerful manifestation of that. Yet it received little news coverage, in a week in which the United States seemed to be unraveling on all sides. On Capitol Hill, a band of Republican nihilists with no agenda beyond inducing chaos came within hours of shutting down the government, and did manage to please a different dictator, in Russia’s Vladimir Putin, by shutting off U.S. aid for Ukraine.
Meanwhile, many of the same Trump allies launched a hearing for an utterly fact-free impeachment of President Joe Biden. The thread running through all these stories is the same: Facts, or truth, or basic functions like keeping the government open, or the quaint idea that our problems can be solved peacefully ... none of those things matter in a nation they are determined to break, so that a strongman named Trump, alone, can fix it.
While this is happening, the guardians of the American way — establishment politicians, and especially the news media — are desperately trying to pretend that we are going into a normal presidential campaign cycle. The latest example was a so-called Republican debate held Wednesday at the Reagan Library in California, a setting meant to invoke gravitas. But Trump, with 55-60% support, didn’t even feel it was necessary to show up and the seven dwarfs on the stage barely criticized him, afraid to trigger the foot soldiers of the MAGA movement — and hardly anyone watched.
But when the debate was over, something surprising happened. A gaggle of the top anchors at MSNBC had a lightbulb moment — that they were trying to do political analysis when they are watching what they called “the end of politics.” That’s when a movement that’s lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections — and is watching its antiabortion, anti-LGBTQ extremism alienate the next generation of voters — is determined to hold power by any means necessary.
Even if that’s the power that grows out of the barrel of a gun.
“What’s happening in Republican politics right now,” MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow opined, “is that the Republican Party, the Republican base, the Republican electorate, has effectively decided that they don’t really want to do politics anymore, and they’re not all that interested in what politics is, and governing and political campaigning and policy competition and all that stuff, they’re not interested in that.” So what do they want? “They would prefer a strongman who is going to end politics.”
Her fellow panelists agreed that Democrats are struggling to understand this, but so is the mainstream media that they belong to. Said MSNBC’s Joy Reid: “The media can’t figure out how to do something other than conventional politics from the ‘90s, so they say, ‘Both sides, both sides, both sides.’ If we say, ‘Donald Trump is corrupt,’ well, we have to cover Hunter Biden equally, we have to even-steven it and find something to say ...”
The fact that left-leaning-but-ultimately mainstream MSNBC was having this “end of politics” conversation was a step in the right direction. So was Biden’s speech on democracy delivered the next day at an event honoring his Republican friend the late Arizona Sen. John McCain, where he said, ““We have to stand up for America’s values embodied in our Declaration of Independence because we know MAGA extremists have already proven they won’t.” An arguably more powerful statement came the next day from Milley, the retiring general, who declared that America’s troops are only loyal to the Constitution, that “we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator.”
No one needed to ask who that wannabe dictator is, although clueless Mike Pence and the other career politicians and media hacks whose paychecks depend on not hearing the only fire alarm that matters today, the five-alarm siren of rising fascism, still pretend not to understand.
Time is running out to decide whether to reinvest in a 247-year-old idea of a government by and for the people, or to conduct government at the end of a Glock. The question isn’t whether a majority of Americans want to be ruled by the barrel of a gun — they don’t — but whether that majority can find the energy and the unity to fight back. Meanwhile, the echoes from the gunshots in a New Mexico courtyard are getting louder and louder.
Donald Trump's increasingly violent vision is coming through loud and clear to supporters like the MAGA gunman in New Mexico.
by Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
He is becoming the Wolfman Jack of political violence and strongman fascism in America, blasting his hate-filled rants at the 21st-century equivalent of 150,000 watts, on a frequency that clears the mighty Mississippi and hurdles the Rocky Mountains and lands in small towns and far-flung cities — his ugly riffs on executing U.S. generals or threatening judges or shutting down news outlets cheered and shared by an audience that’s counted in the millions.
When Donald Trump howls into his metaphorical microphone, it’s on a frequency that gets picked up by the likes of Ryan Martinez, a 23-year-old man living in Sandia Park, N.M., a small-town suburb of Albuquerque. Martinez’s Facebook page says he’s a graduate of Los Lunas High School, and, according to the Albuquerque Journal, his bio reads: “(expletive) The Chinese Communist Party and (expletive) Joe Biden. TRUMP WON. (pre-law major).”
The legal education — if that part is real — could come in handy for Martinez, whose social media profile also includes Trumpian rants about the Big Lie of election fraud, as well as a photo of his political idol with North Korean dictator Kim Jung Un. On Thursday, the young Trump fan, wearing his “Make America Great Again” hat, went to nearby Española as a counterprotester against Indigenous New Mexicans and left-wing allies angry over the county government’s plan to reinstall a controversial statue of a Spanish conquistador, Juan de Oñate.
Martinez reportedly argued with and baited the largely Native American protesters at the event before a scuffle broke out, knocking off Martinez’s red cap. As captured vividly by an Albuquerque photojournalist, the young man then pulled out a handgun and began shooting, striking and wounding an out-of-state environmental activist and member of the Hopi tribe named Jacob Johns. Police who arrested Martinez said he laughed and smirked through an interview.
It’s small consolation that no one was killed during Martinez’s rampage. Hardly the first episode of political violence tied closely to the MAGA movement, it surely will not be the last. Especially when this fish stinks from the head. The New Mexico shooting marked the end of a week in which Donald Trump repeatedly celebrated violence, making it clear that death, injury and intimidation isn’t a side effect of his authoritarian push to return to the White House, but the primary disease.
The overwhelming front-runner for the GOP 2024 presidential nomination even visited South Carolina’s Palmetto State Armory, a massive gun emporium that was in the news just weeks earlier for selling an AR-15 to a racist gunman who etched a swastika onto the handle and used it to hunt down Black people in a Dollar General store, killing three of them. That fact didn’t deter the four-times-indicted Trump, who held and admired a Glock pistol burnished with his own image and sent mixed signals about whether he was buying it, alarming federal prosecutors.
Trump’s celebration of gun culture was sandwiched between some stunning remarks. The first was an assault on the nation’s outgoing Joint Chiefs chair, Gen. Mark Milley, in which he ranted that a Milley phone call with Chinese brass while Trump was melting down after his 2020 election was “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!” On Friday, the would-be 47th president told California Republicans that shoplifters should be shot and killed and then celebrated another act of violence by a supporter, 2022′s hammer attack that nearly killed Paul Pelosi, husband of the former Democratic House leader.
“We’ll stand up to crazy Nancy Pelosi, who ruined San Francisco — how’s her husband doing, anybody know?” Trump told a state party convention. “And she’s against building a wall at our border, even though she has a wall around her house — which obviously didn’t do a very good job.” The crowd laughed and Trump smirked — just like Martinez, the New Mexico shooter.
Trump is playing a dangerous game, and there is a name for it: Stochastic terrorism. The cries for vengeance and violent retribution from the leader of the MAGA movement aren’t a message to anyone in specific but rather a bat signal to everyone who can hear his voice, whether it’s armed and troubled young men like Martinez or the Jacksonville gunman, or the angry mob that responded on Jan. 6, 2021, after Trump tweeted, “Will be wild!”
This undercurrent of violence and rage has always been there — Trump was urging fans to “knock the crap out of” hecklers when he first ran in 2015 — but it is increasingly front and center as MAGA evolves from a cult of personality around a reality-TV star into a full-blown fascist-style movement. After Trump’s South Carolina gun shop excursion, NYU professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on dictators, wrote that now “his brand is violence, and his rallies and other events sell that violence, presenting it as the preferred way to resolve differences in society and as the only way to move history forward.”
The gunplay in New Mexico was a powerful manifestation of that. Yet it received little news coverage, in a week in which the United States seemed to be unraveling on all sides. On Capitol Hill, a band of Republican nihilists with no agenda beyond inducing chaos came within hours of shutting down the government, and did manage to please a different dictator, in Russia’s Vladimir Putin, by shutting off U.S. aid for Ukraine.
Meanwhile, many of the same Trump allies launched a hearing for an utterly fact-free impeachment of President Joe Biden. The thread running through all these stories is the same: Facts, or truth, or basic functions like keeping the government open, or the quaint idea that our problems can be solved peacefully ... none of those things matter in a nation they are determined to break, so that a strongman named Trump, alone, can fix it.
While this is happening, the guardians of the American way — establishment politicians, and especially the news media — are desperately trying to pretend that we are going into a normal presidential campaign cycle. The latest example was a so-called Republican debate held Wednesday at the Reagan Library in California, a setting meant to invoke gravitas. But Trump, with 55-60% support, didn’t even feel it was necessary to show up and the seven dwarfs on the stage barely criticized him, afraid to trigger the foot soldiers of the MAGA movement — and hardly anyone watched.
But when the debate was over, something surprising happened. A gaggle of the top anchors at MSNBC had a lightbulb moment — that they were trying to do political analysis when they are watching what they called “the end of politics.” That’s when a movement that’s lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections — and is watching its antiabortion, anti-LGBTQ extremism alienate the next generation of voters — is determined to hold power by any means necessary.
Even if that’s the power that grows out of the barrel of a gun.
“What’s happening in Republican politics right now,” MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow opined, “is that the Republican Party, the Republican base, the Republican electorate, has effectively decided that they don’t really want to do politics anymore, and they’re not all that interested in what politics is, and governing and political campaigning and policy competition and all that stuff, they’re not interested in that.” So what do they want? “They would prefer a strongman who is going to end politics.”
Her fellow panelists agreed that Democrats are struggling to understand this, but so is the mainstream media that they belong to. Said MSNBC’s Joy Reid: “The media can’t figure out how to do something other than conventional politics from the ‘90s, so they say, ‘Both sides, both sides, both sides.’ If we say, ‘Donald Trump is corrupt,’ well, we have to cover Hunter Biden equally, we have to even-steven it and find something to say ...”
The fact that left-leaning-but-ultimately mainstream MSNBC was having this “end of politics” conversation was a step in the right direction. So was Biden’s speech on democracy delivered the next day at an event honoring his Republican friend the late Arizona Sen. John McCain, where he said, ““We have to stand up for America’s values embodied in our Declaration of Independence because we know MAGA extremists have already proven they won’t.” An arguably more powerful statement came the next day from Milley, the retiring general, who declared that America’s troops are only loyal to the Constitution, that “we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator.”
No one needed to ask who that wannabe dictator is, although clueless Mike Pence and the other career politicians and media hacks whose paychecks depend on not hearing the only fire alarm that matters today, the five-alarm siren of rising fascism, still pretend not to understand.
Time is running out to decide whether to reinvest in a 247-year-old idea of a government by and for the people, or to conduct government at the end of a Glock. The question isn’t whether a majority of Americans want to be ruled by the barrel of a gun — they don’t — but whether that majority can find the energy and the unity to fight back. Meanwhile, the echoes from the gunshots in a New Mexico courtyard are getting louder and louder.
REPUBLICANS (RIGHTLY) PANIC. GOOD LUCK FINDING A VIABLE ALTERNATIVE.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
The media obsession with finding fault with President Biden or fanning “but he’s too old” chatter (worse: “But he wears sneakers”) not only renders a disservice to voters facing an existential threat to democracy but also misses the real “they should be panicked” storyline: Republicans’ growing realization that the MAGA cult cannot be weaned from a candidate who might well be convicted in one or more criminal cases by Election Day 2024.
CBS News’s Robert Costa tweeted before the debate Wednesday: “Lots of angst tonight among my top GOP sources about this debate. Donors concerned. Flurry of texts. Questions about where this race goes from here. They wonder: Can anybody have a breakout moment? Meanwhile, Trump all but ignores the scene and shrugs off his indictments.”
Well, no one had a breakout moment.
Nervous Republicans are reduced to pleading with Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin to enter the race, but there’s no sign yet he would or, if he did, that he forcefully would attack former president Donald Trump or that others would drop out. In a Post Opinions essay on Thursday, Costa reported on a planned gathering of insiders next month. “It is the latest slapdash scheme in a long search for a standard-bearer and a portrait of the powerlessness so many Republicans feel as Trump plows ahead, shrugging off criminal indictments and outrage over rhetoric they fear is growing dark and dangerous.”
If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. In 2015, establishment Republicans never came up with an effective means of shoving Trump out of the way or finding a viable alternative. One Post headline: “Plan A for GOP donors: Wait for Trump to fall. (There is no Plan B.).”
Those pesky voters, inflamed by right-wing media and encouraged by desperate Republicans masquerading as populists, don’t seem to be interested in the views of establishment Republicans.
This is what comes from Republicans sleepwalking through the past seven years and refusing to dump Trump when multiple opportunities arose (e.g., the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, the second impeachment, the first or second or third or fourth indictment). It’s what comes from accommodating his tantrums, including provoking a government shutdown while running an impeachment inquiry (the first hearing of which was characterized by a number of Republicans as a disaster) even Republicans’ go-to legal hack Jonathan Turley threw cold water on. It’s what comes from placing hope in a Florida governor who is extreme, unlikeable and untested on the national stage.
In consistently normalizing Trump, refusing to debunk his lies and avoiding scrutiny of his abominable record (e.g., no coronavirus inoculation plan, a devastating recession, no border solution, no infrastructure deal, a horribly damaged national image), most Republicans, including the ones now panicked, effectively discouraged any competent, competitive and cogent alternative from jumping into the race.
Republicans are left with a putative standard-bearer who is increasingly incoherent (e.g. electric vehicles that zap you in water, windmills that kill whales, Jeb Bush’s Iraq War) and whose streak of legal losses suggest his criminal trials are far more formidable than his supporters imagine. The alternative is a list of challengers so hapless and unlikeable that the debates have come to resemble the “Star Wars” bar scene.
Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) suggested the Great Society was worse than slavery (revealing the MAGA movement’s desperation to rewrite history and reclaim victimhood for Whites); Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis claimed the role of worst underperformer; and Nikki Haley, a former ambassador to the United Nations, spoke for millions when she told Vivek Ramaswamy, “Honestly, every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber.” None (not even Haley, who is the liveliest of the bunch) seems remotely willing or capable of taking on Trump with the most effective argument: He’s a fraud and a political and legal loser.
There might be no deus ex machina to save Republicans. Some Republicans are hoping Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp will enter the race. But there is no sign he’s pulling together a team. Moreover, the appetite for a governor who has expressly debunked Trump’s election lies might not find favor with the Republican primary electorate.
No wonder some GOP donors and right-wing hacks in the punditocracy are supporting No Labels, which promises to put a third-party candidate on the ballot. It might be the only way to divide the anti-Trump vote and allow Trump to squeeze into office. But then they and the rest of the country would be stuck with an unhinged, vengeful, incoherent, dangerous neo-fascist president. And deep down, I suspect not even they fancy that outcome.
Truth be told, there might be no solution to the GOP’s quandary. And that — not Vice President Harris, not Biden’s age, not premature polls and not pointless debates — should be the election campaign story. Instead, the media — like too many in the GOP base — pretend this is a competitive primary. Maybe the last debate debacle will convince them otherwise.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
The media obsession with finding fault with President Biden or fanning “but he’s too old” chatter (worse: “But he wears sneakers”) not only renders a disservice to voters facing an existential threat to democracy but also misses the real “they should be panicked” storyline: Republicans’ growing realization that the MAGA cult cannot be weaned from a candidate who might well be convicted in one or more criminal cases by Election Day 2024.
CBS News’s Robert Costa tweeted before the debate Wednesday: “Lots of angst tonight among my top GOP sources about this debate. Donors concerned. Flurry of texts. Questions about where this race goes from here. They wonder: Can anybody have a breakout moment? Meanwhile, Trump all but ignores the scene and shrugs off his indictments.”
Well, no one had a breakout moment.
Nervous Republicans are reduced to pleading with Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin to enter the race, but there’s no sign yet he would or, if he did, that he forcefully would attack former president Donald Trump or that others would drop out. In a Post Opinions essay on Thursday, Costa reported on a planned gathering of insiders next month. “It is the latest slapdash scheme in a long search for a standard-bearer and a portrait of the powerlessness so many Republicans feel as Trump plows ahead, shrugging off criminal indictments and outrage over rhetoric they fear is growing dark and dangerous.”
If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. In 2015, establishment Republicans never came up with an effective means of shoving Trump out of the way or finding a viable alternative. One Post headline: “Plan A for GOP donors: Wait for Trump to fall. (There is no Plan B.).”
Those pesky voters, inflamed by right-wing media and encouraged by desperate Republicans masquerading as populists, don’t seem to be interested in the views of establishment Republicans.
This is what comes from Republicans sleepwalking through the past seven years and refusing to dump Trump when multiple opportunities arose (e.g., the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, the second impeachment, the first or second or third or fourth indictment). It’s what comes from accommodating his tantrums, including provoking a government shutdown while running an impeachment inquiry (the first hearing of which was characterized by a number of Republicans as a disaster) even Republicans’ go-to legal hack Jonathan Turley threw cold water on. It’s what comes from placing hope in a Florida governor who is extreme, unlikeable and untested on the national stage.
In consistently normalizing Trump, refusing to debunk his lies and avoiding scrutiny of his abominable record (e.g., no coronavirus inoculation plan, a devastating recession, no border solution, no infrastructure deal, a horribly damaged national image), most Republicans, including the ones now panicked, effectively discouraged any competent, competitive and cogent alternative from jumping into the race.
Republicans are left with a putative standard-bearer who is increasingly incoherent (e.g. electric vehicles that zap you in water, windmills that kill whales, Jeb Bush’s Iraq War) and whose streak of legal losses suggest his criminal trials are far more formidable than his supporters imagine. The alternative is a list of challengers so hapless and unlikeable that the debates have come to resemble the “Star Wars” bar scene.
Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) suggested the Great Society was worse than slavery (revealing the MAGA movement’s desperation to rewrite history and reclaim victimhood for Whites); Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis claimed the role of worst underperformer; and Nikki Haley, a former ambassador to the United Nations, spoke for millions when she told Vivek Ramaswamy, “Honestly, every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber.” None (not even Haley, who is the liveliest of the bunch) seems remotely willing or capable of taking on Trump with the most effective argument: He’s a fraud and a political and legal loser.
There might be no deus ex machina to save Republicans. Some Republicans are hoping Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp will enter the race. But there is no sign he’s pulling together a team. Moreover, the appetite for a governor who has expressly debunked Trump’s election lies might not find favor with the Republican primary electorate.
No wonder some GOP donors and right-wing hacks in the punditocracy are supporting No Labels, which promises to put a third-party candidate on the ballot. It might be the only way to divide the anti-Trump vote and allow Trump to squeeze into office. But then they and the rest of the country would be stuck with an unhinged, vengeful, incoherent, dangerous neo-fascist president. And deep down, I suspect not even they fancy that outcome.
Truth be told, there might be no solution to the GOP’s quandary. And that — not Vice President Harris, not Biden’s age, not premature polls and not pointless debates — should be the election campaign story. Instead, the media — like too many in the GOP base — pretend this is a competitive primary. Maybe the last debate debacle will convince them otherwise.
TRUMP’S PROMISE OF LAWLESSNESS
By Alex Kingsbury, The New York Times
Though it was lost in the four-year cyclone that was the presidency of Donald Trump, one of his most immoral acts was to pardon soldiers who were accused of committing war crimes by killing unarmed civilians or prisoners. Military leaders, including his own defense secretary and the secretary of the Army, objected, saying it would undermine good order and discipline. Lawlessness can easily beget lawlessness.
But the American system is ill prepared to deter leaders bent on undermining the rule of law. Checks and balances spread powers across the government, but that isn’t enough to temper or stop bad-faith actors looking to subvert the law. According to a new article in The Atlantic, Gen. Mark Milley, upon becoming the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2019, “found himself in a disconcerting situation: trying, and failing, to teach President Trump the difference between appropriate battlefield aggressiveness on the one hand, and war crimes on the other.”
Mr. Trump, as General Milley discovered and many Americans already knew, is a man unencumbered by any moral compass. He goes the way he wants to go, legalities and niceties be damned. Last week in a post on his social network, Mr. Trump argued that General Milley’s actions would have once been punishable by death.
Most Americans probably didn’t notice his screed. Of those who did and were not alarmed, far too many nodded along in agreement. As Josh Barro said in a Times Opinion round table this week about the former president’s recent comments, “Trump is and has been unhinged, and that’s priced in” to the views that many voters have of him.
It is no exaggeration to say that Mr. Trump is running for the presidency on a platform of lawlessness, promising to wield the power of the state against his enemies — real or imagined. Today, millions and millions of Americans support him for that reason or despite it.
In a poll released this week, 51 percent of American adults said they’d vote for Mr. Trump over President Biden, including a vast majority of Republicans. And Wednesday night’s farcical G.O.P. debate may only increase Mr. Trump’s large lead in the primary race.
That advantage over the rest of the Republican field is growing even as prosecutors are finally trying to hold Mr. Trump legally responsible for his misdeeds — from the plot to overturn the 2020 election to fraud allegations concerning his real estate empire.
The backlash has been predictable: In the past few months, Mr. Trump has argued that federal laws about classified documents don’t apply to him; floated the idea of pardons for his supporters jailed for attacking the Capitol; said that judges with whom he disagrees are unfit to preside over cases against him; and has been accused of threatening to prejudice the jury pool in one case.
A judge decided to shield the identity of jurors for another trial after Trump supporters posted the names, photos and addresses of grand jurors involved in issuing an indictment in that case. Mr. Trump is also pushing for a government shutdown to halt Justice Department investigations, to force a show of loyalty and try to bend our political system to his will — even when he is out of office.
All this has accompanied a sharp uptick in the often incoherent statements from the 77-year-old former president, on social media and at his rallies. And while many Americans long ago tuned him out, his most extreme supporters, like Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, have not. In his newsletter, Mr. Gosar recently wrote that General Milley should be hanged.
As the legal cases against Mr. Trump have picked up, “so too have threats against law enforcement authorities, judges, elected officials and others,” The Times reported this week. “The threats, in turn, are prompting protective measures, a legal effort to curb his angry and sometimes incendiary public statements and renewed concern about the potential for an election campaign in which Mr. Trump has promised ‘retribution’ to produce violence.”
Mr. Trump’s targets extend to other Republicans. In a biography out next month, Senator Mitt Romney disclosed that he was spending $5,000 per day on security for himself and his family against threats from Trump supporters.
This combustible combination of heated political rhetoric, unhinged conspiracy theories, anti-government sentiment and a militant gun culture have created fertile ground for political violence. The country is not powerless to stop the spread of lawlessness but it requires addressing those precursors to violence.
Many of those elements swirled around a visit by Mr. Trump this week to a gun store in South Carolina that this summer sold an AR-15-style rifle to a man who later carried out a racist mass shooting at a dollar store. During his visit, Mr. Trump hefted a custom Glock handgun with his face etched onto the handle. Though he said he wanted to buy one of the weapons — they’re big sellers! — it is unclear if he could legally do so since he is under indictment.
Mr. Trump’s whims and erratic online missives should not be dismissed as “Trump being Trump.” Take his call this month for House Republicans to shut down the government. Mr. Trump egged them on, urging them to settle for nothing less than their full slate of demands, including forcing the Justice Department to end its investigations of him. He called it “the last chance to defund these political prosecutions against me and other Patriots.”
While a government shutdown wouldn’t end the federal prosecutions of Mr. Trump, a Trump presidency could easily do so. After all, there are few moral or legal hurdles left to clear after pardoning war criminals.
There are many nations where citizens live in fear of governments that wield unchecked and arbitrary authority against their enemies, real or imagined. That is the America that Mr. Trump is promising his supporters. When Mr. Trump told supporters “I am your retribution,” all Americans should take him at his word.
Defeating Mr. Trump at the ballot box is going to require a lot more political courage than it takes to put flashes of honesty in the pages of a memoir. The former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson is the latest in a long line of memoirists, declaring in an interview on Tuesday for her new book that Mr. Trump is the “most grave threat we will face to our democracy in our lifetime, and potentially in American history.”
True enough. Which is why Americans can’t wait until January 2025, and another shelf of memoirs, to hear the truth that so many Republicans have long known.
By Alex Kingsbury, The New York Times
Though it was lost in the four-year cyclone that was the presidency of Donald Trump, one of his most immoral acts was to pardon soldiers who were accused of committing war crimes by killing unarmed civilians or prisoners. Military leaders, including his own defense secretary and the secretary of the Army, objected, saying it would undermine good order and discipline. Lawlessness can easily beget lawlessness.
But the American system is ill prepared to deter leaders bent on undermining the rule of law. Checks and balances spread powers across the government, but that isn’t enough to temper or stop bad-faith actors looking to subvert the law. According to a new article in The Atlantic, Gen. Mark Milley, upon becoming the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2019, “found himself in a disconcerting situation: trying, and failing, to teach President Trump the difference between appropriate battlefield aggressiveness on the one hand, and war crimes on the other.”
Mr. Trump, as General Milley discovered and many Americans already knew, is a man unencumbered by any moral compass. He goes the way he wants to go, legalities and niceties be damned. Last week in a post on his social network, Mr. Trump argued that General Milley’s actions would have once been punishable by death.
Most Americans probably didn’t notice his screed. Of those who did and were not alarmed, far too many nodded along in agreement. As Josh Barro said in a Times Opinion round table this week about the former president’s recent comments, “Trump is and has been unhinged, and that’s priced in” to the views that many voters have of him.
It is no exaggeration to say that Mr. Trump is running for the presidency on a platform of lawlessness, promising to wield the power of the state against his enemies — real or imagined. Today, millions and millions of Americans support him for that reason or despite it.
In a poll released this week, 51 percent of American adults said they’d vote for Mr. Trump over President Biden, including a vast majority of Republicans. And Wednesday night’s farcical G.O.P. debate may only increase Mr. Trump’s large lead in the primary race.
That advantage over the rest of the Republican field is growing even as prosecutors are finally trying to hold Mr. Trump legally responsible for his misdeeds — from the plot to overturn the 2020 election to fraud allegations concerning his real estate empire.
The backlash has been predictable: In the past few months, Mr. Trump has argued that federal laws about classified documents don’t apply to him; floated the idea of pardons for his supporters jailed for attacking the Capitol; said that judges with whom he disagrees are unfit to preside over cases against him; and has been accused of threatening to prejudice the jury pool in one case.
A judge decided to shield the identity of jurors for another trial after Trump supporters posted the names, photos and addresses of grand jurors involved in issuing an indictment in that case. Mr. Trump is also pushing for a government shutdown to halt Justice Department investigations, to force a show of loyalty and try to bend our political system to his will — even when he is out of office.
All this has accompanied a sharp uptick in the often incoherent statements from the 77-year-old former president, on social media and at his rallies. And while many Americans long ago tuned him out, his most extreme supporters, like Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, have not. In his newsletter, Mr. Gosar recently wrote that General Milley should be hanged.
As the legal cases against Mr. Trump have picked up, “so too have threats against law enforcement authorities, judges, elected officials and others,” The Times reported this week. “The threats, in turn, are prompting protective measures, a legal effort to curb his angry and sometimes incendiary public statements and renewed concern about the potential for an election campaign in which Mr. Trump has promised ‘retribution’ to produce violence.”
Mr. Trump’s targets extend to other Republicans. In a biography out next month, Senator Mitt Romney disclosed that he was spending $5,000 per day on security for himself and his family against threats from Trump supporters.
This combustible combination of heated political rhetoric, unhinged conspiracy theories, anti-government sentiment and a militant gun culture have created fertile ground for political violence. The country is not powerless to stop the spread of lawlessness but it requires addressing those precursors to violence.
Many of those elements swirled around a visit by Mr. Trump this week to a gun store in South Carolina that this summer sold an AR-15-style rifle to a man who later carried out a racist mass shooting at a dollar store. During his visit, Mr. Trump hefted a custom Glock handgun with his face etched onto the handle. Though he said he wanted to buy one of the weapons — they’re big sellers! — it is unclear if he could legally do so since he is under indictment.
Mr. Trump’s whims and erratic online missives should not be dismissed as “Trump being Trump.” Take his call this month for House Republicans to shut down the government. Mr. Trump egged them on, urging them to settle for nothing less than their full slate of demands, including forcing the Justice Department to end its investigations of him. He called it “the last chance to defund these political prosecutions against me and other Patriots.”
While a government shutdown wouldn’t end the federal prosecutions of Mr. Trump, a Trump presidency could easily do so. After all, there are few moral or legal hurdles left to clear after pardoning war criminals.
There are many nations where citizens live in fear of governments that wield unchecked and arbitrary authority against their enemies, real or imagined. That is the America that Mr. Trump is promising his supporters. When Mr. Trump told supporters “I am your retribution,” all Americans should take him at his word.
Defeating Mr. Trump at the ballot box is going to require a lot more political courage than it takes to put flashes of honesty in the pages of a memoir. The former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson is the latest in a long line of memoirists, declaring in an interview on Tuesday for her new book that Mr. Trump is the “most grave threat we will face to our democracy in our lifetime, and potentially in American history.”
True enough. Which is why Americans can’t wait until January 2025, and another shelf of memoirs, to hear the truth that so many Republicans have long known.
IF YOU WANT TO SAVE DEMOCRACY IN 2024, BIDEN IS THE ONLY VIABLE CHOICE
By Max Boot, The Washington Post
I fear for America’s future and hence the world’s — more so now than ever. I had relaxed a bit after the last two national elections, which had seemed to signal a return to normalcy. Donald Trump was decisively defeated in 2020 and, in 2022, most of his fellow election deniers also lost in their bids to take over the election machinery of swing states.
But now we’re back in Crazytown. Trump is the almost certain Republican nominee in 2024. And, if current polls are to be believed, he has an excellent chance of winning the presidency again — despite his two impeachments, his incitement of an insurrection, and the 91 felony counts he currently faces in four criminal cases.
A year ago, I naively imagined that Trump would be politically hurt by being indicted. Once again, I either overestimated the American public or underestimated Trump. If anything, the criminal cases seem to have helped him politically. He leads all his Republican challengers by a very wide margin: In the FiveThirtyEight polling average, he is at nearly 56 percent among Republican voters.
Even more disturbing, Trump is running neck and neck with President Biden in general-election matchups. That means — given the Republican advantage in the electoral college — that he is probably ahead in the electoral count. Somehow, most voters have decided that Biden is too old for the presidency, but Trump, who is only three years younger and infinitely less cogent, isn’t.
The prospect of another Trump term is the greatest foreseeable disaster that can befall the United States and the world. Trump is likely to be 10 times more dangerous this time around, because he won’t allow any adults in the White House to act as a check on his worst instincts — no more Jim Mattis as defense secretary, John F. Kelly as chief of staff or H.R. McMaster as national security adviser. In a second term, Trump is likely to only appoint advisers as unhinged as he is.
We can only speculate what this will mean, but the likelihood is that Trump will cut off aid to Ukraine, pull out of NATO, eviscerate the civil service and the military’s top ranks, and appoint an attorney general who will prosecute his enemies. For a start. He was eager to do all of those things in his first term but was dissuaded or blocked by the “deep state.” He’s unlikely to allow that to happen again. He has become even more radical and more authoritarian since leaving office, and he now has much more experience in getting what he wants out of the government.
The consequences will be dire enough domestically, imperiling U.S. democracy, but they will be even worse internationally. Among other alarming consequences, a Trump presidency could allow Russian leader Vladimir Putin to defeat Ukraine and remake the 21st-century global order in favor of tyrants and aggressors.
So how do we stop Trump? Biden is a feeble vessel at best, but he’s the only realistic option we have. It’s true that he is 80 years old (and would be 82 at the start of a new term), and he often stumbles rhetorically and sometimes physically. But his successful performance in office belies his doddering image.
He has managed to pass big, bipartisan bills, including infrastructure legislation that Trump only talked about. He has been even more impressive internationally, assembling a large coalition to oppose Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine and another coalition in East Asia to deter China from aggression of its own. The economy — the ultimate barometer of a president’s performance — has been doing much better than expected, with low unemployment, declining inflation and no recession in sight. That’s a record any president can be proud of. Yet the polls haven’t been giving Biden the credit he is due, possibly because perceptions of the economy still lag the reality.
In an ideal world, Biden would head off to a well-deserved retirement and a younger, more vigorous successor — someone such as Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, California Gov. Gavin Newsom or Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo — would run in his place. The likelihood is that any of those candidates would be stronger than Biden in the general election.
But we don’t live in that ideal world. In the world as it is, we’re just a few months before the start of the primaries, so if Biden were to step down now, the almost certain Democratic nominee would be Vice President Harris. (The last sitting vice president who sought but failed to secure a party’s presidential nomination was Alben Barkley in 1952.) And I have yet to meet a Democrat who has any confidence in Harris’s ability to beat Trump.
Harris has a poor track record in national politics. She exited the 2020 Democratic race before a single vote was cast and has done little to elevate herself as vice president (admittedly a difficult task in a low-profile post with few fixed responsibilities). Moreover, unfair as it is, there is good cause to worry that Trump would run a sexist and racist campaign that could hurt Harris among working-class White voters in industrial states. The RealClearPolitics polling average shows that, while Trump is beating Biden by just 0.5 points, he leads Harris by 4 points — and that’s before he has begun to focus his fire and fury on her.
At the same time, any move to challenge Biden in the primaries or to replace Harris on the ticket would lead to Democratic fratricide which would likely ease Trump’s path back to power. Anyone who believes in preserving American democracy and the U.S.-led world order, therefore, has no choice but to back Biden in 2024, however uninspiring that might be.
We had better hope that popular perceptions of the economy improve … and that a likely Trump conviction might dissuade swing voters from supporting him … and that a third-party candidate won’t split the anti-Trump vote … and that Biden doesn’t experience any Mitch McConnell-like freeze-ups or other health scares. Otherwise, come November 2024, we might be facing the end of the world as we know it.
You can see why I’m not feeling good about the future — not when the fate of the world depends on the vitality and vigor of an octogenarian who looks his age. But it does.
By Max Boot, The Washington Post
I fear for America’s future and hence the world’s — more so now than ever. I had relaxed a bit after the last two national elections, which had seemed to signal a return to normalcy. Donald Trump was decisively defeated in 2020 and, in 2022, most of his fellow election deniers also lost in their bids to take over the election machinery of swing states.
But now we’re back in Crazytown. Trump is the almost certain Republican nominee in 2024. And, if current polls are to be believed, he has an excellent chance of winning the presidency again — despite his two impeachments, his incitement of an insurrection, and the 91 felony counts he currently faces in four criminal cases.
A year ago, I naively imagined that Trump would be politically hurt by being indicted. Once again, I either overestimated the American public or underestimated Trump. If anything, the criminal cases seem to have helped him politically. He leads all his Republican challengers by a very wide margin: In the FiveThirtyEight polling average, he is at nearly 56 percent among Republican voters.
Even more disturbing, Trump is running neck and neck with President Biden in general-election matchups. That means — given the Republican advantage in the electoral college — that he is probably ahead in the electoral count. Somehow, most voters have decided that Biden is too old for the presidency, but Trump, who is only three years younger and infinitely less cogent, isn’t.
The prospect of another Trump term is the greatest foreseeable disaster that can befall the United States and the world. Trump is likely to be 10 times more dangerous this time around, because he won’t allow any adults in the White House to act as a check on his worst instincts — no more Jim Mattis as defense secretary, John F. Kelly as chief of staff or H.R. McMaster as national security adviser. In a second term, Trump is likely to only appoint advisers as unhinged as he is.
We can only speculate what this will mean, but the likelihood is that Trump will cut off aid to Ukraine, pull out of NATO, eviscerate the civil service and the military’s top ranks, and appoint an attorney general who will prosecute his enemies. For a start. He was eager to do all of those things in his first term but was dissuaded or blocked by the “deep state.” He’s unlikely to allow that to happen again. He has become even more radical and more authoritarian since leaving office, and he now has much more experience in getting what he wants out of the government.
The consequences will be dire enough domestically, imperiling U.S. democracy, but they will be even worse internationally. Among other alarming consequences, a Trump presidency could allow Russian leader Vladimir Putin to defeat Ukraine and remake the 21st-century global order in favor of tyrants and aggressors.
So how do we stop Trump? Biden is a feeble vessel at best, but he’s the only realistic option we have. It’s true that he is 80 years old (and would be 82 at the start of a new term), and he often stumbles rhetorically and sometimes physically. But his successful performance in office belies his doddering image.
He has managed to pass big, bipartisan bills, including infrastructure legislation that Trump only talked about. He has been even more impressive internationally, assembling a large coalition to oppose Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine and another coalition in East Asia to deter China from aggression of its own. The economy — the ultimate barometer of a president’s performance — has been doing much better than expected, with low unemployment, declining inflation and no recession in sight. That’s a record any president can be proud of. Yet the polls haven’t been giving Biden the credit he is due, possibly because perceptions of the economy still lag the reality.
In an ideal world, Biden would head off to a well-deserved retirement and a younger, more vigorous successor — someone such as Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, California Gov. Gavin Newsom or Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo — would run in his place. The likelihood is that any of those candidates would be stronger than Biden in the general election.
But we don’t live in that ideal world. In the world as it is, we’re just a few months before the start of the primaries, so if Biden were to step down now, the almost certain Democratic nominee would be Vice President Harris. (The last sitting vice president who sought but failed to secure a party’s presidential nomination was Alben Barkley in 1952.) And I have yet to meet a Democrat who has any confidence in Harris’s ability to beat Trump.
Harris has a poor track record in national politics. She exited the 2020 Democratic race before a single vote was cast and has done little to elevate herself as vice president (admittedly a difficult task in a low-profile post with few fixed responsibilities). Moreover, unfair as it is, there is good cause to worry that Trump would run a sexist and racist campaign that could hurt Harris among working-class White voters in industrial states. The RealClearPolitics polling average shows that, while Trump is beating Biden by just 0.5 points, he leads Harris by 4 points — and that’s before he has begun to focus his fire and fury on her.
At the same time, any move to challenge Biden in the primaries or to replace Harris on the ticket would lead to Democratic fratricide which would likely ease Trump’s path back to power. Anyone who believes in preserving American democracy and the U.S.-led world order, therefore, has no choice but to back Biden in 2024, however uninspiring that might be.
We had better hope that popular perceptions of the economy improve … and that a likely Trump conviction might dissuade swing voters from supporting him … and that a third-party candidate won’t split the anti-Trump vote … and that Biden doesn’t experience any Mitch McConnell-like freeze-ups or other health scares. Otherwise, come November 2024, we might be facing the end of the world as we know it.
You can see why I’m not feeling good about the future — not when the fate of the world depends on the vitality and vigor of an octogenarian who looks his age. But it does.
UAW STRIKE IS EXPOSING THE FRAUD THAT GOP IS THE PARTY OF THE WORKING CLASS
Republicans have been crowing that they're now the party of the working class, so why do they oppose higher pay for workers?
by Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Republicans woke up on Nov. 4, 2020 looking for the silver lining behind a cloudy election. Sure, the GOP’s leader, Donald Trump, was on his way to losing the White House, but he’d racked up a surprising 74 million votes, and Republicans had won some key House races. The reason, party leaders crowed, was a surge in support from the working class — mainly white folks, but more Latino blue-collar voters and even some African Americans.
“We are a working-class party now,” Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley had tweeted on Election Night. “That’s our future.”
Hawley’s political lack-of-soul-mate, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, laid it on much thicker that winter when he spoke to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Cruz is a graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School who’s married to an investment banker and had just returned from Cancun, while his working-class constituents were freezing in a massive power outage. Yet Cruz declared that the GOP will be “the party of steel workers and construction workers and pipeline workers and taxi cab drivers and cops and firefighters and waiters and waitresses and the men and women with calluses on their hands who are working for this country.”
He left out auto workers. Maybe that was foreshadowing.
Last week, United Auto Workers members at three Midwestern factories walked out on strike, as the vanguard of a historic effort by their 145,000-member union to win higher pay, enhanced retirement and overtime, and a shorter work week from the Big Three automakers — Ford, GM, and Stellantis (formerly Chrysler) — that are posting billions in profits. The UAW strike is a proxy war for whether the working class in America can be saved — by reversing decades of income inequality that soared as union membership plunged.
It feels like a moment for the epic labor song written in the depths of the Great Depression by an organizer for the United Mine Workers in Kentucky’s bloody Harlan County, “Which Side Are You On?” If you are a Republican running to get elected president in 2024, you are not on the side of America’s auto workers. It turns out that the best and brightest of the new “party of the working class” just can’t quit their love affair with billionaire CEOs.
“We’re all going to suffer from this,” Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, told (who else?) Fox News when asked about the UAW strike. Haley occasionally tries to position herself as a more compassionate conservative in the crowded GOP primary field, but she holds no compassion for union workers. She bragged in the interview that she is a “union buster,” and that she brought jobs to the Palmetto State without what she sees as the scourge of organized labor.
Yet Haley didn’t go as far as her fellow South Carolinian, Sen. Tim Scott, whotold a campaign event in Iowa: “Ronald Reagan gave us a great example when federal employees decided they were going to strike. He said, ‘You strike, you’re fired.’ Simple concept to me. To the extent that we can use that once again, absolutely.”
It’s also a simple concept that’s illegal under U.S. labor law — employers can’t fire a union member for striking — but facts weren’t as important for Scott as espousing what even his fellow conservative, the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, called “zombie Reaganism,” the perfect term for an idea that is not just brain-dead but increasingly past its expiration date.
One poll showed that 75% of Americans are supporting the UAW strikers over management, which suggests that even a lot of Republicans support the picketers. More broadly, a Gallup Poll this summer found that 67% of the public are supportive of unions, consolidating a trend that began when the economic crisis of 2008-09 dramatized how far the pendulum of inequality had swung toward corporations and billionaires, and away from the U.S. worker.
Unreal. Tim Scott (@votetimscott) said companies should "absolutely" fire workers who strike for better wages and safer working conditions pic.twitter.com/GpdmVkdmIe — American Bridge 21st Century (@American_Bridge) September 19, 2023
“When looking at these strikes that have been happening recently, it becomes very clear where their loyalties lie and their priorities lie,” Ken Jacobs, who chairs the University of California, Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, told me about the modern GOP. “Some Republican commentators have argued that Republicans should find a way to be more a party of the working class, but when you dig down into their proposals, they are still anti-union or anti-working people.”
You could argue the current state of affairs began on May 8, 1970, the date of the notorious Hard Hat Riot, when union workers attacked a rally of anti-Vietnam War protesters in lower Manhattan. The GOP‘s Richard Nixon seized the moment, inviting New York union leaders to the White House to herald a new strategy of playing on the resentments of the college-educated New Left to peel away blue-collar votes. The plan worked, at least among a white working-class that became Reagan Democrats in the 1980s and full-throated Republicans when Fox News arrived to amp up a culture war.
So is the GOP the party of the working class? Yes, and no. In the 2022 midterms, Republicans captured a record 55% of “non-college voters” — a not totally accurate proxy for the blue-collar electorate — by continuing to pull in two-thirds of whites without a diploma, and gaining votes from non-college-educated Latinos. But Democrats are increasing votes in specifically union households — 55% in 2022 balloting.
No wonder the GOP is aggressively putting the union movement down.
South Carolina, the home state of both Haley and Scott, is instructive. It may indeed be — as Haley boasted to Fox News — the most anti-labor state in America, with just 1.7% of workers carrying a union card. It’s not a coincidence that a survey this year by the business network CNBC ranked South Carolina the fourth-worst state for workers, writing: “South Carolina is an unhealthy state, both at home and on the job. The state has the nation’s fifth-highest rate of occupational deaths and it finishes in the top 10 for frequent physical and mental distress overall. Legal protections for workers are limited ... ”
Gee, if only there was some kind of organization that could fight for safer factories and warehouses, a less stressful workplace, and codified employee protections, not to mention increasing paychecks (since South Carolina also is the 10th-worst state for poverty). The problem for the GOP is that more and more voters see what’s happening here.
This is not 1970, or 1984. Culture warring begins to lose its impact when blue-collar workers realize how far they’ve fallen behind over a half-century, or connect GOP policies with the fact that CEOs now make nearly 400 times as much as their workers.
The epitome of the labor conundrum for the Republican Party is the man much more likely than a Haley or Scott to be its 2024 nominee: Donald Trump. The 45th president may be a corrupt autocratic narcissist, but his political instincts aren’t quite as dumb as the South Carolina brigade. He’s threatened to visit a UAW picket line in Michigan while his distant rivals are debating next week in California. But even Trump can’t help but get drawn back into anti-unionism, having made remarks critical of the UAW just days earlier.
The reality is that Trump had four years in the Oval Office to prove that Republicans are the party of the working class, and he whiffed, badly. His administration specifically weakened the right to organize in the workplace and made it easier for companies to fight unions. POTUS 45 also signed a tax cut enriching billionaires and corporations, sent to him by a GOP Congress that refused to raise the minimum wage. Perhaps that’s not surprising, considering that as a developer, he’d built his landmark Trump Tower with non-union, undocumented workers.
Look, labor issues are politically complicated. Just ask President Joe Biden, whose sentiments — both personally and politically — are clearly pro-union, and yet is hampered by the fact he also wants a short strike and needs to negotiate with both sides. GOP candidates have no such burden and can say whatever they want, and what most want to say is that “the party of the working class” despises unions — the only people out there fighting for the working class to have a better life.
I hope that Trump does try and walk the picket line in Detroit next week, because it may not be the lovefest that he fantasizes about from his castle at Mar-a-Lago. The longer that the UAW’s fight for a fair deal goes on, the more that those Americans with calluses on their hands are realizing that the frauds of the Republican Party are not on their side.
Republicans have been crowing that they're now the party of the working class, so why do they oppose higher pay for workers?
by Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Republicans woke up on Nov. 4, 2020 looking for the silver lining behind a cloudy election. Sure, the GOP’s leader, Donald Trump, was on his way to losing the White House, but he’d racked up a surprising 74 million votes, and Republicans had won some key House races. The reason, party leaders crowed, was a surge in support from the working class — mainly white folks, but more Latino blue-collar voters and even some African Americans.
“We are a working-class party now,” Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley had tweeted on Election Night. “That’s our future.”
Hawley’s political lack-of-soul-mate, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, laid it on much thicker that winter when he spoke to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Cruz is a graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School who’s married to an investment banker and had just returned from Cancun, while his working-class constituents were freezing in a massive power outage. Yet Cruz declared that the GOP will be “the party of steel workers and construction workers and pipeline workers and taxi cab drivers and cops and firefighters and waiters and waitresses and the men and women with calluses on their hands who are working for this country.”
He left out auto workers. Maybe that was foreshadowing.
Last week, United Auto Workers members at three Midwestern factories walked out on strike, as the vanguard of a historic effort by their 145,000-member union to win higher pay, enhanced retirement and overtime, and a shorter work week from the Big Three automakers — Ford, GM, and Stellantis (formerly Chrysler) — that are posting billions in profits. The UAW strike is a proxy war for whether the working class in America can be saved — by reversing decades of income inequality that soared as union membership plunged.
It feels like a moment for the epic labor song written in the depths of the Great Depression by an organizer for the United Mine Workers in Kentucky’s bloody Harlan County, “Which Side Are You On?” If you are a Republican running to get elected president in 2024, you are not on the side of America’s auto workers. It turns out that the best and brightest of the new “party of the working class” just can’t quit their love affair with billionaire CEOs.
“We’re all going to suffer from this,” Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, told (who else?) Fox News when asked about the UAW strike. Haley occasionally tries to position herself as a more compassionate conservative in the crowded GOP primary field, but she holds no compassion for union workers. She bragged in the interview that she is a “union buster,” and that she brought jobs to the Palmetto State without what she sees as the scourge of organized labor.
Yet Haley didn’t go as far as her fellow South Carolinian, Sen. Tim Scott, who
It’s also a simple concept that’s illegal under U.S. labor law — employers can’t fire a union member for striking — but facts weren’t as important for Scott as espousing what even his fellow conservative, the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, called “zombie Reaganism,” the perfect term for an idea that is not just brain-dead but increasingly past its expiration date.
One poll showed that 75% of Americans are supporting the UAW strikers over management, which suggests that even a lot of Republicans support the picketers. More broadly, a Gallup Poll this summer found that 67% of the public are supportive of unions, consolidating a trend that began when the economic crisis of 2008-09 dramatized how far the pendulum of inequality had swung toward corporations and billionaires, and away from the U.S. worker.
Unreal. Tim Scott (@votetimscott) said companies should "absolutely" fire workers who strike for better wages and safer working conditions pic.twitter.com/GpdmVkdmIe — American Bridge 21st Century (@American_Bridge) September 19, 2023
“When looking at these strikes that have been happening recently, it becomes very clear where their loyalties lie and their priorities lie,” Ken Jacobs, who chairs the University of California, Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, told me about the modern GOP. “Some Republican commentators have argued that Republicans should find a way to be more a party of the working class, but when you dig down into their proposals, they are still anti-union or anti-working people.”
You could argue the current state of affairs began on May 8, 1970, the date of the notorious Hard Hat Riot, when union workers attacked a rally of anti-Vietnam War protesters in lower Manhattan. The GOP‘s Richard Nixon seized the moment, inviting New York union leaders to the White House to herald a new strategy of playing on the resentments of the college-educated New Left to peel away blue-collar votes. The plan worked, at least among a white working-class that became Reagan Democrats in the 1980s and full-throated Republicans when Fox News arrived to amp up a culture war.
So is the GOP the party of the working class? Yes, and no. In the 2022 midterms, Republicans captured a record 55% of “non-college voters” — a not totally accurate proxy for the blue-collar electorate — by continuing to pull in two-thirds of whites without a diploma, and gaining votes from non-college-educated Latinos. But Democrats are increasing votes in specifically union households — 55% in 2022 balloting.
No wonder the GOP is aggressively putting the union movement down.
South Carolina, the home state of both Haley and Scott, is instructive. It may indeed be — as Haley boasted to Fox News — the most anti-labor state in America, with just 1.7% of workers carrying a union card. It’s not a coincidence that a survey this year by the business network CNBC ranked South Carolina the fourth-worst state for workers, writing: “South Carolina is an unhealthy state, both at home and on the job. The state has the nation’s fifth-highest rate of occupational deaths and it finishes in the top 10 for frequent physical and mental distress overall. Legal protections for workers are limited ... ”
Gee, if only there was some kind of organization that could fight for safer factories and warehouses, a less stressful workplace, and codified employee protections, not to mention increasing paychecks (since South Carolina also is the 10th-worst state for poverty). The problem for the GOP is that more and more voters see what’s happening here.
This is not 1970, or 1984. Culture warring begins to lose its impact when blue-collar workers realize how far they’ve fallen behind over a half-century, or connect GOP policies with the fact that CEOs now make nearly 400 times as much as their workers.
The epitome of the labor conundrum for the Republican Party is the man much more likely than a Haley or Scott to be its 2024 nominee: Donald Trump. The 45th president may be a corrupt autocratic narcissist, but his political instincts aren’t quite as dumb as the South Carolina brigade. He’s threatened to visit a UAW picket line in Michigan while his distant rivals are debating next week in California. But even Trump can’t help but get drawn back into anti-unionism, having made remarks critical of the UAW just days earlier.
The reality is that Trump had four years in the Oval Office to prove that Republicans are the party of the working class, and he whiffed, badly. His administration specifically weakened the right to organize in the workplace and made it easier for companies to fight unions. POTUS 45 also signed a tax cut enriching billionaires and corporations, sent to him by a GOP Congress that refused to raise the minimum wage. Perhaps that’s not surprising, considering that as a developer, he’d built his landmark Trump Tower with non-union, undocumented workers.
Look, labor issues are politically complicated. Just ask President Joe Biden, whose sentiments — both personally and politically — are clearly pro-union, and yet is hampered by the fact he also wants a short strike and needs to negotiate with both sides. GOP candidates have no such burden and can say whatever they want, and what most want to say is that “the party of the working class” despises unions — the only people out there fighting for the working class to have a better life.
I hope that Trump does try and walk the picket line in Detroit next week, because it may not be the lovefest that he fantasizes about from his castle at Mar-a-Lago. The longer that the UAW’s fight for a fair deal goes on, the more that those Americans with calluses on their hands are realizing that the frauds of the Republican Party are not on their side.
JACK SMITH AND FANI WILLIS HAVE A SECRET WEAPON: DONALD TRUMP
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Four-times indicted former president Donald Trump and his co-defendants are turning out to be special counsel Jack Smith’s and Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis’s secret weapons. Their trail of admissions of wrongdoing, failed efforts at moving their cases to federal court and incriminating documents provide evidence that prosecutors only dream of collecting.
The “advice of counsel” defense posits that if you received and accepted reasonable legal advice, you might not have had the requisite intent for certain crimes.
Whatever the shortcomings in Kristen Welker’s “Meet the Press” interview, it did provide Trump with the opportunity to disarm one of his defenses to the indictments regarding Jan. 6, 2021. Welker asked, “The most senior lawyers in your own administration and in your campaign told you that after you lost more than 60 legal challenges that it was over. Why did you ignore them and decide to listen to a new outside group of attorneys?” He responded that he didn’t “respect them.” He explained, “You know who I listen to? Myself. I saw what happened, I watched that election, and I thought the election was over at 10 o’clock in the evening. My instincts are a big part of it. That’s been the thing that’s gotten me to where I am — my instincts.”
Just to make sure everyone understood he wasn’t blaming the lawyers, he reiterated, “It was my decision. I listened to some people.”
His attorneys might now be barred from even raising the defense. Prosecutors in Georgia state court and in federal court in D.C. will argue that when the client expressly disclaims following lawyers’ advice, they cannot tell a jury they were following their lawyers’ counsel. Unless his lawyers are willing to put Trump on the stand to explain his interview answers (which would open him to devastating cross-examination and waive his Fifth Amendment rights), the advice of counsel defense might be gone for good.
In addition, Trump’s co-defendants’ failing efforts to move the Georgia case to federal court have done Trump no favors. Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows implicated Trump in the phony-elector plot, acknowledged he had no evidence of fraud and conceded at least some of these activities were campaign-related (which would obliterate an immunity defense for him and Trump).
Former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark didn’t help matters either in his written declaration (which the judge refused to accept because a defendant must testify or provide other admissible evidence to justify removal). The Post reported that Clark’s attorney argued at the removal hearing that others in the administration said Clark was “acting outside of his lane” but that Trump “put it in his lane.” Clark also claims that he sent letters to Georgia and other state officials “only after he was pressed to do so by then-President Donald Trump.” This also undercuts any Trump defense that he was acting at the behest of lawyers.
Trump also appears to have dug his own legal grave in the Mar-a-Lago indictment involving the Espionage Act and obstruction (e.g., the audio recording of him bragging about possessing Iran war plans, a “reckless” Jan. 6, 2021, tweet about Vice President Mike Pence). Trump routinely makes declarations that affirm he consciously withheld documents from the government, indicating that he believes himself infallible and revealing his gross misunderstanding of the Constitution. (He’s wrongfully insisted he had the “right” to do what he wanted and that the Presidential Records Act permitted him to defy demands to return the documents.)
ABC News reported, “One of former president Donald Trump’s long-time assistants told federal investigators that Trump repeatedly wrote to-do lists for her on documents from the White House that were marked classified, according to sources familiar with her statements.” (Writing a to-do list on a classified document would be peak Trump conduct.)
The report continued: “The aide, Molly Michael, told investigators that — more than once — she received requests or taskings from Trump that were written on the back of notecards, and she later recognized those notecards as sensitive White House materials — with visible classification markings — used to brief Trump while he was still in office about phone calls with foreign leaders or other international-related matters.”
Worse still: “After Trump heard the FBI wanted to interview Michael last year, Trump allegedly told her, ‘You don’t know anything about the boxes.’” It sure sounds like Trump was obstructing the investigation and/or encouraging her to lie:
As Trump continued to claim that there were no more boxes, Michael even pointed out to him that many people, including maintenance workers, knew otherwise because they had all seen that there were many more than 15 boxes, sources said she told investigators.
Smith's indictment against Trump alleges that Trump asked one of his attorneys at the time, "Wouldn't it be better if we just told them we don't have anything here?"
Speaking later with investigators, Michael said she believed early on that claims of no more boxes from Trump were “easily” disproven, and she believed Trump knew they were false because he knew the contents of those boxes better than anyone else — and because he had previously seen a photograph of the storage room with all 90 or so boxes in it, ABC News was told.
Let’s count the ways in which this might be damaging. First and foremost, it can negate the notion that Trump didn’t know what was in the boxes. Second, that he was worried and allegedly encouraged Michael to lie indicates that he did not believe he truly had a right to the documents or that he had declassified them. If Michael is credible and supported by other witnesses, Trump’s “to-do” list and his conversations will be powerful evidence in the documents case.
Trump’s statements and the testimony of his co-defendants point in one direction: He engaged in conduct outside presidential powers and disregarded or overrode advice of counsel. Meanwhile, his notes, statements affirming his willful retention of documents and the testimony of an aide shore up evidence of willful intent and obstruction of justice.
Bottom line: Trump and his cohorts’ arrogance have made prosecutors’ cases all the more compelling.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Four-times indicted former president Donald Trump and his co-defendants are turning out to be special counsel Jack Smith’s and Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis’s secret weapons. Their trail of admissions of wrongdoing, failed efforts at moving their cases to federal court and incriminating documents provide evidence that prosecutors only dream of collecting.
The “advice of counsel” defense posits that if you received and accepted reasonable legal advice, you might not have had the requisite intent for certain crimes.
Whatever the shortcomings in Kristen Welker’s “Meet the Press” interview, it did provide Trump with the opportunity to disarm one of his defenses to the indictments regarding Jan. 6, 2021. Welker asked, “The most senior lawyers in your own administration and in your campaign told you that after you lost more than 60 legal challenges that it was over. Why did you ignore them and decide to listen to a new outside group of attorneys?” He responded that he didn’t “respect them.” He explained, “You know who I listen to? Myself. I saw what happened, I watched that election, and I thought the election was over at 10 o’clock in the evening. My instincts are a big part of it. That’s been the thing that’s gotten me to where I am — my instincts.”
Just to make sure everyone understood he wasn’t blaming the lawyers, he reiterated, “It was my decision. I listened to some people.”
His attorneys might now be barred from even raising the defense. Prosecutors in Georgia state court and in federal court in D.C. will argue that when the client expressly disclaims following lawyers’ advice, they cannot tell a jury they were following their lawyers’ counsel. Unless his lawyers are willing to put Trump on the stand to explain his interview answers (which would open him to devastating cross-examination and waive his Fifth Amendment rights), the advice of counsel defense might be gone for good.
In addition, Trump’s co-defendants’ failing efforts to move the Georgia case to federal court have done Trump no favors. Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows implicated Trump in the phony-elector plot, acknowledged he had no evidence of fraud and conceded at least some of these activities were campaign-related (which would obliterate an immunity defense for him and Trump).
Former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark didn’t help matters either in his written declaration (which the judge refused to accept because a defendant must testify or provide other admissible evidence to justify removal). The Post reported that Clark’s attorney argued at the removal hearing that others in the administration said Clark was “acting outside of his lane” but that Trump “put it in his lane.” Clark also claims that he sent letters to Georgia and other state officials “only after he was pressed to do so by then-President Donald Trump.” This also undercuts any Trump defense that he was acting at the behest of lawyers.
Trump also appears to have dug his own legal grave in the Mar-a-Lago indictment involving the Espionage Act and obstruction (e.g., the audio recording of him bragging about possessing Iran war plans, a “reckless” Jan. 6, 2021, tweet about Vice President Mike Pence). Trump routinely makes declarations that affirm he consciously withheld documents from the government, indicating that he believes himself infallible and revealing his gross misunderstanding of the Constitution. (He’s wrongfully insisted he had the “right” to do what he wanted and that the Presidential Records Act permitted him to defy demands to return the documents.)
ABC News reported, “One of former president Donald Trump’s long-time assistants told federal investigators that Trump repeatedly wrote to-do lists for her on documents from the White House that were marked classified, according to sources familiar with her statements.” (Writing a to-do list on a classified document would be peak Trump conduct.)
The report continued: “The aide, Molly Michael, told investigators that — more than once — she received requests or taskings from Trump that were written on the back of notecards, and she later recognized those notecards as sensitive White House materials — with visible classification markings — used to brief Trump while he was still in office about phone calls with foreign leaders or other international-related matters.”
Worse still: “After Trump heard the FBI wanted to interview Michael last year, Trump allegedly told her, ‘You don’t know anything about the boxes.’” It sure sounds like Trump was obstructing the investigation and/or encouraging her to lie:
As Trump continued to claim that there were no more boxes, Michael even pointed out to him that many people, including maintenance workers, knew otherwise because they had all seen that there were many more than 15 boxes, sources said she told investigators.
Smith's indictment against Trump alleges that Trump asked one of his attorneys at the time, "Wouldn't it be better if we just told them we don't have anything here?"
Speaking later with investigators, Michael said she believed early on that claims of no more boxes from Trump were “easily” disproven, and she believed Trump knew they were false because he knew the contents of those boxes better than anyone else — and because he had previously seen a photograph of the storage room with all 90 or so boxes in it, ABC News was told.
Let’s count the ways in which this might be damaging. First and foremost, it can negate the notion that Trump didn’t know what was in the boxes. Second, that he was worried and allegedly encouraged Michael to lie indicates that he did not believe he truly had a right to the documents or that he had declassified them. If Michael is credible and supported by other witnesses, Trump’s “to-do” list and his conversations will be powerful evidence in the documents case.
Trump’s statements and the testimony of his co-defendants point in one direction: He engaged in conduct outside presidential powers and disregarded or overrode advice of counsel. Meanwhile, his notes, statements affirming his willful retention of documents and the testimony of an aide shore up evidence of willful intent and obstruction of justice.
Bottom line: Trump and his cohorts’ arrogance have made prosecutors’ cases all the more compelling.
BIDEN’S NEW CLIMATE CORPS WILL TRAIN THOUSANDS OF YOUNG PEOPLE
It comes after a similar program was dropped from the Inflation Reduction Act
By Maxine Joselow, The Washington Post
President Biden on Wednesday announced an initiative to train more than 20,000 young people in skills crucial to combating climate change, such as installing solar panels, restoring coastal wetlands and retrofitting homes to be more energy-efficient.
The American Climate Corps comes as Biden seeks to win over young voters, a critical constituency, before next year’s presidential election. Polls show that climate change is a top concern for young people, who are more likely than older generations to face raging wildfires, stronger storms and rising seas in their lifetimes.
The initiative resembles a proposal that was included in an early version of Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act. The Civilian Climate Corps was ultimately dropped from the final version of the legislation during private negotiations last summer between Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.).
Since then, many Democrats and climate activists have called on Biden to use his executive authority to resurrect the Civilian Climate Corps. In a TikTok video Monday that racked up more than 16,000 views, the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led climate group, declared that “Dark Brandon would pass a CCC” — a reference to a meme that Biden’s 2024 campaign has embraced.
Youth climate activists have criticized the Biden administration for approving new fossil fuel projects such as the Willow oil drilling project in Alaska, with the hashtag #StopWillow going viral this spring. They say the president must do more to curb America’s dependence on fossil fuels, the leading cause of global warming, to lock in their support.
“I can’t speak on behalf of every single youth voter, but if President Biden continues to take bold climate action like this, I think it could go a long way,” Varshini Prakash, co-founder and executive director of Sunrise Movement, said in an interview. “Young people need to see more policies like this from the administration in the lead-up to the election.”
How will the Climate Corps work?
As part of a recruitment push, the White House on Wednesday will launch a new website where Americans can sign up to learn more about the workforce training program. All participants in the program will be paid, administration officials said, although they declined to disclose specific salaries.
The officials, who are closely monitoring the United Auto Workers’ ongoing strike against Detroit’s Big Three automakers, emphasized the program would help young people secure high-quality jobs after their training is complete.
The administration “will specifically be focused on making sure that folks that are coming through this program have a pathway into good-paying union jobs,” White House National Climate Adviser Ali Zaidi said on a Tuesday call with reporters previewing the announcement. “We’re very keenly focused on that.”
Zaidi said the initiative could help train the next generation of electricians. The country faces a dire shortage of electricians, who are needed to install a host of climate-friendly technologies, including heat pumps, efficient air conditioners and electric car chargers.
Biden’s push to transition to electric vehicles has become a key sticking point for the striking autoworkers, who fear the shift to EVs will mean fewer jobs and lower pay. The new initiative demonstrates that “green jobs can be good jobs,” said Trevor Dolan, industry and workforce policy lead at Evergreen Action, a climate advocacy group.
Where did the idea for the Climate Corps come from?
Biden is not the first president to envision such a program. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Civilian Conservation Corps, which putmore than 3 million young men to work planting trees, constructing trails and making improvements to the nation’s infrastructure. However, the New Deal-era plan limited leadership roles to White men, whereas “this climate corps will uplift and empower a diverse and inclusive workforce,” Prakash said.
Biden’s move bypasses gridlock on Capitol Hill, where Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) have introduced legislation to establish a Civilian Climate Corps that is unlikely to pass the Republican-controlled House. In recognition of this reality, Markey and Ocasio-Cortez sent a letter to the president on Monday urging him to take executive action.
“We must mobilize and train Americans to tackle the threats climate change poses to our communities by putting people to work on thousands of projects with one shared sense of purpose,” Markey said in a statement.
How much will the Climate Corps cost?
Democrats had proposed $30 billion in new funding for the Civilian Climate Corps that was included in the early version of the Inflation Reduction Act. In contrast, the new initiative will rely on existing funding sources, although administration officials declined to say how much money the program will receive or where these dollars will come from.
In the absence of federal action, eight states have established versions of climate corps programs, many of which are embedded in state governments and receive federal funding from AmeriCorps. The White House announced Wednesday that an additional five states — Arizona, Maryland, Minnesota, North Carolina and Utah — will move forward with climate corps programs that are funded through public-private partnerships, including AmeriCorps.
In California, which established the nation’s first climate corps program in 2020, participants have sought to divert food from landfills — a significant source of climate pollution — to residents who struggle with food insecurity. Meanwhile in Michigan, the program has partnered with Wayne State University to help Detroiters protect their homes from flooding, which has been exacerbated by rising global temperatures.
It comes after a similar program was dropped from the Inflation Reduction Act
By Maxine Joselow, The Washington Post
President Biden on Wednesday announced an initiative to train more than 20,000 young people in skills crucial to combating climate change, such as installing solar panels, restoring coastal wetlands and retrofitting homes to be more energy-efficient.
The American Climate Corps comes as Biden seeks to win over young voters, a critical constituency, before next year’s presidential election. Polls show that climate change is a top concern for young people, who are more likely than older generations to face raging wildfires, stronger storms and rising seas in their lifetimes.
The initiative resembles a proposal that was included in an early version of Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act. The Civilian Climate Corps was ultimately dropped from the final version of the legislation during private negotiations last summer between Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.).
Since then, many Democrats and climate activists have called on Biden to use his executive authority to resurrect the Civilian Climate Corps. In a TikTok video Monday that racked up more than 16,000 views, the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led climate group, declared that “Dark Brandon would pass a CCC” — a reference to a meme that Biden’s 2024 campaign has embraced.
Youth climate activists have criticized the Biden administration for approving new fossil fuel projects such as the Willow oil drilling project in Alaska, with the hashtag #StopWillow going viral this spring. They say the president must do more to curb America’s dependence on fossil fuels, the leading cause of global warming, to lock in their support.
“I can’t speak on behalf of every single youth voter, but if President Biden continues to take bold climate action like this, I think it could go a long way,” Varshini Prakash, co-founder and executive director of Sunrise Movement, said in an interview. “Young people need to see more policies like this from the administration in the lead-up to the election.”
How will the Climate Corps work?
As part of a recruitment push, the White House on Wednesday will launch a new website where Americans can sign up to learn more about the workforce training program. All participants in the program will be paid, administration officials said, although they declined to disclose specific salaries.
The officials, who are closely monitoring the United Auto Workers’ ongoing strike against Detroit’s Big Three automakers, emphasized the program would help young people secure high-quality jobs after their training is complete.
The administration “will specifically be focused on making sure that folks that are coming through this program have a pathway into good-paying union jobs,” White House National Climate Adviser Ali Zaidi said on a Tuesday call with reporters previewing the announcement. “We’re very keenly focused on that.”
Zaidi said the initiative could help train the next generation of electricians. The country faces a dire shortage of electricians, who are needed to install a host of climate-friendly technologies, including heat pumps, efficient air conditioners and electric car chargers.
Biden’s push to transition to electric vehicles has become a key sticking point for the striking autoworkers, who fear the shift to EVs will mean fewer jobs and lower pay. The new initiative demonstrates that “green jobs can be good jobs,” said Trevor Dolan, industry and workforce policy lead at Evergreen Action, a climate advocacy group.
Where did the idea for the Climate Corps come from?
Biden is not the first president to envision such a program. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Civilian Conservation Corps, which put
Biden’s move bypasses gridlock on Capitol Hill, where Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) have introduced legislation to establish a Civilian Climate Corps that is unlikely to pass the Republican-controlled House. In recognition of this reality, Markey and Ocasio-Cortez sent a letter to the president on Monday urging him to take executive action.
“We must mobilize and train Americans to tackle the threats climate change poses to our communities by putting people to work on thousands of projects with one shared sense of purpose,” Markey said in a statement.
How much will the Climate Corps cost?
Democrats had proposed $30 billion in new funding for the Civilian Climate Corps that was included in the early version of the Inflation Reduction Act. In contrast, the new initiative will rely on existing funding sources, although administration officials declined to say how much money the program will receive or where these dollars will come from.
In the absence of federal action, eight states have established versions of climate corps programs, many of which are embedded in state governments and receive federal funding from AmeriCorps. The White House announced Wednesday that an additional five states — Arizona, Maryland, Minnesota, North Carolina and Utah — will move forward with climate corps programs that are funded through public-private partnerships, including AmeriCorps.
In California, which established the nation’s first climate corps program in 2020, participants have sought to divert food from landfills — a significant source of climate pollution — to residents who struggle with food insecurity. Meanwhile in Michigan, the program has partnered with Wayne State University to help Detroiters protect their homes from flooding, which has been exacerbated by rising global temperatures.
THE GOP WANTS TO IMPEACH BIDEN FOR ‘CORRUPTION’? DON’T MAKE ME LAUGH.
By Paul Waldman, The Washington Post
If one tried to articulate the principle on which the Republican push to impeach President Biden is based, it would have to go something like this: Public officials shouldn’t be permitted to profit from their positions, and anyone who does should be removed from office. Like any principle, this one should apply to every public official regardless of party or ideology.
But if any Republican said that out loud, the proper response would be to burst out laughing.
This isn’t just because Republicans have found no evidence that Biden is guilty of wrongdoing, despite the tireless efforts of multiple House committees. Nor is it because they have defended the relentless quest of the Trump family to profit from former president Donald Trump’s time in the White House. Hypocrisy might be the tribute vice pays to virtue, but Republicans stopped paying any tribute to virtue long ago. They sped right past hypocrisy to arrive at something entirely different.
Republicans are not characterizing their impeachment push against Biden as an attempt to bring strict ethical standards back to government. There’s no high-minded talk of integrity, moral rectitude or the solemn obligations of public service. That’s because they are in the midst of a years-long crusade to convince the public to not care about corruption.
That crusade is only partly about defending Trump, perhaps the most shamelessly corrupt president in U.S. history. He installed his laughably unqualified family members in White House positions. He spent a good amount of time in office at his various resorts, charging the Secret Service as much as $1,185 a night per room to stay there to protect him. His Washington hotel became a destination for anyone who wanted to put some money directly in his pocket; foreign governments spent millions of dollars there, as did a fleet of Republican candidates and party flunkies. Foreign governments also eagerly gave special favors to Trump’s businesses. His relentless advocacy for the government of Saudi Arabia while in office was followed by the Saudis giving son-in-law Jared Kushner $2 billion for his start-up private equity firm, even though the Saudis’ own investment advisers found Kushner’s operation “unsatisfactory in all aspects.”
And that doesn’t even get into the litany of Trump associates with flexible ethics, including multiple Cabinet members and a raft of cronies who faced their own scandals and criminal charges.
Were Republicans bothered by this orgy of self-dealing? They were not. In fact, judging by the myriad ways they have decimated the legal and normative standards to which public officials must abide, they were perfectly sincere when they insisted that Trump’s actions were nothing worse than what voters should expect of anyone in high office.
For instance, the GOP effort to remove nearly all restrictions on how much money corporations and the wealthy can give to candidates goes back decades. It had its greatest success with the Citizens United case, which opened the floodgates to a tidal wave of spending on campaigns. They also celebrated another Supreme Court case, McDonnell v. United States, which redefined what constituted an “official act,” ruling that the favors former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell did for donors who showered him with money and gifts while in office didn’t qualify as corruption.
Speaking of the Supreme Court, in recent weeks, reporters have exposed the extravagant largesse that billionaire Harlan Crow has lavished on Justice Clarence Thomas, which included not just luxury vacations but also paying the private-school tuition of a Thomas relative. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. has also taken advantage of billionaire-funded hospitality. These revelations were greeted by Republicans everywhere with either a shrug or a rush to defend the right-wing justices. How dare anyone impugn their character by claiming there’s something wrong with taking gifts from super-rich “friends” who have a deep interest in the decisions the court makes?
Given the GOP’s clear position on what ought to be expected of public officials at all levels, one might be tempted to label it the “pro-corruption” party. But it would be more accurate to say that its position is that we should stop worrying about corruption altogether.
So listen closely as Republicans offer their wild tales of President Biden’s alleged wrongdoing, spun from innuendo and outright lies. They’ll say Biden is “corrupt,” but they likely won’t say why corruption is bad. Because they don’t think it is.
By Paul Waldman, The Washington Post
If one tried to articulate the principle on which the Republican push to impeach President Biden is based, it would have to go something like this: Public officials shouldn’t be permitted to profit from their positions, and anyone who does should be removed from office. Like any principle, this one should apply to every public official regardless of party or ideology.
But if any Republican said that out loud, the proper response would be to burst out laughing.
This isn’t just because Republicans have found no evidence that Biden is guilty of wrongdoing, despite the tireless efforts of multiple House committees. Nor is it because they have defended the relentless quest of the Trump family to profit from former president Donald Trump’s time in the White House. Hypocrisy might be the tribute vice pays to virtue, but Republicans stopped paying any tribute to virtue long ago. They sped right past hypocrisy to arrive at something entirely different.
Republicans are not characterizing their impeachment push against Biden as an attempt to bring strict ethical standards back to government. There’s no high-minded talk of integrity, moral rectitude or the solemn obligations of public service. That’s because they are in the midst of a years-long crusade to convince the public to not care about corruption.
That crusade is only partly about defending Trump, perhaps the most shamelessly corrupt president in U.S. history. He installed his laughably unqualified family members in White House positions. He spent a good amount of time in office at his various resorts, charging the Secret Service as much as $1,185 a night per room to stay there to protect him. His Washington hotel became a destination for anyone who wanted to put some money directly in his pocket; foreign governments spent millions of dollars there, as did a fleet of Republican candidates and party flunkies. Foreign governments also eagerly gave special favors to Trump’s businesses. His relentless advocacy for the government of Saudi Arabia while in office was followed by the Saudis giving son-in-law Jared Kushner $2 billion for his start-up private equity firm, even though the Saudis’ own investment advisers found Kushner’s operation “unsatisfactory in all aspects.”
And that doesn’t even get into the litany of Trump associates with flexible ethics, including multiple Cabinet members and a raft of cronies who faced their own scandals and criminal charges.
Were Republicans bothered by this orgy of self-dealing? They were not. In fact, judging by the myriad ways they have decimated the legal and normative standards to which public officials must abide, they were perfectly sincere when they insisted that Trump’s actions were nothing worse than what voters should expect of anyone in high office.
For instance, the GOP effort to remove nearly all restrictions on how much money corporations and the wealthy can give to candidates goes back decades. It had its greatest success with the Citizens United case, which opened the floodgates to a tidal wave of spending on campaigns. They also celebrated another Supreme Court case, McDonnell v. United States, which redefined what constituted an “official act,” ruling that the favors former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell did for donors who showered him with money and gifts while in office didn’t qualify as corruption.
Speaking of the Supreme Court, in recent weeks, reporters have exposed the extravagant largesse that billionaire Harlan Crow has lavished on Justice Clarence Thomas, which included not just luxury vacations but also paying the private-school tuition of a Thomas relative. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. has also taken advantage of billionaire-funded hospitality. These revelations were greeted by Republicans everywhere with either a shrug or a rush to defend the right-wing justices. How dare anyone impugn their character by claiming there’s something wrong with taking gifts from super-rich “friends” who have a deep interest in the decisions the court makes?
Given the GOP’s clear position on what ought to be expected of public officials at all levels, one might be tempted to label it the “pro-corruption” party. But it would be more accurate to say that its position is that we should stop worrying about corruption altogether.
So listen closely as Republicans offer their wild tales of President Biden’s alleged wrongdoing, spun from innuendo and outright lies. They’ll say Biden is “corrupt,” but they likely won’t say why corruption is bad. Because they don’t think it is.
THIS IS WHAT TAKING ON ELECTION DENIERS REALLY LOOKS LIKE
By Greg Sargent, The Washington Post
Democrats won a whole lot of elections in 2022, in no small part on their vow to strengthen and defend democracy. But if they hope to turn the issue into a sustained political winner, they have to deliver on that promise by showing voters what a pro-democracy governing agenda actually looks like.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is set to make a big move in this direction by unveiling a big change on Tuesday that will implement what’s known as “automatic voter registration” statewide.
Automatic registration makes getting on the voter rolls something you have to opt out of, rather than actively sign up for in advance. An underappreciated success story, it has been put into effect in two dozen states, mostly by Democrats. It typically works by automatically registering customers at state Department of Motor Vehicles offices (or other agencies) or by automatically extending them that option, while offering an opt-out alternative.
“I see voter participation as key to strengthening democracy,” Shapiro told me in an interview, noting that he is “committed to ensuring free and fair elections, and to making sure every eligible voter can make their voice heard.”
The insight behind automatic voter registration is that the registration process often creates a bureaucratic barrier that needlessly dissuades voting, and is sometimes manipulated by vote-suppressors. By keeping a registration process in place while removing the need to affirmatively initiate it, studies show, AVR encourages democratic participation. AVR also tends to make voter rolls more accurate and more up to date.
In Pennsylvania’s version of automatic registration, residents who are obtaining new or renewed driver’s licenses and state ID cards will be automatically moved through the voter registration process unless they opt out — provided they are eligible voters. This will be achieved using the governor’s control over state agencies that administer processes involving driver’s licenses and voting registration.
The change could be dramatic. Shapiro said that the state has calculated that 1.6 million people who are currently eligible to vote in Pennsylvania are not registered, and his office estimates that automatic registration could add tens of thousands of new voters to the rolls.
All this has the makings of an important experiment. Perhaps no Democrat campaigned as aggressively in defense of democracy in last year’s midterm elections as Shapiro did. As state attorney general in 2020, he fought Donald Trump’s efforts to reverse his loss, and in 2022 he vowed to use the governorship to prevent a future stolen election, parlaying all that into a landslide victory over ultra-MAGA opponent Doug Mastriano.
In Pennsylvania, the state GOP continues to elevate election deniers to positions of local importance, in effect feeding doubts about the state’s voting system itself. But if automatic voter registration is well received in Pennsylvania, it could act as an antidote to that MAGA mania.
That’s because efforts to weaken public confidence in elections often seek to exploit existing public beliefs that the system is cumbersome and prone to human error and hacking, even if those beliefs are wrong. If automatic registration can make the voter rolls more accurate and make the system of enrollment and registration more efficient and user-friendly, that could make voters less susceptible to that sort of demagoguery.
“The answer to people undermining faith in our democracy is to give people a democracy that works,” Sean Morales-Doyle, the director of the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights Program, told me. He added that automatic voter registration shows voters that “the people who are attacking our democracy are wrong” and that “the people who are running our elections are trustworthy.”
This is why those who win elections by vowing to protect democracy should deliver on a broader pro-democracy program. In Minnesota, Democrats who gained ground at the state level passed such a package earlier this year. Such policies, which include expanded early voting, same-day registration and no-excuse absentee voting, are all designed to make election systems more functional and inclusive.
Republicans at the state level have been gerrymandering, restricting ballot access and manipulating the rules of political competition for decades. But Trump has exacerbated these tendencies: Right now, Republicans in numerous states are responding to recent election losses by supercharging anti-democratic, anti-majoritarian tactics — even though evidence is mounting that people are growing accustomed to voting in defense of democracy.
Offering a concrete pro-democracy agenda is a good way for Democrats to keep reinforcing that positive dynamic — and keep throwing MAGA on the defensive.
By Greg Sargent, The Washington Post
Democrats won a whole lot of elections in 2022, in no small part on their vow to strengthen and defend democracy. But if they hope to turn the issue into a sustained political winner, they have to deliver on that promise by showing voters what a pro-democracy governing agenda actually looks like.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is set to make a big move in this direction by unveiling a big change on Tuesday that will implement what’s known as “automatic voter registration” statewide.
Automatic registration makes getting on the voter rolls something you have to opt out of, rather than actively sign up for in advance. An underappreciated success story, it has been put into effect in two dozen states, mostly by Democrats. It typically works by automatically registering customers at state Department of Motor Vehicles offices (or other agencies) or by automatically extending them that option, while offering an opt-out alternative.
“I see voter participation as key to strengthening democracy,” Shapiro told me in an interview, noting that he is “committed to ensuring free and fair elections, and to making sure every eligible voter can make their voice heard.”
The insight behind automatic voter registration is that the registration process often creates a bureaucratic barrier that needlessly dissuades voting, and is sometimes manipulated by vote-suppressors. By keeping a registration process in place while removing the need to affirmatively initiate it, studies show, AVR encourages democratic participation. AVR also tends to make voter rolls more accurate and more up to date.
In Pennsylvania’s version of automatic registration, residents who are obtaining new or renewed driver’s licenses and state ID cards will be automatically moved through the voter registration process unless they opt out — provided they are eligible voters. This will be achieved using the governor’s control over state agencies that administer processes involving driver’s licenses and voting registration.
The change could be dramatic. Shapiro said that the state has calculated that 1.6 million people who are currently eligible to vote in Pennsylvania are not registered, and his office estimates that automatic registration could add tens of thousands of new voters to the rolls.
All this has the makings of an important experiment. Perhaps no Democrat campaigned as aggressively in defense of democracy in last year’s midterm elections as Shapiro did. As state attorney general in 2020, he fought Donald Trump’s efforts to reverse his loss, and in 2022 he vowed to use the governorship to prevent a future stolen election, parlaying all that into a landslide victory over ultra-MAGA opponent Doug Mastriano.
In Pennsylvania, the state GOP continues to elevate election deniers to positions of local importance, in effect feeding doubts about the state’s voting system itself. But if automatic voter registration is well received in Pennsylvania, it could act as an antidote to that MAGA mania.
That’s because efforts to weaken public confidence in elections often seek to exploit existing public beliefs that the system is cumbersome and prone to human error and hacking, even if those beliefs are wrong. If automatic registration can make the voter rolls more accurate and make the system of enrollment and registration more efficient and user-friendly, that could make voters less susceptible to that sort of demagoguery.
“The answer to people undermining faith in our democracy is to give people a democracy that works,” Sean Morales-Doyle, the director of the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights Program, told me. He added that automatic voter registration shows voters that “the people who are attacking our democracy are wrong” and that “the people who are running our elections are trustworthy.”
This is why those who win elections by vowing to protect democracy should deliver on a broader pro-democracy program. In Minnesota, Democrats who gained ground at the state level passed such a package earlier this year. Such policies, which include expanded early voting, same-day registration and no-excuse absentee voting, are all designed to make election systems more functional and inclusive.
Republicans at the state level have been gerrymandering, restricting ballot access and manipulating the rules of political competition for decades. But Trump has exacerbated these tendencies: Right now, Republicans in numerous states are responding to recent election losses by supercharging anti-democratic, anti-majoritarian tactics — even though evidence is mounting that people are growing accustomed to voting in defense of democracy.
Offering a concrete pro-democracy agenda is a good way for Democrats to keep reinforcing that positive dynamic — and keep throwing MAGA on the defensive.
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY HAS DEVOLVED INTO A RACKET
By Sam Rosenfeld and Daniel Schlozman, authors of the forthcoming “The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics.”
This is the Republican Party today. In the House, Speaker Kevin McCarthy, trying to corral a fractious majority, has ordered an impeachment inquiry into President Biden over his son’s financial entanglements, even as elements in his caucus push to shut down the government unless there are drastic cuts in spending. In the Senate, Mitt Romney announced his plan to retire, having declared to his biographer that “a very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”
In Wisconsin and North Carolina, G.O.P. legislators push the envelope of hardball tactics to remove or disempower Democrats in other branches of government. And in the presidential campaign, Republican contenders struggle to make the case for a non-Trump candidacy without antagonizing Donald Trump’s many supporters, and often avoid major spheres of public policy.
Together these depict a party that is preoccupied with antics that crash into the guardrails of American political life and conspicuously lacks a coherent, forward-looking vision for governing. A modern political party has devolved into a racket.
The G.O.P. has lost a collective commitment to solving the nation’s problems and become purposeless, the line separating party politics from political conspiracy has frayed. Mr. Trump, in this way, is the product more than the author of that collective party failure.
The broader party work of evasion and deflection contributes to the conspiracy. The posture’s stock-in-trade is an “anti-anti” discourse, which focuses on excoriating foes rather than making explicit defenses of behavior or positive arguments about plans for the country. As Senator Romney described the dynamic among his colleagues, “These guys have got to justify their silence, at least to themselves.” A conservative media ecosystem, including Fox News, helps enable a politics of performative antics and profits handsomely from it.
The Trump-focused personalism that has defined Republican politics since 2015 is more a symptom than the cause of the party’s pathology. Indeed, the combined conspiracy of insider electoral malfeasance and outsider “anti-anti” attacks says less about how spellbound the party is by Mr. Trump than about how aimless it has become beyond the struggle for power and the demonization of its enemies.
Trump unleashed a hostile takeover of a hollowed and delegitimized party, the conspiracism and the transactional view of political institutions had fully joined. Conspiracism brought about active conspiracy.
The Republican Party of the 21st century has succumbed to erosion of collective party principle, and so revived something of the brittle and unstable quality of politics in the Republic’s early years. This leaves the Republic itself, now as then, vulnerable.
Without a commitment to solve problems, the tendencies to conspiracism and ultimately conspiracy prove harder to resist. Barring the sort of fundamental course correction that typically comes only from the defeats of many political actors in multiple elections, those tendencies inside the Republican Party will endure long after, and regardless of how, Mr. Trump departs from the scene. These responsible individual actions simply cannot substitute for a conspicuously missing party project.
As long as that remains so, the impulse to conspiracy will remain, and democracy will depend on keeping it in check.
By Sam Rosenfeld and Daniel Schlozman, authors of the forthcoming “The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics.”
This is the Republican Party today. In the House, Speaker Kevin McCarthy, trying to corral a fractious majority, has ordered an impeachment inquiry into President Biden over his son’s financial entanglements, even as elements in his caucus push to shut down the government unless there are drastic cuts in spending. In the Senate, Mitt Romney announced his plan to retire, having declared to his biographer that “a very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”
In Wisconsin and North Carolina, G.O.P. legislators push the envelope of hardball tactics to remove or disempower Democrats in other branches of government. And in the presidential campaign, Republican contenders struggle to make the case for a non-Trump candidacy without antagonizing Donald Trump’s many supporters, and often avoid major spheres of public policy.
Together these depict a party that is preoccupied with antics that crash into the guardrails of American political life and conspicuously lacks a coherent, forward-looking vision for governing. A modern political party has devolved into a racket.
The G.O.P. has lost a collective commitment to solving the nation’s problems and become purposeless, the line separating party politics from political conspiracy has frayed. Mr. Trump, in this way, is the product more than the author of that collective party failure.
The broader party work of evasion and deflection contributes to the conspiracy. The posture’s stock-in-trade is an “anti-anti” discourse, which focuses on excoriating foes rather than making explicit defenses of behavior or positive arguments about plans for the country. As Senator Romney described the dynamic among his colleagues, “These guys have got to justify their silence, at least to themselves.” A conservative media ecosystem, including Fox News, helps enable a politics of performative antics and profits handsomely from it.
The Trump-focused personalism that has defined Republican politics since 2015 is more a symptom than the cause of the party’s pathology. Indeed, the combined conspiracy of insider electoral malfeasance and outsider “anti-anti” attacks says less about how spellbound the party is by Mr. Trump than about how aimless it has become beyond the struggle for power and the demonization of its enemies.
Trump unleashed a hostile takeover of a hollowed and delegitimized party, the conspiracism and the transactional view of political institutions had fully joined. Conspiracism brought about active conspiracy.
The Republican Party of the 21st century has succumbed to erosion of collective party principle, and so revived something of the brittle and unstable quality of politics in the Republic’s early years. This leaves the Republic itself, now as then, vulnerable.
Without a commitment to solve problems, the tendencies to conspiracism and ultimately conspiracy prove harder to resist. Barring the sort of fundamental course correction that typically comes only from the defeats of many political actors in multiple elections, those tendencies inside the Republican Party will endure long after, and regardless of how, Mr. Trump departs from the scene. These responsible individual actions simply cannot substitute for a conspicuously missing party project.
As long as that remains so, the impulse to conspiracy will remain, and democracy will depend on keeping it in check.
FLORIDA’S BIG LIE ON VACCINES IS A SCARY PREVIEW OF HOW GOP WOULD RUN AMERICA
Ron DeSantis's Florida puts the health of its citizens at risk, bucking the science on COVID-19 vaccine.
by Will Bunch, The Phuladelphia Inquirer
The initial, overrepeated mantra of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign was that “Florida is the state where ‘woke’ goes to die.” Now, a growing number of scientists and public-health experts are worried that the governor of America’s third-largest state may be adding a second risk of death to that list.
His own citizens.
In what should be seen as an alarming moment in America’s descent into misinformation and political demagoguery, DeSantis’s hand-picked state surgeon general, Joseph Lapado, is telling Florida residents under age 65 to avoid a new anti-COVID booster vaccine. That’s the exact opposite of what the nation’s public-health agencies and most experts are recommending to prevent a fall 2023 resurgence of the pandemic. Our would-be POTUS DeSantis is totally on board with his anti-vax medical adviser, claiming he won’t allow healthy Floridians to be “guinea pigs.”
But history and science suggest that some folks who refuse to become “guinea pigs” could become corpses, or will suffer the debilitating impact of long COVID. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, had two words for the Washington Post about Florida’s anti-vaccine guidance: “It’s dangerous.”
Hello, and welcome to the free state of Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis is responsibly telling residents under 65 years old to defy the advice of the FDA and CDC and not get the updated COVID-19 vaccine. LIVE FREE AND DIE, BABY!https://t.co/kiGVypVcHN — Rex Huppke (@RexHuppke) September 14, 2023
Offit told the newspaper there’s legitimate debate over who should be prioritized for receiving the new booster — reformulated to attack recent, dominant strains of the coronavirus — but that what Lapado and DeSantis are doing is casting deeper and unwarranted doubt on the effacy of COVID-19 vaccines more generally. “They have been given a platform and abused it,” he said.
Indeed, at a moment when objective testing — such as levels of the coronavirus in municipal sewage wastewater — is showing a COVID-19 spike equal to some of the worst peaks in 2020 and 2021, Florida is already at severe risk. In fact, the state with one of the five oldest populations in the United States is currently leading the nation in new COVID-19 hospitalizations, with 11.81 per 100,000 residents, and those numbers have been increasing.
Given the health danger, it’s sad but not a total surprise that DeSantis — whose White House bid is badly foundering and trails far behind Donald Trump — would demagogue around vaccines. It was the COVID-19 crisis in 2020 that thrust the then-first-term GOP governor onto the national stage, with his aggressive stance on reopening schools and businesses — popular with voters even if the science is mixed. But DeSantis — like Trump and other top Republicans — initially encouraged the initial vaccine when it was introduced in December 2020. Now, the Florida governor panders to an increasingly conspiratorial and anti-science base of the GOP primary electorate.
If it were an isolated incident, Florida’s stance in opposition to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration would be viewed as a stunning assault on the nation’s public-health infrastructure. But it’s not an isolated incident. Rather, it’s another glimpse — courtesy of authoritarian governors and lawmakers in Florida, and also the nation’s second-largest state in Texas, and elsewhere — of the looming disaster for democracy if Republicans retake the White House on Jan. 20, 2025.
DeSantis: We’re going to clean house at places like the CDC… We will clean house with personnel. You’re going to have people in with me like my Surgeon General in Florida pic.twitter.com/VaFpmVTfst — Acyn (@Acyn) September 8, 2023
The chances of that happening are 50-50, or better. Most recent polls show that Trump — the overwhelming favorite to win the Republican nomination for the third straight time despite his 91 felony charges — is in a dead heat with President Joe Biden, and that’s not even accounting for the GOP advantage in the Electoral College. Meanwhile, the Beltway-based media continues to do a terrible job conveying the stakes for democracy in the 2024 election — yet again on Sunday when Kristen Welker, the new host of NBC News’ Meet the Press, conducted a debut interview with Trump that generally platformed his authoritarianism and allowed him to spout nonsense on how he’d bring peace to Ukraine and bridge the abortion divide, with too little pushback. Instead, journalists could be conveying the risk to the American Experiment by looking at how current Republicans govern.
Under the sway of DeSantis, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, and far-right lawmakers in Wisconsin and elsewhere, red states have become laboratories of autocracy. They’ve laid the groundwork for anti-democratic rule in Washington by inventing voter-fraud scandals (DeSantis’ election police) and undoing the results of democratic elections (the unwarranted removal of two Florida elected prosecutors). Both DeSantis and Abbott endorse sometimes violent demonization of The Other, with their migrant flights and buses and a killer barrier against refugees in the Rio Grande. Republicans politicize justice by going after the innocent (Wisconsin justice Janet Protasiewicz) and clearing the guilty (Texas AG Ken Paxton). Their opposition to knowledge, science, and the tolerance that DeSantis calls “woke” is destroying education, with 47% of Florida’s public college professors looking for work in other states.
On one level, the current anti-vax follies in the Sunshine State are a grim warning of how the United States might respond — or not respond — to the next pandemic that arrives on our shores. But the dangerous doctoring of Lapado also points to something even more insidious: the GOP promise, through a formal agenda known as Project 2025, to “demolish the administrative state” by undoing civil service protection, so that career servants and experts could be replaced with true believers in the religion of Trumpism.
That would mean that key federal decisions about your health and welfare would be made by zealots like Lapado, who was hired in 2022 by DeSantis as the state’s top health official even after his colleagues at the University of California-Los Angeles said the surgeon exaggerated his own experiences in treating COVID-19 and that they wouldn’t recommend him for the Florida post because he had “created stress and acrimony” with his anti-vaccine views.
It wasn’t a total surprise, then, that a special task force at the University of Florida, where Lapado was given a tenured faculty post, found that the state’s top doc used flawed science and may have violated the school’s integrity rules when he recommended that men under 40 should not take the then-current iteration of the COVID-19 vaccine. The panel found that his recommendation — claiming an increased risk of heart problems — was based on a small sample studied with shaky methodology.
And yet Lapado was not disciplined. Instead, he has become point man for DeSantis’s 90-degree right-turn on vaccine science, which has coincided with his run for the presidency. The Florida governor’s early support for COVID-19 vaccines was reflected in the state’s early 70% vaccination rate, on par with the rest of the United States. That was before DeSantis stuck his finger in the wind and grasped that public-health measures and the public face of those interventions, Dr. Anthony Fauci, were increasingly seen by core GOP voters as threats to liberty from “a deep state.” Now, only 12% of Floridians received the most recent booster shot, compared to 17% nationwide.
An in-depth analysis by the New York Times earlier this year found that Florida’s drop-off in vaccinations left the state ill-prepared when the Delta variant of COVID-19 hit in late 2021. During those months, the newspaper found, Florida actually had a higher death rate than almost any other state. The 23,000 who died in Florida included 9,000 people under age 65, the group that Lapado now urges not to get a booster; most of those who succumbed, according to the Times, were unvaccinated or had not received the second dose.
How many thousands more of Floridians will die needlessly this fall because of the politically poisonous Big Lie about vaccines from DeSantis and Lapado? In fact, the current anti-vaccine and anti-federal government is so extreme that public health experts are deeply concerned they’ll be a drop in other vaccines like the flu shot or protection against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) headed into the winter virus season. That could be disastrous in a state with so many elderly residents.
These are the stakes, looking ahead to next year’s election. We don’t have to speculate about what Republican government in 2025 and beyond would look like. Just look south to Florida, an authoritarian regime where knowledge and expertise are increasingly despised, cruelty is the point of government, and needless death and despair is on the rise. Meanwhile, pray for the souls of those swayed by the cynical anti-science of DeSantis and Lapado. They are the only real “guinea pigs” here.
Ron DeSantis's Florida puts the health of its citizens at risk, bucking the science on COVID-19 vaccine.
by Will Bunch, The Phuladelphia Inquirer
The initial, overrepeated mantra of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign was that “Florida is the state where ‘woke’ goes to die.” Now, a growing number of scientists and public-health experts are worried that the governor of America’s third-largest state may be adding a second risk of death to that list.
His own citizens.
In what should be seen as an alarming moment in America’s descent into misinformation and political demagoguery, DeSantis’s hand-picked state surgeon general, Joseph Lapado, is telling Florida residents under age 65 to avoid a new anti-COVID booster vaccine. That’s the exact opposite of what the nation’s public-health agencies and most experts are recommending to prevent a fall 2023 resurgence of the pandemic. Our would-be POTUS DeSantis is totally on board with his anti-vax medical adviser, claiming he won’t allow healthy Floridians to be “guinea pigs.”
But history and science suggest that some folks who refuse to become “guinea pigs” could become corpses, or will suffer the debilitating impact of long COVID. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, had two words for the Washington Post about Florida’s anti-vaccine guidance: “It’s dangerous.”
Hello, and welcome to the free state of Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis is responsibly telling residents under 65 years old to defy the advice of the FDA and CDC and not get the updated COVID-19 vaccine. LIVE FREE AND DIE, BABY!https://t.co/kiGVypVcHN — Rex Huppke (@RexHuppke) September 14, 2023
Offit told the newspaper there’s legitimate debate over who should be prioritized for receiving the new booster — reformulated to attack recent, dominant strains of the coronavirus — but that what Lapado and DeSantis are doing is casting deeper and unwarranted doubt on the effacy of COVID-19 vaccines more generally. “They have been given a platform and abused it,” he said.
Indeed, at a moment when objective testing — such as levels of the coronavirus in municipal sewage wastewater — is showing a COVID-19 spike equal to some of the worst peaks in 2020 and 2021, Florida is already at severe risk. In fact, the state with one of the five oldest populations in the United States is currently leading the nation in new COVID-19 hospitalizations, with 11.81 per 100,000 residents, and those numbers have been increasing.
Given the health danger, it’s sad but not a total surprise that DeSantis — whose White House bid is badly foundering and trails far behind Donald Trump — would demagogue around vaccines. It was the COVID-19 crisis in 2020 that thrust the then-first-term GOP governor onto the national stage, with his aggressive stance on reopening schools and businesses — popular with voters even if the science is mixed. But DeSantis — like Trump and other top Republicans — initially encouraged the initial vaccine when it was introduced in December 2020. Now, the Florida governor panders to an increasingly conspiratorial and anti-science base of the GOP primary electorate.
If it were an isolated incident, Florida’s stance in opposition to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration would be viewed as a stunning assault on the nation’s public-health infrastructure. But it’s not an isolated incident. Rather, it’s another glimpse — courtesy of authoritarian governors and lawmakers in Florida, and also the nation’s second-largest state in Texas, and elsewhere — of the looming disaster for democracy if Republicans retake the White House on Jan. 20, 2025.
DeSantis: We’re going to clean house at places like the CDC… We will clean house with personnel. You’re going to have people in with me like my Surgeon General in Florida pic.twitter.com/VaFpmVTfst — Acyn (@Acyn) September 8, 2023
The chances of that happening are 50-50, or better. Most recent polls show that Trump — the overwhelming favorite to win the Republican nomination for the third straight time despite his 91 felony charges — is in a dead heat with President Joe Biden, and that’s not even accounting for the GOP advantage in the Electoral College. Meanwhile, the Beltway-based media continues to do a terrible job conveying the stakes for democracy in the 2024 election — yet again on Sunday when Kristen Welker, the new host of NBC News’ Meet the Press, conducted a debut interview with Trump that generally platformed his authoritarianism and allowed him to spout nonsense on how he’d bring peace to Ukraine and bridge the abortion divide, with too little pushback. Instead, journalists could be conveying the risk to the American Experiment by looking at how current Republicans govern.
Under the sway of DeSantis, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, and far-right lawmakers in Wisconsin and elsewhere, red states have become laboratories of autocracy. They’ve laid the groundwork for anti-democratic rule in Washington by inventing voter-fraud scandals (DeSantis’ election police) and undoing the results of democratic elections (the unwarranted removal of two Florida elected prosecutors). Both DeSantis and Abbott endorse sometimes violent demonization of The Other, with their migrant flights and buses and a killer barrier against refugees in the Rio Grande. Republicans politicize justice by going after the innocent (Wisconsin justice Janet Protasiewicz) and clearing the guilty (Texas AG Ken Paxton). Their opposition to knowledge, science, and the tolerance that DeSantis calls “woke” is destroying education, with 47% of Florida’s public college professors looking for work in other states.
On one level, the current anti-vax follies in the Sunshine State are a grim warning of how the United States might respond — or not respond — to the next pandemic that arrives on our shores. But the dangerous doctoring of Lapado also points to something even more insidious: the GOP promise, through a formal agenda known as Project 2025, to “demolish the administrative state” by undoing civil service protection, so that career servants and experts could be replaced with true believers in the religion of Trumpism.
That would mean that key federal decisions about your health and welfare would be made by zealots like Lapado, who was hired in 2022 by DeSantis as the state’s top health official even after his colleagues at the University of California-Los Angeles said the surgeon exaggerated his own experiences in treating COVID-19 and that they wouldn’t recommend him for the Florida post because he had “created stress and acrimony” with his anti-vaccine views.
It wasn’t a total surprise, then, that a special task force at the University of Florida, where Lapado was given a tenured faculty post, found that the state’s top doc used flawed science and may have violated the school’s integrity rules when he recommended that men under 40 should not take the then-current iteration of the COVID-19 vaccine. The panel found that his recommendation — claiming an increased risk of heart problems — was based on a small sample studied with shaky methodology.
And yet Lapado was not disciplined. Instead, he has become point man for DeSantis’s 90-degree right-turn on vaccine science, which has coincided with his run for the presidency. The Florida governor’s early support for COVID-19 vaccines was reflected in the state’s early 70% vaccination rate, on par with the rest of the United States. That was before DeSantis stuck his finger in the wind and grasped that public-health measures and the public face of those interventions, Dr. Anthony Fauci, were increasingly seen by core GOP voters as threats to liberty from “a deep state.” Now, only 12% of Floridians received the most recent booster shot, compared to 17% nationwide.
An in-depth analysis by the New York Times earlier this year found that Florida’s drop-off in vaccinations left the state ill-prepared when the Delta variant of COVID-19 hit in late 2021. During those months, the newspaper found, Florida actually had a higher death rate than almost any other state. The 23,000 who died in Florida included 9,000 people under age 65, the group that Lapado now urges not to get a booster; most of those who succumbed, according to the Times, were unvaccinated or had not received the second dose.
How many thousands more of Floridians will die needlessly this fall because of the politically poisonous Big Lie about vaccines from DeSantis and Lapado? In fact, the current anti-vaccine and anti-federal government is so extreme that public health experts are deeply concerned they’ll be a drop in other vaccines like the flu shot or protection against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) headed into the winter virus season. That could be disastrous in a state with so many elderly residents.
These are the stakes, looking ahead to next year’s election. We don’t have to speculate about what Republican government in 2025 and beyond would look like. Just look south to Florida, an authoritarian regime where knowledge and expertise are increasingly despised, cruelty is the point of government, and needless death and despair is on the rise. Meanwhile, pray for the souls of those swayed by the cynical anti-science of DeSantis and Lapado. They are the only real “guinea pigs” here.
CONGRESS MUST ACT TO AVERT THE LOOMING CHILDCARE CRISIS
At the end of the month, roughly $37 billion in pandemic-era grants that subsidized childcare will expire, likely driving many parents out of the workforce.
by The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
Without federal action, three million children in America could abruptly lose access to childcare at the end of the month, a development that could push many parents — including, experts say, a disproportionate number of women — out of the workforce.
Roughly $37 billion in pandemic-era stabilization grants — which have ensured financial access to childcare for families — will lapse on Sept. 30, leaving families with no guarantee of continued care.
President Joe Biden and Congress must act to avert this catastrophe. More than just that, however, the country needs to find a more comprehensive path to supporting mothers, children, and families. In the childcare world, costs are too high and pay is too low. American parents do not get the support other developed countries treat as routine.
The United States is one of only six countries that does not offer any form of national paid leave. (Fourteen states — including New Jersey and Delaware, but not Pennsylvania — and the District of Columbia have enacted paid leave programs.) By contrast, just over the U.S. border, parents in Canada receive a year of paid leave.
Meanwhile, surveys have found that one in four American working mothers returns to their job within two weeks of giving birth. Most American fathers fail to take their full allotted time off, often due to social or career pressures. The majority of working dads take fewer than 10 days away from the workplace, exacerbating the pressure on moms to fill the gap.
Expanding family leave in the U.S. so it gets closer to international standards isn’t just the right thing to do for families and babies, it would also help reduce the overall cost of childcare.
This is a particular concern for infants, who are placed in day-care centers at very early ages when their parents are forced to return to work. Per federal government recommendations, a group of eight 4-year-olds can be supervised by just one adult, while one adult should only care for two or three infants at a time. Infants also require smaller groups than older children, meaning care for infants also requires more space and more staff members, factors that also drive up pricing.
The Center for American Progress found that providing infant care costs $1,230 per month. Providing high-quality infant care, with adequate wages and sick time for workers, would cost over $2,200 each month.
But the typical American worker earns about $4,400 each month. This means that infant care will never be affordable to working-class families absent a significant subsidy.
Allowing parents to take longer leave would reduce how many newborns need care centers, bringing down the cost of childcare for all children. This would benefit all families, including those who choose not to take their entire leave.
While they’re fixing childcare, Congress must also act to restore the enhanced child tax credit. The expiration of this benefit led to a surge in child poverty, which jumped from 5% to 12%.
Given how many states have criminalized abortion in the wake of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, failing to offer new parents this modest support seems especially egregious. Evidence is mounting that direct cash assistance is more useful than subsidies, as families know best how to weigh their own needs.
While no one has ever claimed that parenting is easy, the federal government should strive to make it slightly less onerous. That starts with averting the incoming childcare crisis.
At the end of the month, roughly $37 billion in pandemic-era grants that subsidized childcare will expire, likely driving many parents out of the workforce.
by The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
Without federal action, three million children in America could abruptly lose access to childcare at the end of the month, a development that could push many parents — including, experts say, a disproportionate number of women — out of the workforce.
Roughly $37 billion in pandemic-era stabilization grants — which have ensured financial access to childcare for families — will lapse on Sept. 30, leaving families with no guarantee of continued care.
President Joe Biden and Congress must act to avert this catastrophe. More than just that, however, the country needs to find a more comprehensive path to supporting mothers, children, and families. In the childcare world, costs are too high and pay is too low. American parents do not get the support other developed countries treat as routine.
The United States is one of only six countries that does not offer any form of national paid leave. (Fourteen states — including New Jersey and Delaware, but not Pennsylvania — and the District of Columbia have enacted paid leave programs.) By contrast, just over the U.S. border, parents in Canada receive a year of paid leave.
Meanwhile, surveys have found that one in four American working mothers returns to their job within two weeks of giving birth. Most American fathers fail to take their full allotted time off, often due to social or career pressures. The majority of working dads take fewer than 10 days away from the workplace, exacerbating the pressure on moms to fill the gap.
Expanding family leave in the U.S. so it gets closer to international standards isn’t just the right thing to do for families and babies, it would also help reduce the overall cost of childcare.
This is a particular concern for infants, who are placed in day-care centers at very early ages when their parents are forced to return to work. Per federal government recommendations, a group of eight 4-year-olds can be supervised by just one adult, while one adult should only care for two or three infants at a time. Infants also require smaller groups than older children, meaning care for infants also requires more space and more staff members, factors that also drive up pricing.
The Center for American Progress found that providing infant care costs $1,230 per month. Providing high-quality infant care, with adequate wages and sick time for workers, would cost over $2,200 each month.
But the typical American worker earns about $4,400 each month. This means that infant care will never be affordable to working-class families absent a significant subsidy.
Allowing parents to take longer leave would reduce how many newborns need care centers, bringing down the cost of childcare for all children. This would benefit all families, including those who choose not to take their entire leave.
While they’re fixing childcare, Congress must also act to restore the enhanced child tax credit. The expiration of this benefit led to a surge in child poverty, which jumped from 5% to 12%.
Given how many states have criminalized abortion in the wake of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, failing to offer new parents this modest support seems especially egregious. Evidence is mounting that direct cash assistance is more useful than subsidies, as families know best how to weigh their own needs.
While no one has ever claimed that parenting is easy, the federal government should strive to make it slightly less onerous. That starts with averting the incoming childcare crisis.
TRUMP AND HIS CRONIES UNDERESTIMATED FANI WILLIS
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis has been the target of right-wing venom and legal second-guessing. I was among those who doubted the wisdom of bringing a complex racketeering charge in Georgia, which complicated her opposition to one defendant’s attempt to move the case to federal court.
But consider what she has already accomplished. She indicted former president Donald Trump and 18 co-defendants. She got an Oct. 23 trial date for at least two defendants. And, at least at the district court level, she beat back former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows’s attempt to move his case to federal court (known as “removal”), eliciting an opinion that has grave implications for Trump. She compelled Meadows to admit under cross-examination that he was intimately involved in the phony elector plot and had no reason to believe the election was stolen.
Her written filings have been tightly argued -- the result, no doubt, of months of preparation. Among her most effective arguments: the Hatch Act, which prohibits White House officials’ political conduct while on duty, means that Meadows’s admittedly campaign-related actions were outside the scope of his official duties.
When, over her objections, the special grand jury’s vote tallies for 39 people were released (a terrible injustice to those who were not charged), the public could see that rather than pursue every possible defendant, Willis exercised appropriate discretion. For example, much as some of his critics would have liked to see Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) in the dock, she apparently came to the conclusion that there was insufficient evidence of criminality and/or that the speech or debate clause would make prosecution too difficult.
She has been so effective that Georgia Republicans have been mulling a maneuver to remove her from office. Fortunately, Gov. Brian Kemp (R) rebuffed that effort forcefully. “The bottom line is that in the state of Georgia, as long as I’m governor, we’re going to follow the law and the Constitution, regardless of who it helps or harms politically,” he declared at a recent news conference. He added, “I have not seen any evidence that DA Willis’s actions or lack thereof warrant action by the prosecuting attorney oversight commission.”
Most recently, in a delightful slapdown of House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Willis penned a letter in response to his attempt to meddle in her case and force her to release the prosecution’s documents. She did not mince words: “There is no justification in the Constitution for Congress to interfere with a state criminal matter, as you attempt to do.” She retorted, “The demands in your letter — and your efforts at intruding upon the State of Georgia’s criminal authority — violate constitutional principles of federalism. Criminal prosecutions under state law are primarily the responsibility of state governments.”
Citing chapter and verse of federal precedent, Willis tersely informed him: “The defendants in this case have been charged under state law with committing state crimes. There is absolutely no support for Congress purporting to second guess or somehow supervise an ongoing Georgia criminal investigation and prosecution.” She told Jordan that “violation of Georgia’s sovereignty is offensive and will not stand” and “your demand for information regarding an ongoing criminal prosecution — a core executive function — is offensive to any notion of separation of powers that recognizes the distinct roles of the executive and legislative functions of government.”
Her letter deserves more attention. It serves as an effective takedown of many of Trump’s phony excuses and defenses. “The criminal defendant about which you express concern was fully aware of the existence of the criminal investigation being conducted by the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office at the time he announced his candidacy for President,” she reminded Jordan. “I have no doubt that many Americans are the subject of criminal investigations and prosecutions at any given moment.” Trump’s whining notwithstanding, she knocked down the notion that running for office can spare one from criminal investigation and prosecution. “Any notion to the contrary is offensive to our democracy and to the fundamental principle that all people are equal before the law.”
And so she went on for nine pages. She concluded by pointing to “the racist threats that have come to my staff and me because of this investigation” and vowing to “keep the promise of my oath to the United States and Georgia Constitutions and … not allow myself to be bullied and threatened by Members of Congress, local elected officials, or others who believe lady justice should not be blind and that America has different laws for different citizens.”
Willis still faces a host of challenges. Having charged 19 people, she faces the prospect of a single ungainly trial or, more likely, a series of expensive, time-consuming trials that allow those tried later to see the prosecution’s full case. Meadows will appeal his removal case. Other litigants, despite Meadows’s failed bid, will still try to remove and then appeal when their efforts get rebuffed. And no trial, least of all one involving high-profile politicians, is a slam dunk. Even a win at trial can be overturned on appeal.
That said, Willis knew the pitfalls and risks going in. She nevertheless moved expeditiously, did not bring the case before she was ready and now might have the distinction of holding the first trial in the phony elector scheme. Moreover, in a proceeding that will be televised, she has the unique opportunity to teach Americans a thing or two about the justice system and the overwhelming evidence of a failed coup that Republicans still defend. If her answer to Jordan is any indication, her presentation is bound to be fiery, effective and incontrovertible.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis has been the target of right-wing venom and legal second-guessing. I was among those who doubted the wisdom of bringing a complex racketeering charge in Georgia, which complicated her opposition to one defendant’s attempt to move the case to federal court.
But consider what she has already accomplished. She indicted former president Donald Trump and 18 co-defendants. She got an Oct. 23 trial date for at least two defendants. And, at least at the district court level, she beat back former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows’s attempt to move his case to federal court (known as “removal”), eliciting an opinion that has grave implications for Trump. She compelled Meadows to admit under cross-examination that he was intimately involved in the phony elector plot and had no reason to believe the election was stolen.
Her written filings have been tightly argued -- the result, no doubt, of months of preparation. Among her most effective arguments: the Hatch Act, which prohibits White House officials’ political conduct while on duty, means that Meadows’s admittedly campaign-related actions were outside the scope of his official duties.
When, over her objections, the special grand jury’s vote tallies for 39 people were released (a terrible injustice to those who were not charged), the public could see that rather than pursue every possible defendant, Willis exercised appropriate discretion. For example, much as some of his critics would have liked to see Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) in the dock, she apparently came to the conclusion that there was insufficient evidence of criminality and/or that the speech or debate clause would make prosecution too difficult.
She has been so effective that Georgia Republicans have been mulling a maneuver to remove her from office. Fortunately, Gov. Brian Kemp (R) rebuffed that effort forcefully. “The bottom line is that in the state of Georgia, as long as I’m governor, we’re going to follow the law and the Constitution, regardless of who it helps or harms politically,” he declared at a recent news conference. He added, “I have not seen any evidence that DA Willis’s actions or lack thereof warrant action by the prosecuting attorney oversight commission.”
Most recently, in a delightful slapdown of House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Willis penned a letter in response to his attempt to meddle in her case and force her to release the prosecution’s documents. She did not mince words: “There is no justification in the Constitution for Congress to interfere with a state criminal matter, as you attempt to do.” She retorted, “The demands in your letter — and your efforts at intruding upon the State of Georgia’s criminal authority — violate constitutional principles of federalism. Criminal prosecutions under state law are primarily the responsibility of state governments.”
Citing chapter and verse of federal precedent, Willis tersely informed him: “The defendants in this case have been charged under state law with committing state crimes. There is absolutely no support for Congress purporting to second guess or somehow supervise an ongoing Georgia criminal investigation and prosecution.” She told Jordan that “violation of Georgia’s sovereignty is offensive and will not stand” and “your demand for information regarding an ongoing criminal prosecution — a core executive function — is offensive to any notion of separation of powers that recognizes the distinct roles of the executive and legislative functions of government.”
Her letter deserves more attention. It serves as an effective takedown of many of Trump’s phony excuses and defenses. “The criminal defendant about which you express concern was fully aware of the existence of the criminal investigation being conducted by the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office at the time he announced his candidacy for President,” she reminded Jordan. “I have no doubt that many Americans are the subject of criminal investigations and prosecutions at any given moment.” Trump’s whining notwithstanding, she knocked down the notion that running for office can spare one from criminal investigation and prosecution. “Any notion to the contrary is offensive to our democracy and to the fundamental principle that all people are equal before the law.”
And so she went on for nine pages. She concluded by pointing to “the racist threats that have come to my staff and me because of this investigation” and vowing to “keep the promise of my oath to the United States and Georgia Constitutions and … not allow myself to be bullied and threatened by Members of Congress, local elected officials, or others who believe lady justice should not be blind and that America has different laws for different citizens.”
Willis still faces a host of challenges. Having charged 19 people, she faces the prospect of a single ungainly trial or, more likely, a series of expensive, time-consuming trials that allow those tried later to see the prosecution’s full case. Meadows will appeal his removal case. Other litigants, despite Meadows’s failed bid, will still try to remove and then appeal when their efforts get rebuffed. And no trial, least of all one involving high-profile politicians, is a slam dunk. Even a win at trial can be overturned on appeal.
That said, Willis knew the pitfalls and risks going in. She nevertheless moved expeditiously, did not bring the case before she was ready and now might have the distinction of holding the first trial in the phony elector scheme. Moreover, in a proceeding that will be televised, she has the unique opportunity to teach Americans a thing or two about the justice system and the overwhelming evidence of a failed coup that Republicans still defend. If her answer to Jordan is any indication, her presentation is bound to be fiery, effective and incontrovertible.
WHY REPUBLICANS PLAY DIRTY
They fear that if they stick to the rules, they will lose everything. Their behavior is a threat to democratic stability.
By Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, political scientists and the authors of “How Democracies Die.”
The greatest threat to our democracy today is a Republican Party that plays dirty to win.
The party’s abandonment of fair play was showcased spectacularly in 2016, when the United States Senate refused to allow President Barack Obama to fill the Supreme Court vacancy created by Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in February. While technically constitutional, the act — in effect, stealing a court seat — hadn’t been tried since the 19th century. It would be bad enough on its own, but the Merrick Garland affair is part of a broader pattern.
Republicans across the country seem to have embraced an “any means necessary” strategy to preserve their power. After losing the governorship in North Carolina in 2016 and Wisconsin in 2018, Republicans used lame-duck legislative sessions to push through a flurry of bills stripping power from incoming Democratic governors. Last year, when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down a Republican gerrymandering initiative, conservative legislators attempted to impeach the justices. And back in North Carolina, Republican legislators used a surprise vote last week, on Sept. 11, to ram through an override of Gov. Roy Cooper’s budget veto — while most Democrats had been told no vote would be held. This is classic “constitutional hardball,” behavior that, while technically legal, uses the letter of the law to subvert its spirit.
Constitutional hardball has accelerated under the Trump administration. President Trump’s declaration of a “national emergency” to divert public money toward a border wall — openly flouting Congress, which voted against building a wall — is a clear example. And the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, manufactured by an earlier act of hardball, may uphold the constitutionality of the president’s autocratic behavior.
Constitutional hardball can damage and even destroy a democracy. Democratic institutions function only when power is exercised with restraint. When parties abandon the spirit of the law and seek to win by any means necessary, politics often descends into institutional warfare. Governments in Hungary and Turkey have used court packing and other “legal” maneuvers to lock in power and ensure that subsequent abuse is ruled “constitutional.” And when one party engages in constitutional hardball, its rivals often feel compelled to respond in a tit-for-tat fashion, triggering an escalating conflict that is difficult to undo. As the collapse of democracy in Germany and Spain in the 1930s and Chile in the 1970s makes clear, these escalating conflicts can end in tragedy.
Why is the Republican Party playing dirty? Republican leaders are not driven by an intrinsic or ideological contempt for democracy. They are driven by fear.
Democracy requires that parties know how to lose. Politicians who fail to win elections must be willing to accept defeat, go home, and get ready to play again the next day. This norm of gracious losing is essential to a healthy democracy.
But for parties to accept losing, two conditions must hold. First, they must feel secure that losing today will not bring ruinous consequences; and second, they must believe they have a reasonable chance of winning again in the future. When party leaders fear that they cannot win future elections, or that defeat poses an existential threat to themselves or their constituents, the stakes rise. Their time horizons shorten. They throw tomorrow to the wind and seek to win at any cost today. In short, desperation leads politicians to play dirty.
Take German conservatives before World War I. They were haunted by the prospect of extending equal voting rights to the working class. They viewed equal (male) suffrage as a menace not only to their own electoral prospects but also to the survival of the aristocratic order. One Conservative leader called full and equal suffrage an “attack on the laws of civilization.” So German conservatives played dirty, engaging in rampant election manipulation and outright repression in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
In the United States, Southern Democrats reacted in a similar manner to the Reconstruction-era enfranchisement of African-Americans. Mandated by the 15th Amendment, which was ratified in 1870, black suffrage not only imperiled Southern Democrats’ political dominance but also challenged longstanding patterns of white supremacy. Since African-Americans represented a majority or near majority in many of the post-Confederate states, Southern Democrats viewed their enfranchisement as an existential threat. So they, too, played dirty.
Between 1885 and 1908, all 11 post-Confederate states passed laws establishing poll taxes, literacy tests, property and residency requirements and other measures aimed at stripping African-Americans of their voting rights — and locking in Democratic Party dominance. In Tennessee, where the 1889 Dortch Law would disenfranchise illiterate black voters, one newspaper editorialized, “Give us the Dortch bill or we perish.” These measures, building on a monstrous campaign of anti-black violence, did precisely what they were intended to do: Black turnout in the South fell to 2 percent in 1912 from 61 percent in 1880. Unwilling to lose, Southern Democrats stripped the right to vote from millions of people, ushering in nearly a century of authoritarian rule in the South.
Republicans appear to be in the grip of a similar panic today. Their medium-term electoral prospects are dim. For one, they remain an overwhelmingly white Christian party in an increasingly diverse society. As a share of the American electorate, white Christians declined from 73 percent in 1992 to 57 percent in 2012 and may be below 50 percent by 2024. Republicans also face a generational challenge: Younger voters are deserting them. In 2018, 18- to 29-year-olds voted for Democrats by more than 2 to 1, and 30-somethings voted nearly 60 percent for Democrats.
Demography is not destiny, but as California Republicans have discovered, it often punishes parties that fail to adapt to changing societies. The growing diversity of the American electorate is making it harder for the Republican Party to win national majorities. Republicans have won the popular vote in presidential elections just once in the last 30 years. Donald Trump captured this Republican pessimism well when he told the Christian Broadcasting Network in 2016, “I think this is the last election the Republicans have a chance of winning because you are going to have people flowing across the border.”
“If we don’t win this election,” Mr. Trump added, “you’ll never see another Republican.”
The problem runs deeper than electoral math, however. Much of the Republican base views defeat as catastrophic. White Christians are losing more than an electoral majority; their once-dominant status in American society is eroding. Half a century ago, white Protestant men occupied nearly all our country’s high-status positions: They made up nearly all the elected officials, business leaders and media figures. Those days are over, but the loss of a group’s social status can feel deeply threatening. Many rank-and-file Republicans believe that the country they grew up in is being taken away from them. Slogans like “take our country back” and “make America great again” reflect this sense of peril.
So like the old Southern Democrats, modern-day Republicans have responded to darkening electoral horizons and rank-and-file perceptions of existential threat with a win-at-any-cost mentality. Most reminiscent of the Jim Crow South are Republican efforts to tilt the electoral playing field. Since 2010, a dozen Republican-led states have adopted new laws making it more difficult to register or vote. Republican state and local governments have closed polling places in predominantly African-American neighborhoods, purged voter rolls and created new obstacles to registration and voting.
In Georgia, a 2017 “exact match law” allowed authorities to throw out voter registration forms whose information did not “exactly match” existing records. Brian Kemp, who was simultaneously Georgia’s secretary of state and the 2018 Republican candidate for governor, tried to use the law to invalidate tens of thousands of registration forms, many of which were from African-Americans. In Tennessee, Republicans recently passed chilling legislation allowing criminal charges to be levied against voter registration groups that submit incomplete forms or miss deadlines. And in Texas this year, Republicans attempted to purge the voter rolls of nearly 100,000 Latinos.
The Trump administration’s effort to include a citizenship question in the census to facilitate gerrymandering schemes that would, in the words of one party strategist, be “advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites,” fits the broader pattern. Although these abuses are certainly less egregious than those committed by post-bellum Southern Democrats, the underlying logic is similar: Parties representing fearful, declining majorities turn, in desperation, to minority rule.
The only way out of this situation is for the Republican Party to become more diverse. A stunning 90 percent of House Republicans are white men, even though white men are a third of the electorate. Only when Republicans can compete seriously for younger, urban and nonwhite voters will their fear of losing — and of a multiracial America — subside.
Such a transformation is less far-fetched than it may appear right now; indeed, the Republican National Committee recommended it in 2013. But parties only change when their strategies bring costly defeat. So Republicans must fail — badly — at the polls.
American democracy faces a Catch-22: Republicans won’t abandon their white identity bunker strategy until they lose, but at the same time that strategy has made them so averse to losing they are willing to bend the rules to avoid this fate. There is no easy exit. Republican leaders must either stand up to their base and broaden their appeal or they must suffer an electoral thrashing so severe that they are compelled to do so.
Liberal democracy has historically required at least two competing parties committed to playing the democratic game, including one that typically represents conservative interests. But the commitment of America’s conservative party to this system is wavering, threatening our political system as a whole. Until Republicans learn to compete fairly in a diverse society, our democratic institutions will be imperiled.
They fear that if they stick to the rules, they will lose everything. Their behavior is a threat to democratic stability.
By Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, political scientists and the authors of “How Democracies Die.”
The greatest threat to our democracy today is a Republican Party that plays dirty to win.
The party’s abandonment of fair play was showcased spectacularly in 2016, when the United States Senate refused to allow President Barack Obama to fill the Supreme Court vacancy created by Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in February. While technically constitutional, the act — in effect, stealing a court seat — hadn’t been tried since the 19th century. It would be bad enough on its own, but the Merrick Garland affair is part of a broader pattern.
Republicans across the country seem to have embraced an “any means necessary” strategy to preserve their power. After losing the governorship in North Carolina in 2016 and Wisconsin in 2018, Republicans used lame-duck legislative sessions to push through a flurry of bills stripping power from incoming Democratic governors. Last year, when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down a Republican gerrymandering initiative, conservative legislators attempted to impeach the justices. And back in North Carolina, Republican legislators used a surprise vote last week, on Sept. 11, to ram through an override of Gov. Roy Cooper’s budget veto — while most Democrats had been told no vote would be held. This is classic “constitutional hardball,” behavior that, while technically legal, uses the letter of the law to subvert its spirit.
Constitutional hardball has accelerated under the Trump administration. President Trump’s declaration of a “national emergency” to divert public money toward a border wall — openly flouting Congress, which voted against building a wall — is a clear example. And the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, manufactured by an earlier act of hardball, may uphold the constitutionality of the president’s autocratic behavior.
Constitutional hardball can damage and even destroy a democracy. Democratic institutions function only when power is exercised with restraint. When parties abandon the spirit of the law and seek to win by any means necessary, politics often descends into institutional warfare. Governments in Hungary and Turkey have used court packing and other “legal” maneuvers to lock in power and ensure that subsequent abuse is ruled “constitutional.” And when one party engages in constitutional hardball, its rivals often feel compelled to respond in a tit-for-tat fashion, triggering an escalating conflict that is difficult to undo. As the collapse of democracy in Germany and Spain in the 1930s and Chile in the 1970s makes clear, these escalating conflicts can end in tragedy.
Why is the Republican Party playing dirty? Republican leaders are not driven by an intrinsic or ideological contempt for democracy. They are driven by fear.
Democracy requires that parties know how to lose. Politicians who fail to win elections must be willing to accept defeat, go home, and get ready to play again the next day. This norm of gracious losing is essential to a healthy democracy.
But for parties to accept losing, two conditions must hold. First, they must feel secure that losing today will not bring ruinous consequences; and second, they must believe they have a reasonable chance of winning again in the future. When party leaders fear that they cannot win future elections, or that defeat poses an existential threat to themselves or their constituents, the stakes rise. Their time horizons shorten. They throw tomorrow to the wind and seek to win at any cost today. In short, desperation leads politicians to play dirty.
Take German conservatives before World War I. They were haunted by the prospect of extending equal voting rights to the working class. They viewed equal (male) suffrage as a menace not only to their own electoral prospects but also to the survival of the aristocratic order. One Conservative leader called full and equal suffrage an “attack on the laws of civilization.” So German conservatives played dirty, engaging in rampant election manipulation and outright repression in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
In the United States, Southern Democrats reacted in a similar manner to the Reconstruction-era enfranchisement of African-Americans. Mandated by the 15th Amendment, which was ratified in 1870, black suffrage not only imperiled Southern Democrats’ political dominance but also challenged longstanding patterns of white supremacy. Since African-Americans represented a majority or near majority in many of the post-Confederate states, Southern Democrats viewed their enfranchisement as an existential threat. So they, too, played dirty.
Between 1885 and 1908, all 11 post-Confederate states passed laws establishing poll taxes, literacy tests, property and residency requirements and other measures aimed at stripping African-Americans of their voting rights — and locking in Democratic Party dominance. In Tennessee, where the 1889 Dortch Law would disenfranchise illiterate black voters, one newspaper editorialized, “Give us the Dortch bill or we perish.” These measures, building on a monstrous campaign of anti-black violence, did precisely what they were intended to do: Black turnout in the South fell to 2 percent in 1912 from 61 percent in 1880. Unwilling to lose, Southern Democrats stripped the right to vote from millions of people, ushering in nearly a century of authoritarian rule in the South.
Republicans appear to be in the grip of a similar panic today. Their medium-term electoral prospects are dim. For one, they remain an overwhelmingly white Christian party in an increasingly diverse society. As a share of the American electorate, white Christians declined from 73 percent in 1992 to 57 percent in 2012 and may be below 50 percent by 2024. Republicans also face a generational challenge: Younger voters are deserting them. In 2018, 18- to 29-year-olds voted for Democrats by more than 2 to 1, and 30-somethings voted nearly 60 percent for Democrats.
Demography is not destiny, but as California Republicans have discovered, it often punishes parties that fail to adapt to changing societies. The growing diversity of the American electorate is making it harder for the Republican Party to win national majorities. Republicans have won the popular vote in presidential elections just once in the last 30 years. Donald Trump captured this Republican pessimism well when he told the Christian Broadcasting Network in 2016, “I think this is the last election the Republicans have a chance of winning because you are going to have people flowing across the border.”
“If we don’t win this election,” Mr. Trump added, “you’ll never see another Republican.”
The problem runs deeper than electoral math, however. Much of the Republican base views defeat as catastrophic. White Christians are losing more than an electoral majority; their once-dominant status in American society is eroding. Half a century ago, white Protestant men occupied nearly all our country’s high-status positions: They made up nearly all the elected officials, business leaders and media figures. Those days are over, but the loss of a group’s social status can feel deeply threatening. Many rank-and-file Republicans believe that the country they grew up in is being taken away from them. Slogans like “take our country back” and “make America great again” reflect this sense of peril.
So like the old Southern Democrats, modern-day Republicans have responded to darkening electoral horizons and rank-and-file perceptions of existential threat with a win-at-any-cost mentality. Most reminiscent of the Jim Crow South are Republican efforts to tilt the electoral playing field. Since 2010, a dozen Republican-led states have adopted new laws making it more difficult to register or vote. Republican state and local governments have closed polling places in predominantly African-American neighborhoods, purged voter rolls and created new obstacles to registration and voting.
In Georgia, a 2017 “exact match law” allowed authorities to throw out voter registration forms whose information did not “exactly match” existing records. Brian Kemp, who was simultaneously Georgia’s secretary of state and the 2018 Republican candidate for governor, tried to use the law to invalidate tens of thousands of registration forms, many of which were from African-Americans. In Tennessee, Republicans recently passed chilling legislation allowing criminal charges to be levied against voter registration groups that submit incomplete forms or miss deadlines. And in Texas this year, Republicans attempted to purge the voter rolls of nearly 100,000 Latinos.
The Trump administration’s effort to include a citizenship question in the census to facilitate gerrymandering schemes that would, in the words of one party strategist, be “advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites,” fits the broader pattern. Although these abuses are certainly less egregious than those committed by post-bellum Southern Democrats, the underlying logic is similar: Parties representing fearful, declining majorities turn, in desperation, to minority rule.
The only way out of this situation is for the Republican Party to become more diverse. A stunning 90 percent of House Republicans are white men, even though white men are a third of the electorate. Only when Republicans can compete seriously for younger, urban and nonwhite voters will their fear of losing — and of a multiracial America — subside.
Such a transformation is less far-fetched than it may appear right now; indeed, the Republican National Committee recommended it in 2013. But parties only change when their strategies bring costly defeat. So Republicans must fail — badly — at the polls.
American democracy faces a Catch-22: Republicans won’t abandon their white identity bunker strategy until they lose, but at the same time that strategy has made them so averse to losing they are willing to bend the rules to avoid this fate. There is no easy exit. Republican leaders must either stand up to their base and broaden their appeal or they must suffer an electoral thrashing so severe that they are compelled to do so.
Liberal democracy has historically required at least two competing parties committed to playing the democratic game, including one that typically represents conservative interests. But the commitment of America’s conservative party to this system is wavering, threatening our political system as a whole. Until Republicans learn to compete fairly in a diverse society, our democratic institutions will be imperiled.
DEMOCRACY’S ASSASSINS ALWAYS HAVE ACCOMPLICES
By Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, professors of government at Harvard
During the first Republican debate of the 2024 presidential primary campaign last month, Donald Trump’s rivals were asked to raise their hands if they would support his candidacy, even if he were “convicted in a court of law.” Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election wasn’t just a potential criminal offense. It also violated the cardinal rule of democracy: Politicians must accept the results of elections, win or lose.
But that seemed to matter little on the debate stage. Vivek Ramaswamy’s hand shot up first, and all the other leading candidates followed suit — some eagerly, some more hesitantly and one after casting furtive glances to his right and his left.
Behavior like this might seem relatively harmless — a small act of political cowardice aimed at avoiding the wrath of the base. But such banal acquiescence is very dangerous. Individual autocrats, even popular demagogues, are never enough to wreck a democracy. Democracy’s assassins always have accomplices among mainstream politicians in the halls of power. The greatest threat to our democracy comes not from demagogues like Mr. Trump or even from extremist followers like those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, but rather from the ordinary politicians, many of them inside the Capitol that day, who protect and enable him.
The problem facing Republican leaders today — the emergence of a popular authoritarian threat in their own ideological camp — is hardly new. It has confronted political leaders across the world for generations. In Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, mainstream center-left and center-right parties had to navigate a political world in which antidemocratic extremists on the communist left and the fascist right enjoyed mass appeal. And in much of South America in the polarized 1960s and 1970s, mainstream parties found that many of their members sympathized with either leftist guerrillas seeking armed revolution or rightist paramilitary groups pushing for military rule.
The Spanish political scientist Juan Linz wrote that when mainstream politicians face this sort of predicament, they can proceed in one of two ways.
On the one hand, politicians may act as loyal democrats, prioritizing democracy over their short-term ambitions. Loyal democrats publicly condemn authoritarian behavior and work to hold its perpetrators accountable, even when they are ideological allies. Loyal democrats expel antidemocratic extremists from their ranks, refuse to endorse their candidacies, eschew all collaboration with them, and when necessary, join forces with ideological rivals to isolate and defeat them. And they do this even when extremists are popular among the party base. The result, history tells us, is a political firewall that can help a democracy survive periods of intense polarization and crisis.
On the other hand, too often, politicians become what Mr. Linz called semi-loyal democrats. At first glance, semi-loyalists look like loyal democrats. They are respectable political insiders and part of the establishment. They dress in suits rather than military camouflage, profess a commitment to democracy and ostensibly play by its rules. We see them in Congress and in governor’s mansions — and on the debate stage. So when democracies die, semi-loyalists’ fingerprints may not be found on the murder weapon.
But when we look closely at the histories of democratic breakdowns, from Europe in the interwar period to Argentina, Brazil and Chile in the 1960s and 1970s to Venezuela in the early 2000s, we see a clear pattern: Semi-loyal politicians play a pivotal role in enabling authoritarians.
Rather than severing ties to antidemocratic extremists, semi-loyalists tolerate and accommodate them. Rather than condemn and seek accountability for antidemocratic acts committed by ideological allies, semi-loyalists turn a blind eye, denying, downplaying and even justifying those acts — often via what is today called whataboutism. Or they simply remain silent. And when they are faced with a choice between joining forces with partisan rivals to defend democracy or preserving their relationship with antidemocratic allies, semi-loyalists opt for the latter.
It is semi-loyalists’ very respectability that makes them so dangerous. As members of the establishment, semi-loyalists can use their positions of authority to normalize antidemocratic extremists, protect them against efforts to hold them legally accountable and empower them by opening doors to the mainstream media, campaign donors and other resources. It is this subtle enabling of extremist forces that can fatally weaken democracies.
Consider the example of France. On Feb. 6, 1934, in the center of Paris, thousands of disaffected and angry men — veterans and members of right-wing militia groups — gathered near the national Parliament as its members were inside preparing to vote for a new government. They threw chairs, metal grates and rocks and used poles with razor blades on one end to try breach the doors of Parliament. Members of Parliament, frightened for their lives, had to sneak out of the building. Seventeen people were killed, and thousands were injured. Although the rioters failed to seize the Parliament building, they achieved one of their objectives: The centrist prime minister resigned the next day and was replaced by a right-leaning prime minister.
Although French democracy survived the Feb. 6 attack on Parliament, the response of some prominent politicians weakened its defenses. Many centrist and center-left politicians responded as loyal democrats, publicly and unequivocally condemning the violence. But many conservative politicians did not. Key members of France’s main conservative party, the Republican Federation, many of whom were inside the Parliament building that day, sympathized publicly with the rioters. Some praised the insurrectionists as heroes and patriots. Others dismissed the importance of the attack, denying that there had been an organized plot to overthrow the government.
When a parliamentary commission was established to investigate the events of Feb. 6, Republican Federation leaders sabotaged the investigation at each step, blocking even modest efforts to hold the rioters to account. Protected from prosecution, many of the insurrection’s organizers were able to continue their political careers. Some of the rioters went on to form the Victims of Feb. 6, a fraternity-like organization that later served as a recruitment channel for the Nazi-sympathizing Vichy government established in the wake of the 1940 German invasion.
The failure to hold the Feb. 6 insurrectionists to account also helped legitimize their ideas. Mainstream French conservatives began to embrace the view — once confined to extremist circles — that their democracy was hopelessly corrupt, dysfunctional and infiltrated by Communists and Jews. Historically, French conservatives had been nationalist and staunchly anti-German. But by 1936, many of them so despised the Socialist prime minister, Léon Blum, that they embraced the slogan “Better Hitler than Blum.” Four years later, they acquiesced to Nazi rule.
The semi-loyalty of leading conservative politicians fatally weakened the immune system of French democracy. The Nazis, of course, finished it off.
A half-century later, Spanish politicians responded very differently to a violent assault on Parliament. After four decades of dictatorship, Spain’s democracy was finally restored in the late 1970s, but its early years were marked by economic crisis and separatist terrorism. And on Feb. 23, 1981, as the Parliament was electing a new prime minister, 200 civil guardsmen entered the building and seized control at gunpoint, holding the 350 members of Parliament hostage. The coup leaders hoped to install a conservative general — a kind of Spanish Charles de Gaulle — as prime minister.
The coup attempt failed, thanks to the quick and decisive intervention of the king, Juan Carlos I. Nearly as important, though, was the reaction of Spanish politicians. Leaders across the ideological spectrum — from communists to conservatives who had long embraced the Franco dictatorship — forcefully denounced the coup. Four days later, more than a million people marched in the streets of Madrid to defend democracy. At the head of the rally, Communist, Socialist, centrist and conservative franquista politicians marched side by side, setting aside their partisan rivalries to jointly defend democracy. The coup leaders were arrested, tried and sentenced to long prison terms. Coups became virtually unthinkable in Spain, and democracy took root.
That is how democracy is defended. Loyal democrats join forces to condemn attacks on democracy, isolate those responsible for such attacks and hold them accountable.
Unfortunately, today’s Republican Party more closely resembles the French right of the 1930s than the Spanish right of the early 1980s. Since the 2020 election, Republican leaders have enabled authoritarianism at four decisive moments. First, rather than adhering to the cardinal rule of accepting election results after Joe Biden won in November, many Republican leaders either questioned the results or remained silent, refusing to publicly recognize Mr. Biden’s victory. Vice President Mike Pence did not congratulate his successor, Kamala Harris, until the middle of January 2021. The Republican Accountability Project, a Republican pro-democracy watchdog group, evaluated the public statements of 261 Republican members of the 117th Congress after the election. They found that 221 of them had publicly expressed doubt about its legitimacy or did not publicly recognize that Biden won. That’s 85 percent. And in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 riot, nearly two-thirds of House Republicans voted against certification of the results. Had Republican leaders not encouraged election denialism, the “stop the steal” movement might have stalled, and thousands of Trump supporters might not have violently stormed the Capitol in an effort to overturn the election.
Second, after Mr. Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives for the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, Senate Republicans overwhelmingly voted to acquit him, even though many conceded that, in Senator Mitch McConnell’s words, the president was “practically and morally responsible” for the attack. The acquittal allowed Mr. Trump to continue his political career despite having tried to block the peaceful transfer of power. Had he been convicted in the Senate, he would have been legally barred from running again for president. In other words, Republican senators had a clear opportunity to ensure that an openly antidemocratic figure would never again occupy the White House — and 43 of them, including Mr. McConnell, declined to take it.
Third, Republican leaders could have worked with Democrats to create an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 uprising. Had both parties joined forces to seek accountability for the insurrection, the day’s events would have gone down in U.S. history (and would likely have been accepted by a larger majority of Americans) as a criminal assault on our democracy that should never again be allowed to occur, much like Spain’s 1981 coup attempt. Republican leaders’ refusal to support an independent investigation shattered any possible consensus around Jan. 6, making it far less likely that Americans will develop a shared belief that such events are beyond the pale.
Finally, with remarkably few exceptions, Republican leaders say they will still support Mr. Trump even if he is convicted of plotting to overturn an election. Alternatives exist. The Republican National Committee could declare that the party will not nominate an individual who poses a threat to democracy or has been indicted on serious criminal charges. Or Republican leaders could jointly declare that, for the sake of democracy, they will endorse Mr. Biden if Mr. Trump is the Republican nominee. Such a move would, of course, destroy the party’s chances in 2024. But by keeping Mr. Trump out of the White House, it would help protect our democracy.
If Republican leaders continue to endorse Mr. Trump, they will normalize him yet again, telling Americans that he is, at the end of the day, an acceptable choice. The 2024 race will become another ordinary red vs. blue election, much like 2016. And as in 2016, Mr. Trump could win.
Republican leaders’ acquiescence to Mr. Trump’s authoritarianism is neither inevitable nor unavoidable. It is a choice.
Less than a year ago in Brazil, right-wing politicians chose a different path. President Jair Bolsonaro, who was elected in 2018, was an extreme-right politician who had praised torture, death squads and political assassination. Like Mr. Trump in 2020, Mr. Bolsonaro faced an uphill re-election battle in 2022. And like Mr. Trump, he tried to undermine public trust in the electoral system, attacking it as rigged and seeking to replace the country’s sophisticated electronic voting system with a paper ballot system that was more prone to fraud. And despite some dirty tricks on Election Day (police roadblocks impeded voter access to the polls in opposition strongholds in the northeast), Mr. Bolsonaro, like Mr. Trump, narrowly lost.
But the similarities end there. Whereas most Republican leaders refused to recognize Mr. Biden’s victory, most of Mr. Bolsonaro’s major political allies, including the president of Congress and the newly elected governors of powerful states like São Paulo and Minas Gerais, unambiguously accepted his defeat at the hands of Lula da Silva, the winner on election night. Although Mr. Bolsonaro himself remained silent, almost no major Brazilian politician questioned the election results.
Likewise, on Jan. 8, 2023, when angry Bolsonaro supporters, seeking to provoke a coup, stormed Congress, the office of the presidency and the Supreme Court building in Brasília, conservative politicians forcefully condemned the violence. In fact, several of them led the push for a congressional investigation into the insurrection. And when the Superior Electoral Court barred Mr. Bolsonaro from seeking public office until 2030 (for abusing his political power, spreading disinformation and making baseless accusations of fraud), the response among right-wing politicians was muted. Although the electoral court’s ruling was controversial, few Brazilian politicians have attacked the legitimacy of the court or defended Mr. Bolsonaro as a victim of political persecution.
Not only is Mr. Bolsonaro barred from running for president in the next election, he is politically isolated. For U.S. Republicans, then, Brazil offers a model.
Many mainstream politicians who preside over a democracy’s collapse are not authoritarians committed to overthrowing the system; they are careerists who are simply trying to get ahead. They are less opposed to democracy than indifferent to it. Careerism is a normal part of politics. But when democracy is at stake, choosing political ambition over its defense can be lethal.
Mr. McConnell, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and other top Republican leaders are not trying to kill democracy, but they have subordinated its defense to their own personal and partisan interests. Such reckless indifference could make them indispensable partners in democracy’s demise. They risk joining the long line of semi-loyal politicians littering the histories of interwar Europe and Cold War Latin America who sacrificed democracy on the altar of political expediency. American voters must hold them to account.
By Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, professors of government at Harvard
During the first Republican debate of the 2024 presidential primary campaign last month, Donald Trump’s rivals were asked to raise their hands if they would support his candidacy, even if he were “convicted in a court of law.” Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election wasn’t just a potential criminal offense. It also violated the cardinal rule of democracy: Politicians must accept the results of elections, win or lose.
But that seemed to matter little on the debate stage. Vivek Ramaswamy’s hand shot up first, and all the other leading candidates followed suit — some eagerly, some more hesitantly and one after casting furtive glances to his right and his left.
Behavior like this might seem relatively harmless — a small act of political cowardice aimed at avoiding the wrath of the base. But such banal acquiescence is very dangerous. Individual autocrats, even popular demagogues, are never enough to wreck a democracy. Democracy’s assassins always have accomplices among mainstream politicians in the halls of power. The greatest threat to our democracy comes not from demagogues like Mr. Trump or even from extremist followers like those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, but rather from the ordinary politicians, many of them inside the Capitol that day, who protect and enable him.
The problem facing Republican leaders today — the emergence of a popular authoritarian threat in their own ideological camp — is hardly new. It has confronted political leaders across the world for generations. In Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, mainstream center-left and center-right parties had to navigate a political world in which antidemocratic extremists on the communist left and the fascist right enjoyed mass appeal. And in much of South America in the polarized 1960s and 1970s, mainstream parties found that many of their members sympathized with either leftist guerrillas seeking armed revolution or rightist paramilitary groups pushing for military rule.
The Spanish political scientist Juan Linz wrote that when mainstream politicians face this sort of predicament, they can proceed in one of two ways.
On the one hand, politicians may act as loyal democrats, prioritizing democracy over their short-term ambitions. Loyal democrats publicly condemn authoritarian behavior and work to hold its perpetrators accountable, even when they are ideological allies. Loyal democrats expel antidemocratic extremists from their ranks, refuse to endorse their candidacies, eschew all collaboration with them, and when necessary, join forces with ideological rivals to isolate and defeat them. And they do this even when extremists are popular among the party base. The result, history tells us, is a political firewall that can help a democracy survive periods of intense polarization and crisis.
On the other hand, too often, politicians become what Mr. Linz called semi-loyal democrats. At first glance, semi-loyalists look like loyal democrats. They are respectable political insiders and part of the establishment. They dress in suits rather than military camouflage, profess a commitment to democracy and ostensibly play by its rules. We see them in Congress and in governor’s mansions — and on the debate stage. So when democracies die, semi-loyalists’ fingerprints may not be found on the murder weapon.
But when we look closely at the histories of democratic breakdowns, from Europe in the interwar period to Argentina, Brazil and Chile in the 1960s and 1970s to Venezuela in the early 2000s, we see a clear pattern: Semi-loyal politicians play a pivotal role in enabling authoritarians.
Rather than severing ties to antidemocratic extremists, semi-loyalists tolerate and accommodate them. Rather than condemn and seek accountability for antidemocratic acts committed by ideological allies, semi-loyalists turn a blind eye, denying, downplaying and even justifying those acts — often via what is today called whataboutism. Or they simply remain silent. And when they are faced with a choice between joining forces with partisan rivals to defend democracy or preserving their relationship with antidemocratic allies, semi-loyalists opt for the latter.
It is semi-loyalists’ very respectability that makes them so dangerous. As members of the establishment, semi-loyalists can use their positions of authority to normalize antidemocratic extremists, protect them against efforts to hold them legally accountable and empower them by opening doors to the mainstream media, campaign donors and other resources. It is this subtle enabling of extremist forces that can fatally weaken democracies.
Consider the example of France. On Feb. 6, 1934, in the center of Paris, thousands of disaffected and angry men — veterans and members of right-wing militia groups — gathered near the national Parliament as its members were inside preparing to vote for a new government. They threw chairs, metal grates and rocks and used poles with razor blades on one end to try breach the doors of Parliament. Members of Parliament, frightened for their lives, had to sneak out of the building. Seventeen people were killed, and thousands were injured. Although the rioters failed to seize the Parliament building, they achieved one of their objectives: The centrist prime minister resigned the next day and was replaced by a right-leaning prime minister.
Although French democracy survived the Feb. 6 attack on Parliament, the response of some prominent politicians weakened its defenses. Many centrist and center-left politicians responded as loyal democrats, publicly and unequivocally condemning the violence. But many conservative politicians did not. Key members of France’s main conservative party, the Republican Federation, many of whom were inside the Parliament building that day, sympathized publicly with the rioters. Some praised the insurrectionists as heroes and patriots. Others dismissed the importance of the attack, denying that there had been an organized plot to overthrow the government.
When a parliamentary commission was established to investigate the events of Feb. 6, Republican Federation leaders sabotaged the investigation at each step, blocking even modest efforts to hold the rioters to account. Protected from prosecution, many of the insurrection’s organizers were able to continue their political careers. Some of the rioters went on to form the Victims of Feb. 6, a fraternity-like organization that later served as a recruitment channel for the Nazi-sympathizing Vichy government established in the wake of the 1940 German invasion.
The failure to hold the Feb. 6 insurrectionists to account also helped legitimize their ideas. Mainstream French conservatives began to embrace the view — once confined to extremist circles — that their democracy was hopelessly corrupt, dysfunctional and infiltrated by Communists and Jews. Historically, French conservatives had been nationalist and staunchly anti-German. But by 1936, many of them so despised the Socialist prime minister, Léon Blum, that they embraced the slogan “Better Hitler than Blum.” Four years later, they acquiesced to Nazi rule.
The semi-loyalty of leading conservative politicians fatally weakened the immune system of French democracy. The Nazis, of course, finished it off.
A half-century later, Spanish politicians responded very differently to a violent assault on Parliament. After four decades of dictatorship, Spain’s democracy was finally restored in the late 1970s, but its early years were marked by economic crisis and separatist terrorism. And on Feb. 23, 1981, as the Parliament was electing a new prime minister, 200 civil guardsmen entered the building and seized control at gunpoint, holding the 350 members of Parliament hostage. The coup leaders hoped to install a conservative general — a kind of Spanish Charles de Gaulle — as prime minister.
The coup attempt failed, thanks to the quick and decisive intervention of the king, Juan Carlos I. Nearly as important, though, was the reaction of Spanish politicians. Leaders across the ideological spectrum — from communists to conservatives who had long embraced the Franco dictatorship — forcefully denounced the coup. Four days later, more than a million people marched in the streets of Madrid to defend democracy. At the head of the rally, Communist, Socialist, centrist and conservative franquista politicians marched side by side, setting aside their partisan rivalries to jointly defend democracy. The coup leaders were arrested, tried and sentenced to long prison terms. Coups became virtually unthinkable in Spain, and democracy took root.
That is how democracy is defended. Loyal democrats join forces to condemn attacks on democracy, isolate those responsible for such attacks and hold them accountable.
Unfortunately, today’s Republican Party more closely resembles the French right of the 1930s than the Spanish right of the early 1980s. Since the 2020 election, Republican leaders have enabled authoritarianism at four decisive moments. First, rather than adhering to the cardinal rule of accepting election results after Joe Biden won in November, many Republican leaders either questioned the results or remained silent, refusing to publicly recognize Mr. Biden’s victory. Vice President Mike Pence did not congratulate his successor, Kamala Harris, until the middle of January 2021. The Republican Accountability Project, a Republican pro-democracy watchdog group, evaluated the public statements of 261 Republican members of the 117th Congress after the election. They found that 221 of them had publicly expressed doubt about its legitimacy or did not publicly recognize that Biden won. That’s 85 percent. And in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 riot, nearly two-thirds of House Republicans voted against certification of the results. Had Republican leaders not encouraged election denialism, the “stop the steal” movement might have stalled, and thousands of Trump supporters might not have violently stormed the Capitol in an effort to overturn the election.
Second, after Mr. Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives for the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, Senate Republicans overwhelmingly voted to acquit him, even though many conceded that, in Senator Mitch McConnell’s words, the president was “practically and morally responsible” for the attack. The acquittal allowed Mr. Trump to continue his political career despite having tried to block the peaceful transfer of power. Had he been convicted in the Senate, he would have been legally barred from running again for president. In other words, Republican senators had a clear opportunity to ensure that an openly antidemocratic figure would never again occupy the White House — and 43 of them, including Mr. McConnell, declined to take it.
Third, Republican leaders could have worked with Democrats to create an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 uprising. Had both parties joined forces to seek accountability for the insurrection, the day’s events would have gone down in U.S. history (and would likely have been accepted by a larger majority of Americans) as a criminal assault on our democracy that should never again be allowed to occur, much like Spain’s 1981 coup attempt. Republican leaders’ refusal to support an independent investigation shattered any possible consensus around Jan. 6, making it far less likely that Americans will develop a shared belief that such events are beyond the pale.
Finally, with remarkably few exceptions, Republican leaders say they will still support Mr. Trump even if he is convicted of plotting to overturn an election. Alternatives exist. The Republican National Committee could declare that the party will not nominate an individual who poses a threat to democracy or has been indicted on serious criminal charges. Or Republican leaders could jointly declare that, for the sake of democracy, they will endorse Mr. Biden if Mr. Trump is the Republican nominee. Such a move would, of course, destroy the party’s chances in 2024. But by keeping Mr. Trump out of the White House, it would help protect our democracy.
If Republican leaders continue to endorse Mr. Trump, they will normalize him yet again, telling Americans that he is, at the end of the day, an acceptable choice. The 2024 race will become another ordinary red vs. blue election, much like 2016. And as in 2016, Mr. Trump could win.
Republican leaders’ acquiescence to Mr. Trump’s authoritarianism is neither inevitable nor unavoidable. It is a choice.
Less than a year ago in Brazil, right-wing politicians chose a different path. President Jair Bolsonaro, who was elected in 2018, was an extreme-right politician who had praised torture, death squads and political assassination. Like Mr. Trump in 2020, Mr. Bolsonaro faced an uphill re-election battle in 2022. And like Mr. Trump, he tried to undermine public trust in the electoral system, attacking it as rigged and seeking to replace the country’s sophisticated electronic voting system with a paper ballot system that was more prone to fraud. And despite some dirty tricks on Election Day (police roadblocks impeded voter access to the polls in opposition strongholds in the northeast), Mr. Bolsonaro, like Mr. Trump, narrowly lost.
But the similarities end there. Whereas most Republican leaders refused to recognize Mr. Biden’s victory, most of Mr. Bolsonaro’s major political allies, including the president of Congress and the newly elected governors of powerful states like São Paulo and Minas Gerais, unambiguously accepted his defeat at the hands of Lula da Silva, the winner on election night. Although Mr. Bolsonaro himself remained silent, almost no major Brazilian politician questioned the election results.
Likewise, on Jan. 8, 2023, when angry Bolsonaro supporters, seeking to provoke a coup, stormed Congress, the office of the presidency and the Supreme Court building in Brasília, conservative politicians forcefully condemned the violence. In fact, several of them led the push for a congressional investigation into the insurrection. And when the Superior Electoral Court barred Mr. Bolsonaro from seeking public office until 2030 (for abusing his political power, spreading disinformation and making baseless accusations of fraud), the response among right-wing politicians was muted. Although the electoral court’s ruling was controversial, few Brazilian politicians have attacked the legitimacy of the court or defended Mr. Bolsonaro as a victim of political persecution.
Not only is Mr. Bolsonaro barred from running for president in the next election, he is politically isolated. For U.S. Republicans, then, Brazil offers a model.
Many mainstream politicians who preside over a democracy’s collapse are not authoritarians committed to overthrowing the system; they are careerists who are simply trying to get ahead. They are less opposed to democracy than indifferent to it. Careerism is a normal part of politics. But when democracy is at stake, choosing political ambition over its defense can be lethal.
Mr. McConnell, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and other top Republican leaders are not trying to kill democracy, but they have subordinated its defense to their own personal and partisan interests. Such reckless indifference could make them indispensable partners in democracy’s demise. They risk joining the long line of semi-loyal politicians littering the histories of interwar Europe and Cold War Latin America who sacrificed democracy on the altar of political expediency. American voters must hold them to account.
FRACKING IS MAKING PENNSYLVANIANS SICK. LAWMAKERS MUST ACT.
Studies have repeatedly found the negative health impacts of fracking. Instead of safeguarding their constituents, legislators have ensured the fallout continues. by The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
(Note: The Republican legislators who voted for HB2154, which watered down laws protecting residents from fracking’s hazardous chemicals, include Clint Owlett.)
You didn’t need to be a geologist or any other kind of expert to know from the start that hydraulic fracking was fraught with a host of health and safety questions in Pennsylvania.
Just consider what goes into using the controversial process. Up to 6 million gallons of water treated with toxic chemicals and sand are used to blast through a rock formation known as the Marcellus Shale to extract natural gas. Since the state embraced fracking in 2008, more than 13,000 such wells have been drilled thousands of feet underground.
The gas industry has long claimed fracking is safe but refused to disclose precisely which toxic chemicals are used in the process. It was a risky gambit of trust with no verification.
So, it’s been no surprise that study after study has found one health problem after another. Three recent reports by the state government and the University of Pittsburgh found increased incidences of childhood cancer, asthma and low birth weight among those living within 10 miles of natural gas wells.
The studies bolster past research that raised red flags about fracking soon after then-Gov. Ed Rendell unleashed a gas drilling gold rush in 2008 by opening 2.2 million acres of state forests to Big Oil and touting the jobs and revenue that would pour into state coffers.
Within a year, a series of water-contamination problems, including methane leaks, affecting drinking water in seven counties were linked to gas drilling in Pennsylvania.
In 2010, an HBO documentary titled Gasland detailed the health and environmental dangers from fracking, including the alarming image of a woman in the small town of Dimock, Pa. — about an hour’s drive north of Scranton — lighting tap water from her faucet on fire because it contained so much methane.
Despite the health concerns, Pennsylvania lawmakers looked the other way as the gas industry spent more than $60 million on lobbying and campaign contributions over a seven-year stretch. The flow of money kept lawmakers from imposing a severance tax on gas drilling, making Pennsylvania the only state without such a tax.
Harrisburg’s embrace of fracking is a shameful study in contrast to what happened when lobbyists came knocking in New York. In 2010, the New York State Assembly approved a temporary moratorium on fracking. Four years later, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order that banned fracking because of health concerns. State lawmakers in Albany codified the ban in 2020.
What did New York know that Pennsylvania lawmakers either didn’t or willfully ignored?
Instead of safeguarding their constituents, legislators ensured that the fallout from fracking continues to impact Pennsylvanians. A 2015 study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that pregnant women living near fracking wells experienced more premature births and high-risk pregnancies.
A 2016 study, also by Johns Hopkins, found that people living near active gas wells were up to four times likelier to have asthma attacks. A 2020 study tied air pollution from fracking to deaths in Pennsylvania.
And what about the unnamed toxic chemicals used in the fracking process?
In 2021, it was disclosed that the Environmental Protection Agency long ago approved the use of so-called forever chemicals in fracking, which have been linked to a variety of cancers as well as asthma, low birth weight, and other health problems.
And what became of the residents in Dimock who could light their water on fire?
After long denying responsibility, Houston-based Coterra Energy Inc. pleaded no contest last year to criminal charges of drilling faulty gas wells that leaked flammable methane into residential water supplies. Coterra agreed to pay more than $16 million to build a new public water system and pay the impacted residents’ water bills for the next 75 years.
That plea deal was the result of criminal charges filed in 2020 against Coterra’s corporate predecessor, Cabot Oil & Gas Corp., by then-Attorney General Josh Shapiro. But in a shameless and irresponsible twist, the day after announcing the deal, the state Department of Environmental Protection lifted a 12-year ban and agreed to allow Coterra to resume drilling in Dimock.
At the time, Shapiro said the gas driller “damaged our environment, harming our water supplies and endangering Pennsylvanians.” The same could be said of the lawmakers and environmental officials who continue to enable the fracking industry.
Now that Shapiro is the governor of Pennsylvania, he must protect residents from the fracking industry.
Studies have repeatedly found the negative health impacts of fracking. Instead of safeguarding their constituents, legislators have ensured the fallout continues. by The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
(Note: The Republican legislators who voted for HB2154, which watered down laws protecting residents from fracking’s hazardous chemicals, include Clint Owlett.)
You didn’t need to be a geologist or any other kind of expert to know from the start that hydraulic fracking was fraught with a host of health and safety questions in Pennsylvania.
Just consider what goes into using the controversial process. Up to 6 million gallons of water treated with toxic chemicals and sand are used to blast through a rock formation known as the Marcellus Shale to extract natural gas. Since the state embraced fracking in 2008, more than 13,000 such wells have been drilled thousands of feet underground.
The gas industry has long claimed fracking is safe but refused to disclose precisely which toxic chemicals are used in the process. It was a risky gambit of trust with no verification.
So, it’s been no surprise that study after study has found one health problem after another. Three recent reports by the state government and the University of Pittsburgh found increased incidences of childhood cancer, asthma and low birth weight among those living within 10 miles of natural gas wells.
The studies bolster past research that raised red flags about fracking soon after then-Gov. Ed Rendell unleashed a gas drilling gold rush in 2008 by opening 2.2 million acres of state forests to Big Oil and touting the jobs and revenue that would pour into state coffers.
Within a year, a series of water-contamination problems, including methane leaks, affecting drinking water in seven counties were linked to gas drilling in Pennsylvania.
In 2010, an HBO documentary titled Gasland detailed the health and environmental dangers from fracking, including the alarming image of a woman in the small town of Dimock, Pa. — about an hour’s drive north of Scranton — lighting tap water from her faucet on fire because it contained so much methane.
Despite the health concerns, Pennsylvania lawmakers looked the other way as the gas industry spent more than $60 million on lobbying and campaign contributions over a seven-year stretch. The flow of money kept lawmakers from imposing a severance tax on gas drilling, making Pennsylvania the only state without such a tax.
Harrisburg’s embrace of fracking is a shameful study in contrast to what happened when lobbyists came knocking in New York. In 2010, the New York State Assembly approved a temporary moratorium on fracking. Four years later, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order that banned fracking because of health concerns. State lawmakers in Albany codified the ban in 2020.
What did New York know that Pennsylvania lawmakers either didn’t or willfully ignored?
Instead of safeguarding their constituents, legislators ensured that the fallout from fracking continues to impact Pennsylvanians. A 2015 study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that pregnant women living near fracking wells experienced more premature births and high-risk pregnancies.
A 2016 study, also by Johns Hopkins, found that people living near active gas wells were up to four times likelier to have asthma attacks. A 2020 study tied air pollution from fracking to deaths in Pennsylvania.
And what about the unnamed toxic chemicals used in the fracking process?
In 2021, it was disclosed that the Environmental Protection Agency long ago approved the use of so-called forever chemicals in fracking, which have been linked to a variety of cancers as well as asthma, low birth weight, and other health problems.
And what became of the residents in Dimock who could light their water on fire?
After long denying responsibility, Houston-based Coterra Energy Inc. pleaded no contest last year to criminal charges of drilling faulty gas wells that leaked flammable methane into residential water supplies. Coterra agreed to pay more than $16 million to build a new public water system and pay the impacted residents’ water bills for the next 75 years.
That plea deal was the result of criminal charges filed in 2020 against Coterra’s corporate predecessor, Cabot Oil & Gas Corp., by then-Attorney General Josh Shapiro. But in a shameless and irresponsible twist, the day after announcing the deal, the state Department of Environmental Protection lifted a 12-year ban and agreed to allow Coterra to resume drilling in Dimock.
At the time, Shapiro said the gas driller “damaged our environment, harming our water supplies and endangering Pennsylvanians.” The same could be said of the lawmakers and environmental officials who continue to enable the fracking industry.
Now that Shapiro is the governor of Pennsylvania, he must protect residents from the fracking industry.
DOES ANYONE CARE ABOUT THE STUDY LINKING PA. FRACKING TO CANCER IN KIDS?
An overdue Pa. study showed alarming links between fracking and lymphoma in kids, increased asthma. Why the tepid response?
by Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Janice Blanock has been demanding answers for nearly a decade. It was late 2013 when her 16-year-old son Luke was diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma — a form of bone cancer that is supposed to be quite rare but which eventually struck three other families in their small rural school district in southwestern Pennsylvania.
The first three years after Luke’s diagnoses were a blur. He married his high school sweetheart — shown nationally on the television program Inside Edition — shortly before he died in August 2016. Since then, Blanock and some of her neighbors have relentlessly pressed government officials, including a confrontation with then-Gov. Tom Wolf for information on what seems to be a cancer cluster, and whether it was caused by 1,800 active natural-gas fracking sites in Washington County, Pa.
This month, Blanock and other activists learned the results of major health studies that the Wolf administration agreed to pay for right after that 2019 confrontation. They discovered that the research into whether fracking — unconventional drilling for natural gas trapped in the shale under rural Pennsylvania — is sickening people who live nearby managed to be both inadequate and alarming at the same time.
Blanock was in the audience as researchers from the University of Pittsburgh, funded by the Pennsylvania Department of Health, told a packed hearing in Washington County that the sample of Ewing’s sarcoma cases like Luke Blanock’s was considered too small to establish a definitive link to gas drilling.
SAD NEWS: Canonsburg teen, Luke Blanock, loses battle with terminal cancer #LukeStrong https://t.co/tvG3SQuZAI pic.twitter.com/BQiaMFUrU7— WPXI (@WPXI) August 8, 2016
But other findings by the Pitt researchers confirmed some of the worst health fears for people who live near the fracking pads that have sprouted like mushrooms across rural Pennsylvania in the first 15 years of the 21st century, and made the state a leading U.S. producer of natural gas.
“For childhood cancer, we found that children living close to active wells, or near many wells, had a higher risk for developing a cancer called lymphoma,” James Fabisiak, associate professor of environmental and occupational health at Pitt’s Graduate School of Public Health, told the meeting.
The researchers also found that natural-gas wells in the production mode — there are thousands of such sites across the state — increase the risk for neighbors of lower birth-weight babies, and for asthma attacks by a factor of four or five times. One expert with Physicians for Social Responsibility called that last finding a “bombshell.”
A bombshell that landed with a thud in Harrisburg and apparently failed to detonate.
The Shapiro administration sent a deputy health commissioner, Kristen Rodack, to the meeting, where she reportedly told the emotional room — including several parents who’d lost a child to cancer — that “I’ll apologize on behalf of the department for not listening as well in the past.” But the state response — to this research that it paid for — lacked any of the sense of urgency you’d expect when a cancer risk is connected to children.
Children who lived closer to natural gas wells in heavily drilled Pennsylvania were more likely to develop a relatively rare form of cancer, and nearby residents of all ages had an increased chance of severe asthma reactions, researchers say. https://t.co/sSfJ6FpOJN— The Associated Press (@AP) August 15, 2023
The Department of Health said the “bombshell” study will lead to ... more studies. It also announced a number of small-bore responses like updating its website for nearby-fracking residents to submit complaints, offering more “air quality awareness” education for Pennsylvania schoolkids, and better training for doctors and nurses in recognizing and dealing with environmental exposures.
Seriously? It almost feels like a scenario where a raging wildfire is fast approaching a mountain town, and the government response is to show kids some “Smokey the Bear” videos and give local doctors a refresher course on burn treatment — rather than evacuating the residents to safety.
“We don’t need more studies — we need action,” Blanock told me Thursday by phone from her home in Cecil, Pa., even as she noted that state leaders continue to seem more concerned about saving oil and gas jobs. “We rely on the Department of Health and the DEP [Department of Environmental Protection] to protect us as citizens, but they just keep passing the buck. I’m disappointed.”
Pennsylvania’s addiction to the supposed economic promise of natural gas fracking — and the good-paying blue-collar jobs that never seem to quite add up — apparently makes more radical steps unthinkable. Even when the thought is to get our own children out of harm’s way.
Long-time anti-fracking and climate activist Karen Feridun of the Better Path Coalition — a frequent thorn in the side of Democratic governors Wolf and now Josh Shapiro — told me that Shapiro’s “only official statement that day [the study was released] announced that Pennsylvania is open for business, referring to increased money for subsidies like the one that gave fossil fuel giant Shell $10 million to build its ethane cracker plant in Beaver County. The level of tone-deafness is astonishing.”
This week, I pressed Shapiro’s office about the governor’s sense of urgency around the link between fracking and cancer. His spokesman, Will Simons, said that Shapiro first signaled a tough-on-polluters approach in 2020 when, as attorney general, he led a grand jury probe critical of both the industry and of lax state regulation — which he plans to toughen now that he’s governor. But the Democratic chief executive believes it’s still possible to regulate the industry while reaping the benefit of energy jobs.
“Governor Shapiro believes we must reject the false choice between projecting jobs and protecting our planet,” Simons said in an email. “The Governor is working to do both — and that’s why his Administration is working to embrace the Commonwealth’s role as an energy leader, create good-paying jobs, take meaningful action to address climate change, and fulfill our constitutional obligation to protect Pennsylvanians’ clean air and pure water.”
Here’s three problems with Shapiro’s so-called “false choice.”
First, evidence is mounting that the economic benefits of fracking were seriously overhyped. Just last week, the Ohio River Valley Institute issued a new report finding that the Appalachian counties that produce 90% of our region’s natural gas from fracking have actually underperformed economically since the beginning of the boom period — losing 10,000 jobs and 47,000 residents.
Second, the Shapiro administration’s balancing act between jobs and the clear-cut health risks from fracking ought to also account for the role that fossil fuels are playing in the worsening climate crisis, which has triggered a long hot summer of deadly wildfires, heat waves and floods. The new governor has said (infrequently) that greenhouse-gas pollution is a problem, but his lukewarm approach around climate change — including a task force that meets in secret and hasn’t disclosed all its members — has befuddled some of his environmentalist supporters.
Third, the new state-funded Pitt study is far from the first indication that fracking is not healthy for children and other living things. In 2021, Environmental Health Network did extensive bloodwork on five families who living close to natural-gas sites and found that biomarkers for hazardous and possibly carcinogenic chemicals, linked to the fracking process, were extremely high. In 2022, a Yale School of Public Health study found that children born near fracking sites in Pennsylvania had double the risk of developing leukemia later in childhood.
“These studies are not a shock for those of us who have been watching the science and seeing the real life impacts,” Laura Dagley, with Physicians for Social Responsibility in Pennsylvania, told me. She added: “The only response I have heard from the state is the need for more education and more studies. Even though I support this, it is not enough.”
No, it’s not. On one hand, activists like Blanock and the retired journalist who broke the Ewing’s sarcoma story for a Pittsburgh newspaper have argued that the four-year Pitt study could have done a lot more to establish a connection between fracking and other types of pediatric cancer — failing, for example, to closely evaluate the impact of types of radium that are produced by gas drilling and have been linked to bone cancers for roughly a century.
But it’s reasonable to also question how much more information is needed at this point. “These kids are our future,” Blanock said, noting that increasingly the gas that’s fracked in Pennsylvania is used to make single-use plastic products. “If you care more about that ... ” Her voice trailed off.
Activists like Blanock and Feridun would back a moratorium on fracking — something that Pennsylvania’s last two Democratic governors would never put on the table, even with these damning studies. As a fallback, Dagley of Physicians for Social Responsibility and Blanock both say Pennsylvania should implement all the recommendations of the 2020 grand jury led by Shapiro — including expanding the new-drill zone around schools or other facilities from 500 to 2,500 feet, full disclosure of fracking chemicals, closing the revolving door of state regulators into industry jobs, and more.
That would certainly be better than doing nothing. A story that we tell ourselves to live in America is that absolutely nothing is more important in our society than protecting the life of a child. The sad reality is such a long way away from that.
An overdue Pa. study showed alarming links between fracking and lymphoma in kids, increased asthma. Why the tepid response?
by Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Janice Blanock has been demanding answers for nearly a decade. It was late 2013 when her 16-year-old son Luke was diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma — a form of bone cancer that is supposed to be quite rare but which eventually struck three other families in their small rural school district in southwestern Pennsylvania.
The first three years after Luke’s diagnoses were a blur. He married his high school sweetheart — shown nationally on the television program Inside Edition — shortly before he died in August 2016. Since then, Blanock and some of her neighbors have relentlessly pressed government officials, including a confrontation with then-Gov. Tom Wolf for information on what seems to be a cancer cluster, and whether it was caused by 1,800 active natural-gas fracking sites in Washington County, Pa.
This month, Blanock and other activists learned the results of major health studies that the Wolf administration agreed to pay for right after that 2019 confrontation. They discovered that the research into whether fracking — unconventional drilling for natural gas trapped in the shale under rural Pennsylvania — is sickening people who live nearby managed to be both inadequate and alarming at the same time.
Blanock was in the audience as researchers from the University of Pittsburgh, funded by the Pennsylvania Department of Health, told a packed hearing in Washington County that the sample of Ewing’s sarcoma cases like Luke Blanock’s was considered too small to establish a definitive link to gas drilling.
SAD NEWS: Canonsburg teen, Luke Blanock, loses battle with terminal cancer #LukeStrong https://t.co/tvG3SQuZAI pic.twitter.com/BQiaMFUrU7— WPXI (@WPXI) August 8, 2016
But other findings by the Pitt researchers confirmed some of the worst health fears for people who live near the fracking pads that have sprouted like mushrooms across rural Pennsylvania in the first 15 years of the 21st century, and made the state a leading U.S. producer of natural gas.
“For childhood cancer, we found that children living close to active wells, or near many wells, had a higher risk for developing a cancer called lymphoma,” James Fabisiak, associate professor of environmental and occupational health at Pitt’s Graduate School of Public Health, told the meeting.
The researchers also found that natural-gas wells in the production mode — there are thousands of such sites across the state — increase the risk for neighbors of lower birth-weight babies, and for asthma attacks by a factor of four or five times. One expert with Physicians for Social Responsibility called that last finding a “bombshell.”
A bombshell that landed with a thud in Harrisburg and apparently failed to detonate.
The Shapiro administration sent a deputy health commissioner, Kristen Rodack, to the meeting, where she reportedly told the emotional room — including several parents who’d lost a child to cancer — that “I’ll apologize on behalf of the department for not listening as well in the past.” But the state response — to this research that it paid for — lacked any of the sense of urgency you’d expect when a cancer risk is connected to children.
Children who lived closer to natural gas wells in heavily drilled Pennsylvania were more likely to develop a relatively rare form of cancer, and nearby residents of all ages had an increased chance of severe asthma reactions, researchers say. https://t.co/sSfJ6FpOJN— The Associated Press (@AP) August 15, 2023
The Department of Health said the “bombshell” study will lead to ... more studies. It also announced a number of small-bore responses like updating its website for nearby-fracking residents to submit complaints, offering more “air quality awareness” education for Pennsylvania schoolkids, and better training for doctors and nurses in recognizing and dealing with environmental exposures.
Seriously? It almost feels like a scenario where a raging wildfire is fast approaching a mountain town, and the government response is to show kids some “Smokey the Bear” videos and give local doctors a refresher course on burn treatment — rather than evacuating the residents to safety.
“We don’t need more studies — we need action,” Blanock told me Thursday by phone from her home in Cecil, Pa., even as she noted that state leaders continue to seem more concerned about saving oil and gas jobs. “We rely on the Department of Health and the DEP [Department of Environmental Protection] to protect us as citizens, but they just keep passing the buck. I’m disappointed.”
Pennsylvania’s addiction to the supposed economic promise of natural gas fracking — and the good-paying blue-collar jobs that never seem to quite add up — apparently makes more radical steps unthinkable. Even when the thought is to get our own children out of harm’s way.
Long-time anti-fracking and climate activist Karen Feridun of the Better Path Coalition — a frequent thorn in the side of Democratic governors Wolf and now Josh Shapiro — told me that Shapiro’s “only official statement that day [the study was released] announced that Pennsylvania is open for business, referring to increased money for subsidies like the one that gave fossil fuel giant Shell $10 million to build its ethane cracker plant in Beaver County. The level of tone-deafness is astonishing.”
This week, I pressed Shapiro’s office about the governor’s sense of urgency around the link between fracking and cancer. His spokesman, Will Simons, said that Shapiro first signaled a tough-on-polluters approach in 2020 when, as attorney general, he led a grand jury probe critical of both the industry and of lax state regulation — which he plans to toughen now that he’s governor. But the Democratic chief executive believes it’s still possible to regulate the industry while reaping the benefit of energy jobs.
“Governor Shapiro believes we must reject the false choice between projecting jobs and protecting our planet,” Simons said in an email. “The Governor is working to do both — and that’s why his Administration is working to embrace the Commonwealth’s role as an energy leader, create good-paying jobs, take meaningful action to address climate change, and fulfill our constitutional obligation to protect Pennsylvanians’ clean air and pure water.”
Here’s three problems with Shapiro’s so-called “false choice.”
First, evidence is mounting that the economic benefits of fracking were seriously overhyped. Just last week, the Ohio River Valley Institute issued a new report finding that the Appalachian counties that produce 90% of our region’s natural gas from fracking have actually underperformed economically since the beginning of the boom period — losing 10,000 jobs and 47,000 residents.
Second, the Shapiro administration’s balancing act between jobs and the clear-cut health risks from fracking ought to also account for the role that fossil fuels are playing in the worsening climate crisis, which has triggered a long hot summer of deadly wildfires, heat waves and floods. The new governor has said (infrequently) that greenhouse-gas pollution is a problem, but his lukewarm approach around climate change — including a task force that meets in secret and hasn’t disclosed all its members — has befuddled some of his environmentalist supporters.
Third, the new state-funded Pitt study is far from the first indication that fracking is not healthy for children and other living things. In 2021, Environmental Health Network did extensive bloodwork on five families who living close to natural-gas sites and found that biomarkers for hazardous and possibly carcinogenic chemicals, linked to the fracking process, were extremely high. In 2022, a Yale School of Public Health study found that children born near fracking sites in Pennsylvania had double the risk of developing leukemia later in childhood.
“These studies are not a shock for those of us who have been watching the science and seeing the real life impacts,” Laura Dagley, with Physicians for Social Responsibility in Pennsylvania, told me. She added: “The only response I have heard from the state is the need for more education and more studies. Even though I support this, it is not enough.”
No, it’s not. On one hand, activists like Blanock and the retired journalist who broke the Ewing’s sarcoma story for a Pittsburgh newspaper have argued that the four-year Pitt study could have done a lot more to establish a connection between fracking and other types of pediatric cancer — failing, for example, to closely evaluate the impact of types of radium that are produced by gas drilling and have been linked to bone cancers for roughly a century.
But it’s reasonable to also question how much more information is needed at this point. “These kids are our future,” Blanock said, noting that increasingly the gas that’s fracked in Pennsylvania is used to make single-use plastic products. “If you care more about that ... ” Her voice trailed off.
Activists like Blanock and Feridun would back a moratorium on fracking — something that Pennsylvania’s last two Democratic governors would never put on the table, even with these damning studies. As a fallback, Dagley of Physicians for Social Responsibility and Blanock both say Pennsylvania should implement all the recommendations of the 2020 grand jury led by Shapiro — including expanding the new-drill zone around schools or other facilities from 500 to 2,500 feet, full disclosure of fracking chemicals, closing the revolving door of state regulators into industry jobs, and more.
That would certainly be better than doing nothing. A story that we tell ourselves to live in America is that absolutely nothing is more important in our society than protecting the life of a child. The sad reality is such a long way away from that.
TRUMP CHARGED IN GEORGIA 2020 ELECTION PROBE, HIS FOURTH INDICTMENT
By Holly Bailey and Amy Gardner, The Washington Post
ATLANTA — Former president Donald Trump and 18 others were criminally charged in Georgia in connection with efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in the state, according to an indictment made public late Monday night.
Trump was charged with 13 counts, including violating the state’s racketeering act, soliciting a public officer to violate their oath, conspiring to impersonate a public officer, conspiring to commit forgery in the first degree and conspiring to file false documents.
The historic indictment, the fourth to implicate the former president, follows a 2½-year investigation by Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D). The probe was launched after audio leaked from a January 2021 phone call during which Trump urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) to question the validity of thousands of ballots, especially in the heavily Democratic Atlanta area, and said he wanted to “find” the votes to erase his 2020 loss in the state.
Willis’s investigation quickly expanded to other alleged efforts by Trump or his supporters, including trying to thwart the electoral college process, harassing election workers, spreading false information about the voting process in Georgia and compromising election equipment in a rural county.
Fulton County, Ga. prosecutor Fani Willis presented her case against former president Donald Trump and 18 others. Here's what to expect from this indictment. (Video: Peter Stevenson, JM Rieger/The Washington Post)
Trump has long decried the Georgia investigation as a “political witch hunt,” defending his calls to Raffensperger and others as “perfect.” Ahead of Monday’s indictment, Trump’s Georgia-based legal team had filed legal challenges seeking to disqualify Willis and block the investigation. In a statement, the attorneys -- Drew Findling, Marissa Goldberg and Jennifer Little – condemned the charges, calling the day’s events “shocking and absurd” and accusing Willis of building her case on “witnesses who harbor their own personal and political interests.”
“We look forward to a detailed review of this indictment which is undoubtedly just as flawed and unconstitutional as this entire process has been,” the statement said.
A total of 41 charges are brought against 19 defendants in the 98-page indictment. Not all face the same counts, but all have been charged with violating the Georgia Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Willis said she has given those charged until Aug. 25 to surrender.
“Trump and the other Defendants charged in this Indictment refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump,” the indictment states.
Among those charged are Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who served as Trump’s personal attorney after the election; Trump’s former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows; Jeffrey Clark, who was a mid-level Justice Department official; and several Trump advisers, including attorneys John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis and Kenneth Chesebro.
Also indicted were two Georgia-based lawyers advocating on Trump’s behalf, Ray S. Smith III and Robert Cheeley; a senior campaign adviser, Mike Roman, who helped plan the elector meeting; and three prominent Georgia Republicans who served as electors: former GOP chairman David Shafer, former GOP finance chairman Shawn Still and Cathy Latham of Coffee County.
Several lesser-known players who participated in efforts to reverse Trump’s defeat in Georgia were also indicted, including three people accused of harassing Fulton County election worker Ruby Freeman. They are Stephen Cliffgard Lee, Harrison Floyd and Trevian Kutti. The latter is a former publicist for R. Kelly and an associate of Ye, formerly known as Kanye West.
A final group of individuals charged in the indictment allegedly participated in an effort to steal election equipment data in rural Coffee County, Ga. In addition to Latham, the former county GOP chair, they are former Coffee County elections supervisor Misty Hampton and Georgia businessman Scott Hall.
Trump was indicted in Washington this month in a separate Justice Department probe into his various attempts to keep his grip on power during the chaotic aftermath of his 2020 defeat. Some aspects of that four-count federal case, led by special counsel Jack Smith, overlap with Willis’s sprawling probe, which accuses Trump and his associates of a broad criminal enterprise to reverse Biden’s election victory in Georgia.
But the Fulton County indictment, issued by a grand jury and made public Monday night, is far more encompassing and detailed than Smith’s ongoing federal investigation. Willis declined to say if she has had contact with Smith, who so far has only charged Trump in his elections-related probe. The federal indictment also listed six unnamed, unindicted co-conspirators, five of whom have been identified by The Washington Post and other news organizations as Giuliani, Eastman, Clark, Chesebro and Powell.
Prosecutors brought charges around five subject areas: false statements by Trump allies, including Giuliani, to the Georgia legislature; the breach of voting data in Coffee County; calls Trump made to state officials, including Raffensperger, seeking to overturn Biden’s victory; the harassment of election workers; and the creation of a slate of alternate electors to undermine the legitimate vote. Those charged in the case were implicated in certain parts of what prosecutors presented as a larger enterprise to undermine the election.
Willis had signaled for months that she planned to use Georgia’s expansive anti-racketeering statutes, which allow prosecutors not only to charge in-state wrongdoing but to use activities in other states to prove criminal intent in Georgia. The statute is broader than federal law in terms of how prosecutors can define a criminal enterprise or conspiracy.
The indictment alleges that the enterprise “constituted a criminal organization whose members and associates engaged in various related criminal activities including, but not limited to, false statements and writings, impersonating a public officer, forgery, filing false documents, influencing witnesses, computer theft, computer trespass, computer invasion of privacy, conspiracy to defraud the state [and] acts involving theft and perjury.” The indictment takes an expansive view of the behaviors it alleges were acts “in furtherance of the conspiracy” -- including, as an example, at least a dozen instances of Trump’s tweets alleging fraud and other claims. Such details from the indictment quickly drew criticism as potential violations of the defendants’ free speech protections.
In January 2022, Willis requested that an unusual special-purpose grand jury be convened to continue the probe, citing the reluctance of witnesses who would not speak to prosecutors without a subpoena. The investigative body of 23 jurors and three alternates picked from a pool of residents from Atlanta and its suburbs was given full subpoena power for documents and the ability to call witnesses — though it could not issue indictments, only recommendations in the case.
Over roughly eight months, the panel heard from 75 witnesses, including key Trump advisers such as Giuliani, Meadows and Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who waged a failed legal battle all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to block his subpoena before ultimately testifying.
The panel also heard from Raffensperger and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R), who were on the other end of aggressive lobbying efforts by Trump and his associates to overturn Trump’s loss in the state.
In January, the special grand jury concluded its work and issued a final report on its investigation, which was largely kept under seal by the judge who oversaw the panel.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney cited “due process” concerns for “potential future defendants” as Willis considered charges in the case. But in February, McBurney released a five-page excerpt of the report, including a section in which the panel concluded that some witnesses may have lied under oath during their testimony and recommended that charges be filed.
The panel’s forewoman later confirmed that the special grand jury had recommended multiple indictments, though she declined to say of whom.
Trump’s attorneys later sought to disqualify Willis and her office from the case — citing Willis’s public comments about the investigation — and quash the final report and any evidence gathered by the special-purpose grand jury. The motions were rejected by McBurney and the Georgia Supreme Court, which ruled that Trump had no legal standing to stop an investigation before charges were filed.
In the spring, amid security concerns, Willis took the unusual step of telling law enforcement that she planned to announce her charging decision in August. Because the special grand jury could not issue indictments, prosecutors presented their case to a regular grand jury sworn in last month, which began hearing the case Monday.
Trump’s attorneys are likely to immediately seek to have the case thrown out, reviving their complaints about Willis and the use of a special grand jury.
Trump has intensified his attacks on Willis and other prosecutors examining his activities, describing them as “vicious, horrible people” and “mentally sick.” He has referred to Willis, who is Black, as the “racist DA from Atlanta.” His 2024 campaign included her in a recent video attacking prosecutors investigating Trump. Willis has generally declined to respond directly to Trump’s attacks, but in a rare exception, she said in an email last week sent to the entire district attorney’s office that Trump’s ad contained “derogatory and false information about me,” and ordered her employees to ignore it.
“You may not comment in any way on the ad or any of the negativity that may be expressed against me, your colleagues, this office in coming days, weeks or months,” Willis wrote in the email, obtained by The Washington Post. “We have no personal feelings against those we investigate or prosecute and we should not express any. This is business, it will never be personal.”
Still, Willis has repeatedly raised concerns about security as her investigation has progressed, citing Trump’s “alarming” rhetoric and the racist threats she and her staff have received. Willis is often accompanied by armed guards at public appearances, and security at her office and her residence was increased even more in recent days ahead of the expected charging announcement, according to a law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive security matters.
By Holly Bailey and Amy Gardner, The Washington Post
ATLANTA — Former president Donald Trump and 18 others were criminally charged in Georgia in connection with efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in the state, according to an indictment made public late Monday night.
Trump was charged with 13 counts, including violating the state’s racketeering act, soliciting a public officer to violate their oath, conspiring to impersonate a public officer, conspiring to commit forgery in the first degree and conspiring to file false documents.
The historic indictment, the fourth to implicate the former president, follows a 2½-year investigation by Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D). The probe was launched after audio leaked from a January 2021 phone call during which Trump urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) to question the validity of thousands of ballots, especially in the heavily Democratic Atlanta area, and said he wanted to “find” the votes to erase his 2020 loss in the state.
Willis’s investigation quickly expanded to other alleged efforts by Trump or his supporters, including trying to thwart the electoral college process, harassing election workers, spreading false information about the voting process in Georgia and compromising election equipment in a rural county.
Fulton County, Ga. prosecutor Fani Willis presented her case against former president Donald Trump and 18 others. Here's what to expect from this indictment. (Video: Peter Stevenson, JM Rieger/The Washington Post)
Trump has long decried the Georgia investigation as a “political witch hunt,” defending his calls to Raffensperger and others as “perfect.” Ahead of Monday’s indictment, Trump’s Georgia-based legal team had filed legal challenges seeking to disqualify Willis and block the investigation. In a statement, the attorneys -- Drew Findling, Marissa Goldberg and Jennifer Little – condemned the charges, calling the day’s events “shocking and absurd” and accusing Willis of building her case on “witnesses who harbor their own personal and political interests.”
“We look forward to a detailed review of this indictment which is undoubtedly just as flawed and unconstitutional as this entire process has been,” the statement said.
A total of 41 charges are brought against 19 defendants in the 98-page indictment. Not all face the same counts, but all have been charged with violating the Georgia Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Willis said she has given those charged until Aug. 25 to surrender.
“Trump and the other Defendants charged in this Indictment refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump,” the indictment states.
Among those charged are Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who served as Trump’s personal attorney after the election; Trump’s former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows; Jeffrey Clark, who was a mid-level Justice Department official; and several Trump advisers, including attorneys John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis and Kenneth Chesebro.
Also indicted were two Georgia-based lawyers advocating on Trump’s behalf, Ray S. Smith III and Robert Cheeley; a senior campaign adviser, Mike Roman, who helped plan the elector meeting; and three prominent Georgia Republicans who served as electors: former GOP chairman David Shafer, former GOP finance chairman Shawn Still and Cathy Latham of Coffee County.
Several lesser-known players who participated in efforts to reverse Trump’s defeat in Georgia were also indicted, including three people accused of harassing Fulton County election worker Ruby Freeman. They are Stephen Cliffgard Lee, Harrison Floyd and Trevian Kutti. The latter is a former publicist for R. Kelly and an associate of Ye, formerly known as Kanye West.
A final group of individuals charged in the indictment allegedly participated in an effort to steal election equipment data in rural Coffee County, Ga. In addition to Latham, the former county GOP chair, they are former Coffee County elections supervisor Misty Hampton and Georgia businessman Scott Hall.
Trump was indicted in Washington this month in a separate Justice Department probe into his various attempts to keep his grip on power during the chaotic aftermath of his 2020 defeat. Some aspects of that four-count federal case, led by special counsel Jack Smith, overlap with Willis’s sprawling probe, which accuses Trump and his associates of a broad criminal enterprise to reverse Biden’s election victory in Georgia.
But the Fulton County indictment, issued by a grand jury and made public Monday night, is far more encompassing and detailed than Smith’s ongoing federal investigation. Willis declined to say if she has had contact with Smith, who so far has only charged Trump in his elections-related probe. The federal indictment also listed six unnamed, unindicted co-conspirators, five of whom have been identified by The Washington Post and other news organizations as Giuliani, Eastman, Clark, Chesebro and Powell.
Prosecutors brought charges around five subject areas: false statements by Trump allies, including Giuliani, to the Georgia legislature; the breach of voting data in Coffee County; calls Trump made to state officials, including Raffensperger, seeking to overturn Biden’s victory; the harassment of election workers; and the creation of a slate of alternate electors to undermine the legitimate vote. Those charged in the case were implicated in certain parts of what prosecutors presented as a larger enterprise to undermine the election.
Willis had signaled for months that she planned to use Georgia’s expansive anti-racketeering statutes, which allow prosecutors not only to charge in-state wrongdoing but to use activities in other states to prove criminal intent in Georgia. The statute is broader than federal law in terms of how prosecutors can define a criminal enterprise or conspiracy.
The indictment alleges that the enterprise “constituted a criminal organization whose members and associates engaged in various related criminal activities including, but not limited to, false statements and writings, impersonating a public officer, forgery, filing false documents, influencing witnesses, computer theft, computer trespass, computer invasion of privacy, conspiracy to defraud the state [and] acts involving theft and perjury.” The indictment takes an expansive view of the behaviors it alleges were acts “in furtherance of the conspiracy” -- including, as an example, at least a dozen instances of Trump’s tweets alleging fraud and other claims. Such details from the indictment quickly drew criticism as potential violations of the defendants’ free speech protections.
In January 2022, Willis requested that an unusual special-purpose grand jury be convened to continue the probe, citing the reluctance of witnesses who would not speak to prosecutors without a subpoena. The investigative body of 23 jurors and three alternates picked from a pool of residents from Atlanta and its suburbs was given full subpoena power for documents and the ability to call witnesses — though it could not issue indictments, only recommendations in the case.
Over roughly eight months, the panel heard from 75 witnesses, including key Trump advisers such as Giuliani, Meadows and Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who waged a failed legal battle all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to block his subpoena before ultimately testifying.
The panel also heard from Raffensperger and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R), who were on the other end of aggressive lobbying efforts by Trump and his associates to overturn Trump’s loss in the state.
In January, the special grand jury concluded its work and issued a final report on its investigation, which was largely kept under seal by the judge who oversaw the panel.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney cited “due process” concerns for “potential future defendants” as Willis considered charges in the case. But in February, McBurney released a five-page excerpt of the report, including a section in which the panel concluded that some witnesses may have lied under oath during their testimony and recommended that charges be filed.
The panel’s forewoman later confirmed that the special grand jury had recommended multiple indictments, though she declined to say of whom.
Trump’s attorneys later sought to disqualify Willis and her office from the case — citing Willis’s public comments about the investigation — and quash the final report and any evidence gathered by the special-purpose grand jury. The motions were rejected by McBurney and the Georgia Supreme Court, which ruled that Trump had no legal standing to stop an investigation before charges were filed.
In the spring, amid security concerns, Willis took the unusual step of telling law enforcement that she planned to announce her charging decision in August. Because the special grand jury could not issue indictments, prosecutors presented their case to a regular grand jury sworn in last month, which began hearing the case Monday.
Trump’s attorneys are likely to immediately seek to have the case thrown out, reviving their complaints about Willis and the use of a special grand jury.
Trump has intensified his attacks on Willis and other prosecutors examining his activities, describing them as “vicious, horrible people” and “mentally sick.” He has referred to Willis, who is Black, as the “racist DA from Atlanta.” His 2024 campaign included her in a recent video attacking prosecutors investigating Trump. Willis has generally declined to respond directly to Trump’s attacks, but in a rare exception, she said in an email last week sent to the entire district attorney’s office that Trump’s ad contained “derogatory and false information about me,” and ordered her employees to ignore it.
“You may not comment in any way on the ad or any of the negativity that may be expressed against me, your colleagues, this office in coming days, weeks or months,” Willis wrote in the email, obtained by The Washington Post. “We have no personal feelings against those we investigate or prosecute and we should not express any. This is business, it will never be personal.”
Still, Willis has repeatedly raised concerns about security as her investigation has progressed, citing Trump’s “alarming” rhetoric and the racist threats she and her staff have received. Willis is often accompanied by armed guards at public appearances, and security at her office and her residence was increased even more in recent days ahead of the expected charging announcement, according to a law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive security matters.
CLIMATE CHANGE CAME FOR MAUI. THE REST OF US ARE NEXT.
By Eugene Robinson, The Washington Post
Climate change, as scientists have long anticipated, is making the weather more extreme and unpredictable. This summer, we’re being taught the tragic lesson that we all need to prepare for “unlikely” disasters as well as familiar ones, and to look for risk in new places.
The deadly wildfires on Maui are the most horrifying example. One culprit in the death and devastation in the historic, now-gutted Hawaiian town of Lahaina: The surrounding hillsides were covered with nonnative, invasive grasses — originally planted on the island by humans — which burned explosively.
Those grasses were so dry and flammable because the island, especially the area around Lahaina, is experiencing a “flash drought.” In late May, none of the island was unusually dry, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. Today, the whole island is either abnormally dry or experiencing moderate to severe drought. Scientists have warned that flash droughts will occur more frequently because of climate change.
The Maui fires were greatly intensified by high winds, caused by the combination of a strong high-pressure system to the north of the island and the powerful Hurricane Dora to the south. Those atmospheric forces worked together like an eggbeater, whipping winds with gusts of up to 80 miles per hour. Climate change has been predicted to intensify both high-pressure heat domes and tropical cyclones such as Dora.
Any of these things in isolation — the drought, the winds from the high-pressure system, the passing hurricane — could have created a problem for Maui. Happening all at once, they created what climate scientist Michael Mann, one of the originators of the “hockey stick” temperature graph depicting global warming and the director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, called “a ‘compound’ climate catastrophe.”
One lesson we must learn from Maui is that combinations of circumstances that we think of as unlikely might no longer be unlikely at all. And bad luck won’t be confined to small islands far away.
By now, there’s ample evidence of the danger and force of extreme heat alone. Globally, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, this past June was the hottest one recorded on the planet — and July wasthe hottest month since record keeping began 174 years ago, with average temperatures worldwide being 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit above the long-term average.
The city of Phoenix saw a record 31 consecutive days with high temperatures at or above 110 degrees; the string was finally broken by a day when the high was only 108. Punishing heat domes parked over much of the southern half of the country for much of the summer. Extreme heat and drought also plagued parts of Europe, North Africa and western China.
Maui is just the latest place to ignite. Canada is in the midst of its worst fire season in history, during which infernos generated smoke that choked cities in the United States. Thousands of tourists and residents had to be evacuated from the Greek island of Rhodes in July because of raging wildfires.
And rain might bring additional suffering instead of relief. In China, extreme heat was followed by two typhoons that made landfall, bringing the heaviest rainfall in Beijing in 140 years and causing floods that killed at least 62 people.
Here in the D.C. area, we have had two episodes of violent thunderstorms accompanied by anomalously strong winds featuring sharp, sudden downdrafts that ripped away roofs and downed power lines. At my house, we lost a couple of big sweet gum branches, which fell harmlessly into the yard. A few blocks away, a big oak tree crashed into a house.
What most of us haven’t adequately internalized yet is that this is how it’s going to be. We have changed the climate, which has changed the weather. We need to stop making things worse, which means switching from fossil fuels to clean energy sources. And we need to face the new reality we have forged.
The insurance industry is already making an adjustment that we all soon will feel. A report last week by the reinsurance giant Swiss Re calculated that severe thunderstorms in the United States accounted for 68 percent of insured natural catastrophe losses worldwide in the first half of this year. Reinsurance companies will pass along those costs to the primary insurers who cover your home and your car. Primary insurers will eventually pass along those costs to you — though imagine facing the random violence of extreme weather without insurance at all.
As individuals and as communities, we need to think more about worst-case scenarios and actively plan for them. Climate change is personal. Act accordingly.
By Eugene Robinson, The Washington Post
Climate change, as scientists have long anticipated, is making the weather more extreme and unpredictable. This summer, we’re being taught the tragic lesson that we all need to prepare for “unlikely” disasters as well as familiar ones, and to look for risk in new places.
The deadly wildfires on Maui are the most horrifying example. One culprit in the death and devastation in the historic, now-gutted Hawaiian town of Lahaina: The surrounding hillsides were covered with nonnative, invasive grasses — originally planted on the island by humans — which burned explosively.
Those grasses were so dry and flammable because the island, especially the area around Lahaina, is experiencing a “flash drought.” In late May, none of the island was unusually dry, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. Today, the whole island is either abnormally dry or experiencing moderate to severe drought. Scientists have warned that flash droughts will occur more frequently because of climate change.
The Maui fires were greatly intensified by high winds, caused by the combination of a strong high-pressure system to the north of the island and the powerful Hurricane Dora to the south. Those atmospheric forces worked together like an eggbeater, whipping winds with gusts of up to 80 miles per hour. Climate change has been predicted to intensify both high-pressure heat domes and tropical cyclones such as Dora.
Any of these things in isolation — the drought, the winds from the high-pressure system, the passing hurricane — could have created a problem for Maui. Happening all at once, they created what climate scientist Michael Mann, one of the originators of the “hockey stick” temperature graph depicting global warming and the director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, called “a ‘compound’ climate catastrophe.”
One lesson we must learn from Maui is that combinations of circumstances that we think of as unlikely might no longer be unlikely at all. And bad luck won’t be confined to small islands far away.
By now, there’s ample evidence of the danger and force of extreme heat alone. Globally, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, this past June was the hottest one recorded on the planet — and July was
The city of Phoenix saw a record 31 consecutive days with high temperatures at or above 110 degrees; the string was finally broken by a day when the high was only 108. Punishing heat domes parked over much of the southern half of the country for much of the summer. Extreme heat and drought also plagued parts of Europe, North Africa and western China.
Maui is just the latest place to ignite. Canada is in the midst of its worst fire season in history, during which infernos generated smoke that choked cities in the United States. Thousands of tourists and residents had to be evacuated from the Greek island of Rhodes in July because of raging wildfires.
And rain might bring additional suffering instead of relief. In China, extreme heat was followed by two typhoons that made landfall, bringing the heaviest rainfall in Beijing in 140 years and causing floods that killed at least 62 people.
Here in the D.C. area, we have had two episodes of violent thunderstorms accompanied by anomalously strong winds featuring sharp, sudden downdrafts that ripped away roofs and downed power lines. At my house, we lost a couple of big sweet gum branches, which fell harmlessly into the yard. A few blocks away, a big oak tree crashed into a house.
What most of us haven’t adequately internalized yet is that this is how it’s going to be. We have changed the climate, which has changed the weather. We need to stop making things worse, which means switching from fossil fuels to clean energy sources. And we need to face the new reality we have forged.
The insurance industry is already making an adjustment that we all soon will feel. A report last week by the reinsurance giant Swiss Re calculated that severe thunderstorms in the United States accounted for 68 percent of insured natural catastrophe losses worldwide in the first half of this year. Reinsurance companies will pass along those costs to the primary insurers who cover your home and your car. Primary insurers will eventually pass along those costs to you — though imagine facing the random violence of extreme weather without insurance at all.
As individuals and as communities, we need to think more about worst-case scenarios and actively plan for them. Climate change is personal. Act accordingly.
FROM A KANSAS NEWSROOM TO A SOCCER PITCH, WHY THE RIGHT HATES AMERICA AND DEMOCRACY
The right's hatred of young, multicultural America — epitomized by U.S. soccer women — is driving its push to end democracy.
by Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
The increasingly dire, near-death experience of American democracy has felt like the proverbial frog in boiling water, as the heat of a shockingly popular U.S. brand of authoritarianism gets turned up one degree at a time. But in 2023 the far right’s embrace of autocracy has finally reached full boil. And the splatters of this dangerous caldron are burning our fundamental moral values in unexpected ways and the most unlikely places.
Like Marion County, Kansas.
Marion County — population 11,823 — is a rural, 75% Republican crossroads for the Chisolm cattle trail and the Santa Fe Railroad, and now the Keystone Pipeline sitting on the edge of the Great Plains. Since 1869, a pillar of the community has been the weekly Marion County Record, which in between the lines of the obituaries and the chain restaurant openings has a cherished history of holding its public officials to account. It was this most important function for American democracy by the small-town newspaper that boiled over the top this weekend, amid a murky backstory: a tip about a politically connected restaurateur, amid rumors the new police chief was under investigation for sexual misconduct.
On Friday, the five members of the Marion Police Department executed a shocking raid on the newspaper’s office — seizing its computers, cell phones, notebooks and other reporting materials. The raiding officers even fanned out to the home of the Meyer family, which has owned the Record for decades. Co-owner Joan Meyer — age 98, mother to current publisher, Eric Meyer — was stunned and in tears as the cops seized her computer and the router for her Alexa device, a lifeline, while sifting through her son’s banking records and leaving a jumble of yanked electric cords behind.
The deepest danger of Trumpism, fascism, isn’t Trump himself but the million little Trumps across the U.S. it enflames. Here’s a whole gang of them following the ethos that the press is “the enemy of the people.” https://t.co/3jxWFzNjcZ — Jeff Sharlet (jeffsharlet.bsky.social) (@JeffSharlet) August 12, 2023
“These are Hitler tactics and something has to be done,” Joan Meyer, who had worked in journalism since 1953 — those heady democracy days after World War II — told a reporter. She was too upset by the raid — which seemed a violation of existing law, not to mention First Amendment principles — to sleep or even eat. On Saturday afternoon, the nonagenarian Meyer — who’d been in good health — abruptly died, the latest casualty in a cold Civil War already ripping America apart.
In a few short generations, the U.S. relationship with authoritarianism has devolved from It Can’t Happen Here to “It could happen here” to today’s mantra: Turn on the news, it just happened again. “Hitler tactics” are busting out all over, and the gasping frog of American democracy is beginning to already taste like burnt chicken.
Deep into the 21st century, America is more racially, ethnically and religiously diverse than any moment in its 247-year history. The rising cohort of younger millennials and Gen Z — the nation’s best-educated generations ever, which seems to coincide with their embrace of diversity, tolerance and progressive ideas — is showing up at the voting booth. Sorry Sarah Palin, but this is “the real America” now, and the millions clinging to the older hierarchies around race, gender and Christian hegemony are not handling it well. If democracy means this true majority winning elections, then they hate democracy. If the real America is this young and diverse, then they hate America.
The rising “Hitler tactics” means finding any means necessary to undo free and fair elections where they didn’t like the outcome, or else changing the rules in the middle of the game, or else trying to prevent elections altogether.
That’s why Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis — increasingly the avatar of this new authoritarianism — just called on dubious powers to simply deny the will of voters in the predominantly Democratic Orlando area by removing the elected state’s attorney, the progressive-minded Monique Worrell. He justified this not because of any wrongdoing but because he disagrees with her policies. This is the second elected prosecutor that DeSantis has dictatorially removed.
That’s why Republicans in Ohio — whose patriarchal power play in the state’s current, disputed “heartbeat” abortion law that would ban women’s reproductive rights in most cases faces a likely defeat in a November referendum — tried unsuccessfully in a dead-of-August-vacation special election to change the rules midstream and raise the requirement to a 60% threshold. That’s why the increasingly popular GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is rising in the polls with a plan to raise the voting age to 25 unless young people pass a citizenship test.
That’s why Republicans in Alabama — confronted with a surprise order from the U.S. Supreme Court to redraw the state’s congressional map under the 1965 Voting Rights Act to add a second, Black-majority district — decided they would just ignore the ruling, with a new map that doesn’t comply. I guess that’s to be expected from a state where one small town simply decided to padlock its City Hall after a Black man was elected mayor in 2020.
This autocratic contempt for the basic rule of law and the tenets of democracy is justified, in their minds, by falsely claiming the will of the people as instead some kind of “fascist left” that uses cultural power to impose its will on the folks they see as the true Americans. The result is a growing tolerance among young and increasingly online conservative activists to openly embrace the language of racism and sexism — even the nomenclature of the fascism they pretend to oppose.
“Hatred, combined with masculine insecurity and cowardice, is herding young right-wing men into outright bigotry and prejudice,” the “never-Trump” conservative David French wrote in a Sunday New York Times op-ed. French was trying to explain the recent firing of DeSantis political adviser Nate Hochman — considered a young “thought leader” in GOP circles — for creating a pro-DeSantis video with a Nazi-flavored meme, as well as the popularity of pundits like Richard Hanania, who has been published in “respectable” publications despite a history of racism.
Christian pastor alarmed after quoting the Sermon on the Mount and being told by Trump supporters, "Where did you get those liberal talking points?"
Pastor: I'm literally quoting Jesus Christ.
Congregant: That's weak.https://t.co/bgYYGBK3n9 — Celeste Headlee (@CelesteHeadlee)
The language and memes that would not have seemed out of place in 1930s Europe come as the paranoid style on the right increasingly sees every institution that embraces American modernity as part of a totalitarian leftist conspiracy: not just academia and the media, the old standbys, but now the public-health bureaucracy, big corporations like Disney or Delta, or the FBI and “the woke military.” The latest coconspirator is ... Jesus Christ?
Russell Moore, the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, told NPR last week that preachers whose sermons include the basics of the New Testament such as Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, in which Christ is quoted as urging his followers to “turn the other cheek” when struck, now generates a confused and sometimes angry response from today’s evangelicals. Moore said the minister is invariably asked: “Where did you get those liberal talking points?”
Moore’s comments are only shocking if you haven’t been paying attention. A 2022 poll found that more than 60% of Republicans would support declaring America as “a Christian nation,” even though a majority also recognized this is unconstitutional. They just don’t care anymore. Jesus, and his gospel of the poor, is weak. The thrice-married Donald Trump who talks of smiting their enemies is strong, the authority figure they truly want to worship from the pews.
How did we even get here? A clarifying moment came at an odd time — about 7 a.m. on a Sunday morning — from halfway around the world in Melbourne, Australia. It was there that the U.S. women’s national soccer team —two-time defending champion, but clearly in flux like the nation they represent — crashed out of the World Cup, losing a penalty-kick shootout to Sweden on a goal that crossed the line by barely a fraction of an inch.
In the years leading up to this defeat, the American women had become the winning icon of what our country has become, and what it hopes to be. Once more successful and arguably as popular as their male counterparts yet paid considerably less, they fought for parity and mostly won. Once mostly white and feeling pressure to downplay any LGBTQ presence, the modern iteration celebrates its diversity, from the biracial rising star Sophia Smith to openly gay and blue-haired leader Megan Rapinoe, who has fought for social justice and thus become a magnet for naysayers.
In this summer’s World Cup held Down Under, U.S. conservatives looked for any excuse, no matter how contrived, to root against their own country. And when the Swedish women celebrated their upset victory on the pitch, the leaders of the American right were jumping up and down with them. “I used to pull for our women’s soccer team, but recently they have shown disrespect for the US & have used their platform to promote the LGBTQ agenda,” posted evangelical leader Franklin Graham. “When they lost, I wasn’t sad.” Donald Trump was unshockingly less subtle, posting: “WOKE EQUALS FAILURE. Nice shot Megan, the USA is going to Hell!!!”
It’s all out in the open now, isn’t it? The U.S. women’s soccer team — young, diverse, not afraid to speak up for equality — are the new, albeit fragile, majority. They are America right now, and the right hates them — because they hate America. And this hatred makes it easier to destroy what America stands for. Even if that requires violence.
“Mr. President, I cannot stand these people that are destroying our country,” Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz told a boisterous crowd at the Iowa State Fair on Saturday, as he introduced Trump amid the usual litany of complaints about the border and the multiple probes into Trump’s corruption. “But we know that only through force do we make any change in a corrupt town like Washington, D.C.”
When all else fails — the canceling of elections, the voter suppression, the rule changing, the growing assault on the free press that makes a shocking raid like Marion County possible — force is their last resort. It was their last resort on Jan. 6, 2021, and they’re telling us now in the bright, deep-fried daylight of an Iowa fairgrounds that they’ll do it again.
Once upon a time, “Bleeding Kansas” was a warning to America — harbinger of a civil war to come. It doesn’t have to be that way this time around. But we won’t succeed until we’re clear-eyed that nearly half of Americans hate who we’ve become, hate democracy when they no longer can win, and will embrace violence to get the results they can’t get at the ballot box.
The right's hatred of young, multicultural America — epitomized by U.S. soccer women — is driving its push to end democracy.
by Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
The increasingly dire, near-death experience of American democracy has felt like the proverbial frog in boiling water, as the heat of a shockingly popular U.S. brand of authoritarianism gets turned up one degree at a time. But in 2023 the far right’s embrace of autocracy has finally reached full boil. And the splatters of this dangerous caldron are burning our fundamental moral values in unexpected ways and the most unlikely places.
Like Marion County, Kansas.
Marion County — population 11,823 — is a rural, 75% Republican crossroads for the Chisolm cattle trail and the Santa Fe Railroad, and now the Keystone Pipeline sitting on the edge of the Great Plains. Since 1869, a pillar of the community has been the weekly Marion County Record, which in between the lines of the obituaries and the chain restaurant openings has a cherished history of holding its public officials to account. It was this most important function for American democracy by the small-town newspaper that boiled over the top this weekend, amid a murky backstory: a tip about a politically connected restaurateur, amid rumors the new police chief was under investigation for sexual misconduct.
On Friday, the five members of the Marion Police Department executed a shocking raid on the newspaper’s office — seizing its computers, cell phones, notebooks and other reporting materials. The raiding officers even fanned out to the home of the Meyer family, which has owned the Record for decades. Co-owner Joan Meyer — age 98, mother to current publisher, Eric Meyer — was stunned and in tears as the cops seized her computer and the router for her Alexa device, a lifeline, while sifting through her son’s banking records and leaving a jumble of yanked electric cords behind.
The deepest danger of Trumpism, fascism, isn’t Trump himself but the million little Trumps across the U.S. it enflames. Here’s a whole gang of them following the ethos that the press is “the enemy of the people.” https://t.co/3jxWFzNjcZ — Jeff Sharlet (jeffsharlet.bsky.social) (@JeffSharlet) August 12, 2023
“These are Hitler tactics and something has to be done,” Joan Meyer, who had worked in journalism since 1953 — those heady democracy days after World War II — told a reporter. She was too upset by the raid — which seemed a violation of existing law, not to mention First Amendment principles — to sleep or even eat. On Saturday afternoon, the nonagenarian Meyer — who’d been in good health — abruptly died, the latest casualty in a cold Civil War already ripping America apart.
In a few short generations, the U.S. relationship with authoritarianism has devolved from It Can’t Happen Here to “It could happen here” to today’s mantra: Turn on the news, it just happened again. “Hitler tactics” are busting out all over, and the gasping frog of American democracy is beginning to already taste like burnt chicken.
Deep into the 21st century, America is more racially, ethnically and religiously diverse than any moment in its 247-year history. The rising cohort of younger millennials and Gen Z — the nation’s best-educated generations ever, which seems to coincide with their embrace of diversity, tolerance and progressive ideas — is showing up at the voting booth. Sorry Sarah Palin, but this is “the real America” now, and the millions clinging to the older hierarchies around race, gender and Christian hegemony are not handling it well. If democracy means this true majority winning elections, then they hate democracy. If the real America is this young and diverse, then they hate America.
The rising “Hitler tactics” means finding any means necessary to undo free and fair elections where they didn’t like the outcome, or else changing the rules in the middle of the game, or else trying to prevent elections altogether.
That’s why Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis — increasingly the avatar of this new authoritarianism — just called on dubious powers to simply deny the will of voters in the predominantly Democratic Orlando area by removing the elected state’s attorney, the progressive-minded Monique Worrell. He justified this not because of any wrongdoing but because he disagrees with her policies. This is the second elected prosecutor that DeSantis has dictatorially removed.
That’s why Republicans in Ohio — whose patriarchal power play in the state’s current, disputed “heartbeat” abortion law that would ban women’s reproductive rights in most cases faces a likely defeat in a November referendum — tried unsuccessfully in a dead-of-August-vacation special election to change the rules midstream and raise the requirement to a 60% threshold. That’s why the increasingly popular GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is rising in the polls with a plan to raise the voting age to 25 unless young people pass a citizenship test.
That’s why Republicans in Alabama — confronted with a surprise order from the U.S. Supreme Court to redraw the state’s congressional map under the 1965 Voting Rights Act to add a second, Black-majority district — decided they would just ignore the ruling, with a new map that doesn’t comply. I guess that’s to be expected from a state where one small town simply decided to padlock its City Hall after a Black man was elected mayor in 2020.
This autocratic contempt for the basic rule of law and the tenets of democracy is justified, in their minds, by falsely claiming the will of the people as instead some kind of “fascist left” that uses cultural power to impose its will on the folks they see as the true Americans. The result is a growing tolerance among young and increasingly online conservative activists to openly embrace the language of racism and sexism — even the nomenclature of the fascism they pretend to oppose.
“Hatred, combined with masculine insecurity and cowardice, is herding young right-wing men into outright bigotry and prejudice,” the “never-Trump” conservative David French wrote in a Sunday New York Times op-ed. French was trying to explain the recent firing of DeSantis political adviser Nate Hochman — considered a young “thought leader” in GOP circles — for creating a pro-DeSantis video with a Nazi-flavored meme, as well as the popularity of pundits like Richard Hanania, who has been published in “respectable” publications despite a history of racism.
Christian pastor alarmed after quoting the Sermon on the Mount and being told by Trump supporters, "Where did you get those liberal talking points?"
Pastor: I'm literally quoting Jesus Christ.
Congregant: That's weak.https://t.co/bgYYGBK3n9 — Celeste Headlee (@CelesteHeadlee)
The language and memes that would not have seemed out of place in 1930s Europe come as the paranoid style on the right increasingly sees every institution that embraces American modernity as part of a totalitarian leftist conspiracy: not just academia and the media, the old standbys, but now the public-health bureaucracy, big corporations like Disney or Delta, or the FBI and “the woke military.” The latest coconspirator is ... Jesus Christ?
Russell Moore, the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, told NPR last week that preachers whose sermons include the basics of the New Testament such as Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, in which Christ is quoted as urging his followers to “turn the other cheek” when struck, now generates a confused and sometimes angry response from today’s evangelicals. Moore said the minister is invariably asked: “Where did you get those liberal talking points?”
Moore’s comments are only shocking if you haven’t been paying attention. A 2022 poll found that more than 60% of Republicans would support declaring America as “a Christian nation,” even though a majority also recognized this is unconstitutional. They just don’t care anymore. Jesus, and his gospel of the poor, is weak. The thrice-married Donald Trump who talks of smiting their enemies is strong, the authority figure they truly want to worship from the pews.
How did we even get here? A clarifying moment came at an odd time — about 7 a.m. on a Sunday morning — from halfway around the world in Melbourne, Australia. It was there that the U.S. women’s national soccer team —two-time defending champion, but clearly in flux like the nation they represent — crashed out of the World Cup, losing a penalty-kick shootout to Sweden on a goal that crossed the line by barely a fraction of an inch.
In the years leading up to this defeat, the American women had become the winning icon of what our country has become, and what it hopes to be. Once more successful and arguably as popular as their male counterparts yet paid considerably less, they fought for parity and mostly won. Once mostly white and feeling pressure to downplay any LGBTQ presence, the modern iteration celebrates its diversity, from the biracial rising star Sophia Smith to openly gay and blue-haired leader Megan Rapinoe, who has fought for social justice and thus become a magnet for naysayers.
In this summer’s World Cup held Down Under, U.S. conservatives looked for any excuse, no matter how contrived, to root against their own country. And when the Swedish women celebrated their upset victory on the pitch, the leaders of the American right were jumping up and down with them. “I used to pull for our women’s soccer team, but recently they have shown disrespect for the US & have used their platform to promote the LGBTQ agenda,” posted evangelical leader Franklin Graham. “When they lost, I wasn’t sad.” Donald Trump was unshockingly less subtle, posting: “WOKE EQUALS FAILURE. Nice shot Megan, the USA is going to Hell!!!”
It’s all out in the open now, isn’t it? The U.S. women’s soccer team — young, diverse, not afraid to speak up for equality — are the new, albeit fragile, majority. They are America right now, and the right hates them — because they hate America. And this hatred makes it easier to destroy what America stands for. Even if that requires violence.
“Mr. President, I cannot stand these people that are destroying our country,” Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz told a boisterous crowd at the Iowa State Fair on Saturday, as he introduced Trump amid the usual litany of complaints about the border and the multiple probes into Trump’s corruption. “But we know that only through force do we make any change in a corrupt town like Washington, D.C.”
When all else fails — the canceling of elections, the voter suppression, the rule changing, the growing assault on the free press that makes a shocking raid like Marion County possible — force is their last resort. It was their last resort on Jan. 6, 2021, and they’re telling us now in the bright, deep-fried daylight of an Iowa fairgrounds that they’ll do it again.
Once upon a time, “Bleeding Kansas” was a warning to America — harbinger of a civil war to come. It doesn’t have to be that way this time around. But we won’t succeed until we’re clear-eyed that nearly half of Americans hate who we’ve become, hate democracy when they no longer can win, and will embrace violence to get the results they can’t get at the ballot box.
TWO MONTHS IN GEORGIA: HOW TRUMP TRIED TO OVERTURN THE VOTE
The Georgia case offers a vivid reminder of the extraordinary lengths Mr. Trump and his allies went to in the Southern state to reverse the election.
By Danny Hakim and Richard Fausset, The New York Times
When President Donald J. Trump’s eldest son took the stage outside the Georgia Republican Party headquarters two days after the 2020 election, he likened what lay ahead to mortal combat.
“Americans need to know this is not a banana republic!” Donald Trump Jr. shouted, claiming that Georgia and other swing states had been overrun by wild electoral shenanigans. He described tens of thousands of ballots that had “magically” shown up around the country, all marked for Joseph R. Biden Jr., and others dumped by Democratic officials into “one big box” so their authenticity could not be verified.
Mr. Trump told his father’s supporters at the news conference — who broke into chants of “Stop the steal!” and “Fraud! Fraud!” — that “the number one thing that Donald Trump can do in this election is fight each and every one of these battles, to the death!”
Over the two months that followed, a vast effort unfolded on behalf of the lame-duck president to overturn the election results in swing states across the country. But perhaps nowhere were there as many attempts to intervene as in Georgia, where Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, is now poised to bring an indictment for a series of brazen moves made on behalf of Mr. Trump in the state after his loss and for lies that the president and his allies circulated about the election there.
Mr. Trump has already been indicted three times this year, most recently in a federal case brought by the special prosecutor Jack Smith that is also related to election interference. But the Georgia case may prove the most expansive legal challenge to Mr. Trump’s attempts to cling to power, with nearly 20 people informed that they could face charges.
It could also prove the most enduring: While Mr. Trump could try to pardon himself from a federal conviction if he were re-elected, presidents cannot pardon state crimes.
Perhaps above all, the Georgia case assembled by Ms. Willis offers a vivid reminder of the extraordinary lengths taken by Mr. Trump and his allies to exert pressure on local officials to overturn the election — an up-close portrait of American democracy tested to its limits.
There was the infamous call that the former president made to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, during which Mr. Trump said he wanted to “find” nearly 12,000 votes, or enough to overturn his narrow loss there. Mr. Trump and his allies harassed and defamed rank-and-file election workers with false accusations of ballot stuffing, leading to so many vicious threats against one of them that she was forced into hiding.
They deployed fake local electors to certify that Mr. Trump had won the election. Within even the Justice Department, an obscure government lawyer secretly plotted with the president to help him overturn the state’s results.
And on the same day that Mr. Biden’s victory was certified by Congress, Trump allies infiltrated a rural Georgia county’s election office, copying sensitive software used in voting machines throughout the state in their fruitless hunt for ballot fraud.
The Georgia investigation has encompassed an array of high-profile allies, from the lawyers Rudolph W. Giuliani, Kenneth Chesebro and John Eastman, to Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff at the time of the election. But it has also scrutinized lesser-known players like a Georgia bail bondsman and a publicist who once worked for Kanye West.
As soon as Monday, there could be charges from a Fulton County grand jury after Ms. Willis presents her case to them. The number of people indicted could be large: A separate special grand jury that investigated the matter in an advisory capacity last year recommended more than a dozen people for indictment, and the forewoman of the grand jury has strongly hinted that the former president was among them.
If an indictment lands and the case goes to trial, a regular jury and the American public will hear a story that centers on nine critical weeks from Election Day through early January in which a host of people all tried to push one lie: that Mr. Trump had secured victory in Georgia. The question before the jurors would be whether some of those accused went so far that they broke the law.
Unleashing ‘Hate and Fury’
It did not take long for the gloves to come off.
During the Nov. 5 visit by Donald Trump Jr., the Georgia Republican Party was already fracturing. Some officials believed they should focus on defending the seats of the state’s two Republican senators, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, who were weeks away from runoff elections, rather than fighting a losing presidential candidate’s battles.
But according to testimony before the Jan. 6 committee by one of the Trump campaign’s local staffers, Mr. Trump’s son was threatening to “tank” those Senate races if there was not total support for his father’s effort. (A spokesman for Donald Trump Jr. disputed that characterization, noting that the former president’s son later appeared in ads for the Senate candidates.)
Four days later, the two senators called for Mr. Raffensperger’s resignation. The Raffensperger family was soon barraged with threats, leading his wife, Tricia, to confront Ms. Loeffler in a text message: “Never did I think you were the kind of person to unleash such hate and fury.”
Four other battleground states had also flipped to Mr. Biden, but losing Georgia, the only Deep South state among them, seemed particularly untenable for Mr. Trump. His margin of defeat there was one of the smallest in the nation. Republicans controlled the state, and as he would note repeatedly in the aftermath, his campaign rallies in Georgia had drawn big, boisterous crowds.
By the end of November, Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed had become a font of misinformation. “Everybody knows it was Rigged” he wrote in a tweet on Nov. 29. And on Dec. 1: “Do something @BrianKempGA,” he wrote, referring to Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a Republican. “You allowed your state to be scammed.”
But these efforts were not gaining traction. Mr. Raffensperger and Mr. Kemp were not bending. And on Dec. 1, Mr. Trump’s attorney general, William P. Barr, announced that the Department of Justice had found no evidence of voting fraud “on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
A Show for Lawmakers
It was time to turn up the volume.
Mr. Giuliani was on the road, traveling to Phoenix and Lansing, Mich., to meet with lawmakers to convince them of fraud in their states, both lost by Mr. Trump. Now, he was in Atlanta.
Even though Mr. Trump’s loss in Georgia had been upheld by a state audit, Mr. Giuliani made fantastical claims at a hearing in front of the State Senate, the first of three legislative hearings in December 2020.
He repeatedly asserted that machines made by Dominion Voting Systems had flipped votes from Mr. Trump to Mr. Biden and changed the election outcome — false claims that became part of Dominion defamation suits against Fox News, Mr. Giuliani and a number of others.
Mr. Giuliani, then Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, also played a video that he said showed election workers pulling suitcases of suspicious ballots from under a table to be secretly counted after Republican poll watchers had left for the night.
He accused two workers, a Black mother and daughter named Ruby Freeman and Wandrea Moss, of passing a suspicious USB drive between them “like vials of heroin or cocaine.” Investigators later determined that they were passing a mint; Mr. Giuliani recently admitted in a civil suit that he had made false statements about the two women.
Other Trump allies also made false claims at the hearing with no evidence to back them up, including that thousands of convicted felons, dead people and others unqualified to vote in Georgia had done so.
John Eastman, a lawyer advising the Trump campaign, claimed that “the number of underage individuals who were allowed to register” in the state “amounts allegedly up to approximately 66,000 people.”
That was not remotely true. During an interview last year, Mr. Eastman said that he had relied on a consultant who had made an error, and there were in fact about 2,000 voters who “were only 16 when they registered.”
But a review of the data he was using found that Mr. Eastman was referring to the total number of Georgians since the 1920s who were recorded as having registered before they were allowed. Even that number was heavily inflated due to data-entry errors common in large government databases.
How Times reporters cover politics. Times journalists may vote, but they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. That includes participating in rallies and donating money to a candidate or cause.
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The truth: Only about a dozen Georgia residents were recorded as being 16 when they registered to vote in 2020, and those appeared to be another data-entry glitch.
The President Calling
In the meantime, Mr. Trump was working the phones, trying to directly persuade Georgia Republican leaders to reject Mr. Biden’s win.
He called Governor Kemp on Dec. 5, a day after the Trump campaign filed a lawsuit seeking to have the state’s election results overturned. Mr. Trump pressured Mr. Kemp to compel lawmakers to come back into session and brush aside the will of the state’s voters.
Mr. Kemp, who during his campaign for governor had toted a rifle and threatened to “round up illegals” in an ad that seemed an homage to Mr. Trump, rebuffed the idea.
Two days later, Mr. Trump called David Ralston, the speaker of the Georgia House, with a similar pitch. But Mr. Ralston, who died last year, “basically cut the president off,” a member of the special grand jury in Atlanta who heard his testimony later told The Atlanta Journal Constitution. “He just basically took the wind out of the sails.”
By Dec. 7, Georgia had completed its third vote count, yet again affirming Mr. Biden’s victory. But Trump allies in the legislature were hatching a new plan to defy the election laws that have long been pillars of American democracy: They wanted to call a special session and pick new electors who would cast votes for Mr. Trump.
Never mind that Georgia lawmakers had already approved representatives to the Electoral College reflecting Biden’s win in the state, part of the constitutionally prescribed process for formalizing the election of a new president. The Trump allies hoped that the fake electors and the votes they cast would be used to pressure Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the election results on Jan. 6.
Mr. Kemp issued a statement warning them off: “Doing this in order to select a separate slate of presidential electors is not an option that is allowed under state or federal law.”
The Fake Electors Meet
Rather than back down, Mr. Trump was deeply involved in the emerging plan to enlist slates of bogus electors.
Mr. Trump called Ronna McDaniel, the head of the Republican National Committee, to enlist her help, according to Ms. McDaniel’s House testimony. By Dec. 13, as the Supreme Court of Georgia rejected an election challenge from the Trump campaign, Robert Sinners, the Trump campaign’s local director of Election Day operations, emailed the 16 fake electors, directing them to quietly meet in the capitol building in Atlanta the next day.
Mr. Trump’s top campaign lawyers were so troubled by the plan that they refused to take part. Still, the president tried to keep up the pressure using his Twitter account. “What a fool Governor @BrianKempGA of Georgia is,” he wrote in a post just after midnight on Dec. 14, adding, “Demand this clown call a Special Session.”
Later that day, the bogus electors met at the Statehouse. They signed documents that claimed they were Georgia’s “duly elected and qualified electors,” even though they were not.
In the end, their effort was rebuffed by Mr. Pence.
In his testimony to House investigators, Mr. Sinners later reflected on what took place: “I felt ashamed,” he said.
Moves in the White House
With other efforts failing, the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, got personally involved. Just before Christmas, he traveled to suburban Cobb County, Ga., during its audit of signatures on mail-in absentee ballots, which had been requested by Mr. Kemp.
Mr. Meadows tried to get into the room where state investigators were verifying the signatures. He was turned away. But he did meet with Jordan Fuchs, Georgia’s deputy secretary of state, to discuss the audit process.
During the visit, Mr. Meadows put Mr. Trump on the phone with the lead investigator for the secretary of state’s office, Frances Watson. “I won Georgia by a lot, and the people know it,” Mr. Trump told her. “Something bad happened.”
Byung J. Pak, the U.S. attorney in Atlanta at the time, believed that Mr. Meadows’s visit was “highly unusual,” adding in his House testimony, “I don’t recall that ever happening in the history of the U.S.”
In Washington, meanwhile, a strange plot was emerging within the Justice Department to help Mr. Trump.
Mr. Barr, one of the most senior administration officials to dismiss the claims of fraud, had stepped down as attorney general, and jockeying for power began. Jeffrey Clark, an unassuming lawyer who had been running the Justice Department’s environmental division, attempted to go around the department’s leadership by meeting with Mr. Trump and pitching a plan to help keep him in office.
Mr. Clark drafted a letter to lawmakers in Georgia, dated Dec. 28, falsely claiming that the Justice Department had “identified significant concerns” regarding the state’s election results. He urged the lawmakers to convene a special session — a dramatic intervention.
Richard Donoghue, who was serving as acting deputy attorney general, later testified that he was so alarmed when he saw the draft letter that he had to read it “twice to make sure I really understood what he was proposing, because it was so extreme.”
The letter was never sent.
One Last Call
Still, Mr. Trump refused to give up. It was time to reach the man who was in charge of election oversight: Mr. Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state.
On Jan. 2, he called Mr. Raffensperger and asked him to recalculate the vote. It was the call that he would later repeatedly defend as “perfect,” an hourlong mostly one-sided conversation during which Mr. Raffensperger politely but firmly rejected his entreaties.
“You know what they did and you’re not reporting it,” the president warned, adding, “you know, that’s a criminal — that’s a criminal offense. And you know, you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you.”
Mr. Raffensperger was staggered. He later wrote that “for the office of the secretary of state to ‘recalculate’ would mean we would somehow have to fudge the numbers. The president was asking me to do something that I knew was wrong, and I was not going to do that.”
Mr. Trump seemed particularly intent on incriminating the Black women working for the county elections office, telling Mr. Raffensperger that Ruby Freeman — whom he mentioned 18 times during the call — was “a professional vote-scammer and hustler.”
“She’s one of the hot items on the internet, Brad,” Mr. Trump said of the viral misinformation circulating about Ms. Freeman, which had already been debunked by Mr. Raffensperger’s aides and federal investigators.
Trump-fueled conspiracy theories about Ms. Freeman and her daughter, Ms. Moss, were indeed proliferating. In testimony to the Jan. 6 committee last year, Ms. Moss recounted Trump supporters forcing their way into her grandmother’s home, claiming they were there to make a citizen’s arrest of her granddaughter; Ms. Freeman said that she no longer went to the grocery store.
Then, on Jan. 4, Ms. Freeman received an unusual overture.
Trevian Kutti, a Trump supporter from Chicago who had once worked as a publicist for Kanye West, persuaded Ms. Freeman to meet her at a police station outside Atlanta. Ms. Freeman later said that Ms. Kutti — who told her that “crisis is my thing,” according to a video of the encounter — had tried to pressure her into saying she had committed voter fraud.
“There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere,” Ms. Freeman said in her testimony, adding, “Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?”
‘Every Freaking Ballot’
On Jan. 7, despite the fake electors and the rest of the pressure campaign, Mr. Pence certified the election results for Mr. Biden. The bloody, chaotic attack on the Capitol the day before did not stop the final certification of Biden’s victory, but in Georgia, the machinations continued.
In a quiet, rural county in the southeastern part of the state, Trump allies gave their mission one more extraordinary try.
A few hours after the certification, a small group working on Mr. Trump’s behalf traveled to Coffee County, about 200 miles from Atlanta. A lawyer advising Mr. Trump had hired a company called SullivanStrickler to scour voting systems in Georgia and other states for evidence of fraud or miscounts; some of its employees joined several Trump allies on the expedition.
“We scanned every freaking ballot,” Scott Hall, an Atlanta-area Trump supporter and bail bondsman who traveled to Coffee County with employees of the company on Jan. 7, recalled in a recorded phone conversation. Mr. Hall said that with the blessing of the Coffee County elections board, the team had “scanned all the equipment” and “imaged all the hard drives” that had been used on Election Day.
A law firm hired by SullivanStrickler would later release a statement saying of the company, “Knowing everything they know now, they would not take on any further work of this kind.”
Others would have their regrets, too. While Mr. Trump still pushes his conspiracy theories, some of those who worked for him now reject the claims of rigged voting machines and mysterious ballot-stuffed suitcases. As Mr. Sinners, the Trump campaign official, put it in his testimony to the Jan. 6 committee last summer, “It was just complete hot garbage.”
By then, Ms. Willis’s investigation was well underway.
“An investigation is like an onion,” she said in an interview soon after her inquiry began. “You never know. You pull something back, and then you find something else.”
The Georgia case offers a vivid reminder of the extraordinary lengths Mr. Trump and his allies went to in the Southern state to reverse the election.
By Danny Hakim and Richard Fausset, The New York Times
When President Donald J. Trump’s eldest son took the stage outside the Georgia Republican Party headquarters two days after the 2020 election, he likened what lay ahead to mortal combat.
“Americans need to know this is not a banana republic!” Donald Trump Jr. shouted, claiming that Georgia and other swing states had been overrun by wild electoral shenanigans. He described tens of thousands of ballots that had “magically” shown up around the country, all marked for Joseph R. Biden Jr., and others dumped by Democratic officials into “one big box” so their authenticity could not be verified.
Mr. Trump told his father’s supporters at the news conference — who broke into chants of “Stop the steal!” and “Fraud! Fraud!” — that “the number one thing that Donald Trump can do in this election is fight each and every one of these battles, to the death!”
Over the two months that followed, a vast effort unfolded on behalf of the lame-duck president to overturn the election results in swing states across the country. But perhaps nowhere were there as many attempts to intervene as in Georgia, where Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, is now poised to bring an indictment for a series of brazen moves made on behalf of Mr. Trump in the state after his loss and for lies that the president and his allies circulated about the election there.
Mr. Trump has already been indicted three times this year, most recently in a federal case brought by the special prosecutor Jack Smith that is also related to election interference. But the Georgia case may prove the most expansive legal challenge to Mr. Trump’s attempts to cling to power, with nearly 20 people informed that they could face charges.
It could also prove the most enduring: While Mr. Trump could try to pardon himself from a federal conviction if he were re-elected, presidents cannot pardon state crimes.
Perhaps above all, the Georgia case assembled by Ms. Willis offers a vivid reminder of the extraordinary lengths taken by Mr. Trump and his allies to exert pressure on local officials to overturn the election — an up-close portrait of American democracy tested to its limits.
There was the infamous call that the former president made to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, during which Mr. Trump said he wanted to “find” nearly 12,000 votes, or enough to overturn his narrow loss there. Mr. Trump and his allies harassed and defamed rank-and-file election workers with false accusations of ballot stuffing, leading to so many vicious threats against one of them that she was forced into hiding.
They deployed fake local electors to certify that Mr. Trump had won the election. Within even the Justice Department, an obscure government lawyer secretly plotted with the president to help him overturn the state’s results.
And on the same day that Mr. Biden’s victory was certified by Congress, Trump allies infiltrated a rural Georgia county’s election office, copying sensitive software used in voting machines throughout the state in their fruitless hunt for ballot fraud.
The Georgia investigation has encompassed an array of high-profile allies, from the lawyers Rudolph W. Giuliani, Kenneth Chesebro and John Eastman, to Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff at the time of the election. But it has also scrutinized lesser-known players like a Georgia bail bondsman and a publicist who once worked for Kanye West.
As soon as Monday, there could be charges from a Fulton County grand jury after Ms. Willis presents her case to them. The number of people indicted could be large: A separate special grand jury that investigated the matter in an advisory capacity last year recommended more than a dozen people for indictment, and the forewoman of the grand jury has strongly hinted that the former president was among them.
If an indictment lands and the case goes to trial, a regular jury and the American public will hear a story that centers on nine critical weeks from Election Day through early January in which a host of people all tried to push one lie: that Mr. Trump had secured victory in Georgia. The question before the jurors would be whether some of those accused went so far that they broke the law.
Unleashing ‘Hate and Fury’
It did not take long for the gloves to come off.
During the Nov. 5 visit by Donald Trump Jr., the Georgia Republican Party was already fracturing. Some officials believed they should focus on defending the seats of the state’s two Republican senators, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, who were weeks away from runoff elections, rather than fighting a losing presidential candidate’s battles.
But according to testimony before the Jan. 6 committee by one of the Trump campaign’s local staffers, Mr. Trump’s son was threatening to “tank” those Senate races if there was not total support for his father’s effort. (A spokesman for Donald Trump Jr. disputed that characterization, noting that the former president’s son later appeared in ads for the Senate candidates.)
Four days later, the two senators called for Mr. Raffensperger’s resignation. The Raffensperger family was soon barraged with threats, leading his wife, Tricia, to confront Ms. Loeffler in a text message: “Never did I think you were the kind of person to unleash such hate and fury.”
Four other battleground states had also flipped to Mr. Biden, but losing Georgia, the only Deep South state among them, seemed particularly untenable for Mr. Trump. His margin of defeat there was one of the smallest in the nation. Republicans controlled the state, and as he would note repeatedly in the aftermath, his campaign rallies in Georgia had drawn big, boisterous crowds.
By the end of November, Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed had become a font of misinformation. “Everybody knows it was Rigged” he wrote in a tweet on Nov. 29. And on Dec. 1: “Do something @BrianKempGA,” he wrote, referring to Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a Republican. “You allowed your state to be scammed.”
But these efforts were not gaining traction. Mr. Raffensperger and Mr. Kemp were not bending. And on Dec. 1, Mr. Trump’s attorney general, William P. Barr, announced that the Department of Justice had found no evidence of voting fraud “on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
A Show for Lawmakers
It was time to turn up the volume.
Mr. Giuliani was on the road, traveling to Phoenix and Lansing, Mich., to meet with lawmakers to convince them of fraud in their states, both lost by Mr. Trump. Now, he was in Atlanta.
Even though Mr. Trump’s loss in Georgia had been upheld by a state audit, Mr. Giuliani made fantastical claims at a hearing in front of the State Senate, the first of three legislative hearings in December 2020.
He repeatedly asserted that machines made by Dominion Voting Systems had flipped votes from Mr. Trump to Mr. Biden and changed the election outcome — false claims that became part of Dominion defamation suits against Fox News, Mr. Giuliani and a number of others.
Mr. Giuliani, then Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, also played a video that he said showed election workers pulling suitcases of suspicious ballots from under a table to be secretly counted after Republican poll watchers had left for the night.
He accused two workers, a Black mother and daughter named Ruby Freeman and Wandrea Moss, of passing a suspicious USB drive between them “like vials of heroin or cocaine.” Investigators later determined that they were passing a mint; Mr. Giuliani recently admitted in a civil suit that he had made false statements about the two women.
Other Trump allies also made false claims at the hearing with no evidence to back them up, including that thousands of convicted felons, dead people and others unqualified to vote in Georgia had done so.
John Eastman, a lawyer advising the Trump campaign, claimed that “the number of underage individuals who were allowed to register” in the state “amounts allegedly up to approximately 66,000 people.”
That was not remotely true. During an interview last year, Mr. Eastman said that he had relied on a consultant who had made an error, and there were in fact about 2,000 voters who “were only 16 when they registered.”
But a review of the data he was using found that Mr. Eastman was referring to the total number of Georgians since the 1920s who were recorded as having registered before they were allowed. Even that number was heavily inflated due to data-entry errors common in large government databases.
How Times reporters cover politics. Times journalists may vote, but they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. That includes participating in rallies and donating money to a candidate or cause.
Did you find this information helpful?
The truth: Only about a dozen Georgia residents were recorded as being 16 when they registered to vote in 2020, and those appeared to be another data-entry glitch.
The President Calling
In the meantime, Mr. Trump was working the phones, trying to directly persuade Georgia Republican leaders to reject Mr. Biden’s win.
He called Governor Kemp on Dec. 5, a day after the Trump campaign filed a lawsuit seeking to have the state’s election results overturned. Mr. Trump pressured Mr. Kemp to compel lawmakers to come back into session and brush aside the will of the state’s voters.
Mr. Kemp, who during his campaign for governor had toted a rifle and threatened to “round up illegals” in an ad that seemed an homage to Mr. Trump, rebuffed the idea.
Two days later, Mr. Trump called David Ralston, the speaker of the Georgia House, with a similar pitch. But Mr. Ralston, who died last year, “basically cut the president off,” a member of the special grand jury in Atlanta who heard his testimony later told The Atlanta Journal Constitution. “He just basically took the wind out of the sails.”
By Dec. 7, Georgia had completed its third vote count, yet again affirming Mr. Biden’s victory. But Trump allies in the legislature were hatching a new plan to defy the election laws that have long been pillars of American democracy: They wanted to call a special session and pick new electors who would cast votes for Mr. Trump.
Never mind that Georgia lawmakers had already approved representatives to the Electoral College reflecting Biden’s win in the state, part of the constitutionally prescribed process for formalizing the election of a new president. The Trump allies hoped that the fake electors and the votes they cast would be used to pressure Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the election results on Jan. 6.
Mr. Kemp issued a statement warning them off: “Doing this in order to select a separate slate of presidential electors is not an option that is allowed under state or federal law.”
The Fake Electors Meet
Rather than back down, Mr. Trump was deeply involved in the emerging plan to enlist slates of bogus electors.
Mr. Trump called Ronna McDaniel, the head of the Republican National Committee, to enlist her help, according to Ms. McDaniel’s House testimony. By Dec. 13, as the Supreme Court of Georgia rejected an election challenge from the Trump campaign, Robert Sinners, the Trump campaign’s local director of Election Day operations, emailed the 16 fake electors, directing them to quietly meet in the capitol building in Atlanta the next day.
Mr. Trump’s top campaign lawyers were so troubled by the plan that they refused to take part. Still, the president tried to keep up the pressure using his Twitter account. “What a fool Governor @BrianKempGA of Georgia is,” he wrote in a post just after midnight on Dec. 14, adding, “Demand this clown call a Special Session.”
Later that day, the bogus electors met at the Statehouse. They signed documents that claimed they were Georgia’s “duly elected and qualified electors,” even though they were not.
In the end, their effort was rebuffed by Mr. Pence.
In his testimony to House investigators, Mr. Sinners later reflected on what took place: “I felt ashamed,” he said.
Moves in the White House
With other efforts failing, the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, got personally involved. Just before Christmas, he traveled to suburban Cobb County, Ga., during its audit of signatures on mail-in absentee ballots, which had been requested by Mr. Kemp.
Mr. Meadows tried to get into the room where state investigators were verifying the signatures. He was turned away. But he did meet with Jordan Fuchs, Georgia’s deputy secretary of state, to discuss the audit process.
During the visit, Mr. Meadows put Mr. Trump on the phone with the lead investigator for the secretary of state’s office, Frances Watson. “I won Georgia by a lot, and the people know it,” Mr. Trump told her. “Something bad happened.”
Byung J. Pak, the U.S. attorney in Atlanta at the time, believed that Mr. Meadows’s visit was “highly unusual,” adding in his House testimony, “I don’t recall that ever happening in the history of the U.S.”
In Washington, meanwhile, a strange plot was emerging within the Justice Department to help Mr. Trump.
Mr. Barr, one of the most senior administration officials to dismiss the claims of fraud, had stepped down as attorney general, and jockeying for power began. Jeffrey Clark, an unassuming lawyer who had been running the Justice Department’s environmental division, attempted to go around the department’s leadership by meeting with Mr. Trump and pitching a plan to help keep him in office.
Mr. Clark drafted a letter to lawmakers in Georgia, dated Dec. 28, falsely claiming that the Justice Department had “identified significant concerns” regarding the state’s election results. He urged the lawmakers to convene a special session — a dramatic intervention.
Richard Donoghue, who was serving as acting deputy attorney general, later testified that he was so alarmed when he saw the draft letter that he had to read it “twice to make sure I really understood what he was proposing, because it was so extreme.”
The letter was never sent.
One Last Call
Still, Mr. Trump refused to give up. It was time to reach the man who was in charge of election oversight: Mr. Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state.
On Jan. 2, he called Mr. Raffensperger and asked him to recalculate the vote. It was the call that he would later repeatedly defend as “perfect,” an hourlong mostly one-sided conversation during which Mr. Raffensperger politely but firmly rejected his entreaties.
“You know what they did and you’re not reporting it,” the president warned, adding, “you know, that’s a criminal — that’s a criminal offense. And you know, you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you.”
Mr. Raffensperger was staggered. He later wrote that “for the office of the secretary of state to ‘recalculate’ would mean we would somehow have to fudge the numbers. The president was asking me to do something that I knew was wrong, and I was not going to do that.”
Mr. Trump seemed particularly intent on incriminating the Black women working for the county elections office, telling Mr. Raffensperger that Ruby Freeman — whom he mentioned 18 times during the call — was “a professional vote-scammer and hustler.”
“She’s one of the hot items on the internet, Brad,” Mr. Trump said of the viral misinformation circulating about Ms. Freeman, which had already been debunked by Mr. Raffensperger’s aides and federal investigators.
Trump-fueled conspiracy theories about Ms. Freeman and her daughter, Ms. Moss, were indeed proliferating. In testimony to the Jan. 6 committee last year, Ms. Moss recounted Trump supporters forcing their way into her grandmother’s home, claiming they were there to make a citizen’s arrest of her granddaughter; Ms. Freeman said that she no longer went to the grocery store.
Then, on Jan. 4, Ms. Freeman received an unusual overture.
Trevian Kutti, a Trump supporter from Chicago who had once worked as a publicist for Kanye West, persuaded Ms. Freeman to meet her at a police station outside Atlanta. Ms. Freeman later said that Ms. Kutti — who told her that “crisis is my thing,” according to a video of the encounter — had tried to pressure her into saying she had committed voter fraud.
“There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere,” Ms. Freeman said in her testimony, adding, “Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?”
‘Every Freaking Ballot’
On Jan. 7, despite the fake electors and the rest of the pressure campaign, Mr. Pence certified the election results for Mr. Biden. The bloody, chaotic attack on the Capitol the day before did not stop the final certification of Biden’s victory, but in Georgia, the machinations continued.
In a quiet, rural county in the southeastern part of the state, Trump allies gave their mission one more extraordinary try.
A few hours after the certification, a small group working on Mr. Trump’s behalf traveled to Coffee County, about 200 miles from Atlanta. A lawyer advising Mr. Trump had hired a company called SullivanStrickler to scour voting systems in Georgia and other states for evidence of fraud or miscounts; some of its employees joined several Trump allies on the expedition.
“We scanned every freaking ballot,” Scott Hall, an Atlanta-area Trump supporter and bail bondsman who traveled to Coffee County with employees of the company on Jan. 7, recalled in a recorded phone conversation. Mr. Hall said that with the blessing of the Coffee County elections board, the team had “scanned all the equipment” and “imaged all the hard drives” that had been used on Election Day.
A law firm hired by SullivanStrickler would later release a statement saying of the company, “Knowing everything they know now, they would not take on any further work of this kind.”
Others would have their regrets, too. While Mr. Trump still pushes his conspiracy theories, some of those who worked for him now reject the claims of rigged voting machines and mysterious ballot-stuffed suitcases. As Mr. Sinners, the Trump campaign official, put it in his testimony to the Jan. 6 committee last summer, “It was just complete hot garbage.”
By then, Ms. Willis’s investigation was well underway.
“An investigation is like an onion,” she said in an interview soon after her inquiry began. “You never know. You pull something back, and then you find something else.”
TRUMP SAYS, ‘I’M COMING AFTER YOU.’ WE SHOULD TAKE HIM AT HIS WORD.
By Colbert I. King, The Washington Post
“If you go after me, I’m coming after you.”
Loyalists of former president Donald Trump have rushed to play down that message, posted on his social media platform, Truth Social, as the very definition of political speech — nothing more than a response to groups opposed to his presidential campaign. We have been here before. The country ignores such threats at its peril. History teaches that when Trump cloaks himself in martyrdom and political victimhood, bad things — violent, ugly and bloody — can happen.
Remember the Trump-inspired insurrection and assault on the Capitol? Recall Trump exhorting the Jan. 6, 2021, crowd to stop what he falsely described as an unlawful congressional transfer of power to President-elect Joe Biden? “We fight like hell,” he said. “And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Remember Trump directing his adoring MAGA fans to head to the Capitol, leaving them to believe that he was going with them and telling them to give Republicans in Congress “the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country”?
Rid yourselves of any thought that only a handful of extremists were on hand to be goaded by Trump into behaving dangerously. Let’s do some stocktaking, courtesy of the Justice Department:
Let’s be clear: Jan. 6 was a call to arms. And Trump’s people responded by the hundreds.
So when Trump, on Aug. 3, the day he pleaded not guilty to charges that he tried to overturn the 2020 election, resorts to self-pity — “It’s a very sad thing to see it. When you look at what’s happening, this is a persecution of a political opponent. This was never supposed to happen in America” — America should consider itself on notice.
And when Trump, at a South Carolina Republican fundraiser on Aug. 5, returns to casting himself as a martyr — “Every time the radical-left Democrats do this and the Marxist, communist fascists indict me, I consider it a great badge of honor, because I’m being indicted for you” — I suggest it’s time to mount the barricades.
Do you think it was pure coincidence that Trump’s “If you go after me, I’m coming after you” threat came one day after he was arraigned in federal court in Washington?
Trump’s rhetoric cultivates anger and resentment. It is rhetoric that mercilessly attacks and seeks to intimidate, whether it’s directed at prosecutors, witnesses and judges, or is aimed at poisoning a jury pool. Political speech? It’s the same cynical calculation that stoked the angry mob to storm the Capitol.
The people in that mob were determined to keep Trump in power. Might there be others equally fixated on impairing or obstructing trials set to begin against Trump in court?
Let’s not repeat the mistakes of Jan. 6. Get on high alert now. Double security around the courts. Take seriously any threats against special counsel Jack Smith and U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan (who on Friday warned Trump not to say things that put the safety of witnesses in the case at risk — we’ll see how that goes).
The same applies to courts and prosecutors in New York and Georgia.
Yes, this is our nation’s capital. Don’t forget that Trump’s rabid supporters came to town and left in their wake more than 100 assaulted police officers and nearly $3 million in damage.
“I’m coming after you.” This time, let America be waiting.
By Colbert I. King, The Washington Post
“If you go after me, I’m coming after you.”
Loyalists of former president Donald Trump have rushed to play down that message, posted on his social media platform, Truth Social, as the very definition of political speech — nothing more than a response to groups opposed to his presidential campaign. We have been here before. The country ignores such threats at its peril. History teaches that when Trump cloaks himself in martyrdom and political victimhood, bad things — violent, ugly and bloody — can happen.
Remember the Trump-inspired insurrection and assault on the Capitol? Recall Trump exhorting the Jan. 6, 2021, crowd to stop what he falsely described as an unlawful congressional transfer of power to President-elect Joe Biden? “We fight like hell,” he said. “And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Remember Trump directing his adoring MAGA fans to head to the Capitol, leaving them to believe that he was going with them and telling them to give Republicans in Congress “the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country”?
Rid yourselves of any thought that only a handful of extremists were on hand to be goaded by Trump into behaving dangerously. Let’s do some stocktaking, courtesy of the Justice Department:
- Some 140 police officers were assaulted at the Capitol — about 80 from the Capitol force and about 60 from the D.C. police.
- About 370 people have been charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers or employees. That includes about 110 charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer.
- Roughly 630 people have pleaded guilty to a variety of federal charges, including some 200 to felonies and about 430 to misdemeanors.
- A total of 110 people have been found guilty at contested trials, including three in D.C. Superior Court.
- About 600 federal defendants have had their cases adjudicated and received sentences.
Let’s be clear: Jan. 6 was a call to arms. And Trump’s people responded by the hundreds.
So when Trump, on Aug. 3, the day he pleaded not guilty to charges that he tried to overturn the 2020 election, resorts to self-pity — “It’s a very sad thing to see it. When you look at what’s happening, this is a persecution of a political opponent. This was never supposed to happen in America” — America should consider itself on notice.
And when Trump, at a South Carolina Republican fundraiser on Aug. 5, returns to casting himself as a martyr — “Every time the radical-left Democrats do this and the Marxist, communist fascists indict me, I consider it a great badge of honor, because I’m being indicted for you” — I suggest it’s time to mount the barricades.
Do you think it was pure coincidence that Trump’s “If you go after me, I’m coming after you” threat came one day after he was arraigned in federal court in Washington?
Trump’s rhetoric cultivates anger and resentment. It is rhetoric that mercilessly attacks and seeks to intimidate, whether it’s directed at prosecutors, witnesses and judges, or is aimed at poisoning a jury pool. Political speech? It’s the same cynical calculation that stoked the angry mob to storm the Capitol.
The people in that mob were determined to keep Trump in power. Might there be others equally fixated on impairing or obstructing trials set to begin against Trump in court?
Let’s not repeat the mistakes of Jan. 6. Get on high alert now. Double security around the courts. Take seriously any threats against special counsel Jack Smith and U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan (who on Friday warned Trump not to say things that put the safety of witnesses in the case at risk — we’ll see how that goes).
The same applies to courts and prosecutors in New York and Georgia.
Yes, this is our nation’s capital. Don’t forget that Trump’s rabid supporters came to town and left in their wake more than 100 assaulted police officers and nearly $3 million in damage.
“I’m coming after you.” This time, let America be waiting.
DESANTIS’S FLORIDA SHOWS THE DISASTER OF MORE COMPETENT TRUMPISM
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
The Trump policy agenda — but with less drama and more competent execution.
That’s the platform most GOP presidential hopefuls are presenting to primary voters. The idea seems to be that by toning down former president Donald Trump’s more vaudevillian, law-skirting qualities, candidates can lure away the traditional conservatives who think of themselves as prioritizing pro-life values, adherence to the Constitution, limited government, fiscal restraint and religious freedom.
Unfortunately, no shift in style can obscure the fact that a truly Trumpian agenda serves none of these lofty principles. It subordinates them to one single goal: owning the libs and other disfavored groups. And we’re already seeing proof of concept, since Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has lately been implementing such an agenda in his state — with an efficiency that shows how much more Trumpism undercuts conservative values when it doesn’t have incompetence to hold it back.
Take DeSantis’s draconian new anti-immigrant law, which took effect last month. It was supposed to demonstrate how a more disciplined government executive could deliver on Trump’s unfinished economic and cultural agenda. But evidence available so far suggests it’s undermining values that conservatives say they care about.
Among other measures, the law requires hospitals to interrogate incoming patients about their immigration status, and then report the resulting data back to the state. Unsurprisingly, this has had the effect of discouraging immigrants and their family members from seeking potentially lifesaving medical treatment.
A legal hotline operated by the Florida Immigrant Coalition has been inundated with calls from people asking for advice on whether they should still seek care, says Renata Bozzetto, the coalition’s deputy director. She added that, in at least one recent case, a medical provider had canceled two appointments because of confusion over whether the law still allows undocumented patients to receive treatment at all.
To be clear: It does. But there is so much misinformation about what the law does and does not permit — much of it deliberate, Bozzetto contends — that this kind of misunderstanding appears common.
“The chilling effect is absolutely the main issue,” she said. “It speaks to how the state shouldn’t be trying to do law for something that is supposed to be managed by the federal government. A lot of the confusion, it’s because the state policy is incoherent with federal policy.”
In fact, the Supreme Court has ruled that immigration law is the purview of the federal government, not of the states — a legal precedent that is now the basis for an ongoing constitutional challenge to the Florida law. Not that constitutional violations appear to be terribly troubling to DeSantis and his ilk; like other Republican presidential candidates, he has pledged to
Florida’s new immigration law also looks likely to undermine the state’s fiscal and economic advantages. It fritters away taxpayer dollars on stunts to ship asylum seekers to blue states, for instance.
Meanwhile, Florida employers have expressed concern about consequences of both the law itself and political leaders’ broader hostility toward immigrants, who make up more than one-quarter of the state’s workforce.
Comprehensive data is not yet available, but employers report that, since the law passed, some foreign-born employees have stopped showing up to work or left the state altogether. Workers apparently fear being rounded up and arrested at their jobs, or during their commutes. Some have lost their ability to drive to work, because the new law invalidated drivers’ licenses issued by certain states.
Local immigration advocates say that many of those departing have legal permission to live and work in the United States. But they are nonetheless leaving Florida because they fear the risks for others in their household. Even some GOP politicians in Florida have warned of an exodus of talent, leaving construction incomplete and crops unpicked.
Such policy changes have not only hurt Florida businesses. They have affected a constituency Republican politicians usually claim to prioritize: people of faith.
At a regional church gathering last week, several pastors said they had already lost large shares of their congregations, said Joel Tooley, lead pastor of Melbourne First Church of the Nazarene in central Florida. One pastor in a farming community reported losing roughly 95 percent of their congregation in recent months.
Nonimmigrant churchgoers are anxious about the law, too.
The legislation includes confusing language making it a felony to provide transportation to undocumented people under certain circumstances. Tooley, who said he was, until recently, registered as a Republican but is now politically unaffiliated, says this jeopardizes common congregational activities: Like many pastors, he often asks churchgoers to give rides to fellow congregants to or from the grocery store, camp or school.
Or, most often, religious services. “This is a normal expression of our faith,” says Tooley.
Today, it’s an expression of faith that might expose believers to criminal liability — all in service of helping ambitious politicians pave a path to the White House.
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
The Trump policy agenda — but with less drama and more competent execution.
That’s the platform most GOP presidential hopefuls are presenting to primary voters. The idea seems to be that by toning down former president Donald Trump’s more vaudevillian, law-skirting qualities, candidates can lure away the traditional conservatives who think of themselves as prioritizing pro-life values, adherence to the Constitution, limited government, fiscal restraint and religious freedom.
Unfortunately, no shift in style can obscure the fact that a truly Trumpian agenda serves none of these lofty principles. It subordinates them to one single goal: owning the libs and other disfavored groups. And we’re already seeing proof of concept, since Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has lately been implementing such an agenda in his state — with an efficiency that shows how much more Trumpism undercuts conservative values when it doesn’t have incompetence to hold it back.
Take DeSantis’s draconian new anti-immigrant law, which took effect last month. It was supposed to demonstrate how a more disciplined government executive could deliver on Trump’s unfinished economic and cultural agenda. But evidence available so far suggests it’s undermining values that conservatives say they care about.
Among other measures, the law requires hospitals to interrogate incoming patients about their immigration status, and then report the resulting data back to the state. Unsurprisingly, this has had the effect of discouraging immigrants and their family members from seeking potentially lifesaving medical treatment.
A legal hotline operated by the Florida Immigrant Coalition has been inundated with calls from people asking for advice on whether they should still seek care, says Renata Bozzetto, the coalition’s deputy director. She added that, in at least one recent case, a medical provider had canceled two appointments because of confusion over whether the law still allows undocumented patients to receive treatment at all.
To be clear: It does. But there is so much misinformation about what the law does and does not permit — much of it deliberate, Bozzetto contends — that this kind of misunderstanding appears common.
“The chilling effect is absolutely the main issue,” she said. “It speaks to how the state shouldn’t be trying to do law for something that is supposed to be managed by the federal government. A lot of the confusion, it’s because the state policy is incoherent with federal policy.”
In fact, the Supreme Court has ruled that immigration law is the purview of the federal government, not of the states — a legal precedent that is now the basis for an ongoing constitutional challenge to the Florida law. Not that constitutional violations appear to be terribly troubling to DeSantis and his ilk; like other Republican presidential candidates, he has pledged to
Florida’s new immigration law also looks likely to undermine the state’s fiscal and economic advantages. It fritters away taxpayer dollars on stunts to ship asylum seekers to blue states, for instance.
Meanwhile, Florida employers have expressed concern about consequences of both the law itself and political leaders’ broader hostility toward immigrants, who make up more than one-quarter of the state’s workforce.
Comprehensive data is not yet available, but employers report that, since the law passed, some foreign-born employees have stopped showing up to work or left the state altogether. Workers apparently fear being rounded up and arrested at their jobs, or during their commutes. Some have lost their ability to drive to work, because the new law invalidated drivers’ licenses issued by certain states.
Local immigration advocates say that many of those departing have legal permission to live and work in the United States. But they are nonetheless leaving Florida because they fear the risks for others in their household. Even some GOP politicians in Florida have warned of an exodus of talent, leaving construction incomplete and crops unpicked.
Such policy changes have not only hurt Florida businesses. They have affected a constituency Republican politicians usually claim to prioritize: people of faith.
At a regional church gathering last week, several pastors said they had already lost large shares of their congregations, said Joel Tooley, lead pastor of Melbourne First Church of the Nazarene in central Florida. One pastor in a farming community reported losing roughly 95 percent of their congregation in recent months.
Nonimmigrant churchgoers are anxious about the law, too.
The legislation includes confusing language making it a felony to provide transportation to undocumented people under certain circumstances. Tooley, who said he was, until recently, registered as a Republican but is now politically unaffiliated, says this jeopardizes common congregational activities: Like many pastors, he often asks churchgoers to give rides to fellow congregants to or from the grocery store, camp or school.
Or, most often, religious services. “This is a normal expression of our faith,” says Tooley.
Today, it’s an expression of faith that might expose believers to criminal liability — all in service of helping ambitious politicians pave a path to the White House.
CLARENCE THOMAS’S LUXURY VACATIONS? THAT’S WHAT FRIENDS ARE FOR.
By Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post
“As friends do.”
That’s what Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had to say in April, after ProPublica reported on the travel benefits lavished on the justice and his wife by Texas billionaire Harlan Crow.
“Harlan and Kathy Crow are among our dearest friends, and we have been friends for over twenty-five years,” Thomas said in a statement. “As friends do, we have joined them on a number of family trips during the more than quarter century we have known them.”
It turns out that Thomas is a man of many friends. And these friends — ultrawealthy friends mostly acquired after Thomas joined the court — do quite a bit for the justice and his family.
For instance, Anthony Welters, a health-care tycoon whose private financing enabled the Thomases to purchase in 1999 the $267,230 motor coach in which they tooled around the country. (Welters, whom Thomas met when they were both congressional staffers, played an essential role because there isn’t much of a commercial financing market for high-end recreational vehicles of the type the Thomases bought.)
Roughly nine years later, the loan was “satisfied,” according to Welters — a fuzzy term that might mean Thomas repaid Welters or that Welters forgave all or part of the debt.
As the New York Times reported, “He would not say how much he had lent Justice Thomas, how much the justice had repaid and whether any of the debt had been forgiven or otherwise discharged. He declined to provide The Times with a copy of a loan agreement — or even say if one existed. Nor would he share the basic terms of the loan, such as what, if any, interest rate had been charged or whether Justice Thomas had adhered to an agreed-upon repayment schedule. And when asked to elaborate on what he had meant when he said the loan had been ‘satisfied,’ he did not respond.”
There’s no way for the public to know, because Thomas never reported the arrangement on his annual financial disclosure forms. Thomas was characteristically unresponsive when the Times submitted questions about the loan to the Supreme Court’s public information office.
Was Thomas obligated to report the loan? The Times explained: “Vehicle loans are generally exempt from those reporting requirements, as long as they are secured by the vehicle and the loan amount doesn’t exceed its purchase price. But private loans like the one between Mr. Welters and Justice Thomas can be deemed gifts or income to the borrower under the federal tax code if they don’t hew to certain criteria: Essentially, experts said, the loan must have well-documented, commercially reasonable terms along the lines of what a bank would offer, and the borrower must adhere to those terms and pay back the principal and interest in full.”
Now, a new ProPublica report offers the most exhaustive accounting yet of how Thomas parlayed his position into a mechanism for subsidizing vacations out of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” The report — “almost certainly an undercount,” ProPublica noted — details at least 38 “destination vacations, including a previously unreported voyage on a yacht around the Bahamas; 26 private jet flights, plus an additional eight by helicopter; a dozen VIP passes to professional and college sporting events, typically perched in the skybox; two stays at luxury resorts in Florida and Jamaica; and one standing invitation to an exclusive golf club overlooking the Atlantic coast.”
In other words, Thomas has any number of Harlan Crows to help make his life more exceptional, including oil executive Paul Novelly; David Sokol, a former Berkshire Hathaway executive; the late billionaire H. Wayne Huizenga, founder of AutoNation and Waste Management.
Other justices, past and present, have accepted hospitality including luxury travel, but we know about those trips because the justices disclosed the gifts. But the extent of Thomas’s travel appears extraordinary. As former federal judge Jeremy Fogel, who served on the committee that reviews the justices’ financial disclosure forms, told ProPublica, “In my career I don’t remember ever seeing this degree of largesse given to anyone.”
It is conduct unbecoming any public official, no less a Supreme Court justice. “It’s just the height of hypocrisy to wear the robes and live the lifestyle of a billionaire,” Don Fox, former general counsel of the Office of Government Ethics, told ProPublica.
Perhaps some of the benefits could be deemed “personal hospitality” and therefore not subject to the reporting requirements, although that exception does not seem to apply to private jet travel, such as Huizenga’s dispatch of one of his personal 737 jets to ferry Thomas to South Florida — at least twice.
But this isn’t — or shouldn’t be — a game of what an individual justice can get away with not disclosing. The federal courts’ “Guide to Judiciary Policy” prohibits judges from accepting gifts “from the same or different sources on a basis so frequent that a reasonable person would believe that the public office is being used for private gain.” What would any reasonable person conclude about Thomas’s behavior? This isn’t just a problem for him — it’s a stain on the court.
I wrote four months ago — without any expectation that this would happen — that Thomas needs to provide a full accounting of the benefits he received, or that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. should insist on it. Since then, we have learned not just about the travel described above but also about Crow’s purchase of the house where Thomas’s mother was living and his tuition payments for Thomas’s grandnephew.
Thomas partisans may convince themselves that this is all part of a liberal plot to discredit the court’s most conservative member. But it is Thomas who is doing the discrediting — not just of himself but of the institution on which he serves. If he won’t wake up to that reality, his colleagues must.
By Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post
“As friends do.”
That’s what Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had to say in April, after ProPublica reported on the travel benefits lavished on the justice and his wife by Texas billionaire Harlan Crow.
“Harlan and Kathy Crow are among our dearest friends, and we have been friends for over twenty-five years,” Thomas said in a statement. “As friends do, we have joined them on a number of family trips during the more than quarter century we have known them.”
It turns out that Thomas is a man of many friends. And these friends — ultrawealthy friends mostly acquired after Thomas joined the court — do quite a bit for the justice and his family.
For instance, Anthony Welters, a health-care tycoon whose private financing enabled the Thomases to purchase in 1999 the $267,230 motor coach in which they tooled around the country. (Welters, whom Thomas met when they were both congressional staffers, played an essential role because there isn’t much of a commercial financing market for high-end recreational vehicles of the type the Thomases bought.)
Roughly nine years later, the loan was “satisfied,” according to Welters — a fuzzy term that might mean Thomas repaid Welters or that Welters forgave all or part of the debt.
As the New York Times reported, “He would not say how much he had lent Justice Thomas, how much the justice had repaid and whether any of the debt had been forgiven or otherwise discharged. He declined to provide The Times with a copy of a loan agreement — or even say if one existed. Nor would he share the basic terms of the loan, such as what, if any, interest rate had been charged or whether Justice Thomas had adhered to an agreed-upon repayment schedule. And when asked to elaborate on what he had meant when he said the loan had been ‘satisfied,’ he did not respond.”
There’s no way for the public to know, because Thomas never reported the arrangement on his annual financial disclosure forms. Thomas was characteristically unresponsive when the Times submitted questions about the loan to the Supreme Court’s public information office.
Was Thomas obligated to report the loan? The Times explained: “Vehicle loans are generally exempt from those reporting requirements, as long as they are secured by the vehicle and the loan amount doesn’t exceed its purchase price. But private loans like the one between Mr. Welters and Justice Thomas can be deemed gifts or income to the borrower under the federal tax code if they don’t hew to certain criteria: Essentially, experts said, the loan must have well-documented, commercially reasonable terms along the lines of what a bank would offer, and the borrower must adhere to those terms and pay back the principal and interest in full.”
Now, a new ProPublica report offers the most exhaustive accounting yet of how Thomas parlayed his position into a mechanism for subsidizing vacations out of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” The report — “almost certainly an undercount,” ProPublica noted — details at least 38 “destination vacations, including a previously unreported voyage on a yacht around the Bahamas; 26 private jet flights, plus an additional eight by helicopter; a dozen VIP passes to professional and college sporting events, typically perched in the skybox; two stays at luxury resorts in Florida and Jamaica; and one standing invitation to an exclusive golf club overlooking the Atlantic coast.”
In other words, Thomas has any number of Harlan Crows to help make his life more exceptional, including oil executive Paul Novelly; David Sokol, a former Berkshire Hathaway executive; the late billionaire H. Wayne Huizenga, founder of AutoNation and Waste Management.
Other justices, past and present, have accepted hospitality including luxury travel, but we know about those trips because the justices disclosed the gifts. But the extent of Thomas’s travel appears extraordinary. As former federal judge Jeremy Fogel, who served on the committee that reviews the justices’ financial disclosure forms, told ProPublica, “In my career I don’t remember ever seeing this degree of largesse given to anyone.”
It is conduct unbecoming any public official, no less a Supreme Court justice. “It’s just the height of hypocrisy to wear the robes and live the lifestyle of a billionaire,” Don Fox, former general counsel of the Office of Government Ethics, told ProPublica.
Perhaps some of the benefits could be deemed “personal hospitality” and therefore not subject to the reporting requirements, although that exception does not seem to apply to private jet travel, such as Huizenga’s dispatch of one of his personal 737 jets to ferry Thomas to South Florida — at least twice.
But this isn’t — or shouldn’t be — a game of what an individual justice can get away with not disclosing. The federal courts’ “Guide to Judiciary Policy” prohibits judges from accepting gifts “from the same or different sources on a basis so frequent that a reasonable person would believe that the public office is being used for private gain.” What would any reasonable person conclude about Thomas’s behavior? This isn’t just a problem for him — it’s a stain on the court.
I wrote four months ago — without any expectation that this would happen — that Thomas needs to provide a full accounting of the benefits he received, or that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. should insist on it. Since then, we have learned not just about the travel described above but also about Crow’s purchase of the house where Thomas’s mother was living and his tuition payments for Thomas’s grandnephew.
Thomas partisans may convince themselves that this is all part of a liberal plot to discredit the court’s most conservative member. But it is Thomas who is doing the discrediting — not just of himself but of the institution on which he serves. If he won’t wake up to that reality, his colleagues must.
TRUMP TRIED TO TAKE AWAY MY VOTE
by Irv Halter, retired U.S. Air Force major general For The Inquirer
In October 2020, my wife and I arrived in Philadelphia just in time to be registered voters in our new home. We joined a long line of folks at our early voting location to be certain our vote was counted.
This being Philadelphia, the line was a blend of young and old, white and Black and Latinx, gay and straight. Despite the 45-minute wait, folks were patient, polite, and happy. It was obvious that the majority were excited to exercise their right to vote, and that Joe Biden was their choice for president — except for the elderly couple just in front of us. The husband and wife were frail, in their late 80s, and somewhat unsteady on their feet. Even without speaking much, it became obvious that the gentleman did not share his line-mates’ enthusiasm for the Democrat.
We struck up a conversation about nonpolitical stuff. He was a Marine Corps veteran who had seen combat in the Korean War. I mentioned that I, too, had combat service in the Middle East, and we thanked each other for that shared commitment to our Constitution. As we climbed the final few steps into the polling place, I reached my hand out behind his back every time he started to stumble. But thankfully he righted himself and pressed on, determined to complete the task at hand.
My wife and I finished voting and walked outside. Our Marine friend was already there, anxiously waiting for his wife to come out of the building. I assured him that I saw her just finishing up and that she would be out shortly. We bid him farewell.
I have thought of that experience often since the events of November 2020, and again on Jan. 6, 2021. I was proud of our new city and state for conducting a well-administered election. I was well aware that there were those who tried to upend that effort. While reading the entire federal indictment of former President Donald Trump released last week, those thoughts came rushing back.
The indictment is clear: Trump has been charged for his role in efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in Pennsylvania and six other battleground states.
Trump and his coconspirators tried to cancel my vote. They tried to cancel that Marine’s vote. They tried to cancel the votes of millions of folks from both parties and overrule the clear mandate of the electorate.
The fact that they did not succeed because other Americans would not let them is irrelevant. (Thank you, “too honest” Mike Pence.) Their nefarious goal was clear and unambiguous.
Read the indictment for yourself, and you will see that Trump tried in every way he could imagine to overturn a free and fair election. He knew it was free and fair despite every corrosive lie he told and continues to tell.
Those lies may be protected free speech. But his documented actions to subvert the election were not. Trump conspired to destroy the linchpin of our republic: our sacred vote.
Trump was abetted by numerous elected Pennsylvania Republicans, including State Sen. Doug Mastriano, in his attempt to reverse our decision. Their lack of fidelity to the Constitution and the laws of the land is a stain on their character that can never be erased. And one we should never forget.
Whatever you may think about our disagreements about politics, about President Biden, about Democrats or Republicans, or about policies you wish to support or not, remember this: Donald Trump tried to take away my vote and yours, disregarding my 32 years of service to the nation in support of the Constitution.
If that does not disgust and anger you, then you are no friend of mine. Worse, you are no friend of America if you do not walk away from Trump now. Because if he ever gets the chance, he’ll do it again.
by Irv Halter, retired U.S. Air Force major general For The Inquirer
In October 2020, my wife and I arrived in Philadelphia just in time to be registered voters in our new home. We joined a long line of folks at our early voting location to be certain our vote was counted.
This being Philadelphia, the line was a blend of young and old, white and Black and Latinx, gay and straight. Despite the 45-minute wait, folks were patient, polite, and happy. It was obvious that the majority were excited to exercise their right to vote, and that Joe Biden was their choice for president — except for the elderly couple just in front of us. The husband and wife were frail, in their late 80s, and somewhat unsteady on their feet. Even without speaking much, it became obvious that the gentleman did not share his line-mates’ enthusiasm for the Democrat.
We struck up a conversation about nonpolitical stuff. He was a Marine Corps veteran who had seen combat in the Korean War. I mentioned that I, too, had combat service in the Middle East, and we thanked each other for that shared commitment to our Constitution. As we climbed the final few steps into the polling place, I reached my hand out behind his back every time he started to stumble. But thankfully he righted himself and pressed on, determined to complete the task at hand.
My wife and I finished voting and walked outside. Our Marine friend was already there, anxiously waiting for his wife to come out of the building. I assured him that I saw her just finishing up and that she would be out shortly. We bid him farewell.
I have thought of that experience often since the events of November 2020, and again on Jan. 6, 2021. I was proud of our new city and state for conducting a well-administered election. I was well aware that there were those who tried to upend that effort. While reading the entire federal indictment of former President Donald Trump released last week, those thoughts came rushing back.
The indictment is clear: Trump has been charged for his role in efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in Pennsylvania and six other battleground states.
Trump and his coconspirators tried to cancel my vote. They tried to cancel that Marine’s vote. They tried to cancel the votes of millions of folks from both parties and overrule the clear mandate of the electorate.
The fact that they did not succeed because other Americans would not let them is irrelevant. (Thank you, “too honest” Mike Pence.) Their nefarious goal was clear and unambiguous.
Read the indictment for yourself, and you will see that Trump tried in every way he could imagine to overturn a free and fair election. He knew it was free and fair despite every corrosive lie he told and continues to tell.
Those lies may be protected free speech. But his documented actions to subvert the election were not. Trump conspired to destroy the linchpin of our republic: our sacred vote.
Trump was abetted by numerous elected Pennsylvania Republicans, including State Sen. Doug Mastriano, in his attempt to reverse our decision. Their lack of fidelity to the Constitution and the laws of the land is a stain on their character that can never be erased. And one we should never forget.
Whatever you may think about our disagreements about politics, about President Biden, about Democrats or Republicans, or about policies you wish to support or not, remember this: Donald Trump tried to take away my vote and yours, disregarding my 32 years of service to the nation in support of the Constitution.
If that does not disgust and anger you, then you are no friend of mine. Worse, you are no friend of America if you do not walk away from Trump now. Because if he ever gets the chance, he’ll do it again.
CLIMATE IS NOW A CULTURE WAR ISSUE
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
Understanding climate denial used to seem easy: It was all about greed. Delve into the background of a researcher challenging the scientific consensus, a think tank trying to block climate action or a politician pronouncing climate change a hoax and you would almost always find major financial backing from the fossil fuel industry.
Those were simpler, more innocent times, and I miss them.
True, greed is still a major factor in anti-environmentalism. But climate denial has also become a front in the culture wars, with right-wingers rejecting the science in part because they dislike science in general and opposing action against emissions out of visceral opposition to anything liberals support.
And this cultural dimension of climate arguments has emerged at the worst possible moment — a moment when both the extreme danger from unchecked emissions and the path toward slashing those emissions are clearer than ever.
Some background: Scientists who began warning decades ago that the rising concentration of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere would have dangerous effects on the climate have been overwhelmingly vindicated.
Worldwide, July was the hottest month on record, with devastating heat waves in many parts of the globe. Extreme weather events are proliferating. Florida is essentially sitting in a hot bath, with ocean temperatures off some of its coast higher than body temperature.
At the same time, technological progress in renewable energy has made it possible to envisage major reductions in emissions at little or no cost in terms of economic growth and living standards.
Back in 2009, when Democrats tried but failed to take significant climate action, their policy proposals consisted mainly of sticks — limits on emissions in the form of permits that businesses could buy and sell. In 2022, when the Biden administration finally succeeded in passing a major climate bill, it consisted almost entirely of carrots — tax credits and subsidies for green energy. Yet thanks to the revolution in renewable technology, energy experts believe that this all-gain-no-pain approach will have major effects in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
But not if Republicans can help it. The Heritage Foundation is spearheading an effort called Project 2025 that will probably define the agenda if a Republican wins the White House next year. As The Times reports, it calls for “dismantling almost every clean energy program in the federal government and boosting the production of fossil fuels.”
What’s behind this destructive effort? Well, Project 2025 appears to have been largely devised by the usual suspects — fossil-fueled think tanks like the Heartland Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute that have been crusading against climate science and climate action for many years.
But the political force of this drive, and the likelihood that there will be no significant dissent from within the G.O.P. if Republicans do take the White House, has a lot to do with the way science in general and climate science in particular have become a front in the culture war.
About attitudes toward science: As recently as the mid-2000s, Republicans and Democrats had similar levels of trust in the scientific community. Since then, however, Republican trust has plunged as Democratic trust has risen; there’s now a 30-point gap between the parties.
We saw the effect of this anti-science trend when Covid vaccines became available: Vaccination was free to the public, so there was no economic cost to individuals, yet getting vaccinated was widely perceived as something “experts” and liberal elites wanted you to do. As a result, Republicans disproportionately refused to get their shots and suffered substantially higher rates of excess deaths — deaths over and above those you would normally have expected — than Democrats.
Does anyone seriously doubt that similar attitudes are driving rank-and-file Republicans to oppose action on climate change? The other day my colleague David Brooks argued that many Republicans dispute the reality of climate change and push for fossil fuels as a way to “offend the elites.” He’s right. Look at the hysterical reaction to potential regulations on gas stoves, and while it’s clear that special interests were, um, fueling the fire, there was also a strong culture-war element: The elites want you to get an induction cooktop, but real men cook with gas.
The fact that the climate war is now part of the culture war worries me, a lot. Special interests can do a great deal of damage, but they can be bought off or counterbalanced with other special interests. Indeed, an important part of President Biden’s climate strategy is the idea that renewable energy investments, which have been soaring since his legislation passed, will give many businesses and communities a stake in continuing the green transition.
But such rational if self-interested considerations won’t do much to persuade people who believe that green energy is a conspiracy against the American way of life. So the culture war has become a major problem for climate action — a problem we really, really don’t need right now.
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
Understanding climate denial used to seem easy: It was all about greed. Delve into the background of a researcher challenging the scientific consensus, a think tank trying to block climate action or a politician pronouncing climate change a hoax and you would almost always find major financial backing from the fossil fuel industry.
Those were simpler, more innocent times, and I miss them.
True, greed is still a major factor in anti-environmentalism. But climate denial has also become a front in the culture wars, with right-wingers rejecting the science in part because they dislike science in general and opposing action against emissions out of visceral opposition to anything liberals support.
And this cultural dimension of climate arguments has emerged at the worst possible moment — a moment when both the extreme danger from unchecked emissions and the path toward slashing those emissions are clearer than ever.
Some background: Scientists who began warning decades ago that the rising concentration of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere would have dangerous effects on the climate have been overwhelmingly vindicated.
Worldwide, July was the hottest month on record, with devastating heat waves in many parts of the globe. Extreme weather events are proliferating. Florida is essentially sitting in a hot bath, with ocean temperatures off some of its coast higher than body temperature.
At the same time, technological progress in renewable energy has made it possible to envisage major reductions in emissions at little or no cost in terms of economic growth and living standards.
Back in 2009, when Democrats tried but failed to take significant climate action, their policy proposals consisted mainly of sticks — limits on emissions in the form of permits that businesses could buy and sell. In 2022, when the Biden administration finally succeeded in passing a major climate bill, it consisted almost entirely of carrots — tax credits and subsidies for green energy. Yet thanks to the revolution in renewable technology, energy experts believe that this all-gain-no-pain approach will have major effects in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
But not if Republicans can help it. The Heritage Foundation is spearheading an effort called Project 2025 that will probably define the agenda if a Republican wins the White House next year. As The Times reports, it calls for “dismantling almost every clean energy program in the federal government and boosting the production of fossil fuels.”
What’s behind this destructive effort? Well, Project 2025 appears to have been largely devised by the usual suspects — fossil-fueled think tanks like the Heartland Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute that have been crusading against climate science and climate action for many years.
But the political force of this drive, and the likelihood that there will be no significant dissent from within the G.O.P. if Republicans do take the White House, has a lot to do with the way science in general and climate science in particular have become a front in the culture war.
About attitudes toward science: As recently as the mid-2000s, Republicans and Democrats had similar levels of trust in the scientific community. Since then, however, Republican trust has plunged as Democratic trust has risen; there’s now a 30-point gap between the parties.
We saw the effect of this anti-science trend when Covid vaccines became available: Vaccination was free to the public, so there was no economic cost to individuals, yet getting vaccinated was widely perceived as something “experts” and liberal elites wanted you to do. As a result, Republicans disproportionately refused to get their shots and suffered substantially higher rates of excess deaths — deaths over and above those you would normally have expected — than Democrats.
Does anyone seriously doubt that similar attitudes are driving rank-and-file Republicans to oppose action on climate change? The other day my colleague David Brooks argued that many Republicans dispute the reality of climate change and push for fossil fuels as a way to “offend the elites.” He’s right. Look at the hysterical reaction to potential regulations on gas stoves, and while it’s clear that special interests were, um, fueling the fire, there was also a strong culture-war element: The elites want you to get an induction cooktop, but real men cook with gas.
The fact that the climate war is now part of the culture war worries me, a lot. Special interests can do a great deal of damage, but they can be bought off or counterbalanced with other special interests. Indeed, an important part of President Biden’s climate strategy is the idea that renewable energy investments, which have been soaring since his legislation passed, will give many businesses and communities a stake in continuing the green transition.
But such rational if self-interested considerations won’t do much to persuade people who believe that green energy is a conspiracy against the American way of life. So the culture war has become a major problem for climate action — a problem we really, really don’t need right now.
IN TRUMP VS. OUR JUSTICE SYSTEM, THE RULE OF LAW IS WINNING. SO FAR.
By Eugene Robinson, The Washington Post
Donald Trump fought the law, and the law won. So far, at least.
No one knows whether the former president — arraigned yet again on Thursday, this time in U.S. District Court in D.C. — will be convicted on felony charges for his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Personally, I wish jurors could return a verdict that goes beyond “guilty as charged.” Maybe something like “guilty as hell.”
I’m not going to be on that jury, though, or on the juries empaneled for Trump’s other coming trials. Citizens who have taken an oath to be open-minded and impartial will decide his fate. This fact, regardless of convictions or acquittals, is a victory for the rule of law.
Despite all his huffing and puffing, Trump could not bully the justice system into granting him impunity. Like every other criminal defendant, he deserves and must be given the presumption of innocence. But like every other criminal defendant, he is being held accountable.
Trump will have to answer in the District of Columbia for the conduct that sparked the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection not far from the federal courthouse that was the site of Thursday’s arraignment. Trump entered “not guilty” pleas before a magistrate in a small courtroom where such initial hearings routinely take place. In other venues, he will have to answer for his conduct in allegedly hoarding top-secret classified documents in a gaudy ballroom and a kitschy bathroom at Mar-a-Lago; and for his conduct in allegedly falsifying business records in Manhattan to hide a hush money payment to adult-film star Stormy Daniels.
I agree with the consensus that the D.C. case is by far the most consequential. For the first time in our nation’s history, an incumbent president who was defeated in his bid for reelection tried to overturn the will of the voters and cling to power.
Think about that. Think about the close and passionately contested presidential elections this country has lived through. Think about how all of them — except one — were resolved by an orderly transfer of power. Richard M. Nixon gracefully conceded to John F. Kennedy in 1960. Al Gore accepted the Supreme Court ruling that cemented George W. Bush’s victory in 2000. Hillary Clinton congratulated Trump on his upset win in 2016.
According to the grand jury indictment sought and obtained by special counsel Jack Smith, Trump led six unindicted fellow plotters in conspiring to illegally defraud the United States by obstructing the 2020 vote count; conspiring to “corruptly obstruct and impede” the official certification by Congress of Joe Biden’s victory; and conspiring to deprive U.S. citizens of “the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted.”
Trump made a famous campaign promise in 2016 about all the “winning” he was going to do. Let me fix it for him, with my word substitutions in italics: “We’re gonna conspire so much, you may even get tired of conspiring. And you’ll say, ‘Please, please — it’s too much conspiring. We can’t take it anymore, Mr. President, it’s too much.’ And I’ll say, ‘No it isn’t. We have to keep conspiring. We have to conspire more. We’re going to conspire more. We’re going to conspire so much.”
One of Trump’s lawyers, John Lauro, has been previewing potential defense strategies. It should worry the former president that William P. Barr, his handpicked attorney general, is skeptical to the point of being dismissive.
“This is the first time that political speech has been criminalized in the history of the United States,” Lauro thundered on CBS. But the indictment notes, in its third paragraph, that Trump had every right to “claim, falsely,” that massive fraud stole the election from him — but in the following paragraph asserts that he had no right to pursue “unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results.” Barr noted during a CNN interview that the First Amendment’s speech protections don’t “give you the right to engage in a fraudulent conspiracy.”
Lauro told Fox News that he would like prosecutors “to try to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Donald Trump believed that these allegations [of voter fraud] were false.” But Barr said he believes Trump “knew well that he had lost the election,” and the indictment proffers convincing evidence of that.
Lauro said on NBC’s “Today” show that Trump was entitled to “trust [the] advice of counsel.” But Barr said that to plead an “advice of counsel” defense, Trump would almost surely have to waive attorney-client privilege and also testify under oath. I cannot imagine any competent defense lawyer letting him get anywhere near the witness stand.
What comes through on page after page of the latest indictment is how Trump tries to bully everyone — state legislators, election supervisors, Justice Department officials, his own vice president. Again and again, his intended patsies tell him no.
Will these charges make those who love Trump love him even more? I hope not, but that’s beside the point. History is kind to those who stand up to bullies — and brutal to those who knuckle under.
By Eugene Robinson, The Washington Post
Donald Trump fought the law, and the law won. So far, at least.
No one knows whether the former president — arraigned yet again on Thursday, this time in U.S. District Court in D.C. — will be convicted on felony charges for his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Personally, I wish jurors could return a verdict that goes beyond “guilty as charged.” Maybe something like “guilty as hell.”
I’m not going to be on that jury, though, or on the juries empaneled for Trump’s other coming trials. Citizens who have taken an oath to be open-minded and impartial will decide his fate. This fact, regardless of convictions or acquittals, is a victory for the rule of law.
Despite all his huffing and puffing, Trump could not bully the justice system into granting him impunity. Like every other criminal defendant, he deserves and must be given the presumption of innocence. But like every other criminal defendant, he is being held accountable.
Trump will have to answer in the District of Columbia for the conduct that sparked the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection not far from the federal courthouse that was the site of Thursday’s arraignment. Trump entered “not guilty” pleas before a magistrate in a small courtroom where such initial hearings routinely take place. In other venues, he will have to answer for his conduct in allegedly hoarding top-secret classified documents in a gaudy ballroom and a kitschy bathroom at Mar-a-Lago; and for his conduct in allegedly falsifying business records in Manhattan to hide a hush money payment to adult-film star Stormy Daniels.
I agree with the consensus that the D.C. case is by far the most consequential. For the first time in our nation’s history, an incumbent president who was defeated in his bid for reelection tried to overturn the will of the voters and cling to power.
Think about that. Think about the close and passionately contested presidential elections this country has lived through. Think about how all of them — except one — were resolved by an orderly transfer of power. Richard M. Nixon gracefully conceded to John F. Kennedy in 1960. Al Gore accepted the Supreme Court ruling that cemented George W. Bush’s victory in 2000. Hillary Clinton congratulated Trump on his upset win in 2016.
According to the grand jury indictment sought and obtained by special counsel Jack Smith, Trump led six unindicted fellow plotters in conspiring to illegally defraud the United States by obstructing the 2020 vote count; conspiring to “corruptly obstruct and impede” the official certification by Congress of Joe Biden’s victory; and conspiring to deprive U.S. citizens of “the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted.”
Trump made a famous campaign promise in 2016 about all the “winning” he was going to do. Let me fix it for him, with my word substitutions in italics: “We’re gonna conspire so much, you may even get tired of conspiring. And you’ll say, ‘Please, please — it’s too much conspiring. We can’t take it anymore, Mr. President, it’s too much.’ And I’ll say, ‘No it isn’t. We have to keep conspiring. We have to conspire more. We’re going to conspire more. We’re going to conspire so much.”
One of Trump’s lawyers, John Lauro, has been previewing potential defense strategies. It should worry the former president that William P. Barr, his handpicked attorney general, is skeptical to the point of being dismissive.
“This is the first time that political speech has been criminalized in the history of the United States,” Lauro thundered on CBS. But the indictment notes, in its third paragraph, that Trump had every right to “claim, falsely,” that massive fraud stole the election from him — but in the following paragraph asserts that he had no right to pursue “unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results.” Barr noted during a CNN interview that the First Amendment’s speech protections don’t “give you the right to engage in a fraudulent conspiracy.”
Lauro told Fox News that he would like prosecutors “to try to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Donald Trump believed that these allegations [of voter fraud] were false.” But Barr said he believes Trump “knew well that he had lost the election,” and the indictment proffers convincing evidence of that.
Lauro said on NBC’s “Today” show that Trump was entitled to “trust [the] advice of counsel.” But Barr said that to plead an “advice of counsel” defense, Trump would almost surely have to waive attorney-client privilege and also testify under oath. I cannot imagine any competent defense lawyer letting him get anywhere near the witness stand.
What comes through on page after page of the latest indictment is how Trump tries to bully everyone — state legislators, election supervisors, Justice Department officials, his own vice president. Again and again, his intended patsies tell him no.
Will these charges make those who love Trump love him even more? I hope not, but that’s beside the point. History is kind to those who stand up to bullies — and brutal to those who knuckle under.
A PRESIDENT ACCUSED OF BETRAYING HIS COUNTRY
By The New York Times Editorial Board
Of all the ways that Donald Trump desecrated his office as president, the gravest — as outlined in extraordinary detail in the criminal indictment issued against him on Tuesday — was his attempt to undermine the Constitution and overturn the results of the 2020 election, hoping to stay in office.
The special counsel Jack Smith got right to the point at the top of the four-count federal indictment, saying that Mr. Trump had knowingly “targeted a bedrock function of the United States federal government: the nation’s process of collecting, counting and certifying the results of the presidential election.”
Bedrock. It’s an apt word for a sacred responsibility of every president: to honor the peaceful transfer of power through the free and fair elections that distinguish the United States. Counting and certifying the vote, Mr. Smith said, “is foundational to the United States democratic process, and until 2021, had operated in a peaceful and orderly manner for more than 130 years,” since electoral counting rules were codified. Until Mr. Trump lost, at which point, the indictment makes clear, he used “dishonesty, fraud and deceit to impair, obstruct and defeat” that cornerstone of democracy.
The criminal justice system of the United States had never seen an indictment of this magnitude. It’s the first time that a former president has been explicitly accused by the federal government of defrauding the country. It’s the first time a former president has been accused of obstructing an official proceeding, the congressional count of the electoral votes. Mr. Trump also stands accused of engaging in a conspiracy to deprive millions of citizens of the right to have their votes counted. This fraud, the indictment said, led directly to a deadly attack by Mr. Trump’s supporters on the seat of American government.
It’s the third criminal indictment of Mr. Trump, and it demonstrates, yet again, that the rule of law in America applies to everyone, even when the defendant was the country’s highest-ranking official. The crimes alleged in this indictment are, by far, the most serious because they undermine the country’s basic principles.
The prosecution’s list of false voter fraud claims made by Mr. Trump and his associates is extensive: that 10,000 dead people voted in Georgia, that there were tens of thousands of double votes in Nevada, 30,000 noncitizens voting in Arizona and 200,000 mystery votes in Pennsylvania, as well as suspicious vote dumps and malfunctioning voting machines elsewhere.
After presenting this list, the indictment makes its case with 12 simple but searing words: “These claims were false, and the defendant knew that they were false.” Mr. Smith points out how many people told Mr. Trump that he was repeating lies. He was told by Vice President Mike Pence that there was no evidence of fraud. He was told the same thing by the Justice Department leaders he appointed, by the director of national intelligence, by the Department of Homeland Security, by senior White House attorneys, by leaders of his campaign, by state officials and, most significantly, by dozens of federal and state courts. The indictment emphasizes that every lawsuit filed by Mr. Trump and his allies to change the outcome was rejected, “providing the defendant real-time notice that his allegations were meritless.”
Demonstrating Mr. Trump’s knowledge that he was lying will be central to the prosecution’s case when it comes to trial, because Mr. Smith wants to make clear that Mr. Trump wasn’t genuinely trying to root out credible instances of voter fraud. The indictment doesn’t charge him with lying or speaking his mind about the outcome of the election, and it notes that he had the right to challenge the results through legal means. But the charges show in detail how, after all those methods failed, his “pervasive and destabilizing lies” set the table for the criminal activity that followed, specifically fraud, obstruction and deprivation of rights. As much as defense lawyers are trying to frame the case as an attack on Mr. Trump’s free speech, the indictment makes clear that it was his actions after Election Day that were criminal.
That “criminal scheme” began, the indictment says, on Nov. 14, 2020, when Mr. Trump turned to Rudy Giuliani (acknowledged by his lawyer to be “co-conspirator 1”) to challenge the results in the swing state of Arizona, which Mr. Trump had lost. “From that point on,” the charges state, “the defendant and his co-conspirators executed a strategy to use knowing deceit in the targeted states,” which also included Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In an example cited in the charges, Mr. Giuliani sent a text to the Senate majority leader in Michigan on Dec. 7 demanding that the legislature pass a resolution saying the election was in dispute and that the state’s electors were not official. That demand was refused, but Mr. Trump continued to claim that more than 100,000 ballots in Detroit were fraudulent.
The scope of Mr. Trump’s plot touched every level of American political life. While the four federal crimes charged by Mr. Smith all relate to the same set of facts, three of those crimes, one for fraud and two related to obstruction of a proceeding, are crimes against the U.S. government. The fourth crime is against the American people, millions of whom Mr. Trump sought to deprive of their right to have their vote counted. This crime carries a sentence of up to 10 years in prison.
It appears increasingly likely that Mr. Trump will soon face charges for crimes against yet another level of American government — the states — as the district attorney in Atlanta reaches the final stages of a grand jury investigation into his pressure campaign to get Georgia to reverse its certified vote count and award its 16 electors to him instead of Joe Biden.
The former president responded to this latest and most serious indictment in his customary style, denouncing it as “corrupt” and invoking, among other things, the “Biden Crime Family” and Nazi Germany. Mr. Smith, a veteran prosecutor on the International Criminal Court who has prosecuted far more brutal and popular leaders than Mr. Trump, has surely heard it all before. But that does not excuse the support Mr. Trump is receiving from his Republican allies in Congress, who insist that this prosecution is political and have helped damage the respect for the criminal justice system in the minds of so many voters. Yes, some in Mr. Trump’s party, including his former vice president, have stood up for democratic norms in the wake of these indictments, and yet it is impossible to ignore those who have not. These attacks are dangerous and have led to death threats against prosecutors, judges and other civil servants for doing their jobs.
If Mr. Smith’s previous indictment of Mr. Trump is any indication, we have not heard the end of the charges in this case. In that earlier case, which charged Mr. Trump with illegally hoarding and refusing to return highly classified documents after he left office, the special counsel issued a superseding indictment last week, adding serious obstruction charges against the former president and one of his aides at Mar-a-Lago. It would not be surprising if Mr. Smith has more coming in the new case as well, whether additional evidence of Mr. Trump’s lawbreaking or charges against his co-conspirators, who are not named in the indictment but who are readily identifiable. Several are lawyers who advised or worked for the former president, including Mr. Giuliani, Sidney Powell and John Eastman.
In many ways, the indictment continues the work of the House Jan. 6 committee, which uncovered many of the same allegations. Several of the committee’s members had urged this prosecution, particularly after the Senate failed to convict Mr. Trump after he was impeached for his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. After he voted to acquit Mr. Trump, Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, said there were other ways to bring Mr. Trump to account. “We have a criminal justice system in this country,” he said. “We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being accountable by either one.”
In that, at least, Mr. McConnell was right. A former president is now being charged with extreme abuse of office and will eventually be judged by a jury. Mr. Trump tried to overturn the nation’s constitutional system and the rule of law. That system survived his attacks and will now hold him to account for that damage.
By The New York Times Editorial Board
Of all the ways that Donald Trump desecrated his office as president, the gravest — as outlined in extraordinary detail in the criminal indictment issued against him on Tuesday — was his attempt to undermine the Constitution and overturn the results of the 2020 election, hoping to stay in office.
The special counsel Jack Smith got right to the point at the top of the four-count federal indictment, saying that Mr. Trump had knowingly “targeted a bedrock function of the United States federal government: the nation’s process of collecting, counting and certifying the results of the presidential election.”
Bedrock. It’s an apt word for a sacred responsibility of every president: to honor the peaceful transfer of power through the free and fair elections that distinguish the United States. Counting and certifying the vote, Mr. Smith said, “is foundational to the United States democratic process, and until 2021, had operated in a peaceful and orderly manner for more than 130 years,” since electoral counting rules were codified. Until Mr. Trump lost, at which point, the indictment makes clear, he used “dishonesty, fraud and deceit to impair, obstruct and defeat” that cornerstone of democracy.
The criminal justice system of the United States had never seen an indictment of this magnitude. It’s the first time that a former president has been explicitly accused by the federal government of defrauding the country. It’s the first time a former president has been accused of obstructing an official proceeding, the congressional count of the electoral votes. Mr. Trump also stands accused of engaging in a conspiracy to deprive millions of citizens of the right to have their votes counted. This fraud, the indictment said, led directly to a deadly attack by Mr. Trump’s supporters on the seat of American government.
It’s the third criminal indictment of Mr. Trump, and it demonstrates, yet again, that the rule of law in America applies to everyone, even when the defendant was the country’s highest-ranking official. The crimes alleged in this indictment are, by far, the most serious because they undermine the country’s basic principles.
The prosecution’s list of false voter fraud claims made by Mr. Trump and his associates is extensive: that 10,000 dead people voted in Georgia, that there were tens of thousands of double votes in Nevada, 30,000 noncitizens voting in Arizona and 200,000 mystery votes in Pennsylvania, as well as suspicious vote dumps and malfunctioning voting machines elsewhere.
After presenting this list, the indictment makes its case with 12 simple but searing words: “These claims were false, and the defendant knew that they were false.” Mr. Smith points out how many people told Mr. Trump that he was repeating lies. He was told by Vice President Mike Pence that there was no evidence of fraud. He was told the same thing by the Justice Department leaders he appointed, by the director of national intelligence, by the Department of Homeland Security, by senior White House attorneys, by leaders of his campaign, by state officials and, most significantly, by dozens of federal and state courts. The indictment emphasizes that every lawsuit filed by Mr. Trump and his allies to change the outcome was rejected, “providing the defendant real-time notice that his allegations were meritless.”
Demonstrating Mr. Trump’s knowledge that he was lying will be central to the prosecution’s case when it comes to trial, because Mr. Smith wants to make clear that Mr. Trump wasn’t genuinely trying to root out credible instances of voter fraud. The indictment doesn’t charge him with lying or speaking his mind about the outcome of the election, and it notes that he had the right to challenge the results through legal means. But the charges show in detail how, after all those methods failed, his “pervasive and destabilizing lies” set the table for the criminal activity that followed, specifically fraud, obstruction and deprivation of rights. As much as defense lawyers are trying to frame the case as an attack on Mr. Trump’s free speech, the indictment makes clear that it was his actions after Election Day that were criminal.
That “criminal scheme” began, the indictment says, on Nov. 14, 2020, when Mr. Trump turned to Rudy Giuliani (acknowledged by his lawyer to be “co-conspirator 1”) to challenge the results in the swing state of Arizona, which Mr. Trump had lost. “From that point on,” the charges state, “the defendant and his co-conspirators executed a strategy to use knowing deceit in the targeted states,” which also included Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In an example cited in the charges, Mr. Giuliani sent a text to the Senate majority leader in Michigan on Dec. 7 demanding that the legislature pass a resolution saying the election was in dispute and that the state’s electors were not official. That demand was refused, but Mr. Trump continued to claim that more than 100,000 ballots in Detroit were fraudulent.
The scope of Mr. Trump’s plot touched every level of American political life. While the four federal crimes charged by Mr. Smith all relate to the same set of facts, three of those crimes, one for fraud and two related to obstruction of a proceeding, are crimes against the U.S. government. The fourth crime is against the American people, millions of whom Mr. Trump sought to deprive of their right to have their vote counted. This crime carries a sentence of up to 10 years in prison.
It appears increasingly likely that Mr. Trump will soon face charges for crimes against yet another level of American government — the states — as the district attorney in Atlanta reaches the final stages of a grand jury investigation into his pressure campaign to get Georgia to reverse its certified vote count and award its 16 electors to him instead of Joe Biden.
The former president responded to this latest and most serious indictment in his customary style, denouncing it as “corrupt” and invoking, among other things, the “Biden Crime Family” and Nazi Germany. Mr. Smith, a veteran prosecutor on the International Criminal Court who has prosecuted far more brutal and popular leaders than Mr. Trump, has surely heard it all before. But that does not excuse the support Mr. Trump is receiving from his Republican allies in Congress, who insist that this prosecution is political and have helped damage the respect for the criminal justice system in the minds of so many voters. Yes, some in Mr. Trump’s party, including his former vice president, have stood up for democratic norms in the wake of these indictments, and yet it is impossible to ignore those who have not. These attacks are dangerous and have led to death threats against prosecutors, judges and other civil servants for doing their jobs.
If Mr. Smith’s previous indictment of Mr. Trump is any indication, we have not heard the end of the charges in this case. In that earlier case, which charged Mr. Trump with illegally hoarding and refusing to return highly classified documents after he left office, the special counsel issued a superseding indictment last week, adding serious obstruction charges against the former president and one of his aides at Mar-a-Lago. It would not be surprising if Mr. Smith has more coming in the new case as well, whether additional evidence of Mr. Trump’s lawbreaking or charges against his co-conspirators, who are not named in the indictment but who are readily identifiable. Several are lawyers who advised or worked for the former president, including Mr. Giuliani, Sidney Powell and John Eastman.
In many ways, the indictment continues the work of the House Jan. 6 committee, which uncovered many of the same allegations. Several of the committee’s members had urged this prosecution, particularly after the Senate failed to convict Mr. Trump after he was impeached for his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. After he voted to acquit Mr. Trump, Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, said there were other ways to bring Mr. Trump to account. “We have a criminal justice system in this country,” he said. “We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being accountable by either one.”
In that, at least, Mr. McConnell was right. A former president is now being charged with extreme abuse of office and will eventually be judged by a jury. Mr. Trump tried to overturn the nation’s constitutional system and the rule of law. That system survived his attacks and will now hold him to account for that damage.
WORRIED BY FLORIDA’S HISTORY STANDARDS? CHECK OUT ITS NEW DICTIONARY!
By Alexandra Petri, The Washington Post
Well, it’s a week with a Thursday in it, and Florida is, once again, revising its educational standards in alarming ways. Not content with removing books from shelves, or demanding that the College Board water down its AP African American studies curriculum, the state’s newest history standards include lessons suggesting that enslaved people “developed skills” for “personal benefit.” This trend appears likely to continue. What follows is a preview of the latest edition of the dictionary to be approved in Florida.
Aah: (exclamation) Normal thing to say when you enter the water at the beach, which is over 100 degrees.
Abolitionists: (noun) Some people in the 19th century who were inexplicably upset about a wonderful free surprise job training program. Today they want to end prisons for equally unclear reasons.
Abortion: (noun) Something that male state legislators (the foremost experts on this subject) believe no one ever wants under any circumstances, probably; decision that people beg the state to make for them and about which doctors beg for as little involvement as possible.
American history: (noun) A branch of learning that concerns a ceaseless parade of triumphs and contains nothing to feel bad about.
Barbie: (noun) Feminist demon enemy of the state.
Biden, Joe: (figure) Illegitimate president.
Black history: (entry not found)
Blacksmith: (noun) A great job and one that enslaved people might have had. Example sentence from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R): “They’re probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.”
Book ban: (noun) Effective way of making sure people never have certain sorts of ideas.
Censorship: (noun) When other people get mad about something you’ve said. Not to be confused with when you remove books from libraries or the state tells colleges what can and can’t be said in classrooms (both fine).
Child: (noun) Useful laborer with tiny hands; alternatively, someone whose reading cannot be censored enough.
Christian nationalism: (noun) Certainly constitutional; probably what the Founding Fathers would have preferred!
Classified: (adjective) The government’s way of saying a paper is especially interesting and you ought to have it in your house.
Climate change: (noun) Conspiracy by scientists to change all the thermometers, fill the air with smoke and then blame us.
Cocaine: (noun) A substance discovered in the White House; the only fit subject for news cycles.
Constitution: (noun) A document that can be interpreted only by Trump-appointed and/or Federalist Society judges. If the Constitution appears to prohibit something that you want to do, take the judge on a boat and try again.
Coral: (noun) Superfluous refuge for fish, others who have failed to adapt to life on land.
DeSantis, Ron: (figure) Governor who represents the ideal human being. Pronunciation varies.
Disney: (noun) A corporation, but not the good kind.
DOJ: (noun) Schrodinger’s legal entity that is both good and evil simultaneously, used for investigating legitimate country-shaking crimes (Hunter Biden possessing a firearm) and conducting illegal raids (Donald Trump kindly opening his home to some classified documents).
Election: (noun) Binding if Republicans win; otherwise, needs help from election officials who will figure out where the fraud was that prevented the election from reflecting the will of the people (that Republicans win).
Elector: (noun) Someone Mike Pence should or should not have accepted, depending.
Emancipation Proclamation: (noun) Classic example of government overreach.
Firearm: (noun) Wonderful, beautiful object that every person ought to have six of, except Hunter Biden.
Florida: God’s paradise on Earth; sometimes Ohio; see “The Courage to Be Free”! All parts of the country at once. Real estate here will only get more valuable.
FOX: News.
Free speech: (noun) When you shut up and I talk.
Gun violence: (noun) Simple, unalterable fact of life, like death but unlike taxes.
Immigration: (noun) When someone leaves their country of origin to seek a better life elsewhere; huge insult to the receiving country, to be prevented at all costs.
Independence Day: See Jan. 6.
Jan. 6: (noun) A day when some beautiful, beloved people took a nice, uneventful tour of the U.S. Capitol.
King Jr., Martin Luther: (figure) A man who, as far as we can discern, uttered only one famous quotation ever and it was about how actually anytime you tried to suggest that people were being treated differently based on skin color you were the real racist. Sample sentence: “Dr. King would be enraged at the existence of Black History Month.”
Liberty: (noun) My freedom to choose what you can read (see Moms for Liberty).
Moms for Liberty: (noun) Censors, but the good kind.
Nature: (noun) Something it is okay to boil, probably. Like soup.
Orca: (noun) Enemy of the state, vessels.
Orwellian: (adjective) When people are mad about a book written by Josh Hawley or another Republican, not when people try to erase slavery from history.
Pregnant (adjective): The state of being a vessel containing a Future Citizen; do not say “pregnant person”; no one who is a real person can get pregnant.
Queer: (entry not found)
Refugee: (noun) Someone who should have stayed put and waited for help to come.
Slavery: (noun) We didn’t invent it, or it wasn’t that bad, or it was a free job training program.
Supreme Court: (noun) Wonderful group of mostly men without whom no journey by private plane or yacht is complete.
Trans: (entry not found)
United States: (noun) Perfect place, no notes.
Unfree: (adjective) The best way for thought and people to be.
By Alexandra Petri, The Washington Post
Well, it’s a week with a Thursday in it, and Florida is, once again, revising its educational standards in alarming ways. Not content with removing books from shelves, or demanding that the College Board water down its AP African American studies curriculum, the state’s newest history standards include lessons suggesting that enslaved people “developed skills” for “personal benefit.” This trend appears likely to continue. What follows is a preview of the latest edition of the dictionary to be approved in Florida.
Aah: (exclamation) Normal thing to say when you enter the water at the beach, which is over 100 degrees.
Abolitionists: (noun) Some people in the 19th century who were inexplicably upset about a wonderful free surprise job training program. Today they want to end prisons for equally unclear reasons.
Abortion: (noun) Something that male state legislators (the foremost experts on this subject) believe no one ever wants under any circumstances, probably; decision that people beg the state to make for them and about which doctors beg for as little involvement as possible.
American history: (noun) A branch of learning that concerns a ceaseless parade of triumphs and contains nothing to feel bad about.
Barbie: (noun) Feminist demon enemy of the state.
Biden, Joe: (figure) Illegitimate president.
Black history: (entry not found)
Blacksmith: (noun) A great job and one that enslaved people might have had. Example sentence from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R): “They’re probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.”
Book ban: (noun) Effective way of making sure people never have certain sorts of ideas.
Censorship: (noun) When other people get mad about something you’ve said. Not to be confused with when you remove books from libraries or the state tells colleges what can and can’t be said in classrooms (both fine).
Child: (noun) Useful laborer with tiny hands; alternatively, someone whose reading cannot be censored enough.
Christian nationalism: (noun) Certainly constitutional; probably what the Founding Fathers would have preferred!
Classified: (adjective) The government’s way of saying a paper is especially interesting and you ought to have it in your house.
Climate change: (noun) Conspiracy by scientists to change all the thermometers, fill the air with smoke and then blame us.
Cocaine: (noun) A substance discovered in the White House; the only fit subject for news cycles.
Constitution: (noun) A document that can be interpreted only by Trump-appointed and/or Federalist Society judges. If the Constitution appears to prohibit something that you want to do, take the judge on a boat and try again.
Coral: (noun) Superfluous refuge for fish, others who have failed to adapt to life on land.
DeSantis, Ron: (figure) Governor who represents the ideal human being. Pronunciation varies.
Disney: (noun) A corporation, but not the good kind.
DOJ: (noun) Schrodinger’s legal entity that is both good and evil simultaneously, used for investigating legitimate country-shaking crimes (Hunter Biden possessing a firearm) and conducting illegal raids (Donald Trump kindly opening his home to some classified documents).
Election: (noun) Binding if Republicans win; otherwise, needs help from election officials who will figure out where the fraud was that prevented the election from reflecting the will of the people (that Republicans win).
Elector: (noun) Someone Mike Pence should or should not have accepted, depending.
Emancipation Proclamation: (noun) Classic example of government overreach.
Firearm: (noun) Wonderful, beautiful object that every person ought to have six of, except Hunter Biden.
Florida: God’s paradise on Earth; sometimes Ohio; see “The Courage to Be Free”! All parts of the country at once. Real estate here will only get more valuable.
FOX: News.
Free speech: (noun) When you shut up and I talk.
Gun violence: (noun) Simple, unalterable fact of life, like death but unlike taxes.
Immigration: (noun) When someone leaves their country of origin to seek a better life elsewhere; huge insult to the receiving country, to be prevented at all costs.
Independence Day: See Jan. 6.
Jan. 6: (noun) A day when some beautiful, beloved people took a nice, uneventful tour of the U.S. Capitol.
King Jr., Martin Luther: (figure) A man who, as far as we can discern, uttered only one famous quotation ever and it was about how actually anytime you tried to suggest that people were being treated differently based on skin color you were the real racist. Sample sentence: “Dr. King would be enraged at the existence of Black History Month.”
Liberty: (noun) My freedom to choose what you can read (see Moms for Liberty).
Moms for Liberty: (noun) Censors, but the good kind.
Nature: (noun) Something it is okay to boil, probably. Like soup.
Orca: (noun) Enemy of the state, vessels.
Orwellian: (adjective) When people are mad about a book written by Josh Hawley or another Republican, not when people try to erase slavery from history.
Pregnant (adjective): The state of being a vessel containing a Future Citizen; do not say “pregnant person”; no one who is a real person can get pregnant.
Queer: (entry not found)
Refugee: (noun) Someone who should have stayed put and waited for help to come.
Slavery: (noun) We didn’t invent it, or it wasn’t that bad, or it was a free job training program.
Supreme Court: (noun) Wonderful group of mostly men without whom no journey by private plane or yacht is complete.
Trans: (entry not found)
United States: (noun) Perfect place, no notes.
Unfree: (adjective) The best way for thought and people to be.
NEW INDICTMENT PROVES TRUMP NEVER LEARNED THE FIRST LESSON OF WATERGATE
By Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post
If the allegations in the latest indictment of Donald Trump hold up, the former president is a common criminal — and an uncommonly stupid one.
Everyone knows, as the Watergate scandal drove home: The coverup is always worse than the crime. Everyone, that is, but Trump.
According to the superseding indictment handed up late Thursday, even after Trump knew the FBI was onto his improper retention of classified information, and even after he knew they were seeking security camera footage from the Mar-a-Lago storage areas where the material was kept — in other words, when any reasonably adept criminal would have known to stop digging holes — Trump made matters infinitely worse.
The alleged conduct — yes, even after all these years of watching Trump flagrantly flout norms — is nothing short of jaw-dropping: Trump allegedly conspired with others to destroy evidence.
As set out in the indictment’s relentlessly damning timeline, Trump enlisted his personal aide, Waltine Nauta, and a Mar-a-Lago worker, Carlos De Oliveira, in a conspiracy to delete the subpoenaed footage.
Consider: According to the indictment, on June 22, 2022, the Justice Department emailed to a Trump lawyer a draft grand jury subpoena for security camera footage. The next day, the former president called De Oliveira — who has reportedly worked for Trump for almost two decades -- “and they spoke for approximately 24 minutes.” Hard to imagine what that might have been about.
After that, the pace picked up. Nauta claiming a “family emergency,” changed plans to accompany Trump to Illinois and made a secret trip to Florida, where he met up with De Oliveira. On June 27, 2022, De Oliveira met with another Trump employee, and, after saying the conversation should “remain between the two of them,” asked how many days the server retained video footage — and advised him that “the boss” wanted the server deleted.
“Trump Employee 4 responded that he would not know how to do that, and that he did not believe that he would have the rights to do that,” the indictment relates. De Oliveira “then insisted to TRUMP Employee 4 that ‘the boss’ wanted the server deleted and asked, ‘what are we going to do?’”
And then: “At 3:55 p.m., TRUMP called DE OLIVEIRA and they spoke for approximately three and a half minutes.”
That isn’t all. On August 26, 2022, two weeks after the FBI seized classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, Nauta called another Trump employee “and said words to the effect of, ‘someone just wants to make sure Carlos is good.’” The employee reassured Nauta that De Oliveira “would not do anything to affect his relationship” with Trump. “That same day,” the indictment states, Trump called De Oliveira and assured him that Trump would get him a lawyer.
Even before this new evidence, the allegations of obstruction lodged against Trump were already damning. “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?” Trump allegedly asked his lawyer — after the documents were subpoenaed. He tried to get the lawyer to deep-six any problematic documents. As the lawyer recalled, “He made a funny motion as though — well okay why don’t you take them with you to your hotel room and if there’s anything really bad in there, like, you know, pluck it out.”
But this — the alleged conspiracy to destroy the security footage — is the epitome of obstruction, stunning in its brazenness.
There is an argument, depressing but not unreasonable, that none of this matters, legally or in the court of public opinion. The unlawful retention of documents and obstruction case against Trump appeared strong when they were first made public more than a month ago. And the new Mar-a-Lago charges are unrelated to the impending indictment of Trump for his efforts to undo the results of the 2020 election.
Those who insist on seeing Trump as the beleaguered victim of partisan prosecutors will not be moved by the fact of his 24-minute chat with a longtime retainer. The rest of us have long understood who he is. These new charges simply add to the pile.
But drip by drip, count by count, obstructive act by obstructive act, the seriousness of this situation comes into focus, the stakes of the next election become clearer. Trump in office was willing to do whatever it took to remain in power. Trump out of office was willing to do whatever it took to keep “my boxes.” One demonstration of narcissistic entitlement bolsters the other and deepens the urgency of holding this man to account, once and for all, and for all that he has done.
By Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post
If the allegations in the latest indictment of Donald Trump hold up, the former president is a common criminal — and an uncommonly stupid one.
Everyone knows, as the Watergate scandal drove home: The coverup is always worse than the crime. Everyone, that is, but Trump.
According to the superseding indictment handed up late Thursday, even after Trump knew the FBI was onto his improper retention of classified information, and even after he knew they were seeking security camera footage from the Mar-a-Lago storage areas where the material was kept — in other words, when any reasonably adept criminal would have known to stop digging holes — Trump made matters infinitely worse.
The alleged conduct — yes, even after all these years of watching Trump flagrantly flout norms — is nothing short of jaw-dropping: Trump allegedly conspired with others to destroy evidence.
As set out in the indictment’s relentlessly damning timeline, Trump enlisted his personal aide, Waltine Nauta, and a Mar-a-Lago worker, Carlos De Oliveira, in a conspiracy to delete the subpoenaed footage.
Consider: According to the indictment, on June 22, 2022, the Justice Department emailed to a Trump lawyer a draft grand jury subpoena for security camera footage. The next day, the former president called De Oliveira — who has reportedly worked for Trump for almost two decades -- “and they spoke for approximately 24 minutes.” Hard to imagine what that might have been about.
After that, the pace picked up. Nauta claiming a “family emergency,” changed plans to accompany Trump to Illinois and made a secret trip to Florida, where he met up with De Oliveira. On June 27, 2022, De Oliveira met with another Trump employee, and, after saying the conversation should “remain between the two of them,” asked how many days the server retained video footage — and advised him that “the boss” wanted the server deleted.
“Trump Employee 4 responded that he would not know how to do that, and that he did not believe that he would have the rights to do that,” the indictment relates. De Oliveira “then insisted to TRUMP Employee 4 that ‘the boss’ wanted the server deleted and asked, ‘what are we going to do?’”
And then: “At 3:55 p.m., TRUMP called DE OLIVEIRA and they spoke for approximately three and a half minutes.”
That isn’t all. On August 26, 2022, two weeks after the FBI seized classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, Nauta called another Trump employee “and said words to the effect of, ‘someone just wants to make sure Carlos is good.’” The employee reassured Nauta that De Oliveira “would not do anything to affect his relationship” with Trump. “That same day,” the indictment states, Trump called De Oliveira and assured him that Trump would get him a lawyer.
Even before this new evidence, the allegations of obstruction lodged against Trump were already damning. “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?” Trump allegedly asked his lawyer — after the documents were subpoenaed. He tried to get the lawyer to deep-six any problematic documents. As the lawyer recalled, “He made a funny motion as though — well okay why don’t you take them with you to your hotel room and if there’s anything really bad in there, like, you know, pluck it out.”
But this — the alleged conspiracy to destroy the security footage — is the epitome of obstruction, stunning in its brazenness.
There is an argument, depressing but not unreasonable, that none of this matters, legally or in the court of public opinion. The unlawful retention of documents and obstruction case against Trump appeared strong when they were first made public more than a month ago. And the new Mar-a-Lago charges are unrelated to the impending indictment of Trump for his efforts to undo the results of the 2020 election.
Those who insist on seeing Trump as the beleaguered victim of partisan prosecutors will not be moved by the fact of his 24-minute chat with a longtime retainer. The rest of us have long understood who he is. These new charges simply add to the pile.
But drip by drip, count by count, obstructive act by obstructive act, the seriousness of this situation comes into focus, the stakes of the next election become clearer. Trump in office was willing to do whatever it took to remain in power. Trump out of office was willing to do whatever it took to keep “my boxes.” One demonstration of narcissistic entitlement bolsters the other and deepens the urgency of holding this man to account, once and for all, and for all that he has done.
A YEAR AFTER DOBBS, HOUSE GOP PROPOSES TAKING FOOD FROM HUNGRY BABIES
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
A year ago, when the Supreme Court struck down the federal right to abortion access, Republican politicians pledged to support women facing unplanned pregnancies.
Today? Republican lawmakers are literally trying to take food away from disadvantaged new moms and their children.
They’re doing so via the annual House appropriations agricultural bill, specifically the GOP-written House version that was slated for a vote this week. This legislation covers a lot of ground, including rural development grants and loans for farmers. But among its most critical, least appreciated, highest return-on-investment programs is one known as WIC (officially, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children).
WIC was created in the early 1970s to serve low-income pregnant women, new moms, babies and young children at nutritional risk. Unlike the better-known food stamp program — which allows beneficiaries to spend their assistance on almost any groceries they like — WIC targets the specific nutritional requirements of prenatal and postpartum mothers and their children up to age 5, based on legally required, regular scientific reviews of their dietary needs.
The program provides modest but evidence-based food benefits (for example, up to a dozen eggs per month per toddler). It also offers screening and referrals to other health and social services, such as breastfeeding counseling and substance-abuse programs. You know, basic stuff you’d expect a rich country to provide for low-income babies and struggling new moms.
Historically, we’ve risen to the occasion. There’s been strong bipartisan support for WIC for decades. Every year since 1997, Congress has committed to fully funding WIC — a fancy way of saying we’ve ensured there would be enough money to serve everyone eligible who applied.
Government officials have stuck to this commitment regardless of which party controlled the White House or either chamber of Congress, “even under Republican trifectas,” according to Brookings Institution scholar Robert Greenstein. In fact, even in years in which more funding turned out to be needed than was budgeted — because a recession increased the number of families eligible or food prices unexpectedly spiked — Congress and the Agriculture Department have made sure money was available to serve anyone eligible who applied, Greenstein said.
Now that commitment might be ending.
The GOP-controlled House’s fiscal 2024 agricultural bill would either eliminate or reduce benefits for 5.3 million kids and pregnant, postpartum and breastfeeding adults, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates.
Of that total, roughly 4.6 million participants would have their benefits cut, primarily because of rollbacks of a fruit and vegetable benefit that had been expanded in 2021 based on recommendations of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. Another 650,000 to 750,000 eligible people would likely be turned away from the program entirely because of funding shortfalls.
The House’s plan to turn away or waitlist these vulnerable families, for the first time in a quarter-century, would be an astonishing break in precedent. Especially so given the timing.
The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which was almost uniformly celebrated by Republican lawmakers (including the House agricultural bill’s sponsor, Maryland Rep. Andy Harris), caused thousands of women to have babies they weren’t prepared to support. We also recently saw nationwide infant-formula shortages. Republican lawmakers (including Harris) treated this crisis as political fodder, as desperate families scoured the country to feed their newborns.
And of course we’re now roughly two years into a run of elevated inflation. This has been another crisis Republicans have mined for political advantage — and pledged to remedy — while Americans struggled to put food on the table.
As is always true, voters should pay more attention to what politicians do than to what they say.
To be clear, GOP-proposed cuts to WIC don’t seem motivated by any particular animus toward the program or a desire to hurt poor families. Rather, the party just has other priorities: Republicans have committed to huge cuts to nondefense spending, even bigger cuts than those agreed to in their recent debt limit deal. Adhering to their self-imposed budget constraints, while safeguarding other programs they care more about (border security, etc.), requires slashing safety-net programs.
So, it’s not like the House GOP hates poor babies or postpartum moms. It’s just ... indifferent to them.
There’s a twist of irony in all this, though. If your priority is really fiscal rectitude, WIC is a terrible program to cut.
Available research suggests that every dollar spent on WIC saves much more than a dollar on other government spending programs. That’s because investing in maternal and early childhood nutrition is associated with fewer preterm births, higher birthweights and other improvements in mental and physical development.
Republicans portray their spending cuts as fiscally responsible. In reality, they’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
A year ago, when the Supreme Court struck down the federal right to abortion access, Republican politicians pledged to support women facing unplanned pregnancies.
Today? Republican lawmakers are literally trying to take food away from disadvantaged new moms and their children.
They’re doing so via the annual House appropriations agricultural bill, specifically the GOP-written House version that was slated for a vote this week. This legislation covers a lot of ground, including rural development grants and loans for farmers. But among its most critical, least appreciated, highest return-on-investment programs is one known as WIC (officially, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children).
WIC was created in the early 1970s to serve low-income pregnant women, new moms, babies and young children at nutritional risk. Unlike the better-known food stamp program — which allows beneficiaries to spend their assistance on almost any groceries they like — WIC targets the specific nutritional requirements of prenatal and postpartum mothers and their children up to age 5, based on legally required, regular scientific reviews of their dietary needs.
The program provides modest but evidence-based food benefits (for example, up to a dozen eggs per month per toddler). It also offers screening and referrals to other health and social services, such as breastfeeding counseling and substance-abuse programs. You know, basic stuff you’d expect a rich country to provide for low-income babies and struggling new moms.
Historically, we’ve risen to the occasion. There’s been strong bipartisan support for WIC for decades. Every year since 1997, Congress has committed to fully funding WIC — a fancy way of saying we’ve ensured there would be enough money to serve everyone eligible who applied.
Government officials have stuck to this commitment regardless of which party controlled the White House or either chamber of Congress, “even under Republican trifectas,” according to Brookings Institution scholar Robert Greenstein. In fact, even in years in which more funding turned out to be needed than was budgeted — because a recession increased the number of families eligible or food prices unexpectedly spiked — Congress and the Agriculture Department have made sure money was available to serve anyone eligible who applied, Greenstein said.
Now that commitment might be ending.
The GOP-controlled House’s fiscal 2024 agricultural bill would either eliminate or reduce benefits for 5.3 million kids and pregnant, postpartum and breastfeeding adults, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates.
Of that total, roughly 4.6 million participants would have their benefits cut, primarily because of rollbacks of a fruit and vegetable benefit that had been expanded in 2021 based on recommendations of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. Another 650,000 to 750,000 eligible people would likely be turned away from the program entirely because of funding shortfalls.
The House’s plan to turn away or waitlist these vulnerable families, for the first time in a quarter-century, would be an astonishing break in precedent. Especially so given the timing.
The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which was almost uniformly celebrated by Republican lawmakers (including the House agricultural bill’s sponsor, Maryland Rep. Andy Harris), caused thousands of women to have babies they weren’t prepared to support. We also recently saw nationwide infant-formula shortages. Republican lawmakers (including Harris) treated this crisis as political fodder, as desperate families scoured the country to feed their newborns.
And of course we’re now roughly two years into a run of elevated inflation. This has been another crisis Republicans have mined for political advantage — and pledged to remedy — while Americans struggled to put food on the table.
As is always true, voters should pay more attention to what politicians do than to what they say.
To be clear, GOP-proposed cuts to WIC don’t seem motivated by any particular animus toward the program or a desire to hurt poor families. Rather, the party just has other priorities: Republicans have committed to huge cuts to nondefense spending, even bigger cuts than those agreed to in their recent debt limit deal. Adhering to their self-imposed budget constraints, while safeguarding other programs they care more about (border security, etc.), requires slashing safety-net programs.
So, it’s not like the House GOP hates poor babies or postpartum moms. It’s just ... indifferent to them.
There’s a twist of irony in all this, though. If your priority is really fiscal rectitude, WIC is a terrible program to cut.
Available research suggests that every dollar spent on WIC saves much more than a dollar on other government spending programs. That’s because investing in maternal and early childhood nutrition is associated with fewer preterm births, higher birthweights and other improvements in mental and physical development.
Republicans portray their spending cuts as fiscally responsible. In reality, they’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
A REPUBLICAN NIGHTMARE SEEMS ABOUT TO BECOME REAL
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
For years now, some Republicans — and, to a large extent, the mainstream media — have harbored the notion that the GOP eventually would come to its senses. Surely, it would eventually dump the unhinged, disloyal, undemocratic and unfit Donald Trump, right?
But if Republicans did not wake from their slumber after the first impeachment or the second, after a jury decided he had lied about sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll, after an indictment accusing him of obstruction and violating the Espionage Act (set out in shocking detail), and after replete evidence of his alleged role in an attempted coup, it is hard to imagine what would bring them to their senses. There is scant evidence that Trump would flee the race to focus on his legal defense; to the contrary, the worse his legal position, the more desperate he becomes to regain power.
Elected Republicans and right-wing media figures have contributed to the predicament as they have minimized, rationalized and denied jaw-dropping allegations against Trump. They have made it easy for Republicans to cling to Trump. Listen, stealing and bandying about top-secret documents isn’t so bad, is it? And, after all, he didn’t do all that much on Jan. 6, 2021, did he?
This is what results when a party, its pundit class and millions of followers cut themselves off from reality, fall into a world of paranoid conspiracies and refuse to simply acknowledge they were very, very wrong to side with him.
And, frankly, the mainstream media has made it that much easier for cowardly Republicans to stick with Trump. Rather than challenge Republicans at every turn to defend their embrace of Trump or even to examine seriously the historical origins of toxic racist, xenophobic and delusional beliefs, the mainstream media largely sticks to horserace politics. (How disagreeable to grapple with the deep pathology in American politics and abandon false equivalence between the parties.)
Before going down the road to political doom, Republicans should understand how refusing to jettison Trump as their standard-bearer would play out. The so-called E. Jean Carroll II trial is scheduled for January. The Manhattan criminal trial is set for March, but even a conviction there might not move the GOP primary electorate. (Trivial! Set up!) The Mar-a-Lago documents case won’t begin before May. (All are subject to delay.) Meanwhile, the GOP presidential primary will have gotten underway in January and will run through March. Republicans might crown a presumptive winner by early May (as happened in 2016), even before the Mar-a-Lago trial concludes.
Without verdicts in the Jan. 6 cases and with appeals pending in any others (e.g., New York, Florida), the chances that a Republican National Convention in July filled with Trump-pledged delegates experiencing a spasm of buyer’s remorse (and overturning the primary winner) are slight. (Think of that being as probable as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy growing a spine or the party rediscovering the charms of moderate governors).
The GOP could very well be saddled with a nominee who has been indicted multiple times and perhaps convicted more than once. They would be betting that millions of voters who didn’t vote for him last time would vote for an indicted or possibly convicted nominee who spends most of his time railing about his plight.
And, keep in mind, even without the legal baggage, Trump would face an uphill climb to match his 2016 results. Democratic pollster Celinda Lake and documentary filmmaker Mac Heller recently wrote for The Post that “between Trump’s election in 2016 and the 2024 election, the number of Gen Z (born in the late 1990s and early 2010s) voters will have advanced by a net 52 million against older people.” Put differently, the 2024 electorate will be younger and more Democratic — by a lot — than the electorate that chose Trump in 2016. The GOP will be pleading with a less Trump-friendly electorate to ignore his alleged crime spree and reelect the Jan. 6 instigator.
If it seems fantastical, even unimaginable, that a party would put itself in such a position, remember this is a party that obsesses over Hunter Biden, elevates to prominence Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and still won’t admit that Joe Biden won the White House in 2020. Maybe it’s time to acknowledge that, barring an epiphany, the GOP’s self-delusion is risking a political wipeout that will take out more than its disastrous nominee. And it won’t be able to claim it wasn’t warned.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
For years now, some Republicans — and, to a large extent, the mainstream media — have harbored the notion that the GOP eventually would come to its senses. Surely, it would eventually dump the unhinged, disloyal, undemocratic and unfit Donald Trump, right?
But if Republicans did not wake from their slumber after the first impeachment or the second, after a jury decided he had lied about sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll, after an indictment accusing him of obstruction and violating the Espionage Act (set out in shocking detail), and after replete evidence of his alleged role in an attempted coup, it is hard to imagine what would bring them to their senses. There is scant evidence that Trump would flee the race to focus on his legal defense; to the contrary, the worse his legal position, the more desperate he becomes to regain power.
Elected Republicans and right-wing media figures have contributed to the predicament as they have minimized, rationalized and denied jaw-dropping allegations against Trump. They have made it easy for Republicans to cling to Trump. Listen, stealing and bandying about top-secret documents isn’t so bad, is it? And, after all, he didn’t do all that much on Jan. 6, 2021, did he?
This is what results when a party, its pundit class and millions of followers cut themselves off from reality, fall into a world of paranoid conspiracies and refuse to simply acknowledge they were very, very wrong to side with him.
And, frankly, the mainstream media has made it that much easier for cowardly Republicans to stick with Trump. Rather than challenge Republicans at every turn to defend their embrace of Trump or even to examine seriously the historical origins of toxic racist, xenophobic and delusional beliefs, the mainstream media largely sticks to horserace politics. (How disagreeable to grapple with the deep pathology in American politics and abandon false equivalence between the parties.)
Before going down the road to political doom, Republicans should understand how refusing to jettison Trump as their standard-bearer would play out. The so-called E. Jean Carroll II trial is scheduled for January. The Manhattan criminal trial is set for March, but even a conviction there might not move the GOP primary electorate. (Trivial! Set up!) The Mar-a-Lago documents case won’t begin before May. (All are subject to delay.) Meanwhile, the GOP presidential primary will have gotten underway in January and will run through March. Republicans might crown a presumptive winner by early May (as happened in 2016), even before the Mar-a-Lago trial concludes.
Without verdicts in the Jan. 6 cases and with appeals pending in any others (e.g., New York, Florida), the chances that a Republican National Convention in July filled with Trump-pledged delegates experiencing a spasm of buyer’s remorse (and overturning the primary winner) are slight. (Think of that being as probable as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy growing a spine or the party rediscovering the charms of moderate governors).
The GOP could very well be saddled with a nominee who has been indicted multiple times and perhaps convicted more than once. They would be betting that millions of voters who didn’t vote for him last time would vote for an indicted or possibly convicted nominee who spends most of his time railing about his plight.
And, keep in mind, even without the legal baggage, Trump would face an uphill climb to match his 2016 results. Democratic pollster Celinda Lake and documentary filmmaker Mac Heller recently wrote for The Post that “between Trump’s election in 2016 and the 2024 election, the number of Gen Z (born in the late 1990s and early 2010s) voters will have advanced by a net 52 million against older people.” Put differently, the 2024 electorate will be younger and more Democratic — by a lot — than the electorate that chose Trump in 2016. The GOP will be pleading with a less Trump-friendly electorate to ignore his alleged crime spree and reelect the Jan. 6 instigator.
If it seems fantastical, even unimaginable, that a party would put itself in such a position, remember this is a party that obsesses over Hunter Biden, elevates to prominence Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and still won’t admit that Joe Biden won the White House in 2020. Maybe it’s time to acknowledge that, barring an epiphany, the GOP’s self-delusion is risking a political wipeout that will take out more than its disastrous nominee. And it won’t be able to claim it wasn’t warned.
THE MOMENT OF TRUTH FOR OUR LIAR IN CHIEF
By Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
WASHINGTON — A man is running to run the government he tried to overthrow while he was running it, even as he is running to stay ahead of the law.
That sounds loony, except in the topsy-turvy world of Donald Trump, where it has a grotesque logic.
The question now is: Has Trump finally run out of time, thanks to Jack Smith, who runs marathons as an Ironman triathlete? Are those ever-loving walls really closing in this time?
Or is Smith Muellering it?
We were expecting an epic clash when Robert Mueller was appointed in 2017 as a special counsel to head the investigation into ties between Trump’s campaign and Russia and his potential obstruction of justice. It was the flamboyant flimflam man vs. the buttoned-down, buttoned-up boy scout.
Mueller, who had been a decorated Marine in Vietnam, was such a straight arrow that he never even deviated to wear a blue shirt when he ran the F.B.I.
Amid the Trump administration chaos, Mueller ran a disciplined, airtight operation as special counsel, assembling a dream team of legal talent. But regarding obstruction of justice, the final report was flaccid, waffling, legalistic.
Now, Mr. Smith goes to Washington. (That classic movie remembers a time when politicians got ashamed when they were caught doing wrong. How quaint.)
This special counsel is another straight arrow trying to deal with a slippery switchblade: In a masterpiece of projection, Trump has been denouncing Smith as a “deranged prosecutor” and “a nasty, horrible human being.” Trump has been zigzagging his whole life and now, unbelievably, he’s trying to zigzag back into the White House, seemingly intent on burning down the federal government and exacting revenge on virtually everyone.
So it will be interesting to see what the top lawyer with the severe expression makes of the bombastic dissembler. Smith seems like a no-nonsense dude who works at his desk through lunch from Subway while Trump is, of course, all nonsense, all the time.
Smith has a herculean task before him. He must present a persuasive narrative that Trump and his henchmen and women (yes, you, Ginni Thomas) were determined to pull off a coup.
His letter telling Trump he’s a target of the Jan. 6 investigation reportedly does not mention sedition or insurrection, which leaves people wondering exactly what Trump will be charged with.
Of all the legal troubles Trump faces, this is the case that makes us breathe, “Finally,” as Susan Glasser put it in The New Yorker. It is, as she wrote, the heart of the matter.
The Times reported that the letter referred to three criminal statutes: conspiracy to defraud the government; obstruction of an official proceeding; and — in a surprise move — a section of the U.S. code that makes it a crime to “conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person” in the “free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.” Initially, the story explained, that last statute was a tool to pursue the Ku Klux Klan and others who engaged in terrorism after the Civil War; more recently it has been used to prosecute cases of voting fraud conspiracies.
On an Iowa radio show on Tuesday, Trump warned it would be “very dangerous” if Smith jailed him, since his supporters have “much more passion than they had in 2020.”
A May trial date has already been set in Smith’s case against Trump for retaining classified documents — despite Trump’s effort to punt it past the election. And Smith should have an ironclad case on Trump defrauding America because defrauding is what he has been doing since the cradle — lying, cheating and lining his pockets, making suckers of nearly everyone while wriggling out of trouble.
Meanwhile, Ron DeSantis, Trump’s closest Republican challenger, defended Trump on Russell Brand’s podcast Friday, dismissing the idea that there was an overt effort to upend the 2020 election.
“The idea that this was a plan to somehow overthrow the government of the United States is not true,” DeSantis said, “and it’s something that the media had spun up just to try to basically get as much mileage out of it and use it for partisan and political aims.”
DeSantis seems almost as delusional as Trump when he denies what we saw before our eyes in the weeks after the election.
Just ask the Georgia officials who were pressured by Trump to “find 11,780 votes” or the police officers who were injured on Jan. 6. Remember the fake electors in Michigan and Georgia, among other places, and the relentless pressure on Mike Pence to invalidate the election results?
Trump ultimately might not be charged with staging an insurrection or sedition. And that would be a shame. For the first time, a president who lost an election nakedly attempted to hold onto power and override the votes of millions of Americans.
If that isn’t sedition, it’s hard to figure what is.
By Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
WASHINGTON — A man is running to run the government he tried to overthrow while he was running it, even as he is running to stay ahead of the law.
That sounds loony, except in the topsy-turvy world of Donald Trump, where it has a grotesque logic.
The question now is: Has Trump finally run out of time, thanks to Jack Smith, who runs marathons as an Ironman triathlete? Are those ever-loving walls really closing in this time?
Or is Smith Muellering it?
We were expecting an epic clash when Robert Mueller was appointed in 2017 as a special counsel to head the investigation into ties between Trump’s campaign and Russia and his potential obstruction of justice. It was the flamboyant flimflam man vs. the buttoned-down, buttoned-up boy scout.
Mueller, who had been a decorated Marine in Vietnam, was such a straight arrow that he never even deviated to wear a blue shirt when he ran the F.B.I.
Amid the Trump administration chaos, Mueller ran a disciplined, airtight operation as special counsel, assembling a dream team of legal talent. But regarding obstruction of justice, the final report was flaccid, waffling, legalistic.
Now, Mr. Smith goes to Washington. (That classic movie remembers a time when politicians got ashamed when they were caught doing wrong. How quaint.)
This special counsel is another straight arrow trying to deal with a slippery switchblade: In a masterpiece of projection, Trump has been denouncing Smith as a “deranged prosecutor” and “a nasty, horrible human being.” Trump has been zigzagging his whole life and now, unbelievably, he’s trying to zigzag back into the White House, seemingly intent on burning down the federal government and exacting revenge on virtually everyone.
So it will be interesting to see what the top lawyer with the severe expression makes of the bombastic dissembler. Smith seems like a no-nonsense dude who works at his desk through lunch from Subway while Trump is, of course, all nonsense, all the time.
Smith has a herculean task before him. He must present a persuasive narrative that Trump and his henchmen and women (yes, you, Ginni Thomas) were determined to pull off a coup.
His letter telling Trump he’s a target of the Jan. 6 investigation reportedly does not mention sedition or insurrection, which leaves people wondering exactly what Trump will be charged with.
Of all the legal troubles Trump faces, this is the case that makes us breathe, “Finally,” as Susan Glasser put it in The New Yorker. It is, as she wrote, the heart of the matter.
The Times reported that the letter referred to three criminal statutes: conspiracy to defraud the government; obstruction of an official proceeding; and — in a surprise move — a section of the U.S. code that makes it a crime to “conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person” in the “free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.” Initially, the story explained, that last statute was a tool to pursue the Ku Klux Klan and others who engaged in terrorism after the Civil War; more recently it has been used to prosecute cases of voting fraud conspiracies.
On an Iowa radio show on Tuesday, Trump warned it would be “very dangerous” if Smith jailed him, since his supporters have “much more passion than they had in 2020.”
A May trial date has already been set in Smith’s case against Trump for retaining classified documents — despite Trump’s effort to punt it past the election. And Smith should have an ironclad case on Trump defrauding America because defrauding is what he has been doing since the cradle — lying, cheating and lining his pockets, making suckers of nearly everyone while wriggling out of trouble.
Meanwhile, Ron DeSantis, Trump’s closest Republican challenger, defended Trump on Russell Brand’s podcast Friday, dismissing the idea that there was an overt effort to upend the 2020 election.
“The idea that this was a plan to somehow overthrow the government of the United States is not true,” DeSantis said, “and it’s something that the media had spun up just to try to basically get as much mileage out of it and use it for partisan and political aims.”
DeSantis seems almost as delusional as Trump when he denies what we saw before our eyes in the weeks after the election.
Just ask the Georgia officials who were pressured by Trump to “find 11,780 votes” or the police officers who were injured on Jan. 6. Remember the fake electors in Michigan and Georgia, among other places, and the relentless pressure on Mike Pence to invalidate the election results?
Trump ultimately might not be charged with staging an insurrection or sedition. And that would be a shame. For the first time, a president who lost an election nakedly attempted to hold onto power and override the votes of millions of Americans.
If that isn’t sedition, it’s hard to figure what is.
TRUMP HAS A PLAN TO CONSOLIDATE POWER IN A SECOND TERM. IT JUST MIGHT WORK.
By Paul Waldman, The Washington Post
From the moment he entered the White House in 2017, Donald Trump was at war with the government he led; as his close adviser Stephen K. Bannon said at the time, the administration’s goal was the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” It was a war Trump mostly lost. But as he campaigns for another term, his loyalists are planning to refight that war, and win.
There are reasons to think they could fail again. Yet there is also cause to be deeply concerned about this aspect of a potential Trump presidency in the future.
As we say in Washington, personnel is policy. And the personnel of a second Trump executive branch would be very different from the first, both in who its members would be and in their plans for remaking the federal government.
The “administrative state” is composed of all the people and agencies who carry out policy, enforce laws and provide services, much of it designed to be somewhat insulated from political influence. That independence has long rankled right-wing thinkers, who have held that the Constitution gives the president almost unfettered authority over the executive branch. For decades — though mostly when a Republican is in the White House — they have sought to expand the power of the president.
This effort is now focused on expanding Trump’s power in a second term. Working through established conservative organizations and newer Trump-centric ones such as the America First Policy Institute, Trump’s associates are developing a plan to concentrate federal authority in his hands. It involves firing large swaths of the civil service and staffing those positions with loyalists, seizing authority from independent agencies and refusing to spend money appropriated by Congress.
The more sweeping their ambitions, the more likely they are to fall short at least some of the time, because they are restrained by either the courts or their own incompetence, something that is never in short supply where Trump is concerned. But many of their failures the last time around came when they were scrambling on the fly to carry out some harebrained scheme (such as stealing an election). This time, they’re planning carefully.
The Heritage Foundation’s massive plan for the next GOP administration states, “Nothing is more important than deconstructing the centralized administrative state.” And as the organizer of Heritage’s effort to assemble lists of potential administration appointments told the Economist, devotion to Trump is nonnegotiable: If you have “fought against the Trump administration,” including by blaming him for the insurrection, that will get you struck from the list.
This effort is meant to avoid a repeat of the personnel chaos of the first Trump administration. Unlike politicians who rise through the ranks to the presidency, Trump came to Washington without a network of aides and associates ready to move into the executive branch. So he cobbled together an administration of GOP apparatchiks, inexperienced ideologues and grifters. But often, he was foiled by the occasionally principled people he appointed, who displayed integrity at key moments.
“A lot of Trump’s frustration with what he called the deep state was as much as anything frustration towards his own political appointees,” says Donald Moynihan, a Georgetown University political scientist who studies government administration. “He has solved that problem,” because now he has “thousands of vetted loyalists” ready to staff the executive branch.
The civil service, with its strong job protections and mandate for nonpartisanship, is being targeted for a purge. Two weeks before the 2020 election, Trump signed an executive order called Schedule F, which would have enabled him to convert tens of thousands of civil servants to political appointee status, meaning he could fire them at will and replace them with his own cronies.
It came too late to have an impact, and President Biden rescinded it when he took office. But reviving Schedule F is at the heart of the Trump force’s plan to break the civil service. The president now makes around 4,000 political appointments, already a preposterously large number. Trump’s people believe that with Schedule F, they could increase that number to more than 50,000.
They’re trying to “change the equilibrium of public sector work, possibly for a generation or more,” Moynihan told me, making it difficult to recruit skilled people who want to serve their country in a nonpolitical way.
That could make government both more corrupt and less capable. “This feels like the biggest bomb that’s waiting to go off under the next Republican administration,” Moynihan continued. “And it’s not like they’re doing it in secret. They’re very upfront about what they plan to do.”
Should Trump become president again, he would pursue a standard Republican policy agenda — tax cuts, abortion restrictions, environmental deregulation. But his biggest impact could be a wholesale remaking of government, of a kind not seen since the New Deal — and it could be one of his most lasting and harmful legacies.
By Paul Waldman, The Washington Post
From the moment he entered the White House in 2017, Donald Trump was at war with the government he led; as his close adviser Stephen K. Bannon said at the time, the administration’s goal was the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” It was a war Trump mostly lost. But as he campaigns for another term, his loyalists are planning to refight that war, and win.
There are reasons to think they could fail again. Yet there is also cause to be deeply concerned about this aspect of a potential Trump presidency in the future.
As we say in Washington, personnel is policy. And the personnel of a second Trump executive branch would be very different from the first, both in who its members would be and in their plans for remaking the federal government.
The “administrative state” is composed of all the people and agencies who carry out policy, enforce laws and provide services, much of it designed to be somewhat insulated from political influence. That independence has long rankled right-wing thinkers, who have held that the Constitution gives the president almost unfettered authority over the executive branch. For decades — though mostly when a Republican is in the White House — they have sought to expand the power of the president.
This effort is now focused on expanding Trump’s power in a second term. Working through established conservative organizations and newer Trump-centric ones such as the America First Policy Institute, Trump’s associates are developing a plan to concentrate federal authority in his hands. It involves firing large swaths of the civil service and staffing those positions with loyalists, seizing authority from independent agencies and refusing to spend money appropriated by Congress.
The more sweeping their ambitions, the more likely they are to fall short at least some of the time, because they are restrained by either the courts or their own incompetence, something that is never in short supply where Trump is concerned. But many of their failures the last time around came when they were scrambling on the fly to carry out some harebrained scheme (such as stealing an election). This time, they’re planning carefully.
The Heritage Foundation’s massive plan for the next GOP administration states, “Nothing is more important than deconstructing the centralized administrative state.” And as the organizer of Heritage’s effort to assemble lists of potential administration appointments told the Economist, devotion to Trump is nonnegotiable: If you have “fought against the Trump administration,” including by blaming him for the insurrection, that will get you struck from the list.
This effort is meant to avoid a repeat of the personnel chaos of the first Trump administration. Unlike politicians who rise through the ranks to the presidency, Trump came to Washington without a network of aides and associates ready to move into the executive branch. So he cobbled together an administration of GOP apparatchiks, inexperienced ideologues and grifters. But often, he was foiled by the occasionally principled people he appointed, who displayed integrity at key moments.
“A lot of Trump’s frustration with what he called the deep state was as much as anything frustration towards his own political appointees,” says Donald Moynihan, a Georgetown University political scientist who studies government administration. “He has solved that problem,” because now he has “thousands of vetted loyalists” ready to staff the executive branch.
The civil service, with its strong job protections and mandate for nonpartisanship, is being targeted for a purge. Two weeks before the 2020 election, Trump signed an executive order called Schedule F, which would have enabled him to convert tens of thousands of civil servants to political appointee status, meaning he could fire them at will and replace them with his own cronies.
It came too late to have an impact, and President Biden rescinded it when he took office. But reviving Schedule F is at the heart of the Trump force’s plan to break the civil service. The president now makes around 4,000 political appointments, already a preposterously large number. Trump’s people believe that with Schedule F, they could increase that number to more than 50,000.
They’re trying to “change the equilibrium of public sector work, possibly for a generation or more,” Moynihan told me, making it difficult to recruit skilled people who want to serve their country in a nonpolitical way.
That could make government both more corrupt and less capable. “This feels like the biggest bomb that’s waiting to go off under the next Republican administration,” Moynihan continued. “And it’s not like they’re doing it in secret. They’re very upfront about what they plan to do.”
Should Trump become president again, he would pursue a standard Republican policy agenda — tax cuts, abortion restrictions, environmental deregulation. But his biggest impact could be a wholesale remaking of government, of a kind not seen since the New Deal — and it could be one of his most lasting and harmful legacies.
REPUBLICANS LOB A BOMB OF CYNICISM AT OUR SOLDIERS
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
Why would Republicans want the military to prepare for real wars when fighting culture wars is so much more fun?
In recent years, the GOP has abandoned its commitment to many of the core principles it once stood for (law and order, family values, fiscal responsibility, etc.). Lately, we can add to that list: a strong commitment to U.S. national security.
Consider Republicans’ recent shenanigans surrounding the marquee annual defense legislation, known as the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). This is a must-pass bill that Republican lawmakers have lately been trying to convert into a less-likely-to-pass, more-likely-to-shut-down-the-entire-government bill.
For most of the past six decades, the NDAA has passed Congress with strong bipartisan support. That tradition was ignored last Friday, when the fiscal 2024 defense bill passed the GOP-controlled House overwhelmingly along party lines.
This time around, only four Democrats voted for the measure. To be clear, that’s not because Democratic lawmakers have suddenly become less supportive of our military. It’s because Republicans decided to compromise national security by dragging the Pentagon into unrelated and divisive culture-war issues, which made the final legislation too toxic for Democrats to support.
At the last minute, after the House Armed Services Committee had spent months hashing out a bipartisan deal, House Republicans voted to add poison-pill amendments demanded by far-right lawmakers.
Among these amendments: new limits on abortion access for service members and their families, through language prohibiting reimbursement for travel and transportation costs related to abortion or fertility care.
The bill would also prohibit the military from implementing directives related to climate change. As military leaders appointed by presidents of both parties have observed, climate change represents a serious security threat, as it affects not only U.S. military readiness but also geopolitical unrest abroad, through floods, famine, drought and other contributors to population displacement and conflict.
The GOP bill would gut the military’s diversity and inclusion programs. (Phew, good thing we don’t need diverse personnel in the armed services.) And it includes a litany of anti-LGBTQ+ provisions, including one curbing medical care for transgender troops. Another would limit the flags that employees of the military may display in public places — language designed to ban the Pride flag.
Yet other language would prohibit military-run schools that educate the children of service members from keeping any “radical gender ideology books” on their library shelves.
Hard-right lawmakers demanded that these measures be added to the bill, knowing full well they would cause the bill to lose Democratic votes.
What to make of such cynical behavior? Consider the wise words of a former House minority leader, who once said: “The NDAA was a test for this new majority. It was a test of whether they could put their radicalism aside and work across the aisle to do what was right for the country. … [They] failed.”
The elder statesman who made these observations was Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). He made the comments back in 2019, when Democrats had just retaken the House. McCarthy was upset that the majority had larded up its defense authorization bill with what he considered partisan priorities (e.g., language blocking use of defense funds for President Donald Trump’s border wall). That bill received a party-line vote in the House, too.
Now back in the majority, and serving as House speaker, McCarthy has changed his tune. Today, he argues that a little culture-warring to slow down the defense bill is not only desirable but necessary. Apparently the greatest risk to U.S. national security is not international terrorism, Russian aggression or even Chinese authoritarianism. It’s homegrown woke-ism.
“We don’t want Disneyland to train our military,” McCarthy said Friday.
Given all this, perhaps the best way to summarize GOP priorities these days is merely promotion of cultural grievances and fearmongering. Certainly there have been many policies — so-called bathroom bills, anti-immigrant measures, book bans, anti-drag legislation — playing up the culture wars, particularly at the state level.
But at the federal level, the GOP seems to have another broad objective, too: throwing sand in the gears of government, and sowing government dysfunction wherever possible.
After all, the House bill’s culture-war measures are probably dead on arrival in the Democratic-controlled Senate. Maybe this means that at the other end of this process, legislators will have worked out a more normal, bipartisan, cultural-grievance-free bill. Perhaps more likely, unresolvable conflict over the defense bill will help precipitate a government shutdown, which some Republican lawmakers have openly signaled they want.
Culture wars and chaos: the brand conservatives can get behind.
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
Why would Republicans want the military to prepare for real wars when fighting culture wars is so much more fun?
In recent years, the GOP has abandoned its commitment to many of the core principles it once stood for (law and order, family values, fiscal responsibility, etc.). Lately, we can add to that list: a strong commitment to U.S. national security.
Consider Republicans’ recent shenanigans surrounding the marquee annual defense legislation, known as the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). This is a must-pass bill that Republican lawmakers have lately been trying to convert into a less-likely-to-pass, more-likely-to-shut-down-the-entire-government bill.
For most of the past six decades, the NDAA has passed Congress with strong bipartisan support. That tradition was ignored last Friday, when the fiscal 2024 defense bill passed the GOP-controlled House overwhelmingly along party lines.
This time around, only four Democrats voted for the measure. To be clear, that’s not because Democratic lawmakers have suddenly become less supportive of our military. It’s because Republicans decided to compromise national security by dragging the Pentagon into unrelated and divisive culture-war issues, which made the final legislation too toxic for Democrats to support.
At the last minute, after the House Armed Services Committee had spent months hashing out a bipartisan deal, House Republicans voted to add poison-pill amendments demanded by far-right lawmakers.
Among these amendments: new limits on abortion access for service members and their families, through language prohibiting reimbursement for travel and transportation costs related to abortion or fertility care.
The bill would also prohibit the military from implementing directives related to climate change. As military leaders appointed by presidents of both parties have observed, climate change represents a serious security threat, as it affects not only U.S. military readiness but also geopolitical unrest abroad, through floods, famine, drought and other contributors to population displacement and conflict.
The GOP bill would gut the military’s diversity and inclusion programs. (Phew, good thing we don’t need diverse personnel in the armed services.) And it includes a litany of anti-LGBTQ+ provisions, including one curbing medical care for transgender troops. Another would limit the flags that employees of the military may display in public places — language designed to ban the Pride flag.
Yet other language would prohibit military-run schools that educate the children of service members from keeping any “radical gender ideology books” on their library shelves.
Hard-right lawmakers demanded that these measures be added to the bill, knowing full well they would cause the bill to lose Democratic votes.
What to make of such cynical behavior? Consider the wise words of a former House minority leader, who once said: “The NDAA was a test for this new majority. It was a test of whether they could put their radicalism aside and work across the aisle to do what was right for the country. … [They] failed.”
The elder statesman who made these observations was Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). He made the comments back in 2019, when Democrats had just retaken the House. McCarthy was upset that the majority had larded up its defense authorization bill with what he considered partisan priorities (e.g., language blocking use of defense funds for President Donald Trump’s border wall). That bill received a party-line vote in the House, too.
Now back in the majority, and serving as House speaker, McCarthy has changed his tune. Today, he argues that a little culture-warring to slow down the defense bill is not only desirable but necessary. Apparently the greatest risk to U.S. national security is not international terrorism, Russian aggression or even Chinese authoritarianism. It’s homegrown woke-ism.
“We don’t want Disneyland to train our military,” McCarthy said Friday.
Given all this, perhaps the best way to summarize GOP priorities these days is merely promotion of cultural grievances and fearmongering. Certainly there have been many policies — so-called bathroom bills, anti-immigrant measures, book bans, anti-drag legislation — playing up the culture wars, particularly at the state level.
But at the federal level, the GOP seems to have another broad objective, too: throwing sand in the gears of government, and sowing government dysfunction wherever possible.
After all, the House bill’s culture-war measures are probably dead on arrival in the Democratic-controlled Senate. Maybe this means that at the other end of this process, legislators will have worked out a more normal, bipartisan, cultural-grievance-free bill. Perhaps more likely, unresolvable conflict over the defense bill will help precipitate a government shutdown, which some Republican lawmakers have openly signaled they want.
Culture wars and chaos: the brand conservatives can get behind.
WHY WE SHOULD POLITICIZE THE WEATHER
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
After officially beginning his presidential campaign, Ron DeSantis was asked about climate change. He brushed the issue aside: “I’ve always rejected the politicization of the weather.”
But we absolutely should politicize the weather. In practice, environmental policy probably won’t be a central issue in the 2024 campaign, which will mainly turn on the economy and social issues. Still, we’re living in a time of accelerating climate-related disasters, and the environmental extremism of the Republican Party — it is more hostile to climate action than any other major political party in the advanced world — would, in a more rational political debate, be the biggest election issue of them all.
First, the environmental background: We’re only halfway through 2023, yet we’ve already seen multiple weather events that would have been shocking not long ago. Globally, last month was the hottest June on record. Unprecedented heat waves have been striking one region of the world after another: South Asia and the Middle East experienced a life-threatening heat wave in May; Europe is now going through its second catastrophic heat wave in a short period of time; China is experiencing its highest temperatures on record; and much of the southern United States has been suffering from dangerous levels of heat for weeks, with no end in sight.
Residents of Florida might be tempted to take a cooling dip in the ocean — but ocean temperatures off South Florida have come close to 100 degrees, not much below the temperature in a hot tub.
But extreme weather events have always been with us. Can we prove that climate change caused any particular disaster? Not exactly. But the burgeoning field of “extreme event attribution” comes close. Climate models say that certain kinds of extreme weather events become more likely on a warming planet — for example, what used to be a heat wave we’d experience on average only once every few decades becomes an almost annual occurrence. Event attribution compares the odds of experiencing an extreme event given global warming with the odds that the same event would have happened without climate change.
Incidentally, I’d argue that extreme event attribution gains credibility from the fact that it doesn’t always tell the same story, that sometimes it says that climate change wasn’t the culprit. For example, preliminary analyses suggest that climate change played a limited role in the extreme flooding that recently struck northeastern Italy.
That was, however, the exception that proves the rule. In general, attribution analysis shows that global warming made the disasters of recent years much more likely. We don’t yet have estimates for the latest, still ongoing series of disasters, but it seems safe to say that this global concatenation of extreme weather events would have been virtually impossible without climate change. And this is almost surely just the leading edge of the crisis, a small foretaste of the many disasters to come.
Which brings me back to the “politicization of the weather.” Worrying about the climate crisis shouldn’t be a partisan issue. But it is, at least in this country. As of last year, only 22 percent of Americans who considered themselves to be on the political right considered climate change a major threat; the left-right gap here was far larger than it was in other countries. And only in America do you see things like Texas Republicans actively trying to undermine their own state’s booming renewable energy sector.
The remarkable thing about climate denial is that the arguments haven’t changed at all over the years: Climate change isn’t happening; OK, it’s happening, but it’s not such a bad thing; besides, doing anything about it would be an economic disaster.
And none of these arguments are ever abandoned in the face of evidence. The next time there’s a cold spell somewhere in America, the usual suspects will once again assert that climate change is a hoax. Spectacular technological progress in renewable energy, which now makes the path to greatly reduced emissions look easier than even optimists imagined, hasn’t stopped claims that the costs of the Biden administration’s climate policy will be unsupportable.
So we shouldn’t expect record heat waves around the globe to end assertions that climate change, even if it’s happening, is no big deal. Nor should we expect Republicans to soften their opposition to climate action, no matter what is happening in the world.
What this means is that if the G.O.P. wins control of the White House and Congress next year, it will almost surely try to dismantle the array of green energy subsidies enacted by the Biden administration that experts believe will lead to a major reduction in emissions.
Like it or not, then, the weather is a political issue. And Americans should be aware that it’s one of the most important issues they’ll be voting on next November.
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
After officially beginning his presidential campaign, Ron DeSantis was asked about climate change. He brushed the issue aside: “I’ve always rejected the politicization of the weather.”
But we absolutely should politicize the weather. In practice, environmental policy probably won’t be a central issue in the 2024 campaign, which will mainly turn on the economy and social issues. Still, we’re living in a time of accelerating climate-related disasters, and the environmental extremism of the Republican Party — it is more hostile to climate action than any other major political party in the advanced world — would, in a more rational political debate, be the biggest election issue of them all.
First, the environmental background: We’re only halfway through 2023, yet we’ve already seen multiple weather events that would have been shocking not long ago. Globally, last month was the hottest June on record. Unprecedented heat waves have been striking one region of the world after another: South Asia and the Middle East experienced a life-threatening heat wave in May; Europe is now going through its second catastrophic heat wave in a short period of time; China is experiencing its highest temperatures on record; and much of the southern United States has been suffering from dangerous levels of heat for weeks, with no end in sight.
Residents of Florida might be tempted to take a cooling dip in the ocean — but ocean temperatures off South Florida have come close to 100 degrees, not much below the temperature in a hot tub.
But extreme weather events have always been with us. Can we prove that climate change caused any particular disaster? Not exactly. But the burgeoning field of “extreme event attribution” comes close. Climate models say that certain kinds of extreme weather events become more likely on a warming planet — for example, what used to be a heat wave we’d experience on average only once every few decades becomes an almost annual occurrence. Event attribution compares the odds of experiencing an extreme event given global warming with the odds that the same event would have happened without climate change.
Incidentally, I’d argue that extreme event attribution gains credibility from the fact that it doesn’t always tell the same story, that sometimes it says that climate change wasn’t the culprit. For example, preliminary analyses suggest that climate change played a limited role in the extreme flooding that recently struck northeastern Italy.
That was, however, the exception that proves the rule. In general, attribution analysis shows that global warming made the disasters of recent years much more likely. We don’t yet have estimates for the latest, still ongoing series of disasters, but it seems safe to say that this global concatenation of extreme weather events would have been virtually impossible without climate change. And this is almost surely just the leading edge of the crisis, a small foretaste of the many disasters to come.
Which brings me back to the “politicization of the weather.” Worrying about the climate crisis shouldn’t be a partisan issue. But it is, at least in this country. As of last year, only 22 percent of Americans who considered themselves to be on the political right considered climate change a major threat; the left-right gap here was far larger than it was in other countries. And only in America do you see things like Texas Republicans actively trying to undermine their own state’s booming renewable energy sector.
The remarkable thing about climate denial is that the arguments haven’t changed at all over the years: Climate change isn’t happening; OK, it’s happening, but it’s not such a bad thing; besides, doing anything about it would be an economic disaster.
And none of these arguments are ever abandoned in the face of evidence. The next time there’s a cold spell somewhere in America, the usual suspects will once again assert that climate change is a hoax. Spectacular technological progress in renewable energy, which now makes the path to greatly reduced emissions look easier than even optimists imagined, hasn’t stopped claims that the costs of the Biden administration’s climate policy will be unsupportable.
So we shouldn’t expect record heat waves around the globe to end assertions that climate change, even if it’s happening, is no big deal. Nor should we expect Republicans to soften their opposition to climate action, no matter what is happening in the world.
What this means is that if the G.O.P. wins control of the White House and Congress next year, it will almost surely try to dismantle the array of green energy subsidies enacted by the Biden administration that experts believe will lead to a major reduction in emissions.
Like it or not, then, the weather is a political issue. And Americans should be aware that it’s one of the most important issues they’ll be voting on next November.
JACK SMITH BROADENS HIS PHONY-ELECTOR CASE
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Jack Smith’s investigation into Donald Trump’s attempted coup has increasingly focused on the defeated president’s fraudulent scheme to overturn the 2020 election. The apparent brainchild of Trump lawyer John Eastman, the phony-elector scheme aimed to create an “alternative” fake slate in seven states (Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania).
Several prominent legal experts recently published a model prosecutorial memorandum that lays out charges Smith might raise against Trump and his fellow conspirators. As the experts explain, Trump and his collaborators “allegedly coordinated to create, submit to Congress, and have Vice President Mike Pence recognize false electoral certificates from seven states, attempting to deny Joe Biden the electoral college majority that he legitimately won in a fair and secure election.” That could form the basis for a strong indictment against Trump to defraud the United States.
The House Jan. 6 committee focused primarily on elector schemes in Georgia and Arizona. But recent news reports show that Smith has been gathering information from other states. CNN reports: “Federal prosecutors have interviewed the secretaries of state for both Pennsylvania and New Mexico in recent months as part of the ongoing investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election, according to two sources familiar with the probe.” Moreover, “Smith’s team has sent subpoenas to local and state officials in all seven of the key states … that were targeted by Trump and his allies and where Trump’s campaign convened the false electors as part of the effort to subvert the electoral college.” Reports also suggest that some officials have been given immunity to testify.
The Las Vegas Sun also reported recently: “Nevada Republican Party Chairman Michael McDonald and state GOP official Jim DeGraffenreid each testified before a federal grand jury. … The testimony to the grand jury included details of how former Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt and Jesse Binnall, a lawyer who worked for the Trump campaign in Nevada, were part of the scheme.”
Until now, Smith’s investigation appears to have focused on the Trump team’s efforts to cajole and pressure state officials to approve slates of electors they knew were not legitimately selected. However, CNN reports that Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson was asked about “the impact of misinformation on election workers and the ‘threats that emerged from that from various sources.’”
“It is unclear how the threats of violence fit into the case. This part of the investigation may portend a charge against Trump for the violence on January 6th,” Ryan Goodman, co-founder of Just Security, told me. “Prosecutors may be using the pattern of threats of violence to pressure state election officials to explain the broader context in which Trump and his close associates were willing to use mob violence to pressure members of Congress and Mike Pence.” Goodman added, “Prosecutors may be considering charging people for using the threat of violence against state officials. That could include former president Trump himself.” He said Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, already gave testimony to the Jan. 6 committee in which he said “Trump pressured him with the specter of political violence.” He added that “any defense counsel should be highly concerned if the secretary of state made such allegations against their client.”
The far-reaching investigation also has the potential to spark new state investigations. The district attorney for Georgia’s Fulton County is the only state prosecutor who is poised to indict, but others might follow. In Arizona, for example, Attorney General Kris Mayes announced she would “investigate the fake electors’ situation, and … will take very seriously any effort to undermine our democracy.” She also stressed the need to deter “behavior that has created an environment where Arizona election officials have begun to leave their jobs at a rapid pace.”
It is therefore conceivable that Trump could face indictment not just in Georgia but in other states in which the phony-elector scheme operated, potentially leading to multiple prosecutions in state courts where the federal pardon power is inoperative.
In sum, recent reports seem to suggest that Smith is following along with a case that looks much like that outlined in Just Security’s prosecution memo. A principal author of that memo, Norm Eisen, told me that the case is essentially about a “nationwide plot to solicit fake electoral certificates — and [Trump’s] campaign to spread incendiary lies about a stolen election that triggered threats throughout the nation.” Since “the effects of both those courses of action were felt across the country and culminated in the Jan. 6 insurrection,” it makes sense to sweep in as many aspects of the phony-elector scheme as possible.
A seven-state investigation raises several questions. Among the most prominent: How many states’ phony-elector schemes can find their way into an indictment (extending the length and complexity of a trial), if it happens? And will threats of violence against state election personnel give rise to other criminal charges not previously considered? As former prosecutor Andrew Weissmann told me: “Questions about the conspirators’ awareness of violence … would be relevant to crimes such as seditious conspiracy and insurrection.”
Smith may be in the unusual position of deciding how much evidence is too much evidence for a swift and successful prosecution.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Jack Smith’s investigation into Donald Trump’s attempted coup has increasingly focused on the defeated president’s fraudulent scheme to overturn the 2020 election. The apparent brainchild of Trump lawyer John Eastman, the phony-elector scheme aimed to create an “alternative” fake slate in seven states (Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania).
Several prominent legal experts recently published a model prosecutorial memorandum that lays out charges Smith might raise against Trump and his fellow conspirators. As the experts explain, Trump and his collaborators “allegedly coordinated to create, submit to Congress, and have Vice President Mike Pence recognize false electoral certificates from seven states, attempting to deny Joe Biden the electoral college majority that he legitimately won in a fair and secure election.” That could form the basis for a strong indictment against Trump to defraud the United States.
The House Jan. 6 committee focused primarily on elector schemes in Georgia and Arizona. But recent news reports show that Smith has been gathering information from other states. CNN reports: “Federal prosecutors have interviewed the secretaries of state for both Pennsylvania and New Mexico in recent months as part of the ongoing investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election, according to two sources familiar with the probe.” Moreover, “Smith’s team has sent subpoenas to local and state officials in all seven of the key states … that were targeted by Trump and his allies and where Trump’s campaign convened the false electors as part of the effort to subvert the electoral college.” Reports also suggest that some officials have been given immunity to testify.
The Las Vegas Sun also reported recently: “Nevada Republican Party Chairman Michael McDonald and state GOP official Jim DeGraffenreid each testified before a federal grand jury. … The testimony to the grand jury included details of how former Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt and Jesse Binnall, a lawyer who worked for the Trump campaign in Nevada, were part of the scheme.”
Until now, Smith’s investigation appears to have focused on the Trump team’s efforts to cajole and pressure state officials to approve slates of electors they knew were not legitimately selected. However, CNN reports that Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson was asked about “the impact of misinformation on election workers and the ‘threats that emerged from that from various sources.’”
“It is unclear how the threats of violence fit into the case. This part of the investigation may portend a charge against Trump for the violence on January 6th,” Ryan Goodman, co-founder of Just Security, told me. “Prosecutors may be using the pattern of threats of violence to pressure state election officials to explain the broader context in which Trump and his close associates were willing to use mob violence to pressure members of Congress and Mike Pence.” Goodman added, “Prosecutors may be considering charging people for using the threat of violence against state officials. That could include former president Trump himself.” He said Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, already gave testimony to the Jan. 6 committee in which he said “Trump pressured him with the specter of political violence.” He added that “any defense counsel should be highly concerned if the secretary of state made such allegations against their client.”
The far-reaching investigation also has the potential to spark new state investigations. The district attorney for Georgia’s Fulton County is the only state prosecutor who is poised to indict, but others might follow. In Arizona, for example, Attorney General Kris Mayes announced she would “investigate the fake electors’ situation, and … will take very seriously any effort to undermine our democracy.” She also stressed the need to deter “behavior that has created an environment where Arizona election officials have begun to leave their jobs at a rapid pace.”
It is therefore conceivable that Trump could face indictment not just in Georgia but in other states in which the phony-elector scheme operated, potentially leading to multiple prosecutions in state courts where the federal pardon power is inoperative.
In sum, recent reports seem to suggest that Smith is following along with a case that looks much like that outlined in Just Security’s prosecution memo. A principal author of that memo, Norm Eisen, told me that the case is essentially about a “nationwide plot to solicit fake electoral certificates — and [Trump’s] campaign to spread incendiary lies about a stolen election that triggered threats throughout the nation.” Since “the effects of both those courses of action were felt across the country and culminated in the Jan. 6 insurrection,” it makes sense to sweep in as many aspects of the phony-elector scheme as possible.
A seven-state investigation raises several questions. Among the most prominent: How many states’ phony-elector schemes can find their way into an indictment (extending the length and complexity of a trial), if it happens? And will threats of violence against state election personnel give rise to other criminal charges not previously considered? As former prosecutor Andrew Weissmann told me: “Questions about the conspirators’ awareness of violence … would be relevant to crimes such as seditious conspiracy and insurrection.”
Smith may be in the unusual position of deciding how much evidence is too much evidence for a swift and successful prosecution.
DONALD TRUMP CANNOT BE ALLOWED TO DELAY JUSTICE
The former president's lawyers argue that putting him on trial before the election "would result in a miscarriage of justice." The opposite is true.
by The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
Donald Trump — who has spent his life acting as if the laws do not apply to him — has come up with a novel defense to delay his criminal trial on charges of illegally taking 31 classified documents and obstructing the federal government’s repeated efforts to get them back: He’s too busy to come to court.
In a 12-page filing, Trump’s lawyers asked U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon to postpone his trial indefinitely because he is booked solid campaigning through the 2024 presidential election. “This undertaking requires a tremendous amount of time and energy, and that effort will continue until the election on Nov. 5, 2024,” they wrote.
Trump’s lawyers argued that putting the former one-term president on trial before the election “would result in a miscarriage of justice.”
In fact, the opposite is true.
Trump has access to a $100 million private jet and millions of dollars in defense funds, thanks to gullible donors. He should have no problem preparing for trial or getting to court while on the campaign trail.
More importantly, the public’s right to a speedy trial is paramount. Voters need to hear all the facts surrounding the serious allegations against Trump before they go to the polls. And they need to know if a jury convicts or acquits Trump. As Richard Nixon said just weeks before he resigned, the “people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook.”
Prosecutors asked for the trial to begin on Dec. 11 and said it would last about three weeks. Trump, who has been involved in more than 4,000 lawsuits, is famous for seeking legal delays.
The trial will be held in Florida, which is known for moving cases along quickly. All eyes will be on Judge Cannon, who was appointed by Trump at the end of his term and had presided over just a handful of cases.
Cannon’s rulings will be closely watched, given her earlier surprise decisions that favored Trump but were reversed by a conservative appeals court. Judges have wide discretion in setting trial dates, picking juries, the pace of the proceedings, and what evidence is presented.
Some argue that holding the trial before the election will further politicize the legal proceedings. But there is no way to untangle the politics from Trump’s self-inflicted legal woes, no matter when the trial is held. That’s because Trump and his Republican allies recklessly inject politics into every investigation of the former president.
Trump continually lashes out at Jack Smith, the special counsel leading the documents investigation as well as a separate probe into Trump’s role in sparking the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. Trump has also blamed President Joe Biden for his indictment, claiming — without any evidence — that the “sitting president had his top political opponent arrested.” (Ironically, it was Trump as president — with the help of former Attorney General Bill Barr — who used the U.S. Justice Department as his political tool.)
Now, Trump has ramped up his attacks on the FBI and the Justice Department. He got help last week from Republicans in Congress, whose hearing with Trump-appointed FBI Director Christopher Wray looked like something from the Joe McCarthy era.
The constant assault on the rule of law by Trump and the GOP is a reminder that American democracy is still at grave risk. While holding Trump’s trial before the election will undoubtedly test the legal and political system, waiting until after the election poses an even bigger challenge.
Trump’s own advisers have reportedly said he is running for president to essentially stay out of prison. If elected, he could try to pardon himself or get his attorney general to drop the charges. It is clear that Trump’s grievance-filled campaign is not about helping everyday Americans, but about helping himself.
Justice delayed would be justice denied. See you in court, Mr. Trump.
The former president's lawyers argue that putting him on trial before the election "would result in a miscarriage of justice." The opposite is true.
by The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
Donald Trump — who has spent his life acting as if the laws do not apply to him — has come up with a novel defense to delay his criminal trial on charges of illegally taking 31 classified documents and obstructing the federal government’s repeated efforts to get them back: He’s too busy to come to court.
In a 12-page filing, Trump’s lawyers asked U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon to postpone his trial indefinitely because he is booked solid campaigning through the 2024 presidential election. “This undertaking requires a tremendous amount of time and energy, and that effort will continue until the election on Nov. 5, 2024,” they wrote.
Trump’s lawyers argued that putting the former one-term president on trial before the election “would result in a miscarriage of justice.”
In fact, the opposite is true.
Trump has access to a $100 million private jet and millions of dollars in defense funds, thanks to gullible donors. He should have no problem preparing for trial or getting to court while on the campaign trail.
More importantly, the public’s right to a speedy trial is paramount. Voters need to hear all the facts surrounding the serious allegations against Trump before they go to the polls. And they need to know if a jury convicts or acquits Trump. As Richard Nixon said just weeks before he resigned, the “people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook.”
Prosecutors asked for the trial to begin on Dec. 11 and said it would last about three weeks. Trump, who has been involved in more than 4,000 lawsuits, is famous for seeking legal delays.
The trial will be held in Florida, which is known for moving cases along quickly. All eyes will be on Judge Cannon, who was appointed by Trump at the end of his term and had presided over just a handful of cases.
Cannon’s rulings will be closely watched, given her earlier surprise decisions that favored Trump but were reversed by a conservative appeals court. Judges have wide discretion in setting trial dates, picking juries, the pace of the proceedings, and what evidence is presented.
Some argue that holding the trial before the election will further politicize the legal proceedings. But there is no way to untangle the politics from Trump’s self-inflicted legal woes, no matter when the trial is held. That’s because Trump and his Republican allies recklessly inject politics into every investigation of the former president.
Trump continually lashes out at Jack Smith, the special counsel leading the documents investigation as well as a separate probe into Trump’s role in sparking the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. Trump has also blamed President Joe Biden for his indictment, claiming — without any evidence — that the “sitting president had his top political opponent arrested.” (Ironically, it was Trump as president — with the help of former Attorney General Bill Barr — who used the U.S. Justice Department as his political tool.)
Now, Trump has ramped up his attacks on the FBI and the Justice Department. He got help last week from Republicans in Congress, whose hearing with Trump-appointed FBI Director Christopher Wray looked like something from the Joe McCarthy era.
The constant assault on the rule of law by Trump and the GOP is a reminder that American democracy is still at grave risk. While holding Trump’s trial before the election will undoubtedly test the legal and political system, waiting until after the election poses an even bigger challenge.
Trump’s own advisers have reportedly said he is running for president to essentially stay out of prison. If elected, he could try to pardon himself or get his attorney general to drop the charges. It is clear that Trump’s grievance-filled campaign is not about helping everyday Americans, but about helping himself.
Justice delayed would be justice denied. See you in court, Mr. Trump.
REPUBLICANS CELEBRATE THEIR SUCCESSFUL DECEPTION OF VOTERS
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
An honest man visited the House of lies this week. He did not like what he found there.
“Insane.” “Absurd.” “Ludicrous.” Those are the actual words FBI Director Christopher Wray used to describe House Republicans’ crackpot conspiracy theories.
“The American people fully understand,” Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.) informed Wray at Wednesday’s hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, “… that you have personally worked to weaponize the FBI against conservatives.”
Right. Hageman, the election denier who ousted Liz Cheney in a primary, would have you believe that Wray — senior political appointee in the George W. Bush Justice Department, clerk to a noted conservative judge, contributor to the Federalist Society, Donald Trump-appointed head of the FBI — is part of a conspiracy to persecute conservatives. “The idea that I’m biased against conservatives seems somewhat insane to me, given my own personal background,” he replied.
Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), a close ally of Speaker Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), told Wray that his FBI “suppressed conservative-leaning free speech” on topics such as the unconfirmed theory that covid-19 resulted from a lab leak in China.
“The idea that the FBI would somehow be involved in suppressing references to the lab-leak theory is somewhat absurd,” Wray answered, pointing a finger, “when you consider the fact that the FBI was the only — the only — agency in the entire intelligence community to reach the assessment that it was more likely than not that that was the explanation for the pandemic.”
And several Republicans on the panel floated the slander that the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection was an inside job perpetrated by the FBI.
“This notion that somehow the violence at the Capitol on January 6 was part of some operation by FBI sources and agents is ludicrous,” Wray responded, “and is a disservice to our brave, hard-working, dedicated men and women.”
Good for him. But here’s what’s especially insane, absurd and ludicrous: No matter how many refutations Wray and others provide, Republicans are persuading people to believe their lies — and they are proud of the deception.
Johnson, the leadoff questioner at Wednesday’s hearing, told Wray about a recent NBC News poll, in which “only 37 percent of registered voters now view the FBI positively,” down from 52 percent in 2018. “That’s a serious decline in the people’s faith, and it’s on your watch,” he told Wray.
Several other Republicans joined Johnson in gloating about the FBI’s poor standing in public opinion. “We’re seeing the polling numbers,” said Rep. Barry Moore (Ala.). “The FBI is tanking.”
Rep. Matt Gaetz (Fla.) taunted: “People trusted the FBI more when J. Edgar Hoover was running the place.”
Reps. Wesley Hunt and Nathaniel Moran, both from Texas, also needled Wray about the FBI’s popularity. “You’re not aware of those numbers?” Moran jeered.
The Republicans are well aware of “those numbers” — because they are the ones who assassinated the reputation of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency. Support for the FBI isn’t low among all Americans; it’s at rock bottom among Republicans — only 17 percent of whom had a positive view of the FBI in the NBC poll, compared with 58 percent of Democrats.
Now why would that have happened? Well, maybe it’s because they’ve been fed an endless diet of lies and conspiracy theories about the FBI by elected Republicans and their Murdoch mouthpieces. These lies — and similar ones told about the Justice Department, public health agencies, the IRS and even the military — serve Republicans’ short-term interest of discrediting the Biden administration. But the lies are also destroying the right’s support for the most basic functions of government that even conservatives long supported, such as law and order and national defense. Maybe that’s the goal.
Now, the arsonists are admiring the ashes.
When Wray walked into the House Judiciary hearing room this week, he entered a parallel universe. Awaiting him in the audience were three women wearing T-shirts saying “Ashli Babbitt, Murdered by Capitol Police.” A few seats down, next to the woman with the “Biden’s Laptop Matters” phone cover, Ivan Raiklin, a self-styled “Deep State Marauder,” rose to heckle Wray: “Sir, can you stop violating our First, Fourth and Fifth amendments?” Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) ordered a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, which ended in the women in the Ashli Babbitt T-shirts shouting, “Justice for all!”
Jordan opened with an ode to paranoia: “American speech is censored. Parents are called terrorists. Catholics are called radicals. And I haven’t even talked about the spying that took place of a presidential campaign or the raiding of a former president’s home.”
Gaetz accused Wray of “protecting the Bidens,” of being “blissfully ignorant as to the Biden shakedown regime,” of “whitewashing the conduct of corrupt people” and of operating a “creepy personal snoop machine” at the FBI.
“Amen!” called out one of the Ashli Babbitt women when Gaetz finished.
Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) accused Wray of a passel of crimes: “unlawful surveillance of American citizens, intimidation of American citizens … potential coverups of convenient political figures and potential setups of inconvenient political figures.”
They invoked the “Russian collusion hoax” and the Steele dossier. Most sinister were the attempts to pin the Jan. 6 insurrection on the FBI.
Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Tex.) invoked the conspiracy theory, popular on the far right, that a man named Ray Epps was an undercover FBI agent who instigated the violence on Jan. 6, 2021, in order to discredit Trump. (Epps filed a defamation lawsuit on Wednesday against Fox News for promoting the “fantastical story.”)
“Shame on you!” Nehls said to Wray. Nehls called the Jan. 6 investigation a “political witch hunt against the greatest president in my lifetime.” Coming to the defense of people convicted for their actions during the insurrection, he claimed the FBI “is more concerned about searching for and arresting grandma and grandpa for entering the Capitol building that day than pursuing the sick individuals in our society who prey on our children.”
Before the hearing, the Associated Press’s Farnoush Amiri reported that Republicans planned to screen a video showing the “FBI planting the pipe bombs outside the DNC on Jan. 6.” Rep. Tom Massie (R-Ky.) did screen the video, but he stopped short of fingering the FBI, suggesting only that there was some unspecified conspiracy involving law enforcement. (Massie, no legal scholar, at one point told Wray his behavior “may be lawful, but it’s not constitutional.”)
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) announced that he was “going to make the assumption” that there were “more than 10” FBI informants in the crowd on Jan. 6, 2021. Wray had said no such thing.
Patiently, Wray tried to disabuse the Republicans of their fantasies. No, the FBI doesn’t investigate parents for attending school board meetings. No, there were not undercover FBI agents in the crowd on Jan. 6. Actually, the FBI has opened more investigations into violence by abortion rights supporters than by abortion opponents.
But each time Wray batted down a wacky accusation, Republicans popped up with another.
Rep. Chip Roy (Tex.) spoke of a “tyrannical FBI storming the home of an American family.”
Rep. Dan Bishop (N.C.) accused the FBI of being the “agent of a foreign power.”
Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.) alleged that the FBI “interfered with the elections in both 2016 and 2020” and that Wray was in “denial” to say otherwise.
And Hageman saw Wray’s FBI doing the “dirty work” of “mass censorship” to “suppress the First Amendment” as part of a supposed “two-tiered justice system that has been weaponized to persecute people.”
It was, to coin a phrase, an “absurd” spectacle to watch this law-and-order conservative being attacked by MAGA lawmakers set on undermining the rule of law. Various House Republicans had already issued demands to “defund the FBI” (Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia even sold T-shirts with the slogan), and on the day before the Wray hearing, Jordan, the Judiciary chairman, sent a letter to House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Kay Granger (Tex.) requesting that she “eliminate any funding for the FBI that is not absolutely essential.” (For good measure, Jordan also asked her to block some funds for the ATF.)
Were Republicans to succeed, Wray told the Judiciary Committee, they would leave Americans more vulnerable to fentanyl cartels, violent criminals, gangs, sex predators, foreign and domestic terrorists, cyberattacks and Chinese spies. This is where a government of lies will take us.
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
An honest man visited the House of lies this week. He did not like what he found there.
“Insane.” “Absurd.” “Ludicrous.” Those are the actual words FBI Director Christopher Wray used to describe House Republicans’ crackpot conspiracy theories.
“The American people fully understand,” Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.) informed Wray at Wednesday’s hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, “… that you have personally worked to weaponize the FBI against conservatives.”
Right. Hageman, the election denier who ousted Liz Cheney in a primary, would have you believe that Wray — senior political appointee in the George W. Bush Justice Department, clerk to a noted conservative judge, contributor to the Federalist Society, Donald Trump-appointed head of the FBI — is part of a conspiracy to persecute conservatives. “The idea that I’m biased against conservatives seems somewhat insane to me, given my own personal background,” he replied.
Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), a close ally of Speaker Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), told Wray that his FBI “suppressed conservative-leaning free speech” on topics such as the unconfirmed theory that covid-19 resulted from a lab leak in China.
“The idea that the FBI would somehow be involved in suppressing references to the lab-leak theory is somewhat absurd,” Wray answered, pointing a finger, “when you consider the fact that the FBI was the only — the only — agency in the entire intelligence community to reach the assessment that it was more likely than not that that was the explanation for the pandemic.”
And several Republicans on the panel floated the slander that the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection was an inside job perpetrated by the FBI.
“This notion that somehow the violence at the Capitol on January 6 was part of some operation by FBI sources and agents is ludicrous,” Wray responded, “and is a disservice to our brave, hard-working, dedicated men and women.”
Good for him. But here’s what’s especially insane, absurd and ludicrous: No matter how many refutations Wray and others provide, Republicans are persuading people to believe their lies — and they are proud of the deception.
Johnson, the leadoff questioner at Wednesday’s hearing, told Wray about a recent NBC News poll, in which “only 37 percent of registered voters now view the FBI positively,” down from 52 percent in 2018. “That’s a serious decline in the people’s faith, and it’s on your watch,” he told Wray.
Several other Republicans joined Johnson in gloating about the FBI’s poor standing in public opinion. “We’re seeing the polling numbers,” said Rep. Barry Moore (Ala.). “The FBI is tanking.”
Rep. Matt Gaetz (Fla.) taunted: “People trusted the FBI more when J. Edgar Hoover was running the place.”
Reps. Wesley Hunt and Nathaniel Moran, both from Texas, also needled Wray about the FBI’s popularity. “You’re not aware of those numbers?” Moran jeered.
The Republicans are well aware of “those numbers” — because they are the ones who assassinated the reputation of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency. Support for the FBI isn’t low among all Americans; it’s at rock bottom among Republicans — only 17 percent of whom had a positive view of the FBI in the NBC poll, compared with 58 percent of Democrats.
Now why would that have happened? Well, maybe it’s because they’ve been fed an endless diet of lies and conspiracy theories about the FBI by elected Republicans and their Murdoch mouthpieces. These lies — and similar ones told about the Justice Department, public health agencies, the IRS and even the military — serve Republicans’ short-term interest of discrediting the Biden administration. But the lies are also destroying the right’s support for the most basic functions of government that even conservatives long supported, such as law and order and national defense. Maybe that’s the goal.
Now, the arsonists are admiring the ashes.
When Wray walked into the House Judiciary hearing room this week, he entered a parallel universe. Awaiting him in the audience were three women wearing T-shirts saying “Ashli Babbitt, Murdered by Capitol Police.” A few seats down, next to the woman with the “Biden’s Laptop Matters” phone cover, Ivan Raiklin, a self-styled “Deep State Marauder,” rose to heckle Wray: “Sir, can you stop violating our First, Fourth and Fifth amendments?” Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) ordered a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, which ended in the women in the Ashli Babbitt T-shirts shouting, “Justice for all!”
Jordan opened with an ode to paranoia: “American speech is censored. Parents are called terrorists. Catholics are called radicals. And I haven’t even talked about the spying that took place of a presidential campaign or the raiding of a former president’s home.”
Gaetz accused Wray of “protecting the Bidens,” of being “blissfully ignorant as to the Biden shakedown regime,” of “whitewashing the conduct of corrupt people” and of operating a “creepy personal snoop machine” at the FBI.
“Amen!” called out one of the Ashli Babbitt women when Gaetz finished.
Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) accused Wray of a passel of crimes: “unlawful surveillance of American citizens, intimidation of American citizens … potential coverups of convenient political figures and potential setups of inconvenient political figures.”
They invoked the “Russian collusion hoax” and the Steele dossier. Most sinister were the attempts to pin the Jan. 6 insurrection on the FBI.
Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Tex.) invoked the conspiracy theory, popular on the far right, that a man named Ray Epps was an undercover FBI agent who instigated the violence on Jan. 6, 2021, in order to discredit Trump. (Epps filed a defamation lawsuit on Wednesday against Fox News for promoting the “fantastical story.”)
“Shame on you!” Nehls said to Wray. Nehls called the Jan. 6 investigation a “political witch hunt against the greatest president in my lifetime.” Coming to the defense of people convicted for their actions during the insurrection, he claimed the FBI “is more concerned about searching for and arresting grandma and grandpa for entering the Capitol building that day than pursuing the sick individuals in our society who prey on our children.”
Before the hearing, the Associated Press’s Farnoush Amiri reported that Republicans planned to screen a video showing the “FBI planting the pipe bombs outside the DNC on Jan. 6.” Rep. Tom Massie (R-Ky.) did screen the video, but he stopped short of fingering the FBI, suggesting only that there was some unspecified conspiracy involving law enforcement. (Massie, no legal scholar, at one point told Wray his behavior “may be lawful, but it’s not constitutional.”)
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) announced that he was “going to make the assumption” that there were “more than 10” FBI informants in the crowd on Jan. 6, 2021. Wray had said no such thing.
Patiently, Wray tried to disabuse the Republicans of their fantasies. No, the FBI doesn’t investigate parents for attending school board meetings. No, there were not undercover FBI agents in the crowd on Jan. 6. Actually, the FBI has opened more investigations into violence by abortion rights supporters than by abortion opponents.
But each time Wray batted down a wacky accusation, Republicans popped up with another.
Rep. Chip Roy (Tex.) spoke of a “tyrannical FBI storming the home of an American family.”
Rep. Dan Bishop (N.C.) accused the FBI of being the “agent of a foreign power.”
Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.) alleged that the FBI “interfered with the elections in both 2016 and 2020” and that Wray was in “denial” to say otherwise.
And Hageman saw Wray’s FBI doing the “dirty work” of “mass censorship” to “suppress the First Amendment” as part of a supposed “two-tiered justice system that has been weaponized to persecute people.”
It was, to coin a phrase, an “absurd” spectacle to watch this law-and-order conservative being attacked by MAGA lawmakers set on undermining the rule of law. Various House Republicans had already issued demands to “defund the FBI” (Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia even sold T-shirts with the slogan), and on the day before the Wray hearing, Jordan, the Judiciary chairman, sent a letter to House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Kay Granger (Tex.) requesting that she “eliminate any funding for the FBI that is not absolutely essential.” (For good measure, Jordan also asked her to block some funds for the ATF.)
Were Republicans to succeed, Wray told the Judiciary Committee, they would leave Americans more vulnerable to fentanyl cartels, violent criminals, gangs, sex predators, foreign and domestic terrorists, cyberattacks and Chinese spies. This is where a government of lies will take us.
FLORIDA MIGHT PAY FOR MAGA CRUELTY AND KNOW-NOTHINGISM
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
This week, I examine the potential price Floridians might pay for MAGA culture wars, pick the people of the week and share some lesser-known D.C. sites.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and his obedient Republican legislature have made bullying and attacking the vulnerable the hallmarks of their governance. Whether it is “don’t say gay” legislation (and retribution against Disney for supporting inclusion), denying medical care to transgender youths, muzzling teachers and professors who address systemic racism in the United States, firing a county prosecutor who dared object to DeSantis’s refusal to protect women’s bodily autonomy, or shipping unwary immigrants to other states, Florida has become not where “woke” died but rather where empathy, decency and kindness go to die.
DeSantis’s stunts frequently fail in court and cost taxpayers money. But his MAGA war on diversity and tolerance might be negatively impacting the state in other ways.
DeSantis likes to brag that more people are moving to Florida than ever. Not so fast. “An estimated 674,740 people reported that their permanent address changed from Florida to another state in 2021. That’s more than any other state, including New York or California, the two states that have received the most attention for outbound migration during the pandemic,” according to the American Community Survey released in June tracking state-by-state migration.
Moreover, Florida already is one of the states with the oldest average populations, and the MAGA culture wars risk alienating young people and the diverse workforce the state needs. In February, USA Today reported, “Florida may be the most moved to state in the country, but not when it comes to Gen Z. They are the only generation that chose to exit Florida, with an outflux of 8,000 young adults, while every other generation moved in.”
In addition, evidence points to a brain drain from Florida universities and colleges, although data is hard to come by. Records show “an upward tick in staff departures at some of Florida’s largest universities. … Across the State University System, the murmurs are getting louder: Some Florida schools are having trouble filling positions,” the Orlando Sentinel reported. “At the University of Florida, 1,087 employees resigned in 2022 — the only time in the last five years that the number exceeded 1,000.” Record numbers of faculty are not returning to University of Central Florida, Florida State University and the University of South Florida. This is hardly surprising, given DeSantis’s assault on academic independence and his suggestion that students go out of state if they want to study topics such as African American studies.
In addition, some businesses might be getting cold feet about spending convention dollars in the Sunshine State. The Sun Sentinel reported, “Broward County has lost more than a half-dozen conventions as their organizers cite the divisive political climate as their reason to stay out of Florida.” If the trend continues, the significant share of jobs and state revenue attributable to convention business could shrink. DeSantis and his supporters counter that tourism is still booming. They insist low taxes will continue to attract the wealthy and businesses.
There is little sign that the rest of the country is enamored of censorship, book bans or anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment. The question remains whether DeSantis’s act wears thin at home.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
This week, I examine the potential price Floridians might pay for MAGA culture wars, pick the people of the week and share some lesser-known D.C. sites.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and his obedient Republican legislature have made bullying and attacking the vulnerable the hallmarks of their governance. Whether it is “don’t say gay” legislation (and retribution against Disney for supporting inclusion), denying medical care to transgender youths, muzzling teachers and professors who address systemic racism in the United States, firing a county prosecutor who dared object to DeSantis’s refusal to protect women’s bodily autonomy, or shipping unwary immigrants to other states, Florida has become not where “woke” died but rather where empathy, decency and kindness go to die.
DeSantis’s stunts frequently fail in court and cost taxpayers money. But his MAGA war on diversity and tolerance might be negatively impacting the state in other ways.
DeSantis likes to brag that more people are moving to Florida than ever. Not so fast. “An estimated 674,740 people reported that their permanent address changed from Florida to another state in 2021. That’s more than any other state, including New York or California, the two states that have received the most attention for outbound migration during the pandemic,” according to the American Community Survey released in June tracking state-by-state migration.
Moreover, Florida already is one of the states with the oldest average populations, and the MAGA culture wars risk alienating young people and the diverse workforce the state needs. In February, USA Today reported, “Florida may be the most moved to state in the country, but not when it comes to Gen Z. They are the only generation that chose to exit Florida, with an outflux of 8,000 young adults, while every other generation moved in.”
In addition, evidence points to a brain drain from Florida universities and colleges, although data is hard to come by. Records show “an upward tick in staff departures at some of Florida’s largest universities. … Across the State University System, the murmurs are getting louder: Some Florida schools are having trouble filling positions,” the Orlando Sentinel reported. “At the University of Florida, 1,087 employees resigned in 2022 — the only time in the last five years that the number exceeded 1,000.” Record numbers of faculty are not returning to University of Central Florida, Florida State University and the University of South Florida. This is hardly surprising, given DeSantis’s assault on academic independence and his suggestion that students go out of state if they want to study topics such as African American studies.
In addition, some businesses might be getting cold feet about spending convention dollars in the Sunshine State. The Sun Sentinel reported, “Broward County has lost more than a half-dozen conventions as their organizers cite the divisive political climate as their reason to stay out of Florida.” If the trend continues, the significant share of jobs and state revenue attributable to convention business could shrink. DeSantis and his supporters counter that tourism is still booming. They insist low taxes will continue to attract the wealthy and businesses.
There is little sign that the rest of the country is enamored of censorship, book bans or anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment. The question remains whether DeSantis’s act wears thin at home.
SELF-GOVERNMENT IS WORTH DEFENDING FROM AN ILLEGITIMATE SUPREME COURT
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
On this Independence Day, we should reaffirm the twin pillars of democracy: Voters (not the mob) pick their leaders, and elected leaders (not unelected judges) make policy decisions for which they are held accountable. Just as we need to preserve the sanctity of elections (by prosecuting coup instigators), democracy defenders need to address judicial radicals’ gross distortion of our system, resulting in the current Supreme Court’s subversion of democracy.
Unhinged from judicial standards, the court now roves through the policy landscape, overturning decades of law and reordering Americans’ lives and institutions. It upends women’s health, revamps college admissions, snatches student aid from millions and redefines public accommodations (allowing egregious discrimination). In aggrandizing power, the court illegitimately dominates policymaking, undermining democracy to an extent we have not seen in nearly 100 years. (Ronald Brownstein pointed out that similar constitutional collisions in the 1850s and 1930s took a civil war or threat of court-packing to resolve.)
Something must change if we want to preserve rule by the people’s elected leaders responsible to voters.
As a preliminary matter, it is essential to identify the problem. As morally and politically offensive as Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action, LGBTQ+ discrimination and student debt forgiveness might be to millions of Americans, merely criticizing the court’s result is misguided and unproductive. The task is to expose the court’s disintegration as a legitimate judicial body and note its emergence as a supreme right-wing policymaker. When the court operates on an ends-justify-the-means basis, shreds legal doctrine and dishonestly presents the facts, critics should not play whack-a-mole, decrying each individual rejection of widespread American values. In doing so, the court negates self-government.
One telltale sign that the justices have become partisan politicians: their refusal to adopt mandatory ethics rules, which destroys the essence of judicial impartiality that is the root of their legitimacy. When judges cease to eliminate conflicts of interest or the appearance thereof, they appear indistinguishable from politicians wined and dined in rarefied settings by lobbyists. The stench of financial corruption, coupled with justices’ intemperate rants in partisan settings and in op-eds, convinces Americans that the justices are partisan players out to score points for their own side.
Moreover, the court strays out of its constitutional lane when it refuses to follow consistent rules of construction and honestly address cases’ facts. When, for example, the majority casts aside stare decisis (as in the affirmative action case) without admitting it or refuses to apply the test for departing from precedent (as in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization), it is simply muscling its way to desired outcomes because it has the votes.
Worse, cases are now manufactured to create policy. The majority has made complete hash out of standing and concepts such as “case and controversy” to reach decisions it had no business deciding.
In the student loan debt relief case, the court created standing out of whole cloth. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent, “The requirement that the proper party — the party actually affected — challenge an action ensures that courts do not overstep their proper bounds. … Without that requirement, courts become ‘forums for the ventilation of public grievances’ — for settlement of ideological and political disputes.” Here the court deliberately ignored that the aggrieved party was not a litigant. Likewise, in the case of a web designer worried about selling her services to a gay couple (who appear to be fabricated), the court defied every principle of standing. When the court goes beyond actual cases and controversies to answer hypotheticals, it goes beyond its constitutional mandate.
And, worst of all, the newfangled “major questions doctrine” allows the court to subjectively decide when the issue is of “major political salience” (whatever the court says it is); if so, the court demands the application at issue be specifically authorized by statute (a standard lawmakers somehow never meet in this court’s eyes). It has become a crutch whenever the court seeks to invalidate a program it doesn’t like. In the student debt relief case, the court reached the desired result by ignoring the word “waive” in the statute authorizing loan forgiveness to reach the finding that Congress hadn’t delegated power to, well, waive student debt. “The Court once again substitutes itself for Congress and the Executive Branch — and the hundreds of millions of people they represent — in making this Nation’s most important, as well as most contested, policy decisions,” Kagan wrote.
The mumbo-jumbo “major questions doctrine” is not the stuff of judging. No wonder the chief justice got touchy when Kagan pointed out that the court “is supposed to stick to its business — to decide only cases and controversies and to stay away from making this Nation’s policy about subjects like student-loan relief.” What the Slaughter-House Cases and substantive due process were to the New Deal-era right-wing court, the “major questions doctrine" is to the current court: a smokescreen for enforcing a right-wing agenda (or vetoing a progressive one).
In departing from the authentic judicial review, the right-wing majority unsurprisingly produces results perfectly aligned with the right’s agenda on hot-button topics. (By the law of averages, its “analysis” should occasionally favor the other side.) When foretelling a case’s outcome or following the majority’s “reasoning” requires a crib sheet on GOP political aims, something is wrong.
And voters have figured out what’s going on. According to an ABC News-Ipsos poll, 53 percent “believe that the nation’s highest court rules mainly on the basis of their partisan political view rather than on the basis of the law (33%), while 14% say they don’t know.” Before the Dobbs opinion, a separate January 2022 poll showed that “38% of Americans believed that the justices rule mainly on the basis of law, versus 43% who believed that the court rules on the basis of their political views.”
The transformation of the court into a partisan player contradicts the central premise of democracy. We should reject the obtuse and naive argument that this court isn’t so bad because it didn’t entirely obliterate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and declined to impose the outrageous independent state legislature doctrine. Now is no time for self-delusion. Ending the right-wing majority’s intolerable war on self-government will require that the other two branches and the voters cut the court down to size. A single election or a single reform might not suffice. Cogent law review articles, informed public debate and exquisite dissents revealing that the right-wing judicial emperors have no clothes can assist reformers. Term limits, jurisdiction stripping, court expansion and ethics reform should be on the table. Simply put, if we want democracy to survive, each election must be a referendum on the court’s legitimacy.
On this Independence Day, which celebrates rebellion against a monarch lacking consent of the governed, it behooves us to dedicate ourselves to robust and authentic democracy: government of the people, by the people, for the people — not by arrogant right-wing justices.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
On this Independence Day, we should reaffirm the twin pillars of democracy: Voters (not the mob) pick their leaders, and elected leaders (not unelected judges) make policy decisions for which they are held accountable. Just as we need to preserve the sanctity of elections (by prosecuting coup instigators), democracy defenders need to address judicial radicals’ gross distortion of our system, resulting in the current Supreme Court’s subversion of democracy.
Unhinged from judicial standards, the court now roves through the policy landscape, overturning decades of law and reordering Americans’ lives and institutions. It upends women’s health, revamps college admissions, snatches student aid from millions and redefines public accommodations (allowing egregious discrimination). In aggrandizing power, the court illegitimately dominates policymaking, undermining democracy to an extent we have not seen in nearly 100 years. (Ronald Brownstein pointed out that similar constitutional collisions in the 1850s and 1930s took a civil war or threat of court-packing to resolve.)
Something must change if we want to preserve rule by the people’s elected leaders responsible to voters.
As a preliminary matter, it is essential to identify the problem. As morally and politically offensive as Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action, LGBTQ+ discrimination and student debt forgiveness might be to millions of Americans, merely criticizing the court’s result is misguided and unproductive. The task is to expose the court’s disintegration as a legitimate judicial body and note its emergence as a supreme right-wing policymaker. When the court operates on an ends-justify-the-means basis, shreds legal doctrine and dishonestly presents the facts, critics should not play whack-a-mole, decrying each individual rejection of widespread American values. In doing so, the court negates self-government.
One telltale sign that the justices have become partisan politicians: their refusal to adopt mandatory ethics rules, which destroys the essence of judicial impartiality that is the root of their legitimacy. When judges cease to eliminate conflicts of interest or the appearance thereof, they appear indistinguishable from politicians wined and dined in rarefied settings by lobbyists. The stench of financial corruption, coupled with justices’ intemperate rants in partisan settings and in op-eds, convinces Americans that the justices are partisan players out to score points for their own side.
Moreover, the court strays out of its constitutional lane when it refuses to follow consistent rules of construction and honestly address cases’ facts. When, for example, the majority casts aside stare decisis (as in the affirmative action case) without admitting it or refuses to apply the test for departing from precedent (as in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization), it is simply muscling its way to desired outcomes because it has the votes.
Worse, cases are now manufactured to create policy. The majority has made complete hash out of standing and concepts such as “case and controversy” to reach decisions it had no business deciding.
In the student loan debt relief case, the court created standing out of whole cloth. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent, “The requirement that the proper party — the party actually affected — challenge an action ensures that courts do not overstep their proper bounds. … Without that requirement, courts become ‘forums for the ventilation of public grievances’ — for settlement of ideological and political disputes.” Here the court deliberately ignored that the aggrieved party was not a litigant. Likewise, in the case of a web designer worried about selling her services to a gay couple (who appear to be fabricated), the court defied every principle of standing. When the court goes beyond actual cases and controversies to answer hypotheticals, it goes beyond its constitutional mandate.
And, worst of all, the newfangled “major questions doctrine” allows the court to subjectively decide when the issue is of “major political salience” (whatever the court says it is); if so, the court demands the application at issue be specifically authorized by statute (a standard lawmakers somehow never meet in this court’s eyes). It has become a crutch whenever the court seeks to invalidate a program it doesn’t like. In the student debt relief case, the court reached the desired result by ignoring the word “waive” in the statute authorizing loan forgiveness to reach the finding that Congress hadn’t delegated power to, well, waive student debt. “The Court once again substitutes itself for Congress and the Executive Branch — and the hundreds of millions of people they represent — in making this Nation’s most important, as well as most contested, policy decisions,” Kagan wrote.
The mumbo-jumbo “major questions doctrine” is not the stuff of judging. No wonder the chief justice got touchy when Kagan pointed out that the court “is supposed to stick to its business — to decide only cases and controversies and to stay away from making this Nation’s policy about subjects like student-loan relief.” What the Slaughter-House Cases and substantive due process were to the New Deal-era right-wing court, the “major questions doctrine" is to the current court: a smokescreen for enforcing a right-wing agenda (or vetoing a progressive one).
In departing from the authentic judicial review, the right-wing majority unsurprisingly produces results perfectly aligned with the right’s agenda on hot-button topics. (By the law of averages, its “analysis” should occasionally favor the other side.) When foretelling a case’s outcome or following the majority’s “reasoning” requires a crib sheet on GOP political aims, something is wrong.
And voters have figured out what’s going on. According to an ABC News-Ipsos poll, 53 percent “believe that the nation’s highest court rules mainly on the basis of their partisan political view rather than on the basis of the law (33%), while 14% say they don’t know.” Before the Dobbs opinion, a separate January 2022 poll showed that “38% of Americans believed that the justices rule mainly on the basis of law, versus 43% who believed that the court rules on the basis of their political views.”
The transformation of the court into a partisan player contradicts the central premise of democracy. We should reject the obtuse and naive argument that this court isn’t so bad because it didn’t entirely obliterate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and declined to impose the outrageous independent state legislature doctrine. Now is no time for self-delusion. Ending the right-wing majority’s intolerable war on self-government will require that the other two branches and the voters cut the court down to size. A single election or a single reform might not suffice. Cogent law review articles, informed public debate and exquisite dissents revealing that the right-wing judicial emperors have no clothes can assist reformers. Term limits, jurisdiction stripping, court expansion and ethics reform should be on the table. Simply put, if we want democracy to survive, each election must be a referendum on the court’s legitimacy.
On this Independence Day, which celebrates rebellion against a monarch lacking consent of the governed, it behooves us to dedicate ourselves to robust and authentic democracy: government of the people, by the people, for the people — not by arrogant right-wing justices.
‘BIDENOMICS’ IS TRANSFORMATIVE. BIDEN NEEDS TO ENSURE VOTERS KNOW IT.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Some presidents don’t have a strong story to tell about their record, so they deflect, distract and demonize their opponents. Other presidents’ records almost speak for themselves. President Biden, however, finds himself in an unusual spot: An economic record that has been working far better than most people anticipated but that the electorate doesn’t yet recognize.
The economy has created 13 million jobs, inflation has been more than cut in half, huge investments are being made in infrastructure and green energy, wage growth has begun to outpace inflation, the first drug price controls are going into effect and the biggest corporations will finally be forced to pay something in federal taxes. Yet polls show voters incorrectly think we are in a recession and remain negative about the economy.
The White House is well aware of the problem.
Beginning this week, the White House is making a focused push to narrow the gap between performance and perception. On Monday, senior Biden advisers Mike Donilon and Anita Dunn released a four-page memo explaining the president’s vision, which they call “Bidenomics.”
Dunn and Donilon wrote, “Bidenomics is rooted in the simple idea that we need to grow the economy from the middle out and the bottom up — not the top down. … Implementing that economic vision and plan — and decisively turning the page on the era of trickle-down economics — has been the defining project of the Biden presidency.” They then ticked off a list of accomplishments: an economic recovery five years earlier than expected, “13 million jobs since the President took office — including nearly 800,000 manufacturing jobs,” a higher job-participation rate for working-age Americans than at anytime in the past 20 years, “transformative investments that are not only bringing back good-paying jobs that don’t require a four-year degree, but also bringing back a sense of pride and dignity to communities across America.”
At the White House on Monday, Biden highlighted the infrastructure bill’s $42 billion investment in fast internet. On Wednesday, he delivered what was billed as a “major” economic address in Chicago. There, he decried trickle-down economics that “failed” the country and the middle class.
His three-part vision: “targeted investment” that encourages private investment (comparing it to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s rural electrification and Dwight D. Eisenhower’s interstate highway program); empowering workers (made-in-America provisions, increasing Pell grants and support for historically Black colleges and universities); and promoting competition (enforcing antitrust rules, cracking down on noncompete clauses, Medicare negotiation for lower drug prices). Biden stressed that the United States is “leading the world economies since the pandemic.” As Biden said, it is “awful hard to demagogue something when it’s working.”
Biden is also emphasizing a break with trickle-down economics, which, he says, increased inequality, sent jobs overseas and hollowed out towns. He argued that ending trickle-down and building up the middle class will also be a recipe for healing divisions.
The media remains fixated on Biden’s failure to sell his program. He should not need to sell a program that already passed. He does need explain what he delivered — without blaming the media for incessantly negative coverage or chalking up the gap between performance and perception to general cynicism about politics (although both are true). Instead of expressing frustration with the electorate, he often sounds like a patient parent, noting with empathy that the country has been through a lot and acknowledging that Americans still feel uneasy about the world.
He is utterly determined to hammer his economic message home between now and Election Day. To help the average voter see what he has gotten (such as cheaper insulin and real wage growth), White House officials are providing a flood of data to highlight the transformative nature of the investments and to personalize Biden’s achievements.
On a macro level, the level of private and public investment in the heartland stand out. Biden insists he is president of the entire country and that he will take care of regions that didn’t vote for him. In that sense, he is building the economy geographically from the “middle out,” as well.
According to a White House fact sheet, the bipartisan infrastructure law has already created 35,000 projects across the country. Its green energy push has spurred more than 150 battery plants and 50 solar plants. “In all, we’ve seen $490 billion in private investment commitments in 21st century industries since the President took office, and inflation-adjusted manufacturing construction spending has grown by nearly 100% in just two years,” the fact sheet announced. “New data … shows the clean energy workforce added nearly 300,000 jobs in 2022 and clean energy jobs grew in every state in America. … Inflation-adjusted income is up 3.5% since the President took office, and low-wage workers have seen the largest wage gains over the last year.”
A recent Treasury Department report emphasized the volume of that investment and the quality of jobs created. “Real manufacturing construction spending has doubled since the end of 2021.” It found: “Within real construction spending on manufacturing, most of the growth has been driven by computer, electronics, and electrical manufacturing. Since the beginning of 2022, real spending on construction for that specific type of manufacturing has nearly quadrupled.” Because such investments increase productivity, the result should be both increased growth and downward pressure on inflation. (It is noteworthy that other industrial countries have not experienced such a boom and have higher inflation and higher unemployment.)
Biden’s success will depend on continued growth, job creation and inflation reduction. But it’s hard to deny the results so far have been impressive. Economists may look back on this time as an inflection point when historic investments ushered in a new era of domestic manufacturing, gave a new lease on life to the Rust Belt and improved the balance sheet of middle-class Americans.
The challenge for Biden, his advisers and surrogates will be to get the public to focus on these developments now, in real time. Because repetition is generally the key to political communication, be prepared to hear Bidenomics again and again over the next 16 months.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Some presidents don’t have a strong story to tell about their record, so they deflect, distract and demonize their opponents. Other presidents’ records almost speak for themselves. President Biden, however, finds himself in an unusual spot: An economic record that has been working far better than most people anticipated but that the electorate doesn’t yet recognize.
The economy has created 13 million jobs, inflation has been more than cut in half, huge investments are being made in infrastructure and green energy, wage growth has begun to outpace inflation, the first drug price controls are going into effect and the biggest corporations will finally be forced to pay something in federal taxes. Yet polls show voters incorrectly think we are in a recession and remain negative about the economy.
The White House is well aware of the problem.
Beginning this week, the White House is making a focused push to narrow the gap between performance and perception. On Monday, senior Biden advisers Mike Donilon and Anita Dunn released a four-page memo explaining the president’s vision, which they call “Bidenomics.”
Dunn and Donilon wrote, “Bidenomics is rooted in the simple idea that we need to grow the economy from the middle out and the bottom up — not the top down. … Implementing that economic vision and plan — and decisively turning the page on the era of trickle-down economics — has been the defining project of the Biden presidency.” They then ticked off a list of accomplishments: an economic recovery five years earlier than expected, “13 million jobs since the President took office — including nearly 800,000 manufacturing jobs,” a higher job-participation rate for working-age Americans than at anytime in the past 20 years, “transformative investments that are not only bringing back good-paying jobs that don’t require a four-year degree, but also bringing back a sense of pride and dignity to communities across America.”
At the White House on Monday, Biden highlighted the infrastructure bill’s $42 billion investment in fast internet. On Wednesday, he delivered what was billed as a “major” economic address in Chicago. There, he decried trickle-down economics that “failed” the country and the middle class.
His three-part vision: “targeted investment” that encourages private investment (comparing it to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s rural electrification and Dwight D. Eisenhower’s interstate highway program); empowering workers (made-in-America provisions, increasing Pell grants and support for historically Black colleges and universities); and promoting competition (enforcing antitrust rules, cracking down on noncompete clauses, Medicare negotiation for lower drug prices). Biden stressed that the United States is “leading the world economies since the pandemic.” As Biden said, it is “awful hard to demagogue something when it’s working.”
Biden is also emphasizing a break with trickle-down economics, which, he says, increased inequality, sent jobs overseas and hollowed out towns. He argued that ending trickle-down and building up the middle class will also be a recipe for healing divisions.
The media remains fixated on Biden’s failure to sell his program. He should not need to sell a program that already passed. He does need explain what he delivered — without blaming the media for incessantly negative coverage or chalking up the gap between performance and perception to general cynicism about politics (although both are true). Instead of expressing frustration with the electorate, he often sounds like a patient parent, noting with empathy that the country has been through a lot and acknowledging that Americans still feel uneasy about the world.
He is utterly determined to hammer his economic message home between now and Election Day. To help the average voter see what he has gotten (such as cheaper insulin and real wage growth), White House officials are providing a flood of data to highlight the transformative nature of the investments and to personalize Biden’s achievements.
On a macro level, the level of private and public investment in the heartland stand out. Biden insists he is president of the entire country and that he will take care of regions that didn’t vote for him. In that sense, he is building the economy geographically from the “middle out,” as well.
According to a White House fact sheet, the bipartisan infrastructure law has already created 35,000 projects across the country. Its green energy push has spurred more than 150 battery plants and 50 solar plants. “In all, we’ve seen $490 billion in private investment commitments in 21st century industries since the President took office, and inflation-adjusted manufacturing construction spending has grown by nearly 100% in just two years,” the fact sheet announced. “New data … shows the clean energy workforce added nearly 300,000 jobs in 2022 and clean energy jobs grew in every state in America. … Inflation-adjusted income is up 3.5% since the President took office, and low-wage workers have seen the largest wage gains over the last year.”
A recent Treasury Department report emphasized the volume of that investment and the quality of jobs created. “Real manufacturing construction spending has doubled since the end of 2021.” It found: “Within real construction spending on manufacturing, most of the growth has been driven by computer, electronics, and electrical manufacturing. Since the beginning of 2022, real spending on construction for that specific type of manufacturing has nearly quadrupled.” Because such investments increase productivity, the result should be both increased growth and downward pressure on inflation. (It is noteworthy that other industrial countries have not experienced such a boom and have higher inflation and higher unemployment.)
Biden’s success will depend on continued growth, job creation and inflation reduction. But it’s hard to deny the results so far have been impressive. Economists may look back on this time as an inflection point when historic investments ushered in a new era of domestic manufacturing, gave a new lease on life to the Rust Belt and improved the balance sheet of middle-class Americans.
The challenge for Biden, his advisers and surrogates will be to get the public to focus on these developments now, in real time. Because repetition is generally the key to political communication, be prepared to hear Bidenomics again and again over the next 16 months.
REPUBLICANS’ ANTI-WOKE, ANTI-VOTE CRUSADE HAS CRASHED INTO THE CONSTITUTION
By Charles M. Blow, The New York Times
Before the dust had cleared on the 2020 election, Republicans in statehouses across the country had already regrouped and coalesced around a core crusade — revived and revitalized — that was anti-woke and anti-vote.
Having lost control of the presidency and Congress, they funneled their quest for control into voting booths, bathrooms, locker rooms, classrooms and doctors’ offices.
If they couldn’t control the highest rungs of power, they would look to exert control over Americans’ lives at the lower rungs. They would come to insert themselves into the most intimate of activities — between voters and ballots, between families and doctors, between teachers and students.
The battle would move from an aerial assault to trench warfare.
In that fight, Arkansas passed the first-in-the-nation law outlawing gender-affirming care for transgender children.
In 2021, Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who is no friend to the queer community, vetoed the bill, saying that it created “new standards of legislative interference with physicians and parents as they deal with some of the most complex and sensitive matters concerning our youths.” He said that the bill positioned “the state as the definitive oracle of medical care, overriding parents, patients and health care experts,” which he called a “vast government overreach.”
Hutchinson — now a long-shot Republican presidential candidate — seemingly understood that the effort was unconstitutional, and came between doctors, families and patients in the same way that Republicans once disingenuously claimed that Obamacare “death panels” would.
Nevertheless, the Arkansas legislature overrode the governor’s veto. The new law was quickly challenged, and last week a federal judge permanently enjoined it, writing that it is, in fact, unconstitutional.
Across states, we’re seeing promising signs that the judiciary may wind up serving as a check on the relentless Republican campaign to disempower and disenfranchise. G.O.P. attempts to impose a kind of semi-fascist federalism is being trumped by our own constitutional democracy.
This month, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction for three trans youths against provisions in a Florida law denying gender affirming care to children, with the judge saying in a scathing opinion that their families are “likely to prevail on their claim that the prohibition is unconstitutional.”
Nearly 20 states have rushed to enact similar laws, seeing political advantage in inflaming culture wars, steamrollering the health and well-being of these children and their constitutional rights.
Last year, after Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas directed his state’s Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate cases of “Texas children being subjected to abusive gender-transitioning procedures,” a state judge issued a temporary injunction blocking some of the inquiries. The judge wrote that without the order, the families would “suffer probable, imminent and irreparable injury in the interim.”
On another note, last week a federal judge temporarily blocked a law that allowed Florida to penalize businesses that allowed children to attend drag performances. The law was written so loosely that some Pride parades in the state were either altered or canceled to avoid running afoul of the law.
This month, a federal judge ruled against a similar anti-drag law in Tennessee, saying the measure “reeks with constitutional maladies of vagueness.”
The same party that argues for parental rights when haranguing and harassing educators about what is being taught and read in the classroom couldn’t care less about the parental rights of those trying to provide the best care for their children or who want their children to have an awareness and understanding of the broad spectrum of humanity and its expressions of love.
The Republican politicians pushing these un-American laws aren’t constitutional absolutists; they’re constitutional opportunists.
The same is true when it comes to elections, where the Republican strategy has become clear: Rather than change their party to appeal more broadly to the electorate, many Republican politicians are whittling away at the electorate and our election architecture, trying to remove or hamstring those aspects of the process that could lead to them losing.
They want to change the very meaning of democracy, shrinking to a government chosen by the chosen, a more originalist version of our system in which only certain people participate.
But again, the judiciary — in this case, the Supreme Court — has stepped in to stop them. The Supreme Court just ruled that a lower court should review Louisiana’s congressional map, which should result in it being redrawn to include an additional majority-Black district, and it has rejected the outrageous “independent state legislature” theory that would have left partisan state legislatures as the final word on federal election administration. Republicans were rebuffed on both turns. The Constitution prevailed.
This should sting for a party that has maintained for decades that it was led by the Constitution.
The Tea Party of the 2000s and early 2010s hailed itself as a constitutional movement, with many adherents professing constitutional originalism as one of its core tenets.
In 2012, the Republican Party platform asserted, “We are the party of the Constitution, the solemn compact which confirms our God-given individual rights and assures that all Americans stand equal before the law.”
The 2016 platform essentially repeated the line, but added, “We reaffirm the Constitution’s fundamental principles: limited government, separation of powers, individual liberty and the rule of law.” (The party didn’t even produce a new platform in 2020.)
Those declarations were never wholly true, but now they’re a mockery. That Republican Party has been swallowed whole the way a cobra swallows a lesser snake. MAGA is ascendant.
By Charles M. Blow, The New York Times
Before the dust had cleared on the 2020 election, Republicans in statehouses across the country had already regrouped and coalesced around a core crusade — revived and revitalized — that was anti-woke and anti-vote.
Having lost control of the presidency and Congress, they funneled their quest for control into voting booths, bathrooms, locker rooms, classrooms and doctors’ offices.
If they couldn’t control the highest rungs of power, they would look to exert control over Americans’ lives at the lower rungs. They would come to insert themselves into the most intimate of activities — between voters and ballots, between families and doctors, between teachers and students.
The battle would move from an aerial assault to trench warfare.
In that fight, Arkansas passed the first-in-the-nation law outlawing gender-affirming care for transgender children.
In 2021, Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who is no friend to the queer community, vetoed the bill, saying that it created “new standards of legislative interference with physicians and parents as they deal with some of the most complex and sensitive matters concerning our youths.” He said that the bill positioned “the state as the definitive oracle of medical care, overriding parents, patients and health care experts,” which he called a “vast government overreach.”
Hutchinson — now a long-shot Republican presidential candidate — seemingly understood that the effort was unconstitutional, and came between doctors, families and patients in the same way that Republicans once disingenuously claimed that Obamacare “death panels” would.
Nevertheless, the Arkansas legislature overrode the governor’s veto. The new law was quickly challenged, and last week a federal judge permanently enjoined it, writing that it is, in fact, unconstitutional.
Across states, we’re seeing promising signs that the judiciary may wind up serving as a check on the relentless Republican campaign to disempower and disenfranchise. G.O.P. attempts to impose a kind of semi-fascist federalism is being trumped by our own constitutional democracy.
This month, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction for three trans youths against provisions in a Florida law denying gender affirming care to children, with the judge saying in a scathing opinion that their families are “likely to prevail on their claim that the prohibition is unconstitutional.”
Nearly 20 states have rushed to enact similar laws, seeing political advantage in inflaming culture wars, steamrollering the health and well-being of these children and their constitutional rights.
Last year, after Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas directed his state’s Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate cases of “Texas children being subjected to abusive gender-transitioning procedures,” a state judge issued a temporary injunction blocking some of the inquiries. The judge wrote that without the order, the families would “suffer probable, imminent and irreparable injury in the interim.”
On another note, last week a federal judge temporarily blocked a law that allowed Florida to penalize businesses that allowed children to attend drag performances. The law was written so loosely that some Pride parades in the state were either altered or canceled to avoid running afoul of the law.
This month, a federal judge ruled against a similar anti-drag law in Tennessee, saying the measure “reeks with constitutional maladies of vagueness.”
The same party that argues for parental rights when haranguing and harassing educators about what is being taught and read in the classroom couldn’t care less about the parental rights of those trying to provide the best care for their children or who want their children to have an awareness and understanding of the broad spectrum of humanity and its expressions of love.
The Republican politicians pushing these un-American laws aren’t constitutional absolutists; they’re constitutional opportunists.
The same is true when it comes to elections, where the Republican strategy has become clear: Rather than change their party to appeal more broadly to the electorate, many Republican politicians are whittling away at the electorate and our election architecture, trying to remove or hamstring those aspects of the process that could lead to them losing.
They want to change the very meaning of democracy, shrinking to a government chosen by the chosen, a more originalist version of our system in which only certain people participate.
But again, the judiciary — in this case, the Supreme Court — has stepped in to stop them. The Supreme Court just ruled that a lower court should review Louisiana’s congressional map, which should result in it being redrawn to include an additional majority-Black district, and it has rejected the outrageous “independent state legislature” theory that would have left partisan state legislatures as the final word on federal election administration. Republicans were rebuffed on both turns. The Constitution prevailed.
This should sting for a party that has maintained for decades that it was led by the Constitution.
The Tea Party of the 2000s and early 2010s hailed itself as a constitutional movement, with many adherents professing constitutional originalism as one of its core tenets.
In 2012, the Republican Party platform asserted, “We are the party of the Constitution, the solemn compact which confirms our God-given individual rights and assures that all Americans stand equal before the law.”
The 2016 platform essentially repeated the line, but added, “We reaffirm the Constitution’s fundamental principles: limited government, separation of powers, individual liberty and the rule of law.” (The party didn’t even produce a new platform in 2020.)
Those declarations were never wholly true, but now they’re a mockery. That Republican Party has been swallowed whole the way a cobra swallows a lesser snake. MAGA is ascendant.
A HANDY GUIDE TO THE REPUBLICAN DEFINITION OF A CRIME
By David Firestone, The New York Times
If you think Republicans are still members of the law-and-order party, you haven’t been paying close attention lately. Since the rise of Donald Trump, the Republican definition of a crime has veered sharply from the law books and become extremely selective. For readers confused about the party’s new positions on law and order, here’s a guide to what today’s Republicans consider a crime, and what they do not.
Not a crime: Federal crimes.
All federal crimes are charged and prosecuted by the Department of Justice. Now that Republicans believe the department has been weaponized into a Democratic Party strike force, particularly against Mr. Trump, its prosecutions can no longer be trusted. “The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida recently tweeted.
The F.B.I., which investigates many federal crimes, has also become corrupted by the same political forces. “The F.B.I. has become a political weapon for the ruling elite rather than an impartial, law-enforcement agency,” said Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the right-wing Heritage Foundation.
And because tax crimes are not real crimes, Republicans have fought for years to slash the number of I.R.S. investigators who fight against cheating.
Crime: State and local crimes, if they happen in an urban area or in states run by Democrats.
“There is a brutal crime wave gripping Democrat-run New York City,” the Republican National Committee wrote last year. “And it’s not just New York. In 2021, violent crime spiked across the country, with 14 major Democrat-run cities setting new record highs for homicide.” (In fact, the crime rate went up in the city during the pandemic, as it did almost everywhere, but it has already begun to recede, and remains far lower than its peak in the 1990s. New York continues to be one of the safest big cities in the United States.)
Crime is so bad in many cities, Republican state leaders say, that they have been forced to try to remove local prosecutors who are letting it happen. Some of these moves, however, are entirely political; a New York Times investigation found no connection between the policies of a prosecutor removed by Mr. DeSantis and the local crime rate.
Not a crime: Any crime that happens in rural areas or in states run by Republicans.
Between 2000 and 2021, the per capita murder rate in states that voted for Donald Trump was 23 percent higher than in states that voted for Joe Biden, according to one major study. The gap is growing, and it is visible even in the rural areas of Trump states.
But this didn’t come up when a Trump ally, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, held a hearing in New York in April to blast Manhattan’s prosecutor for being lax on crime, even though rates for all seven major crime categories are higher in Ohio than in New York City. Nor does House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — who tweets about Democratic “lawlessness” — talk about the per capita homicide rate in Bakersfield, Calif., which he represents, which has been the highest in California for years and is higher than New York City’s.
Crime: What they imagine Hunter Biden did.
The Republican fantasy, being actively pursued by the House Oversight Committee, is that Hunter Biden and his father, President Biden, engaged in “influence peddling” by cashing in on the family name through foreign business deals. Republicans have yet to discover a single piece of evidence proving this theory, but they appear to have no doubt it really happened.
Not a crime: What Hunter Biden will actually plead guilty to.
Specifically: two misdemeanor counts of failing to pay his taxes on time. Because tax crimes are not real crimes to Republicans, the charges are thus proof of a sweetheart deal to let the president’s son off easy, when they would prefer he be charged with bribery and other forms of corruption. Mr. Trump said the plea amounted to a “traffic ticket.” The government also charged Mr. Biden with a handgun-related crime (though it said it would not prosecute this charge); gun-purchasing crimes are also not considered real crimes.
Also not a crime: What the Trump family did.
There is vast evidence of actual influence-peddling and self-dealing by the Trump family and the Trump Organization during and after Mr. Trump’s presidency, which would seem to violate the emoluments clause of the Constitution and any number of federal ethics guidelines. Just last week The Times published new details of Mr. Trump’s entanglement with the government of Oman, which will bring his company millions of dollars from a Mideast power player even as he runs for re-election.
Crime: Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.
“Hillary Clinton used a hammer to destroy evidence of a private e-mail server and classified information on that server and was never indicted,” wrote Nancy Mace, a Republican congresswoman from South Carolina. In fact, a three-year State Department investigation found that instances of classified information being deliberately transmitted on Mrs. Clinton’s server were a “rare exception,” and determined that “there was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.”
Not a crime: Donald Trump’s mishandling of government secrets.
The Justice Department has accused Mr. Trump of willfully purloining classified documents from the White House — including top military secrets — and then lying about having them and refusing the government’s demands that they be returned. Nonetheless, former Vice President Mike Pence warned against indicting his old boss because it would be “terribly divisive,” and Mr. McCarthy said “this judgment is wrong by this D.O.J.” because it treats Mr. Trump differently than other officials in the same position. (Except no other official has ever been in the same position, refusing to return classified material that was improperly taken from the White House.)
Crime: Any urban disruption that occurred during the protests after George Floyd was killed.
Republicans have long claimed that the federal government turned a blind eye to widespread violence during the 2020 protests, and in 2021 five Republican senators accused the Justice Department of an “apparent unwillingness to punish these individuals.” In fact, though the protests were largely peaceful, The Associated Press found that more than 120 defendants around the country pleaded guilty or were convicted of federal crimes related to the protests, including rioting, arson and conspiracy, and that scores received significant prison terms.
Not a crime: The invasion of the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Many Republicans are brushing aside the insurrection that occurred when hundreds of people, egged on by Mr. Trump, tried to stop the certification of the 2020 electoral votes. “It was not an insurrection,” said Andrew Clyde, a Republican congressman from Georgia, who said many rioters seemed to be on a “normal tourist visit.” Paul Gosar, a Republican congressman from Arizona, described Jan. 6 defendants as “political prisoners” who were being “persecuted” by federal prosecutors. Mr. Trump said he was inclined to pardon many of the more than 600 people convicted, and Mr. DeSantis said he was open to the possibility of pardoning any Jan. 6 defendant who was the victim of a politicized or weaponized prosecution, including Mr. Trump.
Crime against children: Abortion and transgender care.
Performing most abortions is now a crime in 14 states, and 20 states have banned or restricted gender-affirming care for transgender minors (though some of those bans have been blocked in court).
Not a crime against children: The possession of guns that kill them.
The sale or possession of assault weapons, used in so many school shootings, is permitted by federal law, even though the leading cause of death for American children is now firearms-related incidents. Republicans will also not pass a federal law requiring gun owners to store their weapons safely, away from children. It is not a federal crime for unlicensed gun dealers to sell a gun without a background check, which is how millions of guns are sold each year.
Any questions? Better not call CrimeStoppers.
By David Firestone, The New York Times
If you think Republicans are still members of the law-and-order party, you haven’t been paying close attention lately. Since the rise of Donald Trump, the Republican definition of a crime has veered sharply from the law books and become extremely selective. For readers confused about the party’s new positions on law and order, here’s a guide to what today’s Republicans consider a crime, and what they do not.
Not a crime: Federal crimes.
All federal crimes are charged and prosecuted by the Department of Justice. Now that Republicans believe the department has been weaponized into a Democratic Party strike force, particularly against Mr. Trump, its prosecutions can no longer be trusted. “The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida recently tweeted.
The F.B.I., which investigates many federal crimes, has also become corrupted by the same political forces. “The F.B.I. has become a political weapon for the ruling elite rather than an impartial, law-enforcement agency,” said Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the right-wing Heritage Foundation.
And because tax crimes are not real crimes, Republicans have fought for years to slash the number of I.R.S. investigators who fight against cheating.
Crime: State and local crimes, if they happen in an urban area or in states run by Democrats.
“There is a brutal crime wave gripping Democrat-run New York City,” the Republican National Committee wrote last year. “And it’s not just New York. In 2021, violent crime spiked across the country, with 14 major Democrat-run cities setting new record highs for homicide.” (In fact, the crime rate went up in the city during the pandemic, as it did almost everywhere, but it has already begun to recede, and remains far lower than its peak in the 1990s. New York continues to be one of the safest big cities in the United States.)
Crime is so bad in many cities, Republican state leaders say, that they have been forced to try to remove local prosecutors who are letting it happen. Some of these moves, however, are entirely political; a New York Times investigation found no connection between the policies of a prosecutor removed by Mr. DeSantis and the local crime rate.
Not a crime: Any crime that happens in rural areas or in states run by Republicans.
Between 2000 and 2021, the per capita murder rate in states that voted for Donald Trump was 23 percent higher than in states that voted for Joe Biden, according to one major study. The gap is growing, and it is visible even in the rural areas of Trump states.
But this didn’t come up when a Trump ally, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, held a hearing in New York in April to blast Manhattan’s prosecutor for being lax on crime, even though rates for all seven major crime categories are higher in Ohio than in New York City. Nor does House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — who tweets about Democratic “lawlessness” — talk about the per capita homicide rate in Bakersfield, Calif., which he represents, which has been the highest in California for years and is higher than New York City’s.
Crime: What they imagine Hunter Biden did.
The Republican fantasy, being actively pursued by the House Oversight Committee, is that Hunter Biden and his father, President Biden, engaged in “influence peddling” by cashing in on the family name through foreign business deals. Republicans have yet to discover a single piece of evidence proving this theory, but they appear to have no doubt it really happened.
Not a crime: What Hunter Biden will actually plead guilty to.
Specifically: two misdemeanor counts of failing to pay his taxes on time. Because tax crimes are not real crimes to Republicans, the charges are thus proof of a sweetheart deal to let the president’s son off easy, when they would prefer he be charged with bribery and other forms of corruption. Mr. Trump said the plea amounted to a “traffic ticket.” The government also charged Mr. Biden with a handgun-related crime (though it said it would not prosecute this charge); gun-purchasing crimes are also not considered real crimes.
Also not a crime: What the Trump family did.
There is vast evidence of actual influence-peddling and self-dealing by the Trump family and the Trump Organization during and after Mr. Trump’s presidency, which would seem to violate the emoluments clause of the Constitution and any number of federal ethics guidelines. Just last week The Times published new details of Mr. Trump’s entanglement with the government of Oman, which will bring his company millions of dollars from a Mideast power player even as he runs for re-election.
Crime: Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.
“Hillary Clinton used a hammer to destroy evidence of a private e-mail server and classified information on that server and was never indicted,” wrote Nancy Mace, a Republican congresswoman from South Carolina. In fact, a three-year State Department investigation found that instances of classified information being deliberately transmitted on Mrs. Clinton’s server were a “rare exception,” and determined that “there was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.”
Not a crime: Donald Trump’s mishandling of government secrets.
The Justice Department has accused Mr. Trump of willfully purloining classified documents from the White House — including top military secrets — and then lying about having them and refusing the government’s demands that they be returned. Nonetheless, former Vice President Mike Pence warned against indicting his old boss because it would be “terribly divisive,” and Mr. McCarthy said “this judgment is wrong by this D.O.J.” because it treats Mr. Trump differently than other officials in the same position. (Except no other official has ever been in the same position, refusing to return classified material that was improperly taken from the White House.)
Crime: Any urban disruption that occurred during the protests after George Floyd was killed.
Republicans have long claimed that the federal government turned a blind eye to widespread violence during the 2020 protests, and in 2021 five Republican senators accused the Justice Department of an “apparent unwillingness to punish these individuals.” In fact, though the protests were largely peaceful, The Associated Press found that more than 120 defendants around the country pleaded guilty or were convicted of federal crimes related to the protests, including rioting, arson and conspiracy, and that scores received significant prison terms.
Not a crime: The invasion of the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Many Republicans are brushing aside the insurrection that occurred when hundreds of people, egged on by Mr. Trump, tried to stop the certification of the 2020 electoral votes. “It was not an insurrection,” said Andrew Clyde, a Republican congressman from Georgia, who said many rioters seemed to be on a “normal tourist visit.” Paul Gosar, a Republican congressman from Arizona, described Jan. 6 defendants as “political prisoners” who were being “persecuted” by federal prosecutors. Mr. Trump said he was inclined to pardon many of the more than 600 people convicted, and Mr. DeSantis said he was open to the possibility of pardoning any Jan. 6 defendant who was the victim of a politicized or weaponized prosecution, including Mr. Trump.
Crime against children: Abortion and transgender care.
Performing most abortions is now a crime in 14 states, and 20 states have banned or restricted gender-affirming care for transgender minors (though some of those bans have been blocked in court).
Not a crime against children: The possession of guns that kill them.
The sale or possession of assault weapons, used in so many school shootings, is permitted by federal law, even though the leading cause of death for American children is now firearms-related incidents. Republicans will also not pass a federal law requiring gun owners to store their weapons safely, away from children. It is not a federal crime for unlicensed gun dealers to sell a gun without a background check, which is how millions of guns are sold each year.
Any questions? Better not call CrimeStoppers.
IT’S ALMOST LIKE THE HOUSE GOP NEVER CARED ABOUT DEFICITS AFTER ALL
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
In the weeks since threatening to cause a global economic crisis over their avowed desire to reduce deficits, Republican lawmakers are again pushing legislation that would increase deficits.
By billions upon billions of dollars.
On Thursday, for instance, a House appropriations subcommittee marked up a bill covering Internal Revenue Service funding for fiscal year 2024. This legislation would slash more than $1 billion — roughly 9 percent of annual funding — from the agency relative to last year. After adjusting for inflation, the IRS would be down to its lowest annual appropriations levels so far this century.
Now, if you hear “spending cuts to [x government agency]” and assume “Oh, surely that will save money,” I’m sorry to say you are mistaken here.
Unlike most kinds of government spending, each dollar spent on the IRS leads to much more than a dollar flowing back into government coffers, especially when the IRS would use that funding to collect unpaid taxes. Which this spending would: The GOP-proposed cuts specifically target IRS enforcement efforts. The Treasury Department projects that this latest GOP proposal to siphon resources away from IRS enforcement would result in an $8.6 billion loss of revenue, by limiting the agency’s ability to audit high-income and corporate tax dodgers.
Also, to be clear (since it can be hard to keep track): This newly proposed IRS budget cut should not be confused with a previous $1.4 trillion that Congress rescinded from IRS budgets in its recent debt limit legislation, via another law enacted three weeks ago. Both of those cuts are also wholly distinct from the $20 billion in mandatory-spending cuts from the IRS budget that Congress and the White House agreed to in a side deal last month.
That is: These are three separate GOP-led efforts to hack away at the federal government’s primary means of funding itself. Death by a thousand cuts, indeed.
This latest round of IRS-related legislation has some anti-consumer measures in it, too. For example, it would expressly prohibit the IRS from using any of its funding to develop its own free, public, electronic tax-return-filing service, as it currently plans to pilot next year.
This IRS bill is not the only legislative development of late that might lead reasonable people to doubt the GOP’s alleged commitment to fiscal responsibility.
Earlier this month, the GOP-controlled House Ways and Means Committee introduced a sweeping new tax bill called the “American Families and Jobs Act.” While that legislation would do little to help “families” — it would not, for example, revive the expanded child tax credit, which had slashed child-poverty levels before its recent expiration — it does cut tax levels pretty much across the board for the next few of years. The legislation would restore some large business tax breaks that had recently lapsed, even making those tax cuts retroactive. It would also increase the standard deduction.
To reiterate: After (correctly!) reminding Americans that our government is too large relative to the amount of tax revenue coming in, Republicans respond to this challenge by … draining tax revenue further.
Overall (and including GOP plans to rescind some clean-energy tax breaks), the tax bill would cost roughly $80 billion over a decade with interest, according to an estimate from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
But that figure arguably understates the cost of these measures.
Why? Because the bill’s biggest tax breaks officially expire at the end of 2025, to make the legislation look less expensive. Come 2025, Republicans are widely expected to push for extending these tax breaks yet again, just as they always have. If the temporary measures are eventually made permanent, this GOP tax plan would cost more than $1.1 trillion over the course of a decade.
At least Biden has some kind of budget, a general statement of what gets funded and how much. Republicans, on the other hand, still do not. Unless you count the “blueprint” released recently by the Republican Study Committee, a subset of the House coalition. Note that the document includes some policy changes (including to Social Security and Medicare) that Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) had explicitly ruled out early this year.
Republicans don’t care enough about deficits to do anything at all — or even pretend to.
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
In the weeks since threatening to cause a global economic crisis over their avowed desire to reduce deficits, Republican lawmakers are again pushing legislation that would increase deficits.
By billions upon billions of dollars.
On Thursday, for instance, a House appropriations subcommittee marked up a bill covering Internal Revenue Service funding for fiscal year 2024. This legislation would slash more than $1 billion — roughly 9 percent of annual funding — from the agency relative to last year. After adjusting for inflation, the IRS would be down to its lowest annual appropriations levels so far this century.
Now, if you hear “spending cuts to [x government agency]” and assume “Oh, surely that will save money,” I’m sorry to say you are mistaken here.
Unlike most kinds of government spending, each dollar spent on the IRS leads to much more than a dollar flowing back into government coffers, especially when the IRS would use that funding to collect unpaid taxes. Which this spending would: The GOP-proposed cuts specifically target IRS enforcement efforts. The Treasury Department projects that this latest GOP proposal to siphon resources away from IRS enforcement would result in an $8.6 billion loss of revenue, by limiting the agency’s ability to audit high-income and corporate tax dodgers.
Also, to be clear (since it can be hard to keep track): This newly proposed IRS budget cut should not be confused with a previous $1.4 trillion that Congress rescinded from IRS budgets in its recent debt limit legislation, via another law enacted three weeks ago. Both of those cuts are also wholly distinct from the $20 billion in mandatory-spending cuts from the IRS budget that Congress and the White House agreed to in a side deal last month.
That is: These are three separate GOP-led efforts to hack away at the federal government’s primary means of funding itself. Death by a thousand cuts, indeed.
This latest round of IRS-related legislation has some anti-consumer measures in it, too. For example, it would expressly prohibit the IRS from using any of its funding to develop its own free, public, electronic tax-return-filing service, as it currently plans to pilot next year.
This IRS bill is not the only legislative development of late that might lead reasonable people to doubt the GOP’s alleged commitment to fiscal responsibility.
Earlier this month, the GOP-controlled House Ways and Means Committee introduced a sweeping new tax bill called the “American Families and Jobs Act.” While that legislation would do little to help “families” — it would not, for example, revive the expanded child tax credit, which had slashed child-poverty levels before its recent expiration — it does cut tax levels pretty much across the board for the next few of years. The legislation would restore some large business tax breaks that had recently lapsed, even making those tax cuts retroactive. It would also increase the standard deduction.
To reiterate: After (correctly!) reminding Americans that our government is too large relative to the amount of tax revenue coming in, Republicans respond to this challenge by … draining tax revenue further.
Overall (and including GOP plans to rescind some clean-energy tax breaks), the tax bill would cost roughly $80 billion over a decade with interest, according to an estimate from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
But that figure arguably understates the cost of these measures.
Why? Because the bill’s biggest tax breaks officially expire at the end of 2025, to make the legislation look less expensive. Come 2025, Republicans are widely expected to push for extending these tax breaks yet again, just as they always have. If the temporary measures are eventually made permanent, this GOP tax plan would cost more than $1.1 trillion over the course of a decade.
At least Biden has some kind of budget, a general statement of what gets funded and how much. Republicans, on the other hand, still do not. Unless you count the “blueprint” released recently by the Republican Study Committee, a subset of the House coalition. Note that the document includes some policy changes (including to Social Security and Medicare) that Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) had explicitly ruled out early this year.
Republicans don’t care enough about deficits to do anything at all — or even pretend to.
SHELDON WHITEHOUSE WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG: THE SUPREME COURT IS CORRUPT
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse has been arguing for years that a flood of “dark money” flowing through right-wing front groups has corrupted the Supreme Court. Never has there been more evidence to bolster his claim.
Whitehouse (D-R.I.) told me in an extensive phone interview last week that Justice Samuel A. Alito’s Jr.’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal intending to pre-but a ProPublica story revealing he failed to disclose gifts from billionaire and right-wing donor Paul Singer and recuse from a case involving Singer was “very, very weird.” And it was not merely because he took to the op-ed pages of a sympathetic right-wing Rupert Murdoch newspaper as though he were a panicky politician trying to control the damage. (If that were his intent, it horribly backfired because the stunt only called attention to his angry response and the underlying charges. He managed to make it front-page news. "“If you were filing a pleading, this would have pretty much failed,” Whitehouse observed.)
The senator ticked off the problems with Alito’s argument: factual omissions (e.g., the standard for exempt gifts does not include transportation); Alito’s lame effort to turn an airplane into a “facility” to jam it into an exempt-gift category (“It doesn’t pass the laugh test,” Whitehouse said); Alito’s plea that he couldn’t possibly have known Singer had a financial stake ($2 billion) in the outcome of a case before the court (although it was widely reported in the media); and the insistence that yet another billionaire was a “friend,” which somehow absolved him from his obligation to report gifts of “hospitality.” And, Whitehouse argued, it strains credulity that Alito (like Justice Clarence Thomas) could be confused about reporting requirements when there is a Financial Disclosure Committee expressly set up to help judges navigate these issues.
All in all, the poorly reasoned argument amounted to what Whitehouse called “a painful exhibit for an actual ethics code.” A bill he co-authored with Judiciary Chairman Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), set to be marked up after July 4, would confirm that the code of ethics applicable to all judges applies to the high court, set up a process for screening ethics complaints and allow chief judges of the circuit to advise on how their circuits handle similar matters. This is “not remotely unconstitutional,” he noted. (Whitehouse wryly remarked that the last thing the justices want is a comparison to circuit courts’ conduct. “The best way to show that a stick is crooked is to lay a straight stick alongside it,” he said.) Whitehouse is merely asking for the court to develop a process that the judicial branch would oversee for the sake of restoring confidence in the Supreme Court.
Yet another poll, this time from Quinnipiac, shows the court’s approval at an all-time low — 29 percent. Don’t they care? Whitehouse surmises that some justices resent anyone questioning their conduct. But, more troubling, he worries that the chief justice has yet to promise a mandatory ethics scheme nor has there been “a chink in the Omerta armor” of the other justices. Any one of them could come forward to acknowledge the problem.
When asked to testify before Congress on ethics reform, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. — who heads the Judicial Conference, an entity created by Congress and dedicated to court administration — refused to come. Mind you, Roberts was not being asked to testify not about the court’s decisions or internal debates but about his own administrative role. Whitehouse said that Roberts’s refusal was “astonishing.”
Whitehouse has long maintained that the court’s unprincipled, outcome-oriented and partisan decision-making is very much linked to the ethics problems. “The ethics problem is not just relevant to expensive gifts and fancy vacations,” he told me. The ethics issues “don’t occur in a vacuum,” he said. They point to “a bigger enterprise whose purpose is to capture the court.”
Whitehouse explained that dark-money groups such as the Federalist Society, led for years by Leonard Leo, put together a list of acceptable high court nominees from which President Donald Trump picked three justices. A closely aligned entity, the Judicial Crisis Network, spent millions to help get the justices confirmed (while donating to Senate Republicans to guarantee their support). Leo and others in dark-money groups filed amicus briefs to advance their agenda. And then Leo set up cozy connections between the billionaire donors and the justices for “hospitality” from their “friends.” Leo arranged Alito’s fishing jaunt and helped set up Thomas with billionaire Harlan Crow. If you put together billionaires, dark money and “phony front groups,” you wind up in a “whole new world,” he argued.
Even if Whitehouse’s ideal ethics bill got passed (currently impossible with the GOP majority in the House and the filibuster in the Senate), major problems would remain with the court. Whitehouse does not — for now — want to “get out over our skis” in jumping to court expansion, one proposed solution to the court’s issues. The country isn’t there yet, in his view. However, “The public knows enough about the troubles at the court to support reasonable term limits.”
Whitehouse is well aware that the constitutionality of a statute imposing term limits would be challenged and, yes, would likely find its way up to this very Supreme Court. However, a case would likely start in district court and advance to a circuit court before reaching the high court. There would be full briefing, a factual record and decisions by lower courts. If, after all that, the Supreme Court nixed a widely popular term limits law, the public outrage and academic criticism would be intense. Indeed, the appetite for expanding the court might grow.
Despite this dreary and depressing state of affairs, Whitehouse remains undaunted. “We’re still finding out the facts,” he told me regarding the latest ethics scandal. He said he is confident that as the full story is brought before the public, the impetus to act on court reform, at least among Democrats, will intensify.
In the meantime, the best argument for court reform comes from Alito, whose arrogant, slipshod and unconvincing defense makes him the poster boy for serious court reform.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse has been arguing for years that a flood of “dark money” flowing through right-wing front groups has corrupted the Supreme Court. Never has there been more evidence to bolster his claim.
Whitehouse (D-R.I.) told me in an extensive phone interview last week that Justice Samuel A. Alito’s Jr.’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal intending to pre-but a ProPublica story revealing he failed to disclose gifts from billionaire and right-wing donor Paul Singer and recuse from a case involving Singer was “very, very weird.” And it was not merely because he took to the op-ed pages of a sympathetic right-wing Rupert Murdoch newspaper as though he were a panicky politician trying to control the damage. (If that were his intent, it horribly backfired because the stunt only called attention to his angry response and the underlying charges. He managed to make it front-page news. "“If you were filing a pleading, this would have pretty much failed,” Whitehouse observed.)
The senator ticked off the problems with Alito’s argument: factual omissions (e.g., the standard for exempt gifts does not include transportation); Alito’s lame effort to turn an airplane into a “facility” to jam it into an exempt-gift category (“It doesn’t pass the laugh test,” Whitehouse said); Alito’s plea that he couldn’t possibly have known Singer had a financial stake ($2 billion) in the outcome of a case before the court (although it was widely reported in the media); and the insistence that yet another billionaire was a “friend,” which somehow absolved him from his obligation to report gifts of “hospitality.” And, Whitehouse argued, it strains credulity that Alito (like Justice Clarence Thomas) could be confused about reporting requirements when there is a Financial Disclosure Committee expressly set up to help judges navigate these issues.
All in all, the poorly reasoned argument amounted to what Whitehouse called “a painful exhibit for an actual ethics code.” A bill he co-authored with Judiciary Chairman Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), set to be marked up after July 4, would confirm that the code of ethics applicable to all judges applies to the high court, set up a process for screening ethics complaints and allow chief judges of the circuit to advise on how their circuits handle similar matters. This is “not remotely unconstitutional,” he noted. (Whitehouse wryly remarked that the last thing the justices want is a comparison to circuit courts’ conduct. “The best way to show that a stick is crooked is to lay a straight stick alongside it,” he said.) Whitehouse is merely asking for the court to develop a process that the judicial branch would oversee for the sake of restoring confidence in the Supreme Court.
Yet another poll, this time from Quinnipiac, shows the court’s approval at an all-time low — 29 percent. Don’t they care? Whitehouse surmises that some justices resent anyone questioning their conduct. But, more troubling, he worries that the chief justice has yet to promise a mandatory ethics scheme nor has there been “a chink in the Omerta armor” of the other justices. Any one of them could come forward to acknowledge the problem.
When asked to testify before Congress on ethics reform, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. — who heads the Judicial Conference, an entity created by Congress and dedicated to court administration — refused to come. Mind you, Roberts was not being asked to testify not about the court’s decisions or internal debates but about his own administrative role. Whitehouse said that Roberts’s refusal was “astonishing.”
Whitehouse has long maintained that the court’s unprincipled, outcome-oriented and partisan decision-making is very much linked to the ethics problems. “The ethics problem is not just relevant to expensive gifts and fancy vacations,” he told me. The ethics issues “don’t occur in a vacuum,” he said. They point to “a bigger enterprise whose purpose is to capture the court.”
Whitehouse explained that dark-money groups such as the Federalist Society, led for years by Leonard Leo, put together a list of acceptable high court nominees from which President Donald Trump picked three justices. A closely aligned entity, the Judicial Crisis Network, spent millions to help get the justices confirmed (while donating to Senate Republicans to guarantee their support). Leo and others in dark-money groups filed amicus briefs to advance their agenda. And then Leo set up cozy connections between the billionaire donors and the justices for “hospitality” from their “friends.” Leo arranged Alito’s fishing jaunt and helped set up Thomas with billionaire Harlan Crow. If you put together billionaires, dark money and “phony front groups,” you wind up in a “whole new world,” he argued.
Even if Whitehouse’s ideal ethics bill got passed (currently impossible with the GOP majority in the House and the filibuster in the Senate), major problems would remain with the court. Whitehouse does not — for now — want to “get out over our skis” in jumping to court expansion, one proposed solution to the court’s issues. The country isn’t there yet, in his view. However, “The public knows enough about the troubles at the court to support reasonable term limits.”
Whitehouse is well aware that the constitutionality of a statute imposing term limits would be challenged and, yes, would likely find its way up to this very Supreme Court. However, a case would likely start in district court and advance to a circuit court before reaching the high court. There would be full briefing, a factual record and decisions by lower courts. If, after all that, the Supreme Court nixed a widely popular term limits law, the public outrage and academic criticism would be intense. Indeed, the appetite for expanding the court might grow.
Despite this dreary and depressing state of affairs, Whitehouse remains undaunted. “We’re still finding out the facts,” he told me regarding the latest ethics scandal. He said he is confident that as the full story is brought before the public, the impetus to act on court reform, at least among Democrats, will intensify.
In the meantime, the best argument for court reform comes from Alito, whose arrogant, slipshod and unconvincing defense makes him the poster boy for serious court reform.
TRUMP, THE WORST BOSS YOU’VE EVER HAD
By Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times
Donald Trump did not — and does not — recognize any distinction between himself and the office of the presidency. He is it and it is him.
This view is as close a fundamental rejection of American constitutionalism as you can imagine — and it helps explain much of the former president’s behavior in and out of office. It is why he could not abide any opposition to anything he tried to pursue, why he raged against the “deep state,” why he strained against every limit on his authority, why he rejected the very idea that he could lose the 2020 presidential election and why he decided he could simply take classified documents to his home in Florida.
For Trump, he is the president. He is the government. The documents, in his mind, belonged to him.
What this means in practical terms is that as Trump runs for president, he has promised to bring key parts of the federal government under his control as soon as he takes office. He wants to clear out as much of the executive branch as possible and swap professionals for true believers — a new crop of officials whose chief loyalty is to the power and authority of Donald Trump, rather than their office or the letter of the law. And in particular, Trump wants to clear house at the Department of Justice, which is investigating him for mishandling those documents.
Trump cannot tolerate the existence of an independent Justice Department, and so, if made president again, he’ll simply put it under his thumb.
Obviously, if it is a preoccupation for Trump, it is a preoccupation for the Republican Party. And in addition to covering for the former president in the face of federal charges, the other Republicans vying for the nomination have adopted his view that the independence of federal law enforcement violates his (and potentially their) authority as president.
Ron DeSantis — whose tight grip on the operations of government has been a hallmark of his tenure as governor of Florida — made his distaste for an independent law enforcement apparatus clear in a set of recent comments. “I think presidents have bought into this canard that they’re independent, and that’s one of the reasons why they’ve accumulated so much power over the years,” he said of the Justice Department. “We will use the lawful authority that we have.”
Former Vice President Mike Pence has promised to “clean house at the highest levels of the Justice Department” if elected president. “Lady Justice is blind,” Pence said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “And there are tens of millions of Americans who have reason to believe that the blinders have been taken off and that we haven’t seen equal treatment under the law.”
Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina has said, similarly, that if elected president, he will “clean out the political appointments in the Department of Justice to restore confidence and integrity in the D.O.J.”
As to what ends? It is not hard to imagine a world where a second-term President Trump orders a newly purged and reconstituted Justice Department to investigate any group or individual that happens to be a target of MAGA rage, whether they broke the law or not.
Trump has upended nearly half a century of tradition with his contempt for the idea that law enforcement ought to remain separate and independent of the White House. But his actions grow naturally from an increasingly vocal faction within the conservative movement, as well as reflect a key change in the nature and composition of the Republican coalition.
With regard to the former, there is the recent enthusiasm among so-called nationalist or populist conservatives for using the state to enforce a particular social order. And with regard to the latter, there is the way that, influenced by Trump, the Republican Party has begun to take on the values and attitudes of the small-time capitalist and the family firm.
Of course, business owners have always been a critical part of state and local Republican politics. The nation’s state legislatures and county boards of supervisors are full of the proprietors of family-owned car dealerships, fast food franchises, construction companies, landscaping businesses and regional distribution firms. And in fact, many of the most visible and important families in conservative politics have their own family firms, albeit supersized ones: the Kochs, the DeVoses, the Crows and the Trumps.
Among the elements that distinguish this closely held model of ownership from that of, say, a multinational corporation is the degree to which the business is understood to be an extension of the business owner, who appears to exercise total authority over the place of production, except in cases where the employees have a union (one of the many reasons members of this class are often intensely and exceptionally anti-labor).
If the nature of our work shapes our values — if the habits of mind we cultivate on the job extend to our lives beyond it — then someone in a position of total control over a closely held business like, say, the Trump empire might bring those attitudes, those same habits and pathologies, to political office.
Donald Trump certainly did, and as the Republican Party has come to shape itself around his person, it has also adopted his worldview, which is to say, the worldview and ideology of the boss. No longer content to run government for business, the Republican Party now hopes to run government as a business.
But this doesn’t mean greater efficiency or responsiveness or whatever else most people (mistakenly) associate with private industry. It means, instead, government as the fief of a small-business tyrant.
The next Republican president, in short, will almost certainly be the worst boss you, and American democracy, have ever had.
By Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times
Donald Trump did not — and does not — recognize any distinction between himself and the office of the presidency. He is it and it is him.
This view is as close a fundamental rejection of American constitutionalism as you can imagine — and it helps explain much of the former president’s behavior in and out of office. It is why he could not abide any opposition to anything he tried to pursue, why he raged against the “deep state,” why he strained against every limit on his authority, why he rejected the very idea that he could lose the 2020 presidential election and why he decided he could simply take classified documents to his home in Florida.
For Trump, he is the president. He is the government. The documents, in his mind, belonged to him.
What this means in practical terms is that as Trump runs for president, he has promised to bring key parts of the federal government under his control as soon as he takes office. He wants to clear out as much of the executive branch as possible and swap professionals for true believers — a new crop of officials whose chief loyalty is to the power and authority of Donald Trump, rather than their office or the letter of the law. And in particular, Trump wants to clear house at the Department of Justice, which is investigating him for mishandling those documents.
Trump cannot tolerate the existence of an independent Justice Department, and so, if made president again, he’ll simply put it under his thumb.
Obviously, if it is a preoccupation for Trump, it is a preoccupation for the Republican Party. And in addition to covering for the former president in the face of federal charges, the other Republicans vying for the nomination have adopted his view that the independence of federal law enforcement violates his (and potentially their) authority as president.
Ron DeSantis — whose tight grip on the operations of government has been a hallmark of his tenure as governor of Florida — made his distaste for an independent law enforcement apparatus clear in a set of recent comments. “I think presidents have bought into this canard that they’re independent, and that’s one of the reasons why they’ve accumulated so much power over the years,” he said of the Justice Department. “We will use the lawful authority that we have.”
Former Vice President Mike Pence has promised to “clean house at the highest levels of the Justice Department” if elected president. “Lady Justice is blind,” Pence said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “And there are tens of millions of Americans who have reason to believe that the blinders have been taken off and that we haven’t seen equal treatment under the law.”
Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina has said, similarly, that if elected president, he will “clean out the political appointments in the Department of Justice to restore confidence and integrity in the D.O.J.”
As to what ends? It is not hard to imagine a world where a second-term President Trump orders a newly purged and reconstituted Justice Department to investigate any group or individual that happens to be a target of MAGA rage, whether they broke the law or not.
Trump has upended nearly half a century of tradition with his contempt for the idea that law enforcement ought to remain separate and independent of the White House. But his actions grow naturally from an increasingly vocal faction within the conservative movement, as well as reflect a key change in the nature and composition of the Republican coalition.
With regard to the former, there is the recent enthusiasm among so-called nationalist or populist conservatives for using the state to enforce a particular social order. And with regard to the latter, there is the way that, influenced by Trump, the Republican Party has begun to take on the values and attitudes of the small-time capitalist and the family firm.
Of course, business owners have always been a critical part of state and local Republican politics. The nation’s state legislatures and county boards of supervisors are full of the proprietors of family-owned car dealerships, fast food franchises, construction companies, landscaping businesses and regional distribution firms. And in fact, many of the most visible and important families in conservative politics have their own family firms, albeit supersized ones: the Kochs, the DeVoses, the Crows and the Trumps.
Among the elements that distinguish this closely held model of ownership from that of, say, a multinational corporation is the degree to which the business is understood to be an extension of the business owner, who appears to exercise total authority over the place of production, except in cases where the employees have a union (one of the many reasons members of this class are often intensely and exceptionally anti-labor).
If the nature of our work shapes our values — if the habits of mind we cultivate on the job extend to our lives beyond it — then someone in a position of total control over a closely held business like, say, the Trump empire might bring those attitudes, those same habits and pathologies, to political office.
Donald Trump certainly did, and as the Republican Party has come to shape itself around his person, it has also adopted his worldview, which is to say, the worldview and ideology of the boss. No longer content to run government for business, the Republican Party now hopes to run government as a business.
But this doesn’t mean greater efficiency or responsiveness or whatever else most people (mistakenly) associate with private industry. It means, instead, government as the fief of a small-business tyrant.
The next Republican president, in short, will almost certainly be the worst boss you, and American democracy, have ever had.
TRUMP COUP PLOTTER JOHN EASTMAN IS FINALLY FACING REAL ACCOUNTABILITY
By Greg Sargent, The Washington Post
Former president Donald Trump and his supporters have blamed his indictment on a “two-tiered” justice system. As it happens, we do have a two-tiered system, but here’s a better example of it: Hundreds of ordinary peoplehave been convicted of attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, yet not one member of Trump’s inner circle of coup-plotters has faced real accountability for it.
That’s why you should pay attention to the disbarment proceedings that lawyer John Eastman is facing in California. Eastman, who manufactured the bogus theory behind Trump’s effort to overturn his 2020 election loss, could lose his law license — making him the first elite insurrectionist to pay a serious professional price for the coup attempt.
Eastman faces 11 charges from the California State Bar, most concerning his lawyerly lies about election fraud. Importantly, the bar also accused Eastman of advising Vice President Mike Pence that a fabricated legal rationale empowered him to reverse or delay the presidential electoral count in Congress.
“No reasonable attorney with expertise in constitutional or election law would conclude that Pence was legally authorized to take the actions that respondent proposed,” the bar states in its charges. It adds that Eastman knew those actions would violate the law and the Constitution.
If Eastman is disbarred for that charge, it would be genuinely novel. When fellow coup-plotter Rudy Giuliani had his law license suspended in New York last year, it was for the conventional charge of making false statements as a lawyer. Eastman, by contrast, would be sanctioned for corrupting the law to try to subvert our constitutional order and help usurp the presidency.
You’ve heard of “mob lawyers.” Well, the Trump era has brought us the “coup lawyer,” which calls for a new kind of disciplinary response.
The glaring need for this was driven home during Eastman’s bar hearing this week. In a dramatic moment, lawyer Greg Jacob — who advised Pence to resist pressure from Trump to halt the electoral count — testified that Eastman’s invented legal theory had inspired the Jan. 6 rioters.
The rioters had been duped into believing Pence had the power to reverse the election, as the House committee on Jan. 6 demonstrated. Trump had bombarded his followers with this message, based on Eastman’s theory, and as Jacob testified, this bore fruit when rioters stormed the Capitol, many apparently looking to intimidate Pence into doing what Eastman said he could do. As Jacob said: “I thought that it brought our profession into disrepute.”
Given this, it’s beyond absurd that hundreds of people have been prosecuted for invading the Capitol while none of the people who manufactured the legal basis for the false hope that motivated the invaders have faced accountability.
Trump’s coup-plotters carried out all manner of other corrupt acts, yet none has faced serious professional discomfort. Not former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who pushed for Pence to execute the plot. Not Jeffrey Clark, who tried to get the Justice Department to fabricate a rationale for reversing Trump’s loss.
Trump himself might face prosecution over Jan. 6, but that’s hardly guaranteed. Eastman might be the only one to face comeuppance, which is sobering, but it would at least send the message that professional sanction awaits lawyerly abuses designed to reverse elections.
True, disciplining lawyers over advice to clients is a tricky business. Eastman’s defense is that his theory was based on a reading of history and the Constitution that’s genuinely contested among scholars. But it strains credulity that Eastman really believed that.
As legal expert Matthew A. Seligman has detailed, Eastman’s theory rested on a tortured reading of constitutional history that essentially invented a vice-presidential power to count electoral votes. And it is not a contested issue among scholars. Seligman was set to testify against Eastman as an expert witness, which should drive home his bad faith.
Elite accountability in this country is at a crossroads. Many of the coup-plotters have skated, and though Trump faces prosecution for hoarding classified documents, he might evade accountability for the insurrection. Tucker Carlson’s propaganda about Jan. 6 helped topple the cable host from his Fox News perch, but Elon Musk has created a safe space for his disinformation to continue. Dogged journalism has produced extraordinary revelations about corrupt Supreme Court justices, but Congress’s refusal to place checks on them only reinforces the sense that our elites operate with impunity.
Yet it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that in some respects, our national response to Jan. 6 was surprisingly robust. The House hearings on the insurrection dramatically illustrated its gravity. Many high-profile election-denying candidates lost in 2022. Prosecutions of Jan. 6 rioters have proceeded apace. Congress passed strong protections against another Jan. 6 by a wide bipartisan margin.
If Eastman loses his law license expressly for abusing his professional stature to destroy our constitutional democracy, it would constitute yet another step, however small, in that direction. At the very least, it will send a message: Coup-lawyering will no longer be tolerated.
By Greg Sargent, The Washington Post
Former president Donald Trump and his supporters have blamed his indictment on a “two-tiered” justice system. As it happens, we do have a two-tiered system, but here’s a better example of it: Hundreds of ordinary people
That’s why you should pay attention to the disbarment proceedings that lawyer John Eastman is facing in California. Eastman, who manufactured the bogus theory behind Trump’s effort to overturn his 2020 election loss, could lose his law license — making him the first elite insurrectionist to pay a serious professional price for the coup attempt.
Eastman faces 11 charges from the California State Bar, most concerning his lawyerly lies about election fraud. Importantly, the bar also accused Eastman of advising Vice President Mike Pence that a fabricated legal rationale empowered him to reverse or delay the presidential electoral count in Congress.
“No reasonable attorney with expertise in constitutional or election law would conclude that Pence was legally authorized to take the actions that respondent proposed,” the bar states in its charges. It adds that Eastman knew those actions would violate the law and the Constitution.
If Eastman is disbarred for that charge, it would be genuinely novel. When fellow coup-plotter Rudy Giuliani had his law license suspended in New York last year, it was for the conventional charge of making false statements as a lawyer. Eastman, by contrast, would be sanctioned for corrupting the law to try to subvert our constitutional order and help usurp the presidency.
You’ve heard of “mob lawyers.” Well, the Trump era has brought us the “coup lawyer,” which calls for a new kind of disciplinary response.
The glaring need for this was driven home during Eastman’s bar hearing this week. In a dramatic moment, lawyer Greg Jacob — who advised Pence to resist pressure from Trump to halt the electoral count — testified that Eastman’s invented legal theory had inspired the Jan. 6 rioters.
The rioters had been duped into believing Pence had the power to reverse the election, as the House committee on Jan. 6 demonstrated. Trump had bombarded his followers with this message, based on Eastman’s theory, and as Jacob testified, this bore fruit when rioters stormed the Capitol, many apparently looking to intimidate Pence into doing what Eastman said he could do. As Jacob said: “I thought that it brought our profession into disrepute.”
Given this, it’s beyond absurd that hundreds of people have been prosecuted for invading the Capitol while none of the people who manufactured the legal basis for the false hope that motivated the invaders have faced accountability.
Trump’s coup-plotters carried out all manner of other corrupt acts, yet none has faced serious professional discomfort. Not former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who pushed for Pence to execute the plot. Not Jeffrey Clark, who tried to get the Justice Department to fabricate a rationale for reversing Trump’s loss.
Trump himself might face prosecution over Jan. 6, but that’s hardly guaranteed. Eastman might be the only one to face comeuppance, which is sobering, but it would at least send the message that professional sanction awaits lawyerly abuses designed to reverse elections.
True, disciplining lawyers over advice to clients is a tricky business. Eastman’s defense is that his theory was based on a reading of history and the Constitution that’s genuinely contested among scholars. But it strains credulity that Eastman really believed that.
As legal expert Matthew A. Seligman has detailed, Eastman’s theory rested on a tortured reading of constitutional history that essentially invented a vice-presidential power to count electoral votes. And it is not a contested issue among scholars. Seligman was set to testify against Eastman as an expert witness, which should drive home his bad faith.
Elite accountability in this country is at a crossroads. Many of the coup-plotters have skated, and though Trump faces prosecution for hoarding classified documents, he might evade accountability for the insurrection. Tucker Carlson’s propaganda about Jan. 6 helped topple the cable host from his Fox News perch, but Elon Musk has created a safe space for his disinformation to continue. Dogged journalism has produced extraordinary revelations about corrupt Supreme Court justices, but Congress’s refusal to place checks on them only reinforces the sense that our elites operate with impunity.
Yet it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that in some respects, our national response to Jan. 6 was surprisingly robust. The House hearings on the insurrection dramatically illustrated its gravity. Many high-profile election-denying candidates lost in 2022. Prosecutions of Jan. 6 rioters have proceeded apace. Congress passed strong protections against another Jan. 6 by a wide bipartisan margin.
If Eastman loses his law license expressly for abusing his professional stature to destroy our constitutional democracy, it would constitute yet another step, however small, in that direction. At the very least, it will send a message: Coup-lawyering will no longer be tolerated.
SUPREME COURT, CONSIDER JUSTICE SPONSORSHIP!
By Alexandra Petri, The Washington Post
It is a truth universally acknowledged that an American billionaire, in possession of sufficient fortune, must be in want of a Supreme Court justice. Nothing seems to bring billionaires so much simple joy as having a personal justice to accompany them on yacht and fishing trips, flights on their private planes and jaunts to rustic lodges where the wine was certainly not $1,000 a bottle (in Justice Samuel A. Alito’s opinion). Instead of getting upset (which is unproductive and irritates the people who decide whether we can vote and control our bodies), we need to acknowledge that people who want their own Supreme Court justices are going to get them — if they are wealthy enough. Instead of pretending that a code of ethics can prevent this, let’s find a better system so we can end all this sneaking around.
After all, we live in a capitalist country. There is clearly demand for access to the Supreme Court justices; let us figure out how to regulate the supply. Let us create a marketplace where all can compete. It’s time we allow the sponsorship of justices!
Look at the Supreme Court justices’ robes. All that wasted black space where the names of sponsors could be! Why are we pretending to have an impartial deliberative body when we could be getting rulings from an appropriately emblazoned Samuel Alito (“Brought to you by the Federalist Society”) or Brett “Michelob Ultra” Kavanaugh (“I LIKE BEER!”). And look at those SCOTUS decisions — all that wasted blank space around the margins. Let the sponsors fill it! Or better yet, have them contribute footnotes! Say $10,000 apiece; $15,000 for one with a wry joke in it.
Nobody would need to disclose anything; it would be right there in the ruling or on the robe. They would never need to recuse themselves; petitioners would just know that there would be no getting a ruling against Wilson Baseball EZ Gear (“We love a man who calls balls and strikes!”) out of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. Also, Justice Alito could post on Facebook when he caught a big sturgeon with a billionaire friend — without worrying about whether it would be a bad look. Think of the money that Harlan Crow would save on photorealistic paintings if he could just post on social media about his favorite Justice Clarence Thomas memories. And Justice Elena Kagan could finally accept those lox that she refused years ago.
Some people want cameras in the courtroom. I want cameras in the room when billionaires bid to sponsor a justice of their choosing and take that justice on fun little jaunts for the next 10, 15, even 30 years! Open the process up to public scrutiny!
And we, the people, could actually take part in this instead of just watching from the sidelines. Why, millions of us could get together and each put in $5 to sponsor a small fraction of Justice Neil Gorsuch, and perhaps he would allow us to keep control of our uteruses! That would be just great! Or, if everyone with a uterus in the United States throws in three bucks, maybe we can buy a trip for Justice Barrett and Justice Kavanaugh to an emergency room where they can watch a woman suffering a doomed pregnancy go into life-threatening sepsis before receiving medical treatment. Would that help? I don’t know! The point is, we could all be throwing treats at the wall, not just an opaque little group of billionaires who happen to know Leonard Leo. That seems more just to me.
Also, under a system where Supreme Court justices openly and proudly wore the names of their sponsors on their robes and rulings, we could understand more clearly when things did or didn’t go our way, instead of having to pretend that it had something to do with closely interpreting signals sent to the justices by Thomas Jefferson’s ghost. (“This ruling sponsored in part by [Your Name Here]!”)
Given the disparity between the number of Supreme Court justices and the number of would-be sponsors, an alternative solution is to increase the number of justices until supply meets demand. I think this is also viable, although Mitch McConnell probably doesn’t. But as long as billionaires are willing to pay for justice access privileges (I, personally, would pay good money to not have to spend time listening to Justice Alito, but as an American I cannot opt out of that; he gets to decide what all the laws are), I say ... let them!
We know the court thinks money is speech. Well, let it speak where we can hear it! Legalize justice sponsorship now!
By Alexandra Petri, The Washington Post
It is a truth universally acknowledged that an American billionaire, in possession of sufficient fortune, must be in want of a Supreme Court justice. Nothing seems to bring billionaires so much simple joy as having a personal justice to accompany them on yacht and fishing trips, flights on their private planes and jaunts to rustic lodges where the wine was certainly not $1,000 a bottle (in Justice Samuel A. Alito’s opinion). Instead of getting upset (which is unproductive and irritates the people who decide whether we can vote and control our bodies), we need to acknowledge that people who want their own Supreme Court justices are going to get them — if they are wealthy enough. Instead of pretending that a code of ethics can prevent this, let’s find a better system so we can end all this sneaking around.
After all, we live in a capitalist country. There is clearly demand for access to the Supreme Court justices; let us figure out how to regulate the supply. Let us create a marketplace where all can compete. It’s time we allow the sponsorship of justices!
Look at the Supreme Court justices’ robes. All that wasted black space where the names of sponsors could be! Why are we pretending to have an impartial deliberative body when we could be getting rulings from an appropriately emblazoned Samuel Alito (“Brought to you by the Federalist Society”) or Brett “Michelob Ultra” Kavanaugh (“I LIKE BEER!”). And look at those SCOTUS decisions — all that wasted blank space around the margins. Let the sponsors fill it! Or better yet, have them contribute footnotes! Say $10,000 apiece; $15,000 for one with a wry joke in it.
Nobody would need to disclose anything; it would be right there in the ruling or on the robe. They would never need to recuse themselves; petitioners would just know that there would be no getting a ruling against Wilson Baseball EZ Gear (“We love a man who calls balls and strikes!”) out of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. Also, Justice Alito could post on Facebook when he caught a big sturgeon with a billionaire friend — without worrying about whether it would be a bad look. Think of the money that Harlan Crow would save on photorealistic paintings if he could just post on social media about his favorite Justice Clarence Thomas memories. And Justice Elena Kagan could finally accept those lox that she refused years ago.
Some people want cameras in the courtroom. I want cameras in the room when billionaires bid to sponsor a justice of their choosing and take that justice on fun little jaunts for the next 10, 15, even 30 years! Open the process up to public scrutiny!
And we, the people, could actually take part in this instead of just watching from the sidelines. Why, millions of us could get together and each put in $5 to sponsor a small fraction of Justice Neil Gorsuch, and perhaps he would allow us to keep control of our uteruses! That would be just great! Or, if everyone with a uterus in the United States throws in three bucks, maybe we can buy a trip for Justice Barrett and Justice Kavanaugh to an emergency room where they can watch a woman suffering a doomed pregnancy go into life-threatening sepsis before receiving medical treatment. Would that help? I don’t know! The point is, we could all be throwing treats at the wall, not just an opaque little group of billionaires who happen to know Leonard Leo. That seems more just to me.
Also, under a system where Supreme Court justices openly and proudly wore the names of their sponsors on their robes and rulings, we could understand more clearly when things did or didn’t go our way, instead of having to pretend that it had something to do with closely interpreting signals sent to the justices by Thomas Jefferson’s ghost. (“This ruling sponsored in part by [Your Name Here]!”)
Given the disparity between the number of Supreme Court justices and the number of would-be sponsors, an alternative solution is to increase the number of justices until supply meets demand. I think this is also viable, although Mitch McConnell probably doesn’t. But as long as billionaires are willing to pay for justice access privileges (I, personally, would pay good money to not have to spend time listening to Justice Alito, but as an American I cannot opt out of that; he gets to decide what all the laws are), I say ... let them!
We know the court thinks money is speech. Well, let it speak where we can hear it! Legalize justice sponsorship now!
THE TEST ISN’T FOR THE JUSTICE SYSTEM. IT’S ALSO FOR REPUBLICANS.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Some people are blithely claiming that the indictment of former president Donald Trump on charges of violating the Espionage Act, obstruction, conspiracy and other crimes puts the justice system on trial. Balderdash. The cliché has no meaning at this stage — and it improperly shifts the attention and blame from a treacherous defendant alleged to have endangered U.S. national security.
The justice system already proved its mettle in the investigation and indictment of Trump. Attorney General Merrick Garland and special counsel Jack Smith meticulously investigated the facts, interviewing every imaginable witness and got Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran to supply invaluable evidence. Ordinary Americans serving on a grand jury indicted him. Should this go to trial, Trump’s fate, as with every criminal defendant who chooses a jury trial, will rest with a jury of his peers.
If there is a test, it is for Republicans. Indeed, it’s a test they have failed repeatedly thus far. When Senate Republicans adopted the “big lie” and acquitted Trump in the second impeachment, they took the side of lawlessness, authoritarianism and contempt for the Constitution.
Now they have a second chance (or third chance, if you consider they could have jettisoned him in the first impeachment). Republicans must decide whether they will continue with self-delusion (aided by lame rationales provided by the right-wing media that will excuse any conduct and minimize any charge) to the detriment of the country, our democracy and the rule of law. Voters need to think long and hard about nominating someone who has been indicted (and, by next year, might be convicted) on charges of serious crimes. Entrusting this guy with U.S. secrets would be ludicrous. Do they really care so little for national security? Do they lack any appreciation for the insult to the Constitution that they’d return to office someone so cavalier about it?
Republican officeholders’ gob-smacking determination to defend him should disqualify them from office. They apparently would stop at nothing to further their own careers (by pandering to the base they’ve radicalized) to the detriment of our democracy.
Democrats might be rooting for Republicans to sleepwalk their way to nominating Trump, believing he would surely lose in the general election. Perhaps. But we should not encourage millions of Americans to play Russian roulette with our democracy. Indeed, we should root for millions of our fellow Americans to regain their decency, honor and sobriety by rejecting someone so manifestly unfit and dangerous.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Some people are blithely claiming that the indictment of former president Donald Trump on charges of violating the Espionage Act, obstruction, conspiracy and other crimes puts the justice system on trial. Balderdash. The cliché has no meaning at this stage — and it improperly shifts the attention and blame from a treacherous defendant alleged to have endangered U.S. national security.
The justice system already proved its mettle in the investigation and indictment of Trump. Attorney General Merrick Garland and special counsel Jack Smith meticulously investigated the facts, interviewing every imaginable witness and got Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran to supply invaluable evidence. Ordinary Americans serving on a grand jury indicted him. Should this go to trial, Trump’s fate, as with every criminal defendant who chooses a jury trial, will rest with a jury of his peers.
If there is a test, it is for Republicans. Indeed, it’s a test they have failed repeatedly thus far. When Senate Republicans adopted the “big lie” and acquitted Trump in the second impeachment, they took the side of lawlessness, authoritarianism and contempt for the Constitution.
Now they have a second chance (or third chance, if you consider they could have jettisoned him in the first impeachment). Republicans must decide whether they will continue with self-delusion (aided by lame rationales provided by the right-wing media that will excuse any conduct and minimize any charge) to the detriment of the country, our democracy and the rule of law. Voters need to think long and hard about nominating someone who has been indicted (and, by next year, might be convicted) on charges of serious crimes. Entrusting this guy with U.S. secrets would be ludicrous. Do they really care so little for national security? Do they lack any appreciation for the insult to the Constitution that they’d return to office someone so cavalier about it?
Republican officeholders’ gob-smacking determination to defend him should disqualify them from office. They apparently would stop at nothing to further their own careers (by pandering to the base they’ve radicalized) to the detriment of our democracy.
Democrats might be rooting for Republicans to sleepwalk their way to nominating Trump, believing he would surely lose in the general election. Perhaps. But we should not encourage millions of Americans to play Russian roulette with our democracy. Indeed, we should root for millions of our fellow Americans to regain their decency, honor and sobriety by rejecting someone so manifestly unfit and dangerous.
THE CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS INDICTMENT IS A STUNNING DISPLAY OF TRUMP’S NARCISSISM
By Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post
The now-unsealed indictment in the case of United States of America v. Donald J. Trump and Waltine Nauta has it all, seemingly every Trump flaw condensed into 49 pages and 38 counts of squalid detail. It is a devastating legal document, but it is also a damning character study of a man whose faults are all too familiar yet retain the power to shock and appall.
In the neutered language of lawyers and their numbered paragraphs, 96 in all, the indictment details the relentless selfishness of Trump’s conduct. The former and would-be future president, in prosecutors’ telling, lied to his own lawyers, pushed them to hide evidence on his behalf, then stood by as they submitted a blatantly false affidavit to federal authorities — all while proclaiming himself an “open book.”
He stored the most classified of government secrets — about matters as sensitive as the vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack — on the stage of the Mar-a-Lago ballroom. He permitted secret “Five Eyes” intelligence material to spill onto the floor of a storage room easily accessible from the pool patio. Responsible people view such documents in a SCIF, shielded from electronic eavesdropping and fortified against intruders. Trump kept them in a chandeliered bathroom.
He hammered his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, for mishandling classified information, then behaved in a far more egregious manner. The indictment doesn’t mention Clinton by name, but prosecutors took pains to lay out numerous Trump campaign statements criticizing her — and hammering home the importance of safeguarding classified information.
“We can’t have someone in the Oval Office who doesn’t understand the meaning of the word confidential or classified,” Trump insisted as Election Day 2016 approached. “One of the first things we must do is to enforce all classification rules and to enforce all laws relating to the handling of classified information.”
So said the man who, according to the indictment, dramatically brandished classified documents for guests at his Bedminster, N.J., country club, guests notably lacking security clearances. “As president I could have declassified it. Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret,” Trump told two people working on the memoir of his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, discussing a memo that outlined the U.S. “plan of attack” on Iran. It’s on tape. The defendant indicted himself.
Prosecutors use the term “speaking indictment” to describe a charging document that narrates a story of criminal conduct. This indictment all but shouts: This man is a danger to the country. He is a liar. He is a hypocrite. He is a crook. It does not say, but I will: He should never again be allowed anywhere near the levers of power.
Missing from the indictment — unnecessary as a matter of law, unavoidable as an element of human psychology — is the question of motive: Why did Trump do this? Why his zeal, his mania, to retain these particular documents when government officials came calling for them? Why persist — why dig the hole deep into the territory of obstruction — when a subpoena underscored that the government meant business?
Part of the explanation may be that of Trump as the eternal toddler: He wants what he wants. The papers are his toys, and he will not give them back. “I don’t want anybody looking,” Trump is quoted as telling his lawyer, in the lawyer’s damning memo-to-self. “I don’t want anybody looking through my boxes, I really don’t.” My boxes. Mine, mine, mine.
These toys impress — and Trump’s pathetic need to puff himself up cannot be underestimated. Thus, meeting with an unnamed “representative” of his PAC at Bedminster, Trump brandished a classified map of “Country B” and told the person “that he should not be showing the map to the PAC Representative and not to get too close.” If that’s evidence for prosecutors that Trump knew he wasn’t supposed to treat classified material so cavalierly, it’s a reminder to the rest of us about Trump’s compulsion to display his importance.
To read the indictment is to drown again in Trump’s narcissism: Others exist only to serve his needs and sacrifice themselves to the greater good of Trump. The indictment relates that in May 2022, speaking with one of his attorneys, Trump blithely suggests that the lawyer deep-six any problem documents. As the lawyer later recalled: “He made a funny motion as though — well okay why don’t you take them with you to your hotel room and if there’s anything really bad in there, like, you know, pluck it out.” Yeah, why don’t you commit a felony and jeopardize your law license?
And then there are the moments of pure deliciousness, the awkward glimpses behind the scenes in Trumpworld. The indictment quotes a Trump family member — I’m guessing his wife, Melania — texting Nauta, the former president’s personal aide, just ahead of a flight out of town. “I saw you put boxes to Potus room,” the text states. “Just FYI and I will tell him as well: Not sure how many he wants to take on Friday on the plane. We will NOT have a room for them. Plane will be full with luggage.” Forget your boxes. I need that cargo space for my couture.
Announcing the indictment Friday, special counsel Jack Smith said: “I invite everyone to read it in full to understand the scope and the gravity of the crimes charged.” Please do. It is a document that should never have had to be written about an American president. Trump’s own conduct made it unavoidable.
By Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post
The now-unsealed indictment in the case of United States of America v. Donald J. Trump and Waltine Nauta has it all, seemingly every Trump flaw condensed into 49 pages and 38 counts of squalid detail. It is a devastating legal document, but it is also a damning character study of a man whose faults are all too familiar yet retain the power to shock and appall.
In the neutered language of lawyers and their numbered paragraphs, 96 in all, the indictment details the relentless selfishness of Trump’s conduct. The former and would-be future president, in prosecutors’ telling, lied to his own lawyers, pushed them to hide evidence on his behalf, then stood by as they submitted a blatantly false affidavit to federal authorities — all while proclaiming himself an “open book.”
He stored the most classified of government secrets — about matters as sensitive as the vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack — on the stage of the Mar-a-Lago ballroom. He permitted secret “Five Eyes” intelligence material to spill onto the floor of a storage room easily accessible from the pool patio. Responsible people view such documents in a SCIF, shielded from electronic eavesdropping and fortified against intruders. Trump kept them in a chandeliered bathroom.
He hammered his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, for mishandling classified information, then behaved in a far more egregious manner. The indictment doesn’t mention Clinton by name, but prosecutors took pains to lay out numerous Trump campaign statements criticizing her — and hammering home the importance of safeguarding classified information.
“We can’t have someone in the Oval Office who doesn’t understand the meaning of the word confidential or classified,” Trump insisted as Election Day 2016 approached. “One of the first things we must do is to enforce all classification rules and to enforce all laws relating to the handling of classified information.”
So said the man who, according to the indictment, dramatically brandished classified documents for guests at his Bedminster, N.J., country club, guests notably lacking security clearances. “As president I could have declassified it. Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret,” Trump told two people working on the memoir of his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, discussing a memo that outlined the U.S. “plan of attack” on Iran. It’s on tape. The defendant indicted himself.
Prosecutors use the term “speaking indictment” to describe a charging document that narrates a story of criminal conduct. This indictment all but shouts: This man is a danger to the country. He is a liar. He is a hypocrite. He is a crook. It does not say, but I will: He should never again be allowed anywhere near the levers of power.
Missing from the indictment — unnecessary as a matter of law, unavoidable as an element of human psychology — is the question of motive: Why did Trump do this? Why his zeal, his mania, to retain these particular documents when government officials came calling for them? Why persist — why dig the hole deep into the territory of obstruction — when a subpoena underscored that the government meant business?
Part of the explanation may be that of Trump as the eternal toddler: He wants what he wants. The papers are his toys, and he will not give them back. “I don’t want anybody looking,” Trump is quoted as telling his lawyer, in the lawyer’s damning memo-to-self. “I don’t want anybody looking through my boxes, I really don’t.” My boxes. Mine, mine, mine.
These toys impress — and Trump’s pathetic need to puff himself up cannot be underestimated. Thus, meeting with an unnamed “representative” of his PAC at Bedminster, Trump brandished a classified map of “Country B” and told the person “that he should not be showing the map to the PAC Representative and not to get too close.” If that’s evidence for prosecutors that Trump knew he wasn’t supposed to treat classified material so cavalierly, it’s a reminder to the rest of us about Trump’s compulsion to display his importance.
To read the indictment is to drown again in Trump’s narcissism: Others exist only to serve his needs and sacrifice themselves to the greater good of Trump. The indictment relates that in May 2022, speaking with one of his attorneys, Trump blithely suggests that the lawyer deep-six any problem documents. As the lawyer later recalled: “He made a funny motion as though — well okay why don’t you take them with you to your hotel room and if there’s anything really bad in there, like, you know, pluck it out.” Yeah, why don’t you commit a felony and jeopardize your law license?
And then there are the moments of pure deliciousness, the awkward glimpses behind the scenes in Trumpworld. The indictment quotes a Trump family member — I’m guessing his wife, Melania — texting Nauta, the former president’s personal aide, just ahead of a flight out of town. “I saw you put boxes to Potus room,” the text states. “Just FYI and I will tell him as well: Not sure how many he wants to take on Friday on the plane. We will NOT have a room for them. Plane will be full with luggage.” Forget your boxes. I need that cargo space for my couture.
Announcing the indictment Friday, special counsel Jack Smith said: “I invite everyone to read it in full to understand the scope and the gravity of the crimes charged.” Please do. It is a document that should never have had to be written about an American president. Trump’s own conduct made it unavoidable.
REPUBLICANS SHOULD LISTEN TO BILL BARR
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Former attorney general William P. Barr could not influence special counsel Jack Smith or Attorney General Merrick Garland in their decision to indict former president Donald Trump. By the time a jury is selected, most jurors (if they had even heard Barr’s remarks) will have forgotten the reaction in the first few days after the indictment. But with the indictment now released — making public the damning series of charges — Barr can play a vital role in helping Republicans accept that their front-runner for the 2024 presidential nomination faces the likelihood of trial and conviction — developments that cannot be wished away.
Since he left the Trump administration, Barr has been candid about Trump’s shortcomings. Barr provided testimony to the Jan. 6, 2021, House select committee, saying he told Trump there was no evidence of election fraud. He told the committee, “Right out of the box on election night, the president claimed that there was major fraud underway. I mean, this [claim of fraud] happened, as far as I could tell, before there was actually any potential of looking at evidence.”
More recently, he’s been open about Trump’s unfitness for office. “He does not have the discipline. He does not have the ability for strategic thinking and linear thinking — or setting priorities or how to get things done in the system,” Barr told a Cleveland group in early May. “It’s a horror show, you know, when he’s left to his own devices.”
With regard to the case stemming from Trump’s retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, Barr has been a lonely Republican voice warning that the charges are serious. He said on ABC’s “This Week” on April 9, “I think that’s a serious potential case. I think they probably have some very good evidence there.” In May, he told CBS News, “It’s very clear that he had no business having those documents.” He explained, “He was given a long time to send them back. And they were subpoenaed. And I’ve said all along that he wouldn’t get in trouble, probably, just for taking them, just as [President] Biden I don’t think is going to get in trouble or [former vice president Mike] Pence is not going to get in trouble.” Barr added, “The problem is what did he do after the government asked for them back and subpoenaed them. And if there’s any games being played there, he’s going to be very exposed.”
This past week on CBS, he declared, “This is not a case of the Department of Justice conducting a witch hunt. … This would have gone nowhere had the president just returned the documents, but he jerked them around for a year and a half. … There is no excuse for what he did here.” He went on at length about Trump’s mind-set:
Never-Trump Republican Bill Kristol told me, “Bill Barr served Trump, distorted the Mueller report for Trump, defended the indefensible for Trump. But even he acknowledges the classified documents is a crime too far.”
Why should any of this matter? As Trump’s former attorney general, Barr’s willingness to speak out tells Republicans still capable of reason that the case is real, it’s serious, it cannot be brushed off and that the Justice Department didn’t engage in misconduct. Barr could break through the right-wing media bubble that shelters millions of Republicans from reality. They have convinced themselves that Trump is innocent and/or that this will all go away. Even after word of the indictment spread, Republican politicians continued to attack the Justice Department as if it, not Trump, were on trial. Barr is there to shake them by the lapels, effectively telling them, “No, he’s in big trouble because he did something very, very wrong.”
Barr is not alone in calling out Trump’s conduct. After the indictment was unsealed, Trump’s former counsel Ty Cobb told CNN, “I think Trump is in an enormous amount of trouble. This indictment is about as carefully structured and evidentially supported as any indictment in history.” Law professor Jonathan Turley, who frequently defended Trump’s behavior during his impeachments, wrote, “For two years, I have said that the Mar-a-Lago charges — particularly obstruction — represent the greatest threat to Donald Trump. It remains baffling why Trump forced this issue over these documents rather than just give them all back.” And yet Barr remains the best-known lawyer for many Americans. As a former attorney general, his words carry additional weight.
Perhaps, now that the indictment has moved from theoretical to actual, Republicans will come to their senses. And Barr might be just the person to help that process along. Never-Trump strategist Sarah Longwell told me, “Bill Barr being vocal about the seriousness of the documents case will make it harder for many Republicans to casually dismiss this indictment as they did with the [Manhattan district attorney Alvin] Bragg indictment.”
Perhaps this will be too little too late to stop Trump’s 2024 candidacy. However, donors, establishment Republicans and ordinary voters might listen to Barr even though they would not pay attention to the mainstream media or even former GOP New Jersey governor Chris Christie. (On Friday, Christie slammed Trump: “The facts that are laid out here are damning in terms of Donald Trump’s conduct. … Do we really believe that someone who engaged in this type of conduct is going to be the best person to put up against Joe Biden?”)
Meanwhile, Barr will be a critical factor in creating a permission structure in which Republicans need not concede that their past support for Trump was “wrong.” Barr could convince a significant number of former Trump voters that the documents case is so serious that reelecting Trump would be dangerous — either because he could be convicted before taking office or because his actions, even if not illegal, were reckless.
Barr’s statements might help “soft Republicans,” independents and those who believe that electing Trump will “solve” his legal dilemma to finally reject Trump. They can tell themselves, “I was right to vote for him before. I was right that he was a good president. But now he’s done something really wrong.”
In the short term, Barr’s remarks might encourage other Republicans, such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), to reject Trump’s cries of persecution. Republicans’ awareness of Trump’s unfitness (or at least his unelectability) could then swell. If so, Barr would have done something — finally! — in defense of our democracy and the rule of law.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Former attorney general William P. Barr could not influence special counsel Jack Smith or Attorney General Merrick Garland in their decision to indict former president Donald Trump. By the time a jury is selected, most jurors (if they had even heard Barr’s remarks) will have forgotten the reaction in the first few days after the indictment. But with the indictment now released — making public the damning series of charges — Barr can play a vital role in helping Republicans accept that their front-runner for the 2024 presidential nomination faces the likelihood of trial and conviction — developments that cannot be wished away.
Since he left the Trump administration, Barr has been candid about Trump’s shortcomings. Barr provided testimony to the Jan. 6, 2021, House select committee, saying he told Trump there was no evidence of election fraud. He told the committee, “Right out of the box on election night, the president claimed that there was major fraud underway. I mean, this [claim of fraud] happened, as far as I could tell, before there was actually any potential of looking at evidence.”
More recently, he’s been open about Trump’s unfitness for office. “He does not have the discipline. He does not have the ability for strategic thinking and linear thinking — or setting priorities or how to get things done in the system,” Barr told a Cleveland group in early May. “It’s a horror show, you know, when he’s left to his own devices.”
With regard to the case stemming from Trump’s retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, Barr has been a lonely Republican voice warning that the charges are serious. He said on ABC’s “This Week” on April 9, “I think that’s a serious potential case. I think they probably have some very good evidence there.” In May, he told CBS News, “It’s very clear that he had no business having those documents.” He explained, “He was given a long time to send them back. And they were subpoenaed. And I’ve said all along that he wouldn’t get in trouble, probably, just for taking them, just as [President] Biden I don’t think is going to get in trouble or [former vice president Mike] Pence is not going to get in trouble.” Barr added, “The problem is what did he do after the government asked for them back and subpoenaed them. And if there’s any games being played there, he’s going to be very exposed.”
This past week on CBS, he declared, “This is not a case of the Department of Justice conducting a witch hunt. … This would have gone nowhere had the president just returned the documents, but he jerked them around for a year and a half. … There is no excuse for what he did here.” He went on at length about Trump’s mind-set:
Never-Trump Republican Bill Kristol told me, “Bill Barr served Trump, distorted the Mueller report for Trump, defended the indefensible for Trump. But even he acknowledges the classified documents is a crime too far.”
Why should any of this matter? As Trump’s former attorney general, Barr’s willingness to speak out tells Republicans still capable of reason that the case is real, it’s serious, it cannot be brushed off and that the Justice Department didn’t engage in misconduct. Barr could break through the right-wing media bubble that shelters millions of Republicans from reality. They have convinced themselves that Trump is innocent and/or that this will all go away. Even after word of the indictment spread, Republican politicians continued to attack the Justice Department as if it, not Trump, were on trial. Barr is there to shake them by the lapels, effectively telling them, “No, he’s in big trouble because he did something very, very wrong.”
Barr is not alone in calling out Trump’s conduct. After the indictment was unsealed, Trump’s former counsel Ty Cobb told CNN, “I think Trump is in an enormous amount of trouble. This indictment is about as carefully structured and evidentially supported as any indictment in history.” Law professor Jonathan Turley, who frequently defended Trump’s behavior during his impeachments, wrote, “For two years, I have said that the Mar-a-Lago charges — particularly obstruction — represent the greatest threat to Donald Trump. It remains baffling why Trump forced this issue over these documents rather than just give them all back.” And yet Barr remains the best-known lawyer for many Americans. As a former attorney general, his words carry additional weight.
Perhaps, now that the indictment has moved from theoretical to actual, Republicans will come to their senses. And Barr might be just the person to help that process along. Never-Trump strategist Sarah Longwell told me, “Bill Barr being vocal about the seriousness of the documents case will make it harder for many Republicans to casually dismiss this indictment as they did with the [Manhattan district attorney Alvin] Bragg indictment.”
Perhaps this will be too little too late to stop Trump’s 2024 candidacy. However, donors, establishment Republicans and ordinary voters might listen to Barr even though they would not pay attention to the mainstream media or even former GOP New Jersey governor Chris Christie. (On Friday, Christie slammed Trump: “The facts that are laid out here are damning in terms of Donald Trump’s conduct. … Do we really believe that someone who engaged in this type of conduct is going to be the best person to put up against Joe Biden?”)
Meanwhile, Barr will be a critical factor in creating a permission structure in which Republicans need not concede that their past support for Trump was “wrong.” Barr could convince a significant number of former Trump voters that the documents case is so serious that reelecting Trump would be dangerous — either because he could be convicted before taking office or because his actions, even if not illegal, were reckless.
Barr’s statements might help “soft Republicans,” independents and those who believe that electing Trump will “solve” his legal dilemma to finally reject Trump. They can tell themselves, “I was right to vote for him before. I was right that he was a good president. But now he’s done something really wrong.”
In the short term, Barr’s remarks might encourage other Republicans, such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), to reject Trump’s cries of persecution. Republicans’ awareness of Trump’s unfitness (or at least his unelectability) could then swell. If so, Barr would have done something — finally! — in defense of our democracy and the rule of law.
MERRICK GARLAND AND JACK SMITH COME THROUGH: TRUMP WILL FACE JUSTICE
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Attorney General Merrick Garland promised he would follow the law and facts in his investigations. He kept his word.
In the first-ever federal indictment against a former president, special counsel Jack Smith has charged former president Donald Trump with 37 felony counts, the bulk of which allege violations of the Espionage Act. The rest allege obstruction, conspiracy and false statements, arising out of Trump’s reported retention of and refusal to return classified documents after leaving the White House in 2021. Trump aide Walt Nauta has also been indicted.
Smith’s indictment relays, in mind-numbing detail, alleged efforts by Trump to stash classified documents in nonsecure locations, including the Mar-a-Lago resort ballroom, his private residence and even a bathroom.
During his presidency, Trump was amply briefed on classification rules and made frequent comments vowing to enforce them. However, in departing the White House he directed boxes containing documents detailing U.S. secrets to be taken to with him. A giant shell game then commenced, according to the indictment, with Trump ordering boxes moved, suggesting documents be concealed and pushing for his lawyers to deceive the Justice Department. At Trump’s Bedminster, N.J., golf club, where prosecutors say some documents were taken, the former president allegedly shared secret material with others, even as he acknowledged that it remained classified.
The portrait painted could hardly be clearer: Throughout the special prosecutor’s account, Trump is shown to be personally and intimately involved in the movement and storage of the classified material. Trump was no passive bystander; according to prosecutors, he made every effort to deceive the Justice Department to retain “his” documents.
According to the indictment, the classified documents in Trump’s possession concerned myriad serious national security matters. The indictment states that “the classified documents Trump stored in his boxes included information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.”
Simply put, Trump’s indictment describes some of the most egregious conduct we have seen in cases involving the alleged mishandling of classified information by politicians. Trump’s defenders will claim a double standard, but the comparisons they will raise don’t hold water. Other prominent cases that were not pursued (e.g., Hillary Clinton, Mike Pence) do not involve willful retention of documents, refusal to return them when requested, lying to authorities or other obstructive conduct. They do not involve manufacturing a false rationale (e.g., magical declassification) to excuse deception and defiance of the law. And they don’t involve a willful game of hide-and-seek with authorities.
Expect MAGA world to continue to denounce the indictment as a witch hunt in the coming days. But to date, Trump has still not articulated a cogent criminal defense. He has attacked prosecutors, wrongly asserted that President Biden stashed boxes of documents in D.C.’s Chinatown, insisted he declassified documents (despite saying he did not in the taped Bedminster conversation) and falsely declared the documents were his.
None of these constitute a viable (or even coherent) defense. At best, these arguments are fodder for the right-wing media outrage machine.
The excuse that Trump was merely acting on “advice of counsel” does not apply when his lawyers apparently were telling him to return the documents. And, despite Trump’s shrieks, the Justice Department properly executed the search warrant based on probable cause to recover certain documents.
What comes next? Trump might try to stall and use interlocutory appeals (before a verdict) to delay. However, federal judges (as seen in the super-fast review of attorney-client and executive privilege claims in the D.C. federal district court) increasingly seem fed up with his stalling tactics.
At Trump’s arraignment, scheduled for Tuesday in Miami, the judge will set a series of dates, including a trial date. It behooves the judge, consistent with due process, to move speedily so as to allow voters to make an informed decision about their presidential pick in 2024. We could see a trial roughly a year from now.
While not relating to Jan. 6, 2021, Trump now faces serious charges. In running for president again with the express intent to seek revenge against those who holding him to account, Trump threatens the basic concept of the rule of law. If a president can commit crimes with impunity, then we have an autocrat, not an elected executive.
Trump has the presumption of innocence in court. But based upon what has been reported, the case against him is devastating. The political question, however, remains open: Has the GOP become so contemptuous of democracy as to nominate an indicted candidate?
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Attorney General Merrick Garland promised he would follow the law and facts in his investigations. He kept his word.
In the first-ever federal indictment against a former president, special counsel Jack Smith has charged former president Donald Trump with 37 felony counts, the bulk of which allege violations of the Espionage Act. The rest allege obstruction, conspiracy and false statements, arising out of Trump’s reported retention of and refusal to return classified documents after leaving the White House in 2021. Trump aide Walt Nauta has also been indicted.
Smith’s indictment relays, in mind-numbing detail, alleged efforts by Trump to stash classified documents in nonsecure locations, including the Mar-a-Lago resort ballroom, his private residence and even a bathroom.
During his presidency, Trump was amply briefed on classification rules and made frequent comments vowing to enforce them. However, in departing the White House he directed boxes containing documents detailing U.S. secrets to be taken to with him. A giant shell game then commenced, according to the indictment, with Trump ordering boxes moved, suggesting documents be concealed and pushing for his lawyers to deceive the Justice Department. At Trump’s Bedminster, N.J., golf club, where prosecutors say some documents were taken, the former president allegedly shared secret material with others, even as he acknowledged that it remained classified.
The portrait painted could hardly be clearer: Throughout the special prosecutor’s account, Trump is shown to be personally and intimately involved in the movement and storage of the classified material. Trump was no passive bystander; according to prosecutors, he made every effort to deceive the Justice Department to retain “his” documents.
According to the indictment, the classified documents in Trump’s possession concerned myriad serious national security matters. The indictment states that “the classified documents Trump stored in his boxes included information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.”
Simply put, Trump’s indictment describes some of the most egregious conduct we have seen in cases involving the alleged mishandling of classified information by politicians. Trump’s defenders will claim a double standard, but the comparisons they will raise don’t hold water. Other prominent cases that were not pursued (e.g., Hillary Clinton, Mike Pence) do not involve willful retention of documents, refusal to return them when requested, lying to authorities or other obstructive conduct. They do not involve manufacturing a false rationale (e.g., magical declassification) to excuse deception and defiance of the law. And they don’t involve a willful game of hide-and-seek with authorities.
Expect MAGA world to continue to denounce the indictment as a witch hunt in the coming days. But to date, Trump has still not articulated a cogent criminal defense. He has attacked prosecutors, wrongly asserted that President Biden stashed boxes of documents in D.C.’s Chinatown, insisted he declassified documents (despite saying he did not in the taped Bedminster conversation) and falsely declared the documents were his.
None of these constitute a viable (or even coherent) defense. At best, these arguments are fodder for the right-wing media outrage machine.
The excuse that Trump was merely acting on “advice of counsel” does not apply when his lawyers apparently were telling him to return the documents. And, despite Trump’s shrieks, the Justice Department properly executed the search warrant based on probable cause to recover certain documents.
What comes next? Trump might try to stall and use interlocutory appeals (before a verdict) to delay. However, federal judges (as seen in the super-fast review of attorney-client and executive privilege claims in the D.C. federal district court) increasingly seem fed up with his stalling tactics.
At Trump’s arraignment, scheduled for Tuesday in Miami, the judge will set a series of dates, including a trial date. It behooves the judge, consistent with due process, to move speedily so as to allow voters to make an informed decision about their presidential pick in 2024. We could see a trial roughly a year from now.
While not relating to Jan. 6, 2021, Trump now faces serious charges. In running for president again with the express intent to seek revenge against those who holding him to account, Trump threatens the basic concept of the rule of law. If a president can commit crimes with impunity, then we have an autocrat, not an elected executive.
Trump has the presumption of innocence in court. But based upon what has been reported, the case against him is devastating. The political question, however, remains open: Has the GOP become so contemptuous of democracy as to nominate an indicted candidate?
A SHOWER FULL OF SECRET DOCUMENTS LEADS TO A SOLID TRUMP INDICTMENT
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
No one should celebrate Thursday’s indictment of Donald Trump in a case involving classified documents improperly stored at his Mar-a-Lago estate. Something has gone deeply wrong when, in a historic first, federal prosecutors reach the point of filing criminal charges against a former and possibly future president. Yet, in this matter, the defendant appears to have left them little choice.
The 38-count indictment against Mr. Trump and an aide, unsealed on Friday, includes disturbing details: “Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this,” the onetime commander in chief says in a transcript of a recording during which he described a “plan of attack” prepared by the Defense Department against a foreign adversary. His audience, according to the indictment, included a writer, a publisher and two members of his staff, none of whom had a security clearance. This was only one episode of gross mishandling of hundreds of pages of materials that included papers on U.S. nuclear programs and this nation’s potential vulnerabilities to attack.
Boxes were moved from a ballroom stage to a storage closet to a bathroom and shower, at one point spilling onto the floor (“Oh no oh no,” texted an employee). Mar-a-Lago hosted tens of thousands of guests at 150 social events, including weddings and movie premieres, during the time the documents were on the premises.
It’s not only the alleged cavalier treatment of classified materials. It is also the extensive effort to avoid compliance with legitimate demands, from which a clear, prosecutable picture of obstruction emerges. Consider Mr. Trump’s alleged instructions to valet and body man Waltine Nauta, also indicted, to hide boxes from his team’s attorney, the FBI and the grand jury; the suggestion to his attorney to make false representations to the FBI and grand jury as well as to conceal or destroy some of the documents called for in a subpoena; and the submission to the FBI and grand jury declaring all relevant documents had been handed over when they had not. Mr. Trump reportedly even asked after receiving a subpoena for the documents’ return: “Well look, isn’t it better if there are no documents?”
These details support a story that has been unfolding in the media for months: of an elected official not only abusing his access to sensitive information but also knowingly sharing it. They distinguish the Mar-a-Lago documents imbroglio from the ongoing investigation by Justice Department special counsel Robert K. Hur into President Biden’s own retention of classified documents. Those materials were willingly returned upon discovery; so far, there’s nothing to suggest they were intentionally retained. Treating different cases differently isn’t necessarily an indication of politicization. On the contrary, it can be the sign of a job carefully done.
Similarly, it is the Justice Department’s duty to assure that no person, not even a former president, is beyond the reach of the law — regardless of the discord or division doing so could sow. Attorney General Merrick Garland and his staff have cautiously followed proper protocol to safeguard the department’s independence — from tapping special counsel Jack Smith, who assembled the case, to choosing to file charges in Miami rather than go judge-shopping in more liberal environs. The presiding judge will be Trump-appointee Aileen M. Cannon, whose (eventually overruled) decision to freeze a portion of the Justice Department’s inquiry last fall set liberals aflame.
Nonetheless, even before the indictment was unsealed, voters were treated to an onslaught of GOP comments tarring the case as corrupt and unconscionable. See House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) decrying a “grave injustice.” Listen to former vice president and 2024 presidential candidate Mike Pence contort himself into an impossible position arguing simultaneously that no one should be above the law and that the indictment shouldn’t have moved forward.
If anyone is guilty of turning the legal system into a political hand grenade, it has been the Republicans themselves. In the 2016 campaign, when questions were raised about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, Mr. Trump himself urged rally crowds to chant “lock her up.” This time, however, they’re the ones on the defense with regard to the possibly illegal handling of sensitive government information.
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
No one should celebrate Thursday’s indictment of Donald Trump in a case involving classified documents improperly stored at his Mar-a-Lago estate. Something has gone deeply wrong when, in a historic first, federal prosecutors reach the point of filing criminal charges against a former and possibly future president. Yet, in this matter, the defendant appears to have left them little choice.
The 38-count indictment against Mr. Trump and an aide, unsealed on Friday, includes disturbing details: “Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this,” the onetime commander in chief says in a transcript of a recording during which he described a “plan of attack” prepared by the Defense Department against a foreign adversary. His audience, according to the indictment, included a writer, a publisher and two members of his staff, none of whom had a security clearance. This was only one episode of gross mishandling of hundreds of pages of materials that included papers on U.S. nuclear programs and this nation’s potential vulnerabilities to attack.
Boxes were moved from a ballroom stage to a storage closet to a bathroom and shower, at one point spilling onto the floor (“Oh no oh no,” texted an employee). Mar-a-Lago hosted tens of thousands of guests at 150 social events, including weddings and movie premieres, during the time the documents were on the premises.
It’s not only the alleged cavalier treatment of classified materials. It is also the extensive effort to avoid compliance with legitimate demands, from which a clear, prosecutable picture of obstruction emerges. Consider Mr. Trump’s alleged instructions to valet and body man Waltine Nauta, also indicted, to hide boxes from his team’s attorney, the FBI and the grand jury; the suggestion to his attorney to make false representations to the FBI and grand jury as well as to conceal or destroy some of the documents called for in a subpoena; and the submission to the FBI and grand jury declaring all relevant documents had been handed over when they had not. Mr. Trump reportedly even asked after receiving a subpoena for the documents’ return: “Well look, isn’t it better if there are no documents?”
These details support a story that has been unfolding in the media for months: of an elected official not only abusing his access to sensitive information but also knowingly sharing it. They distinguish the Mar-a-Lago documents imbroglio from the ongoing investigation by Justice Department special counsel Robert K. Hur into President Biden’s own retention of classified documents. Those materials were willingly returned upon discovery; so far, there’s nothing to suggest they were intentionally retained. Treating different cases differently isn’t necessarily an indication of politicization. On the contrary, it can be the sign of a job carefully done.
Similarly, it is the Justice Department’s duty to assure that no person, not even a former president, is beyond the reach of the law — regardless of the discord or division doing so could sow. Attorney General Merrick Garland and his staff have cautiously followed proper protocol to safeguard the department’s independence — from tapping special counsel Jack Smith, who assembled the case, to choosing to file charges in Miami rather than go judge-shopping in more liberal environs. The presiding judge will be Trump-appointee Aileen M. Cannon, whose (eventually overruled) decision to freeze a portion of the Justice Department’s inquiry last fall set liberals aflame.
Nonetheless, even before the indictment was unsealed, voters were treated to an onslaught of GOP comments tarring the case as corrupt and unconscionable. See House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) decrying a “grave injustice.” Listen to former vice president and 2024 presidential candidate Mike Pence contort himself into an impossible position arguing simultaneously that no one should be above the law and that the indictment shouldn’t have moved forward.
If anyone is guilty of turning the legal system into a political hand grenade, it has been the Republicans themselves. In the 2016 campaign, when questions were raised about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, Mr. Trump himself urged rally crowds to chant “lock her up.” This time, however, they’re the ones on the defense with regard to the possibly illegal handling of sensitive government information.
HERE ARE THE CHARGES AGAINST TRUMP AND WHAT THEY MEAN
By Rachel Weiner, The Washington Post
Former president Donald Trump announced Thursday evening that he had been indicted in federal court in Florida over the classified information found at his Mar-a-Lago home. The indictment remains under seal, so we don’t know the full scope of the charges, including the particular counts Trump faces or whether others are charged alongside him. Here’s what we can say about the indictment and charges, as described by Trump’s legal team and other people familiar with the matter.
What are the charges against Trump?
Espionage Act/unauthorized retention of national defense information: Trump is charged under a part of the Espionage Act that bars willful retention of national defense information by someone not authorized to have it, according to people familiar with the case. Such information is defined as “any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, or note relating to the national defense, or information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.” Technically, that information does not have to be classified, but in practice the law is almost exclusively used to prosecute retention of classified material.
A conviction does not require any evidence of a desire to disseminate the classified information; having it in an unauthorized location is enough. But the crime requires a “willful” mishandling of material “the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.” Charges are generally not brought without some aggravating factor making clear the retention was not accidental — such as evidence of intent to share the information, signs of disloyalty to the U.S. government, or simply the amount of documents taken.
Unlike other government employees, the president does not go through a security clearance process that includes a pledge to follow classification rules. But Trump received requests from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and subpoenas from the Justice Department indicating that the documents in question were classified and needed to be returned to the U.S. government. Prosecutors say he instead sought to hide them from federal investigators. And while the president can declassify most information, there is a process for doing so. According to a person familiar with the transcript, prosecutors have a recording of Trump acknowledging that one “secret” document he held onto was still classified and lamenting that he no longer had the power to declassify it.
Obstruction of justice: Trump is also charged obstruction of justice for his alleged efforts to stymie the federal investigation, according to people familiar with the charges. People familiar with the investigation say the government gathered evidence that Trump directed his aides to hide classified papers in advance of an FBI search and told advisers and lawyers to falsely assert that all classified documents in his possession had been returned to the federal government.
False statements: Jim Trusty, an attorney for Trump, said on CNN that the former president is also accused of making false statements to federal investigators. It is unclear so far what those particular statements are. Publicly, Trump has suggested without evidence that FBI agents planted classified evidence at his home and claimed that anything sensitive found there had been declassified.
Conspiracy: Trump is charged as part of a conspiracy, meaning prosecutors will have to show at least one other person was helping him violate the law. It is unclear who that is, but numerous Trump aides, associates and attorneys involved in the storage of presidential records at Mar-a-Lago have been called to testify in front of grand jurors.
What possible penalties does Trump face?
The maximum punishment for unlawful retention of national defense information is 10 years in prison; for obstruction of justice it is 20 years, and for conspiracy and false statements five years. All those sentences could run consecutively, but federal defendants are rarely given the maximum possible punishment.
Sentences in unlawful retention cases vary widely, depending in part on how sensitive the material is, how much of it there is, how long the person held on to it and his or her cooperation with investigators. A Defense Department employee in Manila who took home a small amount of secret-level information to work on a classified thesis project served only three months incarceration. Kenneth Wayne Ford Jr., who was found guilty at trial of bringing home national defense information after leaving the National Security Agency and lying about the case, received a six-year sentence. A former NSA contractor who over two decades amassed a huge trove of highly sensitive material, including hacking tools and details of overseas operations, was sentenced to nine years in prison. A Navy sailor who took pictures of classified areas of a nuclear-powered submarine and then destroyed the evidence was sentenced to a year in prison for retention and obstruction; he was later pardoned by Trump.
Retired general David H. Petraeus was given probation after pleading guilty to sharing classified information with his biographer. At the time, the crime of mishandling classified information — as opposed to national defense information — was a misdemeanor with a maximum punishment of a year behind bars. It became a felony under President Trump.
What other criminal charges does Trump face?
Trump is charged in New York State Court with unrelated crimes for conduct that predates his presidency. He is accused of falsifying business records to hide payments during the 2016 campaign made to an adult-film star to keep her from saying publicly that she had an affair with Trump.
Trump is also under investigation by a state prosecutor in Georgia, who is looking at Trump’s efforts to overturn Biden’s 2020 victory in that state. Special counsel Jack Smith is also investigating Trump’s attempts to stay in office after losing the presidential election, including his pressure on officials in battleground states and fundraising off false claims of election fraud.
Has Trump responded to the charges?
The former president described himself as “an innocent man” being treated unfairly in comparison to President Biden. Classified documents from the Obama administration were discovered in Biden’s Delaware home late last year by lawyers cleaning out his home office. Biden’s attorneys turned those documents over to NARA, and the president gave the Justice Department permission to search the home, as well as his beach house and think tank office. The White House has said only “a small number” of documents from Biden’s vice-presidential tenure were found. A special counsel has been appointed to oversee that investigation.
By Rachel Weiner, The Washington Post
Former president Donald Trump announced Thursday evening that he had been indicted in federal court in Florida over the classified information found at his Mar-a-Lago home. The indictment remains under seal, so we don’t know the full scope of the charges, including the particular counts Trump faces or whether others are charged alongside him. Here’s what we can say about the indictment and charges, as described by Trump’s legal team and other people familiar with the matter.
What are the charges against Trump?
Espionage Act/unauthorized retention of national defense information: Trump is charged under a part of the Espionage Act that bars willful retention of national defense information by someone not authorized to have it, according to people familiar with the case. Such information is defined as “any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, or note relating to the national defense, or information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.” Technically, that information does not have to be classified, but in practice the law is almost exclusively used to prosecute retention of classified material.
A conviction does not require any evidence of a desire to disseminate the classified information; having it in an unauthorized location is enough. But the crime requires a “willful” mishandling of material “the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.” Charges are generally not brought without some aggravating factor making clear the retention was not accidental — such as evidence of intent to share the information, signs of disloyalty to the U.S. government, or simply the amount of documents taken.
Unlike other government employees, the president does not go through a security clearance process that includes a pledge to follow classification rules. But Trump received requests from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and subpoenas from the Justice Department indicating that the documents in question were classified and needed to be returned to the U.S. government. Prosecutors say he instead sought to hide them from federal investigators. And while the president can declassify most information, there is a process for doing so. According to a person familiar with the transcript, prosecutors have a recording of Trump acknowledging that one “secret” document he held onto was still classified and lamenting that he no longer had the power to declassify it.
Obstruction of justice: Trump is also charged obstruction of justice for his alleged efforts to stymie the federal investigation, according to people familiar with the charges. People familiar with the investigation say the government gathered evidence that Trump directed his aides to hide classified papers in advance of an FBI search and told advisers and lawyers to falsely assert that all classified documents in his possession had been returned to the federal government.
False statements: Jim Trusty, an attorney for Trump, said on CNN that the former president is also accused of making false statements to federal investigators. It is unclear so far what those particular statements are. Publicly, Trump has suggested without evidence that FBI agents planted classified evidence at his home and claimed that anything sensitive found there had been declassified.
Conspiracy: Trump is charged as part of a conspiracy, meaning prosecutors will have to show at least one other person was helping him violate the law. It is unclear who that is, but numerous Trump aides, associates and attorneys involved in the storage of presidential records at Mar-a-Lago have been called to testify in front of grand jurors.
What possible penalties does Trump face?
The maximum punishment for unlawful retention of national defense information is 10 years in prison; for obstruction of justice it is 20 years, and for conspiracy and false statements five years. All those sentences could run consecutively, but federal defendants are rarely given the maximum possible punishment.
Sentences in unlawful retention cases vary widely, depending in part on how sensitive the material is, how much of it there is, how long the person held on to it and his or her cooperation with investigators. A Defense Department employee in Manila who took home a small amount of secret-level information to work on a classified thesis project served only three months incarceration. Kenneth Wayne Ford Jr., who was found guilty at trial of bringing home national defense information after leaving the National Security Agency and lying about the case, received a six-year sentence. A former NSA contractor who over two decades amassed a huge trove of highly sensitive material, including hacking tools and details of overseas operations, was sentenced to nine years in prison. A Navy sailor who took pictures of classified areas of a nuclear-powered submarine and then destroyed the evidence was sentenced to a year in prison for retention and obstruction; he was later pardoned by Trump.
Retired general David H. Petraeus was given probation after pleading guilty to sharing classified information with his biographer. At the time, the crime of mishandling classified information — as opposed to national defense information — was a misdemeanor with a maximum punishment of a year behind bars. It became a felony under President Trump.
What other criminal charges does Trump face?
Trump is charged in New York State Court with unrelated crimes for conduct that predates his presidency. He is accused of falsifying business records to hide payments during the 2016 campaign made to an adult-film star to keep her from saying publicly that she had an affair with Trump.
Trump is also under investigation by a state prosecutor in Georgia, who is looking at Trump’s efforts to overturn Biden’s 2020 victory in that state. Special counsel Jack Smith is also investigating Trump’s attempts to stay in office after losing the presidential election, including his pressure on officials in battleground states and fundraising off false claims of election fraud.
Has Trump responded to the charges?
The former president described himself as “an innocent man” being treated unfairly in comparison to President Biden. Classified documents from the Obama administration were discovered in Biden’s Delaware home late last year by lawyers cleaning out his home office. Biden’s attorneys turned those documents over to NARA, and the president gave the Justice Department permission to search the home, as well as his beach house and think tank office. The White House has said only “a small number” of documents from Biden’s vice-presidential tenure were found. A special counsel has been appointed to oversee that investigation.
BIDEN HAS DONE THE HARD PART. HERE’S HOW HE CAN RACK UP MORE WINS.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
President Biden has done the hard part: He’s passed Democratic-only and bipartisan bills to keep with his promise to “build the economy from the bottom up and middle out” (e.g., the Chips and Science Act, the bipartisan infrastructure law, the Inflation Reduction Act); confirmed about 130 judges; strengthened and possibly expanded NATO; set the stage for an employment boom (more than 13 million jobs) and a manufacturing resurgence; and kept the country from a catastrophic default. If he did nothing else for the last year and a half of his term, it would still be considered one of the most productive in the past century. Biden can still rack up more wins, albeit not of the magnitude possible when Democrats had majorities in both chambers of Congress.
First, no issue draws together Republicans and Democrats like China. Reps. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), chair of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, and member Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) agree on many issues. Recently, the committee put out two reports, one calling for additional military aid to and military cooperation with Taiwan (identifying “ten bipartisan key findings and recommendations to help build a more credible deterrent when it comes to Taiwan”) and another proposing policy changes and sanctions against China for its treatment of the Uyghurs. Biden should immediately embrace the proposals and call for the House to put them on the floor for votes.
Second only to China, Silicon Valley’s abuses have attracted more bipartisan anger than almost any other issue. Whether it is Democrats complaining about antitrust violations and hate speech or Republicans whining about political favoritism, everyone has gripes. Though some policies might be too ambitious or controversial (e.g., repealing Section 230), the public is fed up with social media platforms. There should be strong support for midsize reforms, including greater transparency in algorithms, enhanced privacy requirements, child protection tools and access for researchers. There are many smart ideas floating around; the White House should pick the best, put together a package and send it to the Hill.
Aside from legislative action, Biden could highlight the degree to which his programs are transforming the heartland, creating well-paying jobs that don’t require college degrees and making life easier and more affordable for average families. The administration is about to launch “a website to map and track tens of thousands of infrastructure projects and private manufacturing investments, an effort by the administration to show the positive impact of its policies on the U.S. economy to a skeptical public,” the Associated Press reported. With “roughly 32,000 infrastructure projects and more than $470 billion worth of investments in the production of electric vehicles, batteries, computer chips, biotech, clean energy and other sectors” to highlight, Biden should make sure the website’s name — Invest.gov — is prominently displayed when he makes trips around the country to tout his record. Voters need to understand how their communities have been helped and what Biden’s policies are doing for them.
Biden -- with the help of Vice President Harris (who is passionate about the topic) — also could lean into the abortion issue. Republicans refuse to accept responsibility for the trauma and endangerment of women’s health and lives their policies entail. The White House can shine a light on cruel, irrational and dangerous laws. Collecting and highlighting the story of victims of forced-birth laws and holding a symposium of doctors and medical school deans about the impact on the supply of doctors and doctor training might help focus attention on the issue and galvanize voters (who are already overwhelming pro-choice) to challenge these laws and the politicians who enact them.
Finally, Biden could be an effective defender of free speech from censors, book banners, white nationalists and MAGA governors. He can task the Education Department and the Justice Department with investigating state and local infringement of First Amendment rights. A White House conference of librarians (who remain among the most trusted professions) could help the public understand the free speech threat that book banners pose. Putting together a task force of well-known personalities to make public service announcements, hold events and organize parents in opposition to censorship, book bans and gag laws could put him and Democrats firmly on the side of core American values: freedom of speech and thought.
Though Biden won’t get any legislative home runs as long as Republicans control the House, the president can get some singles and doubles with modest legislative proposals. Coupled with diplomatic successes, judicial confirmations and a focus on issues that are huge negatives for Republicans, Biden will find plenty to do until Election Day 2024.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
President Biden has done the hard part: He’s passed Democratic-only and bipartisan bills to keep with his promise to “build the economy from the bottom up and middle out” (e.g., the Chips and Science Act, the bipartisan infrastructure law, the Inflation Reduction Act); confirmed about 130 judges; strengthened and possibly expanded NATO; set the stage for an employment boom (more than 13 million jobs) and a manufacturing resurgence; and kept the country from a catastrophic default. If he did nothing else for the last year and a half of his term, it would still be considered one of the most productive in the past century. Biden can still rack up more wins, albeit not of the magnitude possible when Democrats had majorities in both chambers of Congress.
First, no issue draws together Republicans and Democrats like China. Reps. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), chair of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, and member Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) agree on many issues. Recently, the committee put out two reports, one calling for additional military aid to and military cooperation with Taiwan (identifying “ten bipartisan key findings and recommendations to help build a more credible deterrent when it comes to Taiwan”) and another proposing policy changes and sanctions against China for its treatment of the Uyghurs. Biden should immediately embrace the proposals and call for the House to put them on the floor for votes.
Second only to China, Silicon Valley’s abuses have attracted more bipartisan anger than almost any other issue. Whether it is Democrats complaining about antitrust violations and hate speech or Republicans whining about political favoritism, everyone has gripes. Though some policies might be too ambitious or controversial (e.g., repealing Section 230), the public is fed up with social media platforms. There should be strong support for midsize reforms, including greater transparency in algorithms, enhanced privacy requirements, child protection tools and access for researchers. There are many smart ideas floating around; the White House should pick the best, put together a package and send it to the Hill.
Aside from legislative action, Biden could highlight the degree to which his programs are transforming the heartland, creating well-paying jobs that don’t require college degrees and making life easier and more affordable for average families. The administration is about to launch “a website to map and track tens of thousands of infrastructure projects and private manufacturing investments, an effort by the administration to show the positive impact of its policies on the U.S. economy to a skeptical public,” the Associated Press reported. With “roughly 32,000 infrastructure projects and more than $470 billion worth of investments in the production of electric vehicles, batteries, computer chips, biotech, clean energy and other sectors” to highlight, Biden should make sure the website’s name — Invest.gov — is prominently displayed when he makes trips around the country to tout his record. Voters need to understand how their communities have been helped and what Biden’s policies are doing for them.
Biden -- with the help of Vice President Harris (who is passionate about the topic) — also could lean into the abortion issue. Republicans refuse to accept responsibility for the trauma and endangerment of women’s health and lives their policies entail. The White House can shine a light on cruel, irrational and dangerous laws. Collecting and highlighting the story of victims of forced-birth laws and holding a symposium of doctors and medical school deans about the impact on the supply of doctors and doctor training might help focus attention on the issue and galvanize voters (who are already overwhelming pro-choice) to challenge these laws and the politicians who enact them.
Finally, Biden could be an effective defender of free speech from censors, book banners, white nationalists and MAGA governors. He can task the Education Department and the Justice Department with investigating state and local infringement of First Amendment rights. A White House conference of librarians (who remain among the most trusted professions) could help the public understand the free speech threat that book banners pose. Putting together a task force of well-known personalities to make public service announcements, hold events and organize parents in opposition to censorship, book bans and gag laws could put him and Democrats firmly on the side of core American values: freedom of speech and thought.
Though Biden won’t get any legislative home runs as long as Republicans control the House, the president can get some singles and doubles with modest legislative proposals. Coupled with diplomatic successes, judicial confirmations and a focus on issues that are huge negatives for Republicans, Biden will find plenty to do until Election Day 2024.
TRUMP’S SMOKING GUN RECORDING GIVES JACK SMITH ALL HE NEEDS
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
When CNN reported on Wednesday night that special counsel Jack Smith has a recording of former president Donald Trump boasting at his Bedminster, N.J., club in 2021 that he had a highly classified multipage document relating to war plans against Iran, months of punditry that Trump would never be indicted went out the window. (The reported sounds of paper rustling suggests Trump might have had a document in hand.) According to news reports, he shared the substance of the document with others in the room, including biographers with no security clearance.
This evidence effectively destroys whatever defense Trump was trying to concoct (he didn’t know there were classified documents, he declassified them, he thought they were not classified). Trump holds the presumption of innocence and has not been indicted. However, the last time such a damning piece of evidence (a “smoking gun”) came to light, Richard M. Nixon’s presidency was effectively over. (He left office less than a week later.)
News reports now indicate the federal grand jury hearing the documents case will meet this week. An indictment, if there is one, could come within days.
Trump’s own words could provide damning evidence of a willful violation of the Espionage Act and of obstruction — and help fix venue in D.C., where the Justice Department almost certainly wants to try the case. Andrew Weissmann, the former lead prosecutor for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, summed up the take of many career prosecutors: “I’m trying not to use hyperbole, but this is game over. ... If this story is accurate, there will be an indictment, and it’s hard to see how there will not be a conviction.” (A complete analysis from nine former prosecutors on the strength of the the special counsel’s case -even before the tape recording was reported - can be found at Just Security.)
When coupled with reports that a Trump lawyer was “waved off” searching the former president’s office, a damning case of wrongful retention of highly sensitive (and likely classified documents) appears to have come together. Trump seems to have confessed that he knew the classification rules, didn’t declassify documents before leaving office and knew that retaining them was illegal.
Moreover, his alleged dissemination of material to others (including allegedly verbally discussing this document with others) can solidify a separate part of the law: the prohibition against sharing and distributing confidential documents. A case of dissemination of classified documents would so serious as to virtually ensure an indictment.
We don’t know precisely what Trump said or what document if any he had taken, but, in a sense, it does not matter. Let’s say the specific document he is alleged to have possessed didn’t say what Trump said it did. It nevertheless confirms that Trump knew he hadn’t declassified documents and was not supposed to keep any. This obliterates the “declassified in his mind” hooey he and his supporters have claimed. Sharing it with others makes prosecution all the more likely.
Ryan Goodman, a former national security lawyer for the Defense Department, reacted this way: “There it is. Espionage Act.” He pointed to a recently unsealed opinion (ruling the attorney-client privilege was ineffective because of the crime-fraud exception) from Judge Beryl A. Howell that stated: “Other evidence demonstrates that the former president willfully sought to retain classified documents when he was not authorized to do so, and knew it.” This evidence, if true, would fit that description.
Such glaring evidence of intent — even aside from the later alleged obstruction of the Justice Department (refusing to comply fully with the subpoena, moving documents) — makes for the sort of serious violation that prompts prosecution under the Espionage Act. To make matters worse, reporting suggests there are other recordings of Trump that could further implicate him.
The latest evidence also supports filing the case in D.C., where prosecutors likely would have a more favorable judge and jury than they would face in Florida.
Even before the most recent accounts, Laurence H. Tribe and Dennis Aftergut, analyzing Trump’s admissions during the CNN town hall, explained:
When asked why he took government documents from the White House, Trump answered: “I was there and I took what I took . . . . I had every right to do it. I didn’t make a secret of it. You know, the boxes were stationed outside of the White House.”
With those fateful words, Trump admitted that he was involved in willfully removing the documents from the White House. It is a federal crime to “willfully and unlawfully … remove … any … document … in any public office … of the United States.” Indeed, the Justice Department has identified “improper removal,” or “unlawful” removal, as a key concern in court filings in the Mar-a-Lago litigation.
The case for trying the case in Washington — where the alleged crime began -- gets exponentially stronger with the newly revealed recording.
Strictly speaking, prosecutors don’t have to prove motive in a criminal case, although it certainly helps juries reach the conclusion the crime was willful. But here, too, the smoking-gun recording might be powerful.
The CNN report explained: “The meeting in which Trump discussed the Iran document with others happened shortly after the New Yorker published a story by Susan Glasser detailing how, in the final days of Trump’s presidency, [then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark A.] Milley instructed the Joint Chiefs to ensure Trump issued no illegal orders and that he be informed if there was any concern. The story infuriated Trump.” The new developments suggest he was keeping the documents to burnish his image, debunk critics and/or show off to others. (Here’s this classified document I have!)
The recording performs one more critical function: It puts Trump’s actions in an entirely different legal universe than President Biden’s or former vice president Mike Pence’s retention of a few stray documents. (On Friday, Pence received a letter declining prosecution.) Trump’s apparent willfulness (plus alleged dissemination) and alleged obstruction bear no resemblance to the facts so far reported in other cases. The Justice Department does not indict for sloppiness (as in the case of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton) but, time and again, it has pursued willful retention of sensitive documents (not to mention willful dissemination cases), especially when other crimes are at issue.
If equal justice under the law has any meaning and the evidence is there, Smith will have no choice but to recommend indictment, and Attorney General Merrick Garland will have no choice but to follow the recommendation. If Trump gets a pass on his alleged willful retention of war plans and alleged blabbing about them to others, then prosecuting virtually any other alleged violation would become all but impossible. And Garland certainly won’t fancy being remembered for tying prosecutors’ hands for years to come.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
When CNN reported on Wednesday night that special counsel Jack Smith has a recording of former president Donald Trump boasting at his Bedminster, N.J., club in 2021 that he had a highly classified multipage document relating to war plans against Iran, months of punditry that Trump would never be indicted went out the window. (The reported sounds of paper rustling suggests Trump might have had a document in hand.) According to news reports, he shared the substance of the document with others in the room, including biographers with no security clearance.
This evidence effectively destroys whatever defense Trump was trying to concoct (he didn’t know there were classified documents, he declassified them, he thought they were not classified). Trump holds the presumption of innocence and has not been indicted. However, the last time such a damning piece of evidence (a “smoking gun”) came to light, Richard M. Nixon’s presidency was effectively over. (He left office less than a week later.)
News reports now indicate the federal grand jury hearing the documents case will meet this week. An indictment, if there is one, could come within days.
Trump’s own words could provide damning evidence of a willful violation of the Espionage Act and of obstruction — and help fix venue in D.C., where the Justice Department almost certainly wants to try the case. Andrew Weissmann, the former lead prosecutor for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, summed up the take of many career prosecutors: “I’m trying not to use hyperbole, but this is game over. ... If this story is accurate, there will be an indictment, and it’s hard to see how there will not be a conviction.” (A complete analysis from nine former prosecutors on the strength of the the special counsel’s case -even before the tape recording was reported - can be found at Just Security.)
When coupled with reports that a Trump lawyer was “waved off” searching the former president’s office, a damning case of wrongful retention of highly sensitive (and likely classified documents) appears to have come together. Trump seems to have confessed that he knew the classification rules, didn’t declassify documents before leaving office and knew that retaining them was illegal.
Moreover, his alleged dissemination of material to others (including allegedly verbally discussing this document with others) can solidify a separate part of the law: the prohibition against sharing and distributing confidential documents. A case of dissemination of classified documents would so serious as to virtually ensure an indictment.
We don’t know precisely what Trump said or what document if any he had taken, but, in a sense, it does not matter. Let’s say the specific document he is alleged to have possessed didn’t say what Trump said it did. It nevertheless confirms that Trump knew he hadn’t declassified documents and was not supposed to keep any. This obliterates the “declassified in his mind” hooey he and his supporters have claimed. Sharing it with others makes prosecution all the more likely.
Ryan Goodman, a former national security lawyer for the Defense Department, reacted this way: “There it is. Espionage Act.” He pointed to a recently unsealed opinion (ruling the attorney-client privilege was ineffective because of the crime-fraud exception) from Judge Beryl A. Howell that stated: “Other evidence demonstrates that the former president willfully sought to retain classified documents when he was not authorized to do so, and knew it.” This evidence, if true, would fit that description.
Such glaring evidence of intent — even aside from the later alleged obstruction of the Justice Department (refusing to comply fully with the subpoena, moving documents) — makes for the sort of serious violation that prompts prosecution under the Espionage Act. To make matters worse, reporting suggests there are other recordings of Trump that could further implicate him.
The latest evidence also supports filing the case in D.C., where prosecutors likely would have a more favorable judge and jury than they would face in Florida.
Even before the most recent accounts, Laurence H. Tribe and Dennis Aftergut, analyzing Trump’s admissions during the CNN town hall, explained:
When asked why he took government documents from the White House, Trump answered: “I was there and I took what I took . . . . I had every right to do it. I didn’t make a secret of it. You know, the boxes were stationed outside of the White House.”
With those fateful words, Trump admitted that he was involved in willfully removing the documents from the White House. It is a federal crime to “willfully and unlawfully … remove … any … document … in any public office … of the United States.” Indeed, the Justice Department has identified “improper removal,” or “unlawful” removal, as a key concern in court filings in the Mar-a-Lago litigation.
The case for trying the case in Washington — where the alleged crime began -- gets exponentially stronger with the newly revealed recording.
Strictly speaking, prosecutors don’t have to prove motive in a criminal case, although it certainly helps juries reach the conclusion the crime was willful. But here, too, the smoking-gun recording might be powerful.
The CNN report explained: “The meeting in which Trump discussed the Iran document with others happened shortly after the New Yorker published a story by Susan Glasser detailing how, in the final days of Trump’s presidency, [then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark A.] Milley instructed the Joint Chiefs to ensure Trump issued no illegal orders and that he be informed if there was any concern. The story infuriated Trump.” The new developments suggest he was keeping the documents to burnish his image, debunk critics and/or show off to others. (Here’s this classified document I have!)
The recording performs one more critical function: It puts Trump’s actions in an entirely different legal universe than President Biden’s or former vice president Mike Pence’s retention of a few stray documents. (On Friday, Pence received a letter declining prosecution.) Trump’s apparent willfulness (plus alleged dissemination) and alleged obstruction bear no resemblance to the facts so far reported in other cases. The Justice Department does not indict for sloppiness (as in the case of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton) but, time and again, it has pursued willful retention of sensitive documents (not to mention willful dissemination cases), especially when other crimes are at issue.
If equal justice under the law has any meaning and the evidence is there, Smith will have no choice but to recommend indictment, and Attorney General Merrick Garland will have no choice but to follow the recommendation. If Trump gets a pass on his alleged willful retention of war plans and alleged blabbing about them to others, then prosecuting virtually any other alleged violation would become all but impossible. And Garland certainly won’t fancy being remembered for tying prosecutors’ hands for years to come.
HOW TO BLOCK THE BOOK BAN BANDWAGON
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
Last fall, Vicki Baggett, a high school English teacher in Escambia County, Fla., launched a crusade against more than 100 books she wanted banned from local school libraries because of “explicit sexual content, graphic language, themes, vulgarity and political pushes.” A 32-page children’s book on the career of Black runner and Olympic gold medalist Wilma Rudolph made her list. So did Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” and Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five,” classics that have appeared on school reading lists for decades.
The policies of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) — such as the Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (Stop Woke) Act of 2022 that prohibits teaching students that they “must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress for actions … committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex” — no doubt encouraged Ms. Baggett’s efforts, which are now the subject of a federal lawsuit from publisher Penguin Random House, the free speech advocacy group PEN America, some of the authors whose works are on the list and local parents. But her crusade is also not unique; parents, activists and others have tried to impose “book bans” in school districts across the country, a mounting problem that threatens to limit the ideas available to students, particularly those in higher grades, and curb critical thinking.
If it eventually hears the Escambia County case, the Supreme Court should clarify its confusing precedent on First Amendment rights for students and bolster their constitutional protections. But those who oppose censorship cannot assume court intervention. As the litigation proceeds, their best option is to oppose book bans where they begin — at the level of local activists and school boards — by pushing educational officials to respect students’ interest to learn.
In the second half of 2022, PEN America documented 1,477 instances of books being banned in 37 states, a significant increase from the first half of that year. Texas, Florida, Missouri, Utah and South Carolina lead the nation, according to PEN America’s data. The Post found that at least seven states have passed laws in the past two years allowing librarians to face prison time or staggering fines for giving children access to “harmful” books, although the definition of what constitutes such a book is rarely clear. About another dozen states considered similar bills, some of which are due to be reevaluated next year.
Ms. Baggett, for one, claims her attempts to ban certain books are meant to protect students from feeling “uncomfortable,” though she has posted images of a Confederate flag on Facebook and admitted that she belongs to a neo-Confederate group.
Parents who express concern with what their children are reading, especially in the lower grades, are not necessarily trying to fight Ms. Baggett’s culture war. Many school districts properly try to accommodate them; if teachers flag particular works as “controversial,” students can opt out of reading the texts or read an alternate text instead. But book bans prevent all students from encountering targeted texts. In the case of, say, a children’s book about a child with parents in a same-sex relationship, students lose access to material that reflects the nation’s reality. In the case of books at higher reading levels, such as “Slaughterhouse-Five,” students miss out on texts that challenge their assumptions. The bans often target minority voices unwelcome among those who would prefer the nation’s complex past and present to be sanitized — of both its struggles and triumphs.
It is unclear whether the Escambia County lawsuit will reverse the book-banning trend, because the law around student First Amendment rights is murky. School districts have the right to control course contents, but teachers are also supposed to refrain from openly espousing clear political or religious perspectives. Books on library shelves are a slightly different matter. The Supreme Court ruled in 1982 that middle and high school libraries, as centers of voluntary inquiry, were limited in what they could remove. But the decision was fractured, leaving its scope vague. Should the Escambia County case make it to the Supreme Court, the justices should use it as an opportunity to clarify where the law stands on student First Amendment rights, and they should err on the side of stronger constitutional protections, rather than weaker.
Barring judicial intervention, the best option is for opponents of censorship to counter the nation’s Vicki Baggetts on their own turf. Right-wing activists have pressed their local officials, with a discouraging amount of success, to restrict poetry by Amanda Gorman and the novels of Jodi Picoult and Nora Roberts. The way to fight them is to follow their example: Show up and volunteer, serve on library boards and advocate for free expression. Force censorship to play defense.
Efforts to police what can be read and thought always fail, sooner or later. Reality asserts itself. History eventually comes for the censors. The task is to limit the damage they do in the meantime.
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
Last fall, Vicki Baggett, a high school English teacher in Escambia County, Fla., launched a crusade against more than 100 books she wanted banned from local school libraries because of “explicit sexual content, graphic language, themes, vulgarity and political pushes.” A 32-page children’s book on the career of Black runner and Olympic gold medalist Wilma Rudolph made her list. So did Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” and Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five,” classics that have appeared on school reading lists for decades.
The policies of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) — such as the Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (Stop Woke) Act of 2022 that prohibits teaching students that they “must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress for actions … committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex” — no doubt encouraged Ms. Baggett’s efforts, which are now the subject of a federal lawsuit from publisher Penguin Random House, the free speech advocacy group PEN America, some of the authors whose works are on the list and local parents. But her crusade is also not unique; parents, activists and others have tried to impose “book bans” in school districts across the country, a mounting problem that threatens to limit the ideas available to students, particularly those in higher grades, and curb critical thinking.
If it eventually hears the Escambia County case, the Supreme Court should clarify its confusing precedent on First Amendment rights for students and bolster their constitutional protections. But those who oppose censorship cannot assume court intervention. As the litigation proceeds, their best option is to oppose book bans where they begin — at the level of local activists and school boards — by pushing educational officials to respect students’ interest to learn.
In the second half of 2022, PEN America documented 1,477 instances of books being banned in 37 states, a significant increase from the first half of that year. Texas, Florida, Missouri, Utah and South Carolina lead the nation, according to PEN America’s data. The Post found that at least seven states have passed laws in the past two years allowing librarians to face prison time or staggering fines for giving children access to “harmful” books, although the definition of what constitutes such a book is rarely clear. About another dozen states considered similar bills, some of which are due to be reevaluated next year.
Ms. Baggett, for one, claims her attempts to ban certain books are meant to protect students from feeling “uncomfortable,” though she has posted images of a Confederate flag on Facebook and admitted that she belongs to a neo-Confederate group.
Parents who express concern with what their children are reading, especially in the lower grades, are not necessarily trying to fight Ms. Baggett’s culture war. Many school districts properly try to accommodate them; if teachers flag particular works as “controversial,” students can opt out of reading the texts or read an alternate text instead. But book bans prevent all students from encountering targeted texts. In the case of, say, a children’s book about a child with parents in a same-sex relationship, students lose access to material that reflects the nation’s reality. In the case of books at higher reading levels, such as “Slaughterhouse-Five,” students miss out on texts that challenge their assumptions. The bans often target minority voices unwelcome among those who would prefer the nation’s complex past and present to be sanitized — of both its struggles and triumphs.
It is unclear whether the Escambia County lawsuit will reverse the book-banning trend, because the law around student First Amendment rights is murky. School districts have the right to control course contents, but teachers are also supposed to refrain from openly espousing clear political or religious perspectives. Books on library shelves are a slightly different matter. The Supreme Court ruled in 1982 that middle and high school libraries, as centers of voluntary inquiry, were limited in what they could remove. But the decision was fractured, leaving its scope vague. Should the Escambia County case make it to the Supreme Court, the justices should use it as an opportunity to clarify where the law stands on student First Amendment rights, and they should err on the side of stronger constitutional protections, rather than weaker.
Barring judicial intervention, the best option is for opponents of censorship to counter the nation’s Vicki Baggetts on their own turf. Right-wing activists have pressed their local officials, with a discouraging amount of success, to restrict poetry by Amanda Gorman and the novels of Jodi Picoult and Nora Roberts. The way to fight them is to follow their example: Show up and volunteer, serve on library boards and advocate for free expression. Force censorship to play defense.
Efforts to police what can be read and thought always fail, sooner or later. Reality asserts itself. History eventually comes for the censors. The task is to limit the damage they do in the meantime.
AS RON DESANTIS BEGINS HIS WHITE HOUSE RUN, THE GOP’S WAR ON THE TRUTH KICKS INTO OVERDRIVE
If the Florida governor or any of his competitors hope to win the Republican nomination, they must do more than defeat the other candidates. They must also defeat the truth.
by Solomon Jones, The Philadelphia Inquirer
When Ron DeSantis announced his presidential campaign via Twitter Spaces this week, it should have given the Florida governor a bigger platform from which to push lies.
However, as glitches and other technical issues delayed his announcement by nearly 30 minutes, costing him hundreds of thousands of viewers in the process, the truth of the moment was evident. DeSantis can sign statutes that allow schools to hide America’s racism. He can create a police force designed to suppress the vote. He can use the levers of government to engage in a culture war with Disney. But try as he might, DeSantis cannot ban the truth.
That’s what makes this Republican presidential primary election so different. Truth itself is on the ballot, and if DeSantis or any of his competitors hope to win the GOP nomination, they must do more than defeat the other candidates. They must also defeat the truth.
The fight against truth didn’t start with DeSantis. It began when Donald Trump won the presidency after years of repeating the racist lie that former President Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Trump went on to make 30,573 false or misleading statements over the course of his presidency.
Though Trump is facing numerous criminal and civil investigations, others are paying the price for acting on Trump’s prevarication, including Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes. He was sentenced to 18 years in prison for his role in planning and executing the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection that began with Trump’s lie about winning the 2020 election. As for Trump, the lies seem to have raised his political stock. He is the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination.
If they hope to erode his lead, Trump’s Republican rivals must embrace at least some of his lies. Some parrot the ridiculous notion that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Others pretend that criminal investigations of Trump are a witch hunt. Still others, like U.S. Sen. Tim Scott, claim that racism is a thing of the past.
Sen. Scott, who announced his presidential campaign a few days before DeSantis, is the first African American to be elected to Congress from South Carolina since Reconstruction. During a 2016 speech, he recounted some of his own experiences with racism. Speaking from the Senate floor, Scott said he had been stopped by the police seven times in one year, mostly for driving a new car in the wrong neighborhood.
“I simply ask you this,” Scott told his Senate colleagues at the time. “Recognize that just because you do not feel the pain, the anguish of another, does not mean it does not exist.”
Yet, in his quest to become president, Scott now claims that America is not a racist country. That’s not only a lie. It’s a lie that Scott can refute through his own lived experience.
Then there’s former Vice President Mike Pence, who was trapped in the U.S. Capitol with his family on Jan. 6 as Trump sent tweets targeting him. Pence wrote a memoir that largely praised Trump’s presidency, but his criticism of Trump’s actions around Jan. 6 has been muted, and a judge had to order Pence to testify about conversations he had with Trump in the run-up to the insurrection.
If Pence, who has hinted that he might run for president, won’t tell the complete story, he’s engaging in half-truths. And in the words of my grandmother, a half-truth is a whole lie.
That brings me back to DeSantis. He is, perhaps, the most dangerous liar of them all, because DeSantis, as governor of Florida, can control what children learn. In doing so, he can create a generation of people for whom lies are the foundation of their very being.
If you can train children to believe that racism is a figment of our imagination, that diversity is an evil to be vanquished, and that knowledge is a luxury we can’t afford, then you create generations of ignorance.
If that is the agenda DeSantis wants to bring to the White House, he is not running against political opponents. He is running against truth, and that is a battle I pray he will eventually lose.
If the Florida governor or any of his competitors hope to win the Republican nomination, they must do more than defeat the other candidates. They must also defeat the truth.
by Solomon Jones, The Philadelphia Inquirer
When Ron DeSantis announced his presidential campaign via Twitter Spaces this week, it should have given the Florida governor a bigger platform from which to push lies.
However, as glitches and other technical issues delayed his announcement by nearly 30 minutes, costing him hundreds of thousands of viewers in the process, the truth of the moment was evident. DeSantis can sign statutes that allow schools to hide America’s racism. He can create a police force designed to suppress the vote. He can use the levers of government to engage in a culture war with Disney. But try as he might, DeSantis cannot ban the truth.
That’s what makes this Republican presidential primary election so different. Truth itself is on the ballot, and if DeSantis or any of his competitors hope to win the GOP nomination, they must do more than defeat the other candidates. They must also defeat the truth.
The fight against truth didn’t start with DeSantis. It began when Donald Trump won the presidency after years of repeating the racist lie that former President Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Trump went on to make 30,573 false or misleading statements over the course of his presidency.
Though Trump is facing numerous criminal and civil investigations, others are paying the price for acting on Trump’s prevarication, including Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes. He was sentenced to 18 years in prison for his role in planning and executing the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection that began with Trump’s lie about winning the 2020 election. As for Trump, the lies seem to have raised his political stock. He is the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination.
If they hope to erode his lead, Trump’s Republican rivals must embrace at least some of his lies. Some parrot the ridiculous notion that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Others pretend that criminal investigations of Trump are a witch hunt. Still others, like U.S. Sen. Tim Scott, claim that racism is a thing of the past.
Sen. Scott, who announced his presidential campaign a few days before DeSantis, is the first African American to be elected to Congress from South Carolina since Reconstruction. During a 2016 speech, he recounted some of his own experiences with racism. Speaking from the Senate floor, Scott said he had been stopped by the police seven times in one year, mostly for driving a new car in the wrong neighborhood.
“I simply ask you this,” Scott told his Senate colleagues at the time. “Recognize that just because you do not feel the pain, the anguish of another, does not mean it does not exist.”
Yet, in his quest to become president, Scott now claims that America is not a racist country. That’s not only a lie. It’s a lie that Scott can refute through his own lived experience.
Then there’s former Vice President Mike Pence, who was trapped in the U.S. Capitol with his family on Jan. 6 as Trump sent tweets targeting him. Pence wrote a memoir that largely praised Trump’s presidency, but his criticism of Trump’s actions around Jan. 6 has been muted, and a judge had to order Pence to testify about conversations he had with Trump in the run-up to the insurrection.
If Pence, who has hinted that he might run for president, won’t tell the complete story, he’s engaging in half-truths. And in the words of my grandmother, a half-truth is a whole lie.
That brings me back to DeSantis. He is, perhaps, the most dangerous liar of them all, because DeSantis, as governor of Florida, can control what children learn. In doing so, he can create a generation of people for whom lies are the foundation of their very being.
If you can train children to believe that racism is a figment of our imagination, that diversity is an evil to be vanquished, and that knowledge is a luxury we can’t afford, then you create generations of ignorance.
If that is the agenda DeSantis wants to bring to the White House, he is not running against political opponents. He is running against truth, and that is a battle I pray he will eventually lose.
10 THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT DESANTIS, THE FLORIDA GOVERNOR RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT
By Amy B Wang, The Washington Post
After months of speculation, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis entered the presidential race on Wednesday, joining a burgeoning field vying for the Republican nomination in 2024.
DeSantis, 44, made little secret of his presidential ambitions. Before he was elected governor of Florida in 2018, DeSantis — a Yale graduate who served in the U.S. Navy — served three terms as a congressman representing Florida’s 6th Congressional District. In November, he won reelection to a second term as governor in a landslide, defeating Democrat Charlie Crist by more than 19 percentage points. In recent appearances across the country, as well as on a book tour that has served as a de facto campaign, DeSantis has touted what he has called the “Florida blueprint” as his vision for America.
Here’s a look at the policies DeSantis has put in place during his tenure as governor, as well as the culture-war battles he has waged leading up to his presidential campaign launch, that best illuminate what that blueprint would be.
1. Anti-LGBTQ legislation
As governor, DeSantis has signed several bills into law targeting the LGBTQ community, including legislation that criminalizes transgender people for using many bathrooms and changing areas that match their gender identity, bans gender-affirming care for minors and targets drag shows and pronouns.
Notably, DeSantis signed a law in July limiting what teachers in Florida’s public schools can discuss about gender identity and sexual orientation. What became known as the “don’t say gay” law triggered similar bills in other state legislatures — as well as a backlash from parents, LGBTQ advocacy groups and corporations. (More on that last one in a bit.)
DeSantis’s measures prompted two advocacy groups this month to issue advisories warning that travel to Florida may be dangerous for members of the LGBTQ community.
“Taken in their totality, Florida’s slate of laws and policies targeting basic freedoms and rights pose a serious risk to the health and safety of those traveling to the state,” Equality Florida said in its advisory.
2. His public feud with Disney
After some public pressure, executives from the Walt Disney Co. criticized the legislation restricting LGBTQ+ discussion before it was signed into law, prompting a defiant DeSantis to declare that Florida’s policies would not be based “on the musings of woke corporations.” (Left unsaid was Disney’s status as Florida’s largest individual taxpayer and that DeSantis himself got married at Walt Disney World in 2009.)
After the law went into effect, Disney publicly opposed it and said it hoped the measure would be overturned through the courts. What followed was a retaliatory tug-of-war that continues today.
State lawmakers moved to dissolve Reedy Creek, Disney’s special taxing district, and ultimately replaced Reedy Creek’s board members with a new panel whose members were chosen by DeSantis. However, in a last-minute legal maneuver, Disney used a “royal lives” clause to strip the DeSantis-appointed oversight board of much of its power. The entertainment behemoth then sued DeSantis last month, alleging political retaliation, which resulted in a countersuit.
3. Abortion restrictions
Last month, DeSantis signed a law banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, hours after the state legislature passed the bill. The decision was widely seen as a political move to the right by him ahead of his entering the Republican presidential primary race. However, ever since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, polling suggests that independent voters have shifted their support to candidates who believe most or all abortions should be legal.
DeSantis may have known the new law would not be as palatable in a general election, given how little he has promoted it, even when among the friendliest of conservative audiences. In a speech at the conservative Liberty University the morning after he signed the law, DeSantis made no mention of it. In a recent appearance at a gala for the most prominent antiabortion group in his state, DeSantis spent only about 20 seconds of his 40-minute keynote speech discussing abortion restrictions.
Demonstrators rally outside the Florida Capitol on Feb. 15 in Tallahassee to protest Gov. Ron DeSantis’s plan to eliminate Advanced Placement courses on African American studies in high schools. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)
4. Restricting African American studies, diversity programs
In January, Florida officials rejected a new Advanced Placement course in African American studies, which DeSantis blasted as progressive “indoctrination.” The College Board, which oversees AP curriculum, later said it would revise the course to remove lessons on Black Lives Matter and the reparations movement but denied it was doing so in response to criticisms from the DeSantis administration. DeSantis later threatened to eliminate Advanced Placement classes in the state entirely.
The decision was part of DeSantis’s campaign against what he has termed “woke” curriculum and came after he signed a bill into law limiting how Florida schools and workplaces teach about race and identity. The bill, called the “Stop Woke Act,” prohibits teachers from discussing race and identity in a way that makes any student feel “guilt or anguish.”
Critics have said that the law is overly broad and that it has resulted in books that address race and identity being removed from schools and libraries — some because of parental challenges, others preemptively by educators seeking to avoid any possible conflict. DeSantis has denied any attempts to ban books in the state, calling it a “hoax.”
DeSantis this month signed a bill into law defunding diversity, equity and inclusion programs in Florida’s public colleges.
5. Expanded gun access
Days after a shooting at a private Christian school in Nashville, DeSantis signed into law a bill that made Florida the 26th state to allow people to carry concealed weapons without a permit. Much like when he signed Florida’s six-week abortion ban into law, the permitless-carry bill was signed without fanfare and marked with a brief news release afterward.
“Constitutional Carry is in the books,” DeSantis said.
The White House sharply criticized the new law, calling it “the opposite of common-sense gun safety.” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre cited three high-profile shootings that have occurred in Florida, including the 2018 attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, where 17 people were killed; the 2016 attack at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, where 49 people were killed and dozens wounded; and a shooting in February that killed a television reporter, a 38-year-old woman and a 9-year-old girl.
“The people of Florida — who have paid a steep price for state and congressional inaction on guns from Parkland to Pulse Nightclub to Pine Hills — deserve better,” Jean-Pierre said.
6. Anti-immigration measures
DeSantis has used both laws and political stunts to crack down on undocumented immigrants. In September, he arranged for dozens of Venezuelan migrants in Texas to be flown to Martha’s Vineyard — part of an ongoing campaign by him and other Republican governors to send migrants to Democrat-heavy cities such as Washington, New York and Chicago.
The migrants who were flown to Martha’s Vineyard later filed a class-action lawsuit against DeSantis and other officials, saying the officials used fraud and misrepresentation to persuade them to travel across state lines. Human rights groups, along with the White House, also condemned the stunt.
Earlier this month, DeSantis announced that he would send 1,000 law enforcement officers to Texas as part of an agreement to help that state with security along the border with Mexico. DeSantis also signed a law cracking down on undocumented immigration to the state, prompting yet another travel advisory — this time from the Latino advocacy group LULAC — warning that Latinos in Florida could face racial profiling under the measure.
7. Ukraine remarks
DeSantis in March called Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a “territorial dispute” that was a vital interest “for Europe, but not for the United States.” Top congressional Republicans — including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) — criticized DeSantis for his characterization of the war. The comments also put him at odds with would-be 2024 rivals, including former vice president Mike Pence, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and former ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley.
DeSantis later walked back those comments, telling broadcaster Piers Morgan that his remarks had been “mischaracterized” — and leading to more criticism from rivals that he was flip-flopping on the issue.
8. Election-crimes unit
As part of an aggressive crackdown on voter fraud — one that critics say is unnecessary relative to the amount of voter fraud that occurs in the state — DeSantis launched an elections police force last year. The new Office of Election Crimes and Security has arrested about two dozen people, mostly Black men who had recently voted and were shown to be confused and concerned upon their arrest, according to police body-camera footage.
All of them were charged with voter fraud, a third-degree felony in the state, and face as much as $5,000 in fines and up to five years in prison. Several of those charged told The Washington Post last year that election officials and voter registration groups led them to believe that they were eligible to vote after the state’s 2018 amendment to restore felons’ voting rights. Some of their attorneys said Florida seemed to target their clients for honestly misunderstanding the law.
9. Coronavirus protections
DeSantis’s railing against restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic is arguably what helped his profile rise in conservative circles. As governor, he consistently resisted or outright opposed coronavirus mitigation measures in Florida, such as masking, lockdowns and testing, often calling the steps an assault on individual freedoms.
Amid a surge of cases caused by the delta variant of the coronavirus, DeSantis issued an executive order prohibiting schools from enacting mask mandates, threatening to withhold funding if they did so. During a surge driven by the omicron variant, DeSantis said testing asymptomatic people was merely “lockdown by stealth.”
DeSantis refused to disclose whether he had received a booster shot, prompting even former president Donald Trump — whose base comprises much of the anti-vaccination contingent — to mock DeSantis as “gutless.” The governor also put out statewide guidance advising “against wearing facial coverings in a community setting” — and once berated a group of high school students for wearing masks around him.
10. An escalating feud with Trump
DeSantis’s rising star has put him in Trump’s crosshairs. Trump announced his reelection campaign in the fall and has since preemptively and relentlessly targeted the governor in his speeches and on social media.
DeSantis, once a vocal supporter of Trump, has distanced himself from the former president after it became apparent that the two would be likely rivals in the 2024 GOP presidential primary. The enmity has been reciprocated: Trump, who claims credit for DeSantis’s rise in the GOP, has mocked the Florida governor as “Ron DeSanctimonious” and released a steady barrage of attacks on DeSantis targeting his policies, his personality, the way he reportedly eats chocolate pudding and more.
DeSantis’s attacks on Trump have been more subtle but no less biting. He reportedly has billed himself as “Trump without the drama.” Asked in March about the possibility of a Trump indictment, DeSantis criticized Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D) — but also couldn’t resist making references to the investigation into Trump’s role in hush money payments to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels.
“Look, I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair — I just, I can’t speak to that,” DeSantis said, prompting laughter and applause from the audience.
By Amy B Wang, The Washington Post
After months of speculation, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis entered the presidential race on Wednesday, joining a burgeoning field vying for the Republican nomination in 2024.
DeSantis, 44, made little secret of his presidential ambitions. Before he was elected governor of Florida in 2018, DeSantis — a Yale graduate who served in the U.S. Navy — served three terms as a congressman representing Florida’s 6th Congressional District. In November, he won reelection to a second term as governor in a landslide, defeating Democrat Charlie Crist by more than 19 percentage points. In recent appearances across the country, as well as on a book tour that has served as a de facto campaign, DeSantis has touted what he has called the “Florida blueprint” as his vision for America.
Here’s a look at the policies DeSantis has put in place during his tenure as governor, as well as the culture-war battles he has waged leading up to his presidential campaign launch, that best illuminate what that blueprint would be.
1. Anti-LGBTQ legislation
As governor, DeSantis has signed several bills into law targeting the LGBTQ community, including legislation that criminalizes transgender people for using many bathrooms and changing areas that match their gender identity, bans gender-affirming care for minors and targets drag shows and pronouns.
Notably, DeSantis signed a law in July limiting what teachers in Florida’s public schools can discuss about gender identity and sexual orientation. What became known as the “don’t say gay” law triggered similar bills in other state legislatures — as well as a backlash from parents, LGBTQ advocacy groups and corporations. (More on that last one in a bit.)
DeSantis’s measures prompted two advocacy groups this month to issue advisories warning that travel to Florida may be dangerous for members of the LGBTQ community.
“Taken in their totality, Florida’s slate of laws and policies targeting basic freedoms and rights pose a serious risk to the health and safety of those traveling to the state,” Equality Florida said in its advisory.
2. His public feud with Disney
After some public pressure, executives from the Walt Disney Co. criticized the legislation restricting LGBTQ+ discussion before it was signed into law, prompting a defiant DeSantis to declare that Florida’s policies would not be based “on the musings of woke corporations.” (Left unsaid was Disney’s status as Florida’s largest individual taxpayer and that DeSantis himself got married at Walt Disney World in 2009.)
After the law went into effect, Disney publicly opposed it and said it hoped the measure would be overturned through the courts. What followed was a retaliatory tug-of-war that continues today.
State lawmakers moved to dissolve Reedy Creek, Disney’s special taxing district, and ultimately replaced Reedy Creek’s board members with a new panel whose members were chosen by DeSantis. However, in a last-minute legal maneuver, Disney used a “royal lives” clause to strip the DeSantis-appointed oversight board of much of its power. The entertainment behemoth then sued DeSantis last month, alleging political retaliation, which resulted in a countersuit.
3. Abortion restrictions
Last month, DeSantis signed a law banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, hours after the state legislature passed the bill. The decision was widely seen as a political move to the right by him ahead of his entering the Republican presidential primary race. However, ever since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, polling suggests that independent voters have shifted their support to candidates who believe most or all abortions should be legal.
DeSantis may have known the new law would not be as palatable in a general election, given how little he has promoted it, even when among the friendliest of conservative audiences. In a speech at the conservative Liberty University the morning after he signed the law, DeSantis made no mention of it. In a recent appearance at a gala for the most prominent antiabortion group in his state, DeSantis spent only about 20 seconds of his 40-minute keynote speech discussing abortion restrictions.
Demonstrators rally outside the Florida Capitol on Feb. 15 in Tallahassee to protest Gov. Ron DeSantis’s plan to eliminate Advanced Placement courses on African American studies in high schools. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)
4. Restricting African American studies, diversity programs
In January, Florida officials rejected a new Advanced Placement course in African American studies, which DeSantis blasted as progressive “indoctrination.” The College Board, which oversees AP curriculum, later said it would revise the course to remove lessons on Black Lives Matter and the reparations movement but denied it was doing so in response to criticisms from the DeSantis administration. DeSantis later threatened to eliminate Advanced Placement classes in the state entirely.
The decision was part of DeSantis’s campaign against what he has termed “woke” curriculum and came after he signed a bill into law limiting how Florida schools and workplaces teach about race and identity. The bill, called the “Stop Woke Act,” prohibits teachers from discussing race and identity in a way that makes any student feel “guilt or anguish.”
Critics have said that the law is overly broad and that it has resulted in books that address race and identity being removed from schools and libraries — some because of parental challenges, others preemptively by educators seeking to avoid any possible conflict. DeSantis has denied any attempts to ban books in the state, calling it a “hoax.”
DeSantis this month signed a bill into law defunding diversity, equity and inclusion programs in Florida’s public colleges.
5. Expanded gun access
Days after a shooting at a private Christian school in Nashville, DeSantis signed into law a bill that made Florida the 26th state to allow people to carry concealed weapons without a permit. Much like when he signed Florida’s six-week abortion ban into law, the permitless-carry bill was signed without fanfare and marked with a brief news release afterward.
“Constitutional Carry is in the books,” DeSantis said.
The White House sharply criticized the new law, calling it “the opposite of common-sense gun safety.” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre cited three high-profile shootings that have occurred in Florida, including the 2018 attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, where 17 people were killed; the 2016 attack at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, where 49 people were killed and dozens wounded; and a shooting in February that killed a television reporter, a 38-year-old woman and a 9-year-old girl.
“The people of Florida — who have paid a steep price for state and congressional inaction on guns from Parkland to Pulse Nightclub to Pine Hills — deserve better,” Jean-Pierre said.
6. Anti-immigration measures
DeSantis has used both laws and political stunts to crack down on undocumented immigrants. In September, he arranged for dozens of Venezuelan migrants in Texas to be flown to Martha’s Vineyard — part of an ongoing campaign by him and other Republican governors to send migrants to Democrat-heavy cities such as Washington, New York and Chicago.
The migrants who were flown to Martha’s Vineyard later filed a class-action lawsuit against DeSantis and other officials, saying the officials used fraud and misrepresentation to persuade them to travel across state lines. Human rights groups, along with the White House, also condemned the stunt.
Earlier this month, DeSantis announced that he would send 1,000 law enforcement officers to Texas as part of an agreement to help that state with security along the border with Mexico. DeSantis also signed a law cracking down on undocumented immigration to the state, prompting yet another travel advisory — this time from the Latino advocacy group LULAC — warning that Latinos in Florida could face racial profiling under the measure.
7. Ukraine remarks
DeSantis in March called Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a “territorial dispute” that was a vital interest “for Europe, but not for the United States.” Top congressional Republicans — including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) — criticized DeSantis for his characterization of the war. The comments also put him at odds with would-be 2024 rivals, including former vice president Mike Pence, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and former ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley.
DeSantis later walked back those comments, telling broadcaster Piers Morgan that his remarks had been “mischaracterized” — and leading to more criticism from rivals that he was flip-flopping on the issue.
8. Election-crimes unit
As part of an aggressive crackdown on voter fraud — one that critics say is unnecessary relative to the amount of voter fraud that occurs in the state — DeSantis launched an elections police force last year. The new Office of Election Crimes and Security has arrested about two dozen people, mostly Black men who had recently voted and were shown to be confused and concerned upon their arrest, according to police body-camera footage.
All of them were charged with voter fraud, a third-degree felony in the state, and face as much as $5,000 in fines and up to five years in prison. Several of those charged told The Washington Post last year that election officials and voter registration groups led them to believe that they were eligible to vote after the state’s 2018 amendment to restore felons’ voting rights. Some of their attorneys said Florida seemed to target their clients for honestly misunderstanding the law.
9. Coronavirus protections
DeSantis’s railing against restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic is arguably what helped his profile rise in conservative circles. As governor, he consistently resisted or outright opposed coronavirus mitigation measures in Florida, such as masking, lockdowns and testing, often calling the steps an assault on individual freedoms.
Amid a surge of cases caused by the delta variant of the coronavirus, DeSantis issued an executive order prohibiting schools from enacting mask mandates, threatening to withhold funding if they did so. During a surge driven by the omicron variant, DeSantis said testing asymptomatic people was merely “lockdown by stealth.”
DeSantis refused to disclose whether he had received a booster shot, prompting even former president Donald Trump — whose base comprises much of the anti-vaccination contingent — to mock DeSantis as “gutless.” The governor also put out statewide guidance advising “against wearing facial coverings in a community setting” — and once berated a group of high school students for wearing masks around him.
10. An escalating feud with Trump
DeSantis’s rising star has put him in Trump’s crosshairs. Trump announced his reelection campaign in the fall and has since preemptively and relentlessly targeted the governor in his speeches and on social media.
DeSantis, once a vocal supporter of Trump, has distanced himself from the former president after it became apparent that the two would be likely rivals in the 2024 GOP presidential primary. The enmity has been reciprocated: Trump, who claims credit for DeSantis’s rise in the GOP, has mocked the Florida governor as “Ron DeSanctimonious” and released a steady barrage of attacks on DeSantis targeting his policies, his personality, the way he reportedly eats chocolate pudding and more.
DeSantis’s attacks on Trump have been more subtle but no less biting. He reportedly has billed himself as “Trump without the drama.” Asked in March about the possibility of a Trump indictment, DeSantis criticized Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D) — but also couldn’t resist making references to the investigation into Trump’s role in hush money payments to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels.
“Look, I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair — I just, I can’t speak to that,” DeSantis said, prompting laughter and applause from the audience.
WHY IS GEORGE SANTOS STILL IN OFFICE?
By The New York Times Editorial Board
George Santos is far from the first member of Congress to be indicted while in office. Both chambers and both parties have endured their share of scandals. In 2005, for instance, F.B.I. agents discovered $90,000 hidden in the freezer of Representative William Jefferson, who was under investigation for bribery. He refused to step down, wound up losing his seat in the 2008 election, and was later sentenced to 13 years in prison. James Traficant was expelled from Congress in 2002 after being convicted of bribery and racketeering. Bob Ney resigned in 2006 because of his involvement in a federal bribery scandal.
But in one way, Mr. Santos is different from other members of Congress who have demonstrated moral failures, ethical failures, failures of judgment and blatant corruption and lawbreaking in office. What he did was to deceive the very voters who brought him to office in the first place, undermining the most basic level of trust between an electorate and a representative. These misdeeds erode the faith in the institution of Congress and the electoral system through which American democracy functions.
For that reason, House Republican leaders should have acted immediately to protect that system by allowing a vote to expel Mr. Santos and joining Democrats in removing him from office. Instead — not wanting to lose Mr. Santos’s crucial vote — Speaker Kevin McCarthy pushed a measure to refer the matter to the House Ethics Committee, notorious for its glacial pace, and the House voted predictably along party lines on Wednesday afternoon to follow that guidance.
If the House doesn’t reverse that vote under public pressure, it’s incumbent on the Ethics Committee to conduct a timely investigation and recommend expulsion to the full House, where a two-thirds vote will be required to send Mr. Santos back to Long Island.
Mr. Santos was arrested and arraigned in federal court last week on 13 criminal counts linked primarily to his 2022 House campaign. Mr. McCarthy and other members of the Republican leadership effectively shrugged, indicating that they would let the legal process “play itself out,” as the conference’s chair, Elise Stefanik, put it.
In addition to expulsion, the Republican leaders have several official disciplinary measures they could pursue, such as a formal reprimand or censure, but so far, they have done little more than express concern. Mr. McCarthy has several tough legislative fights looming, including negotiations over the federal budget to avoid a government default, and Mr. Santos’s removal might imperil the G.O.P.’s slim majority. In effect, Mr. Santos’s bad faith has made him indispensable.
His constituents believed he held certain qualifications and values, only to learn after Election Day that they had been deceived. Now they have no recourse until the next election.
The question, then, is whether House Republican leaders and other members are willing to risk their credibility for a con man, someone whose entire way of life — his origin story, résumé, livelihood — is based on a never-ending series of lies. Of course they should not be. They should have demonstrated to the American people that there is a minimum ethical standard for Congress and used the power of expulsion to enforce it. They should have explained to voters that their commitment to democracy and public trust goes beyond their party’s political goals.
At least some Republican lawmakers recognize what is at stake and are speaking out. Senator Mitt Romney of Utah reiterated his view that Mr. Santos should do the honorable thing and step aside, saying, “He should have resigned a long time ago. He is an embarrassment to our party. He is an embarrassment to the United States Congress.”
Similarly, Anthony D’Esposito and Mike Lawler, both representing districts in New York, are among several House Republicans advocating his resignation. Representative Tony Gonzales of Texas has gone a step further, calling for Mr. Santos’s expulsion and a special election to replace him. “The people of New York’s 3rd district deserve a voice in Congress,” he wrote on Twitter.
Mr. Gonzales gets at the heart of the matter. Mr. Santos has shown contempt for his constituents and for the electoral process. Mr. McCarthy and the other Republican House leaders owe Americans more.
By The New York Times Editorial Board
George Santos is far from the first member of Congress to be indicted while in office. Both chambers and both parties have endured their share of scandals. In 2005, for instance, F.B.I. agents discovered $90,000 hidden in the freezer of Representative William Jefferson, who was under investigation for bribery. He refused to step down, wound up losing his seat in the 2008 election, and was later sentenced to 13 years in prison. James Traficant was expelled from Congress in 2002 after being convicted of bribery and racketeering. Bob Ney resigned in 2006 because of his involvement in a federal bribery scandal.
But in one way, Mr. Santos is different from other members of Congress who have demonstrated moral failures, ethical failures, failures of judgment and blatant corruption and lawbreaking in office. What he did was to deceive the very voters who brought him to office in the first place, undermining the most basic level of trust between an electorate and a representative. These misdeeds erode the faith in the institution of Congress and the electoral system through which American democracy functions.
For that reason, House Republican leaders should have acted immediately to protect that system by allowing a vote to expel Mr. Santos and joining Democrats in removing him from office. Instead — not wanting to lose Mr. Santos’s crucial vote — Speaker Kevin McCarthy pushed a measure to refer the matter to the House Ethics Committee, notorious for its glacial pace, and the House voted predictably along party lines on Wednesday afternoon to follow that guidance.
If the House doesn’t reverse that vote under public pressure, it’s incumbent on the Ethics Committee to conduct a timely investigation and recommend expulsion to the full House, where a two-thirds vote will be required to send Mr. Santos back to Long Island.
Mr. Santos was arrested and arraigned in federal court last week on 13 criminal counts linked primarily to his 2022 House campaign. Mr. McCarthy and other members of the Republican leadership effectively shrugged, indicating that they would let the legal process “play itself out,” as the conference’s chair, Elise Stefanik, put it.
In addition to expulsion, the Republican leaders have several official disciplinary measures they could pursue, such as a formal reprimand or censure, but so far, they have done little more than express concern. Mr. McCarthy has several tough legislative fights looming, including negotiations over the federal budget to avoid a government default, and Mr. Santos’s removal might imperil the G.O.P.’s slim majority. In effect, Mr. Santos’s bad faith has made him indispensable.
His constituents believed he held certain qualifications and values, only to learn after Election Day that they had been deceived. Now they have no recourse until the next election.
The question, then, is whether House Republican leaders and other members are willing to risk their credibility for a con man, someone whose entire way of life — his origin story, résumé, livelihood — is based on a never-ending series of lies. Of course they should not be. They should have demonstrated to the American people that there is a minimum ethical standard for Congress and used the power of expulsion to enforce it. They should have explained to voters that their commitment to democracy and public trust goes beyond their party’s political goals.
At least some Republican lawmakers recognize what is at stake and are speaking out. Senator Mitt Romney of Utah reiterated his view that Mr. Santos should do the honorable thing and step aside, saying, “He should have resigned a long time ago. He is an embarrassment to our party. He is an embarrassment to the United States Congress.”
Similarly, Anthony D’Esposito and Mike Lawler, both representing districts in New York, are among several House Republicans advocating his resignation. Representative Tony Gonzales of Texas has gone a step further, calling for Mr. Santos’s expulsion and a special election to replace him. “The people of New York’s 3rd district deserve a voice in Congress,” he wrote on Twitter.
Mr. Gonzales gets at the heart of the matter. Mr. Santos has shown contempt for his constituents and for the electoral process. Mr. McCarthy and the other Republican House leaders owe Americans more.
AIR DESANTIS: THE PRIVATE JETS AND SECRET DONORS FLYING HIM AROUND
As the Florida governor hopscotched the country preparing to run for president, a Michigan nonprofit paid the bills. It won’t say where it got the money.
By Alexandra Berzon and Rebecca Davis O’Brien, The New York Times
For Ron DeSantis, Sunday, Feb. 19, was the start of another busy week of not officially running for president.
That night, he left Tallahassee on a Florida hotelier’s private jet, heading to Newark before a meet-and-greet with police officers on Staten Island on Monday morning. Next, he boarded a twin-jet Bombardier to get to a speech in the Philadelphia suburbs, before flying to a Knights of Columbus hall outside Chicago, and then home to his day job as governor of Florida.
The tour and others like it were made possible by the convenience of private air travel — and by the largess of wealthy and in some cases secret donors footing the bill.
Ahead of an expected White House bid, Mr. DeSantis has relied heavily on his rich allies to ferry him around the country to test his message and raise his profile. Many of these donors are familiar boosters from Florida, some with business interests before the state, according to a New York Times review of Mr. DeSantis’s travel. Others have been shielded from the public by a new nonprofit, The Times found, in an arrangement that drew criticism from ethics experts.
Mr. DeSantis, who is expected to formally announce his candidacy next week, is hardly the first politician to take advantage of the speed and comfort of a Gulfstream jet. Candidates and officeholders in both parties have long accepted the benefits of a donor’s plane as worth the political risk of appearing indebted to special interests or out of touch with voters.
But ethics experts said the travel — and specifically the role of the nonprofit — shows how Mr. DeSantis’s prolonged candidate-in-limbo status has allowed him to work around rules intended to keep donors from wielding secret influence. As a declared federal candidate, he would face far stricter requirements for accepting and reporting such donations.
Mr. DeSantis has aggressively navigated his state’s ethics and campaign finance laws to avoid flying commercial. And he has gone to new lengths to prevent transparency: Last week, he signed a bill making travel records held by law enforcement, dating back to the beginning of his term, exempt from public records requests.
Mr. DeSantis is still required to report contributions and expenses in his campaign finance records, but the new law probably prevents law enforcement agencies from releasing more details, such as itineraries, flight information or even lists of visitors to the governor’s mansion. (Mr. DeSantis says he is trying to address a security concern.)
In February, Mr. DeSantis traveled to Newark on a jet owned by Jeffrey Soffer, a prominent hotel owner who, according to several lawmakers and lobbyists, has sought a change in state law that would allow him to expand gambling to his Miami Beach resort.
The February trip and others were arranged by And To The Republic, a Michigan-based nonprofit, according to Tori Sachs, its executive director. The nonprofit formed in late January as Mr. DeSantis was beginning to test the national waters and quickly became a critical part of his warm-up campaign. It organized nearly a dozen speaking events featuring the governor in at least eight states.
Ms. Sachs would not say how much was spent on the flights or who paid for them.
Navigating the Loopholes
It is unclear how Mr. DeSantis will account for the trips arranged by the nonprofit without running afoul of state ethics laws. Florida generally bars officeholders from accepting gifts from lobbyists or people, like Mr. Soffer, whose companies employ lobbyists — unless those gifts are considered political contributions.
But both Ms. Sachs and a person involved in Mr. DeSantis’s recent travel said they did not consider the trips political contributions or gifts. The person was not authorized to discuss the matter and spoke on condition of anonymity. The group’s practice “is to provide transportation for special guests,” Ms. Sachs said, “in full compliance with the law.”
Florida ethics rules, however, give politicians plenty of loopholes. In some circumstances, for example, officeholders can accept paid travel to give speeches as part of their official duties. The state ethics commission has also allowed officeholders to accept gifts from lobbyists if they are channeled through third-party groups.
Additional travel donations were routed to the Republican Party of Florida, which Mr. DeSantis often used as a third-party pass-through.
A half dozen lobbyists and donors who spoke with The Times said they became accustomed to calls from the governor’s political aides asking for planes — in at least one case, for a last-minute trip home from out of state and, more recently, for a flight to Japan.
The Japan trip, which was part of an overseas tour that gave Mr. DeSantis a chance to show off his foreign policy chops, was considered part of the governor’s official duties and was organized in part by Enterprise Florida, a public-private business development group. But Mr. DeSantis’s office would not disclose how it was paid for or how he traveled. Enterprise Florida did not respond to requests for comment.
“It’s all legal, ethical, no issues there,” he told reporters.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Soffer declined to comment.
The Warm-Up Campaign
Soon after winning re-election in November, the governor turned to building his national profile. He began traveling the country to visit with Republican activists, dine with donors, speak at events and promote a new book, “The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival.”
Some of his travel was paid for by Friends of Ron DeSantis, a Florida political committee that supported his campaign for governor and reports its donors. The committee had more than $80 million on hand as recently as last month — money that is expected to be transferred to a federal super PAC supporting his presidential run.
Since November, that committee has received 17 contributions for political travel from nine donors. They include Maximo Alvarez, an oil and gas distributor, and Morteza Hosseini, a Florida homebuilder who has frequently lent his plane to the governor and has become a close ally.
But trips paid for by the nonprofit group, And To The Republic, do not appear in state records.
The group is registered as a social welfare organization under Section 501(c)(4) of the federal tax code, meaning its primary activity cannot be related to political campaigns. Other prospective and official presidential candidates also have relationships to similar organizations, often called dark money groups because they are not required to disclose their donors.
The nonprofit’s founder, Ms. Sachs, said it was formed to promote “state policy solutions that are setting the agenda for the country” and described Mr. DeSantis as one of the first elected officials to “partner” with the group. Another of those officials, Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa, has appeared at the group’s events in her home state — alongside Mr. DeSantis.
And To The Republic has hosted Mr. DeSantis at events in South Carolina, Nevada and Iowa, all key early primary states. Some of those events were promoted as “The Florida Blueprint,” borrowing from Mr. DeSantis’s book title.
The arrangement has made tracking Mr. DeSantis’s travel — and its costs — difficult. The Times and other news outlets used public flight trackers to verify the governor’s use of Mr. Soffer’s plane, which was first reported by Politico.
Other trips arranged by the group include the Feb. 20 stops outside Philadelphia and Chicago and the return trip to Tallahassee, on which Mr. DeSantis flew on a plane registered to a company run by Charles Whittall, an Orlando developer. Mr. Whittall, who gave $25,000 to Mr. DeSantis’s political committee in 2021, said that he uses a leasing company to rent out his aircraft, and that he did not provide it as a political contribution.
In March, he traveled to Cobb County, Ga., on a plane owned by an entity connected to Waffle House, the Georgia-based restaurant chain. The company did not respond to a request for comment.
Other potential DeSantis rivals have made headlines for their use of private jets. Both as South Carolina governor and as ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley faced criticism for flying on private planes owned by wealthy South Carolinians.
In 2020, The Associated Press reported that donors gave hundreds of thousands of dollars in private air travel to Donald J. Trump’s fund-raising committee. The donors included Ben Pogue, a Texas businessman whose father later received a presidential pardon.
Still, Mr. Trump — who owns his own plane — has repeatedly sought to draw attention to Mr. DeSantis’s travel, claiming the private planes were effectively campaign contributions and “Ron DeSantis is a full-time candidate for president.”
As the Florida governor hopscotched the country preparing to run for president, a Michigan nonprofit paid the bills. It won’t say where it got the money.
By Alexandra Berzon and Rebecca Davis O’Brien, The New York Times
For Ron DeSantis, Sunday, Feb. 19, was the start of another busy week of not officially running for president.
That night, he left Tallahassee on a Florida hotelier’s private jet, heading to Newark before a meet-and-greet with police officers on Staten Island on Monday morning. Next, he boarded a twin-jet Bombardier to get to a speech in the Philadelphia suburbs, before flying to a Knights of Columbus hall outside Chicago, and then home to his day job as governor of Florida.
The tour and others like it were made possible by the convenience of private air travel — and by the largess of wealthy and in some cases secret donors footing the bill.
Ahead of an expected White House bid, Mr. DeSantis has relied heavily on his rich allies to ferry him around the country to test his message and raise his profile. Many of these donors are familiar boosters from Florida, some with business interests before the state, according to a New York Times review of Mr. DeSantis’s travel. Others have been shielded from the public by a new nonprofit, The Times found, in an arrangement that drew criticism from ethics experts.
Mr. DeSantis, who is expected to formally announce his candidacy next week, is hardly the first politician to take advantage of the speed and comfort of a Gulfstream jet. Candidates and officeholders in both parties have long accepted the benefits of a donor’s plane as worth the political risk of appearing indebted to special interests or out of touch with voters.
But ethics experts said the travel — and specifically the role of the nonprofit — shows how Mr. DeSantis’s prolonged candidate-in-limbo status has allowed him to work around rules intended to keep donors from wielding secret influence. As a declared federal candidate, he would face far stricter requirements for accepting and reporting such donations.
Mr. DeSantis has aggressively navigated his state’s ethics and campaign finance laws to avoid flying commercial. And he has gone to new lengths to prevent transparency: Last week, he signed a bill making travel records held by law enforcement, dating back to the beginning of his term, exempt from public records requests.
Mr. DeSantis is still required to report contributions and expenses in his campaign finance records, but the new law probably prevents law enforcement agencies from releasing more details, such as itineraries, flight information or even lists of visitors to the governor’s mansion. (Mr. DeSantis says he is trying to address a security concern.)
In February, Mr. DeSantis traveled to Newark on a jet owned by Jeffrey Soffer, a prominent hotel owner who, according to several lawmakers and lobbyists, has sought a change in state law that would allow him to expand gambling to his Miami Beach resort.
The February trip and others were arranged by And To The Republic, a Michigan-based nonprofit, according to Tori Sachs, its executive director. The nonprofit formed in late January as Mr. DeSantis was beginning to test the national waters and quickly became a critical part of his warm-up campaign. It organized nearly a dozen speaking events featuring the governor in at least eight states.
Ms. Sachs would not say how much was spent on the flights or who paid for them.
Navigating the Loopholes
It is unclear how Mr. DeSantis will account for the trips arranged by the nonprofit without running afoul of state ethics laws. Florida generally bars officeholders from accepting gifts from lobbyists or people, like Mr. Soffer, whose companies employ lobbyists — unless those gifts are considered political contributions.
But both Ms. Sachs and a person involved in Mr. DeSantis’s recent travel said they did not consider the trips political contributions or gifts. The person was not authorized to discuss the matter and spoke on condition of anonymity. The group’s practice “is to provide transportation for special guests,” Ms. Sachs said, “in full compliance with the law.”
Florida ethics rules, however, give politicians plenty of loopholes. In some circumstances, for example, officeholders can accept paid travel to give speeches as part of their official duties. The state ethics commission has also allowed officeholders to accept gifts from lobbyists if they are channeled through third-party groups.
Additional travel donations were routed to the Republican Party of Florida, which Mr. DeSantis often used as a third-party pass-through.
A half dozen lobbyists and donors who spoke with The Times said they became accustomed to calls from the governor’s political aides asking for planes — in at least one case, for a last-minute trip home from out of state and, more recently, for a flight to Japan.
The Japan trip, which was part of an overseas tour that gave Mr. DeSantis a chance to show off his foreign policy chops, was considered part of the governor’s official duties and was organized in part by Enterprise Florida, a public-private business development group. But Mr. DeSantis’s office would not disclose how it was paid for or how he traveled. Enterprise Florida did not respond to requests for comment.
“It’s all legal, ethical, no issues there,” he told reporters.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Soffer declined to comment.
The Warm-Up Campaign
Soon after winning re-election in November, the governor turned to building his national profile. He began traveling the country to visit with Republican activists, dine with donors, speak at events and promote a new book, “The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival.”
Some of his travel was paid for by Friends of Ron DeSantis, a Florida political committee that supported his campaign for governor and reports its donors. The committee had more than $80 million on hand as recently as last month — money that is expected to be transferred to a federal super PAC supporting his presidential run.
Since November, that committee has received 17 contributions for political travel from nine donors. They include Maximo Alvarez, an oil and gas distributor, and Morteza Hosseini, a Florida homebuilder who has frequently lent his plane to the governor and has become a close ally.
But trips paid for by the nonprofit group, And To The Republic, do not appear in state records.
The group is registered as a social welfare organization under Section 501(c)(4) of the federal tax code, meaning its primary activity cannot be related to political campaigns. Other prospective and official presidential candidates also have relationships to similar organizations, often called dark money groups because they are not required to disclose their donors.
The nonprofit’s founder, Ms. Sachs, said it was formed to promote “state policy solutions that are setting the agenda for the country” and described Mr. DeSantis as one of the first elected officials to “partner” with the group. Another of those officials, Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa, has appeared at the group’s events in her home state — alongside Mr. DeSantis.
And To The Republic has hosted Mr. DeSantis at events in South Carolina, Nevada and Iowa, all key early primary states. Some of those events were promoted as “The Florida Blueprint,” borrowing from Mr. DeSantis’s book title.
The arrangement has made tracking Mr. DeSantis’s travel — and its costs — difficult. The Times and other news outlets used public flight trackers to verify the governor’s use of Mr. Soffer’s plane, which was first reported by Politico.
Other trips arranged by the group include the Feb. 20 stops outside Philadelphia and Chicago and the return trip to Tallahassee, on which Mr. DeSantis flew on a plane registered to a company run by Charles Whittall, an Orlando developer. Mr. Whittall, who gave $25,000 to Mr. DeSantis’s political committee in 2021, said that he uses a leasing company to rent out his aircraft, and that he did not provide it as a political contribution.
In March, he traveled to Cobb County, Ga., on a plane owned by an entity connected to Waffle House, the Georgia-based restaurant chain. The company did not respond to a request for comment.
Other potential DeSantis rivals have made headlines for their use of private jets. Both as South Carolina governor and as ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley faced criticism for flying on private planes owned by wealthy South Carolinians.
In 2020, The Associated Press reported that donors gave hundreds of thousands of dollars in private air travel to Donald J. Trump’s fund-raising committee. The donors included Ben Pogue, a Texas businessman whose father later received a presidential pardon.
Still, Mr. Trump — who owns his own plane — has repeatedly sought to draw attention to Mr. DeSantis’s travel, claiming the private planes were effectively campaign contributions and “Ron DeSantis is a full-time candidate for president.”
THE FOUR FREEDOMS, ACCORDING TO REPUBLICANS
By Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times
On Tuesday, Republicans in North Carolina overrode Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto to pass a strict limit on bodily autonomy in the form of a 12-week abortion ban.
In addition to this new limit on abortion, the law extends the waiting period for people seeking abortions to 72 hours and puts onerous new rules on clinics. As intended, the net effect is to limit access to abortion and other reproductive health services to everyone but those with the time and resources to seek care outside the state.
North Carolina Republicans are obviously not the only ones fighting to ban, limit or restrict the right to bodily autonomy, whether abortion or gender-affirming health care for transgender people. All across the country, Republicans have passed laws to do exactly that wherever they have the power to do so, regardless of public opinion in their states or anywhere else. The war on bodily autonomy is a critical project for nearly the entire G.O.P., pursued with dedication by Republicans from the lowliest state legislator to the party’s powerful functionaries on the Supreme Court.
You might even say that in the absence of a national leader with a coherent ideology and agenda, the actions of Republican-led states and legislatures provide the best guide to what the Republican Party wants to do and the best insight into the society it hopes to build.
larger effort to restore traditional hierarchies of gender and sexuality. What else is on the Republican Party’s agenda, if we use those states as our guide to the party’s priorities?
There is the push to free business from the suffocating grasp of child labor laws. Republican lawmakers in Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri and Ohio have advanced legislation to make it easier for children as young as 14 to work more hours, work without a permit and be subjected to more dangerous working conditions. The reason to loosen child labor laws — as a group of Wisconsin Republicans explained in a memo in support of a bill that would allow minors to serve alcohol at restaurants — is to deal with a shortage of low-wage workers in those states.
There are other ways to solve this problem — you could raise wages, for one — but in addition to making life easier for the midsize-capitalist class that is the material backbone of Republican politics, freeing businesses to hire underage workers for otherwise adult jobs would undermine organized labor and public education, two bêtes noires of the conservative movement.
Elsewhere in the country, Republican-led legislatures are placing harsh limits on what teachers and other educators can say in the classroom about American history or the existence of L.G.B.T.Q. people. This week in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill that bans discussion in general education courses at public institutions of “theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political and economic inequities.” He also signed a bill that prohibits state colleges and universities from spending on diversity, equity and inclusion programs beyond what is necessary to retain accreditation as educational institutions.
Nationwide, Republicans in at least 18 states have passed laws or imposed bans designed to keep discussion of racial discrimination, structural inequality and other divisive concepts out of classrooms and far away from students.
Last but certainly not least is the Republican effort to make civil society a shooting gallery. Since 2003, Republicans in 25 states have introduced and passed so-called constitutional carry laws, which allow residents to have concealed weapons in public without a permit. In most of those states, according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, it is also legal to openly carry a firearm in public without a permit.
Republicans have also moved aggressively to expand the scope of “stand your ground” laws, which erode the longstanding duty to retreat in favor of a right to use deadly force in the face of perceived danger. These laws, which have been cited to defend shooters in countless cases, such as George Zimmerman in 2013, are associated with a moderate increase in firearm homicide rates, according to a 2022 study published in JAMA Network Open. Republicans, however, say they are necessary.
“If someone tries to kill you, you should have the right to return fire and preserve your life,” said Representative Matt Gaetz, who introduced a national “stand your ground” bill this month. “It’s time to reaffirm in law what exists in our Constitution and in the hearts of our fellow Americans,” he added. “We must abolish the legal duty of retreat everywhere.”
It should be said as well that some Republicans want to protect gun manufacturers and dealers from lawsuits. Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee did just that this month — after a shooting in Nashville killed six people, including three children, in March — signing a bill that gives additional protections to the gun industry.
What should we make of all this? In his 1941 State of the Union address, Franklin Roosevelt said there was “nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy” and that he, along with the nation, looked forward to “a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.” Famously, those freedoms were the “freedom of speech and expression,” the “freedom of every person to worship God in his own way,” the “freedom from want” and the “freedom from fear.” Those freedoms were the guiding lights of his New Deal, and they remained the guiding lights of his administration through the trials of World War II.
There are, I think, four freedoms we can glean from the Republican program.
There is the freedom to control — to restrict the bodily autonomy of women and repress the existence of anyone who does not conform to traditional gender roles.
There is the freedom to exploit — to allow the owners of business and capital to weaken labor and take advantage of workers as they see fit.
There is the freedom to censor — to suppress ideas that challenge and threaten the ideologies of the ruling class.
And there is the freedom to menace — to carry weapons wherever you please, to brandish them in public, to turn the right of self-defense into a right to threaten other people.
Roosevelt’s four freedoms were the building blocks of a humane society — a social democratic aspiration for egalitarians then and now. These Republican freedoms are also building blocks not of a humane society but of a rigid and hierarchical one, in which you can either dominate or be dominated.
By Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times
On Tuesday, Republicans in North Carolina overrode Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto to pass a strict limit on bodily autonomy in the form of a 12-week abortion ban.
In addition to this new limit on abortion, the law extends the waiting period for people seeking abortions to 72 hours and puts onerous new rules on clinics. As intended, the net effect is to limit access to abortion and other reproductive health services to everyone but those with the time and resources to seek care outside the state.
North Carolina Republicans are obviously not the only ones fighting to ban, limit or restrict the right to bodily autonomy, whether abortion or gender-affirming health care for transgender people. All across the country, Republicans have passed laws to do exactly that wherever they have the power to do so, regardless of public opinion in their states or anywhere else. The war on bodily autonomy is a critical project for nearly the entire G.O.P., pursued with dedication by Republicans from the lowliest state legislator to the party’s powerful functionaries on the Supreme Court.
You might even say that in the absence of a national leader with a coherent ideology and agenda, the actions of Republican-led states and legislatures provide the best guide to what the Republican Party wants to do and the best insight into the society it hopes to build.
larger effort to restore traditional hierarchies of gender and sexuality. What else is on the Republican Party’s agenda, if we use those states as our guide to the party’s priorities?
There is the push to free business from the suffocating grasp of child labor laws. Republican lawmakers in Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri and Ohio have advanced legislation to make it easier for children as young as 14 to work more hours, work without a permit and be subjected to more dangerous working conditions. The reason to loosen child labor laws — as a group of Wisconsin Republicans explained in a memo in support of a bill that would allow minors to serve alcohol at restaurants — is to deal with a shortage of low-wage workers in those states.
There are other ways to solve this problem — you could raise wages, for one — but in addition to making life easier for the midsize-capitalist class that is the material backbone of Republican politics, freeing businesses to hire underage workers for otherwise adult jobs would undermine organized labor and public education, two bêtes noires of the conservative movement.
Elsewhere in the country, Republican-led legislatures are placing harsh limits on what teachers and other educators can say in the classroom about American history or the existence of L.G.B.T.Q. people. This week in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill that bans discussion in general education courses at public institutions of “theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political and economic inequities.” He also signed a bill that prohibits state colleges and universities from spending on diversity, equity and inclusion programs beyond what is necessary to retain accreditation as educational institutions.
Nationwide, Republicans in at least 18 states have passed laws or imposed bans designed to keep discussion of racial discrimination, structural inequality and other divisive concepts out of classrooms and far away from students.
Last but certainly not least is the Republican effort to make civil society a shooting gallery. Since 2003, Republicans in 25 states have introduced and passed so-called constitutional carry laws, which allow residents to have concealed weapons in public without a permit. In most of those states, according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, it is also legal to openly carry a firearm in public without a permit.
Republicans have also moved aggressively to expand the scope of “stand your ground” laws, which erode the longstanding duty to retreat in favor of a right to use deadly force in the face of perceived danger. These laws, which have been cited to defend shooters in countless cases, such as George Zimmerman in 2013, are associated with a moderate increase in firearm homicide rates, according to a 2022 study published in JAMA Network Open. Republicans, however, say they are necessary.
“If someone tries to kill you, you should have the right to return fire and preserve your life,” said Representative Matt Gaetz, who introduced a national “stand your ground” bill this month. “It’s time to reaffirm in law what exists in our Constitution and in the hearts of our fellow Americans,” he added. “We must abolish the legal duty of retreat everywhere.”
It should be said as well that some Republicans want to protect gun manufacturers and dealers from lawsuits. Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee did just that this month — after a shooting in Nashville killed six people, including three children, in March — signing a bill that gives additional protections to the gun industry.
What should we make of all this? In his 1941 State of the Union address, Franklin Roosevelt said there was “nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy” and that he, along with the nation, looked forward to “a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.” Famously, those freedoms were the “freedom of speech and expression,” the “freedom of every person to worship God in his own way,” the “freedom from want” and the “freedom from fear.” Those freedoms were the guiding lights of his New Deal, and they remained the guiding lights of his administration through the trials of World War II.
There are, I think, four freedoms we can glean from the Republican program.
There is the freedom to control — to restrict the bodily autonomy of women and repress the existence of anyone who does not conform to traditional gender roles.
There is the freedom to exploit — to allow the owners of business and capital to weaken labor and take advantage of workers as they see fit.
There is the freedom to censor — to suppress ideas that challenge and threaten the ideologies of the ruling class.
And there is the freedom to menace — to carry weapons wherever you please, to brandish them in public, to turn the right of self-defense into a right to threaten other people.
Roosevelt’s four freedoms were the building blocks of a humane society — a social democratic aspiration for egalitarians then and now. These Republican freedoms are also building blocks not of a humane society but of a rigid and hierarchical one, in which you can either dominate or be dominated.
RON DESANTIS’S BIG IDEA: MAKE FLORIDA STUDENTS IGNORANT
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who earned two Ivy League degrees, has apparently decided that making Florida schools and universities the laughingstock of the country is good politics. The Republican already went after public school teachers with his “don’t say gay” bill, championed an effort to prevent instruction about history that might upset students (make that White students), and banned Advanced Placement classes in African American studies. Now, he has decided to shred the curriculums of Florida’s public universities, inviting students interested in unapproved subjects to go to California (!) or other states that don’t control what can and cannot be taught.
This week, he signed a bill banning state spending on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in public universities. The Post reported: “These programs often assist colleges in increasing student and faculty diversity, which can apply to race and ethnicity, as well as sexual orientation, religion and socioeconomic status.”
Worse: “The law also forbids public colleges from offering general education courses — which are part of the required curriculum for all college students — that ‘distort significant historical events,’ teach ‘identity politics’ or are ‘based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, or privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political, or economic inequities.’”
Who decides what “distorts”? How can the state prohibit instruction about, say, the consequences of Jim Crow in a U.S. history survey class? Well, that’s up to the regime DeSantis has installed. We now see the full extent of the governor’s authoritarian impulse to control independent sources of information and to eviscerate professional standards that provide the basis for challenging state action and abuse of power.
DeSantis declared, “If you want to do things like gender ideology, go to Berkeley” — or presumably, to some other state system that features quality scholarship about topics that make right-wing purveyors of White male supremacy squeamish.
If newly installed University of Florida president and former Nebraska senator Ben Sasse had an ounce of integrity, he would resign in protest of this wholesale annihilation of academic freedom. (The Chronicle of Higher Education, however, reported recently that, a month into his tenure, “Sasse has made few public appearances and declined a number of interview requests from local media.” His obsequiousness to his partisan boss and contempt for academic independence should surprise no one.)
DeSantis is not alone in the assault on academic freedom; he is simply the highest-profile MAGA figure attempting to suppress freedom and dissent. The American Association of University Professors recently documented 57 bills in 23 states aimed at undermining academic freedom. The AAUP explained: “The current round of legislation reinforces a right-wing communication effort to attack public colleges and universities on the grounds that they are ideologically outside the mainstream, hostile to conservative views and focused on indoctrinating students into 'woke’ ideology.” The report added: “These bills are only one piece of a broader campaign to remake public higher education that includes Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ hostile takeover of the New College of Florida.”
As with press freedom and democracy more generally, academic freedom is under assault around the world. The University World News recently reported that, “over the past decade, academic freedom has declined in more than 22 countries representing more than half of the world’s population, four billion people, says the Academic Freedom Index: Update 2023 (AFI).” Though the Czech Republic Luxembourg, Sweden, Peru, Portugal and Canada enjoy robust protection of academic freedom, the AFI report says, “autocracies like China, and increasingly authoritarian countries [from] India, to fully-fledged democracies like Britain and the United States” show measurable declines in academic freedom, a cornerstone of freedom of thought and democratic self-governance.
It’s not hard to figure out that the threat to vibrant, free discourse and to educational independence comes primarily from right-wing nationalists. “Since 2016, the year Donald J. Trump was elected president, America’s AFI score has declined from 0.92 to 0.79,” the University World News report found. “This figure puts the United States in the top third of the fifth quintile, below South Africa and above Kenya.”
Anti-democratic, nationalist movements have historically attacked universities as hotbeds of elite and foreign influence, seeking to bend instruction to the will of the state and turn academics into handmaidens of state propaganda. Right-wing pundits who have whined incessantly about the disfavored status of conservative academics (largely because of peer or student pressure) have had precious little to say about state-driven attacks against academic freedom from a petty autocrat. (Their caterwauling about political correctness on campus is the sort of projection and victimology that seeks to cast oppressors as victims and tyrants as saviors of Western culture.)
DeSantis might get his wish. Parents, students and businesses seeking well-educated workers might decide it is better to decamp from Florida for states that prepare students for the real world, help them function in a diverse society and foster intellectual excellence. Sadly, that will leave Floridians less prosperous and less capable of performing the obligations of informed citizenry. Perhaps that’s the point.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who earned two Ivy League degrees, has apparently decided that making Florida schools and universities the laughingstock of the country is good politics. The Republican already went after public school teachers with his “don’t say gay” bill, championed an effort to prevent instruction about history that might upset students (make that White students), and banned Advanced Placement classes in African American studies. Now, he has decided to shred the curriculums of Florida’s public universities, inviting students interested in unapproved subjects to go to California (!) or other states that don’t control what can and cannot be taught.
This week, he signed a bill banning state spending on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in public universities. The Post reported: “These programs often assist colleges in increasing student and faculty diversity, which can apply to race and ethnicity, as well as sexual orientation, religion and socioeconomic status.”
Worse: “The law also forbids public colleges from offering general education courses — which are part of the required curriculum for all college students — that ‘distort significant historical events,’ teach ‘identity politics’ or are ‘based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, or privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political, or economic inequities.’”
Who decides what “distorts”? How can the state prohibit instruction about, say, the consequences of Jim Crow in a U.S. history survey class? Well, that’s up to the regime DeSantis has installed. We now see the full extent of the governor’s authoritarian impulse to control independent sources of information and to eviscerate professional standards that provide the basis for challenging state action and abuse of power.
DeSantis declared, “If you want to do things like gender ideology, go to Berkeley” — or presumably, to some other state system that features quality scholarship about topics that make right-wing purveyors of White male supremacy squeamish.
If newly installed University of Florida president and former Nebraska senator Ben Sasse had an ounce of integrity, he would resign in protest of this wholesale annihilation of academic freedom. (The Chronicle of Higher Education, however, reported recently that, a month into his tenure, “Sasse has made few public appearances and declined a number of interview requests from local media.” His obsequiousness to his partisan boss and contempt for academic independence should surprise no one.)
DeSantis is not alone in the assault on academic freedom; he is simply the highest-profile MAGA figure attempting to suppress freedom and dissent. The American Association of University Professors recently documented 57 bills in 23 states aimed at undermining academic freedom. The AAUP explained: “The current round of legislation reinforces a right-wing communication effort to attack public colleges and universities on the grounds that they are ideologically outside the mainstream, hostile to conservative views and focused on indoctrinating students into 'woke’ ideology.” The report added: “These bills are only one piece of a broader campaign to remake public higher education that includes Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ hostile takeover of the New College of Florida.”
As with press freedom and democracy more generally, academic freedom is under assault around the world. The University World News recently reported that, “over the past decade, academic freedom has declined in more than 22 countries representing more than half of the world’s population, four billion people, says the Academic Freedom Index: Update 2023 (AFI).” Though the Czech Republic Luxembourg, Sweden, Peru, Portugal and Canada enjoy robust protection of academic freedom, the AFI report says, “autocracies like China, and increasingly authoritarian countries [from] India, to fully-fledged democracies like Britain and the United States” show measurable declines in academic freedom, a cornerstone of freedom of thought and democratic self-governance.
It’s not hard to figure out that the threat to vibrant, free discourse and to educational independence comes primarily from right-wing nationalists. “Since 2016, the year Donald J. Trump was elected president, America’s AFI score has declined from 0.92 to 0.79,” the University World News report found. “This figure puts the United States in the top third of the fifth quintile, below South Africa and above Kenya.”
Anti-democratic, nationalist movements have historically attacked universities as hotbeds of elite and foreign influence, seeking to bend instruction to the will of the state and turn academics into handmaidens of state propaganda. Right-wing pundits who have whined incessantly about the disfavored status of conservative academics (largely because of peer or student pressure) have had precious little to say about state-driven attacks against academic freedom from a petty autocrat. (Their caterwauling about political correctness on campus is the sort of projection and victimology that seeks to cast oppressors as victims and tyrants as saviors of Western culture.)
DeSantis might get his wish. Parents, students and businesses seeking well-educated workers might decide it is better to decamp from Florida for states that prepare students for the real world, help them function in a diverse society and foster intellectual excellence. Sadly, that will leave Floridians less prosperous and less capable of performing the obligations of informed citizenry. Perhaps that’s the point.
DESANTIS’S CELEBRATION OF VIGILANTISM IS A NEW LOW IN MAGA EXTREMISM
By Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman, The Washington Post
When Ron DeSantis defended Daniel Penny, the former Marine accused of killing a man suffering from mental illness on a New York City subway, the Florida governor didn’t just laud Penny as a hero. He also cast the law enforcement apparatus prosecuting Penny as presumptively illegitimate.
In so doing, DeSantis joined many on the right seeking to transform Penny into a martyr being punished by the “deep state” for supposedly defending civil order. But this is particularly sobering coming from DeSantis; it suggests the two leading contenders for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination — DeSantis and former president Donald Trump — are open celebrators of vigilante “justice."
“Law and order” and “tough on crime” rhetoric from Republicans goes back more than half a century and has a long history of shading into support for vigilantism in popular culture. (Think of Charles Bronson in “Death Wish.”) But in the Trump era, it seems that wide swaths of one of our major parties have taken to blatantly celebrating extralegal violence.
“The idea that individual citizens should do this — that’s a different place to go,” said Sam Tanenhaus, who recently completed a biography of William F. Buckley, the conservative commentator who played a key role in tough-on-crime politics with his ill-fated 1965 campaign for New York mayor.
DeSantis didn’t merely valorize Penny as a good Samaritan. DeSantis is also raising money for Penny’s defense, arguing that his prosecutors are pro-criminal:
Penny has been charged with second-degree manslaughter in connection with the May 1 death of Jordan Neely, a man with a history of mental illness, homelessness and violence. Neely was shouting on a New York subway car in a disturbing manner, and Penny put him in a chokehold for several minutes. Neely died. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office said Neely “should still be alive today.”
Like all defendants, Penny should be presumed innocent of the charge until proved guilty. A lot remains unknown about what happened. It would be one thing if right-wing figures were merely reminding people of this presumption and urging them to allow the justice system to do its work.
Instead, some are valorizing Penny as a hero and the victim of a prosecution that has been decreed inevitably unjust, no matter what the facts prove. They argue that Neely was a threatening figure who needed to be restrained, and that subway riders who fear for their safety have been unfairly victimized by political and societal failures. Therefore, not only was Penny’s apparent use of lethal force justified, a jury cannot legitimately decide it was excessive.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), for instance, hailed Penny as a “hero” who “stepped in to protect others.” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) suggested that Penny is being persecuted for standing up to “anarcho-tyranny.” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page echoed DeSantis, describing Penny as “the Subway Samaritan.” This, of course, is an allusion to the biblical Samaritan who aids a traveler who had been robbed and beaten; the tale doesn’t involve putting the perp in a chokehold until he dies.
To Tanenhaus, all this is a continuation of — but also a departure from — the history of GOP “tough on crime” politics. Buckley’s 1965 campaign emphasized fear of crime and drew on the White backlash to the civil rights movement, Tanenhaus says, by calling for the unshackling of police and stricter sentencing.
This continued through Richard M. Nixon’s “law and order” presidential campaigns and Ronald Reagan’s use of tropes like the “welfare queen,” Tanenhaus notes. Trump’s 2016 presidential candidacy was consciously modeled on Nixon’s efforts to win over northern Whites disaffected by images, if not experiences, of urban disorder.
The right in recent years has repeatedly portrayed vigilantes as heroic, and victims as deserving of death. Fox News valorized Edward Gallagher, the Navy SEAL accused by members of his own unit of killing multiple unarmed civilians, and Trump pardoned him. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) vowed to pardon a man convicted for the 2020 murder of a Black Lives Matter protester; the killer had texted about his intent to kill.
And in 2020, Kyle Rittenhouse descended on urban disorder in Wisconsin with an AR-15-style rifle and killed two protesters. Conservatives could have argued that Rittenhouse shouldn’t have gone there but ultimately acted in self-defense, as a jury found. Instead, they celebrated him because he killed people. As Tucker Carlson enthused, “Rittenhouse went to Kenosha to clean up the filth.”
For some on the right, it is self-evident that Neely was mere “filth” that called for a “clean up." To them, the real criminals are the administrators of the justice system who are pursuing the superfluous exercise of determining whether violently ending his life was justified. As Tanenhaus bluntly concluded of the right’s campaign: “We’re really talking about lawlessness.”
By Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman, The Washington Post
When Ron DeSantis defended Daniel Penny, the former Marine accused of killing a man suffering from mental illness on a New York City subway, the Florida governor didn’t just laud Penny as a hero. He also cast the law enforcement apparatus prosecuting Penny as presumptively illegitimate.
In so doing, DeSantis joined many on the right seeking to transform Penny into a martyr being punished by the “deep state” for supposedly defending civil order. But this is particularly sobering coming from DeSantis; it suggests the two leading contenders for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination — DeSantis and former president Donald Trump — are open celebrators of vigilante “justice."
“Law and order” and “tough on crime” rhetoric from Republicans goes back more than half a century and has a long history of shading into support for vigilantism in popular culture. (Think of Charles Bronson in “Death Wish.”) But in the Trump era, it seems that wide swaths of one of our major parties have taken to blatantly celebrating extralegal violence.
“The idea that individual citizens should do this — that’s a different place to go,” said Sam Tanenhaus, who recently completed a biography of William F. Buckley, the conservative commentator who played a key role in tough-on-crime politics with his ill-fated 1965 campaign for New York mayor.
DeSantis didn’t merely valorize Penny as a good Samaritan. DeSantis is also raising money for Penny’s defense, arguing that his prosecutors are pro-criminal:
Penny has been charged with second-degree manslaughter in connection with the May 1 death of Jordan Neely, a man with a history of mental illness, homelessness and violence. Neely was shouting on a New York subway car in a disturbing manner, and Penny put him in a chokehold for several minutes. Neely died. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office said Neely “should still be alive today.”
Like all defendants, Penny should be presumed innocent of the charge until proved guilty. A lot remains unknown about what happened. It would be one thing if right-wing figures were merely reminding people of this presumption and urging them to allow the justice system to do its work.
Instead, some are valorizing Penny as a hero and the victim of a prosecution that has been decreed inevitably unjust, no matter what the facts prove. They argue that Neely was a threatening figure who needed to be restrained, and that subway riders who fear for their safety have been unfairly victimized by political and societal failures. Therefore, not only was Penny’s apparent use of lethal force justified, a jury cannot legitimately decide it was excessive.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), for instance, hailed Penny as a “hero” who “stepped in to protect others.” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) suggested that Penny is being persecuted for standing up to “anarcho-tyranny.” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page echoed DeSantis, describing Penny as “the Subway Samaritan.” This, of course, is an allusion to the biblical Samaritan who aids a traveler who had been robbed and beaten; the tale doesn’t involve putting the perp in a chokehold until he dies.
To Tanenhaus, all this is a continuation of — but also a departure from — the history of GOP “tough on crime” politics. Buckley’s 1965 campaign emphasized fear of crime and drew on the White backlash to the civil rights movement, Tanenhaus says, by calling for the unshackling of police and stricter sentencing.
This continued through Richard M. Nixon’s “law and order” presidential campaigns and Ronald Reagan’s use of tropes like the “welfare queen,” Tanenhaus notes. Trump’s 2016 presidential candidacy was consciously modeled on Nixon’s efforts to win over northern Whites disaffected by images, if not experiences, of urban disorder.
The right in recent years has repeatedly portrayed vigilantes as heroic, and victims as deserving of death. Fox News valorized Edward Gallagher, the Navy SEAL accused by members of his own unit of killing multiple unarmed civilians, and Trump pardoned him. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) vowed to pardon a man convicted for the 2020 murder of a Black Lives Matter protester; the killer had texted about his intent to kill.
And in 2020, Kyle Rittenhouse descended on urban disorder in Wisconsin with an AR-15-style rifle and killed two protesters. Conservatives could have argued that Rittenhouse shouldn’t have gone there but ultimately acted in self-defense, as a jury found. Instead, they celebrated him because he killed people. As Tucker Carlson enthused, “Rittenhouse went to Kenosha to clean up the filth.”
For some on the right, it is self-evident that Neely was mere “filth” that called for a “clean up." To them, the real criminals are the administrators of the justice system who are pursuing the superfluous exercise of determining whether violently ending his life was justified. As Tanenhaus bluntly concluded of the right’s campaign: “We’re really talking about lawlessness.”
TRUMP’S ‘STUPID,’ ‘STUPID’ TOWN HALL
By Frank Bruni, The New York Times
Given all the attention to President Biden’s cognitive fitness for a second presidential term, it seems fair, even mandatory, to assess Donald Trump’s performance at a televised town hall in Manchester, N.H., on Wednesday night through the same lens:
On a scale of 1 to Marjorie Taylor Greene, I’d give him an 11.
He was asked to respond to a Manhattan jury’s verdict the previous day that he had sexually abused and defamed the writer E. Jean Carroll.
He said that Carroll once had a cat named Vagina.
He was asked about his failure to deliver on his signature promise to voters in 2016 — that he’d build a wall stretching across the southwestern border of the United States.
“I did finish the wall,” he said, just a few beats before adding that Biden could have easily and quickly completed the stretch that still hasn’t been built if he’d cared to. The statements contradicted each other. They made no sense. They were his entire performance in a nutshell.
He was asked about his role in the Jan. 6 violence and whether he had regrets.
He reminisced mistily about addressing the rally before the riot — “It was the largest crowd I’ve ever spoken to,” he boasted — and about how they were there “with love in their hearts.” The problem, he said, was “Crazy Nancy,” meaning Pelosi, whose fault all of this really was.
It’s never Trump’s — not on this score, not on any other, not when a jury rules against him, not when voters pick someone else to be in the White House, not when he’s indicted, not when he’s impeached, not when he’s impeached a second time, not when he’s caught hiding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, not when he’s caught on tape.
He was grilled about such a tape, the one after Election Day 2020 that has him ordering the Republican secretary of state in Georgia, which Biden narrowly won, to overturn that result by finding him more votes.
“I didn’t ask him to find anything,” Trump insisted, incorrectly. “I said, ‘You owe me votes.’” Whew! I’m glad that’s cleared up.
In response to question after question, on issue after issue, Trump denied incontrovertible facts, insisted on alternative ones, spoke of America as a country swirling down the toilet, spoke of himself as the only politician who could save it, framed his presidency as one that outshone all the others, projected his own flaws and mistakes on his critics and opponents, expressed contempt for them and claimed persecution.
He was, in other words, a font of lies keeping true to himself, ever the peacock, always cuckoo. The evening made utterly clear — just in case there was a scintilla of doubt — that his latest, third bid for the White House won’t be any kind of reset, just a full-on rehash. And that was inevitable, because someone like Trump doesn’t change. His self-infatuation precludes any possibility of that.
The town hall, hosted by CNN and moderated heroically by the anchor Kaitlan Collins, played like a kind of Mad Libs of hundreds of Trump’s public appearances and interviews since he jumped into the presidential fray back in 2015. Some of the proper nouns were different. Some of the dates had changed. Almost everything else was the same.
Instead of complaining about the insufficient financial contributions of NATO’s member countries, he complained about the insufficient financial contributions of European nations to Ukraine’s war effort. His descriptions of the evil, dangerous hordes poised to stream into the United States from Mexico right now sounded like a remix of his descriptions, on the day he announced his first presidential campaign nearly eight years ago, of the evil, dangerous hordes supposedly streaming in then.
In an ugly echo of the 2016 presidential debate when he called Hillary Clinton “nasty,” he called Collins “nasty.” The “very stable genius,” as he once pronounced himself, has a very static vocabulary.
And he has no acquaintance with a thesaurus, dignity or maturity. “Stupid,” “stupid,” “stupid” — he kept using that word, I guess because it’s so presidential. He applied it to anyone who doesn’t believe that the 2020 election was stolen and rigged. He applied it to everything about the Biden administration and Democrats in Washington.
“Our country is being destroyed by stupid people — by very stupid people,” he said. He never ascended to an altitude of eloquence above that.
There was the moral of the much-discussed poll by The Washington Post and ABC News that was released last weekend. It not only gave Trump a six-point lead over Biden in a hypothetical matchup but also showed that voters deem Trump, 76, more physically and mentally fit for the presidency than Biden, 80.
I’ll grant Trump his vigor. During the town hall, he spoke emphatically and energetically.
But vigor isn’t competence, and that brings me back to the start. I myself have observed that Biden often doesn’t seem as clear and focused as he did in the past, but next to a man who insouciantly brags that he could end the war between Ukraine and Russia in 24 hours, as Trump did on Wednesday night?
Next to a man who also reprised his claims of some godlike power to declassify documents by simply staring at them and thinking unclassified thoughts?
Next to a man who sires his own reality, comes to believe in that fantasy while it’s still in diapers, considers himself omnipotent, fancies himself omniscient and replaces genuine reflection with disingenuous navel gazing?
That was Trump at the town hall. That was Trump for his four years in office. That would be Trump if he gets back to the White House. And it’s no display of superior cognition. Just a reminder of the madness that this country can’t seem to put behind it.
By Frank Bruni, The New York Times
Given all the attention to President Biden’s cognitive fitness for a second presidential term, it seems fair, even mandatory, to assess Donald Trump’s performance at a televised town hall in Manchester, N.H., on Wednesday night through the same lens:
On a scale of 1 to Marjorie Taylor Greene, I’d give him an 11.
He was asked to respond to a Manhattan jury’s verdict the previous day that he had sexually abused and defamed the writer E. Jean Carroll.
He said that Carroll once had a cat named Vagina.
He was asked about his failure to deliver on his signature promise to voters in 2016 — that he’d build a wall stretching across the southwestern border of the United States.
“I did finish the wall,” he said, just a few beats before adding that Biden could have easily and quickly completed the stretch that still hasn’t been built if he’d cared to. The statements contradicted each other. They made no sense. They were his entire performance in a nutshell.
He was asked about his role in the Jan. 6 violence and whether he had regrets.
He reminisced mistily about addressing the rally before the riot — “It was the largest crowd I’ve ever spoken to,” he boasted — and about how they were there “with love in their hearts.” The problem, he said, was “Crazy Nancy,” meaning Pelosi, whose fault all of this really was.
It’s never Trump’s — not on this score, not on any other, not when a jury rules against him, not when voters pick someone else to be in the White House, not when he’s indicted, not when he’s impeached, not when he’s impeached a second time, not when he’s caught hiding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, not when he’s caught on tape.
He was grilled about such a tape, the one after Election Day 2020 that has him ordering the Republican secretary of state in Georgia, which Biden narrowly won, to overturn that result by finding him more votes.
“I didn’t ask him to find anything,” Trump insisted, incorrectly. “I said, ‘You owe me votes.’” Whew! I’m glad that’s cleared up.
In response to question after question, on issue after issue, Trump denied incontrovertible facts, insisted on alternative ones, spoke of America as a country swirling down the toilet, spoke of himself as the only politician who could save it, framed his presidency as one that outshone all the others, projected his own flaws and mistakes on his critics and opponents, expressed contempt for them and claimed persecution.
He was, in other words, a font of lies keeping true to himself, ever the peacock, always cuckoo. The evening made utterly clear — just in case there was a scintilla of doubt — that his latest, third bid for the White House won’t be any kind of reset, just a full-on rehash. And that was inevitable, because someone like Trump doesn’t change. His self-infatuation precludes any possibility of that.
The town hall, hosted by CNN and moderated heroically by the anchor Kaitlan Collins, played like a kind of Mad Libs of hundreds of Trump’s public appearances and interviews since he jumped into the presidential fray back in 2015. Some of the proper nouns were different. Some of the dates had changed. Almost everything else was the same.
Instead of complaining about the insufficient financial contributions of NATO’s member countries, he complained about the insufficient financial contributions of European nations to Ukraine’s war effort. His descriptions of the evil, dangerous hordes poised to stream into the United States from Mexico right now sounded like a remix of his descriptions, on the day he announced his first presidential campaign nearly eight years ago, of the evil, dangerous hordes supposedly streaming in then.
In an ugly echo of the 2016 presidential debate when he called Hillary Clinton “nasty,” he called Collins “nasty.” The “very stable genius,” as he once pronounced himself, has a very static vocabulary.
And he has no acquaintance with a thesaurus, dignity or maturity. “Stupid,” “stupid,” “stupid” — he kept using that word, I guess because it’s so presidential. He applied it to anyone who doesn’t believe that the 2020 election was stolen and rigged. He applied it to everything about the Biden administration and Democrats in Washington.
“Our country is being destroyed by stupid people — by very stupid people,” he said. He never ascended to an altitude of eloquence above that.
There was the moral of the much-discussed poll by The Washington Post and ABC News that was released last weekend. It not only gave Trump a six-point lead over Biden in a hypothetical matchup but also showed that voters deem Trump, 76, more physically and mentally fit for the presidency than Biden, 80.
I’ll grant Trump his vigor. During the town hall, he spoke emphatically and energetically.
But vigor isn’t competence, and that brings me back to the start. I myself have observed that Biden often doesn’t seem as clear and focused as he did in the past, but next to a man who insouciantly brags that he could end the war between Ukraine and Russia in 24 hours, as Trump did on Wednesday night?
Next to a man who also reprised his claims of some godlike power to declassify documents by simply staring at them and thinking unclassified thoughts?
Next to a man who sires his own reality, comes to believe in that fantasy while it’s still in diapers, considers himself omnipotent, fancies himself omniscient and replaces genuine reflection with disingenuous navel gazing?
That was Trump at the town hall. That was Trump for his four years in office. That would be Trump if he gets back to the White House. And it’s no display of superior cognition. Just a reminder of the madness that this country can’t seem to put behind it.
DONALD TRUMP VERDICT IS A GOOD DAY FOR JUSTICE
It only took a federal jury in Manhattan three hours to unanimously find the former president sexually abused and defamed magazine writer E. Jean Carroll.
by The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
It’s not every day a former president of the United States is found liable of sexual abuse and defamation.
Then again, America has never experienced a former president like the norm-busting, twice impeached, criminally indicated, serial lying, race-baiting, tax dodging, insurrectionist starting, Donald J. Trump.
It only took a federal jury in Manhattan three hours to unanimously find that Trump sexually abused and defamed magazine writer E. Jean Carroll. The jury of six men and three women awarded Carroll $5 million in damages.
The historic civil verdict is also a significant victory for the #MeToo movement and the more than two dozen women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct. The defamation finding is also a small victory for the truth. A corrective to the sea of daily lies that Trump told during his tumultuous one term as president and that he continues to spread.
Right on cue, Trump took to social media to spout his usual all-caps defense. This time, it is the verdict that’s the “GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME!”
It’s a tired line in a country that is tired of Trump’s act — at least most of the country that doesn’t watch Fox News and still believes in truth, justice, and American democracy. Sadly, Trump still has many supporters in the Republican Party and remains the frontrunner for the GOP nomination in 2024.
Many Trump voters knew in 2016 they were electing someone who has little respect for women. Before going to the polls, the country had seen him call women “nasty,” “horseface” and “dog.” Trump boasted about how he could grab women by their genitals.
Indeed, Trump doubled down on his demeaning and disgusting disregard for women during his deposition in the runup to the Carroll trial. When Carroll’s attorney asked Trump about his comments about grabbing women captured on the infamous Access Hollywood tape, the former president didn’t deny it. He didn’t flinch.
“Well, historically, that’s true with stars,” Trump said. “If you look over the last million years, I guess that’s been largely true.” He then added, “Unfortunately or fortunately.”
Trump’s casual response while under oath underscores his belief that he is above the law. For years, he has escaped accountability for many of his misdeeds. But the law may be finally, albeit slowly, catching up to him.
The Trump Organization was found guilty of tax fraud last year. In April, Trump was indicted by the Manhattan district attorney on 34 counts relating to falsifying records to pay off an adult film star. This summer, a district attorney in Georgia is expected to announce if Trump will be indicted there for his role in attempting to interfere in the 2020 election results.
Meanwhile, a special counsel continues to pursue two federal criminal investigations involving Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his handling of classified documents that were removed when he left the White House.
Trump’s current presidential campaign can also be viewed as his best legal defense strategy. If reelected, he will likely do whatever it takes to pervert justice and evade the law. Trump is already on record calling for “termination” of the Constitution. He has long criticized and attacked the Justice Department, the FBI, and the courts, and will surely take a sledgehammer to those institutions if re-elected.
As such, American democracy remains in peril and will be tested if more criminal indictments emerge. Still, with an unwavering — if small — base of supporters and Republican lawmakers willing to defend him, no matter the charge or the evidence, the courts remain the one place where the truth can win out.
For now, E. Jean Carroll’s legal win is a victory for all women who have been sexually assaulted, including those by the former president. It is a good day for justice that shows that no one is above the law.
It only took a federal jury in Manhattan three hours to unanimously find the former president sexually abused and defamed magazine writer E. Jean Carroll.
by The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
It’s not every day a former president of the United States is found liable of sexual abuse and defamation.
Then again, America has never experienced a former president like the norm-busting, twice impeached, criminally indicated, serial lying, race-baiting, tax dodging, insurrectionist starting, Donald J. Trump.
It only took a federal jury in Manhattan three hours to unanimously find that Trump sexually abused and defamed magazine writer E. Jean Carroll. The jury of six men and three women awarded Carroll $5 million in damages.
The historic civil verdict is also a significant victory for the #MeToo movement and the more than two dozen women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct. The defamation finding is also a small victory for the truth. A corrective to the sea of daily lies that Trump told during his tumultuous one term as president and that he continues to spread.
Right on cue, Trump took to social media to spout his usual all-caps defense. This time, it is the verdict that’s the “GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME!”
It’s a tired line in a country that is tired of Trump’s act — at least most of the country that doesn’t watch Fox News and still believes in truth, justice, and American democracy. Sadly, Trump still has many supporters in the Republican Party and remains the frontrunner for the GOP nomination in 2024.
Many Trump voters knew in 2016 they were electing someone who has little respect for women. Before going to the polls, the country had seen him call women “nasty,” “horseface” and “dog.” Trump boasted about how he could grab women by their genitals.
Indeed, Trump doubled down on his demeaning and disgusting disregard for women during his deposition in the runup to the Carroll trial. When Carroll’s attorney asked Trump about his comments about grabbing women captured on the infamous Access Hollywood tape, the former president didn’t deny it. He didn’t flinch.
“Well, historically, that’s true with stars,” Trump said. “If you look over the last million years, I guess that’s been largely true.” He then added, “Unfortunately or fortunately.”
Trump’s casual response while under oath underscores his belief that he is above the law. For years, he has escaped accountability for many of his misdeeds. But the law may be finally, albeit slowly, catching up to him.
The Trump Organization was found guilty of tax fraud last year. In April, Trump was indicted by the Manhattan district attorney on 34 counts relating to falsifying records to pay off an adult film star. This summer, a district attorney in Georgia is expected to announce if Trump will be indicted there for his role in attempting to interfere in the 2020 election results.
Meanwhile, a special counsel continues to pursue two federal criminal investigations involving Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his handling of classified documents that were removed when he left the White House.
Trump’s current presidential campaign can also be viewed as his best legal defense strategy. If reelected, he will likely do whatever it takes to pervert justice and evade the law. Trump is already on record calling for “termination” of the Constitution. He has long criticized and attacked the Justice Department, the FBI, and the courts, and will surely take a sledgehammer to those institutions if re-elected.
As such, American democracy remains in peril and will be tested if more criminal indictments emerge. Still, with an unwavering — if small — base of supporters and Republican lawmakers willing to defend him, no matter the charge or the evidence, the courts remain the one place where the truth can win out.
For now, E. Jean Carroll’s legal win is a victory for all women who have been sexually assaulted, including those by the former president. It is a good day for justice that shows that no one is above the law.
JUDGMENT DAY FOR TRUMP? IT COMES NOV. 5, 2024.
By Colbert I. King, The Washington Post
Guessing the fate of former president Donald Trump, given legal woes stretching from lawsuits and a criminal indictment to a civil suit over rape allegations and two Justice Department investigations, is little more than a parlor game. However, Trump’s capturing the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination — as appears more likely with each passing day — will lead to a dead certainty: Election Day, Nov. 5, 2024, will be his time of reckoning with the American people. ’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.
If ever a former president needed to face a day of judgment for his actions — and their damaging consequences — it is Trump.
His ruinous misdeeds are his alone.
Last year, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a staggering step that erased a fundamental right to abortion established more than 50 years ago. Roe’s demise set in motion state antiabortion legislation and orders that will cut off or severely limit access to the procedure. As Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan said in their joint dissent, the court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization essentially declared that from the moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of. “As of today,” they said, “a State can always force a woman to give birth, prohibiting even the earliest abortions. A State can thus transform what, when freely undertaken, is a wonder into what, when forced, may be a nightmare.”
Hold Trump responsible for that sweeping rollback of women’s equality and independence. He nominated the three justices — Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — who joined with a tepid Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. in voting to uphold the restrictive Mississippi law in question.
Trump’s three nominations were no accident. As a presidential candidate, he pledged to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe. In Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett, Trump got exactly what he sought.
It should come as no surprise that Trump also nominated Matthew Kacsmaryk, the Texas-based federal judge who, rooted in antiabortion zealotry and untethered to sound legal reasoning, shot down the Food and Drug Administration’s 23-year-old approval of the abortion drug mifepristone. Kacsmaryk’s anti-FDA decision is under appeal, along with his ruling against sending abortion medications by mail or other delivery service under the terms of an 1873 anti-vice law. But women now find themselves confronted with yet another potentially devastating situation because of Trump.
The former president, and all candidates on the ballot who agree with his repudiation of a woman’s constitutional right, deserves an Election Day 2024 reckoning.
That day could also be a moment of consequences for a nation still coming to grips with the most violent attack on the Capitol since the War of 1812. The Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection sought to halt the certification of the result of the 2020 presidential election, which Trump lost. Repercussions are still unfolding from the Capitol breach that occurred with a shocked nation — and world — looking on. More than 1,000 people have been charged by U.S. prosecutors. Nearly 600 have pleaded guilty. That number will climb.
But accountability has never been properly placed. Yes, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) did explicitly point at Trump for helping spur the attack. Said McConnell on the Senate floor: “The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people.”
Yes, we also know that Trump riled up his supporters with false voter-fraud claims. These were dangerous lies that he keeps telling. But the consequences of Trump’s instigation were greater than the storming of a national shrine.
It was, as the Anti-Defamation League observed, “an inflection point for extremism in America.” Jan. 6 was one of those rare moments in U.S. history when virulent extremism, hate and disinformation converged to produce a toxicity that continues to spread through our body politic. Credit Trump with spawning those democracy-threatening moments — threats that continue to this day.
The courts and the wheels of justice might have their say with respect to the once-defeated former president.
But if Donald Trump makes it to Election Day 2024, that will be a providential occasion for the nation to call him to account for all he has done — and continues to do — to undermine democratic values of freedom, fairness, equality and self-determination. That day can’t come soon enough.
By Colbert I. King, The Washington Post
Guessing the fate of former president Donald Trump, given legal woes stretching from lawsuits and a criminal indictment to a civil suit over rape allegations and two Justice Department investigations, is little more than a parlor game. However, Trump’s capturing the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination — as appears more likely with each passing day — will lead to a dead certainty: Election Day, Nov. 5, 2024, will be his time of reckoning with the American people. ’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.
If ever a former president needed to face a day of judgment for his actions — and their damaging consequences — it is Trump.
His ruinous misdeeds are his alone.
Last year, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a staggering step that erased a fundamental right to abortion established more than 50 years ago. Roe’s demise set in motion state antiabortion legislation and orders that will cut off or severely limit access to the procedure. As Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan said in their joint dissent, the court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization essentially declared that from the moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of. “As of today,” they said, “a State can always force a woman to give birth, prohibiting even the earliest abortions. A State can thus transform what, when freely undertaken, is a wonder into what, when forced, may be a nightmare.”
Hold Trump responsible for that sweeping rollback of women’s equality and independence. He nominated the three justices — Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — who joined with a tepid Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. in voting to uphold the restrictive Mississippi law in question.
Trump’s three nominations were no accident. As a presidential candidate, he pledged to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe. In Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett, Trump got exactly what he sought.
It should come as no surprise that Trump also nominated Matthew Kacsmaryk, the Texas-based federal judge who, rooted in antiabortion zealotry and untethered to sound legal reasoning, shot down the Food and Drug Administration’s 23-year-old approval of the abortion drug mifepristone. Kacsmaryk’s anti-FDA decision is under appeal, along with his ruling against sending abortion medications by mail or other delivery service under the terms of an 1873 anti-vice law. But women now find themselves confronted with yet another potentially devastating situation because of Trump.
The former president, and all candidates on the ballot who agree with his repudiation of a woman’s constitutional right, deserves an Election Day 2024 reckoning.
That day could also be a moment of consequences for a nation still coming to grips with the most violent attack on the Capitol since the War of 1812. The Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection sought to halt the certification of the result of the 2020 presidential election, which Trump lost. Repercussions are still unfolding from the Capitol breach that occurred with a shocked nation — and world — looking on. More than 1,000 people have been charged by U.S. prosecutors. Nearly 600 have pleaded guilty. That number will climb.
But accountability has never been properly placed. Yes, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) did explicitly point at Trump for helping spur the attack. Said McConnell on the Senate floor: “The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people.”
Yes, we also know that Trump riled up his supporters with false voter-fraud claims. These were dangerous lies that he keeps telling. But the consequences of Trump’s instigation were greater than the storming of a national shrine.
It was, as the Anti-Defamation League observed, “an inflection point for extremism in America.” Jan. 6 was one of those rare moments in U.S. history when virulent extremism, hate and disinformation converged to produce a toxicity that continues to spread through our body politic. Credit Trump with spawning those democracy-threatening moments — threats that continue to this day.
The courts and the wheels of justice might have their say with respect to the once-defeated former president.
But if Donald Trump makes it to Election Day 2024, that will be a providential occasion for the nation to call him to account for all he has done — and continues to do — to undermine democratic values of freedom, fairness, equality and self-determination. That day can’t come soon enough.
FREEDOM IS UNDER ASSAULT IN RON DESANTIS’S FLORIDA
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) describes his state as “a citadel of freedom,” “freedom’s linchpin” and “freedom’s vanguard.” He titled his memoir “The Courage to Be Free” and called his budget a “Framework for Freedom.” In his State of the State address last month, he said: “We find ourselves in Florida on the front lines in the battle for freedom.”
The ongoing 60-day state legislative session in Tallahassee, which Mr. DeSantis is treating as a springboard to announce a presidential bid, shows the hollowness of his rhetoric.
Backed by GOP supermajorities in both chambers, Mr. DeSantis is waging frontal assaults on press freedom, reproductive freedom, free enterprise and academic freedom. Meanwhile, in the name of protecting gun rights, he has scaled back prudent safety rules. And now he’s poised to target undocumented immigrants, including “dreamers," with what will be some of the cruelest policies in America.
All of this should give pause to those looking to Mr. DeSantis as an alternative to the toxicity of Trumpism. Let’s look at some of Mr. DeSantis’s efforts to undercut freedom:
Freedom of the press
Mr. DeSantis wants to make it easy to successfully sue journalists who quote anonymous sources. The governor has set his sights on overturning a 59-year-old Supreme Court precedent in Times v. Sullivan, which requires plaintiffs suing for defamation to prove an outlet acted with “actual malice” when publishing erroneous information about a public figure. The governor is pushing a bill that would create the presumption under the law that any information attributed to an unnamed source is false.
This would have a chilling effect on whistleblowers and make it harder to hold corrupt government officials accountable. It would discourage newspapers, especially those without deep pockets, from tackling tough topics and reporting on litigious people. The measure would encourage venue shopping by trial lawyers whose clients want to harass journalists. It could also expose small newspapers, local TV stations, bloggers, talk-radio hosts, YouTubers and even online commenters to crippling liability. Even DeSantis admirers in right-wing media have mobilized against the measure.
Freedom to choose
Last year, Mr. DeSantis signed a ban on abortion after 15 weeks without exceptions for rape or incest. Apparently, that wasn’t extreme enough. He has since signaled support for legislation, passed by both houses of the legislature, which would outlaw abortion after six weeks of gestation and make Florida one of the most restrictive states in the country.
Last summer, Mr. DeSantis removed an elected prosecutor in Tampa, Andrew Warren, who said he wouldn’t enforce the state’s 15-week ban. A federal judge ruled that the governor violated Florida’s constitution and the prosecutor’s First Amendment rights but said he didn’t have the power to reinstall him.
Free enterprise
Mr. DeSantis tried to build a better mousetrap. After Disney — the employer of 75,000 Floridians — publicly opposed one of his education policies, the governor retaliated by removing the company’s power to self-govern the land around Walt Disney World in the Orlando area. He dissolved a special tax zone that existed since 1967 and named a new board to oversee the land. But before Mr. DeSantis’s handpicked appointees took over this year, the outgoing board passed a series of covenants to tie their hands.
Last week, Mr. DeSantis ordered an inspector general to investigate the former board, and his attorney general is trying to find ways to invalidate the covenants. The governor floated hiking taxes on Disney-owned hotels, imposing tolls on roads into its theme parks and exploring other pressure points. “Ultimately, we’re going to win on every single issue involving Disney,” said Mr. DeSantis.
This hostility to the actions of private corporations repudiates what conservatives used to stand for. But it’s part of a pattern. Mr. DeSantis outlawed cruise lines from asking passengers on their own ships to be vaccinated against the coronavirus. He signed a law to impose daily fines up to $250,000 on social media companies that deplatform candidates for office in his state for any reason. In the current legislative session, the House passed and the Senate is expected to follow soon with a bill to forbid the state pension fund from doing business with private financial institutions that invest based on environmental criteria.
The freedom to teach and learn
The attacks on Disney started after the company criticized what critics have branded the “don’t say gay” law, which restricts classroom lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity from kindergarten through third grade. The legislature is expected to pass an updated law expanding the prohibition through eighth grade. Meanwhile, the governor is using administrative powers to try banning these subjects from being taught in any grade.
Mr. DeSantis also signed a law last year limiting how teachers can talk about race. Instructors are barred from suggesting students should feel guilty about racist acts perpetrated by earlier generations. The DeSantis administration announced in January that Florida won’t recognize the Advanced Placement African American studies course.
State efforts to undermine local control of education also have contributed to a frenzy of book banning, which Mr. DeSantis falsely called a hoax. A proposal under consideration in the legislature would essentially give a heckler’s veto over what’s taught and available in school libraries. Mr. DeSantis also continues to challenge academic freedom in higher education. His administration recently requested a trove of data on how many individuals receive gender-affirming treatments at a dozen state universities.
Meanwhile, there is at least one area where Mr. DeSantis has expanded individual rights — albeit in violation of common sense. He signed a bill this month that allows Floridians to carry concealed handguns without a permit, safety training or background check.
One of the cruelest steps Mr. DeSantis plans to take in the coming weeks to bolster his presidential bona fides is a crackdown on undocumented immigrants. He wants to require hospitals to collect data on the immigration status of patients, which would deter people from seeking needed medical care. Another measure under consideration would make it a felony to shelter, hire or transport any undocumented immigrant. Advocates say this could criminalize a lawyer driving a client to court or an American citizen letting a parent live with them. Landlords could face legal jeopardy for tenants who have an undocumented housekeeper or nanny.
Mr. DeSantis has even called for eliminating in-state college tuition for undocumented Florida residents, including dreamers who were brought to the United States as young children through no fault of their own. Access to such tuition was signed into law by Rick Scott when he was governor in 2014. Mr. Scott, now a Republican senator, says he’d sign it again.
Bryan Griffin, a spokesman for Mr. DeSantis, says Mr. DeSantis is fighting to keep Florida “free from things like" critical race theory; diversity, equity and inclusion programs; and “medical authoritarianism that can force ineffective covid vaccines on people.”
Now Mr. DeSantis wants to go national. He promises to “Make America Florida.” If the bullying coming out of Tallahassee is an indication of what that means, we think most Americans won’t want what he is offering.
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) describes his state as “a citadel of freedom,” “freedom’s linchpin” and “freedom’s vanguard.” He titled his memoir “The Courage to Be Free” and called his budget a “Framework for Freedom.” In his State of the State address last month, he said: “We find ourselves in Florida on the front lines in the battle for freedom.”
The ongoing 60-day state legislative session in Tallahassee, which Mr. DeSantis is treating as a springboard to announce a presidential bid, shows the hollowness of his rhetoric.
Backed by GOP supermajorities in both chambers, Mr. DeSantis is waging frontal assaults on press freedom, reproductive freedom, free enterprise and academic freedom. Meanwhile, in the name of protecting gun rights, he has scaled back prudent safety rules. And now he’s poised to target undocumented immigrants, including “dreamers," with what will be some of the cruelest policies in America.
All of this should give pause to those looking to Mr. DeSantis as an alternative to the toxicity of Trumpism. Let’s look at some of Mr. DeSantis’s efforts to undercut freedom:
Freedom of the press
Mr. DeSantis wants to make it easy to successfully sue journalists who quote anonymous sources. The governor has set his sights on overturning a 59-year-old Supreme Court precedent in Times v. Sullivan, which requires plaintiffs suing for defamation to prove an outlet acted with “actual malice” when publishing erroneous information about a public figure. The governor is pushing a bill that would create the presumption under the law that any information attributed to an unnamed source is false.
This would have a chilling effect on whistleblowers and make it harder to hold corrupt government officials accountable. It would discourage newspapers, especially those without deep pockets, from tackling tough topics and reporting on litigious people. The measure would encourage venue shopping by trial lawyers whose clients want to harass journalists. It could also expose small newspapers, local TV stations, bloggers, talk-radio hosts, YouTubers and even online commenters to crippling liability. Even DeSantis admirers in right-wing media have mobilized against the measure.
Freedom to choose
Last year, Mr. DeSantis signed a ban on abortion after 15 weeks without exceptions for rape or incest. Apparently, that wasn’t extreme enough. He has since signaled support for legislation, passed by both houses of the legislature, which would outlaw abortion after six weeks of gestation and make Florida one of the most restrictive states in the country.
Last summer, Mr. DeSantis removed an elected prosecutor in Tampa, Andrew Warren, who said he wouldn’t enforce the state’s 15-week ban. A federal judge ruled that the governor violated Florida’s constitution and the prosecutor’s First Amendment rights but said he didn’t have the power to reinstall him.
Free enterprise
Mr. DeSantis tried to build a better mousetrap. After Disney — the employer of 75,000 Floridians — publicly opposed one of his education policies, the governor retaliated by removing the company’s power to self-govern the land around Walt Disney World in the Orlando area. He dissolved a special tax zone that existed since 1967 and named a new board to oversee the land. But before Mr. DeSantis’s handpicked appointees took over this year, the outgoing board passed a series of covenants to tie their hands.
Last week, Mr. DeSantis ordered an inspector general to investigate the former board, and his attorney general is trying to find ways to invalidate the covenants. The governor floated hiking taxes on Disney-owned hotels, imposing tolls on roads into its theme parks and exploring other pressure points. “Ultimately, we’re going to win on every single issue involving Disney,” said Mr. DeSantis.
This hostility to the actions of private corporations repudiates what conservatives used to stand for. But it’s part of a pattern. Mr. DeSantis outlawed cruise lines from asking passengers on their own ships to be vaccinated against the coronavirus. He signed a law to impose daily fines up to $250,000 on social media companies that deplatform candidates for office in his state for any reason. In the current legislative session, the House passed and the Senate is expected to follow soon with a bill to forbid the state pension fund from doing business with private financial institutions that invest based on environmental criteria.
The freedom to teach and learn
The attacks on Disney started after the company criticized what critics have branded the “don’t say gay” law, which restricts classroom lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity from kindergarten through third grade. The legislature is expected to pass an updated law expanding the prohibition through eighth grade. Meanwhile, the governor is using administrative powers to try banning these subjects from being taught in any grade.
Mr. DeSantis also signed a law last year limiting how teachers can talk about race. Instructors are barred from suggesting students should feel guilty about racist acts perpetrated by earlier generations. The DeSantis administration announced in January that Florida won’t recognize the Advanced Placement African American studies course.
State efforts to undermine local control of education also have contributed to a frenzy of book banning, which Mr. DeSantis falsely called a hoax. A proposal under consideration in the legislature would essentially give a heckler’s veto over what’s taught and available in school libraries. Mr. DeSantis also continues to challenge academic freedom in higher education. His administration recently requested a trove of data on how many individuals receive gender-affirming treatments at a dozen state universities.
Meanwhile, there is at least one area where Mr. DeSantis has expanded individual rights — albeit in violation of common sense. He signed a bill this month that allows Floridians to carry concealed handguns without a permit, safety training or background check.
One of the cruelest steps Mr. DeSantis plans to take in the coming weeks to bolster his presidential bona fides is a crackdown on undocumented immigrants. He wants to require hospitals to collect data on the immigration status of patients, which would deter people from seeking needed medical care. Another measure under consideration would make it a felony to shelter, hire or transport any undocumented immigrant. Advocates say this could criminalize a lawyer driving a client to court or an American citizen letting a parent live with them. Landlords could face legal jeopardy for tenants who have an undocumented housekeeper or nanny.
Mr. DeSantis has even called for eliminating in-state college tuition for undocumented Florida residents, including dreamers who were brought to the United States as young children through no fault of their own. Access to such tuition was signed into law by Rick Scott when he was governor in 2014. Mr. Scott, now a Republican senator, says he’d sign it again.
Bryan Griffin, a spokesman for Mr. DeSantis, says Mr. DeSantis is fighting to keep Florida “free from things like" critical race theory; diversity, equity and inclusion programs; and “medical authoritarianism that can force ineffective covid vaccines on people.”
Now Mr. DeSantis wants to go national. He promises to “Make America Florida.” If the bullying coming out of Tallahassee is an indication of what that means, we think most Americans won’t want what he is offering.
BIDEN ADMINISTRATION ASKS SUPREME COURT TO RESTORE BROAD AVAILABILITY OF ABORTION PILL
In an emergency application, lawyers for the government asked the justices to stay all of a Texas judge’s ruling suspending a commonly used abortion medication.
By Adam Liptak, The New York Times
WASHINGTON — The Biden administration filed an emergency application to the Supreme Court on Friday asking the justices to pause parts of an appeals court ruling that limited the availability of a common abortion pill.
The application, in the first major abortion case to reach the justices since they eliminated the constitutional right to abortion in June, asked the court to allow the pill, mifepristone, to remain widely available while the government pursues an appeal.
The brief was harshly critical of a ruling from a federal judge suspending approval of the drug.
"The district court countermanded a scientific judgment F.D.A. has maintained across five administrations; nullified the approval of a drug that has been safely used by millions of Americans over more than two decades; and upset reliance interests in a health care system that depends on the availability of mifepristone as an alternative to surgical abortion for women who choose to lawfully terminate their early pregnancies,” the government’s brief said.
On Wednesday night, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, issued a mixed decision, staying the most sweeping aspects of a decision from Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk that would have wholly overridden the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the pill.
But the appeals court, in an unsigned order from a divided three-judge panel, temporarily let stand other aspects of Judge Kacsmaryk’s ruling, including by requiring in-person visits with doctors, rolling back the availability of the pills from the first 10 weeks of pregnancy to seven weeks and barring dispensing them by mail.
The panel’s ruling was provisional, and the court put the appeal itself on a fast track.
In the emergency application, Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar, representing the F.D.A., wrote that the plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge a drug they neither take nor prescribe and that they had provided no basis for second-guessing the agency’s scientific judgment.
Had Judge Kacsmaryk’s ruling fully come into force, it would have even more severely disrupted the availability of mifepristone, part of the most commonly used method for ending pregnancies in the United States.
The case was brought by several doctors and medical groups, including the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, which was incorporated in August in Amarillo, Texas, where the case was filed. Judge Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee who is a longtime opponent of abortion, is the only federal judge in the Amarillo division in the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of Texas.
The appeals court majority wrote that the statute of limitations appeared to bar a challenge to the F.D.A.’s initial approval of the pill in 2000. But it said that later expansions of access to the pill were properly before the judge and that there were authentic safety concerns warranting suspension of regulations making it easier to obtain the pills.
The majority added that the plaintiffs appeared to have standing to sue because they might have to treat complications from the use of the pill.
Two judges in the majority on the appeals court panel, Kurt D. Engelhardt and Andrew Oldham, are appointees of President Donald J. Trump. The third judge on the appeals court panel who was effectively in dissent, Catharina Haynes, was appointed by President George W. Bush.
Ms. Prelogar, representing the agency, responded that the plaintiffs could not show that they had experienced the sort of direct and concrete injury that would give them standing to sue. Rather, she wrote, they relied on implausible speculation.
“They neither take nor prescribe mifepristone, and F.D.A.’s approval of the drug does not require them to do or refrain from doing anything,” she wrote. “Yet the Fifth Circuit held that the associations have standing because some of their members might be asked to treat women who are prescribed mifepristone by other providers and who then suffer an exceedingly rare adverse event.”
In an emergency application, lawyers for the government asked the justices to stay all of a Texas judge’s ruling suspending a commonly used abortion medication.
By Adam Liptak, The New York Times
WASHINGTON — The Biden administration filed an emergency application to the Supreme Court on Friday asking the justices to pause parts of an appeals court ruling that limited the availability of a common abortion pill.
The application, in the first major abortion case to reach the justices since they eliminated the constitutional right to abortion in June, asked the court to allow the pill, mifepristone, to remain widely available while the government pursues an appeal.
The brief was harshly critical of a ruling from a federal judge suspending approval of the drug.
"The district court countermanded a scientific judgment F.D.A. has maintained across five administrations; nullified the approval of a drug that has been safely used by millions of Americans over more than two decades; and upset reliance interests in a health care system that depends on the availability of mifepristone as an alternative to surgical abortion for women who choose to lawfully terminate their early pregnancies,” the government’s brief said.
On Wednesday night, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, issued a mixed decision, staying the most sweeping aspects of a decision from Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk that would have wholly overridden the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the pill.
But the appeals court, in an unsigned order from a divided three-judge panel, temporarily let stand other aspects of Judge Kacsmaryk’s ruling, including by requiring in-person visits with doctors, rolling back the availability of the pills from the first 10 weeks of pregnancy to seven weeks and barring dispensing them by mail.
The panel’s ruling was provisional, and the court put the appeal itself on a fast track.
In the emergency application, Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar, representing the F.D.A., wrote that the plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge a drug they neither take nor prescribe and that they had provided no basis for second-guessing the agency’s scientific judgment.
Had Judge Kacsmaryk’s ruling fully come into force, it would have even more severely disrupted the availability of mifepristone, part of the most commonly used method for ending pregnancies in the United States.
The case was brought by several doctors and medical groups, including the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, which was incorporated in August in Amarillo, Texas, where the case was filed. Judge Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee who is a longtime opponent of abortion, is the only federal judge in the Amarillo division in the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of Texas.
The appeals court majority wrote that the statute of limitations appeared to bar a challenge to the F.D.A.’s initial approval of the pill in 2000. But it said that later expansions of access to the pill were properly before the judge and that there were authentic safety concerns warranting suspension of regulations making it easier to obtain the pills.
The majority added that the plaintiffs appeared to have standing to sue because they might have to treat complications from the use of the pill.
Two judges in the majority on the appeals court panel, Kurt D. Engelhardt and Andrew Oldham, are appointees of President Donald J. Trump. The third judge on the appeals court panel who was effectively in dissent, Catharina Haynes, was appointed by President George W. Bush.
Ms. Prelogar, representing the agency, responded that the plaintiffs could not show that they had experienced the sort of direct and concrete injury that would give them standing to sue. Rather, she wrote, they relied on implausible speculation.
“They neither take nor prescribe mifepristone, and F.D.A.’s approval of the drug does not require them to do or refrain from doing anything,” she wrote. “Yet the Fifth Circuit held that the associations have standing because some of their members might be asked to treat women who are prescribed mifepristone by other providers and who then suffer an exceedingly rare adverse event.”
CLARENCE THOMAS ENTERS THE DANGER ZONE
By Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post
The matter of Clarence Thomas’s relationship with billionaire Harlan Crow has now entered new territory, treacherous for the justice and the court on which he serves.
Until Thursday’s ProPublica’s report disclosing Crow’s purchase of property owned by Thomas and his family in 2014, the story was about Thomas’s judgment, or lack thereof, in accepting large amounts of luxury travel from the Republican megadonor, and whether he had failed once again to comply with federal financial disclosure rules.
The latest revelation escalates the situation to a new and concerning level. This time, Thomas directly received money from Crow — perhaps in excess of the market value of the Chatham County, Ga., properties that Crow purchased from Thomas and his kin. This is no longer about receiving “personal hospitality.” It’s about a financial transaction between Thomas and a GOP donor who has also subsidized his vacations.
There is no doubt that the sale of personal real estate to Crow should have been reported on the justice’s financial disclosure form for 2014, and there is no excuse for failing to do so. The most logical explanation is that Thomas, whose relationship with Crow had already been the subject of unflattering news reports, wanted to keep it from public view.
Thomas’s relationship with Crow and the accuracy of his financial disclosure reports must now be fully scrutinized by the Judicial Conference of the United States, which oversees the federal judiciary and may refer the matter to the Justice Department for additional action. As Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. surely understands, this is a problem not just for Thomas but also for the court and its public legitimacy.
According to the ProPublica report, a company controlled by Crow bought the properties in Savannah, Ga., for $133,363 from Thomas, the family of his late brother, and his mother Leola Williams, who continued to live there.
“Soon after the sale was completed, contractors began work on tens of thousands of dollars of improvements on the two-bedroom, one-bathroom home, which looks out onto a patch of orange trees,” ProPublica reported. “The renovations included a carport, a repaired roof and a new fence and gates, according to city permit records and blueprints.”
Crow told the publication that the transaction was “at market rate.” The year before, he bought two other properties — a vacant lot and a house on the same block for $40,000. Thomas, in earlier financial disclosure forms, listed his one-third interest in “rental property” in Savannah at $15,000 or less.
Crow said his interest in the property was “to one day create a public museum at the Thomas home dedicated to telling the story of our nation’s second black Supreme Court Justice” and “approached the Thomas family about my desire to maintain this historic site so future generations could learn about the inspiring life of one of our greatest Americans.”
Fine, but the real estate deal raises several questions, among them: Why didn’t Thomas report the transaction on his financial disclosure forms? And did Thomas’s mother pay Crow rent as he improved the home and paid taxes on it? ProPublica posed this question to Crow, but he did not answer.
Thomas has said that he didn’t have to disclose his Crow-paid vacations under the exemption for “personal hospitality” — a dubious defense when it comes to his use of Crow’s private jet. Thomas had reported travel at Crow’s expense before he stopped disclosing it in the wake of negative news stories.
But Thomas’s obligation to report the real estate deal couldn’t be clearer. He had reported the property as an asset. Selling it was a transaction that necessitated disclosure.
The Ethics in Government Act requires judges, like other senior officials, to file annual financial reports, and sets out the consequences for failing to comply. It further provides that the relevant party, which in the case of judges is the Judicial Conference, “shall refer to the Attorney General the name of any individual which such official or committee has reasonable cause to believe has willfully failed to file information required to be reported.” A violation can result in a fine under the criminal code.
Did Thomas act “knowingly and willfully” in failing to report the property sale? One relevant consideration: The Judicial Conference has seen this kind of nondisclosure from Thomas before.
Like other senior officials in government, justices must disclose their spouses’ sources of income, although not the dollar amounts. On his financial disclosure forms, Thomas simply marked the box labeled “NONE” for noninvestment income earned by his wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas. In fact, she was employed by the House Republican leadership, Hillsdale College and the Heritage Foundation, earning more than $1.6 million from those sources, according to separate records compiled by Common Cause and the Alliance for Justice.
Thomas’s explanation — a “misunderstanding” of the reporting rules — was unconvincing then, and relevant to the situation now. As the instructions for “filer’s spouse” state, “Report only the date(s) and source of earned income from any source that exceeds $1,000.”
Second, Thomas had complied with those rules for the previous decade, reporting the source of his wife’s income during his years as chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, when he was a judge on the D.C. Circuit, and for the first five years of his tenure on the Supreme Court.
The justice is a repeat offender. Judges aren’t eager to police their own — especially not a sitting justice. Human nature and history suggest the Judicial Conference won’t do a thing. But the Georgia real estate deal will make that dodge harder. And the law requires otherwise.
By Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post
The matter of Clarence Thomas’s relationship with billionaire Harlan Crow has now entered new territory, treacherous for the justice and the court on which he serves.
Until Thursday’s ProPublica’s report disclosing Crow’s purchase of property owned by Thomas and his family in 2014, the story was about Thomas’s judgment, or lack thereof, in accepting large amounts of luxury travel from the Republican megadonor, and whether he had failed once again to comply with federal financial disclosure rules.
The latest revelation escalates the situation to a new and concerning level. This time, Thomas directly received money from Crow — perhaps in excess of the market value of the Chatham County, Ga., properties that Crow purchased from Thomas and his kin. This is no longer about receiving “personal hospitality.” It’s about a financial transaction between Thomas and a GOP donor who has also subsidized his vacations.
There is no doubt that the sale of personal real estate to Crow should have been reported on the justice’s financial disclosure form for 2014, and there is no excuse for failing to do so. The most logical explanation is that Thomas, whose relationship with Crow had already been the subject of unflattering news reports, wanted to keep it from public view.
Thomas’s relationship with Crow and the accuracy of his financial disclosure reports must now be fully scrutinized by the Judicial Conference of the United States, which oversees the federal judiciary and may refer the matter to the Justice Department for additional action. As Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. surely understands, this is a problem not just for Thomas but also for the court and its public legitimacy.
According to the ProPublica report, a company controlled by Crow bought the properties in Savannah, Ga., for $133,363 from Thomas, the family of his late brother, and his mother Leola Williams, who continued to live there.
“Soon after the sale was completed, contractors began work on tens of thousands of dollars of improvements on the two-bedroom, one-bathroom home, which looks out onto a patch of orange trees,” ProPublica reported. “The renovations included a carport, a repaired roof and a new fence and gates, according to city permit records and blueprints.”
Crow told the publication that the transaction was “at market rate.” The year before, he bought two other properties — a vacant lot and a house on the same block for $40,000. Thomas, in earlier financial disclosure forms, listed his one-third interest in “rental property” in Savannah at $15,000 or less.
Crow said his interest in the property was “to one day create a public museum at the Thomas home dedicated to telling the story of our nation’s second black Supreme Court Justice” and “approached the Thomas family about my desire to maintain this historic site so future generations could learn about the inspiring life of one of our greatest Americans.”
Fine, but the real estate deal raises several questions, among them: Why didn’t Thomas report the transaction on his financial disclosure forms? And did Thomas’s mother pay Crow rent as he improved the home and paid taxes on it? ProPublica posed this question to Crow, but he did not answer.
Thomas has said that he didn’t have to disclose his Crow-paid vacations under the exemption for “personal hospitality” — a dubious defense when it comes to his use of Crow’s private jet. Thomas had reported travel at Crow’s expense before he stopped disclosing it in the wake of negative news stories.
But Thomas’s obligation to report the real estate deal couldn’t be clearer. He had reported the property as an asset. Selling it was a transaction that necessitated disclosure.
The Ethics in Government Act requires judges, like other senior officials, to file annual financial reports, and sets out the consequences for failing to comply. It further provides that the relevant party, which in the case of judges is the Judicial Conference, “shall refer to the Attorney General the name of any individual which such official or committee has reasonable cause to believe has willfully failed to file information required to be reported.” A violation can result in a fine under the criminal code.
Did Thomas act “knowingly and willfully” in failing to report the property sale? One relevant consideration: The Judicial Conference has seen this kind of nondisclosure from Thomas before.
Like other senior officials in government, justices must disclose their spouses’ sources of income, although not the dollar amounts. On his financial disclosure forms, Thomas simply marked the box labeled “NONE” for noninvestment income earned by his wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas. In fact, she was employed by the House Republican leadership, Hillsdale College and the Heritage Foundation, earning more than $1.6 million from those sources, according to separate records compiled by Common Cause and the Alliance for Justice.
Thomas’s explanation — a “misunderstanding” of the reporting rules — was unconvincing then, and relevant to the situation now. As the instructions for “filer’s spouse” state, “Report only the date(s) and source of earned income from any source that exceeds $1,000.”
Second, Thomas had complied with those rules for the previous decade, reporting the source of his wife’s income during his years as chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, when he was a judge on the D.C. Circuit, and for the first five years of his tenure on the Supreme Court.
The justice is a repeat offender. Judges aren’t eager to police their own — especially not a sitting justice. Human nature and history suggest the Judicial Conference won’t do a thing. But the Georgia real estate deal will make that dodge harder. And the law requires otherwise.
CLARENCE THOMAS IS AS FREE AS EVER TO TREAT HIS SEAT LIKE A WINNING LOTTERY TICKET
By Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times
We have Clarence Thomas to thank for the latest illustration of how the Supreme Court’s outsize power, isolation and virtual immunity from public pressure has made it a magnet for corruption and influence-peddling.
For more than 20 years, according to an investigation by ProPublica, Justice Thomas received lavish and expensive gifts — including luxury trips to private resorts — from Harlan Crow, a Texas billionaire and real estate developer with a long record of extensive support for Republican politicians, conservative media and the Federalist Society.
Under a federal law passed after Watergate, it appears that Thomas was supposed to disclose these gifts and trips to the government. He hasn’t. Instead, Thomas has lived a lavish life on the largess of his rich confidant while posing, in public, as the most humble and unassuming of the justices. In return, Crow has gotten direct access to one of the most influential and powerful men in America.
Not a bad trade.
If Thomas were an ordinary federal judge, this conduct would be an obvious — and flagrant — violation of the judiciary’s code of ethics. But that code doesn’t actually bind the nine members of the Supreme Court. For them, it is mere guidance.
For his part, Thomas denies wrongdoing.
“Early in my tenure at the court, I sought guidance from my colleagues and others in the judiciary, and was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the court, was not reportable,” Thomas said in a statement. “I have endeavored to follow that counsel throughout my tenure and have always sought to comply with the disclosure guidelines.”
And while several Democrats, most notably Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have called for investigations and even impeachment, there’s no real expectation that Thomas will even answer questions about his conduct, much less face consequences for it. He is still as free as he’s ever been to treat his seat on the court — ostensibly a public trust — like a winning lottery ticket, to redeem with the nearest friendly billionaire (who happens to have a collection of Nazi paraphernalia and Hitler-related souvenirs).
Last year, in the wake of a different Supreme Court ethics scandal — involving a sophisticated and well-funded influence operation aimed at Republican justices like Thomas and Samuel Alito — I wrote about the problem of lifetime tenure for judges and justices. The framers of the Constitution embraced service on “good behavior” because they wanted a truly independent judiciary, free from the corruption and venality of ordinary politics.
As Alexander Hamilton explains in Federalist No. 78, “That inflexible and uniform adherence to the rights of the Constitution, and of individuals, which we perceive to be indispensable in the courts of justice, can certainly not be expected from judges who hold their offices by a temporary commission.”
“Periodical appointments, however regulated,” he writes, “or by whomsoever made, would, in some way or other, be fatal to their necessary independence.”
But, I asked, “What if lifetime tenure, rather than raising the barriers to corruption, makes it easier to influence the court by giving interested parties the time and space to operate?” My answer was that it does. Nothing that has happened since makes me think any differently.
There is a second point to make here, one that harks back to arguments from the anti-Federalist opponents of the Constitution.
Turning his eye to the Supreme Court, the writer who called himself Brutus blanched at the power and authority that the Philadelphia convention entrusted in such a small group of men. “Every body of men invested with office are tenacious of power,” he wrote. “The same principle will influence them to extend their power, and increase their rights” and, he continued, “enlarge the sphere of their own authority.”
Taking aim at the other source of concentrated power in the proposed new government, the Senate, the Maryland antifederalist Samuel Chase complained that “its members are too few” and that its small size leaves it vulnerable to “bribery and corruption.”
“No free people ever reposed power in so small a number,” he said.
Although I can’t say for certain, it sounds like both Brutus and Chase are channeling Machiavelli’s observation that “the few always behave in the mode of the few.” Build an exclusive, oligarchical institution, and you’ll get an exclusive, oligarchical politics.
This has always been true of the Supreme Court — a reliable friend of property, capital and class rule throughout its 234-year history, occasional bouts of decency notwithstanding — but it has become an acute problem in this era of unchecked judicial supremacy. As the court arrogates more and greater power to itself, and grows both distant from and contemptuous of public opinion, it naturally attracts flatterers and intriguers.
With his close ties to a powerful, property-owning billionaire, Thomas embodies the historic role of the Supreme Court in American politics, not as a liberator or defender of the rights of political and social minorities, but as a partner to and ally of moneyed interests.
Thomas also shows us something of the real world of corruption. The Supreme Court’s ruling in McDonnell v. United States notwithstanding, corruption is much more than a cartoonish quid pro quo, where cash changes hands and the state is used for private gain. Corruption, more often than not, looks like an ordinary relationship, even a friendship. It is perks and benefits freely given to a powerful friend. It is expensive gifts and tokens of appreciation between those friends, except that one holds office and the other wants to influence its ideological course. It is being enmeshed in networks of patronage that look innocent from the inside but suspect to those who look with clearer eyes from the outside.
The Supreme Court is not going to police itself. The only remedy to the problem of the court’s corruption — to say nothing of its power — is to subject it to the same checks and limits we associate with the other branches. The court may adjudicate disputes within the constitutional order, but it does not exist above or outside its reach. In practice, this means the Democratic Party will have to abandon its squeamishness about challenging and shaping the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary. Whether it’s through structural change or a simple ethics code, it is up to elected officials to remind the court that it serves the republic, and not the other way around.
We have a poor record of elite accountability in American politics. But even by our pitiful standards, we seem to be living in an era of almost total impunity for people of influence. Both the powerful and their apologists treat political authority as a grant of freedom from rules, responsibilities, duties and obligations. You see it in the case of Justice Thomas, whose defenders say he is the victim of a smear campaign. His relationship with Harlan Crow, The Wall Street Journal editorial board writes, is a “non-bombshell.”
This is not how a republic should work. Our leaders — who chose to vie for influence — should be shackled by the power they wield, not free to abuse it for their own interests and their own pleasures. And if they won’t act in the spirit of public service, then we should make them.
By Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times
We have Clarence Thomas to thank for the latest illustration of how the Supreme Court’s outsize power, isolation and virtual immunity from public pressure has made it a magnet for corruption and influence-peddling.
For more than 20 years, according to an investigation by ProPublica, Justice Thomas received lavish and expensive gifts — including luxury trips to private resorts — from Harlan Crow, a Texas billionaire and real estate developer with a long record of extensive support for Republican politicians, conservative media and the Federalist Society.
Under a federal law passed after Watergate, it appears that Thomas was supposed to disclose these gifts and trips to the government. He hasn’t. Instead, Thomas has lived a lavish life on the largess of his rich confidant while posing, in public, as the most humble and unassuming of the justices. In return, Crow has gotten direct access to one of the most influential and powerful men in America.
Not a bad trade.
If Thomas were an ordinary federal judge, this conduct would be an obvious — and flagrant — violation of the judiciary’s code of ethics. But that code doesn’t actually bind the nine members of the Supreme Court. For them, it is mere guidance.
For his part, Thomas denies wrongdoing.
“Early in my tenure at the court, I sought guidance from my colleagues and others in the judiciary, and was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the court, was not reportable,” Thomas said in a statement. “I have endeavored to follow that counsel throughout my tenure and have always sought to comply with the disclosure guidelines.”
And while several Democrats, most notably Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have called for investigations and even impeachment, there’s no real expectation that Thomas will even answer questions about his conduct, much less face consequences for it. He is still as free as he’s ever been to treat his seat on the court — ostensibly a public trust — like a winning lottery ticket, to redeem with the nearest friendly billionaire (who happens to have a collection of Nazi paraphernalia and Hitler-related souvenirs).
Last year, in the wake of a different Supreme Court ethics scandal — involving a sophisticated and well-funded influence operation aimed at Republican justices like Thomas and Samuel Alito — I wrote about the problem of lifetime tenure for judges and justices. The framers of the Constitution embraced service on “good behavior” because they wanted a truly independent judiciary, free from the corruption and venality of ordinary politics.
As Alexander Hamilton explains in Federalist No. 78, “That inflexible and uniform adherence to the rights of the Constitution, and of individuals, which we perceive to be indispensable in the courts of justice, can certainly not be expected from judges who hold their offices by a temporary commission.”
“Periodical appointments, however regulated,” he writes, “or by whomsoever made, would, in some way or other, be fatal to their necessary independence.”
But, I asked, “What if lifetime tenure, rather than raising the barriers to corruption, makes it easier to influence the court by giving interested parties the time and space to operate?” My answer was that it does. Nothing that has happened since makes me think any differently.
There is a second point to make here, one that harks back to arguments from the anti-Federalist opponents of the Constitution.
Turning his eye to the Supreme Court, the writer who called himself Brutus blanched at the power and authority that the Philadelphia convention entrusted in such a small group of men. “Every body of men invested with office are tenacious of power,” he wrote. “The same principle will influence them to extend their power, and increase their rights” and, he continued, “enlarge the sphere of their own authority.”
Taking aim at the other source of concentrated power in the proposed new government, the Senate, the Maryland antifederalist Samuel Chase complained that “its members are too few” and that its small size leaves it vulnerable to “bribery and corruption.”
“No free people ever reposed power in so small a number,” he said.
Although I can’t say for certain, it sounds like both Brutus and Chase are channeling Machiavelli’s observation that “the few always behave in the mode of the few.” Build an exclusive, oligarchical institution, and you’ll get an exclusive, oligarchical politics.
This has always been true of the Supreme Court — a reliable friend of property, capital and class rule throughout its 234-year history, occasional bouts of decency notwithstanding — but it has become an acute problem in this era of unchecked judicial supremacy. As the court arrogates more and greater power to itself, and grows both distant from and contemptuous of public opinion, it naturally attracts flatterers and intriguers.
With his close ties to a powerful, property-owning billionaire, Thomas embodies the historic role of the Supreme Court in American politics, not as a liberator or defender of the rights of political and social minorities, but as a partner to and ally of moneyed interests.
Thomas also shows us something of the real world of corruption. The Supreme Court’s ruling in McDonnell v. United States notwithstanding, corruption is much more than a cartoonish quid pro quo, where cash changes hands and the state is used for private gain. Corruption, more often than not, looks like an ordinary relationship, even a friendship. It is perks and benefits freely given to a powerful friend. It is expensive gifts and tokens of appreciation between those friends, except that one holds office and the other wants to influence its ideological course. It is being enmeshed in networks of patronage that look innocent from the inside but suspect to those who look with clearer eyes from the outside.
The Supreme Court is not going to police itself. The only remedy to the problem of the court’s corruption — to say nothing of its power — is to subject it to the same checks and limits we associate with the other branches. The court may adjudicate disputes within the constitutional order, but it does not exist above or outside its reach. In practice, this means the Democratic Party will have to abandon its squeamishness about challenging and shaping the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary. Whether it’s through structural change or a simple ethics code, it is up to elected officials to remind the court that it serves the republic, and not the other way around.
We have a poor record of elite accountability in American politics. But even by our pitiful standards, we seem to be living in an era of almost total impunity for people of influence. Both the powerful and their apologists treat political authority as a grant of freedom from rules, responsibilities, duties and obligations. You see it in the case of Justice Thomas, whose defenders say he is the victim of a smear campaign. His relationship with Harlan Crow, The Wall Street Journal editorial board writes, is a “non-bombshell.”
This is not how a republic should work. Our leaders — who chose to vie for influence — should be shackled by the power they wield, not free to abuse it for their own interests and their own pleasures. And if they won’t act in the spirit of public service, then we should make them.
RIGHT-WING JUDGES MAY CRIPPLE THE GOP
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
U.S. District Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk’s widely panned ruling blocking the Food and Drug Administration’s approval more than 20 years ago of an effective and safe medication, mifepristone, used both for medical abortions and to treat miscarriages, is another in a string of decisions from right-wing judges that may well boomerang on the MAGA movement. The decisions have revealed its true reactionary face.
Kacsmaryk’s opinion (which the Justice Department appealed on Monday and moved to stay) displays the three telltale characteristics of Trump-appointed judges’ opinions: Contempt for the law, sleight of hand on the facts and partisan language more appropriate to a MAGA rally than a courtroom.
On the law, Kacsmaryk ignored the six-year statute of limitations on FDA challenges and trashed any semblance of “standing.”
Kacsmaryk “said physicians who may treat patients who have side effects from medical abortions prescribed by someone else are sufficiently injured by mifepristone to sue,” writes Mark Joseph Stern for Slate. “Kacsmaryk’s logic would essentially abolish the standing requirement for lawsuits against drug approvals by creating a special exception out of thin air. That is not the law.”
Moreover, the judge’s reliance on the 1873 “anti-vice” Comstock Act smacks of utter desperation to find any rationale for his desired result. The law, which included a wildly overbroad ban on mailing any “thing” that could be used in an abortion, was an obvious government prior restraint on speech. Comstock was largely invalidated by the Supreme Court’s 1965 ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut.
“Over sixty years ago, the interpretation of the Comstock Act endorsed by Judge Kacsmaryk was already recognized as part of a bygone era,” constitutional scholar Michael C. Dorf writes. He also notes that a December 2022 memo from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel explains in detail that “the relevant provision of the Comstock Act has long been read to forbid the mailing of materials only for illegal abortions.” Federal courts held that position well before the passage of Roe v. Wade, he adds, and thus the rulings survive the Supreme Court’s overturning of that law.
Kacsmaryk’s ruling also makes factual assertions that are “scientifically baseless and infused with hostility to abortion,” constitutional scholar Kate Shaw writes in a New York Times op-ed, “including that the FDA failed to consider ‘the intense psychological trauma and post-traumatic stress women often experience from chemical abortion.’”
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists lambasted the decision as “inflammatory” and “brazenly” substituting “the court’s judgment for that of trained professionals.”
And Kacsmaryk’s decision displays the voice of an overtly antiabortion advocate. Any pretense of judicial impartiality was dispensed with when he insisted on calling the fetus an “unborn human,” referring to “fetal personhood” and asserting that women who have abortions “often experience shame, regret, anxiety, depression, drug abuse and suicidal thoughts.”
Given that Kacsmaryk’s decision has heaped fuel onto the conflagration caused by the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Republicans might want to ponder: Is the right-wing judiciary as a whole a threat to the MAGA movement’s viability?
It is one thing to gin up the base on invented threats from critical race theory or the “great replacement theory.” But when the MAGA movement’s judges begin to inflict radically unpopular edicts on those outside the right-wing audience, that risks sparking a counter-response: a determined, broad-based movement insistent that the United States not turn the clock back on decades of social progress.
Republican setbacks such as the disappointing 2022 midterms, a progressive Democrat last week winning a crucial Wisconsin Supreme Court seat and rising support for abortion rights over the past year suggest that conservatives may have won the battle to stack the courts with ideologues but might be losing the war for public opinion and, ultimately, electoral control.
The more the Supreme Court diverges from overwhelming public sentiment on issues such as abortion, guns and voting rights, the more strength and more allies the progressive movement may gain.
Writing in the Atlantic, Ronald Brownstein considered the current Supreme Court’s “backward-facing crusade” and found historical echoes in the 1850s and 1930s. “In each of those decades, a Supreme Court that also was nominated and confirmed primarily by a political coalition reflecting an earlier majority similarly positioned itself as a bulwark against the preferences of the emerging America.”
The court, Brownstein says, with its deplorable slavery-preserving Dred Scott decision in 1857, helped drive the nation toward the Civil War and emancipation. In the 1930s, the court tried to derail President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs but ultimately acquiesced, ushering in wide acceptance for an activist federal government.
Radical judges who would impose their will on modern America make themselves a target for a movement that pushes back on the courts’ decisions and on the courts themselves. No wonder that there are rising calls for expanding the Supreme Court as well as lower courts (to dilute right-wing judges’ power); limiting Supreme Court terms; and stripping jurisdiction from the Supreme Court. Support for progressive state judicial candidates who vow to act as a counterweight to right-wing judicial imperialism is almost inevitable.
Republicans cannot very well tell their appointees to cool it; they certainly cannot contain the blowback their judges unleash. The greatest irony of Donald Trump’s presidency might be that the “accomplishment” that most thrilled right-wingers may accelerate the vanquishing of a movement that is at odds with the values and sensibilities of most Americans. And the power of the judiciary itself may be one of the casualties.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
U.S. District Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk’s widely panned ruling blocking the Food and Drug Administration’s approval more than 20 years ago of an effective and safe medication, mifepristone, used both for medical abortions and to treat miscarriages, is another in a string of decisions from right-wing judges that may well boomerang on the MAGA movement. The decisions have revealed its true reactionary face.
Kacsmaryk’s opinion (which the Justice Department appealed on Monday and moved to stay) displays the three telltale characteristics of Trump-appointed judges’ opinions: Contempt for the law, sleight of hand on the facts and partisan language more appropriate to a MAGA rally than a courtroom.
On the law, Kacsmaryk ignored the six-year statute of limitations on FDA challenges and trashed any semblance of “standing.”
Kacsmaryk “said physicians who may treat patients who have side effects from medical abortions prescribed by someone else are sufficiently injured by mifepristone to sue,” writes Mark Joseph Stern for Slate. “Kacsmaryk’s logic would essentially abolish the standing requirement for lawsuits against drug approvals by creating a special exception out of thin air. That is not the law.”
Moreover, the judge’s reliance on the 1873 “anti-vice” Comstock Act smacks of utter desperation to find any rationale for his desired result. The law, which included a wildly overbroad ban on mailing any “thing” that could be used in an abortion, was an obvious government prior restraint on speech. Comstock was largely invalidated by the Supreme Court’s 1965 ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut.
“Over sixty years ago, the interpretation of the Comstock Act endorsed by Judge Kacsmaryk was already recognized as part of a bygone era,” constitutional scholar Michael C. Dorf writes. He also notes that a December 2022 memo from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel explains in detail that “the relevant provision of the Comstock Act has long been read to forbid the mailing of materials only for illegal abortions.” Federal courts held that position well before the passage of Roe v. Wade, he adds, and thus the rulings survive the Supreme Court’s overturning of that law.
Kacsmaryk’s ruling also makes factual assertions that are “scientifically baseless and infused with hostility to abortion,” constitutional scholar Kate Shaw writes in a New York Times op-ed, “including that the FDA failed to consider ‘the intense psychological trauma and post-traumatic stress women often experience from chemical abortion.’”
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists lambasted the decision as “inflammatory” and “brazenly” substituting “the court’s judgment for that of trained professionals.”
And Kacsmaryk’s decision displays the voice of an overtly antiabortion advocate. Any pretense of judicial impartiality was dispensed with when he insisted on calling the fetus an “unborn human,” referring to “fetal personhood” and asserting that women who have abortions “often experience shame, regret, anxiety, depression, drug abuse and suicidal thoughts.”
Given that Kacsmaryk’s decision has heaped fuel onto the conflagration caused by the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Republicans might want to ponder: Is the right-wing judiciary as a whole a threat to the MAGA movement’s viability?
It is one thing to gin up the base on invented threats from critical race theory or the “great replacement theory.” But when the MAGA movement’s judges begin to inflict radically unpopular edicts on those outside the right-wing audience, that risks sparking a counter-response: a determined, broad-based movement insistent that the United States not turn the clock back on decades of social progress.
Republican setbacks such as the disappointing 2022 midterms, a progressive Democrat last week winning a crucial Wisconsin Supreme Court seat and rising support for abortion rights over the past year suggest that conservatives may have won the battle to stack the courts with ideologues but might be losing the war for public opinion and, ultimately, electoral control.
The more the Supreme Court diverges from overwhelming public sentiment on issues such as abortion, guns and voting rights, the more strength and more allies the progressive movement may gain.
Writing in the Atlantic, Ronald Brownstein considered the current Supreme Court’s “backward-facing crusade” and found historical echoes in the 1850s and 1930s. “In each of those decades, a Supreme Court that also was nominated and confirmed primarily by a political coalition reflecting an earlier majority similarly positioned itself as a bulwark against the preferences of the emerging America.”
The court, Brownstein says, with its deplorable slavery-preserving Dred Scott decision in 1857, helped drive the nation toward the Civil War and emancipation. In the 1930s, the court tried to derail President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs but ultimately acquiesced, ushering in wide acceptance for an activist federal government.
Radical judges who would impose their will on modern America make themselves a target for a movement that pushes back on the courts’ decisions and on the courts themselves. No wonder that there are rising calls for expanding the Supreme Court as well as lower courts (to dilute right-wing judges’ power); limiting Supreme Court terms; and stripping jurisdiction from the Supreme Court. Support for progressive state judicial candidates who vow to act as a counterweight to right-wing judicial imperialism is almost inevitable.
Republicans cannot very well tell their appointees to cool it; they certainly cannot contain the blowback their judges unleash. The greatest irony of Donald Trump’s presidency might be that the “accomplishment” that most thrilled right-wingers may accelerate the vanquishing of a movement that is at odds with the values and sensibilities of most Americans. And the power of the judiciary itself may be one of the casualties.
GOP WAGES AN ASYMMETRICAL WAR ON DEMOCRACY BECAUSE IT CAN’T GET THE VOTES
The expulsion of two Black Tennessee lawmakers capped a dangerous week when Democrats won elections and the GOP waged war on democracy.
by Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
It was the highlight reel of what should have been a banner week for American democracy — scores of down vest-wearing, smartphone-gazing students at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire in a line that snaked around every corner of a campus building as they waited to cast a ballot for an open seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
When the votes were tallied at the end of the night, some 883 people had cast ballots at the campus polling place — more than any other precinct in Eau Claire, and nearly six times as many as voted there in a similar election four years earlier. And 87% of the students had voted for Democrat Janet Protasiewicz — perhaps a rejection of her Republican opponent Dan Kelly’s lifelong opposition to abortion and his work trying to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.
The surge in young-voter turnout was a key reason why Protasiewicz won a landslide, 11-point victory in a key swing state that Biden had only won by just over 20,000 votes three years earlier. Overall, the turnout for a race to decide the balance of power on the Badger State’s highest court set a record for a nonpresidential year, but the GOP’s Kelly wasn’t hearing the chimes of freedom. He all but called the Democrat’s victory illegitimate.
“I wish that in a circumstance like this, I would be able to concede to a worthy opponent,” Kelly told his supporters on election night. “But I do not have a worthy opponent to which I can concede.” He claimed without evidence that Protasiewicz is “a serial liar” and that the Democrat who defeated him doesn’t believe in the rule of law but “the rule of Janet.”
It would be easy to dismiss Kelly’s election denial as unusually sour grapes, except that some lawmakers in the GOP majority in the Wisconsin legislature are — and this is hard to believe — already talking about impeaching Protasiewicz even before she takes the oath of office. A new state senator who won a special election to give Republicans a supermajority in Madison said he’d “seriously consider” impeaching the new justice, citing the flimsy pretext of her record as a circuit judge in “failing” Milwaukee.
It should have been a banner week for democracy. But it wasn’t.
Anyone doubting Republicans’ impeachment bluster in Wisconsin could take a look around to Nashville, Tenn., where white GOP lawmakers stunned the nation by expelling two Black colleagues and disenfranchising their roughly 140,000 predominantly African American constituents because the men had, from the floor of the Capitol, joined a thousand or so young people protesting gun violence. (A white female Democrat who also protested kept her seat by one vote.)
The Tennessee expulsions, tinged with a racism that echoed from 1960s civil rights protests with deep roots in Nashville’s once-segregated lunch counters, showed America just how far Republicans are willing to go to hold power — by nullifying the votes of Black and brown voters and drowning out the voices of young people who thoroughly reject Republican dogma around AR-15 assault rifles, transgender athletes or banning abortion.
That movement has in 2023 already brought a flurry of moves including state takeovers of Democratic school boards in large red-state cities like Houston and legislation in states from Georgia to Missouri aiming to sharply curtail power and potentially remove progressive DAs elected by urban voters, such as the impeachment of Philadelphia’s twice-elected prosecutor Larry Krasner. Even Congress got in on the act with legislation to nullify a sweeping criminal justice overhaul that Washington, D.C.’s, majority-Black city council had approved 12-1.
What’s more, this political counterrevolution in legislative corridors is taking place right as the conservative movement’s grand project of the last half-century — a ruthless, multimillion-dollar crusade to install unaccountable, lifetime right-wing judges across the federal bench — is coming to full fruition. Good Friday’s decision by Amarillo, Texas-based federal Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Donald Trump appointee rooted in ultra-conservative networks, seeking to undo approval of the abortion drug mifepristone after 23 years on the market is a huge end run around democracy in a nation where a majority of voters support abortion rights. Conservatives
Now his ruling — another huge blow to reproductive rights in a nation still reeling from the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 overturn of Roe v. Wade, clearing the way for red-state abortion bans — heads to that same high court, which is reeking from the stench of billionaire corruption. Last week’s blockbuster report from ProPublica that Justice Clarence Thomas has accepted and not reported hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of luxury travel from a Texas billionaire with a right-wing agenda shows the moral depths of an unaccountable Supreme Court — lacking an ethics code and apparently for sale — that is thwarting the popular will on issues ranging from abortion to climate change.
The tumultuous events of the last week call to mind Vladimir Lenin’s famous observation that “there are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” Decades, indeed. Over these seven days in April, we watched the right-wing dead-enders of the 1980s “Reagan Revolution” mount legislative and judicial coups against the rising youth of the 2020s in a battle waged with all the moral intensity of the 1960s. But we should also see it as a moment of clarity for a chaotic America — revealing exactly what we are fighting for, and the massive stakes.
Democrats are waging conventional warfare on the political frontlines — at the ballot box, trying to get votes with the power of their ideas — and in much of America they appear to be winning. It happened on Tuesday, with the coalition that produced the Protasiewicz landslide in Wisconsin, and with Chicago voters rejecting the reactionary, cop-union conservatism of Paul Vallas to elect progressive upstart Brandon Johnson as their new mayor. But then, it’s happened on the bigger stage since 1992, as Democrats have won the national popular vote in seven of eight presidential elections, as the United States grows more diverse and less in thrall to the conservative hierarchies around race, gender, sexuality, and intolerance.
Republicans are responding with an asymmetrical civil war against democracy, constantly looking for the weak points to deploy their IEDs of autocracy, determined to blow up the American Experiment if that’s what it takes to retain power by any means necessary. Their tactics are working well, unfortunately. Darth Vader’s Death Star had just one opening to exploit, but U.S. democracy has many — gerrymandering, the filibuster, the Electoral College, the undemocratic makeup of the U.S. Senate, statehouse power plays against home rule for Black or brown or progressive-minded communities, a take-no-prisoners hijacking of the judiciary. The only shock of Thursday’s next-level expulsion of two duly-elected Black lawmakers in Nashville was the proof that — as Republican ideas become more unpopular — there is no bottom to how low this movement will go.
And the targeting of these two young Black activists — Reps. Justin Jones of Nashville and Justin Pearson of Memphis — should have removed any lingering doubts around what the GOP’s war on democracy is ultimately all about: white power. Increasingly, state legislatures are using the pandemic-era uptick in urban crime as their shallow justification for antidemocratic assaults on the will of big-city voters who believe in criminal justice reform, not the GOP’s preferred method of warrior cops with roots going back to the 1800s slave patrols. In Tennessee, the white Republican majority is triggered over who can own assault rifles, the ultimate social control.
The conservative movement doesn’t really believe in the liberties laid out in the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It believes in the divine right of its preordained hierarchies — white supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia, xenophobia, etc. — and will stop at nothing to maintain them. The story of America has been the fight for democracy against slavery, Jim Crow, pervasive sexism, mass incarceration, and more. Today, the forces of repression are running out of room, so they would rather win by fascism than lose elections.
It’s fitting that the dramas from Nashville to Amarillo played out against the week’s other huge story — the arraignment of Donald Trump in a Manhattan courtroom. Rather than depart the stage after his own election defeat in 2020, Trump has survived to become the Great Orange Whale of American neofascism. The fact that the 45th president has so far managed to evade any accountability for mounting an attempted coup against the peaceful transfer of power to Biden, and is running for a second term to pardon the insurrectionists of Jan. 6, 2021, cannot be overstated here. His survival is the symbol that has emboldened the expellers, the impeachers, the judicial dictators — the guerilla fighters against our freely cast votes.
The Nashville travesty made clear that the next 19 months, between now and the 2024 presidential election, in which Trump remains front-runner for the GOP nomination, are likely to be the most fraught time for America since 1860-61, and perhaps even more perilous than that prelude to our Civil War.
It’s not impossible to see an immediate future in which more and more democratically elected officials like Jones and Pearson are impeached or expelled, with a Supreme Court that serves an oligarchy and not the 99% of U.S. citizens continuing to strip our basic freedoms — perhaps even ruling that the same state legislatures now disenfranchising Black voters can also award presidential electors to the candidate with fewer votes in 2024. The citizens who cling to “it can’t happen here” need to look at what is happening right now.
And yet there is also reason for great hope. America’s young people — the ones who left their classroom last week and overran the state capitol in Nashville to plead for real action against gun violence, the ones fighting book bans in their schools and speaking out for radical action on climate — are the bravest and boldest generation this nation has seen in some time. Their moral authority, and their rising power at the ballot box from Eau Claire to Memphis, is why a decrepit GOP is lashing out. History will surely remember what happened in Tennessee as an affront to democracy — and the last throes of a dying movement.
The expulsion of two Black Tennessee lawmakers capped a dangerous week when Democrats won elections and the GOP waged war on democracy.
by Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
It was the highlight reel of what should have been a banner week for American democracy — scores of down vest-wearing, smartphone-gazing students at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire in a line that snaked around every corner of a campus building as they waited to cast a ballot for an open seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
When the votes were tallied at the end of the night, some 883 people had cast ballots at the campus polling place — more than any other precinct in Eau Claire, and nearly six times as many as voted there in a similar election four years earlier. And 87% of the students had voted for Democrat Janet Protasiewicz — perhaps a rejection of her Republican opponent Dan Kelly’s lifelong opposition to abortion and his work trying to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.
The surge in young-voter turnout was a key reason why Protasiewicz won a landslide, 11-point victory in a key swing state that Biden had only won by just over 20,000 votes three years earlier. Overall, the turnout for a race to decide the balance of power on the Badger State’s highest court set a record for a nonpresidential year, but the GOP’s Kelly wasn’t hearing the chimes of freedom. He all but called the Democrat’s victory illegitimate.
“I wish that in a circumstance like this, I would be able to concede to a worthy opponent,” Kelly told his supporters on election night. “But I do not have a worthy opponent to which I can concede.” He claimed without evidence that Protasiewicz is “a serial liar” and that the Democrat who defeated him doesn’t believe in the rule of law but “the rule of Janet.”
It would be easy to dismiss Kelly’s election denial as unusually sour grapes, except that some lawmakers in the GOP majority in the Wisconsin legislature are — and this is hard to believe — already talking about impeaching Protasiewicz even before she takes the oath of office. A new state senator who won a special election to give Republicans a supermajority in Madison said he’d “seriously consider” impeaching the new justice, citing the flimsy pretext of her record as a circuit judge in “failing” Milwaukee.
It should have been a banner week for democracy. But it wasn’t.
Anyone doubting Republicans’ impeachment bluster in Wisconsin could take a look around to Nashville, Tenn., where white GOP lawmakers stunned the nation by expelling two Black colleagues and disenfranchising their roughly 140,000 predominantly African American constituents because the men had, from the floor of the Capitol, joined a thousand or so young people protesting gun violence. (A white female Democrat who also protested kept her seat by one vote.)
The Tennessee expulsions, tinged with a racism that echoed from 1960s civil rights protests with deep roots in Nashville’s once-segregated lunch counters, showed America just how far Republicans are willing to go to hold power — by nullifying the votes of Black and brown voters and drowning out the voices of young people who thoroughly reject Republican dogma around AR-15 assault rifles, transgender athletes or banning abortion.
That movement has in 2023 already brought a flurry of moves including state takeovers of Democratic school boards in large red-state cities like Houston and legislation in states from Georgia to Missouri aiming to sharply curtail power and potentially remove progressive DAs elected by urban voters, such as the impeachment of Philadelphia’s twice-elected prosecutor Larry Krasner. Even Congress got in on the act with legislation to nullify a sweeping criminal justice overhaul that Washington, D.C.’s, majority-Black city council had approved 12-1.
What’s more, this political counterrevolution in legislative corridors is taking place right as the conservative movement’s grand project of the last half-century — a ruthless, multimillion-dollar crusade to install unaccountable, lifetime right-wing judges across the federal bench — is coming to full fruition. Good Friday’s decision by Amarillo, Texas-based federal Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Donald Trump appointee rooted in ultra-conservative networks, seeking to undo approval of the abortion drug mifepristone after 23 years on the market is a huge end run around democracy in a nation where a majority of voters support abortion rights. Conservatives
Now his ruling — another huge blow to reproductive rights in a nation still reeling from the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 overturn of Roe v. Wade, clearing the way for red-state abortion bans — heads to that same high court, which is reeking from the stench of billionaire corruption. Last week’s blockbuster report from ProPublica that Justice Clarence Thomas has accepted and not reported hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of luxury travel from a Texas billionaire with a right-wing agenda shows the moral depths of an unaccountable Supreme Court — lacking an ethics code and apparently for sale — that is thwarting the popular will on issues ranging from abortion to climate change.
The tumultuous events of the last week call to mind Vladimir Lenin’s famous observation that “there are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” Decades, indeed. Over these seven days in April, we watched the right-wing dead-enders of the 1980s “Reagan Revolution” mount legislative and judicial coups against the rising youth of the 2020s in a battle waged with all the moral intensity of the 1960s. But we should also see it as a moment of clarity for a chaotic America — revealing exactly what we are fighting for, and the massive stakes.
Democrats are waging conventional warfare on the political frontlines — at the ballot box, trying to get votes with the power of their ideas — and in much of America they appear to be winning. It happened on Tuesday, with the coalition that produced the Protasiewicz landslide in Wisconsin, and with Chicago voters rejecting the reactionary, cop-union conservatism of Paul Vallas to elect progressive upstart Brandon Johnson as their new mayor. But then, it’s happened on the bigger stage since 1992, as Democrats have won the national popular vote in seven of eight presidential elections, as the United States grows more diverse and less in thrall to the conservative hierarchies around race, gender, sexuality, and intolerance.
Republicans are responding with an asymmetrical civil war against democracy, constantly looking for the weak points to deploy their IEDs of autocracy, determined to blow up the American Experiment if that’s what it takes to retain power by any means necessary. Their tactics are working well, unfortunately. Darth Vader’s Death Star had just one opening to exploit, but U.S. democracy has many — gerrymandering, the filibuster, the Electoral College, the undemocratic makeup of the U.S. Senate, statehouse power plays against home rule for Black or brown or progressive-minded communities, a take-no-prisoners hijacking of the judiciary. The only shock of Thursday’s next-level expulsion of two duly-elected Black lawmakers in Nashville was the proof that — as Republican ideas become more unpopular — there is no bottom to how low this movement will go.
And the targeting of these two young Black activists — Reps. Justin Jones of Nashville and Justin Pearson of Memphis — should have removed any lingering doubts around what the GOP’s war on democracy is ultimately all about: white power. Increasingly, state legislatures are using the pandemic-era uptick in urban crime as their shallow justification for antidemocratic assaults on the will of big-city voters who believe in criminal justice reform, not the GOP’s preferred method of warrior cops with roots going back to the 1800s slave patrols. In Tennessee, the white Republican majority is triggered over who can own assault rifles, the ultimate social control.
The conservative movement doesn’t really believe in the liberties laid out in the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It believes in the divine right of its preordained hierarchies — white supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia, xenophobia, etc. — and will stop at nothing to maintain them. The story of America has been the fight for democracy against slavery, Jim Crow, pervasive sexism, mass incarceration, and more. Today, the forces of repression are running out of room, so they would rather win by fascism than lose elections.
It’s fitting that the dramas from Nashville to Amarillo played out against the week’s other huge story — the arraignment of Donald Trump in a Manhattan courtroom. Rather than depart the stage after his own election defeat in 2020, Trump has survived to become the Great Orange Whale of American neofascism. The fact that the 45th president has so far managed to evade any accountability for mounting an attempted coup against the peaceful transfer of power to Biden, and is running for a second term to pardon the insurrectionists of Jan. 6, 2021, cannot be overstated here. His survival is the symbol that has emboldened the expellers, the impeachers, the judicial dictators — the guerilla fighters against our freely cast votes.
The Nashville travesty made clear that the next 19 months, between now and the 2024 presidential election, in which Trump remains front-runner for the GOP nomination, are likely to be the most fraught time for America since 1860-61, and perhaps even more perilous than that prelude to our Civil War.
It’s not impossible to see an immediate future in which more and more democratically elected officials like Jones and Pearson are impeached or expelled, with a Supreme Court that serves an oligarchy and not the 99% of U.S. citizens continuing to strip our basic freedoms — perhaps even ruling that the same state legislatures now disenfranchising Black voters can also award presidential electors to the candidate with fewer votes in 2024. The citizens who cling to “
And yet there is also reason for great hope. America’s young people — the ones who left their classroom last week and overran the state capitol in Nashville to plead for real action against gun violence, the ones fighting book bans in their schools and speaking out for radical action on climate — are the bravest and boldest generation this nation has seen in some time. Their moral authority, and their rising power at the ballot box from Eau Claire to Memphis, is why a decrepit GOP is lashing out. History will surely remember what happened in Tennessee as an affront to democracy — and the last throes of a dying movement.
TRUMP’S DAY OF MARTYRDOM DIDN’T GO QUITE AS HE EXPECTED
By David Firestone, The New York Times
Court officials didn’t take a mug shot of former President Donald J. Trump at his arraignment on Tuesday. But it’s not because he didn’t want one. The authorities didn’t really need an ID photo of one of the most recognizable faces on earth.
Mr. Trump wanted that mug shot, CNN reported, and when he didn’t get it, his presidential campaign put a fake one on a fund-raising T-shirt. He wanted it for the same reason he brought his private videographer from Florida to the courthouse: to contrive physical relics of his martyrdom at the hands of his leftist oppressors, proof of the vast conspiracy that he can wave at rallies and blare on his social media platform.
But a few things happened on Tuesday that Mr. Trump didn’t count on. The images — and the details of the case itself — sent a far more serious message than he expected.
Instead of a defiant N.Y.P.D. photo or a raised fist, the lasting image of the day may well be that of a humbled former president looking hunched, angry and nervous at the courtroom defense table, a suddenly small man wedged between his lawyers, as two New York State court officers loomed behind him in a required posture of making sure the defendant stayed in his place.
And the 34 felony charges, to which Mr. Trump pleaded not guilty, turned out to be more significant and more sweeping than previously suspected. The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, described a broad conspiracy, with Mr. Trump at the center, to falsify business records for the purpose of unlawfully influencing the 2016 presidential election. The former president, he said, “orchestrated a scheme with others to influence the 2016 presidential election by identifying and purchasing negative information about him to suppress its publication and benefit the defendant’s electoral prospects.”
It’s been known for a while that the case revolved around hush-money payments that Mr. Trump made to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, to cover up an affair they had. Falsifying business records can sometimes be charged as a misdemeanor in New York State, and to bump up the charges to felonies requires proof that they were falsified to conceal another crime. That crime was widely believed to be a federal campaign finance violation, and some legal experts described that combination as an untested legal theory, because federal violations are outside Mr. Bragg’s jurisdiction.
But it turned out that Mr. Bragg and the grand jury had more than one basis for making the charges felonies. The prosecutor argued on Tuesday that in addition to the federal campaign finance violations, Mr. Trump violated a state election law that makes it a crime to prevent any person from being elected to public office by unlawful means while acting in a conspiracy with others. Mr. Bragg is on much safer ground tying fraudulent business records to a violation of state law, because the defense cannot argue that he lacks jurisdiction on the matter — though Mr. Trump’s lawyers can still argue that state law doesn’t apply to a federal election.
And that wasn’t the only state law that Mr. Bragg said he would cite. The payments to Ms. Daniels were made by Mr. Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen, who was reimbursed by Mr. Trump in a fraudulent way, the prosecution said. The charging document said this reimbursement was illegally disguised as income in a way that “mischaracterized, for tax purposes, the true nature of the payments made in furtherance of the scheme.” So add state tax violations to the list.
The charges also revealed the breadth of Mr. Bragg’s case, showing he intends to persuade a jury of a conspiracy that extended from Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen to David Pecker, a former publisher of The National Enquirer, who was allegedly paid $150,000 by Mr. Trump to procure the silence of a second woman with whom Mr. Trump had an affair, the former Playboy model Karen McDougal. It was not certain until Tuesday that the relationship with Ms. McDougal would be part of the case. The felony charges are specifically about Ms. Daniels, but to prove them, Mr. Bragg made it clear that he would describe a much broader pattern of payoffs that included Ms. McDougal.
Prosecutors also revealed that they would rely on more than just the oral testimony of their star witness, Mr. Cohen, who already served a year in federal prison for his role in the payments and whose credibility will be challenged. There will, for example, be an audio recording of Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen discussing how exactly the payment to Ms. McDougal should be made to The National Enquirer’s parent company. And the evidence will also include texts and email messages discussing Mr. Trump’s suggestion to delay paying Ms. Daniels until after the election, “because at that point it would not matter if the story became public,” prosecutors said. (Those texts may effectively short-circuit any attempt by Mr. Trump to claim the payments were made solely to prevent his wife from learning about his affairs.)
Mr. Bragg will have to prove all these charges in court, of course, assuming the case goes to trial, and the charging documents did not reveal more than the surface of the evidence he plans to use. It’s still not a slam-dunk case. But these crimes are hardly novel ones for the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which is used to prosecuting business record cases, and are far from the one-off political persecution that Republicans are claiming it to be.
Inevitably, the images of the day and the details of the charges will have a cumulative and wearying effect on many voters. Mr. Trump thinks only of his core supporters, who will share his rage at his ordeal on Tuesday and demand revenge. But there aren’t enough base Trump voters to guarantee him even the Republican nomination, let alone the general election in 2024. Will the images of Mr. Trump at a defendant’s table, not to mention the headlines about 34 counts of paying hush money to a porn star, win a substantial number of swing voters to his side?
It’s hard to imagine all of this will really do him any good, particularly if there are charges down the road from other prosecutors alleging abuse of his presidential office. Mr. Trump may sell a few fake T-shirts, but with the law closing in on him, he will have a much harder time selling himself.
By David Firestone, The New York Times
Court officials didn’t take a mug shot of former President Donald J. Trump at his arraignment on Tuesday. But it’s not because he didn’t want one. The authorities didn’t really need an ID photo of one of the most recognizable faces on earth.
Mr. Trump wanted that mug shot, CNN reported, and when he didn’t get it, his presidential campaign put a fake one on a fund-raising T-shirt. He wanted it for the same reason he brought his private videographer from Florida to the courthouse: to contrive physical relics of his martyrdom at the hands of his leftist oppressors, proof of the vast conspiracy that he can wave at rallies and blare on his social media platform.
But a few things happened on Tuesday that Mr. Trump didn’t count on. The images — and the details of the case itself — sent a far more serious message than he expected.
Instead of a defiant N.Y.P.D. photo or a raised fist, the lasting image of the day may well be that of a humbled former president looking hunched, angry and nervous at the courtroom defense table, a suddenly small man wedged between his lawyers, as two New York State court officers loomed behind him in a required posture of making sure the defendant stayed in his place.
And the 34 felony charges, to which Mr. Trump pleaded not guilty, turned out to be more significant and more sweeping than previously suspected. The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, described a broad conspiracy, with Mr. Trump at the center, to falsify business records for the purpose of unlawfully influencing the 2016 presidential election. The former president, he said, “orchestrated a scheme with others to influence the 2016 presidential election by identifying and purchasing negative information about him to suppress its publication and benefit the defendant’s electoral prospects.”
It’s been known for a while that the case revolved around hush-money payments that Mr. Trump made to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, to cover up an affair they had. Falsifying business records can sometimes be charged as a misdemeanor in New York State, and to bump up the charges to felonies requires proof that they were falsified to conceal another crime. That crime was widely believed to be a federal campaign finance violation, and some legal experts described that combination as an untested legal theory, because federal violations are outside Mr. Bragg’s jurisdiction.
But it turned out that Mr. Bragg and the grand jury had more than one basis for making the charges felonies. The prosecutor argued on Tuesday that in addition to the federal campaign finance violations, Mr. Trump violated a state election law that makes it a crime to prevent any person from being elected to public office by unlawful means while acting in a conspiracy with others. Mr. Bragg is on much safer ground tying fraudulent business records to a violation of state law, because the defense cannot argue that he lacks jurisdiction on the matter — though Mr. Trump’s lawyers can still argue that state law doesn’t apply to a federal election.
And that wasn’t the only state law that Mr. Bragg said he would cite. The payments to Ms. Daniels were made by Mr. Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen, who was reimbursed by Mr. Trump in a fraudulent way, the prosecution said. The charging document said this reimbursement was illegally disguised as income in a way that “mischaracterized, for tax purposes, the true nature of the payments made in furtherance of the scheme.” So add state tax violations to the list.
The charges also revealed the breadth of Mr. Bragg’s case, showing he intends to persuade a jury of a conspiracy that extended from Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen to David Pecker, a former publisher of The National Enquirer, who was allegedly paid $150,000 by Mr. Trump to procure the silence of a second woman with whom Mr. Trump had an affair, the former Playboy model Karen McDougal. It was not certain until Tuesday that the relationship with Ms. McDougal would be part of the case. The felony charges are specifically about Ms. Daniels, but to prove them, Mr. Bragg made it clear that he would describe a much broader pattern of payoffs that included Ms. McDougal.
Prosecutors also revealed that they would rely on more than just the oral testimony of their star witness, Mr. Cohen, who already served a year in federal prison for his role in the payments and whose credibility will be challenged. There will, for example, be an audio recording of Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen discussing how exactly the payment to Ms. McDougal should be made to The National Enquirer’s parent company. And the evidence will also include texts and email messages discussing Mr. Trump’s suggestion to delay paying Ms. Daniels until after the election, “because at that point it would not matter if the story became public,” prosecutors said. (Those texts may effectively short-circuit any attempt by Mr. Trump to claim the payments were made solely to prevent his wife from learning about his affairs.)
Mr. Bragg will have to prove all these charges in court, of course, assuming the case goes to trial, and the charging documents did not reveal more than the surface of the evidence he plans to use. It’s still not a slam-dunk case. But these crimes are hardly novel ones for the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which is used to prosecuting business record cases, and are far from the one-off political persecution that Republicans are claiming it to be.
Inevitably, the images of the day and the details of the charges will have a cumulative and wearying effect on many voters. Mr. Trump thinks only of his core supporters, who will share his rage at his ordeal on Tuesday and demand revenge. But there aren’t enough base Trump voters to guarantee him even the Republican nomination, let alone the general election in 2024. Will the images of Mr. Trump at a defendant’s table, not to mention the headlines about 34 counts of paying hush money to a porn star, win a substantial number of swing voters to his side?
It’s hard to imagine all of this will really do him any good, particularly if there are charges down the road from other prosecutors alleging abuse of his presidential office. Mr. Trump may sell a few fake T-shirts, but with the law closing in on him, he will have a much harder time selling himself.
TRUMP IS INDICTED, AND JUSTICE IS SERVED
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg made history on Thursday, indicting a former U.S. president for the first time. The indictment is under seal. From all indications, however, former president Donald Trump was indicted for falsification of business records (a crime regularly prosecuted under New York law), beginning before the 2016 election. (The hush-money payments continued during his presidency.) If news reports are correct that Trump was indicted for a felony, Bragg will have cited another crime that Trump allegedly furthered through bookkeeping shenanigans.
Former prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, part of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Trump, told me, “This is the first step in true legal accountability. But it will be important to remember that the rule of law requires us to presume him innocent now that he is a criminal defendant.”
No felony is inconsequential, nor is the likely charge incidental to Trump’s sustained attack on our democracy. The scheme Trump allegedly set up to keep adult-film star Stormy Daniels quiet about an affair was intended to pull the wool over voters’ eyes, the first of other attempts to defraud them, and the coverup scheme extended into his presidency when he lied in denying the affair. Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen pleaded guilty and served jail time for attempting to conceal these very payments. (Rather than ponder why Bragg prosecuted Trump for the same facts, it’s fair to wonder why the Justice Department did not prosecute Trump immediately after he left office.)
Norman Eisen, co-counsel for the House impeachment managers and author of numerous analyses on the case, told me that facts publicly known suggest this “is a clear violation of the New York books and records statute.” He further argues that if “it was done to benefit the Trump campaign — an alleged illegal contribution — it is also a felony, and because it could have affected the extremely close 2016 election, it is also a serious alleged offense against our democracy.”
Contrary to some commentators’ argument that New York law might be preempted by federal law, a Just Security report makes clear that plenty of state laws are not preempted, including “a limitation on corporate contributions to federal campaigns; a violation of consumer protection laws … and fraudulent transfers of donations from PACs ostensibly founded to support presidential campaigns.” Bragg has a strong case that Trump’s attempt to conceal hush money is precisely the sort of skulduggery that states can pursue.
Fred Wertheimer, head of Democracy 21, told me, “Trump now faces the possibility of criminal accountability for his actions in New York. And this just the beginning.” He predicted: “Before this is over, Trump may be facing four possible prosecutions and accountability in New York, Georgia and at the Justice Department.”
A few aspects of the case are worth underscoring:
1. The hue and cry has gone up that this is a ticky-tacky indictment. The complaint here seems to be that because Trump is under investigation for important federal crimes, the state cannot enforce its own laws when he violates them. But the rule of law does not require that someone under investigation for serious felonies not be arrested for, say, drunken driving or shoplifting. No suspect can avoid consequences for lesser crimes pending indictment for more serious ones.
“It’s a historic breakthrough with a clear message that no one is above the law,” said Ryan Goodman, founding co-editor in chief of Just Security.
2. Trump has already started threatening and demonizing Bragg. He has mused about death and destruction and summoned his shock troops to take back their country, just as he did in the run-up to the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021. After reports of the indictment, Trump posted a diatribe decrying prosecutors as “Thugs and Radical Left Monsters.” It’s noteworthy that his first complaint is that they indicted the 45th president and a 2024 presidential candidate. The rule of law is indifferent to such facts.
Any attempt to thwart our legal system with violence and chaos cannot be tolerated. The assigned New York judge should use the full array of judicial power, including a gag order, to prevent threats to the district attorney, court staff and jurors. (If Trump is trying to lay the groundwork for a defense of “selective prosecution,” he’ll most likely fail. In the criminal prosecution of the Trump Organization, Judge Juan Merchan disallowed this defense.)
Rep. Daniel S. Goldman (D-N.Y.), former counsel in Trump’s first impeachment, tweeted, “Now as a criminal defendant, Donald Trump has numerous rights to defend himself. But that defense should take place in the court of law, not in the halls of Congress or in the political sphere. The rule of law demands it.”
3. This is probably not the last indictment. Trump attorney Evan Corcoran has been compelled to testify in the Mar-a-Lago espionage and obstruction case. And former vice president Mike Pence has been ordered to testify before a grand jury in the Jan. 6 investigation. Other news reports suggest the Georgia state criminal case (focused on the phony electors) is briskly moving along.
Trump is being prosecuted not because he is a former president but because his status as a former president does not shield him from the law. “Whatever one thinks of Trump, it’s a sad day for America when a former president is indicted,” said former New Jersey Democratic representative Tom Malinowski. Also sad, he said, is the prospect that jurors in any Trump trial would need “armed protection from people a former president will be inciting to violence.”
New York state judges, unlike some right-wing, handpicked federal judges, are likely to dismiss any frivolous arguments and attempts to delay from Trump’s attorneys. Trump is about to be treated like any criminal defendant. The rule of law seems finally to have caught up to him.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg made history on Thursday, indicting a former U.S. president for the first time. The indictment is under seal. From all indications, however, former president Donald Trump was indicted for falsification of business records (a crime regularly prosecuted under New York law), beginning before the 2016 election. (The hush-money payments continued during his presidency.) If news reports are correct that Trump was indicted for a felony, Bragg will have cited another crime that Trump allegedly furthered through bookkeeping shenanigans.
Former prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, part of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Trump, told me, “This is the first step in true legal accountability. But it will be important to remember that the rule of law requires us to presume him innocent now that he is a criminal defendant.”
No felony is inconsequential, nor is the likely charge incidental to Trump’s sustained attack on our democracy. The scheme Trump allegedly set up to keep adult-film star Stormy Daniels quiet about an affair was intended to pull the wool over voters’ eyes, the first of other attempts to defraud them, and the coverup scheme extended into his presidency when he lied in denying the affair. Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen pleaded guilty and served jail time for attempting to conceal these very payments. (Rather than ponder why Bragg prosecuted Trump for the same facts, it’s fair to wonder why the Justice Department did not prosecute Trump immediately after he left office.)
Norman Eisen, co-counsel for the House impeachment managers and author of numerous analyses on the case, told me that facts publicly known suggest this “is a clear violation of the New York books and records statute.” He further argues that if “it was done to benefit the Trump campaign — an alleged illegal contribution — it is also a felony, and because it could have affected the extremely close 2016 election, it is also a serious alleged offense against our democracy.”
Contrary to some commentators’ argument that New York law might be preempted by federal law, a Just Security report makes clear that plenty of state laws are not preempted, including “a limitation on corporate contributions to federal campaigns; a violation of consumer protection laws … and fraudulent transfers of donations from PACs ostensibly founded to support presidential campaigns.” Bragg has a strong case that Trump’s attempt to conceal hush money is precisely the sort of skulduggery that states can pursue.
Fred Wertheimer, head of Democracy 21, told me, “Trump now faces the possibility of criminal accountability for his actions in New York. And this just the beginning.” He predicted: “Before this is over, Trump may be facing four possible prosecutions and accountability in New York, Georgia and at the Justice Department.”
A few aspects of the case are worth underscoring:
1. The hue and cry has gone up that this is a ticky-tacky indictment. The complaint here seems to be that because Trump is under investigation for important federal crimes, the state cannot enforce its own laws when he violates them. But the rule of law does not require that someone under investigation for serious felonies not be arrested for, say, drunken driving or shoplifting. No suspect can avoid consequences for lesser crimes pending indictment for more serious ones.
“It’s a historic breakthrough with a clear message that no one is above the law,” said Ryan Goodman, founding co-editor in chief of Just Security.
2. Trump has already started threatening and demonizing Bragg. He has mused about death and destruction and summoned his shock troops to take back their country, just as he did in the run-up to the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021. After reports of the indictment, Trump posted a diatribe decrying prosecutors as “Thugs and Radical Left Monsters.” It’s noteworthy that his first complaint is that they indicted the 45th president and a 2024 presidential candidate. The rule of law is indifferent to such facts.
Any attempt to thwart our legal system with violence and chaos cannot be tolerated. The assigned New York judge should use the full array of judicial power, including a gag order, to prevent threats to the district attorney, court staff and jurors. (If Trump is trying to lay the groundwork for a defense of “selective prosecution,” he’ll most likely fail. In the criminal prosecution of the Trump Organization, Judge Juan Merchan disallowed this defense.)
Rep. Daniel S. Goldman (D-N.Y.), former counsel in Trump’s first impeachment, tweeted, “Now as a criminal defendant, Donald Trump has numerous rights to defend himself. But that defense should take place in the court of law, not in the halls of Congress or in the political sphere. The rule of law demands it.”
3. This is probably not the last indictment. Trump attorney Evan Corcoran has been compelled to testify in the Mar-a-Lago espionage and obstruction case. And former vice president Mike Pence has been ordered to testify before a grand jury in the Jan. 6 investigation. Other news reports suggest the Georgia state criminal case (focused on the phony electors) is briskly moving along.
Trump is being prosecuted not because he is a former president but because his status as a former president does not shield him from the law. “Whatever one thinks of Trump, it’s a sad day for America when a former president is indicted,” said former New Jersey Democratic representative Tom Malinowski. Also sad, he said, is the prospect that jurors in any Trump trial would need “armed protection from people a former president will be inciting to violence.”
New York state judges, unlike some right-wing, handpicked federal judges, are likely to dismiss any frivolous arguments and attempts to delay from Trump’s attorneys. Trump is about to be treated like any criminal defendant. The rule of law seems finally to have caught up to him.
THE DANGEROUS RACE TO PUT MORE CHILDREN TO WORK
By The New York Times Editorial Board
In February, the Department of Labor announced that it had discovered 102 teenagers working in hazardous conditions for a company that cleans meatpacking equipment at factories around the country, a violation of federal standards. The minors, ages 13 to 17, were working with dangerous chemicals and cleaning brisket saws and head splitters; three of them suffered injuries, including one with caustic burns.
Ten of those children worked in Arkansas, including six at a factory owned by the state’s second-largest private employer, Tyson Foods. Rather than taking immediate action to tighten standards and prevent further exploitation of children, Arkansas went the opposite direction. Earlier this month, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a Republican, signed legislation that would actually make it easier for companies to put children to work. The bill eliminated a requirement that children under 16 get a state work permit before being employed, a process that required them to verify their age and get the permission of a parent or guardian.
Arkansas is at the vanguard of a concerted effort by business lobbyists and Republican legislators to roll back federal and state regulations that have been in place for decades to protect children from abuse. Echoing that philosophy, bills are moving through at least nine other state legislatures that would expand work hours for children, lift restrictions on hazardous occupations, allow them to work in locations that serve alcohol, or lower the state minimum wage for minors. The Labor Department says there has been a 69 percent increase since 2018 in the illegal employment of children.
The response in these states is not to protect those children from exploitation, but instead to make it legal. Voters in these states may support deregulation, but they may not know that businesses can use these bills to work children harder, cut their wages and put them in danger. There is time for them to persuade lawmakers to say no to these abuses.
Ms. Sanders, formerly the press secretary for President Donald Trump, made clear in her inaugural address in January the disdain for the protective role of government that is driving this effort. “As long as I am your governor, the meddling hand of big government creeping down from Washington, D.C., will be stopped cold at the Mississippi River,” she said. “We will get the overregulating, micromanaging, bureaucratic tyrants off of your backs, out of your wallets and out of your lives.”
Lawmakers in these states have been vigorously lobbied by industry groups who like the flexibility of teenage employees and say that more children are needed in the work force to make up for labor shortages. One of the principal lobbying organizations pushing these bills in several states is the National Federation of Independent Business, a conservative group that supports Republican candidates and has long opposed most forms of regulation, as well as the Affordable Care Act. It has issued news releases praising lawmakers for passing bills that let businesses hire more minors for longer hours, and taking credit for supporting these efforts.
The Arkansas governor’s spokesperson said in a statement that the work permit requirement was “an arbitrary burden on parents,” but opponents noted that many child workers don’t have parents or guardians to look after their interests. In the cleaning company case, several of the child workers were unaccompanied minors who recently came over the southern border, according to their lawyers. Soon, they won’t even have the state to approve their employment or working conditions.
The real target of these rollbacks is not after-school jobs at the corner hardware store; they will have a much bigger effect on a labor force that includes many unaccompanied migrant children who work long hours to make or package products sold by big companies like General Mills, J. Crew, Target, Whole Foods and PepsiCo. As a recent New York Times investigation documented, children are being widely employed across the country in exhausting and often dangerous jobs working for some of the biggest names in American retailing and manufacturing. (Several of those companies later told The Times that they would investigate any illegal practices and try to end them.)
Hundreds of children described in the Times report were working in violation of federal labor standards, which bar child workers from a long list of hazardous jobs and forbid children under 16 from working more than three hours a day or after 7 p.m. on school days unless they work on a farm. (Those under 14 are prohibited from working in all but a handful of jobs.)
Many of the minors crossed unaccompanied from Latin American countries and may not know when their employment violates the law. A 13-year-old who was burned with caustic chemicals while working for Packers Sanitation Services in Nebraska told investigators the accident occurred during a shift that lasted from 11 p.m. to 5 or 7 a.m., a direct violation of multiple federal laws. The Labor Department imposed a $1.5 million fine on the cleaning company, which is owned by Blackstone, one of the world’s largest private equity firms.
Despite the evidence that more children are being exploited and hurt in this way, state lawmakers are passing bills that defy the federal standards. They are inviting a court challenge, and, in effect, daring the Labor Department to come after them, knowing the department often lacks the manpower to prevent violations of federal law. The Ohio Senate, which passed a bill earlier this month extending working hours for minors under 16, in violation of federal standards, also approved a resolution urging Congress to do the same.
One of the worst bills, introduced by Republicans in Iowa, would allow 14-year-olds to work in industrial freezers, meat coolers and industrial laundries, and 15-year-olds to lift heavy items onto shelves. It is backed by, among others, the independent business federation, the Iowa Grocery Industry Association, and Americans for Prosperity, a conservative advocacy group backed by Charles Koch, the industrialist who supported many national efforts to deregulate businesses.
If states will not perform a role that has been fundamental for a century — protecting workers from abuse — the federal government will have to increase its efforts to do so. After the Times investigation was published, the Biden administration announced a series of new efforts to crack down on illegal child labor, many of which hold promise as possible deterrents.
The Labor Department said it would intensify its investigations of business violations, not just by direct employers of children but also by the larger companies that contract with those employers, or that use children in their supply chain. In many cases, big companies use contractors or staffing agencies to hire children and then claim they had nothing to do with the abuses. Some of those agencies shut down and reopen under new names when they are fined, said Meredith Stewart, a senior supervising attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center. The companies that hire them should be held accountable. The department also has the authority to seize any products that are made using illegal child labor, even through the use of contractors. Seema Nanda, the department’s chief legal officer, said in an interview that it would use that authority aggressively, as well as every other litigation tool available.
The administration also said it would do more to coordinate the protection of children, particularly those who migrate across the border unaccompanied by a parent and then receive little supervision once they leave immigration shelters. In some cases, The Times reported, H.H.S. has lost touch with designated sponsors and the children themselves, leaving them vulnerable to sex trafficking or other criminal exploitation.
The administration lacks all the tools to do the job right. Because its budget has been held flat by Congress, the Wage and Hour Division lost 12 percent of its staff between 2010 and 2019, and Ms. Nanda’s office lost more than 100 lawyers, so the Labor Department doesn’t have enough investigators to effectively pursue illegal child labor practices. In addition, under current law, the maximum fine for a labor violation by a company is $15,138 per child — often little more than the cost of doing business for big companies.
Comprehensive immigration reform would be the best insurance that migrant children have the protections they need. If families can stay together, minors will be less vulnerable to abuse and better able to seek legal protection.
The administration has asked Congress for more enforcement money in its current budget, and for higher penalties. Neither request is likely to be granted, and immigration reform seems far in the distance. Protections against “oppressive child labor,” however, have been part of American law since the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed in 1938; dismantling those safeguards now puts young lives at risk.
By The New York Times Editorial Board
In February, the Department of Labor announced that it had discovered 102 teenagers working in hazardous conditions for a company that cleans meatpacking equipment at factories around the country, a violation of federal standards. The minors, ages 13 to 17, were working with dangerous chemicals and cleaning brisket saws and head splitters; three of them suffered injuries, including one with caustic burns.
Ten of those children worked in Arkansas, including six at a factory owned by the state’s second-largest private employer, Tyson Foods. Rather than taking immediate action to tighten standards and prevent further exploitation of children, Arkansas went the opposite direction. Earlier this month, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a Republican, signed legislation that would actually make it easier for companies to put children to work. The bill eliminated a requirement that children under 16 get a state work permit before being employed, a process that required them to verify their age and get the permission of a parent or guardian.
Arkansas is at the vanguard of a concerted effort by business lobbyists and Republican legislators to roll back federal and state regulations that have been in place for decades to protect children from abuse. Echoing that philosophy, bills are moving through at least nine other state legislatures that would expand work hours for children, lift restrictions on hazardous occupations, allow them to work in locations that serve alcohol, or lower the state minimum wage for minors. The Labor Department says there has been a 69 percent increase since 2018 in the illegal employment of children.
The response in these states is not to protect those children from exploitation, but instead to make it legal. Voters in these states may support deregulation, but they may not know that businesses can use these bills to work children harder, cut their wages and put them in danger. There is time for them to persuade lawmakers to say no to these abuses.
Ms. Sanders, formerly the press secretary for President Donald Trump, made clear in her inaugural address in January the disdain for the protective role of government that is driving this effort. “As long as I am your governor, the meddling hand of big government creeping down from Washington, D.C., will be stopped cold at the Mississippi River,” she said. “We will get the overregulating, micromanaging, bureaucratic tyrants off of your backs, out of your wallets and out of your lives.”
Lawmakers in these states have been vigorously lobbied by industry groups who like the flexibility of teenage employees and say that more children are needed in the work force to make up for labor shortages. One of the principal lobbying organizations pushing these bills in several states is the National Federation of Independent Business, a conservative group that supports Republican candidates and has long opposed most forms of regulation, as well as the Affordable Care Act. It has issued news releases praising lawmakers for passing bills that let businesses hire more minors for longer hours, and taking credit for supporting these efforts.
The Arkansas governor’s spokesperson said in a statement that the work permit requirement was “an arbitrary burden on parents,” but opponents noted that many child workers don’t have parents or guardians to look after their interests. In the cleaning company case, several of the child workers were unaccompanied minors who recently came over the southern border, according to their lawyers. Soon, they won’t even have the state to approve their employment or working conditions.
The real target of these rollbacks is not after-school jobs at the corner hardware store; they will have a much bigger effect on a labor force that includes many unaccompanied migrant children who work long hours to make or package products sold by big companies like General Mills, J. Crew, Target, Whole Foods and PepsiCo. As a recent New York Times investigation documented, children are being widely employed across the country in exhausting and often dangerous jobs working for some of the biggest names in American retailing and manufacturing. (Several of those companies later told The Times that they would investigate any illegal practices and try to end them.)
Hundreds of children described in the Times report were working in violation of federal labor standards, which bar child workers from a long list of hazardous jobs and forbid children under 16 from working more than three hours a day or after 7 p.m. on school days unless they work on a farm. (Those under 14 are prohibited from working in all but a handful of jobs.)
Many of the minors crossed unaccompanied from Latin American countries and may not know when their employment violates the law. A 13-year-old who was burned with caustic chemicals while working for Packers Sanitation Services in Nebraska told investigators the accident occurred during a shift that lasted from 11 p.m. to 5 or 7 a.m., a direct violation of multiple federal laws. The Labor Department imposed a $1.5 million fine on the cleaning company, which is owned by Blackstone, one of the world’s largest private equity firms.
Despite the evidence that more children are being exploited and hurt in this way, state lawmakers are passing bills that defy the federal standards. They are inviting a court challenge, and, in effect, daring the Labor Department to come after them, knowing the department often lacks the manpower to prevent violations of federal law. The Ohio Senate, which passed a bill earlier this month extending working hours for minors under 16, in violation of federal standards, also approved a resolution urging Congress to do the same.
One of the worst bills, introduced by Republicans in Iowa, would allow 14-year-olds to work in industrial freezers, meat coolers and industrial laundries, and 15-year-olds to lift heavy items onto shelves. It is backed by, among others, the independent business federation, the Iowa Grocery Industry Association, and Americans for Prosperity, a conservative advocacy group backed by Charles Koch, the industrialist who supported many national efforts to deregulate businesses.
If states will not perform a role that has been fundamental for a century — protecting workers from abuse — the federal government will have to increase its efforts to do so. After the Times investigation was published, the Biden administration announced a series of new efforts to crack down on illegal child labor, many of which hold promise as possible deterrents.
The Labor Department said it would intensify its investigations of business violations, not just by direct employers of children but also by the larger companies that contract with those employers, or that use children in their supply chain. In many cases, big companies use contractors or staffing agencies to hire children and then claim they had nothing to do with the abuses. Some of those agencies shut down and reopen under new names when they are fined, said Meredith Stewart, a senior supervising attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center. The companies that hire them should be held accountable. The department also has the authority to seize any products that are made using illegal child labor, even through the use of contractors. Seema Nanda, the department’s chief legal officer, said in an interview that it would use that authority aggressively, as well as every other litigation tool available.
The administration also said it would do more to coordinate the protection of children, particularly those who migrate across the border unaccompanied by a parent and then receive little supervision once they leave immigration shelters. In some cases, The Times reported, H.H.S. has lost touch with designated sponsors and the children themselves, leaving them vulnerable to sex trafficking or other criminal exploitation.
The administration lacks all the tools to do the job right. Because its budget has been held flat by Congress, the Wage and Hour Division lost 12 percent of its staff between 2010 and 2019, and Ms. Nanda’s office lost more than 100 lawyers, so the Labor Department doesn’t have enough investigators to effectively pursue illegal child labor practices. In addition, under current law, the maximum fine for a labor violation by a company is $15,138 per child — often little more than the cost of doing business for big companies.
Comprehensive immigration reform would be the best insurance that migrant children have the protections they need. If families can stay together, minors will be less vulnerable to abuse and better able to seek legal protection.
The administration has asked Congress for more enforcement money in its current budget, and for higher penalties. Neither request is likely to be granted, and immigration reform seems far in the distance. Protections against “oppressive child labor,” however, have been part of American law since the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed in 1938; dismantling those safeguards now puts young lives at risk.
PARENTS’ RIGHTS? HOW ABOUT A ‘PARENTS’ BILL OF RESPONSIBILITIES’ INSTEAD?
You want teachers to teach the basics? Then stop leaving the parenting to them.
By Petula Dvorak, The Washington Post
How to say you’ve been totally asleep at the switch of your children’s life without saying it?
Support the “Parents Bill of Rights Act!”
This toxic bill, introduced into Congress this month and debated on Capitol Hill this week, attacks an entire profession and scorches thousands of dedicated educators under the guise of empowering parents.
Baloney. It’s no secret that this nationwide “movement” is simply politics and began right here in the DMV, when Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin capitalized on parents’ frustrations with education during the pandemic, turning the once-snoozy, county board of education meetings into screamfests.
It’s a cheap device to divide Americans politically with culture-war scare tactics, with lies about curriculum and education. It pushes a preposterously shortsighted idea of what children need to be informed citizens in a contemporary world, disproportionately targeting accurate history about discrimination and anything LGBTQ-related.
A cottage industry of groups sprung up to foment outrage and harness grievances: Parents should be in charge of what children learn, Moms for Liberty began arguing in Brevard County, Fla., before taking their message nationwide, building a network of civically-engaged conservative voters.
There are options these folks might consider — home schooling or parochial or private schools.
Amid the shouting, there are things we’re not spending enough time talking about. The movement largely ignores the real problems of equity in education and the alarming, nationwide drop in math and reading competency across all ages.
Our teachers are quitting in droves, burned out and afraid.
And where have these parents been in all this? Complicit. They’re weaponizing fear against the folks in the classrooms, who are already making not nearly enough to deal with very big problems — the consequences of poor parenting among them.
They’re somehow everywhere and nowhere, busy revving up outrage online while simultaneously confused by what’s been withheld from them. Maybe a little less Facebook and a little more focus — you know — talking to teachers and asking about homework would’ve told them what kids were learning.
Glenda the Good Witch could’ve told these parents they’ve had the power all along to know what’s in the school library, in their kids’ classrooms and on the curriculums. It’s called involvement. I’ve never met a teacher who has said “no” to any of my questions or requests for meetings.
Just yesterday, after we failed to connect on Zoom and in person for parent-teacher conferences several times (most of the misses my fault), my son’s public school Spanish teacher tracked me down and made sure we had a chat because I asked him for a meeting to see how my little hombre was doing.
Teachers want to hear from you.
For centuries, we have been asking the impossible of teachers. We want them to be educated and qualified, then we question their qualifications. We want them to discipline and inform our children, then we repeatedly challenge them. And when parents have been involved, have shown up to the meetings and conferences, asked the questions and met the teachers, most teachers respond to their concerns.
Instead, parents blindsided by curriculum (because they read out-of-context excerpts on a conservative blog), are advocating censorship and squaring off with teachers.
“This us-versus-them mind-set hurts students [and] disregards educators’ professionalism,” Marc Egan, a lobbyist for the National Education Association, wrote in a letter to Congress.
Perhaps nowhere is this more absurd than in the surging ban on books. A PEN America review found that from June 21 to July 22, book bans were imposed in 138 school districts in 32 states, affecting nearly 4 million students in more than 5,000 schools. That staggering number has probably increased in the past seven months, and it will only get worse if Congress soon decides to join forces with book ban proponents, according to an NEA report.
“The concern is if this bill passes, God forbid it ever became law, that it would have a chilling impact on schools, on libraries,” said Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), in a hearing on the bill held by the House Committee on Rules Wednesday.
McGovern read aloud parts of a banned book — the Rosa Parks story. It was a straightforward narrative of her famous bus protest. He asked the woman testifying on behalf of the bill, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), what could have been deemed offensive in the book.
“I have no idea,” Foxx responded, shrugging.
Republicans are advancing a bill that makes it easier to ban books. So last night at our Rules Committee hearing, I read an amazing book about Rosa Parks that was pulled off the shelves & asked a simple question: should it be banned?
But let’s be honest, how often are parents more interested in their jobs than what their kids are reading?
How about a Parents’ Bill of Responsibilities?
Parents are responsible for being informed about their teachers, the curriculum, the library. It’s all public and available to anyone who asks.
They are responsible for managing the biggest influencer in their kids’ lives — the digital world in the palm of their hand. There’s stuff on there far more scarring than a book about a gay penguin and more provocative than any work by Toni Morrison — the main targets of the Bill-of-Rights parenting crew.
Parents are responsible for teaching their kids respect and tolerance. For championing a solid work ethic and an open mind.
You want teachers to teach the basics? Then stop leaving the parenting to them.
You want teachers to teach the basics? Then stop leaving the parenting to them.
By Petula Dvorak, The Washington Post
How to say you’ve been totally asleep at the switch of your children’s life without saying it?
Support the “Parents Bill of Rights Act!”
This toxic bill, introduced into Congress this month and debated on Capitol Hill this week, attacks an entire profession and scorches thousands of dedicated educators under the guise of empowering parents.
Baloney. It’s no secret that this nationwide “movement” is simply politics and began right here in the DMV, when Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin capitalized on parents’ frustrations with education during the pandemic, turning the once-snoozy, county board of education meetings into screamfests.
It’s a cheap device to divide Americans politically with culture-war scare tactics, with lies about curriculum and education. It pushes a preposterously shortsighted idea of what children need to be informed citizens in a contemporary world, disproportionately targeting accurate history about discrimination and anything LGBTQ-related.
A cottage industry of groups sprung up to foment outrage and harness grievances: Parents should be in charge of what children learn, Moms for Liberty began arguing in Brevard County, Fla., before taking their message nationwide, building a network of civically-engaged conservative voters.
There are options these folks might consider — home schooling or parochial or private schools.
Amid the shouting, there are things we’re not spending enough time talking about. The movement largely ignores the real problems of equity in education and the alarming, nationwide drop in math and reading competency across all ages.
Our teachers are quitting in droves, burned out and afraid.
And where have these parents been in all this? Complicit. They’re weaponizing fear against the folks in the classrooms, who are already making not nearly enough to deal with very big problems — the consequences of poor parenting among them.
They’re somehow everywhere and nowhere, busy revving up outrage online while simultaneously confused by what’s been withheld from them. Maybe a little less Facebook and a little more focus — you know — talking to teachers and asking about homework would’ve told them what kids were learning.
Glenda the Good Witch could’ve told these parents they’ve had the power all along to know what’s in the school library, in their kids’ classrooms and on the curriculums. It’s called involvement. I’ve never met a teacher who has said “no” to any of my questions or requests for meetings.
Just yesterday, after we failed to connect on Zoom and in person for parent-teacher conferences several times (most of the misses my fault), my son’s public school Spanish teacher tracked me down and made sure we had a chat because I asked him for a meeting to see how my little hombre was doing.
Teachers want to hear from you.
For centuries, we have been asking the impossible of teachers. We want them to be educated and qualified, then we question their qualifications. We want them to discipline and inform our children, then we repeatedly challenge them. And when parents have been involved, have shown up to the meetings and conferences, asked the questions and met the teachers, most teachers respond to their concerns.
Instead, parents blindsided by curriculum (because they read out-of-context excerpts on a conservative blog), are advocating censorship and squaring off with teachers.
“This us-versus-them mind-set hurts students [and] disregards educators’ professionalism,” Marc Egan, a lobbyist for the National Education Association, wrote in a letter to Congress.
Perhaps nowhere is this more absurd than in the surging ban on books. A PEN America review found that from June 21 to July 22, book bans were imposed in 138 school districts in 32 states, affecting nearly 4 million students in more than 5,000 schools. That staggering number has probably increased in the past seven months, and it will only get worse if Congress soon decides to join forces with book ban proponents, according to an NEA report.
“The concern is if this bill passes, God forbid it ever became law, that it would have a chilling impact on schools, on libraries,” said Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), in a hearing on the bill held by the House Committee on Rules Wednesday.
McGovern read aloud parts of a banned book — the Rosa Parks story. It was a straightforward narrative of her famous bus protest. He asked the woman testifying on behalf of the bill, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), what could have been deemed offensive in the book.
“I have no idea,” Foxx responded, shrugging.
Republicans are advancing a bill that makes it easier to ban books. So last night at our Rules Committee hearing, I read an amazing book about Rosa Parks that was pulled off the shelves & asked a simple question: should it be banned?
But let’s be honest, how often are parents more interested in their jobs than what their kids are reading?
How about a Parents’ Bill of Responsibilities?
Parents are responsible for being informed about their teachers, the curriculum, the library. It’s all public and available to anyone who asks.
They are responsible for managing the biggest influencer in their kids’ lives — the digital world in the palm of their hand. There’s stuff on there far more scarring than a book about a gay penguin and more provocative than any work by Toni Morrison — the main targets of the Bill-of-Rights parenting crew.
Parents are responsible for teaching their kids respect and tolerance. For championing a solid work ethic and an open mind.
You want teachers to teach the basics? Then stop leaving the parenting to them.
THE GOP’S SCORN OVER THE TRUMP INVESTIGATIONS AFFIRMS THE RACIST DISCONNECT OF ITS ‘LAW AND ORDER’ MESSAGING
Republican rhetoric has long focused on how theirs is a party that respects the rule of law. But that principle only seems to apply when the accused is Black and poor, not rich and white.
by Solomon Jones , The Philadelphia Inquirer
It’s odd to watch conservatives twist themselves into knots while trying to defend Donald Trump.
The former president allegedly used campaign funds to repay his then-lawyer, Michael Cohen, for making a hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels. Trump is accused of using the $130,000 payout to buy Daniels’ silence about an alleged affair. Now, on the heels of a grand jury investigation initiated by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Trump might be indicted as early as this week, and for the first time in U.S. history, a former president could be hurled into the criminal justice system.
That puts America squarely at the center of a raging debate on race, class, position and power. If Trump’s wealth and status as a white former president shields him from prosecution, the status quo remains intact. But if Trump can be charged with a crime after an investigation headed by Bragg — a Black prosecutor — then America has become a place that our nation’s founders never imagined. It has become a place where no one is above the law.
Conservative Republicans fear that possibility, and that’s why the same people who claim to believe in law and order and state’s rights are working feverishly to undermine those very ideals.
Even without full knowledge of the charges Trump might actually face, the Republican chairmen of three powerful U.S. House committees sent a letter to Bragg demanding his testimony before Congress. In that letter, House Oversight Chairman James Comer, House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, and House Administration Chairman Bryan Steil accused the New York Democrat of improperly using federal funds for political purposes.
“Your decision to pursue such a politically motivated prosecution … requires congressional scrutiny about how public safety funds appropriated by Congress are implemented by local law-enforcement agencies,” they wrote in a joint letter.
Never mind that they don’t know if federal funds were actually utilized in the investigation. The facts don’t seem to matter now. Neither does that law-and-order messaging so many Republicans have used to talk their way into office. Law-and-order applies mostly when the images of criminals are Black and poor. It rarely pertains to cases where the alleged offender is rich and white.
The same could be said for the principle of state’s rights. So long as the state is working to decrease or eliminate the rights of people of color, conservatives support the concept. But when the power of the state is wielded by Black people — in this case, Bragg — its use must be questioned, undermined, or even stopped.
That’s what Trump’s allies are trying to do. And for those who don’t think their attempts are steeped in racism, consider Trump’s own words when he referenced Bragg, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, all of whom are Black prosecutors leading separate investigations against Trump.
“These prosecutors are vicious, horrible people,” Trump said last February at a Texas rally. “They’re racists and they’re very sick, they’re mentally sick. In reality, they’re not after me. They’re after you.”
By declaring that his legal troubles are the result of Black people targeting his overwhelmingly white following, Trump taps into the paranoia and anger that drives white supremacy. He also proves what I have come to believe — that Trump is but a symbol.
He epitomizes the hope that America can go back to the time when everyone knew their place, and no one would question the system.
That’s why this pitched battle for the soul of our country is about much more than Donald Trump. It is about our national identity. Are we a country where the cult of personality grants immunity from justice? Or does America fit John Adams’ vision as a “government of laws, not men”?
If, in fact, we are the place our founders wrote about, then we must prove it by casting aside our differences, and prosecuting Donald Trump. If he is charged, tried and acquitted for his role in the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, the mishandling of classified documents, election interference in Georgia, or illegal hush money payments in New York, so be it.
However, if the facts lead to one or more guilty verdicts, Trump must pay the cost for what he’s done.
Republican rhetoric has long focused on how theirs is a party that respects the rule of law. But that principle only seems to apply when the accused is Black and poor, not rich and white.
by Solomon Jones , The Philadelphia Inquirer
It’s odd to watch conservatives twist themselves into knots while trying to defend Donald Trump.
The former president allegedly used campaign funds to repay his then-lawyer, Michael Cohen, for making a hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels. Trump is accused of using the $130,000 payout to buy Daniels’ silence about an alleged affair. Now, on the heels of a grand jury investigation initiated by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Trump might be indicted as early as this week, and for the first time in U.S. history, a former president could be hurled into the criminal justice system.
That puts America squarely at the center of a raging debate on race, class, position and power. If Trump’s wealth and status as a white former president shields him from prosecution, the status quo remains intact. But if Trump can be charged with a crime after an investigation headed by Bragg — a Black prosecutor — then America has become a place that our nation’s founders never imagined. It has become a place where no one is above the law.
Conservative Republicans fear that possibility, and that’s why the same people who claim to believe in law and order and state’s rights are working feverishly to undermine those very ideals.
Even without full knowledge of the charges Trump might actually face, the Republican chairmen of three powerful U.S. House committees sent a letter to Bragg demanding his testimony before Congress. In that letter, House Oversight Chairman James Comer, House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, and House Administration Chairman Bryan Steil accused the New York Democrat of improperly using federal funds for political purposes.
“Your decision to pursue such a politically motivated prosecution … requires congressional scrutiny about how public safety funds appropriated by Congress are implemented by local law-enforcement agencies,” they wrote in a joint letter.
Never mind that they don’t know if federal funds were actually utilized in the investigation. The facts don’t seem to matter now. Neither does that law-and-order messaging so many Republicans have used to talk their way into office. Law-and-order applies mostly when the images of criminals are Black and poor. It rarely pertains to cases where the alleged offender is rich and white.
The same could be said for the principle of state’s rights. So long as the state is working to decrease or eliminate the rights of people of color, conservatives support the concept. But when the power of the state is wielded by Black people — in this case, Bragg — its use must be questioned, undermined, or even stopped.
That’s what Trump’s allies are trying to do. And for those who don’t think their attempts are steeped in racism, consider Trump’s own words when he referenced Bragg, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, all of whom are Black prosecutors leading separate investigations against Trump.
“These prosecutors are vicious, horrible people,” Trump said last February at a Texas rally. “They’re racists and they’re very sick, they’re mentally sick. In reality, they’re not after me. They’re after you.”
By declaring that his legal troubles are the result of Black people targeting his overwhelmingly white following, Trump taps into the paranoia and anger that drives white supremacy. He also proves what I have come to believe — that Trump is but a symbol.
He epitomizes the hope that America can go back to the time when everyone knew their place, and no one would question the system.
That’s why this pitched battle for the soul of our country is about much more than Donald Trump. It is about our national identity. Are we a country where the cult of personality grants immunity from justice? Or does America fit John Adams’ vision as a “government of laws, not men”?
If, in fact, we are the place our founders wrote about, then we must prove it by casting aside our differences, and prosecuting Donald Trump. If he is charged, tried and acquitted for his role in the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, the mishandling of classified documents, election interference in Georgia, or illegal hush money payments in New York, so be it.
However, if the facts lead to one or more guilty verdicts, Trump must pay the cost for what he’s done.
THE PRE-PEARL HARBOR GOP IS BACK
By Max Boot, The Washington Post
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) of Florida has been widely and rightly criticized — including by prominent members of his own party — for dismissing the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a “territorial dispute” of little concern to the United States. Yet, while he says that countering Russia is not a “vital national interest,” he claims that “checking the economic, cultural, and military power of the Chinese Communist Party” is one. DeSantis worries that U.S. aid to Ukraine could draw us into “a hot war” with a nuclear-armed state, but he expresses no such concern about U.S. aid to Taiwan — even though, in the event of Chinese military action against Taiwan, U.S. forces would be far more likely to fight China directly.
This distinction — U.S. aid to Ukraine bad, U.S. aid to Taiwan good — makes little strategic sense: Both Ukraine and Taiwan are worth supporting, and both Europe and Asia matter to the United States. But it’s a dichotomy rooted in a century of Republican foreign policy thinking.
In the 1930s, Republicans were isolationist when it came to Nazi Germany but were more sympathetic to sanctioning Japan and supporting Nationalist China, as political scientist Colin Dueck noted in his history of GOP foreign policy. The “America Firsters” saw support for Britain as a plot by the Eastern Establishment, international bankers and Jews to embroil America in another world war, but they romanticized “Free China” as a fertile ground for Christianity and capitalism. Even during World War II, some Republicans criticized Franklin D. Roosevelt for prioritizing the defeat of Germany over Japan.
In the early years of the Cold War, Republicans such as Sen. Robert A. Taft of Ohio were opposed to joining NATO or sending U.S. troops to Europe, but, during the Korean War, they supported Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s desire to wage war on “Red China” with the help of Taiwan.
Dwight D. Eisenhower’s victory over Taft for the 1952 Republican presidential nomination vanquished the “Asia First” wing of the GOP and made Republicans a firmly Atlanticist party. Just watch Ronald Reagan’s 1984 speech on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, which was a tribute not only to the “boys of Pointe du Hoc” but also to “a great alliance that serves to this day as our shield for freedom, for prosperity, and for peace.”
Now the pre-Eisenhower GOP is back with a vengeance, thanks to former president Donald Trump, who reveres Vladimir Putin while reviling China. DeSantis, who as recently as 2015 supported arming Ukraine, is following his lead.
Admittedly today, as Dueck pointed out to me, “the Asia First argument actually has more validity” than in 1940s or 1950s. But, if China is now America’s top threat, Russia is a close second — and it has far more nuclear weapons. Moreover, China and Russia are partners, and Russia’s difficulties in conquering Ukraine may discourage China from trying to conquer Taiwan.
A few analysts, including former Trump defense official Elbridge Colby, argue that the United States cannot afford to support both Ukraine and Taiwan. But America’s billions in aid to Ukraine are only a tiny portion of a defense budget that is approaching $1 trillion. “US spending of 5.6% of its defense budget to destroy nearly half of Russia’s conventional military capability seems like an absolutely incredible investment,” argues the Center for European Policy Analysis.
Aside from Stinger and Javelin missiles, there is little overlap between the weapons systems needed to fight Russia and China: Ukraine is experiencing a land war, while a battle over Taiwan would be a naval and air war. The United States isn’t dispatching aircraft carriers, submarines or F-35’s to help Kyiv. In fact, as conservative analyst Gabriel Scheinmann argued in The Post, aid to Ukraine will increase U.S. capacity to fight China, because it is reviving America’s decaying defense industrial base.
But it’s safe to say that DeSantis’s turn against Ukraine is motivated by politics, not principles or a thought-out foreign policy. Today, 40 percent of Republicans say that the United States is providing too much aid to Ukraine — the view espoused by Tucker Carlson and Trump. Meanwhile, 76 percent of Republicans cite China as America’s greatest enemy.
Why are so many Republicans soft on Russia and tough on China? 1. China is an economic threat; Russia isn’t. (Both parties blame China for the loss of U.S. jobs while ignoring all the jobs created by U.S.-China trade.) 2. China is nominally a Communist country; Russia isn’t. (In practice, however, both combine capitalism with authoritarianism.) 3. Putin has made a play for right-wing support by posing as a defender of Christianity and traditional values. 4. There is growing anti-Asian racism in America. 5. Many Republicans will oppose anything Democrats support (and vice versa), and Democrats are backing Ukraine.
Whatever the explanations, the return of so many Republicans to a quasi-isolationist, Asia First foreign policy is an ominous development. If the GOP succeeds in blocking further U.S. aid to Ukraine, it could allow Putin to win the war despite his battlefield blunders, and that would make him a greater threat to NATO. If Trump were to return to office, of course, he would be likely to pull out of NATO altogether. DeSantis might not be too far behind. And then we would be back to the pre-Pearl Harbor world.
By Max Boot, The Washington Post
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) of Florida has been widely and rightly criticized — including by prominent members of his own party — for dismissing the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a “territorial dispute” of little concern to the United States. Yet, while he says that countering Russia is not a “vital national interest,” he claims that “checking the economic, cultural, and military power of the Chinese Communist Party” is one. DeSantis worries that U.S. aid to Ukraine could draw us into “a hot war” with a nuclear-armed state, but he expresses no such concern about U.S. aid to Taiwan — even though, in the event of Chinese military action against Taiwan, U.S. forces would be far more likely to fight China directly.
This distinction — U.S. aid to Ukraine bad, U.S. aid to Taiwan good — makes little strategic sense: Both Ukraine and Taiwan are worth supporting, and both Europe and Asia matter to the United States. But it’s a dichotomy rooted in a century of Republican foreign policy thinking.
In the 1930s, Republicans were isolationist when it came to Nazi Germany but were more sympathetic to sanctioning Japan and supporting Nationalist China, as political scientist Colin Dueck noted in his history of GOP foreign policy. The “America Firsters” saw support for Britain as a plot by the Eastern Establishment, international bankers and Jews to embroil America in another world war, but they romanticized “Free China” as a fertile ground for Christianity and capitalism. Even during World War II, some Republicans criticized Franklin D. Roosevelt for prioritizing the defeat of Germany over Japan.
In the early years of the Cold War, Republicans such as Sen. Robert A. Taft of Ohio were opposed to joining NATO or sending U.S. troops to Europe, but, during the Korean War, they supported Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s desire to wage war on “Red China” with the help of Taiwan.
Dwight D. Eisenhower’s victory over Taft for the 1952 Republican presidential nomination vanquished the “Asia First” wing of the GOP and made Republicans a firmly Atlanticist party. Just watch Ronald Reagan’s 1984 speech on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, which was a tribute not only to the “boys of Pointe du Hoc” but also to “a great alliance that serves to this day as our shield for freedom, for prosperity, and for peace.”
Now the pre-Eisenhower GOP is back with a vengeance, thanks to former president Donald Trump, who reveres Vladimir Putin while reviling China. DeSantis, who as recently as 2015 supported arming Ukraine, is following his lead.
Admittedly today, as Dueck pointed out to me, “the Asia First argument actually has more validity” than in 1940s or 1950s. But, if China is now America’s top threat, Russia is a close second — and it has far more nuclear weapons. Moreover, China and Russia are partners, and Russia’s difficulties in conquering Ukraine may discourage China from trying to conquer Taiwan.
A few analysts, including former Trump defense official Elbridge Colby, argue that the United States cannot afford to support both Ukraine and Taiwan. But America’s billions in aid to Ukraine are only a tiny portion of a defense budget that is approaching $1 trillion. “US spending of 5.6% of its defense budget to destroy nearly half of Russia’s conventional military capability seems like an absolutely incredible investment,” argues the Center for European Policy Analysis.
Aside from Stinger and Javelin missiles, there is little overlap between the weapons systems needed to fight Russia and China: Ukraine is experiencing a land war, while a battle over Taiwan would be a naval and air war. The United States isn’t dispatching aircraft carriers, submarines or F-35’s to help Kyiv. In fact, as conservative analyst Gabriel Scheinmann argued in The Post, aid to Ukraine will increase U.S. capacity to fight China, because it is reviving America’s decaying defense industrial base.
But it’s safe to say that DeSantis’s turn against Ukraine is motivated by politics, not principles or a thought-out foreign policy. Today, 40 percent of Republicans say that the United States is providing too much aid to Ukraine — the view espoused by Tucker Carlson and Trump. Meanwhile, 76 percent of Republicans cite China as America’s greatest enemy.
Why are so many Republicans soft on Russia and tough on China? 1. China is an economic threat; Russia isn’t. (Both parties blame China for the loss of U.S. jobs while ignoring all the jobs created by U.S.-China trade.) 2. China is nominally a Communist country; Russia isn’t. (In practice, however, both combine capitalism with authoritarianism.) 3. Putin has made a play for right-wing support by posing as a defender of Christianity and traditional values. 4. There is growing anti-Asian racism in America. 5. Many Republicans will oppose anything Democrats support (and vice versa), and Democrats are backing Ukraine.
Whatever the explanations, the return of so many Republicans to a quasi-isolationist, Asia First foreign policy is an ominous development. If the GOP succeeds in blocking further U.S. aid to Ukraine, it could allow Putin to win the war despite his battlefield blunders, and that would make him a greater threat to NATO. If Trump were to return to office, of course, he would be likely to pull out of NATO altogether. DeSantis might not be too far behind. And then we would be back to the pre-Pearl Harbor world.
WHY WHITE CHRISTIAN NATIONALISTS ARE IN SUCH A PANIC
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
You might find it strange that a large segment of the Republican base thinks Whites are the true victims of racism and that Christians are under attack. After all, America’s biggest racial group is still Whites; the most common religious affiliation remains Christianity. Whites and Christians dominate elected office at all levels, the judiciary and corporate America. What’s the problem?
Well, there is a straightforward reason for the freak-out, and an explanation for why former president Donald Trump developed such a close bond with white Christian nationalists.
This group feels besieged because they are losing ground. “The newly-released 2022 supplement to the PRRI Census of American Religion — based on over 40,000 interviews conducted last year — confirms that the decline of white Christians (Americans who identify as white, non-Hispanic and Christian of any kind) as a proportion of the population continues unabated,” writes Robert P. Jones, president of the Public Religion Research Institute. “As recently as 2008, when our first Black president was elected, the U.S. was a majority (54%) white Christian country.” By 2014 the number had dropped to 47 percent, and in 2022 it stood at 42 percent.
The group that has declined the most is at the core of the MAGA movement, the group most devoted to Christian nationalism. “White evangelical Protestants have experienced the steepest decline. As recently as 2006, white evangelical Protestants comprised nearly one-quarter of Americans (23%). By the time of Trump’s rise to power, their numbers had dipped to 16.8%,” Jones explains. “Today, white evangelical Protestants comprise only 13.6% of Americans.”
And that decline may yet accelerate, because they skew older than the population as a whole. Put differently, there are far more baby boomers in this group than Generation Z members. White evangelicals are “losing” people with each successive generation. (“White Christian subgroups have each lost approximately half their market share just across the generations who are alive today,” according to Jones.) If your business had lost half its market share, you would be panicking, too.
With those kind of numbers, the responsible thing to do would be to think about “fixing” what’s wrong by adapting to a changing market. Instead, many in this cohort have doubled down, becoming the foot soldiers in the red-hatted MAGA movement. The decline isn’t going to be reversed by angry, gray-haired folks demanding abortion bans and “don’t say gay” bills.
Instead, White evangelicals might look at former “customers” who are abandoning organized religion in droves. “Nearly four in ten Americans ages 18-29 (38%) are religiously unaffiliated, an increase from 34% in 2021," the PRRI census said. "As the cohorts age, the growth in religiously unaffiliated Americans has started to show up more in the 30-49 age category, which is up to 32% unaffiliated from 26% in 2016.”
In some sense, White evangelicals’ desperate efforts to cling to political power and demand adherence to a set of outdated cultural norms only make the problem worse. Not many 20-year-olds (part of the most diverse, inclusive generation in history, one steeped in climate science and tech) would leap at the prospect of living in a state where abortion is unattainable, gays are ostracized and secularism is bashed.
If Christian evangelicals really want to slow their decline, they might consider getting out of the unpopular political ideas market (e.g., abortion bans) and stressing values that could win back alienated young people (e.g., reverence for conserving the planet, ministering to the poor and the weak). That might put more seats in the pews, although it likely wouldn’t do much for the aging, mostly White, reactionary GOP.
The reality is that the convergence of the declining population of White Christians with the rise of Trump has been bad for both evangelicalism and American politics. Trump came along, telling the shrinking band of white Christian nationalists that they are victims. He reveled in nostalgia for a time when they dominated (demographically and politically) and blamed immigrants, elites and “wokeness” for their ills. They were the group most susceptible to a message that reinforces their feeling they have “lost” something or something has been “taken away.”
That “something” they felt had been stolen may have been as concrete as the 2020 election, or as all-encompassing as white Christian supremacy. However they define that sense of loss, it fuels their anger and binds them to Trump.
But the demographic clock cannot be turned back. No one can claim to be patriotic defenders of democracy when they decide their declining numbers justify anti-democratic voter suppression or even violence. In short, MAGA White Christians have painted themselves into a corner where the majority rejects their outlook and anti-majoritarian tactics cannot keep them in power forever.
A dramatic transformation would need to happen for this movement to return to pluralistic politics. The MAGA crowd would have to recognize America’s complete history, reflecting our full experience, not just the story of people like them. And most important, they would need to rediscover the principles on which the United States was founded. (“All men are created equal...”) They would have to abandon the myth that America is the domain of one race or religion.
Unimaginable? Maybe so, but what other choice is there? To thrive in the future, they eventually must appeal to America as it is, not as they imagine it was in the past.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
You might find it strange that a large segment of the Republican base thinks Whites are the true victims of racism and that Christians are under attack. After all, America’s biggest racial group is still Whites; the most common religious affiliation remains Christianity. Whites and Christians dominate elected office at all levels, the judiciary and corporate America. What’s the problem?
Well, there is a straightforward reason for the freak-out, and an explanation for why former president Donald Trump developed such a close bond with white Christian nationalists.
This group feels besieged because they are losing ground. “The newly-released 2022 supplement to the PRRI Census of American Religion — based on over 40,000 interviews conducted last year — confirms that the decline of white Christians (Americans who identify as white, non-Hispanic and Christian of any kind) as a proportion of the population continues unabated,” writes Robert P. Jones, president of the Public Religion Research Institute. “As recently as 2008, when our first Black president was elected, the U.S. was a majority (54%) white Christian country.” By 2014 the number had dropped to 47 percent, and in 2022 it stood at 42 percent.
The group that has declined the most is at the core of the MAGA movement, the group most devoted to Christian nationalism. “White evangelical Protestants have experienced the steepest decline. As recently as 2006, white evangelical Protestants comprised nearly one-quarter of Americans (23%). By the time of Trump’s rise to power, their numbers had dipped to 16.8%,” Jones explains. “Today, white evangelical Protestants comprise only 13.6% of Americans.”
And that decline may yet accelerate, because they skew older than the population as a whole. Put differently, there are far more baby boomers in this group than Generation Z members. White evangelicals are “losing” people with each successive generation. (“White Christian subgroups have each lost approximately half their market share just across the generations who are alive today,” according to Jones.) If your business had lost half its market share, you would be panicking, too.
With those kind of numbers, the responsible thing to do would be to think about “fixing” what’s wrong by adapting to a changing market. Instead, many in this cohort have doubled down, becoming the foot soldiers in the red-hatted MAGA movement. The decline isn’t going to be reversed by angry, gray-haired folks demanding abortion bans and “don’t say gay” bills.
Instead, White evangelicals might look at former “customers” who are abandoning organized religion in droves. “Nearly four in ten Americans ages 18-29 (38%) are religiously unaffiliated, an increase from 34% in 2021," the PRRI census said. "As the cohorts age, the growth in religiously unaffiliated Americans has started to show up more in the 30-49 age category, which is up to 32% unaffiliated from 26% in 2016.”
In some sense, White evangelicals’ desperate efforts to cling to political power and demand adherence to a set of outdated cultural norms only make the problem worse. Not many 20-year-olds (part of the most diverse, inclusive generation in history, one steeped in climate science and tech) would leap at the prospect of living in a state where abortion is unattainable, gays are ostracized and secularism is bashed.
If Christian evangelicals really want to slow their decline, they might consider getting out of the unpopular political ideas market (e.g., abortion bans) and stressing values that could win back alienated young people (e.g., reverence for conserving the planet, ministering to the poor and the weak). That might put more seats in the pews, although it likely wouldn’t do much for the aging, mostly White, reactionary GOP.
The reality is that the convergence of the declining population of White Christians with the rise of Trump has been bad for both evangelicalism and American politics. Trump came along, telling the shrinking band of white Christian nationalists that they are victims. He reveled in nostalgia for a time when they dominated (demographically and politically) and blamed immigrants, elites and “wokeness” for their ills. They were the group most susceptible to a message that reinforces their feeling they have “lost” something or something has been “taken away.”
That “something” they felt had been stolen may have been as concrete as the 2020 election, or as all-encompassing as white Christian supremacy. However they define that sense of loss, it fuels their anger and binds them to Trump.
But the demographic clock cannot be turned back. No one can claim to be patriotic defenders of democracy when they decide their declining numbers justify anti-democratic voter suppression or even violence. In short, MAGA White Christians have painted themselves into a corner where the majority rejects their outlook and anti-majoritarian tactics cannot keep them in power forever.
A dramatic transformation would need to happen for this movement to return to pluralistic politics. The MAGA crowd would have to recognize America’s complete history, reflecting our full experience, not just the story of people like them. And most important, they would need to rediscover the principles on which the United States was founded. (“All men are created equal...”) They would have to abandon the myth that America is the domain of one race or religion.
Unimaginable? Maybe so, but what other choice is there? To thrive in the future, they eventually must appeal to America as it is, not as they imagine it was in the past.
BIDEN ASKS CONGRESS FOR NEW TOOLS TO TARGET EXECUTIVES OF FAILED BANKS
The request is a response to the federal rescue of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, and it seeks to impose new fines and other penalties.
By Jim Tankersley and Emily Flitter, The New York Times
WASHINGTON — President Biden asked Congress on Friday to pass legislation to give financial regulators broad new powers to claw back ill-gotten gains from the executives of failed banks and impose fines for failures.
The proposal, a response to the federal rescue of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank last week, would also seek to bar executives at failed banks from taking other jobs in the financial industry.
The measures contained in Mr. Biden’s plan would build on existing regulatory powers held by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
“Strengthening accountability is an important deterrent to prevent mismanagement in the future,” Mr. Biden said in a statement released by the White House.
“When banks fail due to mismanagement and excessive risk taking, it should be easier for regulators to claw back compensation from executives, to impose civil penalties, and to ban executives from working in the banking industry again,” he said, adding that Congress would have to pass legislation to make that possible.
“The law limits the administration’s authority to hold executives responsible,” he said.
One plank of the proposal would broaden the F.D.I.C.’s ability to seek the return of compensation from executives of failed banks, in response to reports that the chief executive of Silicon Valley Bank sold $3 million in shares of the bank shortly before it was taken over by federal regulators a week ago. Regulators’ current clawback powers are limited to the largest banks; Mr. Biden would expand them to cover banks the size of Signature and Silicon Valley Bank.
The president is also asking Congress to lower a legal bar that the F.D.I.C. must clear in order to bar an executive from a failed bank from working elsewhere in the financial industry. That ability currently applies only to executives who engage in “willful or continuing disregard for the safety and soundness” of their institutions. He is similarly seeking to broaden the agency’s ability to impose fines on executives whose actions contribute to the failure of their banks.
The proposals face an uncertain future in Congress. Republicans control the House and have opposed other pushes by Mr. Biden to strengthen federal regulations.
The request is a response to the federal rescue of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, and it seeks to impose new fines and other penalties.
By Jim Tankersley and Emily Flitter, The New York Times
WASHINGTON — President Biden asked Congress on Friday to pass legislation to give financial regulators broad new powers to claw back ill-gotten gains from the executives of failed banks and impose fines for failures.
The proposal, a response to the federal rescue of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank last week, would also seek to bar executives at failed banks from taking other jobs in the financial industry.
The measures contained in Mr. Biden’s plan would build on existing regulatory powers held by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
“Strengthening accountability is an important deterrent to prevent mismanagement in the future,” Mr. Biden said in a statement released by the White House.
“When banks fail due to mismanagement and excessive risk taking, it should be easier for regulators to claw back compensation from executives, to impose civil penalties, and to ban executives from working in the banking industry again,” he said, adding that Congress would have to pass legislation to make that possible.
“The law limits the administration’s authority to hold executives responsible,” he said.
One plank of the proposal would broaden the F.D.I.C.’s ability to seek the return of compensation from executives of failed banks, in response to reports that the chief executive of Silicon Valley Bank sold $3 million in shares of the bank shortly before it was taken over by federal regulators a week ago. Regulators’ current clawback powers are limited to the largest banks; Mr. Biden would expand them to cover banks the size of Signature and Silicon Valley Bank.
The president is also asking Congress to lower a legal bar that the F.D.I.C. must clear in order to bar an executive from a failed bank from working elsewhere in the financial industry. That ability currently applies only to executives who engage in “willful or continuing disregard for the safety and soundness” of their institutions. He is similarly seeking to broaden the agency’s ability to impose fines on executives whose actions contribute to the failure of their banks.
The proposals face an uncertain future in Congress. Republicans control the House and have opposed other pushes by Mr. Biden to strengthen federal regulations.
THREATENING A U.S. DEFAULT WAS BAD BEFORE. NOW, IT’S COLOSSALLY IDIOTIC.
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
A plea to lawmakers: If it was a bad idea to threaten default on U.S. debt before, it would be astoundingly, colossally idiotic now.
Recent financial-market turmoil — in regional U.S. banks, as well as some of the larger European institutions — suggests there might be much more fragility in the financial system than previously understood. In a sane world, politicians might respond to this new information constructively.
They might, for instance, figure out what they could do to ensure that financial regulators detect vulnerabilities at significantly sized banks sooner.
Politicians might also take some modest actions to combat inflation themselves, so that less of the burden of dampening demand falls on the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate increases — which are part of the reason we’re seeing stresses in the financial system today.
Unfortunately, that sane world does not appear to be the one we live in.
Faced with the second-biggest bank failure in U.S. history, lawmakers retreated to their predictable partisan talking points. Democrats blame a 2018 rollback of “stress test” requirements on small and midsize banks. While this might plausibly have contributed to Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse, we still don’t know for certain; bank supervisors might have spotted the problem on SVB’s balance sheet even without those requirements, given that the bank was relatively open about its poor risk management.
Republicans, meanwhile, have been grasping for some alternative explanation of what went wrong that would not implicate their general hostility toward greater oversight. So, some have instead blamed bank “wokeness,” a thoroughly incoherent (and yet very funny!) theory of the case. Hardcore Trumpers such as Peter Thiel patronized Silicon Valley Bank, so it’s hard to imagine the bank’s problems lay in too much emphasis on, say, critical race theory. We shouldn’t be surprised if Republicans start scapegoating drag queens soon, too.
After a scare like this, the next few months would normally be consumed with fights about what happened and how lawmakers should best address unexpected new weaknesses in the financial sector. But things have so devolved into petty demagoguing that the biggest new risk is that demagoguing about SVB’s problems will dovetail with the other crisis that has been looming for months.
Since at least last fall, Republican lawmakers have been threatening to not raise the debt ceiling, the statutory limit on how much the federal government can borrow to pay off bills that Congress has already committed to. They have laid out a mathematically impossible set of conditions they say must be met before they would consider raising the government’s borrowing authority.
There is never a good time to toy with the full faith and credit of the U.S. government, or otherwise question the validity of U.S. public debt. (Fun fact: According to the Constitution, it’s actually always forbidden.) But doing so right now seems especially unwise.
U.S. Treasury debt has long been considered virtually risk-free. The government has always paid its bills on time and in full, and all other assets are benchmarked against our relative safety. If we reveal ourselves to be unreliable borrowers — because we’d rather engage in political posturing than make good on our bills — that will not only call into question the riskiness of our debt. It will also call into question the riskiness of lots of other assets, too.
In the best of times, this kind of behavior could spook markets and set off a global financial crisis. Today, when there’s already mounting anxiety about the balance sheets of some financial institutions, is far from the best of times. Even hinting at default could trigger more panic in global markets.
Recent bank turmoil could indirectly accelerate how soon lawmakers need to raise the debt limit, too. (Before Silicon Valley Bank failed, forecasters were expecting the deadline would come as early as June.)
The FDIC’s rescue of depositors at SVB and Signature Bank should not affect how quickly the government runs out of cash, but some other things might. The Treasury’s Exchange Stabilization Fund, for example, is currently being used to backstop the Fed’s emergency lending facility. Officials have said they don’t expect this special Treasury fund to be needed, but if it is, it could have a small impact on how soon Congress needs to again raise the borrowing limit.
Of course, if that happens, “we may also have bigger economic problems,” says Shai Akabas, a researcher at the Bipartisan Policy Center. Bigger problems like: a more widespread banking crisis, and/or severe recession.
These risks have so far not led Republicans to change their course. Last week, hours before Silicon Valley Bank failed, House Republicans proposed ordering the Treasury to prioritize payments in the event of a debt-limit breach. This is something that might not be technically feasible and is still, in any case, a different version of default.
If Congress is incapable of making financial conditions better, the least lawmakers can do is not make them worse.
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
A plea to lawmakers: If it was a bad idea to threaten default on U.S. debt before, it would be astoundingly, colossally idiotic now.
Recent financial-market turmoil — in regional U.S. banks, as well as some of the larger European institutions — suggests there might be much more fragility in the financial system than previously understood. In a sane world, politicians might respond to this new information constructively.
They might, for instance, figure out what they could do to ensure that financial regulators detect vulnerabilities at significantly sized banks sooner.
Politicians might also take some modest actions to combat inflation themselves, so that less of the burden of dampening demand falls on the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate increases — which are part of the reason we’re seeing stresses in the financial system today.
Unfortunately, that sane world does not appear to be the one we live in.
Faced with the second-biggest bank failure in U.S. history, lawmakers retreated to their predictable partisan talking points. Democrats blame a 2018 rollback of “stress test” requirements on small and midsize banks. While this might plausibly have contributed to Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse, we still don’t know for certain; bank supervisors might have spotted the problem on SVB’s balance sheet even without those requirements, given that the bank was relatively open about its poor risk management.
Republicans, meanwhile, have been grasping for some alternative explanation of what went wrong that would not implicate their general hostility toward greater oversight. So, some have instead blamed bank “wokeness,” a thoroughly incoherent (and yet very funny!) theory of the case. Hardcore Trumpers such as Peter Thiel patronized Silicon Valley Bank, so it’s hard to imagine the bank’s problems lay in too much emphasis on, say, critical race theory. We shouldn’t be surprised if Republicans start scapegoating drag queens soon, too.
After a scare like this, the next few months would normally be consumed with fights about what happened and how lawmakers should best address unexpected new weaknesses in the financial sector. But things have so devolved into petty demagoguing that the biggest new risk is that demagoguing about SVB’s problems will dovetail with the other crisis that has been looming for months.
Since at least last fall, Republican lawmakers have been threatening to not raise the debt ceiling, the statutory limit on how much the federal government can borrow to pay off bills that Congress has already committed to. They have laid out a mathematically impossible set of conditions they say must be met before they would consider raising the government’s borrowing authority.
There is never a good time to toy with the full faith and credit of the U.S. government, or otherwise question the validity of U.S. public debt. (Fun fact: According to the Constitution, it’s actually always forbidden.) But doing so right now seems especially unwise.
U.S. Treasury debt has long been considered virtually risk-free. The government has always paid its bills on time and in full, and all other assets are benchmarked against our relative safety. If we reveal ourselves to be unreliable borrowers — because we’d rather engage in political posturing than make good on our bills — that will not only call into question the riskiness of our debt. It will also call into question the riskiness of lots of other assets, too.
In the best of times, this kind of behavior could spook markets and set off a global financial crisis. Today, when there’s already mounting anxiety about the balance sheets of some financial institutions, is far from the best of times. Even hinting at default could trigger more panic in global markets.
Recent bank turmoil could indirectly accelerate how soon lawmakers need to raise the debt limit, too. (Before Silicon Valley Bank failed, forecasters were expecting the deadline would come as early as June.)
The FDIC’s rescue of depositors at SVB and Signature Bank should not affect how quickly the government runs out of cash, but some other things might. The Treasury’s Exchange Stabilization Fund, for example, is currently being used to backstop the Fed’s emergency lending facility. Officials have said they don’t expect this special Treasury fund to be needed, but if it is, it could have a small impact on how soon Congress needs to again raise the borrowing limit.
Of course, if that happens, “we may also have bigger economic problems,” says Shai Akabas, a researcher at the Bipartisan Policy Center. Bigger problems like: a more widespread banking crisis, and/or severe recession.
These risks have so far not led Republicans to change their course. Last week, hours before Silicon Valley Bank failed, House Republicans proposed ordering the Treasury to prioritize payments in the event of a debt-limit breach. This is something that might not be technically feasible and is still, in any case, a different version of default.
If Congress is incapable of making financial conditions better, the least lawmakers can do is not make them worse.
RON DESANTIS’S PANDERING ON UKRAINE IS DANGEROUSLY WRONG
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is dangerously wrong to say that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is a mere “territorial dispute” and that the United States lacks a vital interest in the outcome. The former Navy lawyer should know better than to peddle appeasement, but he’s pandering to his party’s isolationist wing by mimicking former president Donald Trump ahead of an all-but-declared bid for the GOP’s 2024 nomination.
“Peace should be the objective,” Mr. DeSantis wrote in answers to a questionnaire from Fox News host Tucker Carlson. If Mr. DeSantis’s goal is peace, letting Russia run roughshod will mean less of it. This all but assures more conflict down the road in a more dangerous and unstable world. History leaves little doubt.
Supporting Ukraine is squarely in America’s national interest. Turning inward would invite a power vacuum that Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, Pyongyang and too many others would be all too happy to fill. China is watching. Taiwan becomes more vulnerable if Russia gets away with annexing large swaths of a neighboring sovereign country. Mr. DeSantis is also turning his back on decades of Republican doctrine, going back to Ronald Reagan, that argues the United States has an essential stake in supporting democracy around the world.
Mr. DeSantis’s projection of weakness makes it harder for leading GOP voices such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) to say on the world stage, as he did in Munich last month, that reports about weakening Republican support for Ukraine have been greatly exaggerated. “Don’t look at Twitter. Look at people in power,” Mr. McConnell implored.
Before he apparently caught the presidential fever, Mr. DeSantis appeared to understand the stakes. After Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, Mr. DeSantis was an outspoken advocate of sending both defensive and offensive weapons to Ukraine. “They’re not asking us to fight … for them,” he said in a radio interview. During a Fox News appearance in 2015, he explained how Russian President Vladimir Putin was emboldened by American weakness. “If we had a policy which was firm,” he said, “Putin would make different calculations.”
Mr. DeSantis described himself in 2017 as a student of “the Reagan school that’s tough on Russia” and criticized President Barack Obama for not offering lethal aid, which Mr. DeSantis called a grave mistake. As a congressman, he voted to impose sanctions on Russian officials and provide economic assistance to Ukraine, and even backed an amendment to a defense bill that would have blocked the implementation of a nuclear weapons treaty until all Russian forces left Ukrainian territory.
More recently, Mr. DeSantis tried to avoid getting pinned down on his position until he could assess which direction the political wind was blowing. When a journalist for the Times of London tried a few weeks ago to pry him for specifics, the governor bristled: “Perhaps you should cover some other ground? I think I’ve said enough.”
Mr. DeSantis — presumably with the benefit of polling — is now following what he might perceive to be the easiest political path to peel away supporters of Mr. Trump. He’s telling Mr. Carlson and his viewers what many might want to hear. A Washington Post-ABC News poll released last month showed that 50 percent of Republicans think the United States is doing “too much” to support Ukraine, up from 18 percent last April.
Mr. DeSantis betrays the hollowness of his rhetoric about fighting for “freedom” by turning his back on the most inspiring freedom fighters in the world today. The Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs invited Mr. DeSantis on Tuesday to visit the front lines to see for himself why the Ukrainians’ fight is our fight. He should take Ukraine up on the offer.
The wobbliness of the two Republican front-runners for president raises the stakes for Ukraine’s counteroffensive this spring, which is all the more reason for Western leaders to rush needed equipment to Ukraine and expedite the necessary training. Absent substantial progress, Mr. Putin will calculate that Western resolve will waver further, and he might be right; other Republican officeholders will be tempted to follow Mr. DeSantis if they sense the war has settled into stalemate.
As things stand, the 2024 presidential election is already shaping up to become one of the biggest battles in Ukraine’s war for survival.
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is dangerously wrong to say that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is a mere “territorial dispute” and that the United States lacks a vital interest in the outcome. The former Navy lawyer should know better than to peddle appeasement, but he’s pandering to his party’s isolationist wing by mimicking former president Donald Trump ahead of an all-but-declared bid for the GOP’s 2024 nomination.
“Peace should be the objective,” Mr. DeSantis wrote in answers to a questionnaire from Fox News host Tucker Carlson. If Mr. DeSantis’s goal is peace, letting Russia run roughshod will mean less of it. This all but assures more conflict down the road in a more dangerous and unstable world. History leaves little doubt.
Supporting Ukraine is squarely in America’s national interest. Turning inward would invite a power vacuum that Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, Pyongyang and too many others would be all too happy to fill. China is watching. Taiwan becomes more vulnerable if Russia gets away with annexing large swaths of a neighboring sovereign country. Mr. DeSantis is also turning his back on decades of Republican doctrine, going back to Ronald Reagan, that argues the United States has an essential stake in supporting democracy around the world.
Mr. DeSantis’s projection of weakness makes it harder for leading GOP voices such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) to say on the world stage, as he did in Munich last month, that reports about weakening Republican support for Ukraine have been greatly exaggerated. “Don’t look at Twitter. Look at people in power,” Mr. McConnell implored.
Before he apparently caught the presidential fever, Mr. DeSantis appeared to understand the stakes. After Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, Mr. DeSantis was an outspoken advocate of sending both defensive and offensive weapons to Ukraine. “They’re not asking us to fight … for them,” he said in a radio interview. During a Fox News appearance in 2015, he explained how Russian President Vladimir Putin was emboldened by American weakness. “If we had a policy which was firm,” he said, “Putin would make different calculations.”
Mr. DeSantis described himself in 2017 as a student of “the Reagan school that’s tough on Russia” and criticized President Barack Obama for not offering lethal aid, which Mr. DeSantis called a grave mistake. As a congressman, he voted to impose sanctions on Russian officials and provide economic assistance to Ukraine, and even backed an amendment to a defense bill that would have blocked the implementation of a nuclear weapons treaty until all Russian forces left Ukrainian territory.
More recently, Mr. DeSantis tried to avoid getting pinned down on his position until he could assess which direction the political wind was blowing. When a journalist for the Times of London tried a few weeks ago to pry him for specifics, the governor bristled: “Perhaps you should cover some other ground? I think I’ve said enough.”
Mr. DeSantis — presumably with the benefit of polling — is now following what he might perceive to be the easiest political path to peel away supporters of Mr. Trump. He’s telling Mr. Carlson and his viewers what many might want to hear. A Washington Post-ABC News poll released last month showed that 50 percent of Republicans think the United States is doing “too much” to support Ukraine, up from 18 percent last April.
Mr. DeSantis betrays the hollowness of his rhetoric about fighting for “freedom” by turning his back on the most inspiring freedom fighters in the world today. The Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs invited Mr. DeSantis on Tuesday to visit the front lines to see for himself why the Ukrainians’ fight is our fight. He should take Ukraine up on the offer.
The wobbliness of the two Republican front-runners for president raises the stakes for Ukraine’s counteroffensive this spring, which is all the more reason for Western leaders to rush needed equipment to Ukraine and expedite the necessary training. Absent substantial progress, Mr. Putin will calculate that Western resolve will waver further, and he might be right; other Republican officeholders will be tempted to follow Mr. DeSantis if they sense the war has settled into stalemate.
As things stand, the 2024 presidential election is already shaping up to become one of the biggest battles in Ukraine’s war for survival.
ICC ISSUES ARREST WARRANT FOR PUTIN OVER WAR CRIMES IN UKRAINE
By Claire Parker, The Washington Post
Judges from the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued on Friday the court’s first arrest warrants related to the war in Ukraine, for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights.
The two bear individual responsibility for the war crimes of “unlawful deportation” and “unlawful transfer” of children from occupied areas of Ukraine after Russia invaded the country last year, the judges alleged.
Russia, like the United States, does not accept the ICC’s jurisdiction. But the warrants carry symbolic weight and could make it difficult for those named to travel to countries that cooperate with the court.
Putin issued a decree last May to make it easy for Russians to adopt Ukrainian children, and Ukrainian officials said in November that at least 10,000 Ukrainian children were reported to have been deported by Russia without their parents. Lvova-Belova, who reports to Putin directly and openly advocates stripping children of their Ukrainian identities, has been the official face of this effort.
The court’s move comes more than a year after its top prosecutor, Karim Khan, announced the opening of a probe into possible violations of international humanitarian law committed during the conflict in Ukraine. While Kyiv is not a party to the court, it had previously accepted the court’s jurisdiction over its territory, and more than three dozen countries referred alleged crimes there to the court for investigation. Khan has traveled to Ukraine on multiple occasions as part of that probe.
International law experts say it’s unlikely, barring major political change in Russia, for Putin to end up in front of the court.
“The decisions of the International Criminal Court have no meaning for our country, including from a legal point of view,” Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for Russia’s foreign ministry, said on Telegram Friday. “Russia does not cooperate with this body, and possible ‘recipes’ for arrest coming from the International Court will be legally null and void for us.”
By Claire Parker, The Washington Post
Judges from the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued on Friday the court’s first arrest warrants related to the war in Ukraine, for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights.
The two bear individual responsibility for the war crimes of “unlawful deportation” and “unlawful transfer” of children from occupied areas of Ukraine after Russia invaded the country last year, the judges alleged.
Russia, like the United States, does not accept the ICC’s jurisdiction. But the warrants carry symbolic weight and could make it difficult for those named to travel to countries that cooperate with the court.
Putin issued a decree last May to make it easy for Russians to adopt Ukrainian children, and Ukrainian officials said in November that at least 10,000 Ukrainian children were reported to have been deported by Russia without their parents. Lvova-Belova, who reports to Putin directly and openly advocates stripping children of their Ukrainian identities, has been the official face of this effort.
The court’s move comes more than a year after its top prosecutor, Karim Khan, announced the opening of a probe into possible violations of international humanitarian law committed during the conflict in Ukraine. While Kyiv is not a party to the court, it had previously accepted the court’s jurisdiction over its territory, and more than three dozen countries referred alleged crimes there to the court for investigation. Khan has traveled to Ukraine on multiple occasions as part of that probe.
International law experts say it’s unlikely, barring major political change in Russia, for Putin to end up in front of the court.
“The decisions of the International Criminal Court have no meaning for our country, including from a legal point of view,” Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for Russia’s foreign ministry, said on Telegram Friday. “Russia does not cooperate with this body, and possible ‘recipes’ for arrest coming from the International Court will be legally null and void for us.”
BIDEN USES THE BUDGET TO BLUDGEON REPUBLICANS
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
President Biden likes to say, “Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” Biden’s budget shows what he values. And by contrast to MAGA Republicans’ plans, he shows what they don’t value: crime-fighting, debt reduction and tax fairness. Budget comparisons might be among his most effective tools in setting the themes of the 2024 election season.
On Wednesday, deputy press secretary Andrew Bates released a memo touting Biden’s “new, historic actions in the fight against violent crime, continuing to lead on a life and death issue that the American people demand be addressed.” Bates continued, “As President Biden has warned, the Freedom Caucus plan would defund the police by cutting 20% of federal funding for law enforcement, assuming their proposed cuts are spread evenly.” The White House does not hesitate to remind voters that “a slew of MAGA congressional Republicans advocate for abolishing the FBI and the ATF” and that “Republicans in Congress, joined by the Trump Administration, have spent years trying to defund the police by slashing funding for the COPS program — a key way the federal government supports state and local law enforcement.”
Republicans have not yet released their official budget, no doubt because they are bitterly divided over the extreme measures some right-wing members want to pursue. However, the White House is essentially daring Republicans to dig their own political graves with radically unpopular cuts:
Will they reverse their years-long campaign to defund the police by paring back the COPS program, and join President Biden in strengthening it? …
Will they rebuke their members who wish to cancel the FBI and the ATF, and join President Biden in backing them?
Plainly, Biden is not about to concede the crime issue to Republicans. Deftly using the contrasting budgets, he puts the GOP on defense.
Democrats have come up with budget comparisons to score political points on other issues as well. Republicans have rediscovered the ills of debt and threaten to hold the country hostage on the debt ceiling unless the administration agrees to massive cuts. However, Biden and his fellow Democrats seem to have outfoxed them.
Biden’s budget, while continuing to spend on domestic priorities, aims to cut the deficit by nearly $3 trillion over a decade. Meanwhile, Democrats have done the homework to show that Republicans’ promised balanced-budget plan to protect Social Security, keep Trump-era tax cuts and maintain defense spending is virtually impossible to achieve. The Congressional Budget Office, in response to a request from Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), reports that to balance the budget as Republicans intend to do, while protecting defense, Social Security and Medicare, they would have to cut 86 percent of everything else.
You can bet Biden will cite this as evidence that Republicans really intend to savage entitlements (despite their protestations to the contrary during his State of the Union address) or else bulldoze everything else, from national parks to infrastructure to Food and Drug Administration enforcement. Biden’s bottom line: Democrats have the only deficit-cutting plan that does not hurt middle- and working-class Americans.
Biden has already begun to deploy budget comparisons to ding Republicans for phony populism. He wasted little time slamming them for their bill to eliminate funding increases for the Internal Revenue Service, which will step up enforcements against tax cheats. “My law to help crack down on big corporations who are cheating on their taxes will help level the playing field for our small businesses, which is part of why it has been so disappointing to see House Republicans make protecting wealthy tax cheats their top legislative priority,” he tweeted in January.
Biden has kept up his drumbeat of criticism over Republicans’ insistence that the rich and super-rich not pay a penny more in taxes. Citing tax fairness, his budget features a minimum tax on billionaires, closes a loophole on Medicare taxes, restores the top marginal tax rate to 39.6 percent for those earning more than $400,000 per year, and raises the standard corporate tax rate to 28 percent. Biden is only too eager to point out that while he won’t raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000, Republicans want to shield big corporations and the rich from “paying their fair share.”
In sum, Biden has skillfully used the contrast between his budget and Republican budget promises to make a values-based argument in favor of Democrats. He is for crime-fighting; Republicans are averse to spending to fight crime. He is for responsible budgets; they are hypocrites when it comes to debt. And he is for tax fairness; they are for shielding the rich at the expense of everyone else.
When Republicans finally release their official budget, we will see if they’ve fallen into the trap of showing us what and whom they truly value.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
President Biden likes to say, “Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” Biden’s budget shows what he values. And by contrast to MAGA Republicans’ plans, he shows what they don’t value: crime-fighting, debt reduction and tax fairness. Budget comparisons might be among his most effective tools in setting the themes of the 2024 election season.
On Wednesday, deputy press secretary Andrew Bates released a memo touting Biden’s “new, historic actions in the fight against violent crime, continuing to lead on a life and death issue that the American people demand be addressed.” Bates continued, “As President Biden has warned, the Freedom Caucus plan would defund the police by cutting 20% of federal funding for law enforcement, assuming their proposed cuts are spread evenly.” The White House does not hesitate to remind voters that “a slew of MAGA congressional Republicans advocate for abolishing the FBI and the ATF” and that “Republicans in Congress, joined by the Trump Administration, have spent years trying to defund the police by slashing funding for the COPS program — a key way the federal government supports state and local law enforcement.”
Republicans have not yet released their official budget, no doubt because they are bitterly divided over the extreme measures some right-wing members want to pursue. However, the White House is essentially daring Republicans to dig their own political graves with radically unpopular cuts:
Will they reverse their years-long campaign to defund the police by paring back the COPS program, and join President Biden in strengthening it? …
Will they rebuke their members who wish to cancel the FBI and the ATF, and join President Biden in backing them?
Plainly, Biden is not about to concede the crime issue to Republicans. Deftly using the contrasting budgets, he puts the GOP on defense.
Democrats have come up with budget comparisons to score political points on other issues as well. Republicans have rediscovered the ills of debt and threaten to hold the country hostage on the debt ceiling unless the administration agrees to massive cuts. However, Biden and his fellow Democrats seem to have outfoxed them.
Biden’s budget, while continuing to spend on domestic priorities, aims to cut the deficit by nearly $3 trillion over a decade. Meanwhile, Democrats have done the homework to show that Republicans’ promised balanced-budget plan to protect Social Security, keep Trump-era tax cuts and maintain defense spending is virtually impossible to achieve. The Congressional Budget Office, in response to a request from Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), reports that to balance the budget as Republicans intend to do, while protecting defense, Social Security and Medicare, they would have to cut 86 percent of everything else.
You can bet Biden will cite this as evidence that Republicans really intend to savage entitlements (despite their protestations to the contrary during his State of the Union address) or else bulldoze everything else, from national parks to infrastructure to Food and Drug Administration enforcement. Biden’s bottom line: Democrats have the only deficit-cutting plan that does not hurt middle- and working-class Americans.
Biden has already begun to deploy budget comparisons to ding Republicans for phony populism. He wasted little time slamming them for their bill to eliminate funding increases for the Internal Revenue Service, which will step up enforcements against tax cheats. “My law to help crack down on big corporations who are cheating on their taxes will help level the playing field for our small businesses, which is part of why it has been so disappointing to see House Republicans make protecting wealthy tax cheats their top legislative priority,” he tweeted in January.
Biden has kept up his drumbeat of criticism over Republicans’ insistence that the rich and super-rich not pay a penny more in taxes. Citing tax fairness, his budget features a minimum tax on billionaires, closes a loophole on Medicare taxes, restores the top marginal tax rate to 39.6 percent for those earning more than $400,000 per year, and raises the standard corporate tax rate to 28 percent. Biden is only too eager to point out that while he won’t raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000, Republicans want to shield big corporations and the rich from “paying their fair share.”
In sum, Biden has skillfully used the contrast between his budget and Republican budget promises to make a values-based argument in favor of Democrats. He is for crime-fighting; Republicans are averse to spending to fight crime. He is for responsible budgets; they are hypocrites when it comes to debt. And he is for tax fairness; they are for shielding the rich at the expense of everyone else.
When Republicans finally release their official budget, we will see if they’ve fallen into the trap of showing us what and whom they truly value.
DESANTIS JOINS THE PRO-PUTIN MAGA CROWD
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), a probable presidential candidate, has decided that if you can’t beat the pro-Putin wing of the Republican Party, then join them. He declared that Russia’s brutal and unjustified war of aggression against a sovereign Ukraine is actually “a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia” and that protecting Ukraine is not a “vital” national interest of the United States. His implicit agreement with Russian President Vladimir Putin that Ukraine has no right to territorial integrity contradicts the view of 140 United Nations member countries and gives oxygen to the Russian propaganda effort. (If Mexico invaded Texas, would it be a “territorial dispute”?) DeSantis’s betrayal of Ukraine (delivered in a statement read on Monday on pro-Putin propagandist Tucker Carlson’s show, no less) is an ominous indication of where DeSantis and the GOP base are heading on the defense of democracy and American foreign policy.
DeSantis has chosen to cast his lot with the crowd that admires Putin’s army as the antithesis of the supposedly “woke” U.S. military. In doing so, DeSantis has simultaneously flip-flopped on a major issue, betrayed a core U.S. national interest (in defending democratic allies against international aggression) and signaled that pro-Putin foreign policy rhetoric is an essential component of a MAGA candidate’s identity.
His move serves to divide the GOP. While MAGA voices in the House get a disproportionate amount of attention, the lion’s share of House and Senate Republicans (especially Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky) strongly endorses support for Ukraine. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie were among the Republicans who slammed DeSantis. Rather than seek to pull together that contingent of Republicans, DeSantis has chosen to out-Trump defeated former president Donald Trump and cozy up to the far right. (By contrast, former vice president Mike Pence and former ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, who has announced her presidential candidacy, have reiterated their support for Ukraine.)
DeSantis, like Putin apologist Trump, might have misjudged the party whose nomination he might seek. The majority of Americans, more than 70 percent, favor our role in the defense of Ukraine, and more than 90 percent have a negative view of Russia. In the 2024 general election, President Biden would love nothing more than to seize the mantle as the defender of strong American foreign policy and leadership, NATO solidarity, and protection of democracy, thereby attracting support from many independents and even the traditional, hawkish wing of the GOP exemplified by figures such as former congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) (who bashed DeSantis for forgetting “the lessons of Ronald Reagan”). In other words, DeSantis is doubling down on the Trump strategy of ingratiating himself with the core MAGA base at the expense of alienating the rest of the electorate.
DeSantis did not always sound this way. CNN reports: “As a conservative congressman, DeSantis, now a potential presidential hopeful, urged sending ‘defensive and offensive’ weapons to Ukraine in 2014 and 2015 and even voted to refuse to fund a new missile defense treaty with Russia until they withdrew from Ukraine.” But that position apparently did not mesh with his current self-image as a cultural warrior, primarily concerned with “wokeness” (which many see as a cover for racism, xenophobia and homophobia). DeSantis is setting himself up for the accusation that he is too unsteady to be commander in chief.
DeSantis might have miscalculated the appetite for MAGA extremism (just as polling in deep-red Florida shows opposition to a six-week abortion ban and attacks on higher education). Even worse, in his willingness to throw Ukraine into the jaws of the Russian bear, DeSantis gives Putin hope that if he can hold out beyond the 2024 U.S. presidential election, the West’s united front will crumble. When it is imperative to convince Russia that its war is hopeless, DeSantis’s declaration — purely for domestic political advantage — has undercut efforts to accelerate Russian capitulation. Only when Putin is convinced that the West will remain united, whatever the outcome of future elections, will he be convinced to give up on his dream of conquest. As Cheney said, “Weakness is provocative and American officials who advocate this type of weakness are Putin’s greatest weapon.”
Other Republican presidential contenders would be wise to differentiate themselves from DeSantis’s and Trump’s pandering to pro-Putin MAGA Republicans. If Haley, Pence and others want to stand out from the crowd and undercut the poll leaders’ position, calling them out for defeatism, weakness and fecklessness on national security would be an ideal place to start.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), a probable presidential candidate, has decided that if you can’t beat the pro-Putin wing of the Republican Party, then join them. He declared that Russia’s brutal and unjustified war of aggression against a sovereign Ukraine is actually “a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia” and that protecting Ukraine is not a “vital” national interest of the United States. His implicit agreement with Russian President Vladimir Putin that Ukraine has no right to territorial integrity contradicts the view of 140 United Nations member countries and gives oxygen to the Russian propaganda effort. (If Mexico invaded Texas, would it be a “territorial dispute”?) DeSantis’s betrayal of Ukraine (delivered in a statement read on Monday on pro-Putin propagandist Tucker Carlson’s show, no less) is an ominous indication of where DeSantis and the GOP base are heading on the defense of democracy and American foreign policy.
DeSantis has chosen to cast his lot with the crowd that admires Putin’s army as the antithesis of the supposedly “woke” U.S. military. In doing so, DeSantis has simultaneously flip-flopped on a major issue, betrayed a core U.S. national interest (in defending democratic allies against international aggression) and signaled that pro-Putin foreign policy rhetoric is an essential component of a MAGA candidate’s identity.
His move serves to divide the GOP. While MAGA voices in the House get a disproportionate amount of attention, the lion’s share of House and Senate Republicans (especially Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky) strongly endorses support for Ukraine. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie were among the Republicans who slammed DeSantis. Rather than seek to pull together that contingent of Republicans, DeSantis has chosen to out-Trump defeated former president Donald Trump and cozy up to the far right. (By contrast, former vice president Mike Pence and former ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, who has announced her presidential candidacy, have reiterated their support for Ukraine.)
DeSantis, like Putin apologist Trump, might have misjudged the party whose nomination he might seek. The majority of Americans, more than 70 percent, favor our role in the defense of Ukraine, and more than 90 percent have a negative view of Russia. In the 2024 general election, President Biden would love nothing more than to seize the mantle as the defender of strong American foreign policy and leadership, NATO solidarity, and protection of democracy, thereby attracting support from many independents and even the traditional, hawkish wing of the GOP exemplified by figures such as former congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) (who bashed DeSantis for forgetting “the lessons of Ronald Reagan”). In other words, DeSantis is doubling down on the Trump strategy of ingratiating himself with the core MAGA base at the expense of alienating the rest of the electorate.
DeSantis did not always sound this way. CNN reports: “As a conservative congressman, DeSantis, now a potential presidential hopeful, urged sending ‘defensive and offensive’ weapons to Ukraine in 2014 and 2015 and even voted to refuse to fund a new missile defense treaty with Russia until they withdrew from Ukraine.” But that position apparently did not mesh with his current self-image as a cultural warrior, primarily concerned with “wokeness” (which many see as a cover for racism, xenophobia and homophobia). DeSantis is setting himself up for the accusation that he is too unsteady to be commander in chief.
DeSantis might have miscalculated the appetite for MAGA extremism (just as polling in deep-red Florida shows opposition to a six-week abortion ban and attacks on higher education). Even worse, in his willingness to throw Ukraine into the jaws of the Russian bear, DeSantis gives Putin hope that if he can hold out beyond the 2024 U.S. presidential election, the West’s united front will crumble. When it is imperative to convince Russia that its war is hopeless, DeSantis’s declaration — purely for domestic political advantage — has undercut efforts to accelerate Russian capitulation. Only when Putin is convinced that the West will remain united, whatever the outcome of future elections, will he be convinced to give up on his dream of conquest. As Cheney said, “Weakness is provocative and American officials who advocate this type of weakness are Putin’s greatest weapon.”
Other Republican presidential contenders would be wise to differentiate themselves from DeSantis’s and Trump’s pandering to pro-Putin MAGA Republicans. If Haley, Pence and others want to stand out from the crowd and undercut the poll leaders’ position, calling them out for defeatism, weakness and fecklessness on national security would be an ideal place to start.
FROM THE CLASSROOM TO THE CLINIC, ‘DESANTISISM’ IS OUR NEW FEAR-DRENCHED MCCARTHYISM
Doctors who won't utter the word 'abortion.' Teachers afraid to recommend any book. Inside the new McCarthyism gripping red America.
by Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Remember, it’s not what you say that counts,” went the refrain on TV’s You Don’t Say, a popular game show that aired in the 1960s and ‘70s. “It’s what you don’t say.” That could also be a good new state motto for Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Florida, or for some of his neighbors in the sun-soaked Trump Belt, where a growing climate of fear has everyone from teachers to doctors to drag queens panicked about what they might say — and who is listening.
To find a political precedent for what’s happening in huge swaths of the United States, you would need to summon the “red scare” led by demagogic Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, when Hollywood operated under a blacklist and teachers lived in fear that “patriotic groups” would out them (often falsely) as communists. Boomers like me who were born in the shadow of McCarthyism grew up learning, with what can now be seen as the naivety of post-war optimism, that America had learned its lesson from this moral panic.
But today, you can hear the echoes of Joe McCarthy when you read in the Washington Post about a central Florida parent named Barbara Mellon who attended an elementary school open house and casually asked a teacher for book recommendations to excite her second grader about reading. The teacher appeared anxious — school bookshelves have been the latest target of right-wing witch hunters — and then said he couldn’t make one.
Over in Texas, a Dallas woman facing a high-risk pregnancy — one twin fetus was all but certain to die before birth, but the other was healthy — dealt with doctors and nurses who refused to say the word “abortion” in their consultations, although one doctor told her: “You can’t do anything in Texas and I can’t tell you anything further in Texas, but you need to get out of state.” The woman, who traveled to Colorado to have the unhealthy fetus aborted because of her home state’s strict laws, told NPR about the bizarre experience of “talking in code” with doctors and nurses.
Of course, it could be worse. With Republican-led states targeting the LGBTQ community — especially transgender youth, as well as public events with drag performers — a growing number of Americans live in a fear not just over what they might say but over who they fundamentally are. “My worst fear had come true with no warning and no time buffer or anything,” the Austin, Texas, mother of 5-year-old twins including a transgender girl told NPR last year as she and her husband searched for out-of-state jobs after Gov. Greg Abbott called for state child-welfare investigations of families raising children the way they do.
It’s hardly a secret that Republican governors like DeSantis or Abbott and lawmakers in the 20 or so states with solid GOP control have taken the so-called culture wars — which have been simmering, arguably, since the 1960s — and turned up the heat to new heights. The panic sparked by 2020′s massive Black Lives Matter marches after the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd has led to a warped kind of bidding war among these red states over which can adopt the harshest laws to ban discussions of race or punish LGBTQ citizens.
The right wing’s culture warriors justify their holy crusades by citing a few extreme examples or frequently just making them up — the notion that there are pornographic books in grade school libraries, for example — to imply that the real-world impact of book censorship or edicts like Florida’s much-discussed “Don’t Say Gay” law is actually minimal.
But now that these laws are on the books, the atmosphere of fear and paranoia is what actually affects millions of people. The most clear-cut example is the legion of schoolteachers or college professors across DeSantis’ Florida who are justifiably terrified that one stray comment or homework assignment could end their careers. Then, start thinking about all the maternity doctors and nurses who are guarding their every utterance, or all the families raising children who are gay or transgender, and you can see a new, deeply entrenched culture of silence.
One of my fellow columnists, Greg Sargent at the Washington Post, has been ahead of the curve in documenting the real impact of the bevy of culture-war laws that have been enacted — especially in the Sunshine State. He noted that the real terror in the laws backed by DeSantis is not their specific targets but their “vagueness” — the ambiguity that causes some school officials to empty entire bookshelves instead of risking getting caught with one or two controversial tomes.
Sargent noted in January that a “recent report by PEN America found many ‘educational gag’ laws around the country are sloppily drafted. That not only creates a larger opening for parents and other citizens to charge violations, but also invites them to see plots against their children lurking everywhere. Demagogues are feeding these fears, alleging nefarious schemes to rob kids of their innocence by sexualizing them, or to indoctrinate them into believing their country is inherently white supremacist and evil.”
This is McCarthyism 2.0 — with its strong regional focus in the more conservative states of the South and West, and its focus on sex, race and culture rather than geopolitics. Maybe we should call it DeSantisism (or DeSantism?) after its 21st-century avatar. But what exactly is all this meant to accomplish?
The writer Adam Serwer was 100% right when he wrote during the Donald Trump presidency that “the cruelty is the point” of his grievance-based appeals to rural and working-class voters, resentful of urban elites or others they fear will upend their own culture. But as we near the mid-2020s, we’re moving beyond that. When Trump tells his supporters, as he did earlier this month, that “for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution,” it means that conservatives now want to see their enemies punished, not just denounced.
This is where DeSantis, who seems likely to challenge Trump for the 2024 GOP presidential nod, enters the fray. The Florida governor is determined to show that while Trump mostly vegetates up the road at Mar-a-Lago, he is a man of action. His flurry of proposed laws and executive orders that target teachers or professors or protesters or drag shows or even big corporations like Disney are making headlines almost every day. The widespread chaos these vague and increasingly autocratic edicts are causing isn’t beside the point. It is the point.
And now we are seeing that real lives are being affected by all of this — the Florida 14-year-old who confessed to his mother that he’s now afraid to mention his dad’s homosexuality in school because of the “Don’t Say Gay” law, or the Central Florida University professor who, up for tenure, at the last minute canceled two courses that touch on racial issues, declaring “It wasn’t worth the risk.”
” that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene invoked recently, but red and blue America are definitely sleeping in separate bedrooms. The bad news is that by concentrating the cruelty of “DeSantisism” in a handful of states, it can encourage apathy in blue America and a sense of despair among those in red states who no longer feel welcome there.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The muzzled of Florida, Texas, and elsewhere are still American citizens covered by the Bill of Rights and other constitutional freedom. This is not a matter of “state rights” any more than the South’s immoral codes of racial segregation that lasted into the 1960s. Several laws signed by DeSantis have already been tossed out or slowed in the federal courts, and almost all can and should be challenged on First Amendment grounds.
Those of us who live in blue states should also be pushing Congress and the White House to use federal law to protect LGBTQ rights, reproductive rights, and academic freedom, no matter where one lives. If we act now, our grandchildren won’t grow up reading about the “red state terror” of “DeSantisism” in their history books.
Doctors who won't utter the word 'abortion.' Teachers afraid to recommend any book. Inside the new McCarthyism gripping red America.
by Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Remember, it’s not what you say that counts,” went the refrain on TV’s You Don’t Say, a popular game show that aired in the 1960s and ‘70s. “It’s what you don’t say.” That could also be a good new state motto for Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Florida, or for some of his neighbors in the sun-soaked Trump Belt, where a growing climate of fear has everyone from teachers to doctors to drag queens panicked about what they might say — and who is listening.
To find a political precedent for what’s happening in huge swaths of the United States, you would need to summon the “red scare” led by demagogic Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, when Hollywood operated under a blacklist and teachers lived in fear that “patriotic groups” would out them (often falsely) as communists. Boomers like me who were born in the shadow of McCarthyism grew up learning, with what can now be seen as the naivety of post-war optimism, that America had learned its lesson from this moral panic.
But today, you can hear the echoes of Joe McCarthy when you read in the Washington Post about a central Florida parent named Barbara Mellon who attended an elementary school open house and casually asked a teacher for book recommendations to excite her second grader about reading. The teacher appeared anxious — school bookshelves have been the latest target of right-wing witch hunters — and then said he couldn’t make one.
Over in Texas, a Dallas woman facing a high-risk pregnancy — one twin fetus was all but certain to die before birth, but the other was healthy — dealt with doctors and nurses who refused to say the word “abortion” in their consultations, although one doctor told her: “You can’t do anything in Texas and I can’t tell you anything further in Texas, but you need to get out of state.” The woman, who traveled to Colorado to have the unhealthy fetus aborted because of her home state’s strict laws, told NPR about the bizarre experience of “talking in code” with doctors and nurses.
Of course, it could be worse. With Republican-led states targeting the LGBTQ community — especially transgender youth, as well as public events with drag performers — a growing number of Americans live in a fear not just over what they might say but over who they fundamentally are. “My worst fear had come true with no warning and no time buffer or anything,” the Austin, Texas, mother of 5-year-old twins including a transgender girl told NPR last year as she and her husband searched for out-of-state jobs after Gov. Greg Abbott called for state child-welfare investigations of families raising children the way they do.
It’s hardly a secret that Republican governors like DeSantis or Abbott and lawmakers in the 20 or so states with solid GOP control have taken the so-called culture wars — which have been simmering, arguably, since the 1960s — and turned up the heat to new heights. The panic sparked by 2020′s massive Black Lives Matter marches after the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd has led to a warped kind of bidding war among these red states over which can adopt the harshest laws to ban discussions of race or punish LGBTQ citizens.
The right wing’s culture warriors justify their holy crusades by citing a few extreme examples or frequently just making them up — the notion that there are pornographic books in grade school libraries, for example — to imply that the real-world impact of book censorship or edicts like Florida’s much-discussed “Don’t Say Gay” law is actually minimal.
But now that these laws are on the books, the atmosphere of fear and paranoia is what actually affects millions of people. The most clear-cut example is the legion of schoolteachers or college professors across DeSantis’ Florida who are justifiably terrified that one stray comment or homework assignment could end their careers. Then, start thinking about all the maternity doctors and nurses who are guarding their every utterance, or all the families raising children who are gay or transgender, and you can see a new, deeply entrenched culture of silence.
One of my fellow columnists, Greg Sargent at the Washington Post, has been ahead of the curve in documenting the real impact of the bevy of culture-war laws that have been enacted — especially in the Sunshine State. He noted that the real terror in the laws backed by DeSantis is not their specific targets but their “vagueness” — the ambiguity that causes some school officials to empty entire bookshelves instead of risking getting caught with one or two controversial tomes.
Sargent noted in January that a “recent report by PEN America found many ‘educational gag’ laws around the country are sloppily drafted. That not only creates a larger opening for parents and other citizens to charge violations, but also invites them to see plots against their children lurking everywhere. Demagogues are feeding these fears, alleging nefarious schemes to rob kids of their innocence by sexualizing them, or to indoctrinate them into believing their country is inherently white supremacist and evil.”
This is McCarthyism 2.0 — with its strong regional focus in the more conservative states of the South and West, and its focus on sex, race and culture rather than geopolitics. Maybe we should call it DeSantisism (or DeSantism?) after its 21st-century avatar. But what exactly is all this meant to accomplish?
The writer Adam Serwer was 100% right when he wrote during the Donald Trump presidency that “the cruelty is the point” of his grievance-based appeals to rural and working-class voters, resentful of urban elites or others they fear will upend their own culture. But as we near the mid-2020s, we’re moving beyond that. When Trump tells his supporters, as he did earlier this month, that “for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution,” it means that conservatives now want to see their enemies punished, not just denounced.
This is where DeSantis, who seems likely to challenge Trump for the 2024 GOP presidential nod, enters the fray. The Florida governor is determined to show that while Trump mostly vegetates up the road at Mar-a-Lago, he is a man of action. His flurry of proposed laws and executive orders that target teachers or professors or protesters or drag shows or even big corporations like Disney are making headlines almost every day. The widespread chaos these vague and increasingly autocratic edicts are causing isn’t beside the point. It is the point.
And now we are seeing that real lives are being affected by all of this — the Florida 14-year-old who confessed to his mother that he’s now afraid to mention his dad’s homosexuality in school because of the “Don’t Say Gay” law, or the Central Florida University professor who, up for tenure, at the last minute canceled two courses that touch on racial issues, declaring “It wasn’t worth the risk.”
” that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene invoked recently, but red and blue America are definitely sleeping in separate bedrooms. The bad news is that by concentrating the cruelty of “DeSantisism” in a handful of states, it can encourage apathy in blue America and a sense of despair among those in red states who no longer feel welcome there.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The muzzled of Florida, Texas, and elsewhere are still American citizens covered by the Bill of Rights and other constitutional freedom. This is not a matter of “state rights” any more than the South’s immoral codes of racial segregation that lasted into the 1960s. Several laws signed by DeSantis have already been tossed out or slowed in the federal courts, and almost all can and should be challenged on First Amendment grounds.
Those of us who live in blue states should also be pushing Congress and the White House to use federal law to protect LGBTQ rights, reproductive rights, and academic freedom, no matter where one lives. If we act now, our grandchildren won’t grow up reading about the “red state terror” of “DeSantisism” in their history books.
DETAILS IN A LAWSUIT AGAINST TEXAS’S ABORTION BAN SHOCK THE CONSCIENCE
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Five pregnant women and two doctors filed suit in Texas this week claiming that the state’s six-week abortion ban violates the state constitution’s due process and equal protection guarantees. The complaint asks that, at a minimum, the court declare a woman can obtain an abortion when a physician in good faith finds the patient suffers a condition of complication that “poses a risk of infection, bleeding, or otherwise makes continuing a pregnancy unsafe for the pregnant person; a physical medical condition that is exacerbated by pregnancy” that can’t be effectively treated or where “the fetus is unlikely to survive the pregnancy and sustain life after birth.”
Though Texas’s right-wing courts might well reject the suit based on its reading of the Texas constitution, the bracing and enlightening facts set out in the complaint should be mandatory reading for lawmakers who want to strip women of essential health care. Unlike most suits that are brought by advocacy groups, this action has real, live plaintiffs with heart-wrenching personal stories:
Amanda was forced to wait until she was septic to receive abortion care, causing one of her fallopian tubes to become permanently closed. When Lauren M. learned one of her twins was not viable, she was forced to travel out of state for the abortion she needed to save her and her other baby’s life, who is due in several weeks. Lauren H. received a devastating fetal diagnosis two weeks after Roe was overturned, and in the chaos that followed, she was forced to travel to Seattle for an abortion. Pregnant again now, Lauren H. fears that Texas is not safe for her or her family. Anna was forced to fly across multiple states after her water broke, risking that she would go into labor or septic shock on the journey. Ashley had to travel out of state to for an abortion to save the life of one of her twins, and afterward, fearful of documenting Ashley’s abortion, her Texas physician instead described her condition as “vanishing twin syndrome.”
Lest anyone think these are oddball cases, the complaint reminds us that such cases are occurring routinely around the country in states that have banned or severely limited abortion access. The complaint points out that in case after case, the story is essentially the same: Necessary health care is denied; doctors are prevented from treating patients according to long-standing standards of care; and “pervasive fear and uncertainty throughout the medical community regarding the scope of the life and health exceptions have put patients’ lives and physicians’ liberty at grave risk.”
The results, the complaint documents, are devastating to millions of people — not only those who seek to end a pregnancy. Obstetric care is imperiled, for example, as doctors leave states that ban abortion. (Or, in the case of one of the doctors bringing the case, retire because “she felt she could no longer practice medicine the way she was trained and consistent with her ethical obligations as a physician.”)
Moreover, the ban in Texas comes when its maternal mortality rate, already higher than the national average, is rising. Non-Hispanic Black women are twice as likely as White women to die from pregnancy-related causes. If you deny abortion care, more women, and disproportionately Black women, will die.
Contradictory and vague language in the Texas abortion ban “leaves physicians uncertain whether the treatment decisions they make in good faith, based on their medical judgment, will be respected or will be later disputed.” The law created chaos, leading to denial of care or forcing women to show “hemorrhaging” or “active signs of infection before they will be offered abortions.”
The complaint references a study in the New England Journal of Medicine that documents fear, confusion and unnecessarily delayed or denied treatment as physicians struggle to interpret the law in real time. (“Without further explanation, physicians do not know if, for example, ‘a patient with pulmonary hypertension, for whom we cite a 30-to-50% chance of dying with ongoing pregnancy,’ is sufficiently at risk of death or substantial impairment of a major bodily function to permit abortion.”)
The complaint’s 92 pages bombard the reader with a barrage of evidence — not predictions or opinions, but glaring, unarguable facts. Reading through the excruciating details set out in the complaint, several conclusions become indisputable.
The parade of horribles is precisely what women, physicians and advocates warned would result from zealots’ efforts to control women and their medical care. Sadly, lawmakers were either ignorant about medical issues or, worse, simply did not care. They are responsible for the suffering and deaths that result from these bans. There is simply no way to dictate the specifics of medical treatment in a coherent way from a state capital. Lawmakers don’t have the knowledge or foresight to assume the role of doctor. The complaint lays out just a few of the daunting situations the bans create:
If a pregnant patient is experiencing renal failure, does she have to be on dialysis before a physician may perform an abortion that would otherwise be prohibited by the Ban? If a pregnant patient has a cardiac lesion, does a physician have to wait until she experiences heart failure to intervene? If a pregnant patient has a clogged blood vessel, does a physician have to wait until she experiences chest pain before terminating the pregnancy to prevent pulmonary embolism?”
When judges and lawmakers arrogantly assume the power to dictate who gets what sort of treatment, the results are bound to be calamitous. This is why we have licensed doctors who are held to recognized standards of care — not forced to follow the dictates of ideologues.
The suffering, dehumanization and abuse of women as a result of these bans should shock any decent human being. If any other group of Americans were put through the trauma, uncertainty, risk and expense to obtain appropriate medical care for, say, a heart condition, the howls of protest would be deafening. And yet, it is only pregnant women who are treated as pawns of the state and denied the best care of their doctors. One does not need to make a legal judgment to understand how deeply wrong it is to treat any person in a free society in this way.
Vice President Harris reacted to the suit in a written statement: “The lawsuit includes devastating, first-hand accounts of women’s lives almost lost after they were denied the health care they needed, because of extreme efforts by Republican officials to control women’s bodies.” She added, “Many extremist ‘so-called’ leaders espouse ‘freedom for all,’ while directly attacking the freedom to make one’s own health care decisions.”
Her assessment is spot on — and a reminder that abortion bans are not “pro-life” but barbaric and dangerous.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Five pregnant women and two doctors filed suit in Texas this week claiming that the state’s six-week abortion ban violates the state constitution’s due process and equal protection guarantees. The complaint asks that, at a minimum, the court declare a woman can obtain an abortion when a physician in good faith finds the patient suffers a condition of complication that “poses a risk of infection, bleeding, or otherwise makes continuing a pregnancy unsafe for the pregnant person; a physical medical condition that is exacerbated by pregnancy” that can’t be effectively treated or where “the fetus is unlikely to survive the pregnancy and sustain life after birth.”
Though Texas’s right-wing courts might well reject the suit based on its reading of the Texas constitution, the bracing and enlightening facts set out in the complaint should be mandatory reading for lawmakers who want to strip women of essential health care. Unlike most suits that are brought by advocacy groups, this action has real, live plaintiffs with heart-wrenching personal stories:
Amanda was forced to wait until she was septic to receive abortion care, causing one of her fallopian tubes to become permanently closed. When Lauren M. learned one of her twins was not viable, she was forced to travel out of state for the abortion she needed to save her and her other baby’s life, who is due in several weeks. Lauren H. received a devastating fetal diagnosis two weeks after Roe was overturned, and in the chaos that followed, she was forced to travel to Seattle for an abortion. Pregnant again now, Lauren H. fears that Texas is not safe for her or her family. Anna was forced to fly across multiple states after her water broke, risking that she would go into labor or septic shock on the journey. Ashley had to travel out of state to for an abortion to save the life of one of her twins, and afterward, fearful of documenting Ashley’s abortion, her Texas physician instead described her condition as “vanishing twin syndrome.”
Lest anyone think these are oddball cases, the complaint reminds us that such cases are occurring routinely around the country in states that have banned or severely limited abortion access. The complaint points out that in case after case, the story is essentially the same: Necessary health care is denied; doctors are prevented from treating patients according to long-standing standards of care; and “pervasive fear and uncertainty throughout the medical community regarding the scope of the life and health exceptions have put patients’ lives and physicians’ liberty at grave risk.”
The results, the complaint documents, are devastating to millions of people — not only those who seek to end a pregnancy. Obstetric care is imperiled, for example, as doctors leave states that ban abortion. (Or, in the case of one of the doctors bringing the case, retire because “she felt she could no longer practice medicine the way she was trained and consistent with her ethical obligations as a physician.”)
Moreover, the ban in Texas comes when its maternal mortality rate, already higher than the national average, is rising. Non-Hispanic Black women are twice as likely as White women to die from pregnancy-related causes. If you deny abortion care, more women, and disproportionately Black women, will die.
Contradictory and vague language in the Texas abortion ban “leaves physicians uncertain whether the treatment decisions they make in good faith, based on their medical judgment, will be respected or will be later disputed.” The law created chaos, leading to denial of care or forcing women to show “hemorrhaging” or “active signs of infection before they will be offered abortions.”
The complaint references a study in the New England Journal of Medicine that documents fear, confusion and unnecessarily delayed or denied treatment as physicians struggle to interpret the law in real time. (“Without further explanation, physicians do not know if, for example, ‘a patient with pulmonary hypertension, for whom we cite a 30-to-50% chance of dying with ongoing pregnancy,’ is sufficiently at risk of death or substantial impairment of a major bodily function to permit abortion.”)
The complaint’s 92 pages bombard the reader with a barrage of evidence — not predictions or opinions, but glaring, unarguable facts. Reading through the excruciating details set out in the complaint, several conclusions become indisputable.
The parade of horribles is precisely what women, physicians and advocates warned would result from zealots’ efforts to control women and their medical care. Sadly, lawmakers were either ignorant about medical issues or, worse, simply did not care. They are responsible for the suffering and deaths that result from these bans. There is simply no way to dictate the specifics of medical treatment in a coherent way from a state capital. Lawmakers don’t have the knowledge or foresight to assume the role of doctor. The complaint lays out just a few of the daunting situations the bans create:
If a pregnant patient is experiencing renal failure, does she have to be on dialysis before a physician may perform an abortion that would otherwise be prohibited by the Ban? If a pregnant patient has a cardiac lesion, does a physician have to wait until she experiences heart failure to intervene? If a pregnant patient has a clogged blood vessel, does a physician have to wait until she experiences chest pain before terminating the pregnancy to prevent pulmonary embolism?”
When judges and lawmakers arrogantly assume the power to dictate who gets what sort of treatment, the results are bound to be calamitous. This is why we have licensed doctors who are held to recognized standards of care — not forced to follow the dictates of ideologues.
The suffering, dehumanization and abuse of women as a result of these bans should shock any decent human being. If any other group of Americans were put through the trauma, uncertainty, risk and expense to obtain appropriate medical care for, say, a heart condition, the howls of protest would be deafening. And yet, it is only pregnant women who are treated as pawns of the state and denied the best care of their doctors. One does not need to make a legal judgment to understand how deeply wrong it is to treat any person in a free society in this way.
Vice President Harris reacted to the suit in a written statement: “The lawsuit includes devastating, first-hand accounts of women’s lives almost lost after they were denied the health care they needed, because of extreme efforts by Republican officials to control women’s bodies.” She added, “Many extremist ‘so-called’ leaders espouse ‘freedom for all,’ while directly attacking the freedom to make one’s own health care decisions.”
Her assessment is spot on — and a reminder that abortion bans are not “pro-life” but barbaric and dangerous.
WHEN WILL AMERICANS FLOOD THE STREETS TO PROTEST OUR BROKEN, CORRUPT SUPREME COURT?
Bombshell disclosures about huge paydays for spouses and influencers at a corrupt Supreme Court, drop with a thud? Is real change possible?
by Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
So it turns out that a huge number of voters actually do understand that it’s essential for a functioning democracy to have a fair and uncompromised judiciary, even when the rules needed to make that happen tends to be arcane and unsexy. They finally get it ... in Israel.
Incredible scenes have been witnessed in the streets of Tel Aviv, where last weekend a record throng of as many as 160,000 protesters packed every inch of the main thoroughfares downtown to voice their extreme displeasure with proposed changes by the increasingly far-right government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Coupled with protests in other Israeli cities, it’s been estimated that the rate of citizens protesting in the Middle Eastern nation is the equivalent of 8.6 million Americans taking to the streets, or about three times the size of the 2017 Women’s March.
And the protestors are so outraged over the Netanyahu-backed changes — which would restrict the ability of Israel’s Supreme Court to strike down legislation or overrule the executive branch — that they vow to be back every week, even as government forces respond with water cannons or other more forceful measures. “I hope that this huge demonstration will effect and prove that we are not going to give up,” 53-year-old history teacher Ronen Cohen told Reuters.
Here in the United States, citizens have already seen the independence and moral standing of our Supreme Court shrink under the weight of millions and now billions of dollars in billionaire “dark money” around the confirmation and lobbying of High Court justices, their frequent ethical lapses, and the increasingly political and thinly justified majority decisions they hand down. But this deterioration has been allowed to fester over decades, like a frog in boiling water, and not in one fell swoop as proposed for Israel. The streets here are empty.
I thought about how the Supreme Court — atop one of our three co-equal branches of government — doesn’t get enough scrutiny, even as its poor ethics and its rulings erode our freedoms. In a moment when Americans claim heightened fear for our democracy, I watched journalists drop two recent bombshells that landed largely with a dull thud, ignored in our frenetic news cycle.
The first was a report in the New York Times that the wife of Chief Justice John Roberts — Jane Sullivan Roberts, who had been a high-powered law partner — is now making millions of dollars in commissions for placing lawyers with top law firms, some of which then argue cases before the court where her husband presides. That highlighted the large sums of money that elite insiders throw at each other for inscrutable services. But much more importantly, the Times report called attention to the mind-boggling fact that the Supreme Court continues to lack any code of ethics that would clarify issues around the income and political activity of justices’ spouses, and whether Roberts should recuse himself from cases involving his wife’s patrons.
A few weeks later, there was a stunning article in Politico about how the lifestyle of the head of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal society that grooms and then supports Republican judicial nominees, “took a lavish turn” after Leonard Leo also became unpaid legal adviser to then-President Donald Trump as he named three Supreme Court justices. Politico traced an elaborate web of transfers of tens of millions of dollars between non-profit and for-profit entities linked to Leo, while he purchased things like two mansions in Maine and other documented luxury perks. And that was before Leo’s network scored an unbelievable $1.6 billion (yes, with a “b”) donation from a 90-year-old Chicago industrialist.
The articles got little or no mention either on cable TV news or from rival papers, during a time when discoveries of obscure and probably misfiled classified documents in Joe Biden’s broom closet or Mike Pence’s sock drawer or wherever were getting hours of coverage. Stories about the complex doings of the 1% can be hard to understand for us mortals who don’t walk around with million-dollar checks falling out of our back pockets.
The truth is that normal Americans don’t pay much heed to the Supreme Court until the day it makes a major decision that breaks past precedent and often common sense and deeply affects them, and which goes against what most people support — like last year’s reversal that stripped millions of women of their reproductive rights, or the ruling that makes it harder for the government to attack climate change, or the decision a decade ago that gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act. But here’s the thing: Those bad, anti-democratic rulings are the direct result of the billionaire money that envelopes the High Court, and the ethical laxness it seems to inspire.
Gabe Roth of the group Fix the Court, which advocates for a number of common sense, good-government reforms, told me this week that a code of ethics — which Roberts and the other justices were reportedly discussing in the late 2010s, and which is also the subject of proposed legislation in Congress — is simply the most basic “first step” toward a long-overdue reform of the Supreme Court.
“We have to start somewhere and an ethics code is the most logical, and least controversial, and the easiest,” Roth said. “There already is a code in the lower courts that you could graft, with a few changes here or there.” He said an ethics code for the High Court could be the “gateway drug” for more ambitious reforms sought by advocate groups, such as new guidelines around financial disclosure and stock ownership, or public appearances.
To make their point, Fix the Court maintains a list of “recent ethical lapses” by Supreme Court justices that runs to roughly 80 or so instances and covers every single sitting justice, conservative or liberal, as well as a few of those recently departed. Some of the breaches are minor and some are debatable; many involve a justice’s failure to recuse from a case where they might have financial or personal conflicts of interest.
But several of the “ethical lapses” on the court should be major national scandals, of the Tel-Aviv-people-in-the-streets variety.
The mother of all current SCOTUS scandals (or maybe it should be called “the wife”) is the failure of Justice Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from matters surrounding Trump’s 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection — despite growing evidence of his wife Ginni Thomas’s significant involvement in efforts to overturn President Biden’s victory. But Thomas also has the longest entry in the list complied by Fix the Court, which notes incidents such as private jet trips and lavish gifts from a financier, Harlan Crow, or attending a Palm Springs retreat backed by the oil-and-gas giant, Koch Industries.
Last year, a New York Times report centered on an alleged advance leak of a major religious-freedom decision by Justice Samuel Alito also spotlighted how a web of super-rich, socially conservative political donors had worked together to wine and dine key justices like Alito and Thomas at fancy restaurants or their own vacation homes and resorts, while hobnobbing with the jurists at fundraisers for a Supreme Court Historical Society. That effort gave millionaires seeking — successfully, as we saw in 2022 — to overturn the right to an abortion the kind of access to America’s most powerful jurists that a poor, would-be single mother didn’t have.
In that context, handing the justices a code of ethics — which might place limits on this millionaire cavorting, or a spouse’s outside activity, or make it more clear when recusal is called for — feels like a baby step and yet also an essential one. There are other more ambitious fixes, such as the proposal by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a leading voice for reform, for a DISCLOSE Act that would shine a brighter light on “dark money” spending by “court whisperers” like Leo. Even bolder reforms — like term limits for justices, backed by Roth’s Fix the Court, or expanding the number of justices — deserve a national debate, given the public’s loss of faith in the judiciary.
America has already been seeing the payback for the right’s big-money focus on the Supreme Court in those moves against reproductive and voting rights, and we could see it again this spring with major rulings on affirmative action and student-loan relief. But these could be the proverbial tip of the iceberg.
Many fear the chaos around the transfer of presidential power in 2020, culminating in the insurrection, was a trial run for more upheaval in 2024 — a looming crisis that could end up at the feet of the nine justices. If the Supreme Court strikes down U.S. democracy, then you will see hundreds of thousands — if not millions — in the streets. But it might be too late.
Bombshell disclosures about huge paydays for spouses and influencers at a corrupt Supreme Court, drop with a thud? Is real change possible?
by Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
So it turns out that a huge number of voters actually do understand that it’s essential for a functioning democracy to have a fair and uncompromised judiciary, even when the rules needed to make that happen tends to be arcane and unsexy. They finally get it ... in Israel.
Incredible scenes have been witnessed in the streets of Tel Aviv, where last weekend a record throng of as many as 160,000 protesters packed every inch of the main thoroughfares downtown to voice their extreme displeasure with proposed changes by the increasingly far-right government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Coupled with protests in other Israeli cities, it’s been estimated that the rate of citizens protesting in the Middle Eastern nation is the equivalent of 8.6 million Americans taking to the streets, or about three times the size of the 2017 Women’s March.
And the protestors are so outraged over the Netanyahu-backed changes — which would restrict the ability of Israel’s Supreme Court to strike down legislation or overrule the executive branch — that they vow to be back every week, even as government forces respond with water cannons or other more forceful measures. “I hope that this huge demonstration will effect and prove that we are not going to give up,” 53-year-old history teacher Ronen Cohen told Reuters.
Here in the United States, citizens have already seen the independence and moral standing of our Supreme Court shrink under the weight of millions and now billions of dollars in billionaire “dark money” around the confirmation and lobbying of High Court justices, their frequent ethical lapses, and the increasingly political and thinly justified majority decisions they hand down. But this deterioration has been allowed to fester over decades, like a frog in boiling water, and not in one fell swoop as proposed for Israel. The streets here are empty.
I thought about how the Supreme Court — atop one of our three co-equal branches of government — doesn’t get enough scrutiny, even as its poor ethics and its rulings erode our freedoms. In a moment when Americans claim heightened fear for our democracy, I watched journalists drop two recent bombshells that landed largely with a dull thud, ignored in our frenetic news cycle.
The first was a report in the New York Times that the wife of Chief Justice John Roberts — Jane Sullivan Roberts, who had been a high-powered law partner — is now making millions of dollars in commissions for placing lawyers with top law firms, some of which then argue cases before the court where her husband presides. That highlighted the large sums of money that elite insiders throw at each other for inscrutable services. But much more importantly, the Times report called attention to the mind-boggling fact that the Supreme Court continues to lack any code of ethics that would clarify issues around the income and political activity of justices’ spouses, and whether Roberts should recuse himself from cases involving his wife’s patrons.
A few weeks later, there was a stunning article in Politico about how the lifestyle of the head of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal society that grooms and then supports Republican judicial nominees, “took a lavish turn” after Leonard Leo also became unpaid legal adviser to then-President Donald Trump as he named three Supreme Court justices. Politico traced an elaborate web of transfers of tens of millions of dollars between non-profit and for-profit entities linked to Leo, while he purchased things like two mansions in Maine and other documented luxury perks. And that was before Leo’s network scored an unbelievable $1.6 billion (yes, with a “b”) donation from a 90-year-old Chicago industrialist.
The articles got little or no mention either on cable TV news or from rival papers, during a time when discoveries of obscure and probably misfiled classified documents in Joe Biden’s broom closet or Mike Pence’s sock drawer or wherever were getting hours of coverage. Stories about the complex doings of the 1% can be hard to understand for us mortals who don’t walk around with million-dollar checks falling out of our back pockets.
The truth is that normal Americans don’t pay much heed to the Supreme Court until the day it makes a major decision that breaks past precedent and often common sense and deeply affects them, and which goes against what most people support — like last year’s reversal that stripped millions of women of their reproductive rights, or the ruling that makes it harder for the government to attack climate change, or the decision a decade ago that gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act. But here’s the thing: Those bad, anti-democratic rulings are the direct result of the billionaire money that envelopes the High Court, and the ethical laxness it seems to inspire.
Gabe Roth of the group Fix the Court, which advocates for a number of common sense, good-government reforms, told me this week that a code of ethics — which Roberts and the other justices were reportedly discussing in the late 2010s, and which is also the subject of proposed legislation in Congress — is simply the most basic “first step” toward a long-overdue reform of the Supreme Court.
“We have to start somewhere and an ethics code is the most logical, and least controversial, and the easiest,” Roth said. “There already is a code in the lower courts that you could graft, with a few changes here or there.” He said an ethics code for the High Court could be the “gateway drug” for more ambitious reforms sought by advocate groups, such as new guidelines around financial disclosure and stock ownership, or public appearances.
To make their point, Fix the Court maintains a list of “recent ethical lapses” by Supreme Court justices that runs to roughly 80 or so instances and covers every single sitting justice, conservative or liberal, as well as a few of those recently departed. Some of the breaches are minor and some are debatable; many involve a justice’s failure to recuse from a case where they might have financial or personal conflicts of interest.
But several of the “ethical lapses” on the court should be major national scandals, of the Tel-Aviv-people-in-the-streets variety.
The mother of all current SCOTUS scandals (or maybe it should be called “the wife”) is the failure of Justice Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from matters surrounding Trump’s 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection — despite growing evidence of his wife Ginni Thomas’s significant involvement in efforts to overturn President Biden’s victory. But Thomas also has the longest entry in the list complied by Fix the Court, which notes incidents such as private jet trips and lavish gifts from a financier, Harlan Crow, or attending a Palm Springs retreat backed by the oil-and-gas giant, Koch Industries.
Last year, a New York Times report centered on an alleged advance leak of a major religious-freedom decision by Justice Samuel Alito also spotlighted how a web of super-rich, socially conservative political donors had worked together to wine and dine key justices like Alito and Thomas at fancy restaurants or their own vacation homes and resorts, while hobnobbing with the jurists at fundraisers for a Supreme Court Historical Society. That effort gave millionaires seeking — successfully, as we saw in 2022 — to overturn the right to an abortion the kind of access to America’s most powerful jurists that a poor, would-be single mother didn’t have.
In that context, handing the justices a code of ethics — which might place limits on this millionaire cavorting, or a spouse’s outside activity, or make it more clear when recusal is called for — feels like a baby step and yet also an essential one. There are other more ambitious fixes, such as the proposal by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a leading voice for reform, for a DISCLOSE Act that would shine a brighter light on “dark money” spending by “court whisperers” like Leo. Even bolder reforms — like term limits for justices, backed by Roth’s Fix the Court, or expanding the number of justices — deserve a national debate, given the public’s loss of faith in the judiciary.
America has already been seeing the payback for the right’s big-money focus on the Supreme Court in those moves against reproductive and voting rights, and we could see it again this spring with major rulings on affirmative action and student-loan relief. But these could be the proverbial tip of the iceberg.
Many fear the chaos around the transfer of presidential power in 2020, culminating in the insurrection, was a trial run for more upheaval in 2024 — a looming crisis that could end up at the feet of the nine justices. If the Supreme Court strikes down U.S. democracy, then you will see hundreds of thousands — if not millions — in the streets. But it might be too late.
JOE BIDEN: MY PLAN TO EXTEND MEDICARE FOR ANOTHER GENERATION
By Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Millions of Americans work their whole life, paying into Medicare with every working day — starting with their first job, even as teenagers. Medicare is more than a government program. It’s the rock-solid guarantee that Americans have counted on to be there for them when they retire.
For decades, I’ve listened to my Republican friends claim that the only way to be serious about preserving Medicare is to cut benefits, including by making it a voucher program worth less and less every year. Some have threatened our economy unless I agree to benefit cuts.
Only in Washington can people claim that they are saving something by destroying it.
The budget I am releasing this week will make the Medicare trust fund solvent beyond 2050 without cutting a penny in benefits. In fact, we can get better value, making sure Americans receive better care for the money they pay into Medicare.
The two biggest health reform bills since the creation of Medicare, both of which will save Medicare hundreds of billions over the decades to come, were signed by President Barack Obama and me.
The Affordable Care Act embraced smart reforms to make our health care system more efficient while improving Medicare coverage for seniors. The Inflation Reduction Act ended the absurd ban on Medicare negotiating lower drug prices, required drug companies to pay rebates to Medicare if they increase prices faster than inflation and capped seniors’ total prescription drug costs — saving seniors up to thousands of dollars a year. These negotiations, combined with the law’s rebates for excessive price hikes, will reduce the deficit by $159 billion.
We have seen a significant slowdown in the growth of health care spending since the Affordable Care Act was passed. In the decade after the A.C.A., Medicare actually spent about $1 trillion less than the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected before the A.C.A. reforms were in place. In 2009, before the A.C.A., the Medicare trustees projected that Medicare’s trust fund would be exhausted in 2017; their latest projection is 2028. But we should do better than that and extend Medicare’s solvency beyond 2050.
So first, let’s expand on that progress. My budget will build on drug price reforms by strengthening Medicare’s newly established negotiation power, allowing Medicare to negotiate prices for more drugs and bringing drugs into negotiation sooner after they launch. That’s another $200 billion in deficit reduction. We will then take those savings and put them directly into the Medicare trust fund. Lowering drug prices while extending Medicare’s solvency sure makes a lot more sense than cutting benefits.
Second, let’s ask the wealthiest to pay just a little bit more of their fair share, to strengthen Medicare for everyone over the long term. My budget proposes to increase the Medicare tax rate on earned and unearned income above $400,000 to 5 percent from 3.8 percent. As I proposed in the past, my budget will also ensure that the tax that supports Medicare can’t be avoided altogether. This modest increase in Medicare contributions from those with the highest incomes will help keep the Medicare program strong for decades to come. My budget will make sure the money goes directly into the Medicare trust fund, protecting taxpayers’ investment and the future of the program.
When Medicare was passed, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans didn’t have more than five times the wealth of the bottom 50 percent combined, and it only makes sense that some adjustments be made to reflect that reality today.
Let’s ask them to pay their fair share so that the millions of workers who helped them build that wealth can retire with dignity and the Medicare they paid into. Republican plans that protect billionaires from a penny more in taxes — but won’t protect a retired firefighter’s hard-earned Medicare benefits — are just detached from the reality that hardworking families live with every day.
Add all that up, and my budget will extend the Medicare trust fund for more than another generation, an additional 25 years or more of solvency — beyond 2050. These are common-sense changes that I’m confident an overwhelming majority of Americans support.
MAGA Republicans have a different view. They want to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act. That means they want to take away the power we just gave to Medicare to negotiate for lower prescription drug prices. Get rid of the $35 per month cap for insulin we just got for people on Medicare. And remove the current $2,000 total annual cap for seniors.
If the MAGA Republicans get their way, seniors will pay higher out-of-pocket costs on prescription drugs and insulin, the deficit will be bigger, and Medicare will be weaker. The only winner under their plan will be Big Pharma. That’s not how we extend Medicare’s life for another generation or grow the economy.
This week, I’ll show Americans my full budget vision to invest in America, lower costs, grow the economy and not raise taxes on anyone making under $400,000. I urge my Republican friends in Congress to do the same — and show the American people what they value.
By Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Millions of Americans work their whole life, paying into Medicare with every working day — starting with their first job, even as teenagers. Medicare is more than a government program. It’s the rock-solid guarantee that Americans have counted on to be there for them when they retire.
For decades, I’ve listened to my Republican friends claim that the only way to be serious about preserving Medicare is to cut benefits, including by making it a voucher program worth less and less every year. Some have threatened our economy unless I agree to benefit cuts.
Only in Washington can people claim that they are saving something by destroying it.
The budget I am releasing this week will make the Medicare trust fund solvent beyond 2050 without cutting a penny in benefits. In fact, we can get better value, making sure Americans receive better care for the money they pay into Medicare.
The two biggest health reform bills since the creation of Medicare, both of which will save Medicare hundreds of billions over the decades to come, were signed by President Barack Obama and me.
The Affordable Care Act embraced smart reforms to make our health care system more efficient while improving Medicare coverage for seniors. The Inflation Reduction Act ended the absurd ban on Medicare negotiating lower drug prices, required drug companies to pay rebates to Medicare if they increase prices faster than inflation and capped seniors’ total prescription drug costs — saving seniors up to thousands of dollars a year. These negotiations, combined with the law’s rebates for excessive price hikes, will reduce the deficit by $159 billion.
We have seen a significant slowdown in the growth of health care spending since the Affordable Care Act was passed. In the decade after the A.C.A., Medicare actually spent about $1 trillion less than the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected before the A.C.A. reforms were in place. In 2009, before the A.C.A., the Medicare trustees projected that Medicare’s trust fund would be exhausted in 2017; their latest projection is 2028. But we should do better than that and extend Medicare’s solvency beyond 2050.
So first, let’s expand on that progress. My budget will build on drug price reforms by strengthening Medicare’s newly established negotiation power, allowing Medicare to negotiate prices for more drugs and bringing drugs into negotiation sooner after they launch. That’s another $200 billion in deficit reduction. We will then take those savings and put them directly into the Medicare trust fund. Lowering drug prices while extending Medicare’s solvency sure makes a lot more sense than cutting benefits.
Second, let’s ask the wealthiest to pay just a little bit more of their fair share, to strengthen Medicare for everyone over the long term. My budget proposes to increase the Medicare tax rate on earned and unearned income above $400,000 to 5 percent from 3.8 percent. As I proposed in the past, my budget will also ensure that the tax that supports Medicare can’t be avoided altogether. This modest increase in Medicare contributions from those with the highest incomes will help keep the Medicare program strong for decades to come. My budget will make sure the money goes directly into the Medicare trust fund, protecting taxpayers’ investment and the future of the program.
When Medicare was passed, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans didn’t have more than five times the wealth of the bottom 50 percent combined, and it only makes sense that some adjustments be made to reflect that reality today.
Let’s ask them to pay their fair share so that the millions of workers who helped them build that wealth can retire with dignity and the Medicare they paid into. Republican plans that protect billionaires from a penny more in taxes — but won’t protect a retired firefighter’s hard-earned Medicare benefits — are just detached from the reality that hardworking families live with every day.
Add all that up, and my budget will extend the Medicare trust fund for more than another generation, an additional 25 years or more of solvency — beyond 2050. These are common-sense changes that I’m confident an overwhelming majority of Americans support.
MAGA Republicans have a different view. They want to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act. That means they want to take away the power we just gave to Medicare to negotiate for lower prescription drug prices. Get rid of the $35 per month cap for insulin we just got for people on Medicare. And remove the current $2,000 total annual cap for seniors.
If the MAGA Republicans get their way, seniors will pay higher out-of-pocket costs on prescription drugs and insulin, the deficit will be bigger, and Medicare will be weaker. The only winner under their plan will be Big Pharma. That’s not how we extend Medicare’s life for another generation or grow the economy.
This week, I’ll show Americans my full budget vision to invest in America, lower costs, grow the economy and not raise taxes on anyone making under $400,000. I urge my Republican friends in Congress to do the same — and show the American people what they value.
REPUBLICANS GASLIGHT VOTERS ON THEIR COVID RESPONSE AND FAILED POLICIES
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
You would think that politicians who trafficked in conspiracy theories and misled Americans about the danger of covid-19 and the effectiveness of vaccines wouldn’t want to dwell on their record. Well, you would be wrong. Among the most brazen lies MAGA Republicans propagate is that compared with those “elite” blue states, red states responded to covid in a superior way that demonstrated the excellence of the right-wing approach to governance. In fact, when it comes to covid and other polices, red states have little to brag about.
No one has pandered to anti-vaccination, anti-science skeptics more than Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. He has gone so far as to set up a committee to go after vaccine manufacturers, the companies that saved millions of lives here and around the world.
In his speech Sunday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California, he was at it again. Touting his approach to covid, he declared, “When common sense suddenly became an uncommon virtue, Florida stood as a refuge of sanity, a citadel of freedom throughout the United States and indeed throughout the world.” (By that he meant reversing parents’ and schools’ demand for masking in schools before vaccines were widely available, I suppose.)
So how did Florida do? As of Monday afternoon, it had the 12th highest death rate from covid and the eighth highest rate of infection. As of last month, it had the second highest number of cumulative child covid cases.
But it’s not just Florida. Red states in general have had far higher death rates than blue states. Of the five states with the highest death rates — Arizona, Oklahoma, Mississippi, West Virginia and New Mexico — GOP governors led all but New Mexico during the height of the pandemic. Governors who bucked the trend of covid denial led all five jurisdictions with the lowest death rates (Hawaii, Vermont, Utah, Puerto Rico and D.C.).
Meanwhile, South Carolina’s former governor (2011-2017) and now presidential contender Nikki Haley declared “wokeness” more dangerous than covid. Perhaps she’s not paying attention to her home state. South Carolina’s Republican governor, Henry McMaster, positioned himself as a ferocious opponent of coronavirus vaccine mandates. The results were predictably awful. South Carolina is the seventh highest in per capita cases.
South Carolina and Florida are emblematic of the divide between red and blue states. As with murder rates, poverty, uninsured residents, poor schools and low age expectancy, covid numbers show that far from a model for the rest of the country, red states are distinguished by their failed policies and lousy statistics.
But people are voting with their feet, DeSantis claims. He cites as proof of success that more people are moving to his and other red states. Perhaps the nice weather has more to do with the influx of people than does red-state governance. The numbers from USAFacts are telling: “Florida, the state with the second-largest elderly population percentage, can attribute its numbers to net migration. From 2000 to 2020, net migration accounted for an increase of 1 million people to the now 65 and older group.” Two other warm-weather states (Nevada and Arizona) were the only ones with higher rates of net migration.
Taking credit for migration is nervy of DeSantis, given that “Florida is home to so many older residents because of its abundance of retirement communities in walkable cities, warm weather and lack of estate taxes. A study from the University of Florida estimates that by 2040, more than 25% of Florida’s population will be over 65,” as Consumer Affairs documents. Not exactly an example the rest of the country can or wants to follow.
Likewise, South Carolina is benefiting from migration from other states. But there, too, its over-65 population is soaring. The No. 1 reason for moving to South Carolina? Retirement. If you want an aging population with warm weather, South Carolina is the place for you. However, among college graduates, South Carolina ranks high for departures.
Weather and retirement, not policies, are the likely magnets for red states. The policies MAGA politicians tout — book banning, abortion bans, excluding discussion of race from history instruction — are uniformly unpopular.
Don’t get me wrong: The MAGA rhetoric, including covid denial, is wildly popular among the extreme base that dominates the GOP presidential primaries. But once the messages of vaccine denial and failed red-state policies are tested among voters in key states with much better records, the red-state gospel might very well fall on deaf ears.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
You would think that politicians who trafficked in conspiracy theories and misled Americans about the danger of covid-19 and the effectiveness of vaccines wouldn’t want to dwell on their record. Well, you would be wrong. Among the most brazen lies MAGA Republicans propagate is that compared with those “elite” blue states, red states responded to covid in a superior way that demonstrated the excellence of the right-wing approach to governance. In fact, when it comes to covid and other polices, red states have little to brag about.
No one has pandered to anti-vaccination, anti-science skeptics more than Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. He has gone so far as to set up a committee to go after vaccine manufacturers, the companies that saved millions of lives here and around the world.
In his speech Sunday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California, he was at it again. Touting his approach to covid, he declared, “When common sense suddenly became an uncommon virtue, Florida stood as a refuge of sanity, a citadel of freedom throughout the United States and indeed throughout the world.” (By that he meant reversing parents’ and schools’ demand for masking in schools before vaccines were widely available, I suppose.)
So how did Florida do? As of Monday afternoon, it had the 12th highest death rate from covid and the eighth highest rate of infection. As of last month, it had the second highest number of cumulative child covid cases.
But it’s not just Florida. Red states in general have had far higher death rates than blue states. Of the five states with the highest death rates — Arizona, Oklahoma, Mississippi, West Virginia and New Mexico — GOP governors led all but New Mexico during the height of the pandemic. Governors who bucked the trend of covid denial led all five jurisdictions with the lowest death rates (Hawaii, Vermont, Utah, Puerto Rico and D.C.).
Meanwhile, South Carolina’s former governor (2011-2017) and now presidential contender Nikki Haley declared “wokeness” more dangerous than covid. Perhaps she’s not paying attention to her home state. South Carolina’s Republican governor, Henry McMaster, positioned himself as a ferocious opponent of coronavirus vaccine mandates. The results were predictably awful. South Carolina is the seventh highest in per capita cases.
South Carolina and Florida are emblematic of the divide between red and blue states. As with murder rates, poverty, uninsured residents, poor schools and low age expectancy, covid numbers show that far from a model for the rest of the country, red states are distinguished by their failed policies and lousy statistics.
But people are voting with their feet, DeSantis claims. He cites as proof of success that more people are moving to his and other red states. Perhaps the nice weather has more to do with the influx of people than does red-state governance. The numbers from USAFacts are telling: “Florida, the state with the second-largest elderly population percentage, can attribute its numbers to net migration. From 2000 to 2020, net migration accounted for an increase of 1 million people to the now 65 and older group.” Two other warm-weather states (Nevada and Arizona) were the only ones with higher rates of net migration.
Taking credit for migration is nervy of DeSantis, given that “Florida is home to so many older residents because of its abundance of retirement communities in walkable cities, warm weather and lack of estate taxes. A study from the University of Florida estimates that by 2040, more than 25% of Florida’s population will be over 65,” as Consumer Affairs documents. Not exactly an example the rest of the country can or wants to follow.
Likewise, South Carolina is benefiting from migration from other states. But there, too, its over-65 population is soaring. The No. 1 reason for moving to South Carolina? Retirement. If you want an aging population with warm weather, South Carolina is the place for you. However, among college graduates, South Carolina ranks high for departures.
Weather and retirement, not policies, are the likely magnets for red states. The policies MAGA politicians tout — book banning, abortion bans, excluding discussion of race from history instruction — are uniformly unpopular.
Don’t get me wrong: The MAGA rhetoric, including covid denial, is wildly popular among the extreme base that dominates the GOP presidential primaries. But once the messages of vaccine denial and failed red-state policies are tested among voters in key states with much better records, the red-state gospel might very well fall on deaf ears.
TIMID MEDIA AND GOP FIGURES ARE AGAIN, DANGEROUSLY, NORMALIZING TRUMP
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
We saw throughout Donald Trump’s two presidential campaigns and four years in the White House a symbiotic relationship between mainstream media outlets and Republicans, in which both made Trump out to be a far more normal politician than he was.
On the one hand, there was Republican denial (Didn’t see the crazy tweet! I’m sure he’s learned his lesson!). On the other, there was the media’s determination to avoid claims of bias and maintain a false balance — which often resulted in their obscuring how loony he sounded. The result: a never-ending Trumpian stream of threats (both policy-related and more personal), absurd conspiracy-mongering, and lies that were never regarded as disqualifying.
Apparently, neither the media nor supposedly sober Republicans have learned anything from the past. Trump gave a bonkers speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday, musing about Russia blowing up NATO headquarters, claiming President Biden had taken the border wall and “put it in a hiding area,” and telling the crowd, “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.”
We do not get headlines acknowledging this is unhinged. Instead, we get from the New York Times: “Trump Says He Would Stay in 2024 Race if Indicted.” And a similar angle from CNN. ABC started its website report this way: “Former President Donald Trump continues to reign supreme over the conservative wing of the Republican Party.” From The Washington Post: “Trump takes victory lap at conservative conference.”
CBS intoned that Trump “aired grievances with his familiar foes: President Biden, the Department of Justice, and the litany of legal fights he is embroiled in.” Politico went with: “Trump ties a ribbon on the most MAGA CPAC yet.” Hmm.
From the coverage, you would never understand how incoherent he sounds, how far divorced his statements are from reality, and how entirely abnormal this all is. Talk about burying the lead.
The press and Republicans’ mutual distaste for candidly acknowledging Trump’s break with reality and the danger he poses to democracy was on full display on the Sunday shows. On “Meet the Press,” New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu lamely offered that he’d support whomever the Republicans nominate for president. Equally cringeworthy, Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) on “This Week” wouldn’t rule out supporting a nominee indicted on a felony charge that involved overthrowing the 2020 election results: “That’s a huge hypothetical right now on the indictment issue. … But right now my plan is to support who becomes the nominee.”
On “Fox News Sunday,” former secretary of state Mike Pompeo said it’s time to reject any candidate who would tell “whoppers” and spends endless time on Twitter — but dodged the question when host Shannon Bream said surely, he must be talking about Trump.
This spectacle is equal parts infuriating and pathetic. Here are Republicans, some of whom are considering runs for the presidency, who somehow expect to get through a campaign without mentioning the single most disqualifying thing about the leader in the race (other than his mental unfitness): He betrayed the country. Such timidity is itself disqualifying for someone seeking the presidency. If these candidates cannot stand up to an ex-president who is currently devoid of power, how can we expect to them to defend the Constitution against enemies foreign and domestic?
It’s not impossible to show some spine. Former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson reacted to the CPAC speech on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “First of all, if you want to heal our land, unite our country together, you don’t do it by appealing to the angry mob. Whenever you’re looking at the leader of our country, you don’t want him to be engaged in a personal vendetta,” Hutchinson said. When Trump talks about vengeance, he added, “he’s talking about his personal vendettas, and that’s not healthy for America. It’s certainly not healthy for our party.”
See — how hard is that?
To top this, Hutchinson criticized the idea that any GOP candidate for president should have to agree to a “loyalty pledge” to support other GOP candidates as a condition for appearing at any debate — something Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel has said she plans to require. The goal of such a pledge, Hutchinson asserted, was to avoid a situation in which a spurned GOP contender might run as a third-party candidate — “that would be the threat from Donald Trump,” he said. “If you’re going to have a pledge, have it say that ... the candidates who participate in the debate are not going to run as a third-party candidate, and that would solve that issue.” Hutchinson remains a lonely island of decency in a sea of cowardice.
Like most Republican politicians, a good deal of the mainstream media is equally reticent when it comes to defending our democracy. You had to go to an unabashed progressive outlet such as HuffPost to get an accurate, complete sense of what happened at CPAC. “Trump To His Followers: ‘I Am Your Retribution,’” its headline read, followed by: “The coup-attempting former president brought his usual grievances back to a diminished CPAC.”
Coverage can be so bland and innocuous as to mislead. The audience — that is, potential voters — might easily come away from such coverage believing that Trump acted like a normal candidate, not a figure plainly unfit to handle any public position. And interviews can be so inept as to allow Republicans to repeatedly avoid explaining how in the world they could support someone so unfit for office.
If you put cowering Republicans together with media unwilling to accurately describe what is going on in front of them, you wind up gaslighting voters, who come away with the impression that Trump’s carnival of crazy is acceptable. We know how this ends: If no one is willing to call out Trump for what he is, and the danger he poses to the United States, we risk returning him to the Oval Office.
Whereupon, expect the headlines: “How did this happen?”
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
We saw throughout Donald Trump’s two presidential campaigns and four years in the White House a symbiotic relationship between mainstream media outlets and Republicans, in which both made Trump out to be a far more normal politician than he was.
On the one hand, there was Republican denial (Didn’t see the crazy tweet! I’m sure he’s learned his lesson!). On the other, there was the media’s determination to avoid claims of bias and maintain a false balance — which often resulted in their obscuring how loony he sounded. The result: a never-ending Trumpian stream of threats (both policy-related and more personal), absurd conspiracy-mongering, and lies that were never regarded as disqualifying.
Apparently, neither the media nor supposedly sober Republicans have learned anything from the past. Trump gave a bonkers speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday, musing about Russia blowing up NATO headquarters, claiming President Biden had taken the border wall and “put it in a hiding area,” and telling the crowd, “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.”
We do not get headlines acknowledging this is unhinged. Instead, we get from the New York Times: “Trump Says He Would Stay in 2024 Race if Indicted.” And a similar angle from CNN. ABC started its website report this way: “Former President Donald Trump continues to reign supreme over the conservative wing of the Republican Party.” From The Washington Post: “Trump takes victory lap at conservative conference.”
CBS intoned that Trump “aired grievances with his familiar foes: President Biden, the Department of Justice, and the litany of legal fights he is embroiled in.” Politico went with: “Trump ties a ribbon on the most MAGA CPAC yet.” Hmm.
From the coverage, you would never understand how incoherent he sounds, how far divorced his statements are from reality, and how entirely abnormal this all is. Talk about burying the lead.
The press and Republicans’ mutual distaste for candidly acknowledging Trump’s break with reality and the danger he poses to democracy was on full display on the Sunday shows. On “Meet the Press,” New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu lamely offered that he’d support whomever the Republicans nominate for president. Equally cringeworthy, Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) on “This Week” wouldn’t rule out supporting a nominee indicted on a felony charge that involved overthrowing the 2020 election results: “That’s a huge hypothetical right now on the indictment issue. … But right now my plan is to support who becomes the nominee.”
On “Fox News Sunday,” former secretary of state Mike Pompeo said it’s time to reject any candidate who would tell “whoppers” and spends endless time on Twitter — but dodged the question when host Shannon Bream said surely, he must be talking about Trump.
This spectacle is equal parts infuriating and pathetic. Here are Republicans, some of whom are considering runs for the presidency, who somehow expect to get through a campaign without mentioning the single most disqualifying thing about the leader in the race (other than his mental unfitness): He betrayed the country. Such timidity is itself disqualifying for someone seeking the presidency. If these candidates cannot stand up to an ex-president who is currently devoid of power, how can we expect to them to defend the Constitution against enemies foreign and domestic?
It’s not impossible to show some spine. Former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson reacted to the CPAC speech on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “First of all, if you want to heal our land, unite our country together, you don’t do it by appealing to the angry mob. Whenever you’re looking at the leader of our country, you don’t want him to be engaged in a personal vendetta,” Hutchinson said. When Trump talks about vengeance, he added, “he’s talking about his personal vendettas, and that’s not healthy for America. It’s certainly not healthy for our party.”
See — how hard is that?
To top this, Hutchinson criticized the idea that any GOP candidate for president should have to agree to a “loyalty pledge” to support other GOP candidates as a condition for appearing at any debate — something Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel has said she plans to require. The goal of such a pledge, Hutchinson asserted, was to avoid a situation in which a spurned GOP contender might run as a third-party candidate — “that would be the threat from Donald Trump,” he said. “If you’re going to have a pledge, have it say that ... the candidates who participate in the debate are not going to run as a third-party candidate, and that would solve that issue.” Hutchinson remains a lonely island of decency in a sea of cowardice.
Like most Republican politicians, a good deal of the mainstream media is equally reticent when it comes to defending our democracy. You had to go to an unabashed progressive outlet such as HuffPost to get an accurate, complete sense of what happened at CPAC. “Trump To His Followers: ‘I Am Your Retribution,’” its headline read, followed by: “The coup-attempting former president brought his usual grievances back to a diminished CPAC.”
Coverage can be so bland and innocuous as to mislead. The audience — that is, potential voters — might easily come away from such coverage believing that Trump acted like a normal candidate, not a figure plainly unfit to handle any public position. And interviews can be so inept as to allow Republicans to repeatedly avoid explaining how in the world they could support someone so unfit for office.
If you put cowering Republicans together with media unwilling to accurately describe what is going on in front of them, you wind up gaslighting voters, who come away with the impression that Trump’s carnival of crazy is acceptable. We know how this ends: If no one is willing to call out Trump for what he is, and the danger he poses to the United States, we risk returning him to the Oval Office.
Whereupon, expect the headlines: “How did this happen?”
FLORIDA IS TRYING TO TAKE AWAY THE AMERICAN RIGHT TO SPEAK FREELY
By The New York Times Editorial Board
A homeowner gets angry at a county commission over a zoning dispute and writes a Facebook post accusing a local buildings official of being in the pocket of developers.
A right-wing broadcaster criticizing border policies accuses the secretary of homeland security of being a traitor.
A parent upset about the removal of a gay-themed book from library shelves goes to a school board meeting and calls the board chair a bigot and a homophobe.
All three are examples of Americans engaging in clamorous but perfectly legal speech about public figures that is broadly protected by the Constitution. The Supreme Court, in a case that dates back nearly 60 years, ruled that even if that speech might be damaging or include errors, it should generally be protected against claims of libel and slander. All three would lose that protection — and be subject to ruinous defamation lawsuits — under a bill that is moving through the Florida House and is based on longstanding goals of Gov. Ron DeSantis.
The bill represents a dangerous threat to free expression in the United States, not only for the news media, but for all Americans, whatever their political beliefs. There’s still time for Florida lawmakers to reject this crude pandering and ensure that their constituents retain the right to free speech.
“This isn’t just a press issue,” said Bobby Block, executive director of Florida’s First Amendment Foundation. “This is a death-to-public-discourse bill. Everyone, even conservatives, would have to second-guess themselves whenever they open their mouths to speak or sit in front of a keyboard.”
The bill is an explicit effort to eviscerate a 1964 Supreme Court decision, The New York Times Company v. Sullivan. This bulwark of First Amendment law requires public figures to prove a news organization engaged in what the court called “actual malice” to win a defamation case. By preventing lawsuits based on unintentional mistakes, the decision freed news organizations to pursue vigorous reporting about public officials without fear of paying damages. The decision has even been applied by lower courts to bloggers and other speakers who make allegations about public figures.
Many conservatives, including Mr. DeSantis, have long chafed at the freedom that this decision gives to a news industry they consider to be too liberal. The new bill embodies that antagonism. It would sharply limit the definition of public figures, eliminating public employees like police officers from the category, even if they become public figures because of their actions.
It would change the definition of actual malice to include any allegation that is “inherently improbable” — an impossibly vague standard — or that is based on what it calls an “unverified” statement by an anonymous source. In fact, it says that all anonymous statements, a crucial tool for investigative reporting, are “presumptively false” for the purposes of a defamation case. Anonymous sources were the basis for much of The Washington Post’s coverage of Watergate and The Times’s exposure of the Bush administration’s domestic eavesdropping program in 2005, among many other examples of journalism with significant impact.
Under the bill, a public figure would no longer need to show actual malice to win a defamation case if the allegation against the figure wasn’t related to the reason for the person’s public status. So if a person is publicly known for being elected president or governor, and a news organization publishes an investigation about that person’s private or business life unrelated to elected office, that report would not get the special liability protection provided by the Sullivan decision.
The bill goes much further than this attempt to hobble the press. It makes it clear that the new defamation rules would also apply to any single “utterance on the internet,” which could mean a tweet or a Facebook post written by anyone, or “any one presentation to an audience,” which could include statements made at school board hearings and other public meetings.
In a direct attack on a key aspect of free expression, it says that whenever someone is accused of discriminating against others on the basis of race, gender or sexual orientation, that accusation is automatically considered enough to sue for defamation. Any person accused of bigotry based on sexual orientation or gender identity could file a defamation lawsuit and be virtually guaranteed of winning by saying the discrimination was based on personal religious or scientific beliefs. The penalty for calling someone a bigot would be a minimum of $35,000.
Mr. DeSantis, who appears to be preparing for a 2024 presidential campaign, has been railing against press freedoms for several years in a clear appeal to likely Republican primary voters. The bill was recently introduced in the Florida House by one of his allies and has a strong chance of passage; a similar if slightly milder version was filed in the State Senate.
If enacted, the House bill would almost instantly be challenged in court, but its backers are counting on that. In public statements, they have said they want the bill to be used as a vehicle to get the Supreme Court to overturn New York Times v. Sullivan and have noted that two justices, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, have called on the court to reconsider that decision. The current court has repeatedly demonstrated that it can’t be counted on to respect long-term precedents that are widely supported by the public.
There may be room for discussion on the precise definition of “public figure,” which has been interpreted in various ways by the Supreme Court and lower courts over the past six decades. Even Justice Elena Kagan, in a 1993 journal article long before she joined the court, expressed interest in determining whether the term had been too broadly defined in the years after Sullivan, though she applauded the overall decision.
A sledgehammer bill like the one in Florida, however, wielded for transparent political reasons, would create enormous damage on the way to the high court, particularly if other states decide to copy its language. In 1964, Justice William J. Brennan Jr., who wrote the court’s opinion, said it was based on “the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust and wide open.” That may well include, he wrote, “vehement, caustic and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.” That principle has not changed through the decades, and any citizen who treasures the right to speak freely should resist politicians like Mr. DeSantis who want to silence them.
By The New York Times Editorial Board
A homeowner gets angry at a county commission over a zoning dispute and writes a Facebook post accusing a local buildings official of being in the pocket of developers.
A right-wing broadcaster criticizing border policies accuses the secretary of homeland security of being a traitor.
A parent upset about the removal of a gay-themed book from library shelves goes to a school board meeting and calls the board chair a bigot and a homophobe.
All three are examples of Americans engaging in clamorous but perfectly legal speech about public figures that is broadly protected by the Constitution. The Supreme Court, in a case that dates back nearly 60 years, ruled that even if that speech might be damaging or include errors, it should generally be protected against claims of libel and slander. All three would lose that protection — and be subject to ruinous defamation lawsuits — under a bill that is moving through the Florida House and is based on longstanding goals of Gov. Ron DeSantis.
The bill represents a dangerous threat to free expression in the United States, not only for the news media, but for all Americans, whatever their political beliefs. There’s still time for Florida lawmakers to reject this crude pandering and ensure that their constituents retain the right to free speech.
“This isn’t just a press issue,” said Bobby Block, executive director of Florida’s First Amendment Foundation. “This is a death-to-public-discourse bill. Everyone, even conservatives, would have to second-guess themselves whenever they open their mouths to speak or sit in front of a keyboard.”
The bill is an explicit effort to eviscerate a 1964 Supreme Court decision, The New York Times Company v. Sullivan. This bulwark of First Amendment law requires public figures to prove a news organization engaged in what the court called “actual malice” to win a defamation case. By preventing lawsuits based on unintentional mistakes, the decision freed news organizations to pursue vigorous reporting about public officials without fear of paying damages. The decision has even been applied by lower courts to bloggers and other speakers who make allegations about public figures.
Many conservatives, including Mr. DeSantis, have long chafed at the freedom that this decision gives to a news industry they consider to be too liberal. The new bill embodies that antagonism. It would sharply limit the definition of public figures, eliminating public employees like police officers from the category, even if they become public figures because of their actions.
It would change the definition of actual malice to include any allegation that is “inherently improbable” — an impossibly vague standard — or that is based on what it calls an “unverified” statement by an anonymous source. In fact, it says that all anonymous statements, a crucial tool for investigative reporting, are “presumptively false” for the purposes of a defamation case. Anonymous sources were the basis for much of The Washington Post’s coverage of Watergate and The Times’s exposure of the Bush administration’s domestic eavesdropping program in 2005, among many other examples of journalism with significant impact.
Under the bill, a public figure would no longer need to show actual malice to win a defamation case if the allegation against the figure wasn’t related to the reason for the person’s public status. So if a person is publicly known for being elected president or governor, and a news organization publishes an investigation about that person’s private or business life unrelated to elected office, that report would not get the special liability protection provided by the Sullivan decision.
The bill goes much further than this attempt to hobble the press. It makes it clear that the new defamation rules would also apply to any single “utterance on the internet,” which could mean a tweet or a Facebook post written by anyone, or “any one presentation to an audience,” which could include statements made at school board hearings and other public meetings.
In a direct attack on a key aspect of free expression, it says that whenever someone is accused of discriminating against others on the basis of race, gender or sexual orientation, that accusation is automatically considered enough to sue for defamation. Any person accused of bigotry based on sexual orientation or gender identity could file a defamation lawsuit and be virtually guaranteed of winning by saying the discrimination was based on personal religious or scientific beliefs. The penalty for calling someone a bigot would be a minimum of $35,000.
Mr. DeSantis, who appears to be preparing for a 2024 presidential campaign, has been railing against press freedoms for several years in a clear appeal to likely Republican primary voters. The bill was recently introduced in the Florida House by one of his allies and has a strong chance of passage; a similar if slightly milder version was filed in the State Senate.
If enacted, the House bill would almost instantly be challenged in court, but its backers are counting on that. In public statements, they have said they want the bill to be used as a vehicle to get the Supreme Court to overturn New York Times v. Sullivan and have noted that two justices, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, have called on the court to reconsider that decision. The current court has repeatedly demonstrated that it can’t be counted on to respect long-term precedents that are widely supported by the public.
There may be room for discussion on the precise definition of “public figure,” which has been interpreted in various ways by the Supreme Court and lower courts over the past six decades. Even Justice Elena Kagan, in a 1993 journal article long before she joined the court, expressed interest in determining whether the term had been too broadly defined in the years after Sullivan, though she applauded the overall decision.
A sledgehammer bill like the one in Florida, however, wielded for transparent political reasons, would create enormous damage on the way to the high court, particularly if other states decide to copy its language. In 1964, Justice William J. Brennan Jr., who wrote the court’s opinion, said it was based on “the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust and wide open.” That may well include, he wrote, “vehement, caustic and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.” That principle has not changed through the decades, and any citizen who treasures the right to speak freely should resist politicians like Mr. DeSantis who want to silence them.
TRUMP CAN BE SUED BY POLICE OVER JAN. 6 RIOT, JUSTICE DEPARTMENT SAYS
Two U.S. Capitol Police officers and 11 Democratic House members are seeking to hold Donald Trump liable for injuries they suffered during the riot.
By Rachel Weiner, The Washington Post
Former president Donald Trump can be held liable in court for the actions of the mob that overtook the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the Justice Department said Thursday.
“Speaking to the public on matters of public concern is a traditional function of the Presidency, and the outer perimeter of the President’s Office includes a vast realm of such speech,” attorneys for the Justice Department’s Civil Division wrote. “But that traditional function is one of public communication. It does not include incitement of imminent private violence.”
Two officers with the U.S. Capitol Police, joined by 11 Democratic House members, are seeking to hold Trump liable for physical and psychological injuries they suffered during the riot. Trump has argued he is protected from the lawsuit by the absolute immunity conferred on a president performing his official duties.
The lawsuit was filed under a statute, written after the Civil War in response to the Ku Klux Klan, that allows for damages when force, threats or intimidation are used to prevent government officials from carrying out their duties.
An appeals court in December debated whether Trump was doing his job when he drew thousands of supporters to Washington with falsehoods and told them they had to “fight like hell” to keep Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 election. Undecided, it asked the Justice Department to offer an opinion.
The response took many months to craft — twice, the Justice Department asked for another month.
Now it has. “Presidents may at times use strong rhetoric. And some who hear that rhetoric may overreact, or even respond with violence,” the Justice Department attorneys said, referencing a concern raised at oral argument. They suggested looking to another Klan-inspired court case — the 1969 ruling that speech “directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action” or “likely to incite or produce such action” is not protected by the First Amendment.
“Just as denying First Amendment protection to incitement does not unduly chill speech in general, denying absolute immunity to incitement of imminent private violence should not unduly chill the President in the performance of his traditional function of speaking to the public on matters of public concern,” the attorneys wrote.
The district court that first heard this suit already ruled that the First Amendment does not protect Trump’s conduct.
A dozen former White House and Justice Department officials from both Democratic and Republican administrations previously urged the court to deny Trump’s claim of immunity, calling this case the “rare but clear circumstance in which a President broke the law while acting well beyond any official capacity.”
The lawsuit is still at a preliminary stage, and the Justice Department emphasized that it was not saying the allegation that Trump incited the Jan. 6 riot is true — only that the “plausibly allege[d]” claims describe conduct outside the scope of a president’s official duties.
Controversially, the Justice Department under President Biden has continued to defend Trump’s claim of absolute immunity in a defamation case brought by a woman who accused Trump of raping her in the mid-1990s. The former president responded by saying “it never happened,” and “she’s not my type.”
Though the administration did not view Trump’s language as “appropriate,” an attorney for the Justice Department said at oral argument in January that Trump was answering a reporter’s question as part of a president’s responsibility “to be responsive to the media and public.”
A different D.C. court is weighing whether that lawsuit against Trump can go forward.
Other Capitol Police officers have sued Trump in separate cases, as have members of the D.C police. The longtime partner of Brian D. Sicknick, who died after battling rioters, has sued Trump along with two members of the mob who deployed chemical spray. D.C.'s attorney general has sued far-right groups whose members were involved in the violent attack.
Trump also faces possible criminal prosecution by the Justice Department for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential race.
Two U.S. Capitol Police officers and 11 Democratic House members are seeking to hold Donald Trump liable for injuries they suffered during the riot.
By Rachel Weiner, The Washington Post
Former president Donald Trump can be held liable in court for the actions of the mob that overtook the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the Justice Department said Thursday.
“Speaking to the public on matters of public concern is a traditional function of the Presidency, and the outer perimeter of the President’s Office includes a vast realm of such speech,” attorneys for the Justice Department’s Civil Division wrote. “But that traditional function is one of public communication. It does not include incitement of imminent private violence.”
Two officers with the U.S. Capitol Police, joined by 11 Democratic House members, are seeking to hold Trump liable for physical and psychological injuries they suffered during the riot. Trump has argued he is protected from the lawsuit by the absolute immunity conferred on a president performing his official duties.
The lawsuit was filed under a statute, written after the Civil War in response to the Ku Klux Klan, that allows for damages when force, threats or intimidation are used to prevent government officials from carrying out their duties.
An appeals court in December debated whether Trump was doing his job when he drew thousands of supporters to Washington with falsehoods and told them they had to “fight like hell” to keep Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 election. Undecided, it asked the Justice Department to offer an opinion.
The response took many months to craft — twice, the Justice Department asked for another month.
Now it has. “Presidents may at times use strong rhetoric. And some who hear that rhetoric may overreact, or even respond with violence,” the Justice Department attorneys said, referencing a concern raised at oral argument. They suggested looking to another Klan-inspired court case — the 1969 ruling that speech “directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action” or “likely to incite or produce such action” is not protected by the First Amendment.
“Just as denying First Amendment protection to incitement does not unduly chill speech in general, denying absolute immunity to incitement of imminent private violence should not unduly chill the President in the performance of his traditional function of speaking to the public on matters of public concern,” the attorneys wrote.
The district court that first heard this suit already ruled that the First Amendment does not protect Trump’s conduct.
A dozen former White House and Justice Department officials from both Democratic and Republican administrations previously urged the court to deny Trump’s claim of immunity, calling this case the “rare but clear circumstance in which a President broke the law while acting well beyond any official capacity.”
The lawsuit is still at a preliminary stage, and the Justice Department emphasized that it was not saying the allegation that Trump incited the Jan. 6 riot is true — only that the “plausibly allege[d]” claims describe conduct outside the scope of a president’s official duties.
Controversially, the Justice Department under President Biden has continued to defend Trump’s claim of absolute immunity in a defamation case brought by a woman who accused Trump of raping her in the mid-1990s. The former president responded by saying “it never happened,” and “she’s not my type.”
Though the administration did not view Trump’s language as “appropriate,” an attorney for the Justice Department said at oral argument in January that Trump was answering a reporter’s question as part of a president’s responsibility “to be responsive to the media and public.”
A different D.C. court is weighing whether that lawsuit against Trump can go forward.
Other Capitol Police officers have sued Trump in separate cases, as have members of the D.C police. The longtime partner of Brian D. Sicknick, who died after battling rioters, has sued Trump along with two members of the mob who deployed chemical spray. D.C.'s attorney general has sued far-right groups whose members were involved in the violent attack.
Trump also faces possible criminal prosecution by the Justice Department for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential race.
THE SERENE HYPOCRISY OF NIKKI HALEY
By Pamela Paul, The New York Times
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Astonishingly, some people still see Nikki Haley as one of the “good” Trump cabinet members, the future of a more tolerant and accepting Republican Party. Like those anti-Trumpers who willfully interpreted each casual flick of Melania’s wrist as a prospect of rebellion, Haley hopefuls want to believe that a conscience might yet emerge from Trump’s Team of Liars, that the G.O.P’s latest showcasing of a Can-Do Immigrant Success Story can somehow undo years of xenophobia.
This requires listening to only half of what Haley says.
But if you listen to the full spectrum of her rhetoric, Haley clearly wants to capture the base that yearns for Trumpism — and to occupy the moral high ground of the post-Trump era. She wants to tout the credential of having served in a presidential cabinet (she was Trump’s U.N. ambassador) — and bask in recognition for having left of her own accord. She wants to criticize Americans’ obsession with identity politics — and highlight her own identity as a significant qualification.
There are plenty of reasons to approach Haley with wariness: her middle-school-cafeteria style of meting out revenge, her robotic “I have seen evil” presidential campaign announcement video, the P.T.A. briskness with which she dismisses a bothersome fact. But most alarming is her untroubled insistence on having her cake and eating it too. Even in short-term-memory Washington, rife as it is with wafflers and flip-floppers, the serene hypocrisy of Nikki Haley stands out. She wants it both ways — and she wants it her way most of all.
Take a glance at the inconvenient record. Here is Rebranded Republican Nikki Haley, who told Politico she was “triggered” by the 2015 slaughter of nine parishioners inside Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, that she was disgusted by Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential candidacy, that she was “disgusted” by Trump’s treatment of Mike Pence. And here also is Red-blooded Republican Haley, who in earlier interviews for the same 2021 Politico magazine profile rolls her eyes at the possibility of Trump’s impeachment, warmly recalls checking in on the disconsolate former president — a man she called her “friend” — and emphasizes “the good that he built.”
Haley is accustomed to internal contradiction, having been plucked from the South Carolina governorship to serve as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, a position Trump reportedly chose her for because it removed her from the governorship. Soon after Madam Ambassador arrived in New York in 2017, she appeared at the Council on Foreign Relations, an event I attended and remember well. Even members of the council, a nonpartisan group accustomed to hosting dignitaries both friendly and hostile, thrummed in anticipation of its first visiting cabinet member from the Trump administration.
Despite a reputation for intuitive political acumen, Haley seemed wholly incapable of reading the room. “This is an intimidating crowd, I’ve got to tell you. It really is,” she said, otherwise placid in her unpreparedness for a role grappling with urgent complexities in Russia, Iran, China and North Korea. She proceeded to share folksy anecdotes about how family members were adjusting to life in the big city. Later, she wove past questions from the council’s president, Richard Haass, at one point breaking into giggles. “It’s like you want me to answer it a certain way,” she admonished him. “That was too funny in the way you worded that.”
Here as elsewhere, Haley emphasized where she came from: “In South Carolina, I was the first minority governor and — a real shock to the state — the first girl governor as well.” As discordant as this blushing Southern girlishness was from a senior administration official, it fit in with Haley’s “You go, girl!” notion of female empowerment. Haley may be the last American woman to champion “leaning in” à la Sheryl Sandberg — and on Sean Hannity’s TV show, of all places — without even a smidge of irony.
In a similar vein, the kicker to her campaign announcement speech was not only stunningly literal — “And when you kick back, it hurts them more if you’re wearing heels” — it also came from the regressive stilettoed playbook of Melania-Ivanka-Kellyanne. As Haley declared in her 2022 book, “If You Want Something Done: Leadership Lessons From Bold Women,” when people try to tell her what she can and can’t do, her strategy is to push back harder: “Your life — the life you want — is worth fighting for.”
Throughout her career, Haley has enjoyed the image of herself as an underdog and outsider willing to stand up to her party. But exposing and exploiting racism in the Republican Party isn’t the same as confronting it head on. Nor has she risked doing so except in rare moments. While governor of South Carolina in 2015, Haley called for the Confederate flag to be removed from the state capitol — but only after the murderous rampage of an avowed white nationalist. A 2010 video recently shown by CNN reveals this less as a moment of principled bravery than of political expediency. In that video, she defended the display of the Confederate flag and the observance of Confederate History Month. Asked how she would respond to those who objected, she replied, “I will work to talk to them about the heritage and how this is not something that’s racist.” She repeated this defense again in 2019 in an interview with Glenn Beck in which she described the flag as a symbol of “service, sacrifice and heritage.”
With equal dexterous flair, Haley emphasizes her relative youth at 51 (“a new generation of leadership”), her identity as a woman and her Indian heritage as the child of immigrants while repeatedly condemning identity politics. “I don’t believe in that,” she said while campaigning recently in South Carolina, before neatly wrapping up with “As I set out on this new journey, I will simply say this — may the best woman win.”
According to a recent poll, Haley is one point ahead of Pence, currently exciting about 5 percent of Republican voters. In all likelihood, she will wind up Sarah Palined into the vice-presidential candidate pool. But with her long-shot win of the South Carolina governorship, Haley has previously proved the unbelievers wrong. She may be hoping that a record of equivocation will be perceived as one of mediation, and her brand of hypocrisy mistaken for one of moderation. It’s on voters to decide, when choosing between her and those Republican candidates who are ideological to their core, whether they prefer a candidate with no core at all.
By Pamela Paul, The New York Times
Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.
Astonishingly, some people still see Nikki Haley as one of the “good” Trump cabinet members, the future of a more tolerant and accepting Republican Party. Like those anti-Trumpers who willfully interpreted each casual flick of Melania’s wrist as a prospect of rebellion, Haley hopefuls want to believe that a conscience might yet emerge from Trump’s Team of Liars, that the G.O.P’s latest showcasing of a Can-Do Immigrant Success Story can somehow undo years of xenophobia.
This requires listening to only half of what Haley says.
But if you listen to the full spectrum of her rhetoric, Haley clearly wants to capture the base that yearns for Trumpism — and to occupy the moral high ground of the post-Trump era. She wants to tout the credential of having served in a presidential cabinet (she was Trump’s U.N. ambassador) — and bask in recognition for having left of her own accord. She wants to criticize Americans’ obsession with identity politics — and highlight her own identity as a significant qualification.
There are plenty of reasons to approach Haley with wariness: her middle-school-cafeteria style of meting out revenge, her robotic “I have seen evil” presidential campaign announcement video, the P.T.A. briskness with which she dismisses a bothersome fact. But most alarming is her untroubled insistence on having her cake and eating it too. Even in short-term-memory Washington, rife as it is with wafflers and flip-floppers, the serene hypocrisy of Nikki Haley stands out. She wants it both ways — and she wants it her way most of all.
Take a glance at the inconvenient record. Here is Rebranded Republican Nikki Haley, who told Politico she was “triggered” by the 2015 slaughter of nine parishioners inside Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, that she was disgusted by Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential candidacy, that she was “disgusted” by Trump’s treatment of Mike Pence. And here also is Red-blooded Republican Haley, who in earlier interviews for the same 2021 Politico magazine profile rolls her eyes at the possibility of Trump’s impeachment, warmly recalls checking in on the disconsolate former president — a man she called her “friend” — and emphasizes “the good that he built.”
Haley is accustomed to internal contradiction, having been plucked from the South Carolina governorship to serve as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, a position Trump reportedly chose her for because it removed her from the governorship. Soon after Madam Ambassador arrived in New York in 2017, she appeared at the Council on Foreign Relations, an event I attended and remember well. Even members of the council, a nonpartisan group accustomed to hosting dignitaries both friendly and hostile, thrummed in anticipation of its first visiting cabinet member from the Trump administration.
Despite a reputation for intuitive political acumen, Haley seemed wholly incapable of reading the room. “This is an intimidating crowd, I’ve got to tell you. It really is,” she said, otherwise placid in her unpreparedness for a role grappling with urgent complexities in Russia, Iran, China and North Korea. She proceeded to share folksy anecdotes about how family members were adjusting to life in the big city. Later, she wove past questions from the council’s president, Richard Haass, at one point breaking into giggles. “It’s like you want me to answer it a certain way,” she admonished him. “That was too funny in the way you worded that.”
Here as elsewhere, Haley emphasized where she came from: “In South Carolina, I was the first minority governor and — a real shock to the state — the first girl governor as well.” As discordant as this blushing Southern girlishness was from a senior administration official, it fit in with Haley’s “You go, girl!” notion of female empowerment. Haley may be the last American woman to champion “leaning in” à la Sheryl Sandberg — and on Sean Hannity’s TV show, of all places — without even a smidge of irony.
In a similar vein, the kicker to her campaign announcement speech was not only stunningly literal — “And when you kick back, it hurts them more if you’re wearing heels” — it also came from the regressive stilettoed playbook of Melania-Ivanka-Kellyanne. As Haley declared in her 2022 book, “If You Want Something Done: Leadership Lessons From Bold Women,” when people try to tell her what she can and can’t do, her strategy is to push back harder: “Your life — the life you want — is worth fighting for.”
Throughout her career, Haley has enjoyed the image of herself as an underdog and outsider willing to stand up to her party. But exposing and exploiting racism in the Republican Party isn’t the same as confronting it head on. Nor has she risked doing so except in rare moments. While governor of South Carolina in 2015, Haley called for the Confederate flag to be removed from the state capitol — but only after the murderous rampage of an avowed white nationalist. A 2010 video recently shown by CNN reveals this less as a moment of principled bravery than of political expediency. In that video, she defended the display of the Confederate flag and the observance of Confederate History Month. Asked how she would respond to those who objected, she replied, “I will work to talk to them about the heritage and how this is not something that’s racist.” She repeated this defense again in 2019 in an interview with Glenn Beck in which she described the flag as a symbol of “service, sacrifice and heritage.”
With equal dexterous flair, Haley emphasizes her relative youth at 51 (“a new generation of leadership”), her identity as a woman and her Indian heritage as the child of immigrants while repeatedly condemning identity politics. “I don’t believe in that,” she said while campaigning recently in South Carolina, before neatly wrapping up with “As I set out on this new journey, I will simply say this — may the best woman win.”
According to a recent poll, Haley is one point ahead of Pence, currently exciting about 5 percent of Republican voters. In all likelihood, she will wind up Sarah Palined into the vice-presidential candidate pool. But with her long-shot win of the South Carolina governorship, Haley has previously proved the unbelievers wrong. She may be hoping that a record of equivocation will be perceived as one of mediation, and her brand of hypocrisy mistaken for one of moderation. It’s on voters to decide, when choosing between her and those Republican candidates who are ideological to their core, whether they prefer a candidate with no core at all.
TRUMP’S ENABLERS MUST FACE CONSEQUENCES, TOO
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
There’s no doubt that Donald Trump was the instigator of the 2020 insurrection. But the former president’s schemes never would have gotten far (or even off the ground) without the participation of right-wing media executives, lawyers and pliant state officials. Without holding these enablers accountable, democracy and the rule of law will remain at risk.
At Fox News, for example, it was not simply the hosts who promulgated the “big lie” of a stolen election, according to the legal filing against the network by Dominion Voting Systems. (Disclaimer: I am an MSNBC contributor.) Former House speaker Paul D. Ryan, as a board member for Fox Corp., knew full well that the network was lying to viewers. Ryan even wrote to News Corp. head Rupert Murdoch to warn the network not to spread the election lie. Yet Ryan remained in his position, reaping the benefits of his position and lending his prestige to the network.
Ryan evidenced his stunning lack of self-awareness during a recent interview with Charlie Sykes, founder of the Bulwark. Sykes asked whether Ryan, as a Fox Corp. board member, bears responsibility for “a company that is pumping toxic sludge, racism, disinformation, and attacks on democracy”:
In the name of preserving a political movement, Ryan remained silent until a lawsuit forced him to testify. He continues serving as a board member to that organization masquerading as a news network. Even if only by public shaming, the former speaker should also be held accountable. Without figures like him enabling Fox News’s lies, the machinery of the “big lie” would have sputtered to a stop.
The same is true for the many lawyers who played a part in the coup attempt. They filed more than 60 bogus challenges to the 2020 election on behalf of the Trump campaign; devised the phony elector scheme; and assisted Trump in attempting to strong-arm state election officials. For the sake of accountability and to deter other lawyers from similar efforts in the future, those involved must be disciplined. If they committed crimes, they must be prosecuted.
Progress has already been made: John Eastman, the architect of the coup plot, faces disciplinary charges from the California state bar. The D.C. bar has similarly filed ethics charges against Jeffrey Clark, the former Justice Department official whom Trump attempted to appoint as acting attorney general. And Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani has been suspended from the New York bar.
In addition, CNN reported last week: “The disciplinary office that regulates attorney conduct in Colorado is taking steps toward potentially bringing an ethics complaint against Jenna Ellis, the lawyer who played a prominent role in former President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election.” Project 65, the nonprofit group that filed complaints against Ellis and others involved in the coup attempt, have also filed complaints against the Arizona lawyers who filed bogus fraud claims on behalf of former gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake.
All criminal litigants deserve a vigorous defense, but lawyers have no obligation to represent those who raise meritless claims. They cannot conspire with clients to undermine the Constitution. Just as the Justice Department must prosecute the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol, so, too, must lawyers, who are officers of the court, be held accountable for their role carrying out Trump’s schemes. This is the essence of the rule of law.
That brings us to another category of enablers: the state Republican officials who signed on as phony electors. As the House Jan. 6 select committee reported: "In five of these States — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin — the certificates they signed used the language that falsely declared themselves to be ‘the duly elected and qualified Electors’ from their State. This declaration was false because none of the signatories had been granted that official status by their State government in the form of a certificate of ascertainment.”
Some of these individuals raised concerns, but eventually went along. They, too, were part and parcel of the scheme to defraud the American people. Simply because they did not initiate the plot does not excuse their participation in it.
State prosecutors such as Fani Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., as well as special counsel Jack Smith, cannot look the other way simply because these individuals did not physically enter the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. These officials still did violence to the Constitution and cannot walk away scot-free. If they are not held accountable, what message would that send to the next group of lawmakers who participate in future coups?
Again, none of these enablers is the worst malefactor in the assault on our democracy. But just as the Magnitsky Act holds responsible the foot soldiers in foreign governments who commit human rights violations as a means of disabling the regimes that rely upon them, so too must our system hold responsible those who took part in Trump’s schemes. Until we do, the threat to democracy will persist.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
There’s no doubt that Donald Trump was the instigator of the 2020 insurrection. But the former president’s schemes never would have gotten far (or even off the ground) without the participation of right-wing media executives, lawyers and pliant state officials. Without holding these enablers accountable, democracy and the rule of law will remain at risk.
At Fox News, for example, it was not simply the hosts who promulgated the “big lie” of a stolen election, according to the legal filing against the network by Dominion Voting Systems. (Disclaimer: I am an MSNBC contributor.) Former House speaker Paul D. Ryan, as a board member for Fox Corp., knew full well that the network was lying to viewers. Ryan even wrote to News Corp. head Rupert Murdoch to warn the network not to spread the election lie. Yet Ryan remained in his position, reaping the benefits of his position and lending his prestige to the network.
Ryan evidenced his stunning lack of self-awareness during a recent interview with Charlie Sykes, founder of the Bulwark. Sykes asked whether Ryan, as a Fox Corp. board member, bears responsibility for “a company that is pumping toxic sludge, racism, disinformation, and attacks on democracy”:
In the name of preserving a political movement, Ryan remained silent until a lawsuit forced him to testify. He continues serving as a board member to that organization masquerading as a news network. Even if only by public shaming, the former speaker should also be held accountable. Without figures like him enabling Fox News’s lies, the machinery of the “big lie” would have sputtered to a stop.
The same is true for the many lawyers who played a part in the coup attempt. They filed more than 60 bogus challenges to the 2020 election on behalf of the Trump campaign; devised the phony elector scheme; and assisted Trump in attempting to strong-arm state election officials. For the sake of accountability and to deter other lawyers from similar efforts in the future, those involved must be disciplined. If they committed crimes, they must be prosecuted.
Progress has already been made: John Eastman, the architect of the coup plot, faces disciplinary charges from the California state bar. The D.C. bar has similarly filed ethics charges against Jeffrey Clark, the former Justice Department official whom Trump attempted to appoint as acting attorney general. And Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani has been suspended from the New York bar.
In addition, CNN reported last week: “The disciplinary office that regulates attorney conduct in Colorado is taking steps toward potentially bringing an ethics complaint against Jenna Ellis, the lawyer who played a prominent role in former President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election.” Project 65, the nonprofit group that filed complaints against Ellis and others involved in the coup attempt, have also filed complaints against the Arizona lawyers who filed bogus fraud claims on behalf of former gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake.
All criminal litigants deserve a vigorous defense, but lawyers have no obligation to represent those who raise meritless claims. They cannot conspire with clients to undermine the Constitution. Just as the Justice Department must prosecute the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol, so, too, must lawyers, who are officers of the court, be held accountable for their role carrying out Trump’s schemes. This is the essence of the rule of law.
That brings us to another category of enablers: the state Republican officials who signed on as phony electors. As the House Jan. 6 select committee reported: "In five of these States — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin — the certificates they signed used the language that falsely declared themselves to be ‘the duly elected and qualified Electors’ from their State. This declaration was false because none of the signatories had been granted that official status by their State government in the form of a certificate of ascertainment.”
Some of these individuals raised concerns, but eventually went along. They, too, were part and parcel of the scheme to defraud the American people. Simply because they did not initiate the plot does not excuse their participation in it.
State prosecutors such as Fani Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., as well as special counsel Jack Smith, cannot look the other way simply because these individuals did not physically enter the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. These officials still did violence to the Constitution and cannot walk away scot-free. If they are not held accountable, what message would that send to the next group of lawmakers who participate in future coups?
Again, none of these enablers is the worst malefactor in the assault on our democracy. But just as the Magnitsky Act holds responsible the foot soldiers in foreign governments who commit human rights violations as a means of disabling the regimes that rely upon them, so too must our system hold responsible those who took part in Trump’s schemes. Until we do, the threat to democracy will persist.
FLORIDA COULD START LOOKING A LOT LIKE HUNGARY
By Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times
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In 2017, the government of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban passed a law intended to drive Central European University, a prestigious school founded by a Hungarian refugee, George Soros, out of the country. At the time, this was shocking; as many as 80,000 protesters rallied in Budapest and intellectuals worldwide rushed to declare their solidarity with the demonstrators. “The fate of the university was a test of whether liberalism had the tactical savvy and emotional fortitude to beat back its new ideological foe,” wrote Franklin Foer in The Atlantic.
Liberalism, sadly, did not: The university was forced to move to Vienna, part of Orban’s lamentably successful campaign to dismantle Hungary’s liberal democracy.
That campaign has included ever-greater ideological control over education, most intensely in grade school, but also in colleges and universities. Following a landslide 2018 re-election victory that Orban saw as a “mandate to build a new era,” his government banned public funding for gender studies courses. “The Hungarian government is of the clear view that people are born either men or women,” said his chief of staff. In 2021, Orban extended political command over Hungarian universities by putting some schools under the authority of “public trusts” full of regime allies.
Many on the American right admire the way Orban uses the power of the state against cultural liberalism, but few are imitating him as faithfully as the Florida governor and likely Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis. Last week, one of DeSantis’s legislative allies filed House Bill 999, which would, as The Tampa Bay Times reported, turn many of DeSantis’s “wide-ranging ideas on higher education into law.” Even by DeSantis’s standards, it is a shocking piece of legislation that takes a sledgehammer to academic freedom. Jeremy Young, senior manager of free expression and education at PEN America, described it as “almost an apocalyptic bill for higher education,” one that is “orders of magnitude worse than anything we’ve seen, either in the recent or the distant past.”
Echoing Orban, House Bill 999 bars Florida’s public colleges and universities from offering gender studies majors or minors, as well as majors or minors in critical race theory or “intersectionality,” or in any subject that “engenders beliefs” in those concepts. The bill prohibits the promotion or support of any campus activities that “espouse diversity, equity and inclusion or critical race theory rhetoric.” This goes far beyond simply ending D.E.I. programming, and could make many campus speakers, as well as student organizations like Black student unions, verboten.
There’s more. Under House Bill 999, general education core courses couldn’t present a view of American history “contrary to the creation of a new nation based on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence,” creating obvious limits on the teaching of subjects like slavery and the Native American genocide. The bill also says that general education courses shouldn’t be based on “unproven, theoretical or exploratory content,” without defining what that means. “State officials would have unfettered discretion to determine which views are ‘theoretical’ and banned from general education courses,” says a statement by the libertarian-leaning Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
Finally, the bill centralizes political control over hiring by allowing faculty to be cut out of the process. Right now, some boards of trustees have the power to veto hiring recommendations made by faculty and administrators, though Young says they rarely use it. Under House Bill 999, rather than an up-or-down vote on candidates vetted by university bodies, trustees could just hire whomever they want. “They don’t even have to hire someone who applied through the regular process,” said Young. “They can just say, ‘Here’s my friend Joe, he’s going to be the new history professor.’”
This would give DeSantis’s cronies enormous power over who can teach in Florida’s colleges and universities. Last month, I wrote about the governor’s campaign to transform the New College of Florida, a progressive public institution, into a bastion of conservatism. At the time, some faculty members suspected that DeSantis’s new trustees might find their grandiose plans stymied by bureaucratic obstacles. Young believes that House Bill 999 would sweep many of those obstacles away.
The bill, of course, is only one part of DeSantis’s culture war. His administration has already limited what can be taught to K-12 students about race, sex and gender. (Some teachers removed all books from their classroom shelves while they waited for them to be reviewed for forbidden content.) When Disney spoke out against one of DeSantis’s education measures, the governor punished the corporation. And he is pushing legislation taking aim at the news media by making it easier for people — especially those accused of racial or gender discrimination — to sue for defamation.
Last year, a court blocked parts of DeSantis’s “Stop W.O.K.E” act, a ban on critical race theory that a federal judge called “positively dystopian.” In the likely event that House Bill 999 passes, the courts may block it as well. But the governor, a front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, has made his political program very clear.
“DeSantis seems to be putting into practice some of the political lessons Orban has to teach the American Right,” Rod Dreher, an American conservative living in Budapest, recently wrote with admiration. If you want to see where this leads, Hungary has a lot to teach us.
By Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times
Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.
In 2017, the government of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban passed a law intended to drive Central European University, a prestigious school founded by a Hungarian refugee, George Soros, out of the country. At the time, this was shocking; as many as 80,000 protesters rallied in Budapest and intellectuals worldwide rushed to declare their solidarity with the demonstrators. “The fate of the university was a test of whether liberalism had the tactical savvy and emotional fortitude to beat back its new ideological foe,” wrote Franklin Foer in The Atlantic.
Liberalism, sadly, did not: The university was forced to move to Vienna, part of Orban’s lamentably successful campaign to dismantle Hungary’s liberal democracy.
That campaign has included ever-greater ideological control over education, most intensely in grade school, but also in colleges and universities. Following a landslide 2018 re-election victory that Orban saw as a “mandate to build a new era,” his government banned public funding for gender studies courses. “The Hungarian government is of the clear view that people are born either men or women,” said his chief of staff. In 2021, Orban extended political command over Hungarian universities by putting some schools under the authority of “public trusts” full of regime allies.
Many on the American right admire the way Orban uses the power of the state against cultural liberalism, but few are imitating him as faithfully as the Florida governor and likely Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis. Last week, one of DeSantis’s legislative allies filed House Bill 999, which would, as The Tampa Bay Times reported, turn many of DeSantis’s “wide-ranging ideas on higher education into law.” Even by DeSantis’s standards, it is a shocking piece of legislation that takes a sledgehammer to academic freedom. Jeremy Young, senior manager of free expression and education at PEN America, described it as “almost an apocalyptic bill for higher education,” one that is “orders of magnitude worse than anything we’ve seen, either in the recent or the distant past.”
Echoing Orban, House Bill 999 bars Florida’s public colleges and universities from offering gender studies majors or minors, as well as majors or minors in critical race theory or “intersectionality,” or in any subject that “engenders beliefs” in those concepts. The bill prohibits the promotion or support of any campus activities that “espouse diversity, equity and inclusion or critical race theory rhetoric.” This goes far beyond simply ending D.E.I. programming, and could make many campus speakers, as well as student organizations like Black student unions, verboten.
There’s more. Under House Bill 999, general education core courses couldn’t present a view of American history “contrary to the creation of a new nation based on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence,” creating obvious limits on the teaching of subjects like slavery and the Native American genocide. The bill also says that general education courses shouldn’t be based on “unproven, theoretical or exploratory content,” without defining what that means. “State officials would have unfettered discretion to determine which views are ‘theoretical’ and banned from general education courses,” says a statement by the libertarian-leaning Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
Finally, the bill centralizes political control over hiring by allowing faculty to be cut out of the process. Right now, some boards of trustees have the power to veto hiring recommendations made by faculty and administrators, though Young says they rarely use it. Under House Bill 999, rather than an up-or-down vote on candidates vetted by university bodies, trustees could just hire whomever they want. “They don’t even have to hire someone who applied through the regular process,” said Young. “They can just say, ‘Here’s my friend Joe, he’s going to be the new history professor.’”
This would give DeSantis’s cronies enormous power over who can teach in Florida’s colleges and universities. Last month, I wrote about the governor’s campaign to transform the New College of Florida, a progressive public institution, into a bastion of conservatism. At the time, some faculty members suspected that DeSantis’s new trustees might find their grandiose plans stymied by bureaucratic obstacles. Young believes that House Bill 999 would sweep many of those obstacles away.
The bill, of course, is only one part of DeSantis’s culture war. His administration has already limited what can be taught to K-12 students about race, sex and gender. (Some teachers removed all books from their classroom shelves while they waited for them to be reviewed for forbidden content.) When Disney spoke out against one of DeSantis’s education measures, the governor punished the corporation. And he is pushing legislation taking aim at the news media by making it easier for people — especially those accused of racial or gender discrimination — to sue for defamation.
Last year, a court blocked parts of DeSantis’s “Stop W.O.K.E” act, a ban on critical race theory that a federal judge called “positively dystopian.” In the likely event that House Bill 999 passes, the courts may block it as well. But the governor, a front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, has made his political program very clear.
“DeSantis seems to be putting into practice some of the political lessons Orban has to teach the American Right,” Rod Dreher, an American conservative living in Budapest, recently wrote with admiration. If you want to see where this leads, Hungary has a lot to teach us.
RON DESANTIS SHOWS HOW NOT TO RUN AN EDUCATION SYSTEM
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
It’s no coincidence that Republican governors who have weaponized government against vulnerable populations represent states that are spectacularly failing their residents on a wide range of issues. There’s no better illustration than Ron DeSantis’s war on education.
The Florida governor seems to view schools as the battleground for his war on inclusivity and truth. Whether it is Desantis’s “don’t say gay” law or his vendetta against African American and gender studies, his obsession with telling teachers what they cannot teach far outweighs his concern for how students are performing.
And as it turns out, that performance is pretty lousy.
While Florida officials — including DeSantis — have boasted about the state’s relatively high proficiency scores among fourth-graders, they have largely ignored how quickly those scores drop as students grow older. As education journalist Billy Townsend writes in an opinion piece for the Tampa Bay Times, “No other state comes close to Florida’s level of consistent fourth to eighth grade performance collapse.”
In the last three state rankings of reading and math proficiency by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (in 2017, 2019 and 2022), Townsend writes, “Florida ranked sixth, fourth and third among states in fourth grade math. In those same years, Florida ranked 33th, 34th and tied for 31st in eighth grade.”
Moreover, the rate at which they drop below their peers in other states is accelerating. Townsend explains, “Florida’s overall average NAEP state rank regression between fourth and eighth grade since 2003 is 17 spots (math) and 18 spots (reading). But since 2015, the averages are 27 spots (math) and 19 spots (reading).” In fact, the deterioration in Florida schools “matches and mostly exceeds the negative impact of COVID” nationwide, he writes.
Florida’s embarrassing drop-off in performance cannot be understood without examining its 20-year-old policy to hold back lower-performing third graders, which means many students take the fourth-grade test when they are at least the age of fifth graders. While it’s unclear how many students are kept back in third grade, Townsend writes that it is “significant,” which likely temporarily boosts the fourth-grade numbers.
But that only delays the inevitable cratering of scores in the eighth grade. Perhaps that is one reason many Florida politicians are shying away from standardized testing.
One likely reason for the shoddy eighth-grade performance: The state ranks 48th in teacher pay, so it’s bound to get rotten results. Right now, few seem motivated to pin down the problem and fix what’s wrong.
And if that isn’t distressing enough, consider what is happening to higher education in Florida. Michael A. MacDowell, president emeritus of Misericordia University, warned in a piece for Florida Today last year that enrollment in the state’s colleges was projected to decline by 5.5 percent in the 2021-2022 academic year.
MacDowell explains, “The implications of declining college enrollments here in Florida and nationally will seriously impact individuals and the economic viability of Florida and the country.” Non-college-educated people tend to be poorer, live shorter lives and pay less taxes. MacDowell also notes that they are “more likely to avail themselves of government subsidies and the wide variety of services that federal, state, and local governments provide” than college-educated Americans.
Yet DeSantis, who has two Ivy League degrees, seems to be cheering for failure. Amid reports in 2021 that men were making up a smaller portion of students attending college, he declared, “I think that is probably a good sign.” So he must be thrilled that Florida’s college enrollment is dropping like a stone.
College administrators are trying to puzzle out why Florida’s decline is so pronounced. It might be an affordability issue. Alternatively, with the White population shrinking in the state, DeSantis’s war on “wokeness” has made college campuses less welcoming to younger, more diverse Floridians — the same people the state needs to educate to maintain a vibrant economy. Whatever the cause, DeSantis doesn’t seem interested in finding a solution.
DeSantis’s bullying of vulnerable populations and pandering to White grievance are morally objectionable and anti-American. But they also come at a price: accelerating the decline of the state’s education system. Do we really want DeSantis to do for America what he’s done to Florida?
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
It’s no coincidence that Republican governors who have weaponized government against vulnerable populations represent states that are spectacularly failing their residents on a wide range of issues. There’s no better illustration than Ron DeSantis’s war on education.
The Florida governor seems to view schools as the battleground for his war on inclusivity and truth. Whether it is Desantis’s “don’t say gay” law or his vendetta against African American and gender studies, his obsession with telling teachers what they cannot teach far outweighs his concern for how students are performing.
And as it turns out, that performance is pretty lousy.
While Florida officials — including DeSantis — have boasted about the state’s relatively high proficiency scores among fourth-graders, they have largely ignored how quickly those scores drop as students grow older. As education journalist Billy Townsend writes in an opinion piece for the Tampa Bay Times, “No other state comes close to Florida’s level of consistent fourth to eighth grade performance collapse.”
In the last three state rankings of reading and math proficiency by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (in 2017, 2019 and 2022), Townsend writes, “Florida ranked sixth, fourth and third among states in fourth grade math. In those same years, Florida ranked 33th, 34th and tied for 31st in eighth grade.”
Moreover, the rate at which they drop below their peers in other states is accelerating. Townsend explains, “Florida’s overall average NAEP state rank regression between fourth and eighth grade since 2003 is 17 spots (math) and 18 spots (reading). But since 2015, the averages are 27 spots (math) and 19 spots (reading).” In fact, the deterioration in Florida schools “matches and mostly exceeds the negative impact of COVID” nationwide, he writes.
Florida’s embarrassing drop-off in performance cannot be understood without examining its 20-year-old policy to hold back lower-performing third graders, which means many students take the fourth-grade test when they are at least the age of fifth graders. While it’s unclear how many students are kept back in third grade, Townsend writes that it is “significant,” which likely temporarily boosts the fourth-grade numbers.
But that only delays the inevitable cratering of scores in the eighth grade. Perhaps that is one reason many Florida politicians are shying away from standardized testing.
One likely reason for the shoddy eighth-grade performance: The state ranks 48th in teacher pay, so it’s bound to get rotten results. Right now, few seem motivated to pin down the problem and fix what’s wrong.
And if that isn’t distressing enough, consider what is happening to higher education in Florida. Michael A. MacDowell, president emeritus of Misericordia University, warned in a piece for Florida Today last year that enrollment in the state’s colleges was projected to decline by 5.5 percent in the 2021-2022 academic year.
MacDowell explains, “The implications of declining college enrollments here in Florida and nationally will seriously impact individuals and the economic viability of Florida and the country.” Non-college-educated people tend to be poorer, live shorter lives and pay less taxes. MacDowell also notes that they are “more likely to avail themselves of government subsidies and the wide variety of services that federal, state, and local governments provide” than college-educated Americans.
Yet DeSantis, who has two Ivy League degrees, seems to be cheering for failure. Amid reports in 2021 that men were making up a smaller portion of students attending college, he declared, “I think that is probably a good sign.” So he must be thrilled that Florida’s college enrollment is dropping like a stone.
College administrators are trying to puzzle out why Florida’s decline is so pronounced. It might be an affordability issue. Alternatively, with the White population shrinking in the state, DeSantis’s war on “wokeness” has made college campuses less welcoming to younger, more diverse Floridians — the same people the state needs to educate to maintain a vibrant economy. Whatever the cause, DeSantis doesn’t seem interested in finding a solution.
DeSantis’s bullying of vulnerable populations and pandering to White grievance are morally objectionable and anti-American. But they also come at a price: accelerating the decline of the state’s education system. Do we really want DeSantis to do for America what he’s done to Florida?
CONSERVATIVES FACE A RUDE FISCAL AWOKENING
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
The Republican response to President Biden’s suggestion that they want to cut Medicare and Social Security has been basically that of the Monty Python knights to the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog: “Run away, run away!” But many in the party still appear to hope that they can make big spending cuts without hurting anyone they care about.
Many House Republicans are reportedly listening to Russell Vought, Donald Trump’s former budget director, who has a new think tank and has been circulating a budget proposal titled “A Commitment to End Woke and Weaponized Government,” which purports to show a way to balance the budget without touching Medicare and Social Security. The document uses the word “woke” 77 times, and — weirdly for a fiscal blueprint — also manages to mention critical race theory 16 times.
Anyway, the proposal relies in part on magical thinking — the assertion that conservative economic policies will cause a burst of economic growth that in turn increases tax receipts. Such claims have, of course, never — and I mean never — worked in practice. But it’s difficult to get politicians to understand something when their careers depend on their not understanding it.
More interesting, however, is the idea that we can achieve major spending cuts by taking on wokeness. What this means in practice is huge cuts to means-tested social insurance programs: Medicaid, Affordable Care Act subsidies and food stamps (or, to use the official term, SNAP, for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program).
So now we know what many conservatives mean by being woke: It means showing any concern for, and offering any help to, Americans who are victims of adverse circumstances.
But if Republicans get anywhere close to carrying out the ideas in Vought’s blueprint, they’re going to get an education in both political and economic reality. The beneficiaries of the programs they want to gut aren’t whom they imagine, and the effects of slashing these programs would be far worse than they realize.
What’s going on in proposals like Vought’s, I believe, is that many conservatives are still stuck in a vision of American society that’s many decades out of date. (I keep thinking about the Florida officials who wanted to know whether the Advanced Placement course in African American history was “trying to advance Black Panther thinking.”) When they hear about means-tested programs, they think “welfare,” and when they think about welfare, they imagine that the beneficiaries are inner-city Black people.
In modern America, however, some of the biggest beneficiaries of means-tested programs are rural white people — who also happen to be the core of the Republican base.
Consider Owsley County, Ky. Eastern Kentucky is at the epicenter of the “Eastern Heartland,” a region that has been left stranded by the rise of the knowledge economy and the migration of jobs to highly educated metropolitan areas. The county is almost entirely non-Hispanic white; 88 percent of its voters supported Trump in 2020.
And 52 percent of its population is covered by Medicaid, while more than 40 percent are SNAP recipients.
Realities like this may explain why Medicaid appears to be highly popular, even among Republicans, and why large majorities of voters in states that haven’t yet expanded Medicaid appear to favor expansion. It’s true that politicians like Ron DeSantis who continue to block expansion haven’t paid any obvious political price. But as we saw in the political backlash against Trump’s attempt to repeal Obamacare, there’s a big difference between obstructing an expansion of social insurance and taking away benefits that have become an integral part of people’s lives.
Furthermore, although it may not matter much for the politics, it’s important to be aware that “woke” social insurance programs almost surely have important benefits beyond the financial support they provide.
First, the beneficiaries of these programs are disproportionately children. Medicaid covers 39 percent of all American children under 18; in West Virginia, another almost all-white and very Trumpy part of the Eastern Heartland, the number is 46 percent. More than 65 percent of SNAP recipients are families with children.
Why does this matter? Partly for moral reasons. Even if you’re one of those people who blame the poor for their own plight, children didn’t choose to be born into low-income households, so why should they be the prime targets of fiscal pain?
There are also practical reasons to provide aid to children, because today’s children are tomorrow’s adults — and they’ll be more productive adults if they have adequate nutrition and health care in their formative years.
This isn’t a speculative assertion. Both SNAP and Medicaid were rolled out gradually across the United States, creating a series of “natural experiments” — situations in which some children had early access to these programs and some otherwise similar children didn’t. And the evidence is clear: Childhood safety net programs lead to improved outcomes in adulthood, including better health and greater economic self-sufficiency.
Actually, the evidence for long-run economic payoffs to investing in children is a lot more solid than the evidence for payoffs to investing in infrastructure, even though the latter has bipartisan support while the former doesn’t.
So if you’re concerned about America’s future, which advocates of big budget cuts claim to be, slashing benefits for children is a really bad way to address your concerns.
And there’s another benefit to Medicaid, in particular: It helps keep rural hospitals alive. America has a growing crisis in simple availability of medical care in rural areas, presumably tied to the growing geographic divergence that has stranded places like eastern Kentucky. But the crisis is significantly worse in states that haven’t expanded Medicaid. That is, Medicaid doesn’t just help its direct recipients; it helps anyone seeking medical care, by helping to keep hospitals afloat.
Now think about what would happen if Congress slashed overall Medicaid funding. One likely result is that the rural-hospital crisis would go national.
So conservatives who think that targeting “woke” spending provides an easy way out of their dilemma — they want to shrink the government, but the big-money government programs are highly popular — are deluding themselves. If they get anywhere near actually realizing their plans, they’re going to face a rude awokening.
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
The Republican response to President Biden’s suggestion that they want to cut Medicare and Social Security has been basically that of the Monty Python knights to the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog: “Run away, run away!” But many in the party still appear to hope that they can make big spending cuts without hurting anyone they care about.
Many House Republicans are reportedly listening to Russell Vought, Donald Trump’s former budget director, who has a new think tank and has been circulating a budget proposal titled “A Commitment to End Woke and Weaponized Government,” which purports to show a way to balance the budget without touching Medicare and Social Security. The document uses the word “woke” 77 times, and — weirdly for a fiscal blueprint — also manages to mention critical race theory 16 times.
Anyway, the proposal relies in part on magical thinking — the assertion that conservative economic policies will cause a burst of economic growth that in turn increases tax receipts. Such claims have, of course, never — and I mean never — worked in practice. But it’s difficult to get politicians to understand something when their careers depend on their not understanding it.
More interesting, however, is the idea that we can achieve major spending cuts by taking on wokeness. What this means in practice is huge cuts to means-tested social insurance programs: Medicaid, Affordable Care Act subsidies and food stamps (or, to use the official term, SNAP, for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program).
So now we know what many conservatives mean by being woke: It means showing any concern for, and offering any help to, Americans who are victims of adverse circumstances.
But if Republicans get anywhere close to carrying out the ideas in Vought’s blueprint, they’re going to get an education in both political and economic reality. The beneficiaries of the programs they want to gut aren’t whom they imagine, and the effects of slashing these programs would be far worse than they realize.
What’s going on in proposals like Vought’s, I believe, is that many conservatives are still stuck in a vision of American society that’s many decades out of date. (I keep thinking about the Florida officials who wanted to know whether the Advanced Placement course in African American history was “trying to advance Black Panther thinking.”) When they hear about means-tested programs, they think “welfare,” and when they think about welfare, they imagine that the beneficiaries are inner-city Black people.
In modern America, however, some of the biggest beneficiaries of means-tested programs are rural white people — who also happen to be the core of the Republican base.
Consider Owsley County, Ky. Eastern Kentucky is at the epicenter of the “Eastern Heartland,” a region that has been left stranded by the rise of the knowledge economy and the migration of jobs to highly educated metropolitan areas. The county is almost entirely non-Hispanic white; 88 percent of its voters supported Trump in 2020.
And 52 percent of its population is covered by Medicaid, while more than 40 percent are SNAP recipients.
Realities like this may explain why Medicaid appears to be highly popular, even among Republicans, and why large majorities of voters in states that haven’t yet expanded Medicaid appear to favor expansion. It’s true that politicians like Ron DeSantis who continue to block expansion haven’t paid any obvious political price. But as we saw in the political backlash against Trump’s attempt to repeal Obamacare, there’s a big difference between obstructing an expansion of social insurance and taking away benefits that have become an integral part of people’s lives.
Furthermore, although it may not matter much for the politics, it’s important to be aware that “woke” social insurance programs almost surely have important benefits beyond the financial support they provide.
First, the beneficiaries of these programs are disproportionately children. Medicaid covers 39 percent of all American children under 18; in West Virginia, another almost all-white and very Trumpy part of the Eastern Heartland, the number is 46 percent. More than 65 percent of SNAP recipients are families with children.
Why does this matter? Partly for moral reasons. Even if you’re one of those people who blame the poor for their own plight, children didn’t choose to be born into low-income households, so why should they be the prime targets of fiscal pain?
There are also practical reasons to provide aid to children, because today’s children are tomorrow’s adults — and they’ll be more productive adults if they have adequate nutrition and health care in their formative years.
This isn’t a speculative assertion. Both SNAP and Medicaid were rolled out gradually across the United States, creating a series of “natural experiments” — situations in which some children had early access to these programs and some otherwise similar children didn’t. And the evidence is clear: Childhood safety net programs lead to improved outcomes in adulthood, including better health and greater economic self-sufficiency.
Actually, the evidence for long-run economic payoffs to investing in children is a lot more solid than the evidence for payoffs to investing in infrastructure, even though the latter has bipartisan support while the former doesn’t.
So if you’re concerned about America’s future, which advocates of big budget cuts claim to be, slashing benefits for children is a really bad way to address your concerns.
And there’s another benefit to Medicaid, in particular: It helps keep rural hospitals alive. America has a growing crisis in simple availability of medical care in rural areas, presumably tied to the growing geographic divergence that has stranded places like eastern Kentucky. But the crisis is significantly worse in states that haven’t expanded Medicaid. That is, Medicaid doesn’t just help its direct recipients; it helps anyone seeking medical care, by helping to keep hospitals afloat.
Now think about what would happen if Congress slashed overall Medicaid funding. One likely result is that the rural-hospital crisis would go national.
So conservatives who think that targeting “woke” spending provides an easy way out of their dilemma — they want to shrink the government, but the big-money government programs are highly popular — are deluding themselves. If they get anywhere near actually realizing their plans, they’re going to face a rude awokening.
FROM CARTER TO M.T.G.: WHAT A PEACH STATE PLUMMET
By Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
When Jimmy Carter was president, I was a lowly clerk at The Washington Star. I saw him mostly through the eyes of Pat Oliphant, our brilliant, biting cartoonist. As Carter came to be seen as uncool and fumbling, Oliphant drew the president smaller and smaller in relation to his tormentors — including that killer rabbit.
It taught me an early lesson in the brutality of dwindling power.
Four decades later, I went one weekend to interview Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, in Plains, Ga., along with my friend Jerry Rafshoon, who was Carter’s media wizard.
I watched Carter teach Sunday school at the Baptist church his friends started in the 1970s, after his original church refused to integrate. Some in Plains, disdaining his views on integration, tried to boycott his peanut business, but most came back. “I had the best peanuts,” he told Rafshoon.
I sat with the former president as he celebrated his 93rd birthday with a concert; he asked the pianist to play “Imagine.” Wearing jeans and a belt with a big “JC” buckle, he showed me the four-poster walnut bed he slept in with Rosalynn, which he had carved himself.
The man was a marvel. The starchiness and righteousness were still there. He had not mellowed, thank God. He remained, to use the descriptor favored by one of his sons, intense. He still felt the sting of being dissed and held at a distance by his successors Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
As a postpresident, Carter’s decency and honesty shone. Unlike Clinton and Obama, he didn’t go Hollywood. Through the Carter Center, he worked tirelessly to eradicate diseases like Guinea worm and supervise elections in more than 100 countries.
He cared so passionately about peace that he even offered to go on a mission for a Republican president with very different values, Donald Trump, to talk to Kim Jong-un in North Korea.
Carter cared about building — furniture and relationships. The nasty new face of Georgia politics cares about dividing.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene followed up her furry catcalls to President Biden during the State of the Union by proposing secession.
“We need a national divorce,” she tweeted on Presidents’ Day. “We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government. Everyone I talk to says this. From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrat’s traitorous America Last policies, we are done.”
Georgia is purplish now, with two Democratic senators, as well as a governor and secretary of state willing to stand up to the Trump election lies that Greene helps spread. So it’s not clear if some states would have to be — what’s that word again? — segregated into blue and red bastions.
Georgians could be proud of Carter, who worked prodigiously to bring peace to the Middle East. Now they have a congresswoman, a creepy confidante of Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who talked gibberish about Jewish space lasers and called A.O.C. and the Squad the “Jihad Squad.” Greene said Black people “are held slaves to the Democratic Party” and labeled Black Lives Matter “the most powerful domestic terrorist organization within inside the United States.”
Carter, a brainiac, is a former nuclear engineer with a soaring I.Q. Greene, a maniac, ranted to Tucker Carlson on Thursday about “this war against Russia in Ukraine.”
When Carter became governor in 1971, many hoped we had begun to move past the kind of hatred and racial struggles that defined the South in the 1950s and ’60s. . He placed Martin Luther King Jr.’s portrait in the State Capitol and said in his inaugural speech: “I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over.”
Time magazine hailed the New South on its cover, saying Carter had triumphed over the South’s “demagogic past” and Confederate ghosts. Now, thanks to the likes of Trump and Greene, we’re back in the toxic soup.
“Marjorie Taylor Greene is following in the footsteps of racist old bigots like Lester Maddox and George Wallace,” Rafshoon said.
Greene is the apotheosis of those who love hating so much, they no longer have any interest in collaborating for the good of the country and the world. Carter is the apotheosis of the mantra “We’re better than this.”
“Jimmy Carter represents all that is good and decent in public life,” said Jonathan Alter, the author of “His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life.” “And Marjorie Taylor Greene represents all that is sinister and despicable in public life.”
Alter has been fielding calls from around the world from people writing stories about Carter since the 98-year-old started hospice a week ago. (Those who know Carter joke that he’s so competitive, he has no doubt asked his doctor the record for hospice care, so he can break it and add to his list of accomplishments.) He wanted to be at home with his wife of 76 years, Rosie, as he calls her. The two were introduced when Carter was a toddler by his mother, Miss Lillian, a nurse, a couple of days after she delivered Rosalynn, which sort of makes them sweethearts for 95 years.
“He’s en route to becoming an American Gandhi,” Alter said. “He went from obscurity and zero percent in the polls to lead an epic American life by offering a positive, inspirational message.” A message that is a rebuke, Alter said, “to what is twisted and wrong about MAGA America.”
So who do we want to be? Marjorie Taylor Greene or Jimmy Carter? Destroyers or builders?
By Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
When Jimmy Carter was president, I was a lowly clerk at The Washington Star. I saw him mostly through the eyes of Pat Oliphant, our brilliant, biting cartoonist. As Carter came to be seen as uncool and fumbling, Oliphant drew the president smaller and smaller in relation to his tormentors — including that killer rabbit.
It taught me an early lesson in the brutality of dwindling power.
Four decades later, I went one weekend to interview Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, in Plains, Ga., along with my friend Jerry Rafshoon, who was Carter’s media wizard.
I watched Carter teach Sunday school at the Baptist church his friends started in the 1970s, after his original church refused to integrate. Some in Plains, disdaining his views on integration, tried to boycott his peanut business, but most came back. “I had the best peanuts,” he told Rafshoon.
I sat with the former president as he celebrated his 93rd birthday with a concert; he asked the pianist to play “Imagine.” Wearing jeans and a belt with a big “JC” buckle, he showed me the four-poster walnut bed he slept in with Rosalynn, which he had carved himself.
The man was a marvel. The starchiness and righteousness were still there. He had not mellowed, thank God. He remained, to use the descriptor favored by one of his sons, intense. He still felt the sting of being dissed and held at a distance by his successors Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
As a postpresident, Carter’s decency and honesty shone. Unlike Clinton and Obama, he didn’t go Hollywood. Through the Carter Center, he worked tirelessly to eradicate diseases like Guinea worm and supervise elections in more than 100 countries.
He cared so passionately about peace that he even offered to go on a mission for a Republican president with very different values, Donald Trump, to talk to Kim Jong-un in North Korea.
Carter cared about building — furniture and relationships. The nasty new face of Georgia politics cares about dividing.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene followed up her furry catcalls to President Biden during the State of the Union by proposing secession.
“We need a national divorce,” she tweeted on Presidents’ Day. “We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government. Everyone I talk to says this. From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrat’s traitorous America Last policies, we are done.”
Georgia is purplish now, with two Democratic senators, as well as a governor and secretary of state willing to stand up to the Trump election lies that Greene helps spread. So it’s not clear if some states would have to be — what’s that word again? — segregated into blue and red bastions.
Georgians could be proud of Carter, who worked prodigiously to bring peace to the Middle East. Now they have a congresswoman, a creepy confidante of Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who talked gibberish about Jewish space lasers and called A.O.C. and the Squad the “Jihad Squad.” Greene said Black people “are held slaves to the Democratic Party” and labeled Black Lives Matter “the most powerful domestic terrorist organization within inside the United States.”
Carter, a brainiac, is a former nuclear engineer with a soaring I.Q. Greene, a maniac, ranted to Tucker Carlson on Thursday about “this war against Russia in Ukraine.”
When Carter became governor in 1971, many hoped we had begun to move past the kind of hatred and racial struggles that defined the South in the 1950s and ’60s. . He placed Martin Luther King Jr.’s portrait in the State Capitol and said in his inaugural speech: “I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over.”
Time magazine hailed the New South on its cover, saying Carter had triumphed over the South’s “demagogic past” and Confederate ghosts. Now, thanks to the likes of Trump and Greene, we’re back in the toxic soup.
“Marjorie Taylor Greene is following in the footsteps of racist old bigots like Lester Maddox and George Wallace,” Rafshoon said.
Greene is the apotheosis of those who love hating so much, they no longer have any interest in collaborating for the good of the country and the world. Carter is the apotheosis of the mantra “We’re better than this.”
“Jimmy Carter represents all that is good and decent in public life,” said Jonathan Alter, the author of “His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life.” “And Marjorie Taylor Greene represents all that is sinister and despicable in public life.”
Alter has been fielding calls from around the world from people writing stories about Carter since the 98-year-old started hospice a week ago. (Those who know Carter joke that he’s so competitive, he has no doubt asked his doctor the record for hospice care, so he can break it and add to his list of accomplishments.) He wanted to be at home with his wife of 76 years, Rosie, as he calls her. The two were introduced when Carter was a toddler by his mother, Miss Lillian, a nurse, a couple of days after she delivered Rosalynn, which sort of makes them sweethearts for 95 years.
“He’s en route to becoming an American Gandhi,” Alter said. “He went from obscurity and zero percent in the polls to lead an epic American life by offering a positive, inspirational message.” A message that is a rebuke, Alter said, “to what is twisted and wrong about MAGA America.”
So who do we want to be? Marjorie Taylor Greene or Jimmy Carter? Destroyers or builders?
PUTIN AND THE RIGHT’S TOUGH-GUY PROBLEM
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
A democracy — imperfect, as all nations are, but aspiring to be part of the free world — is invaded by its much larger neighbor, a vicious dictatorship that commits mass atrocities. Defying the odds, the democracy beats back an attack most people expected to succeed in a matter of days, then holds the line and even regains ground over the months of brutal fighting that follow.
How can any American, a citizen of a nation that holds itself up as a beacon of freedom, not be rooting for Ukraine in this war?
Yet there are significant factions in U.S. politics — a small group on the left, a much more significant bloc on the right — that not only oppose Western support for Ukraine but also clearly want to see Russia win. And my question, on the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion, is what lies behind right-wing support for Vladimir Putin?
Now, Putin isn’t the only foreign autocrat America’s right likes. Viktor Orban of Hungary has become a conservative icon, a featured speaker at meetings of the Conservative Political Action Committee, which even held one of its conferences in Budapest.
But conservative admiration for Orban, I’m sorry to say, makes rational sense, given the right’s goals. If you want your nation to become a bastion of white nationalism and social illiberalism, a democracy on paper but a one-party state in practice, Orban’s transformation of Hungary offers a road map. And that is, of course, what much of the modern Republican Party wants.
Yet Orban is not, as far as I can tell, the subject of a right-wing cult of personality; how many American conservatives even know what he looks like?
Putin, by contrast, very much is the subject of a personality cult not just in Russia but also on the American right and has been for years. And it’s a fairly creepy cult at that. For example, back in 2014 a National Review columnist contrasted Putin’s bare-chested horseback riding with President Barack Obama’s “metrosexual golf get-ups.”
Until the invasion of Ukraine, Putinphilia also went hand in hand with extravagant praise for Russia’s supposed military effectiveness. Most famously, in 2021 Ted Cruz circulated a video contrasting a Russian military recruitment ad featuring a muscular man doing manly stuff with a U.S. ad highlighting the diversity of Army recruits. “Perhaps a woke, emasculated military isn’t the best idea,” Cruz declared.
What was the basis for this worship of Putinism? I’d argue that many people on the right equate being powerful with being a swaggering tough guy and sneer at anything — like intellectual openness and respect for diversity — that might interfere with the swagger. Putin was their idea of what a powerful man should look like, and Russia, with its muscleman military vision, their idea of a powerful country.
It should have been obvious from the beginning that this worldview was all wrong. National power in the modern world rests mainly on economic strength and technological capacity, not military prowess.
But then came the invasion, and it turned out that Putin’s not-woke, unemasculated Russia isn’t even very good at waging war.
Why has Russia’s military failed so spectacularly? Because modern wars aren’t won by strutting guys flexing their biceps. They’re won mainly through logistics, technology and intelligence (in both the military and the ordinary senses) — things, it turns out, that Russia does badly and Ukraine does surprisingly well. (It’s not just Western weapons, although these have been awesomely effective; the Ukrainians have also shown a real talent for MacGyvering solutions to their military needs.)
Just to be clear, wars are still hell and can’t be won, even with superior weapons, without immense courage and endurance. But these are also qualities Ukrainians — men and women — turn out to have in remarkable abundance.
Speaking of courage, am I the only one struck by the contrast between President Biden’s daring visit to Kyiv and the way President Donald Trump retreated to the White House bunker in the face of unarmed protesters in Lafayette Park?
But back to the war. The key to understanding right-wingers’ growing Ukraine rage is that Russia’s failures don’t just show that a leader they idolized has feet of clay. They also show that their whole tough-guy view about the nature of power is wrong. And they’re having a hard time coping.
This explains why leading Putinists in the United States keep insisting that Ukraine is actually losing. Putin is “winning the war in Ukraine,” declared Tucker Carlson on Aug. 29, just days before several Ukrainian victories. There’s still a lot of hype about a huge Russian offensive this winter; the truth, however, is that this offensive is already underway, but as one Ukrainian official put it, it has achieved so little “that not everyone even sees it.”
None of this means that Russia can’t eventually conquer Ukraine. If it does, however, it will, in part, be because America’s Putin fans force a cutoff of crucial aid. And if this happens, it will be because the U.S. right can’t stand the idea of a world in which woke doesn’t mean weak and men who pose as tough guys are actually losers.
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
A democracy — imperfect, as all nations are, but aspiring to be part of the free world — is invaded by its much larger neighbor, a vicious dictatorship that commits mass atrocities. Defying the odds, the democracy beats back an attack most people expected to succeed in a matter of days, then holds the line and even regains ground over the months of brutal fighting that follow.
How can any American, a citizen of a nation that holds itself up as a beacon of freedom, not be rooting for Ukraine in this war?
Yet there are significant factions in U.S. politics — a small group on the left, a much more significant bloc on the right — that not only oppose Western support for Ukraine but also clearly want to see Russia win. And my question, on the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion, is what lies behind right-wing support for Vladimir Putin?
Now, Putin isn’t the only foreign autocrat America’s right likes. Viktor Orban of Hungary has become a conservative icon, a featured speaker at meetings of the Conservative Political Action Committee, which even held one of its conferences in Budapest.
But conservative admiration for Orban, I’m sorry to say, makes rational sense, given the right’s goals. If you want your nation to become a bastion of white nationalism and social illiberalism, a democracy on paper but a one-party state in practice, Orban’s transformation of Hungary offers a road map. And that is, of course, what much of the modern Republican Party wants.
Yet Orban is not, as far as I can tell, the subject of a right-wing cult of personality; how many American conservatives even know what he looks like?
Putin, by contrast, very much is the subject of a personality cult not just in Russia but also on the American right and has been for years. And it’s a fairly creepy cult at that. For example, back in 2014 a National Review columnist contrasted Putin’s bare-chested horseback riding with President Barack Obama’s “metrosexual golf get-ups.”
Until the invasion of Ukraine, Putinphilia also went hand in hand with extravagant praise for Russia’s supposed military effectiveness. Most famously, in 2021 Ted Cruz circulated a video contrasting a Russian military recruitment ad featuring a muscular man doing manly stuff with a U.S. ad highlighting the diversity of Army recruits. “Perhaps a woke, emasculated military isn’t the best idea,” Cruz declared.
What was the basis for this worship of Putinism? I’d argue that many people on the right equate being powerful with being a swaggering tough guy and sneer at anything — like intellectual openness and respect for diversity — that might interfere with the swagger. Putin was their idea of what a powerful man should look like, and Russia, with its muscleman military vision, their idea of a powerful country.
It should have been obvious from the beginning that this worldview was all wrong. National power in the modern world rests mainly on economic strength and technological capacity, not military prowess.
But then came the invasion, and it turned out that Putin’s not-woke, unemasculated Russia isn’t even very good at waging war.
Why has Russia’s military failed so spectacularly? Because modern wars aren’t won by strutting guys flexing their biceps. They’re won mainly through logistics, technology and intelligence (in both the military and the ordinary senses) — things, it turns out, that Russia does badly and Ukraine does surprisingly well. (It’s not just Western weapons, although these have been awesomely effective; the Ukrainians have also shown a real talent for MacGyvering solutions to their military needs.)
Just to be clear, wars are still hell and can’t be won, even with superior weapons, without immense courage and endurance. But these are also qualities Ukrainians — men and women — turn out to have in remarkable abundance.
Speaking of courage, am I the only one struck by the contrast between President Biden’s daring visit to Kyiv and the way President Donald Trump retreated to the White House bunker in the face of unarmed protesters in Lafayette Park?
But back to the war. The key to understanding right-wingers’ growing Ukraine rage is that Russia’s failures don’t just show that a leader they idolized has feet of clay. They also show that their whole tough-guy view about the nature of power is wrong. And they’re having a hard time coping.
This explains why leading Putinists in the United States keep insisting that Ukraine is actually losing. Putin is “winning the war in Ukraine,” declared Tucker Carlson on Aug. 29, just days before several Ukrainian victories. There’s still a lot of hype about a huge Russian offensive this winter; the truth, however, is that this offensive is already underway, but as one Ukrainian official put it, it has achieved so little “that not everyone even sees it.”
None of this means that Russia can’t eventually conquer Ukraine. If it does, however, it will, in part, be because America’s Putin fans force a cutoff of crucial aid. And if this happens, it will be because the U.S. right can’t stand the idea of a world in which woke doesn’t mean weak and men who pose as tough guys are actually losers.
THERE IS ONLY ONE WAY TO REIN IN REPUBLICAN JUDGES: SHAMING THEM.
By Perry Bacon Jr., The Washington Post
The confirmation of several of President Biden’s nominees for district and circuit judgeships has now put the total number of federal judges that he has appointed at over 100. Under Biden, the Senate is confirming judges at a faster pace than it did under Presidents Donald Trump or Barack Obama, an achievement Democratic officials are celebrating.
But these appointments don’t come close to addressing the problem: America’s judiciary is dominated by conservatives issuing an endless stream of rulings that help corporations, the rich and the bigoted while hurting working-class people, women and minorities in particular. Biden’s lower-court appointees must follow the precedents set by the Republican-dominated U.S. Supreme Court or their rulings will be overturned. Meanwhile, the high court usually allows very-right-wing opinions issued by lower-level conservative judges to remain in place.
So at least in the short term, there is only one real option to rein in America’s overly conservative judiciary: shame.
Democratic politicians, left-leaning activist groups, newspaper editorial boards and other influential people and institutions need to start relentlessly blasting Republican-appointed judges. A sustained campaign of condemnation isn’t going to push these judges to write liberal opinions, but it could chasten them toward more moderate ones.
There are a ton of people and institutions looking to rein in Republican-appointed judges. But many proposed reforms, while useful, are too small-bore: a code of ethics that Supreme Court justices must follow; more appointments of progressives to lower-court judgeships; limitations on the Supreme Court’s use of its so-called shadow docket. More ambitious ideas have no chance of being adopted right now: term limits for Supreme Court justices; “court-packing” that increases the number of left-leaning justices; limitations on federal judges’ ability to invalidate legislation.
With little ability to formally limit the power of conservative judges, there are only informal means left.
So when lower-court Republican-appointed judges suspended Biden’s student loan cancellation policy, the president should have immediately brought some people struggling with college debt to the White House for a news conference where both he and the college debtors would blast those judges by name (Ralph R. Erickson, L. Steven Grasz, Mark T. Pittman and Bobby E. Shepherd, all appointed by Republican presidents).
He should do the same to the Trump appointees (Kurt D. Engelhardt, Don R. Willett, Cory T. Wilson) who last year issued a ruling, which is being appealed, that would cripple the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the three judges who recently decided that people under restraining orders because of domestic violence accusations should have the right to buy guns. (The three judges include Wilson and Trump appointees James Ho and Reagan-appointee Edith Jones.)
There will be arguments that such high-profile criticism would put judges in physical danger. I obviously oppose violence. But judges are powerful figures setting policy — they should get as much scrutiny as elected officials. No one argues that Biden is imperiling the life of Florida Republican Rick Scott, even though the president has repeatedly named Scott while criticizing the senator’s Social Security proposals.
While the president should highlight the worst rulings, he doesn’t have time to attack them all. So there should be a high-profile Democratic politician in a safe seat (perhaps House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York) who each week holds a news conference to slam the most extreme rulings by GOP judges.
And Senate Democrats should hold hearings on the judiciary in the mold of the Jan. 6 commission, with compelling witnesses and videos. Republican-appointed judges have been just as damaging to American democracy as Trump has been (if not more so), just in a less obvious way. That needs to be explained to the American public.
The criticism of these judges should be plain-spoken. We should end the veneer that judges are somehow separate from partisanship. So it’s important to say, “Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., a Republican,” not “conservative-leaning Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.” or “Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., a Republican appointee. (This is an idea from legal writer Jay Willis of the website Balls and Strikes.)
We should describe the impact of Republican judicial rulings in straightforward terms. For example, “The Republican judges are making it easier to discriminate against gay and lesbian people” (what the judges describe as protecting religious freedom).
And there is no need to wait until the rulings are issued to start the criticism. The Supreme Court seems poised to rule against affirmative action policies this summer. So, Democratic politicians should be holding events at college campuses, with a message along the lines of “I want this to be a diverse school, with sufficient numbers of Black and Latino students. Samuel A. Alito Jr., Amy Coney Barrett, Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh, John G. Roberts Jr. and Clarence Thomas, why don’t you want that, too? What’s wrong with you?”
There is a group of judges, mostly appointed by Trump, who regularly issue extreme rulings.
For example, conservative activists constantly steer cases to Texas-based Trump appointee Matthew Kacsmaryk, knowing he will always take the Republican position. People on the left should make judges such as Kacsmaryk as infamous as, say, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R). After all, these judges have way more power than the Georgia congresswoman does.
These tactics would (1) drive news coverage and therefore public attention to the right-wing tendencies of Republican-appointed judges; (2) bring particular focus to the worst rulings and judges; (3) establish a clear case for judicial reform.
But the real goal is to make Republican judges less conservative in their rulings right now. Why would that happen? Because many judges care deeply about their reputations. They want to be seen more as umpires than politicians. I’m not guessing — several Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices have complained about being cast as Republican partisans.
This kind of shaming has already been shown to work. After intense criticism from liberals about the court’s usage of the shadow docket to issue conservative rulings without even hearing arguments, the court has stopped using the practice as often. Many of the opinions of Kavanaugh, who is now the court’s swing justice, seem almost intentionally written to minimize public blowback. He seems to want to be respected by people across the political spectrum as a fair-minded judge. People on the left need to make clear he won’t get that respect if all he does is issue opinions that align with what the Republican Party wants.
I understand these judges just struck down Roe v. Wade. I am not expecting conservative judges to become moderates. Could this strategy backfire and push them to be even more right-wing? I don’t really find that believable. They just overturned Roe — it’s not clear they can get much worse.
In their thinking about the judiciary, Democrats should be more like Trump. While in office, Trump criticized a ruling he didn’t like by casting the judge who wrote it as an “Obama judge.” Roberts then issued a sanctimonious statement, “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges.”
But at least right now, Trump is right. Roberts and his colleagues are acting like Republicans, not judges — and Democrats should say that loudly and often.
By Perry Bacon Jr., The Washington Post
The confirmation of several of President Biden’s nominees for district and circuit judgeships has now put the total number of federal judges that he has appointed at over 100. Under Biden, the Senate is confirming judges at a faster pace than it did under Presidents Donald Trump or Barack Obama, an achievement Democratic officials are celebrating.
But these appointments don’t come close to addressing the problem: America’s judiciary is dominated by conservatives issuing an endless stream of rulings that help corporations, the rich and the bigoted while hurting working-class people, women and minorities in particular. Biden’s lower-court appointees must follow the precedents set by the Republican-dominated U.S. Supreme Court or their rulings will be overturned. Meanwhile, the high court usually allows very-right-wing opinions issued by lower-level conservative judges to remain in place.
So at least in the short term, there is only one real option to rein in America’s overly conservative judiciary: shame.
Democratic politicians, left-leaning activist groups, newspaper editorial boards and other influential people and institutions need to start relentlessly blasting Republican-appointed judges. A sustained campaign of condemnation isn’t going to push these judges to write liberal opinions, but it could chasten them toward more moderate ones.
There are a ton of people and institutions looking to rein in Republican-appointed judges. But many proposed reforms, while useful, are too small-bore: a code of ethics that Supreme Court justices must follow; more appointments of progressives to lower-court judgeships; limitations on the Supreme Court’s use of its so-called shadow docket. More ambitious ideas have no chance of being adopted right now: term limits for Supreme Court justices; “court-packing” that increases the number of left-leaning justices; limitations on federal judges’ ability to invalidate legislation.
With little ability to formally limit the power of conservative judges, there are only informal means left.
So when lower-court Republican-appointed judges suspended Biden’s student loan cancellation policy, the president should have immediately brought some people struggling with college debt to the White House for a news conference where both he and the college debtors would blast those judges by name (Ralph R. Erickson, L. Steven Grasz, Mark T. Pittman and Bobby E. Shepherd, all appointed by Republican presidents).
He should do the same to the Trump appointees (Kurt D. Engelhardt, Don R. Willett, Cory T. Wilson) who last year issued a ruling, which is being appealed, that would cripple the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the three judges who recently decided that people under restraining orders because of domestic violence accusations should have the right to buy guns. (The three judges include Wilson and Trump appointees James Ho and Reagan-appointee Edith Jones.)
There will be arguments that such high-profile criticism would put judges in physical danger. I obviously oppose violence. But judges are powerful figures setting policy — they should get as much scrutiny as elected officials. No one argues that Biden is imperiling the life of Florida Republican Rick Scott, even though the president has repeatedly named Scott while criticizing the senator’s Social Security proposals.
While the president should highlight the worst rulings, he doesn’t have time to attack them all. So there should be a high-profile Democratic politician in a safe seat (perhaps House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York) who each week holds a news conference to slam the most extreme rulings by GOP judges.
And Senate Democrats should hold hearings on the judiciary in the mold of the Jan. 6 commission, with compelling witnesses and videos. Republican-appointed judges have been just as damaging to American democracy as Trump has been (if not more so), just in a less obvious way. That needs to be explained to the American public.
The criticism of these judges should be plain-spoken. We should end the veneer that judges are somehow separate from partisanship. So it’s important to say, “Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., a Republican,” not “conservative-leaning Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.” or “Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., a Republican appointee. (This is an idea from legal writer Jay Willis of the website Balls and Strikes.)
We should describe the impact of Republican judicial rulings in straightforward terms. For example, “The Republican judges are making it easier to discriminate against gay and lesbian people” (what the judges describe as protecting religious freedom).
And there is no need to wait until the rulings are issued to start the criticism. The Supreme Court seems poised to rule against affirmative action policies this summer. So, Democratic politicians should be holding events at college campuses, with a message along the lines of “I want this to be a diverse school, with sufficient numbers of Black and Latino students. Samuel A. Alito Jr., Amy Coney Barrett, Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh, John G. Roberts Jr. and Clarence Thomas, why don’t you want that, too? What’s wrong with you?”
There is a group of judges, mostly appointed by Trump, who regularly issue extreme rulings.
For example, conservative activists constantly steer cases to Texas-based Trump appointee Matthew Kacsmaryk, knowing he will always take the Republican position. People on the left should make judges such as Kacsmaryk as infamous as, say, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R). After all, these judges have way more power than the Georgia congresswoman does.
These tactics would (1) drive news coverage and therefore public attention to the right-wing tendencies of Republican-appointed judges; (2) bring particular focus to the worst rulings and judges; (3) establish a clear case for judicial reform.
But the real goal is to make Republican judges less conservative in their rulings right now. Why would that happen? Because many judges care deeply about their reputations. They want to be seen more as umpires than politicians. I’m not guessing — several Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices have complained about being cast as Republican partisans.
This kind of shaming has already been shown to work. After intense criticism from liberals about the court’s usage of the shadow docket to issue conservative rulings without even hearing arguments, the court has stopped using the practice as often. Many of the opinions of Kavanaugh, who is now the court’s swing justice, seem almost intentionally written to minimize public blowback. He seems to want to be respected by people across the political spectrum as a fair-minded judge. People on the left need to make clear he won’t get that respect if all he does is issue opinions that align with what the Republican Party wants.
I understand these judges just struck down Roe v. Wade. I am not expecting conservative judges to become moderates. Could this strategy backfire and push them to be even more right-wing? I don’t really find that believable. They just overturned Roe — it’s not clear they can get much worse.
In their thinking about the judiciary, Democrats should be more like Trump. While in office, Trump criticized a ruling he didn’t like by casting the judge who wrote it as an “Obama judge.” Roberts then issued a sanctimonious statement, “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges.”
But at least right now, Trump is right. Roberts and his colleagues are acting like Republicans, not judges — and Democrats should say that loudly and often.
FOX NEWS IS WORSE THAN YOU THOUGHT
By Erik Wemple, The Washington Post
News organizations rarely look good when their internal emails and text messages surface in the public square. A filing Thursday from Dominion Voting Systems in its defamation lawsuit against Fox News is not only no exception, it’s a watershed of journalistic misdeeds.
The network’s prime-time stars — Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity, along with other top names — care about ratings first, second and third, a consideration that eclipses the truth and other principles of journalism. “Sidney Powell is lying,” Carlson wrote on Nov. 16, 2020, to a producer about President Donald Trump’s lawyer, who played a leading role in pushing far-out theories about election theft. The Dominion filing makes clear that the stars and Fox executives knew there was no evidence behind the election-denial lies repeated on the network’s broadcasts — a bombshell that is likely to take Fox years to live down.
“There will be a lot of noise and confusion generated by Dominion and their opportunistic private equity owners,” a Fox News spokesperson said in a statement, “but the core of this case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, which are fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution and protected by New York Times v. Sullivan.”
Even the generous protections of U.S. libel might not save Fox News in this case. “Fox, one of the most powerful media companies in the United States, gave life to a manufactured storyline about election fraud that cast a then-little-known voting machine company called Dominion as the villain,” reads Dominion’s March 2021 complaint. The company argues that Fox News defamed its work across jurisdictions in 28 states in the 2020 elections and is seeking summary judgment from a Delaware court. The programming in question spanned the November 2020 presidential election and the tumult of January 2021, a time when Fox News found itself in an audience dogfight with other conservative cable networks — Newsmax and One America News (OAN) — for pro-Trump viewers eager to hear that their candidate had been cheated out of a second term.
Panic over audience desertion got going early at Fox News, correspondence cited in Thursday’s filing shows. On election night, Fox News was the first news outlet to call Arizona for Democratic nominee Joe Biden, a decision that infuriated the Trump campaign. Disenchantment trickled down to the Trump faithful. “We worked really hard to build what we have,” Carlson wrote to a producer, according to the Dominion filing. “Those f---ers are destroying our credibility. It enrages me.”
A familiar network fault line emerged, as the prime-time opinion stars sought to keep MAGA viewers happy while news-siders provided more fact-based analysis. Bret Baier, anchor of the weeknight program “Special Report,” expressed incredulity that Powell had gone on Lou Dobbs’s evening program three days after the election to discuss a far-out theory on voter fraud. “What is this? Oh man,” Baier asked Jay Wallace, president and executive editor of Fox News Media.
On Nov. 7, Fox News called the race for Biden. That night, top communications official Irena Briganti wrote, “Our viewers left this week after AZ.” And Carlson wrote, “Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience? We’re playing with fire, for real....an alternative like newsmax could be devastating to us.”
Fearing an all-out ratings crisis, Fox News executives “made an explicit decision to push narratives to entice their audience back,” the Dominion filing says. Journalism wasn’t one of those narratives. On Nov. 9, Neil Cavuto, an afternoon host known for his affability and independence, cut away from unsupported remarks by White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany. “Unless she has more details to back that up, I can’t in good countenance continue to show you this,” Cavuto said on air. That moment triggered a notification from an executive at parent company Fox Corp. about the “Brand Threat” from Cavuto’s actions. An email from Fox News Media chief executive Suzanne Scott to other executives following the incident is redacted from the filing.
(Not redacted but notable from the filing? Fox Corp. founder Rupert Murdoch noting the election-fraud lies are “terrible stuff damaging everybody” and that it is “very hard to credibly claim foul everywhere.”)
Collegiality followed journalistic principles out the window on Nov. 12, when reporter Jacqui Heinrich tweeted out a fact check of Trump, who had cited reporting by Hannity and Dobbs (whose eponymous Fox program was canceled in 2021) and mentioned Dominion. Election officials, Heinrich pointed out, claim there was “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” Having spotted Heinrich’s tweet, Carlson told Hannity via text, “Please get her fired. Seriously….What the f---? I’m actually shocked … It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”
Hannity took his concerns to Scott, who apprised other colleagues: “Sean texted me—he’s standing down on responding but not happy about this and doesn’t understand how this is allowed to happen from anyone in news. She [Heinrich] has serious nerve doing this and if this gets picked up, viewers are going to be further disgusted.”
Think about that statement — the top official at Fox News choosing falsehood over fact, for the sake of ratings. Fox News viewers, the correspondence confirms, get “disgusted” when their favorite network stops feeding them conspiracy theories.
Yes, we know: The internal correspondence and testimony Dominion cites are part of a filing in a defamation case relating to “actual malice,” damages and so on. There will be time to evaluate those matters, which are scheduled to go before a jury in mid-April. For the moment, let’s pause on how effectively a well-crafted lawsuit has pierced one of the country’s most powerful, and opaque, media organizations.
Scott, Hannity and Carlson, after all, don’t publish their own messages.
By Erik Wemple, The Washington Post
News organizations rarely look good when their internal emails and text messages surface in the public square. A filing Thursday from Dominion Voting Systems in its defamation lawsuit against Fox News is not only no exception, it’s a watershed of journalistic misdeeds.
The network’s prime-time stars — Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity, along with other top names — care about ratings first, second and third, a consideration that eclipses the truth and other principles of journalism. “Sidney Powell is lying,” Carlson wrote on Nov. 16, 2020, to a producer about President Donald Trump’s lawyer, who played a leading role in pushing far-out theories about election theft. The Dominion filing makes clear that the stars and Fox executives knew there was no evidence behind the election-denial lies repeated on the network’s broadcasts — a bombshell that is likely to take Fox years to live down.
“There will be a lot of noise and confusion generated by Dominion and their opportunistic private equity owners,” a Fox News spokesperson said in a statement, “but the core of this case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, which are fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution and protected by New York Times v. Sullivan.”
Even the generous protections of U.S. libel might not save Fox News in this case. “Fox, one of the most powerful media companies in the United States, gave life to a manufactured storyline about election fraud that cast a then-little-known voting machine company called Dominion as the villain,” reads Dominion’s March 2021 complaint. The company argues that Fox News defamed its work across jurisdictions in 28 states in the 2020 elections and is seeking summary judgment from a Delaware court. The programming in question spanned the November 2020 presidential election and the tumult of January 2021, a time when Fox News found itself in an audience dogfight with other conservative cable networks — Newsmax and One America News (OAN) — for pro-Trump viewers eager to hear that their candidate had been cheated out of a second term.
Panic over audience desertion got going early at Fox News, correspondence cited in Thursday’s filing shows. On election night, Fox News was the first news outlet to call Arizona for Democratic nominee Joe Biden, a decision that infuriated the Trump campaign. Disenchantment trickled down to the Trump faithful. “We worked really hard to build what we have,” Carlson wrote to a producer, according to the Dominion filing. “Those f---ers are destroying our credibility. It enrages me.”
A familiar network fault line emerged, as the prime-time opinion stars sought to keep MAGA viewers happy while news-siders provided more fact-based analysis. Bret Baier, anchor of the weeknight program “Special Report,” expressed incredulity that Powell had gone on Lou Dobbs’s evening program three days after the election to discuss a far-out theory on voter fraud. “What is this? Oh man,” Baier asked Jay Wallace, president and executive editor of Fox News Media.
On Nov. 7, Fox News called the race for Biden. That night, top communications official Irena Briganti wrote, “Our viewers left this week after AZ.” And Carlson wrote, “Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience? We’re playing with fire, for real....an alternative like newsmax could be devastating to us.”
Fearing an all-out ratings crisis, Fox News executives “made an explicit decision to push narratives to entice their audience back,” the Dominion filing says. Journalism wasn’t one of those narratives. On Nov. 9, Neil Cavuto, an afternoon host known for his affability and independence, cut away from unsupported remarks by White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany. “Unless she has more details to back that up, I can’t in good countenance continue to show you this,” Cavuto said on air. That moment triggered a notification from an executive at parent company Fox Corp. about the “Brand Threat” from Cavuto’s actions. An email from Fox News Media chief executive Suzanne Scott to other executives following the incident is redacted from the filing.
(Not redacted but notable from the filing? Fox Corp. founder Rupert Murdoch noting the election-fraud lies are “terrible stuff damaging everybody” and that it is “very hard to credibly claim foul everywhere.”)
Collegiality followed journalistic principles out the window on Nov. 12, when reporter Jacqui Heinrich tweeted out a fact check of Trump, who had cited reporting by Hannity and Dobbs (whose eponymous Fox program was canceled in 2021) and mentioned Dominion. Election officials, Heinrich pointed out, claim there was “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” Having spotted Heinrich’s tweet, Carlson told Hannity via text, “Please get her fired. Seriously….What the f---? I’m actually shocked … It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”
Hannity took his concerns to Scott, who apprised other colleagues: “Sean texted me—he’s standing down on responding but not happy about this and doesn’t understand how this is allowed to happen from anyone in news. She [Heinrich] has serious nerve doing this and if this gets picked up, viewers are going to be further disgusted.”
Think about that statement — the top official at Fox News choosing falsehood over fact, for the sake of ratings. Fox News viewers, the correspondence confirms, get “disgusted” when their favorite network stops feeding them conspiracy theories.
Yes, we know: The internal correspondence and testimony Dominion cites are part of a filing in a defamation case relating to “actual malice,” damages and so on. There will be time to evaluate those matters, which are scheduled to go before a jury in mid-April. For the moment, let’s pause on how effectively a well-crafted lawsuit has pierced one of the country’s most powerful, and opaque, media organizations.
Scott, Hannity and Carlson, after all, don’t publish their own messages.
THERE’S NOTHING FAIR ABOUT REPUBLICANS’ FAIRTAX PROPOSAL
By Natasha Sarin, The Washington Post
Republicans are talking tough on the deficit. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has threatened default unless Democrats come to the negotiating table, proclaiming, “We must return Washington to a basic truth: Debt matters.”
But it’s hard to take Republicans seriously when weeks into the 118th Congress, they’ve already proposed tax policies that would add trillions to the deficit.
Their first bill out of the gate sought to defund the IRS, decreasing the agency’s ability to pursue tax evasion by the wealthy, and is estimated by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to increase the deficit.
For some Republicans, defunding the tax police doesn’t go far enough. Their next proposal, the so-called FairTax, would replace our current tax system with a single, 30 percent sales tax — and eliminate the IRS altogether.
FairTax would add trillions more to the deficit if ever enacted. Although official scorekeepers have not assessed its revenue effects, economist Bill Gale in 2005 estimated a 10-year revenue loss of at least $7 trillion — easily more than $1 trillion per year today.
What explains the constant drumbeat for policies that grow — rather than shrink — the deficit?
For House Republicans, tax policy appears to be less about raising revenue and more about satisfying wealthy donors.
Let’s start with the IRS. The logic is easy to follow: For most Americans earning a paycheck, most of their tax liability is automatically withheld. But wealthy evaders don’t earn their incomes this way and therefore benefit from a system in which the IRS doesn’t have the wherewithal to pursue them. While at the Treasury Department, I worked on the IRS funding provision included in the Inflation Reduction Act. Since it became law, millions of dollars have been poured into anti-IRS campaigns to rescind that funding — and preserve tax cheats’ evasion advantage. That’s why, even though doing so would ultimately expand the deficit, gutting the agency is high on the list of proposed Republican negotiations around the debt ceiling.
FairTax, too, is rooted in the interests of the most privileged. In fact, it is the brainchild of three Houston entrepreneurs — Leo Linbeck Jr., Jack Trotter and Bob McNair, the former owner of the National Football League’s Houston Texans. The trio, who have all now passed away, raised millions in the late 1990s— much of it their own seed funding — to build a grass-roots movement for their policy.
FairTax proponents say it would simplify the system by eliminating income taxes and allowing Americans to keep everything in their paychecks. In reality, replacing the income tax system with a national sales tax shifts the tax burden to lower-income households and benefits higher-income ones.
The economics are simple: Wealthier households spend a smaller share of their income than poorer households do, which means lower- and middle-income taxpayers would take on more of the overall tax burden. If Treasury Department estimates from 2005 — old, but directionally still accurate — reflected the distribution of taxes today, the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers would pay more than twice as much tax this year — roughly an extra $220 billion — under FairTax. The top 1 percent would pay about $320 billion less.
FairTax won’t die, despite its legion of detractors. Since 1999, it has been introduced in every Congress. And although most mainstream Republicans have moved away from public support of FairTax in recent years, it actually has some renewed momentum: It is on track for its first-ever floor vote, has spent weeks atop the list of most viewed bills this Congress, and could well be a campaign issue for Republicans in the 2024 cycle, given that many potential presidential nominees — including Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley and Mike Pence — are past champions.
These proposals illustrate the hypocrisy of House Republicans’ dangerous debt limit tactics.
Reasonable people can disagree with Democrats’ approach to tax policy. But last week, President Biden called for raising hundreds of billions of dollars in new taxes from high-earners and corporations. He has promised a budget that will raise enough to cut the deficit by $2 trillion.
If Republicans truly cared about budget deficits, perhaps they could take a page out of his book: by proposing tax changes that would raise, rather than lose, money.
By Natasha Sarin, The Washington Post
Republicans are talking tough on the deficit. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has threatened default unless Democrats come to the negotiating table, proclaiming, “We must return Washington to a basic truth: Debt matters.”
But it’s hard to take Republicans seriously when weeks into the 118th Congress, they’ve already proposed tax policies that would add trillions to the deficit.
Their first bill out of the gate sought to defund the IRS, decreasing the agency’s ability to pursue tax evasion by the wealthy, and is estimated by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to increase the deficit.
For some Republicans, defunding the tax police doesn’t go far enough. Their next proposal, the so-called FairTax, would replace our current tax system with a single, 30 percent sales tax — and eliminate the IRS altogether.
FairTax would add trillions more to the deficit if ever enacted. Although official scorekeepers have not assessed its revenue effects, economist Bill Gale in 2005 estimated a 10-year revenue loss of at least $7 trillion — easily more than $1 trillion per year today.
What explains the constant drumbeat for policies that grow — rather than shrink — the deficit?
For House Republicans, tax policy appears to be less about raising revenue and more about satisfying wealthy donors.
Let’s start with the IRS. The logic is easy to follow: For most Americans earning a paycheck, most of their tax liability is automatically withheld. But wealthy evaders don’t earn their incomes this way and therefore benefit from a system in which the IRS doesn’t have the wherewithal to pursue them. While at the Treasury Department, I worked on the IRS funding provision included in the Inflation Reduction Act. Since it became law, millions of dollars have been poured into anti-IRS campaigns to rescind that funding — and preserve tax cheats’ evasion advantage. That’s why, even though doing so would ultimately expand the deficit, gutting the agency is high on the list of proposed Republican negotiations around the debt ceiling.
FairTax, too, is rooted in the interests of the most privileged. In fact, it is the brainchild of three Houston entrepreneurs — Leo Linbeck Jr., Jack Trotter and Bob McNair, the former owner of the National Football League’s Houston Texans. The trio, who have all now passed away, raised millions in the late 1990s— much of it their own seed funding — to build a grass-roots movement for their policy.
FairTax proponents say it would simplify the system by eliminating income taxes and allowing Americans to keep everything in their paychecks. In reality, replacing the income tax system with a national sales tax shifts the tax burden to lower-income households and benefits higher-income ones.
The economics are simple: Wealthier households spend a smaller share of their income than poorer households do, which means lower- and middle-income taxpayers would take on more of the overall tax burden. If Treasury Department estimates from 2005 — old, but directionally still accurate — reflected the distribution of taxes today, the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers would pay more than twice as much tax this year — roughly an extra $220 billion — under FairTax. The top 1 percent would pay about $320 billion less.
FairTax won’t die, despite its legion of detractors. Since 1999, it has been introduced in every Congress. And although most mainstream Republicans have moved away from public support of FairTax in recent years, it actually has some renewed momentum: It is on track for its first-ever floor vote, has spent weeks atop the list of most viewed bills this Congress, and could well be a campaign issue for Republicans in the 2024 cycle, given that many potential presidential nominees — including Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley and Mike Pence — are past champions.
These proposals illustrate the hypocrisy of House Republicans’ dangerous debt limit tactics.
Reasonable people can disagree with Democrats’ approach to tax policy. But last week, President Biden called for raising hundreds of billions of dollars in new taxes from high-earners and corporations. He has promised a budget that will raise enough to cut the deficit by $2 trillion.
If Republicans truly cared about budget deficits, perhaps they could take a page out of his book: by proposing tax changes that would raise, rather than lose, money.
SORRY, REPUBLICANS, NO ONE SHOULD TRUST YOUR WORD ON SOCIAL SECURITY
By Paul Waldman, The Washington Post
“I know that a lot of Republicans, their dream is to cut Social Security and Medicare,” President Biden said during a speech in Tampa on Thursday. “If that’s your dream, I’m your nightmare.”
After Republicans’ heckling of Biden on this topic at the State of the Union, the White House clearly thinks it has struck political gold and has sent the president out to keep up this drumbeat.
When Biden, referring to a plan released last year by Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), told Congress and the nation that “some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset” — then emphasized, “I’m not saying it’s the majority” — Republicans erupted in catcalls, fist-shaking and cries of “Liar!”
Their rage was powerful enough to make you suspect it might be sincere. And if their claim is that no more than a few Republicans agree with Scott’s suggestion to have every federal program disappear every five years unless it is reauthorized by Congress, they’re right.
But if Republicans want the public to believe that their passion for defending those popular safety-net programs should be beyond doubt, they are on shaky ground.
Even if Biden might sometimes exaggerate what his opponents believe, this debate carries with it a history and a context that make it hard for Republicans to claim they are being unfairly maligned.
This dates all the way back to the beginning of Social Security during the New Deal era, and Medicare (along with Medicaid) as part of the Great Society. All these programs were opposed by conservatives; one Republican senator thundered, before the bill passed in 1935, that Social Security would “end the progress of a great country and bring its people to the level of the average European.” Likewise, Republicans fought Medicare relentlessly; Ronald Reagan said in the early 1960s that if the government were to give seniors health coverage, their grandchildren would have to be instructed about the bygone time “when men were free.”
In the decades since, Republicans have periodically attempted to limit, cut, restrict or privatize all these programs. In 2005, President George W. Bush wanted to shift younger workers into private accounts rather than traditional Social Security. It was a bad policy idea for multiple reasons, but politically it was a disaster; after the public recoiled, Republicans in Congress refused to get behind the plan.
For years, as the GOP’s chief budget advocate in the House, Rep. Paul D. Ryan (Wis.) proposed plans to move Medicare toward privatization. Though his ideas never became law, many Republicans supported his proposals, including some considering a run for president in 2024.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the most prominent potential GOP contender, voted as a member of Congress to limit cost-of-living increases for Social Security, privatize Medicare by turning it into a “premium support” program, and raise the retirement age for both. DeSantis also made comments supporting partial privatization of Social Security.
And after Donald Trump was elected in 2016, Republicans mounted a campaign to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which would have done away with the law’s expansion of Medicaid that had extended coverage to more than 20 million people. They failed by a single vote.
The most positive spin Republicans can put on this record is that, over and over, many of them have tried to undermine these programs, but the party as a whole usually gets cold feet in the end because political self-preservation wins out over ideology.
But their ideological perspective is clear: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are the embodiment of Big Government, massive programs that provide individual benefits and encourage people to rely on Washington. It’s no mystery why conservatives don’t like them.
Yes, it’s true that Trump, who has few real policy convictions, repeatedly said as a candidate that he would never cut Social Security or Medicare. And just recently he warned Republicans not to advocate cuts to the programs.
But Trump tried to do exactly that as president. And in a recent speech to an industry group, his former vice president, Mike Pence, revived the idea of prodding private Americans toward privatized Social Security accounts, which Pence described as replacing “the New Deal with a better deal.”
Today, House Republicans are circling the idea of cuts to Social Security and Medicare as they look for ways to slash government spending.
Republicans will ask that we put aside their historical opposition and ideological hostility toward these programs, and focus instead on what they’re saying now. The last part isn’t an unfair demand; once they figure out what they actually want to do, their proposal should be taken seriously.
The trouble is, Republicans haven’t earned a whole lot of trust when it comes to programs that were created by Democrats, and that have been sustained and defended by Democrats in the face of decades of Republican attacks. It’s hard to give them the benefit of the doubt. But if they keep working at it, maybe one day we’ll be able to believe they love the safety net as much as they claim they do.
By Paul Waldman, The Washington Post
“I know that a lot of Republicans, their dream is to cut Social Security and Medicare,” President Biden said during a speech in Tampa on Thursday. “If that’s your dream, I’m your nightmare.”
After Republicans’ heckling of Biden on this topic at the State of the Union, the White House clearly thinks it has struck political gold and has sent the president out to keep up this drumbeat.
When Biden, referring to a plan released last year by Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), told Congress and the nation that “some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset” — then emphasized, “I’m not saying it’s the majority” — Republicans erupted in catcalls, fist-shaking and cries of “Liar!”
Their rage was powerful enough to make you suspect it might be sincere. And if their claim is that no more than a few Republicans agree with Scott’s suggestion to have every federal program disappear every five years unless it is reauthorized by Congress, they’re right.
But if Republicans want the public to believe that their passion for defending those popular safety-net programs should be beyond doubt, they are on shaky ground.
Even if Biden might sometimes exaggerate what his opponents believe, this debate carries with it a history and a context that make it hard for Republicans to claim they are being unfairly maligned.
This dates all the way back to the beginning of Social Security during the New Deal era, and Medicare (along with Medicaid) as part of the Great Society. All these programs were opposed by conservatives; one Republican senator thundered, before the bill passed in 1935, that Social Security would “end the progress of a great country and bring its people to the level of the average European.” Likewise, Republicans fought Medicare relentlessly; Ronald Reagan said in the early 1960s that if the government were to give seniors health coverage, their grandchildren would have to be instructed about the bygone time “when men were free.”
In the decades since, Republicans have periodically attempted to limit, cut, restrict or privatize all these programs. In 2005, President George W. Bush wanted to shift younger workers into private accounts rather than traditional Social Security. It was a bad policy idea for multiple reasons, but politically it was a disaster; after the public recoiled, Republicans in Congress refused to get behind the plan.
For years, as the GOP’s chief budget advocate in the House, Rep. Paul D. Ryan (Wis.) proposed plans to move Medicare toward privatization. Though his ideas never became law, many Republicans supported his proposals, including some considering a run for president in 2024.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the most prominent potential GOP contender, voted as a member of Congress to limit cost-of-living increases for Social Security, privatize Medicare by turning it into a “premium support” program, and raise the retirement age for both. DeSantis also made comments supporting partial privatization of Social Security.
And after Donald Trump was elected in 2016, Republicans mounted a campaign to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which would have done away with the law’s expansion of Medicaid that had extended coverage to more than 20 million people. They failed by a single vote.
The most positive spin Republicans can put on this record is that, over and over, many of them have tried to undermine these programs, but the party as a whole usually gets cold feet in the end because political self-preservation wins out over ideology.
But their ideological perspective is clear: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are the embodiment of Big Government, massive programs that provide individual benefits and encourage people to rely on Washington. It’s no mystery why conservatives don’t like them.
Yes, it’s true that Trump, who has few real policy convictions, repeatedly said as a candidate that he would never cut Social Security or Medicare. And just recently he warned Republicans not to advocate cuts to the programs.
But Trump tried to do exactly that as president. And in a recent speech to an industry group, his former vice president, Mike Pence, revived the idea of prodding private Americans toward privatized Social Security accounts, which Pence described as replacing “the New Deal with a better deal.”
Today, House Republicans are circling the idea of cuts to Social Security and Medicare as they look for ways to slash government spending.
Republicans will ask that we put aside their historical opposition and ideological hostility toward these programs, and focus instead on what they’re saying now. The last part isn’t an unfair demand; once they figure out what they actually want to do, their proposal should be taken seriously.
The trouble is, Republicans haven’t earned a whole lot of trust when it comes to programs that were created by Democrats, and that have been sustained and defended by Democrats in the face of decades of Republican attacks. It’s hard to give them the benefit of the doubt. But if they keep working at it, maybe one day we’ll be able to believe they love the safety net as much as they claim they do.
AT LONG LAST, AN EQUITABLE RULING ON SCHOOL FUNDING. CHANGE MUST NOW FOLLOW SWIFTLY.
Gov. Josh Shapiro and state lawmakers do not have to wait for the courts to tell them what is obvious to everyone: It is past time to properly fund public education for all students.
By The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
A Commonwealth Court judge found what many have long said about the way Pennsylvania pays for K-12 public education: The state’s method of funding schools is unfair and inadequate. Even more egregious, it is unconstitutional.
Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer’s landmark 786-page decision is a long-overdue victory for students across the state — especially those in poorer rural and urban districts. It is also a triumph for justice, equality, and the rule of law.
However, when real change will come remains unclear.
After all, the lawsuit was first filed in 2014 and did not go to trial until November 2021. After three months of arguments, the ruling came a year later. The decision will likely be appealed to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
That process could take another year or so. If the Supreme Court upholds the decision, it will be left to the General Assembly and Gov. Josh Shapiro to determine how to properly fund the schools, as the judge’s ruling did not prescribe a remedy.
Kudos to the attorneys at the Education Law Center, the Public Interest Law Center, and the private firm of O’Melveny & Myers for their tenacity throughout the long legal process. They shined a light on the state’s inability to provide a “thorough and efficient” education for all children, as the Pennsylvania Constitution’s education clause requires.
Hurdles remain, but Shapiro and state lawmakers do not have to wait for the courts to tell them what is obvious to everyone: It is past time to properly fund public education for all students. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, “The time is always right to do what is right.”
The price, though, will not be cheap. A Penn State professor’s analysis provided at the trial found it would take an additional $4.6 billion invested over time to adequately fund the schools. The entire state budget for 2022-23 is $45.2 billion.
In effect, to properly fund the schools, lawmakers would have to increase revenues by roughly 10%. Those revenues mainly come from three sources: sales taxes, personal income taxes, and corporate income taxes.
Republican lawmakers in Harrisburg will surely oppose tax increases and instead use the ruling to call for more school choice, which has failed to solve the state’s education woes.
The good news is Democrats control the state House, and Shapiro supports increasing education funding and making it more equitable for students in every zip code.
As state attorney general, Shapiro filed an amicus brief supporting the legal challenge to the current funding method. Shapiro’s brief said the “Commonwealth’s most fundamental need is an intelligent and informed citizenry, which will support our democratic institutions, grow our economy, and strengthen the foundations of our shared civic life.”
That cuts to the heart of the matter.
Pennsylvania does a good job of investing in the elderly. The state funds nursing homes, offers seniors property tax rebates, and earmarks lottery proceeds for a variety of programs that benefit senior citizens.
Now, Pennsylvania must also invest in its future.
Research shows that states with well-educated workers have stronger economies. One study found increasing student achievement to basic mastery levels across the country would increase the nation’s gross domestic product by $32 trillion, or 14.6%.
There is also a clear correlation that shows investing in education lowers crime. Pennsylvania spends more than $42,000 a year, per inmate, to house people in prison. The state would be better off investing in education, thus reducing prison costs and the number of incarcerated individuals.
Pennsylvania has long lagged behind other states in terms of funding public schools and job growth. Students in poorer school districts especially lack many basic resources, including books, libraries, counselors, and even enough teachers.
The state’s uneven funding was underscored during the pandemic, when schools in poorer districts lacked resources to transition to online learning, leaving kids to fall further behind.
Republicans in Harrisburg have long ignored education as an investment. More than a decade ago, then-Gov. Tom Corbett slashed education funding statewide by $1 billion and crippled Philadelphia’s schools.
Doug Mastriano, last year’s Republican nominee for governor, wanted to eliminate property taxes and give parents vouchers for $9,000, which would have effectively cut education funding by a third. Voters ensured that disaster was averted.
But Republicans in Washington have also been hostile to public education for more than a generation. Former President Ronald Reagan promised to kill the U.S. Department of Education in 1980. Donald Trump repeatedly proposed cutting billions in funding meant for after-school programs, teacher training, and grants.
Starving education is a losing policy on many levels. Public education is a public good. Pennsylvania students have already waited too long for state leaders to do what is right.
Gov. Josh Shapiro and state lawmakers do not have to wait for the courts to tell them what is obvious to everyone: It is past time to properly fund public education for all students.
By The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
A Commonwealth Court judge found what many have long said about the way Pennsylvania pays for K-12 public education: The state’s method of funding schools is unfair and inadequate. Even more egregious, it is unconstitutional.
Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer’s landmark 786-page decision is a long-overdue victory for students across the state — especially those in poorer rural and urban districts. It is also a triumph for justice, equality, and the rule of law.
However, when real change will come remains unclear.
After all, the lawsuit was first filed in 2014 and did not go to trial until November 2021. After three months of arguments, the ruling came a year later. The decision will likely be appealed to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
That process could take another year or so. If the Supreme Court upholds the decision, it will be left to the General Assembly and Gov. Josh Shapiro to determine how to properly fund the schools, as the judge’s ruling did not prescribe a remedy.
Kudos to the attorneys at the Education Law Center, the Public Interest Law Center, and the private firm of O’Melveny & Myers for their tenacity throughout the long legal process. They shined a light on the state’s inability to provide a “thorough and efficient” education for all children, as the Pennsylvania Constitution’s education clause requires.
Hurdles remain, but Shapiro and state lawmakers do not have to wait for the courts to tell them what is obvious to everyone: It is past time to properly fund public education for all students. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, “The time is always right to do what is right.”
The price, though, will not be cheap. A Penn State professor’s analysis provided at the trial found it would take an additional $4.6 billion invested over time to adequately fund the schools. The entire state budget for 2022-23 is $45.2 billion.
In effect, to properly fund the schools, lawmakers would have to increase revenues by roughly 10%. Those revenues mainly come from three sources: sales taxes, personal income taxes, and corporate income taxes.
Republican lawmakers in Harrisburg will surely oppose tax increases and instead use the ruling to call for more school choice, which has failed to solve the state’s education woes.
The good news is Democrats control the state House, and Shapiro supports increasing education funding and making it more equitable for students in every zip code.
As state attorney general, Shapiro filed an amicus brief supporting the legal challenge to the current funding method. Shapiro’s brief said the “Commonwealth’s most fundamental need is an intelligent and informed citizenry, which will support our democratic institutions, grow our economy, and strengthen the foundations of our shared civic life.”
That cuts to the heart of the matter.
Pennsylvania does a good job of investing in the elderly. The state funds nursing homes, offers seniors property tax rebates, and earmarks lottery proceeds for a variety of programs that benefit senior citizens.
Now, Pennsylvania must also invest in its future.
Research shows that states with well-educated workers have stronger economies. One study found increasing student achievement to basic mastery levels across the country would increase the nation’s gross domestic product by $32 trillion, or 14.6%.
There is also a clear correlation that shows investing in education lowers crime. Pennsylvania spends more than $42,000 a year, per inmate, to house people in prison. The state would be better off investing in education, thus reducing prison costs and the number of incarcerated individuals.
Pennsylvania has long lagged behind other states in terms of funding public schools and job growth. Students in poorer school districts especially lack many basic resources, including books, libraries, counselors, and even enough teachers.
The state’s uneven funding was underscored during the pandemic, when schools in poorer districts lacked resources to transition to online learning, leaving kids to fall further behind.
Republicans in Harrisburg have long ignored education as an investment. More than a decade ago, then-Gov. Tom Corbett slashed education funding statewide by $1 billion and crippled Philadelphia’s schools.
Doug Mastriano, last year’s Republican nominee for governor, wanted to eliminate property taxes and give parents vouchers for $9,000, which would have effectively cut education funding by a third. Voters ensured that disaster was averted.
But Republicans in Washington have also been hostile to public education for more than a generation. Former President Ronald Reagan promised to kill the U.S. Department of Education in 1980. Donald Trump repeatedly proposed cutting billions in funding meant for after-school programs, teacher training, and grants.
Starving education is a losing policy on many levels. Public education is a public good. Pennsylvania students have already waited too long for state leaders to do what is right.
A NEW POLL GIVES US INSIGHT INTO A TROUBLING ANTI-AMERICAN MOVEMENT
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
When you hear the phrase “Christian nationalists,” you might think of antiabortion conservatives who are upset about the phrase “Happy Holidays” and embrace a vaguely “America First” way of thinking. But according to a Public Religion Research Institute-Brookings Institution poll released Wednesday, Christian nationalists in fact harbor a set of extreme beliefs at odds with pluralistic democracy. The findings will alarm you.
“Christian nationalism is a new term for a worldview that has been with us since the founding of our country — the idea that America is destined to be a promised land for European Christians,” PRRI president and founder Robert P. Jones explained in a news release on the survey of more than 6,000 Americans. “While most Americans today embrace pluralism and reject this anti-democratic claim, majorities of white evangelical Protestants and Republicans remain animated by this vision of a white Christian America.”The poll used the following beliefs to gauge how deeply respondents embraced Christian nationalism:
PRRI found that 10 percent (“adherents”) of American adults believe in these ideas overwhelmingly or completely; 19 percent agree but not completely (“sympathizers”); 39 percent disagree (“skeptics”) but not completely; and 29 percent disagree completely (“rejecters”).
Who are these people? “Nearly two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants qualify as either Christian nationalism sympathizers (35%) or adherents (29%).” Thirty-five percent of all Whites are adherents. Put differently, Christian nationalist adherents are a minority but when combined with sympathizers still comprise a stunning 29 percent of Americans — many tens of millions.
Christian nationalists also make up the base of the Republican Party. “Most Republicans qualify as either Christian nationalism sympathizers (33%) or adherents (21%), while at least three-quarters of both independents (46% skeptics and 29% rejecters) and Democrats (36% skeptics and 47% rejecters) lean toward rejecting Christian nationalism.” In total, “Republicans (21%) are about four times as likely as Democrats (5%) or independents (6%) to be adherents of Christian nationalism.” Some promising news: There are fewer adherents and sympathizers among younger Americans. “More than seven in ten Americans ages 18-29 (37% skeptics, 42% rejecters) and ages 30-49 (37% skeptics, 35% rejecters) lean toward opposing Christian nationalism.” Support is also inversely related to educational attainment.
Christian nationalist adherents are emphatically out of synch with the pluralist majority. “Americans overall are much more likely to express a preference for the U.S. to be a nation made up of people belonging to a variety of religions (73%).” They also are much more likely to hold authoritarian and racist views.
“Adherents of Christian nationalism are nearly seven times as likely as rejecters to agree that ‘true patriots might have to resort to violence to save our country’ (40% vs. 16%),” the news release said. In addition, “While only about 3 in 10 Americans (28%) agree that ‘because things have gotten so far off track in this country, we need a leader who is willing to break some rules if that’s what it takes to set thing right,’ half of Christian nationalism adherents and nearly 4 in 10 sympathizers (38%) support the idea of an authoritarian leader.”
There is also a strong racist/white grievance element:
Around four in ten Americans (41%) agree that discrimination against white Americans is as big of a problem as discrimination against Black Americans and other minorities, compared to 58% who disagree. Approximately two-thirds of Christian nationalism sympathizers (66%) and more than three-quarters of Christian nationalism adherents (77%) agree with this statement. Among Christian nationalism sympathizers and adherents who are white, agreement with this sentiment rises to 73% and 85%, respectively.
Moreover, a stunning 83 percent of adherents think “God intended America to be a new promised land where European Christians could create a society that could be an example to the rest of the world.” Two-thirds of Americans overall reject this explicitly racist statement
More than 70 percent of adherents embrace replacement theory, nearly one-quarter harbor the antisemitic view that Jews hold too many positions of power and 44 percent believe Jews are more loyal to Israel than America, the poll found. More than 65 percent think Muslims from some countries should be banned. Almost 70 percent believe “the husband is the head of the household in ‘a truly Christian family’ and his wife submits to his leadership.”
If you think this sounds like MAGA tripe, you’re right. This is the hardcore MAGA base. More alarming: “Nearly six in ten QAnon believers are also either Christian nationalism sympathizers (29%) or adherents (29%).”
The findings highlight challenges to those who cherish the American creed that “All men are created equal” and who embrace the anti-establishment clause of the First Amendment. And because Christian nationalists adopt their views as articles of religious faith, they might be far less willing to reexamine them. The task of inculcating American values of inclusion, democracy and rule of law will have to come, in all likelihood, from within church communities.
The survey also confirms that Christian nationalism is not tied to any specific candidate. Rather, a vast number of like-minded Americans could be receptive to an authoritarian, racist, dogmatic message donning the cloak of Christianity. Defeating a single candidate won’t end this movement.
Given their numbers and potential staying power, the response to this threat to pluralistic democracy must be cross-partisan. And it will have to go beyond politics. To counteract Christian nationalism we will need a positive, optimistic message that celebrates an inclusive, diverse democracy in which no American is more “real” than another.
What makes us unique — or “exceptional” as the right likes to say — is that America isn’t defined by race or religion. Believers in American values have their work cut out for them.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
When you hear the phrase “Christian nationalists,” you might think of antiabortion conservatives who are upset about the phrase “Happy Holidays” and embrace a vaguely “America First” way of thinking. But according to a Public Religion Research Institute-Brookings Institution poll released Wednesday, Christian nationalists in fact harbor a set of extreme beliefs at odds with pluralistic democracy. The findings will alarm you.
“Christian nationalism is a new term for a worldview that has been with us since the founding of our country — the idea that America is destined to be a promised land for European Christians,” PRRI president and founder Robert P. Jones explained in a news release on the survey of more than 6,000 Americans. “While most Americans today embrace pluralism and reject this anti-democratic claim, majorities of white evangelical Protestants and Republicans remain animated by this vision of a white Christian America.”The poll used the following beliefs to gauge how deeply respondents embraced Christian nationalism:
- “The U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation.”
- “U.S. laws should be based on Christian values.”
- “If the U.S. moves away from our Christian foundations, we will not have a country anymore.”
- “Being Christian is an important part of being truly American.”
- “God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.”
PRRI found that 10 percent (“adherents”) of American adults believe in these ideas overwhelmingly or completely; 19 percent agree but not completely (“sympathizers”); 39 percent disagree (“skeptics”) but not completely; and 29 percent disagree completely (“rejecters”).
Who are these people? “Nearly two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants qualify as either Christian nationalism sympathizers (35%) or adherents (29%).” Thirty-five percent of all Whites are adherents. Put differently, Christian nationalist adherents are a minority but when combined with sympathizers still comprise a stunning 29 percent of Americans — many tens of millions.
Christian nationalists also make up the base of the Republican Party. “Most Republicans qualify as either Christian nationalism sympathizers (33%) or adherents (21%), while at least three-quarters of both independents (46% skeptics and 29% rejecters) and Democrats (36% skeptics and 47% rejecters) lean toward rejecting Christian nationalism.” In total, “Republicans (21%) are about four times as likely as Democrats (5%) or independents (6%) to be adherents of Christian nationalism.” Some promising news: There are fewer adherents and sympathizers among younger Americans. “More than seven in ten Americans ages 18-29 (37% skeptics, 42% rejecters) and ages 30-49 (37% skeptics, 35% rejecters) lean toward opposing Christian nationalism.” Support is also inversely related to educational attainment.
Christian nationalist adherents are emphatically out of synch with the pluralist majority. “Americans overall are much more likely to express a preference for the U.S. to be a nation made up of people belonging to a variety of religions (73%).” They also are much more likely to hold authoritarian and racist views.
“Adherents of Christian nationalism are nearly seven times as likely as rejecters to agree that ‘true patriots might have to resort to violence to save our country’ (40% vs. 16%),” the news release said. In addition, “While only about 3 in 10 Americans (28%) agree that ‘because things have gotten so far off track in this country, we need a leader who is willing to break some rules if that’s what it takes to set thing right,’ half of Christian nationalism adherents and nearly 4 in 10 sympathizers (38%) support the idea of an authoritarian leader.”
There is also a strong racist/white grievance element:
Around four in ten Americans (41%) agree that discrimination against white Americans is as big of a problem as discrimination against Black Americans and other minorities, compared to 58% who disagree. Approximately two-thirds of Christian nationalism sympathizers (66%) and more than three-quarters of Christian nationalism adherents (77%) agree with this statement. Among Christian nationalism sympathizers and adherents who are white, agreement with this sentiment rises to 73% and 85%, respectively.
Moreover, a stunning 83 percent of adherents think “God intended America to be a new promised land where European Christians could create a society that could be an example to the rest of the world.” Two-thirds of Americans overall reject this explicitly racist statement
More than 70 percent of adherents embrace replacement theory, nearly one-quarter harbor the antisemitic view that Jews hold too many positions of power and 44 percent believe Jews are more loyal to Israel than America, the poll found. More than 65 percent think Muslims from some countries should be banned. Almost 70 percent believe “the husband is the head of the household in ‘a truly Christian family’ and his wife submits to his leadership.”
If you think this sounds like MAGA tripe, you’re right. This is the hardcore MAGA base. More alarming: “Nearly six in ten QAnon believers are also either Christian nationalism sympathizers (29%) or adherents (29%).”
The findings highlight challenges to those who cherish the American creed that “All men are created equal” and who embrace the anti-establishment clause of the First Amendment. And because Christian nationalists adopt their views as articles of religious faith, they might be far less willing to reexamine them. The task of inculcating American values of inclusion, democracy and rule of law will have to come, in all likelihood, from within church communities.
The survey also confirms that Christian nationalism is not tied to any specific candidate. Rather, a vast number of like-minded Americans could be receptive to an authoritarian, racist, dogmatic message donning the cloak of Christianity. Defeating a single candidate won’t end this movement.
Given their numbers and potential staying power, the response to this threat to pluralistic democracy must be cross-partisan. And it will have to go beyond politics. To counteract Christian nationalism we will need a positive, optimistic message that celebrates an inclusive, diverse democracy in which no American is more “real” than another.
What makes us unique — or “exceptional” as the right likes to say — is that America isn’t defined by race or religion. Believers in American values have their work cut out for them.
AR-15 LAPEL PIN IS A PERFECT SYMBOL FOR A GOP THAT’S BECOME A DEATH CULT
A GOP celebration of a mass-killing machine on the House floor is on-brand for a nihilistic party that prides deadly individualism over problem-solving.
By Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
The backward walk of devolution that is the modern Republican Party, and the near-death experience of American governing, can be best told through the story of two adjacent Long Island congressional districts that, over the course of one generation, sent two radically different kinds of human beings to Capitol Hill.
In 1993, a stunning act of violence turned an everyday citizen into a political activist who tried to change the world for the better — by getting elected to Congress. Carolyn McCarthy was shocked when her husband was murdered and her son wounded when a rage-addled madman boarded a Long Island Rail Road commuter train and began firing a Ruger 9mm pistol, killing six and wounding 19. A nurse by training, she ran for Congress in New York’s 4th Congressional District as a Democrat three years later and won an upset victory, largely on her promise to Long Islanders that she would be “the fiercest gun-control advocate.”
McCarthy’s storyline had an almost Frank Capra-esque feel, albeit tinged with sadness. But her tenure overlapped with the rise of a far-right Republican Party that fetishized firearms ownership and thus ensured there would be no Jimmy Stewart-style satisfying ending to her crusade for justice for the gun attack on her family. In fact, McCarthy was a House member in 2004 when her colleagues allowed a ban on assault weapons to expire, triggering a rise in mass shootings like the one that shattered that LIRR commuter car.
She retired in 2014, eight years before voters next door in New York’s 3rd Congressional District, covering Long Island’s North Shore and parts of Queens, elected a GOP grifter and con man who called himself George Santos. While McCarthy had gone to Washington to get something done on guns, the cash-strapped Santos reportedly confided to friends he wanted to cash in on the lucrative congressional pension and free health care.
In winning election on a completely made-up resume, Santos is the final downward spiral for a Republican Party that has become 100% about the performance and 0% about the policy. So when his new GOP colleague from Georgia handed Santos a lapel pin in the shape of an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, the New Yorker did what any outrageous showman would do. He pinned it on.
The sight in recent days of Santos and several of his Republican colleagues parading through the hallowed halls of the U.S. Capitol with a mini-celebration of a killing machine that serves no civilian purpose beyond mowing down large numbers of innocent people in the shortest possible time is perhaps the most hideous assault on human decency I’ve seen in more than 40 years of covering U.S. politics.
But that’s the point, isn’t it? The lapel pins — like those Christmas cards of their adorable blond kids armed to the teeth with high-powered weaponry or the right’s new love affair with the toxic fumes of gas stoves — are meant to “trigger the libs” and sustain a career arc that generates prime-time hits on Fox News and fund-raising emails without ever having to get anything done. Yes, you could argue this column, then, is a perfect example of what these cons want. But what a choice: playing along, or remaining silent while America sheds the skin of humanity.
It’s one thing to embrace the more extreme interpretations of what the Second Amendment means around the rights of individual citizens to buy or own a gun, for purposes like hunting or self-defense. It’s something else entirely to worship the AR-15 and similar assault rifles, which were invented in the 1950s for the military and weren’t meant for civilians until the lucrative gun manufacturers who also finance the National Rifle Association saw a gold mine in marketing them to men obsessed with their masculinity in an era of social change.
And so these AR-15 lapel pins appeared on the chests of Santos and his fellow newcomer Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida — even in the same week that back in Luna’s home state four gunmen in a sedan opened fire on a crowd of people in Lakeland, wounding 11. Even as the notorious list of deaths from mass shootings involving AR-15-style weapons — in now-infamous locales like Uvalde, Las Vegas, Orlando, Sutherland Springs, Parkland and Newtown — grows longer and longer.
Imagine members strutting around the corridors of Congress in late 2001 with a Boeing 747 lapel pin, or wearing a spiky replica of the coronavirus when New York City’s morgues were overflowing in the spring of 2020. Explain to me how worshiping an AR-15 — when the blood stains are still being scrubbed off a dance studio in Monterey Park, Club Q in Colorado Springs, or a bus in Charlottesville — is any different, really?
Yet while it’s about “owning the libs,” the GOP’s performance art is also about much more than that. It’s instructive to look at who has been handing out the AR-15 lapel pins: Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia. In the you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up department, Clyde was born on Nov. 22, 1963 — the exact day that someone with a rifle gunned down President John F. Kennedy — and he has built his political career around the cult of firearms.
A Navy combat vet who before this week was best known for his declaration that the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection was like “a normal tourist visit,” Clyde was first elected in 2020 largely on his high profile in the north Georgia exurbs as the owner of the Clyde Armory gun store. He grew that operation from his garage into a $25 million business, marketing AR-15-style guns in the heart of Trump country. That’s because in the Donald Trump/George Santos GOP, grievance is highly profitable — and often a grift.
But Clyde’s career is also a tribute to the ways that today’s GOP has inherited the flag that Southern segregationists like Georgia’s Lester Maddox waved in the 1960s. The Georgia freshman was one of only three House members to vote against the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act and 14 who opposed the creation of the Juneteenth holiday. In doling out his AR-15 pins, Clyde reminds us that the NRA’s radical interpretation of the Second Amendment arose only after Black civil rights gains in the 1960s, and that for its true believers gun ownership is a surrogate for their core value, which is white supremacy.
For much of America’s history, white supremacy — enforced by everything from the bias baked into our laws and codes to the terror of lynching — has dominated. When the swings of social change and a more enlightened government advanced the rights of Blacks, women, the LGBTQ community and others, Republicans competed as the anti-government party backed by the new terror of their unbridled gun cult, but even that increasingly is a losing hand in a more diverse and better educated America. If the white supremacy-soaked far right can no longer rule our nation, today’s Republicans are all too happy to blow it all up, in a world of mass shootings, insurrections, and unchecked pandemics. Their nihilism — wittingly or not — has turned them into a death cult.
At the start of 2023, Clyde, Santos and Luna are the avatars of what some have called “the Seinfeld Congress” with the House back under Republican control — a show about “nothing.” The next two years are indeed likely to see little more than a surge of Fox News-friendly stunts around protecting gas stoves or banning drag shows, but the GOP’s lack of interest in policy is worse than inertia. Americans are dying from do-nothing government.
It’s not only the hundreds who’ve been needlessly killed since 2004 in the surge of mass shootings by AR-15-style weapons and large-capacity magazines that Congress had banned in the 1990s only to let that successful law expire. And it’s not just the rejection of 99% of the world’s top climate scientists by a political party screaming “drill, baby, drill!” in the face of growing wildfires and 1000-year floods that are destroying homes and lives.
Today, the leading candidates for the 2024 Republican nomination for president — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and our ex-president Donald Trump — seem locked in a bidding war for who can most dissuade the public from using the COVID-19 vaccines that both men once touted before vaccine denial was swept into the jet stream of conservative nihilism. DeSantis has even launched a criminal probe of the vaccine’s production — pretending that research hasn’t shown that the shots have been highly effective in preventing hospitalization and death. As the pandemic nears its third anniversary, some 400 to 500 Americans are still dying every day — many, needlessly.
And things could get worse. In recent days, health experts are increasingly alarmed about newer H5N1 strains of the so-called bird flu that seem to spread more easily among mammals, which is highly worrisome because human infections with the bird flu have been much more deadly than COVID-19. In other words, a major outbreak of bird flu would require exactly the type of communal response — both in terms of government spending and action, and public cooperation — that today’s nihilistic Republican Party is built to prevent.
So when the next pandemic strikes, our first line of defense will be the Andrew Clydes and George Santoses waving the silly millimeters of their do-nothing death cult’s AR-15 lapel pins against the lethal threat they can’t see and don’t understand. God save the United States of America.
A GOP celebration of a mass-killing machine on the House floor is on-brand for a nihilistic party that prides deadly individualism over problem-solving.
By Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
The backward walk of devolution that is the modern Republican Party, and the near-death experience of American governing, can be best told through the story of two adjacent Long Island congressional districts that, over the course of one generation, sent two radically different kinds of human beings to Capitol Hill.
In 1993, a stunning act of violence turned an everyday citizen into a political activist who tried to change the world for the better — by getting elected to Congress. Carolyn McCarthy was shocked when her husband was murdered and her son wounded when a rage-addled madman boarded a Long Island Rail Road commuter train and began firing a Ruger 9mm pistol, killing six and wounding 19. A nurse by training, she ran for Congress in New York’s 4th Congressional District as a Democrat three years later and won an upset victory, largely on her promise to Long Islanders that she would be “the fiercest gun-control advocate.”
McCarthy’s storyline had an almost Frank Capra-esque feel, albeit tinged with sadness. But her tenure overlapped with the rise of a far-right Republican Party that fetishized firearms ownership and thus ensured there would be no Jimmy Stewart-style satisfying ending to her crusade for justice for the gun attack on her family. In fact, McCarthy was a House member in 2004 when her colleagues allowed a ban on assault weapons to expire, triggering a rise in mass shootings like the one that shattered that LIRR commuter car.
She retired in 2014, eight years before voters next door in New York’s 3rd Congressional District, covering Long Island’s North Shore and parts of Queens, elected a GOP grifter and con man who called himself George Santos. While McCarthy had gone to Washington to get something done on guns, the cash-strapped Santos reportedly confided to friends he wanted to cash in on the lucrative congressional pension and free health care.
In winning election on a completely made-up resume, Santos is the final downward spiral for a Republican Party that has become 100% about the performance and 0% about the policy. So when his new GOP colleague from Georgia handed Santos a lapel pin in the shape of an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, the New Yorker did what any outrageous showman would do. He pinned it on.
The sight in recent days of Santos and several of his Republican colleagues parading through the hallowed halls of the U.S. Capitol with a mini-celebration of a killing machine that serves no civilian purpose beyond mowing down large numbers of innocent people in the shortest possible time is perhaps the most hideous assault on human decency I’ve seen in more than 40 years of covering U.S. politics.
But that’s the point, isn’t it? The lapel pins — like those Christmas cards of their adorable blond kids armed to the teeth with high-powered weaponry or the right’s new love affair with the toxic fumes of gas stoves — are meant to “trigger the libs” and sustain a career arc that generates prime-time hits on Fox News and fund-raising emails without ever having to get anything done. Yes, you could argue this column, then, is a perfect example of what these cons want. But what a choice: playing along, or remaining silent while America sheds the skin of humanity.
It’s one thing to embrace the more extreme interpretations of what the Second Amendment means around the rights of individual citizens to buy or own a gun, for purposes like hunting or self-defense. It’s something else entirely to worship the AR-15 and similar assault rifles, which were invented in the 1950s for the military and weren’t meant for civilians until the lucrative gun manufacturers who also finance the National Rifle Association saw a gold mine in marketing them to men obsessed with their masculinity in an era of social change.
And so these AR-15 lapel pins appeared on the chests of Santos and his fellow newcomer Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida — even in the same week that back in Luna’s home state four gunmen in a sedan opened fire on a crowd of people in Lakeland, wounding 11. Even as the notorious list of deaths from mass shootings involving AR-15-style weapons — in now-infamous locales like Uvalde, Las Vegas, Orlando, Sutherland Springs, Parkland and Newtown — grows longer and longer.
Imagine members strutting around the corridors of Congress in late 2001 with a Boeing 747 lapel pin, or wearing a spiky replica of the coronavirus when New York City’s morgues were overflowing in the spring of 2020. Explain to me how worshiping an AR-15 — when the blood stains are still being scrubbed off a dance studio in Monterey Park, Club Q in Colorado Springs, or a bus in Charlottesville — is any different, really?
Yet while it’s about “owning the libs,” the GOP’s performance art is also about much more than that. It’s instructive to look at who has been handing out the AR-15 lapel pins: Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia. In the you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up department, Clyde was born on Nov. 22, 1963 — the exact day that someone with a rifle gunned down President John F. Kennedy — and he has built his political career around the cult of firearms.
A Navy combat vet who before this week was best known for his declaration that the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection was like “a normal tourist visit,” Clyde was first elected in 2020 largely on his high profile in the north Georgia exurbs as the owner of the Clyde Armory gun store. He grew that operation from his garage into a $25 million business, marketing AR-15-style guns in the heart of Trump country. That’s because in the Donald Trump/George Santos GOP, grievance is highly profitable — and often a grift.
But Clyde’s career is also a tribute to the ways that today’s GOP has inherited the flag that Southern segregationists like Georgia’s Lester Maddox waved in the 1960s. The Georgia freshman was one of only three House members to vote against the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act and 14 who opposed the creation of the Juneteenth holiday. In doling out his AR-15 pins, Clyde reminds us that the NRA’s radical interpretation of the Second Amendment arose only after Black civil rights gains in the 1960s, and that for its true believers gun ownership is a surrogate for their core value, which is white supremacy.
For much of America’s history, white supremacy — enforced by everything from the bias baked into our laws and codes to the terror of lynching — has dominated. When the swings of social change and a more enlightened government advanced the rights of Blacks, women, the LGBTQ community and others, Republicans competed as the anti-government party backed by the new terror of their unbridled gun cult, but even that increasingly is a losing hand in a more diverse and better educated America. If the white supremacy-soaked far right can no longer rule our nation, today’s Republicans are all too happy to blow it all up, in a world of mass shootings, insurrections, and unchecked pandemics. Their nihilism — wittingly or not — has turned them into a death cult.
At the start of 2023, Clyde, Santos and Luna are the avatars of what some have called “the Seinfeld Congress” with the House back under Republican control — a show about “nothing.” The next two years are indeed likely to see little more than a surge of Fox News-friendly stunts around protecting gas stoves or banning drag shows, but the GOP’s lack of interest in policy is worse than inertia. Americans are dying from do-nothing government.
It’s not only the hundreds who’ve been needlessly killed since 2004 in the surge of mass shootings by AR-15-style weapons and large-capacity magazines that Congress had banned in the 1990s only to let that successful law expire. And it’s not just the rejection of 99% of the world’s top climate scientists by a political party screaming “drill, baby, drill!” in the face of growing wildfires and 1000-year floods that are destroying homes and lives.
Today, the leading candidates for the 2024 Republican nomination for president — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and our ex-president Donald Trump — seem locked in a bidding war for who can most dissuade the public from using the COVID-19 vaccines that both men once touted before vaccine denial was swept into the jet stream of conservative nihilism. DeSantis has even launched a criminal probe of the vaccine’s production — pretending that research hasn’t shown that the shots have been highly effective in preventing hospitalization and death. As the pandemic nears its third anniversary, some 400 to 500 Americans are still dying every day — many, needlessly.
And things could get worse. In recent days, health experts are increasingly alarmed about newer H5N1 strains of the so-called bird flu that seem to spread more easily among mammals, which is highly worrisome because human infections with the bird flu have been much more deadly than COVID-19. In other words, a major outbreak of bird flu would require exactly the type of communal response — both in terms of government spending and action, and public cooperation — that today’s nihilistic Republican Party is built to prevent.
So when the next pandemic strikes, our first line of defense will be the Andrew Clydes and George Santoses waving the silly millimeters of their do-nothing death cult’s AR-15 lapel pins against the lethal threat they can’t see and don’t understand. God save the United States of America.
WHEN REPUBLICANS RANT ABOUT ‘SOCIALISM,’ REMEMBER THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
One of the greatest government success stories in a generation rarely gets much attention. That is the story of the Affordable Care Act.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services recently reported a “nearly 50% increase in HealthCare.gov of since President Biden took office.” In addition, “3.6 million people signed up for health care coverage on the Marketplaces for the first time this year.” Altogether, that resulted in a record-breaking 16.3 million people who selected a plan on the ACA marketplaces during the most recent open enrollment period (Nov. 1 to Jan. 15).
CMS also reported that families who purchased insurance in the marketplace saved an average of $800 in premiums in 2022. More than 90 percent of purchasers had choices from three or more providers.
The administration also has consistently strengthened the ACA in recent years. The American Rescue Plan Act expanded and extended ACA premium support, which the Inflation Reduction Act further extended through 2025.
Biden also eliminated the ACA’s “family glitch,” which based an employee’s eligibility for ACA subsidies on his or her individual rate, even if that person was paying for far more expensive family coverage. That left many families paying exorbitant rates to cover their entire household. Claire Heyison of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explained that when the administration’s fix to the family glitch went into effect at the end of 2022, millions of people gained eligibility to buy ACA coverage. Almost half of them were in “families of low-income workers (those earning between 100-250 percent of the federal poverty level, or between $28,000-$70,000 a year for a family of four).”
In the midterms, almost no Republican — other than Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin — talked about repealing the ACA. That might be because the ACA is widely used in red states. Nine of the 10 states with the highest enrollment rates are led by Republicans. In other words, red states are getting a ride on the federal program their political leaders have long lambasted.
All of this amounts to a historic achievement. Not only did the ACA survive multiple attempts by Republicans to repeal the law and reduce outreach, but it also managed to drive down uninsured rate to a record low of 8 percent last year. That’s in large part because of the Biden administration’s competent management of the program and extension of subsidies over united GOP opposition.
The next time Republicans rant about “socialism,” Democrats should remind them and all Americans about the Affordable Care Act. For years, Republicans denounced the law as “socialist,” yet red-state Americans have been using it at higher rates than blue-state residents. Watch red-state Americans similarly benefit from other government programs that Republican politicians whine about, such as government price controls on prescription drugs and subsidies to help transition to green energy.
Indeed, Democrats should highlight their successes where Republicans have fought against expanding access to health care. Florida, for example, has refused to expand Medicaid under the ACA, leading to its 12 percent uninsured rate.
And that’s about to get even worse: Once the federal government’s covid-19 national emergency ends, so too will pandemic-era policies designed to keep people enrolled in Medicaid continuously. So unless governors act, more people will lose Medicaid coverage. While other governors are scrambling to minimize coverage losses, Florida’s Ron DeSantis has a plan that could kick as many as 1.75 million residents off Medicaid. No wonder DeSantis wants to talk about “wokeism”; his actual record on issues people care most about is putrid.
The lesson of the ACA is clear: With competent leaders, government policies can help Americans. As Republicans vote against these measures and scream “socialism!” — all while claiming the banner of economic populism — Democrats would do well to remind the country which party actually helps ordinary people.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
One of the greatest government success stories in a generation rarely gets much attention. That is the story of the Affordable Care Act.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services recently reported a “nearly 50% increase in HealthCare.gov of since President Biden took office.” In addition, “3.6 million people signed up for health care coverage on the Marketplaces for the first time this year.” Altogether, that resulted in a record-breaking 16.3 million people who selected a plan on the ACA marketplaces during the most recent open enrollment period (Nov. 1 to Jan. 15).
CMS also reported that families who purchased insurance in the marketplace saved an average of $800 in premiums in 2022. More than 90 percent of purchasers had choices from three or more providers.
The administration also has consistently strengthened the ACA in recent years. The American Rescue Plan Act expanded and extended ACA premium support, which the Inflation Reduction Act further extended through 2025.
Biden also eliminated the ACA’s “family glitch,” which based an employee’s eligibility for ACA subsidies on his or her individual rate, even if that person was paying for far more expensive family coverage. That left many families paying exorbitant rates to cover their entire household. Claire Heyison of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explained that when the administration’s fix to the family glitch went into effect at the end of 2022, millions of people gained eligibility to buy ACA coverage. Almost half of them were in “families of low-income workers (those earning between 100-250 percent of the federal poverty level, or between $28,000-$70,000 a year for a family of four).”
In the midterms, almost no Republican — other than Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin — talked about repealing the ACA. That might be because the ACA is widely used in red states. Nine of the 10 states with the highest enrollment rates are led by Republicans. In other words, red states are getting a ride on the federal program their political leaders have long lambasted.
All of this amounts to a historic achievement. Not only did the ACA survive multiple attempts by Republicans to repeal the law and reduce outreach, but it also managed to drive down uninsured rate to a record low of 8 percent last year. That’s in large part because of the Biden administration’s competent management of the program and extension of subsidies over united GOP opposition.
The next time Republicans rant about “socialism,” Democrats should remind them and all Americans about the Affordable Care Act. For years, Republicans denounced the law as “socialist,” yet red-state Americans have been using it at higher rates than blue-state residents. Watch red-state Americans similarly benefit from other government programs that Republican politicians whine about, such as government price controls on prescription drugs and subsidies to help transition to green energy.
Indeed, Democrats should highlight their successes where Republicans have fought against expanding access to health care. Florida, for example, has refused to expand Medicaid under the ACA, leading to its 12 percent uninsured rate.
And that’s about to get even worse: Once the federal government’s covid-19 national emergency ends, so too will pandemic-era policies designed to keep people enrolled in Medicaid continuously. So unless governors act, more people will lose Medicaid coverage. While other governors are scrambling to minimize coverage losses, Florida’s Ron DeSantis has a plan that could kick as many as 1.75 million residents off Medicaid. No wonder DeSantis wants to talk about “wokeism”; his actual record on issues people care most about is putrid.
The lesson of the ACA is clear: With competent leaders, government policies can help Americans. As Republicans vote against these measures and scream “socialism!” — all while claiming the banner of economic populism — Democrats would do well to remind the country which party actually helps ordinary people.
THE NEW HOUSE MAJORITY USES THE LEVERS OF POWER TO STOKE PARANOIA
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
A CNN poll last week found that about three quarters of Americans, including nearly half of Republicans, think House Republican leaders aren’t paying enough attention to the country’s most pressing problems.
So this week, GOP leaders set out to rectify the situation. They approved a resolution condemning the Russian Revolution. Of 1917.
But before you call Bolshevik on Republican leaders for being 106 years out of date, I should note, in fairness, that their resolution also took issue with more recent events: Joseph Stalin’s Ukrainian famine, Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward and Pol Pot’s “killing fields.”
For those who haven’t kept up with current affairs, those events happened, respectively, in 1932-1933, 1958-1960 and 1975-1979. Still awaiting legislative action by the new House majority: a condemnation of Genghis Khan’s Siege of Merv in 1221 and the Roman Sack of Carthage during the Third Punic War.
The Republicans’ late hit on 20th-century atrocities served a 21st-century partisan aim — specifically, the insinuation that Democrats are trying to import the “horrors of socialism” to the United States. “Congress denounces socialism in all its forms and opposes the implementation of socialist policies in the United States,” the resolution concluded.
It was some good, old-fashioned red-baiting, in the year 2023.
“Socialism is the greatest threat to our economy and freedom and must be defeated,” Rep. Roger Williams (R-Tex.) warned the House on Thursday, calling the fictional menace “alarming and scary.”
Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Tex.) joined the caterwauling, saying the Biden administration had seized “control of the means of production” from private industries. “God have mercy on our country!”
And Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) felt qualified after one month in office to declare that the Democratic Party “has been taken over by a radical socialist ideology.”
Most Democrats went along with the resolution — it’s not a good look to be on the same side of a vote as Pol Pot — but not before they had some fun with the red-scare revivalism.
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) pointed out that the Paycheck Protection Program might qualify as socialism to Republicans, then asked consent to insert into the record the names of all Republican lawmakers who requested PPP loans and forgiveness.
Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), leading the antisocialist forces on the floor, leapt to his feet. “I object!” he said.
The attempt to draw an unbroken line from Uncle Joe Stalin to Sleepy Joe Biden was downright silly, but it served a deadly serious purpose. It is part of a broader effort by Republicans that encourages Americans to see enemies everywhere within their government.
This week alone, the new majority used its powers in committee rooms and on the House floor to undermine trust in government on various fronts:
The bureaucrats are cheating you. The vaccine is killing you. Immigrants are drugging your children. Muslims are endangering you. And the bloodthirsty socialists are destroying your way of life. The new majority is using the levers of power to stoke paranoia.
···
Last month, in its first legislative action, the new House majority voted to rescind more than $70 billion in funding for the IRS, much of it intended to improve customer service at the agency.
This week, many of those same Republican lawmakers went to the House floor with a new grievance: They are angry about — wait for it — poor customer service at the IRS.
“The American people have suffered” while waiting “for months for their tax refunds,” Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, declared on the House floor.
Can the IRS run an irony audit on these guys?
Republicans, some of whom are still scaring Americans with the bogus claim that 87,000 armed IRS agents will be breaking down their doors, now have a new conspiracy theory: The IRS’s backlogs are caused by teleworking. (It has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the IRS had its budget slashed by 15 percent since 2010, while the number of returns jumped by nearly 10 million annually.)
Therefore, the new majority passed a bill this week ordering IRS employees and all federal workers to return to teleworking levels that existed in 2019 — before the pandemic forever changed the way people work. The title of the bill is as jumbled as its goal: the Stopping Home Office Work’s Unproductive Problems Act — a word soup that forms the acronym SHOW UP.
But it’s not really about teleworking. It’s about encouraging Americans to loathe federal workers.
“This legislation asks every member to ask a simple question,” Comer told the House. “Do you put the needs of your constituents first, or do you put the preferences of federal bureaucrats first?”
Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), chair of the Education and Workforce committee, blamed “bureaucrats in Washington” for making it so that “delay and disarray might as well have become hallmarks of federal agencies and departments.”
The sentiment was much the same at a hearing Comer held Wednesday on waste and fraud in pandemic-relief programs. There, he bemoaned taxpayer dollars “wasted by bureaucrats whose only priority is getting money out the door.”
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) picked up the theme: “How the heck were these bureaucrats so dang incompetent?”
And over at the Rules Committee, Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) said bureaucrats “are not getting the work done” — something he knows because he “just hired a girl who’d been with Social Security for 20 years.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) protested the “implied contempt” for federal workers in Republicans’ statements. But really, it’s explicit. “They’re surely collecting their paychecks,” said a sneering Steve Scalise, the majority leader. “It’s long past time that they show up for work.”
···
The complaint that federal workers don’t work is contradicted by another complaint — that federal workers are working hard to kill everyday Americans with lethal vaccines and opioid overdoses.
The new House majority passed a bill this week aimed at striking down the “tyrannical” requirement that many health-care workers get vaccinated. It came armed with vials of disinformation.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) announced that it has “been proven false” that the vaccine “stops the spread” and that government agencies “have conceded” this. The original vaccine is “for a virus that no longer exists,” he claimed, and the vaccine “can cause myocarditis, blood clots, strokes and even death.”
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) joined in, telling the House that the vaccine has “been admitted by our own CDC director, by the CDC, by the NIH, to do nothing to stop transmission.”
That’s just wrong. The vaccines don’t entirely prevent spread — but they reduce it. The vaccines do have rare side effects — but the risk of death from the virus itself is much greater.
Rep. Greg Murphy (R-N.C.), a doctor, spoke of people shunning the vaccine “based upon fears about fertility” — without mentioning that there is no basis for such fears.
But there is only so much room for vaccine terror in the overworked amygdala of the Republican voter. That’s because they also have to fear migrant drug smugglers crossing our “open borders.”
In reality, illegal border crossings fell by about 40 percent in January, The Post reported this week. Most of the fentanyl seized has been at legal border crossings, typically smuggled by U.S. citizens — not by migrants crossing illegally.
Yet Republicans used the first hearing of the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday to alarm Americans about “Mexican smuggling cartels exploiting the open border to terrorize U.S. communities,” as Chairman Jim Jordan (Ohio) put it. “Under President Biden, there is no border, and Americans are paying the price.”
Never mind that U.S. authorities stopped migrants nearly 3 million times at the supposedly “open border” last fiscal year. You should be very afraid.
Heck, you should even be afraid that the alleged Chinese spy balloon spotted over Montana might have taken off from Wuhan loaded with bioweapons — as Comer speculated Friday on Fox News. Is it any wonder that Rep. George Santos (N.Y.) and other House Republicans are now arming themselves with lapel pins shaped like tiny AR-15 assault rifles?
···
If things weren’t already scary enough, the new House majority this week declared an emergency.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine?
High prices?
Violent crime?
Well, no. Their emergency was the need to kick Ilhan Omar off the House Foreign Affairs Committee, lickety-split.
So House Republicans declared an emergency in order to override the rule they had voted in with great fanfare just a couple of weeks ago that bills must be introduced 72 hours before receiving a vote. Apparently, having the Minnesota Democrat continue to serve on the panel for even one more day would be ruinous.
Scalise, the majority leader, cited “concerns to national security” this week in claiming it “would create major problems if she were on the Foreign Affairs Committee” with “access to classified, sensitive information.”
In a refreshing moment of candor, Republicans on the House Rules Committee on Tuesday night admitted that was B.S.
“This is raw politics. That’s what this is,” acknowledged Roy of Texas.
Massie, of Kentucky, concurred: “It’s a partisan exercise.”
Added Norman, of South Carolina: “The partisanship is real, and I’m glad.”
This was revenge, pure and simple. Two years ago, Democrats had votes to remove Republican Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) and Paul Gosar (Ariz.) from committees for engaging in social-media fantasies about killing Democratic colleagues. (Republicans have reinstated both.)
Omar hadn’t threatened violence against anyone. She made antisemitic remarks a few years ago, and, after an outcry from Democrats and Republicans alike, she apologized unequivocally — a detail omitted from the resolution denouncing her. Votes to remove Greene and Gosar were bipartisan; Friday’s vote to oust Omar was strictly partisan.
A few Republicans had qualms about what they were doing. “This is not my resolution; I didn’t draft it,” saidMichael Guest (R-Miss.), who as chairman of the Ethics Committee had the task of leading the debate on the House floor. (McHenry, of North Carolina, used that same phrase — “this is not my resolution” — to excuse his involvement in the “socialism” denouncement charade.)
Likewise, Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) said last week that she wouldn’t join the “circus” of ousting Omar — but this week she donned a clown suit under pressure.
Maybe they should have heeded their consciences, for the debate was ugly.
After Guest quickly ran out of speakers (only six enlisted), he spent much of the debate reserving his time and leaving the Democrats’ allegations unrebutted.
And they were lacerating:
“This is the very weaponization of antisemitism that I as a Jewish person find repulsive, dangerous and shameful,” said Rep. Dean Phillips (Minn.).
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), bouncing with fury, accused Republicans of “racism and incitement of violence against women of color in this body.”
Rep. Cori Bush (Mo.) saw a “blatantly Islamophobic and racist attack on Congresswoman Omar.”
Rep. Eric Swalwell (Calif.) shouted for Republicans to “look in your own damn mirror” for antisemitism.
“Unbelievable bigotry. Shame on you!” scolded Rep. Mark Pocan (Wis.).
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), breaking into sobs, said Republicans had turned “Congress into a place of fearmongering hate.”
And Guest kept saying: “I reserve.”
Omar stood with a poster showing her as a 9-year-old Somali refugee who fled civil war. “There is this idea that you are suspect if you are an immigrant, or if you are from certain parts of the world, or a certain skin tone, or a Muslim,” she said, angrily reminding her Republican assailants: “I am an American — an American who was sent here by her constituents to represent them in Congress.”
She closed with defiance. “My leadership and voice will not be diminished if I am not on this committee for one term,” she said. “So take your vote or not. I am here to stay.”
The hugs and tears she shared on the floor with her colleagues — Black, White and brown, Jewish, Christian and Muslim — were a powerful rejoinder to the Republicans’ reign of fear and loathing.
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
A CNN poll last week found that about three quarters of Americans, including nearly half of Republicans, think House Republican leaders aren’t paying enough attention to the country’s most pressing problems.
So this week, GOP leaders set out to rectify the situation. They approved a resolution condemning the Russian Revolution. Of 1917.
But before you call Bolshevik on Republican leaders for being 106 years out of date, I should note, in fairness, that their resolution also took issue with more recent events: Joseph Stalin’s Ukrainian famine, Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward and Pol Pot’s “killing fields.”
For those who haven’t kept up with current affairs, those events happened, respectively, in 1932-1933, 1958-1960 and 1975-1979. Still awaiting legislative action by the new House majority: a condemnation of Genghis Khan’s Siege of Merv in 1221 and the Roman Sack of Carthage during the Third Punic War.
The Republicans’ late hit on 20th-century atrocities served a 21st-century partisan aim — specifically, the insinuation that Democrats are trying to import the “horrors of socialism” to the United States. “Congress denounces socialism in all its forms and opposes the implementation of socialist policies in the United States,” the resolution concluded.
It was some good, old-fashioned red-baiting, in the year 2023.
“Socialism is the greatest threat to our economy and freedom and must be defeated,” Rep. Roger Williams (R-Tex.) warned the House on Thursday, calling the fictional menace “alarming and scary.”
Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Tex.) joined the caterwauling, saying the Biden administration had seized “control of the means of production” from private industries. “God have mercy on our country!”
And Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) felt qualified after one month in office to declare that the Democratic Party “has been taken over by a radical socialist ideology.”
Most Democrats went along with the resolution — it’s not a good look to be on the same side of a vote as Pol Pot — but not before they had some fun with the red-scare revivalism.
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) pointed out that the Paycheck Protection Program might qualify as socialism to Republicans, then asked consent to insert into the record the names of all Republican lawmakers who requested PPP loans and forgiveness.
Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), leading the antisocialist forces on the floor, leapt to his feet. “I object!” he said.
The attempt to draw an unbroken line from Uncle Joe Stalin to Sleepy Joe Biden was downright silly, but it served a deadly serious purpose. It is part of a broader effort by Republicans that encourages Americans to see enemies everywhere within their government.
This week alone, the new majority used its powers in committee rooms and on the House floor to undermine trust in government on various fronts:
- Falsely claiming that lazy bureaucrats are refusing to go to work, denying Americans their tax refunds, passports and benefits.
- Falsely insinuating that the government is forcing Americans to take coronavirus vaccines that are both deadly and useless.
- Falsely asserting that the Biden administration is in effect killing Americans by encouraging fentanyl smugglers to enter the country across “open borders.”
- Falsely declaring the only Muslim on the House Foreign Affairs Committee a threat to national security and booting her from the panel in a party-line vote.
- And, for extra credit, summoning the ghosts of Stalin and Mao to suggest that the administration promotes an ideology of mass murder.
The bureaucrats are cheating you. The vaccine is killing you. Immigrants are drugging your children. Muslims are endangering you. And the bloodthirsty socialists are destroying your way of life. The new majority is using the levers of power to stoke paranoia.
···
Last month, in its first legislative action, the new House majority voted to rescind more than $70 billion in funding for the IRS, much of it intended to improve customer service at the agency.
This week, many of those same Republican lawmakers went to the House floor with a new grievance: They are angry about — wait for it — poor customer service at the IRS.
“The American people have suffered” while waiting “for months for their tax refunds,” Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, declared on the House floor.
Can the IRS run an irony audit on these guys?
Republicans, some of whom are still scaring Americans with the bogus claim that 87,000 armed IRS agents will be breaking down their doors, now have a new conspiracy theory: The IRS’s backlogs are caused by teleworking. (It has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the IRS had its budget slashed by 15 percent since 2010, while the number of returns jumped by nearly 10 million annually.)
Therefore, the new majority passed a bill this week ordering IRS employees and all federal workers to return to teleworking levels that existed in 2019 — before the pandemic forever changed the way people work. The title of the bill is as jumbled as its goal: the Stopping Home Office Work’s Unproductive Problems Act — a word soup that forms the acronym SHOW UP.
But it’s not really about teleworking. It’s about encouraging Americans to loathe federal workers.
“This legislation asks every member to ask a simple question,” Comer told the House. “Do you put the needs of your constituents first, or do you put the preferences of federal bureaucrats first?”
Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), chair of the Education and Workforce committee, blamed “bureaucrats in Washington” for making it so that “delay and disarray might as well have become hallmarks of federal agencies and departments.”
The sentiment was much the same at a hearing Comer held Wednesday on waste and fraud in pandemic-relief programs. There, he bemoaned taxpayer dollars “wasted by bureaucrats whose only priority is getting money out the door.”
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) picked up the theme: “How the heck were these bureaucrats so dang incompetent?”
And over at the Rules Committee, Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) said bureaucrats “are not getting the work done” — something he knows because he “just hired a girl who’d been with Social Security for 20 years.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) protested the “implied contempt” for federal workers in Republicans’ statements. But really, it’s explicit. “They’re surely collecting their paychecks,” said a sneering Steve Scalise, the majority leader. “It’s long past time that they show up for work.”
···
The complaint that federal workers don’t work is contradicted by another complaint — that federal workers are working hard to kill everyday Americans with lethal vaccines and opioid overdoses.
The new House majority passed a bill this week aimed at striking down the “tyrannical” requirement that many health-care workers get vaccinated. It came armed with vials of disinformation.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) announced that it has “been proven false” that the vaccine “stops the spread” and that government agencies “have conceded” this. The original vaccine is “for a virus that no longer exists,” he claimed, and the vaccine “can cause myocarditis, blood clots, strokes and even death.”
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) joined in, telling the House that the vaccine has “been admitted by our own CDC director, by the CDC, by the NIH, to do nothing to stop transmission.”
That’s just wrong. The vaccines don’t entirely prevent spread — but they reduce it. The vaccines do have rare side effects — but the risk of death from the virus itself is much greater.
Rep. Greg Murphy (R-N.C.), a doctor, spoke of people shunning the vaccine “based upon fears about fertility” — without mentioning that there is no basis for such fears.
But there is only so much room for vaccine terror in the overworked amygdala of the Republican voter. That’s because they also have to fear migrant drug smugglers crossing our “open borders.”
In reality, illegal border crossings fell by about 40 percent in January, The Post reported this week. Most of the fentanyl seized has been at legal border crossings, typically smuggled by U.S. citizens — not by migrants crossing illegally.
Yet Republicans used the first hearing of the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday to alarm Americans about “Mexican smuggling cartels exploiting the open border to terrorize U.S. communities,” as Chairman Jim Jordan (Ohio) put it. “Under President Biden, there is no border, and Americans are paying the price.”
Never mind that U.S. authorities stopped migrants nearly 3 million times at the supposedly “open border” last fiscal year. You should be very afraid.
Heck, you should even be afraid that the alleged Chinese spy balloon spotted over Montana might have taken off from Wuhan loaded with bioweapons — as Comer speculated Friday on Fox News. Is it any wonder that Rep. George Santos (N.Y.) and other House Republicans are now arming themselves with lapel pins shaped like tiny AR-15 assault rifles?
···
If things weren’t already scary enough, the new House majority this week declared an emergency.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine?
High prices?
Violent crime?
Well, no. Their emergency was the need to kick Ilhan Omar off the House Foreign Affairs Committee, lickety-split.
So House Republicans declared an emergency in order to override the rule they had voted in with great fanfare just a couple of weeks ago that bills must be introduced 72 hours before receiving a vote. Apparently, having the Minnesota Democrat continue to serve on the panel for even one more day would be ruinous.
Scalise, the majority leader, cited “concerns to national security” this week in claiming it “would create major problems if she were on the Foreign Affairs Committee” with “access to classified, sensitive information.”
In a refreshing moment of candor, Republicans on the House Rules Committee on Tuesday night admitted that was B.S.
“This is raw politics. That’s what this is,” acknowledged Roy of Texas.
Massie, of Kentucky, concurred: “It’s a partisan exercise.”
Added Norman, of South Carolina: “The partisanship is real, and I’m glad.”
This was revenge, pure and simple. Two years ago, Democrats had votes to remove Republican Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) and Paul Gosar (Ariz.) from committees for engaging in social-media fantasies about killing Democratic colleagues. (Republicans have reinstated both.)
Omar hadn’t threatened violence against anyone. She made antisemitic remarks a few years ago, and, after an outcry from Democrats and Republicans alike, she apologized unequivocally — a detail omitted from the resolution denouncing her. Votes to remove Greene and Gosar were bipartisan; Friday’s vote to oust Omar was strictly partisan.
A few Republicans had qualms about what they were doing. “This is not my resolution; I didn’t draft it,” saidMichael Guest (R-Miss.), who as chairman of the Ethics Committee had the task of leading the debate on the House floor. (McHenry, of North Carolina, used that same phrase — “this is not my resolution” — to excuse his involvement in the “socialism” denouncement charade.)
Likewise, Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) said last week that she wouldn’t join the “circus” of ousting Omar — but this week she donned a clown suit under pressure.
Maybe they should have heeded their consciences, for the debate was ugly.
After Guest quickly ran out of speakers (only six enlisted), he spent much of the debate reserving his time and leaving the Democrats’ allegations unrebutted.
And they were lacerating:
“This is the very weaponization of antisemitism that I as a Jewish person find repulsive, dangerous and shameful,” said Rep. Dean Phillips (Minn.).
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), bouncing with fury, accused Republicans of “racism and incitement of violence against women of color in this body.”
Rep. Cori Bush (Mo.) saw a “blatantly Islamophobic and racist attack on Congresswoman Omar.”
Rep. Eric Swalwell (Calif.) shouted for Republicans to “look in your own damn mirror” for antisemitism.
“Unbelievable bigotry. Shame on you!” scolded Rep. Mark Pocan (Wis.).
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), breaking into sobs, said Republicans had turned “Congress into a place of fearmongering hate.”
And Guest kept saying: “I reserve.”
Omar stood with a poster showing her as a 9-year-old Somali refugee who fled civil war. “There is this idea that you are suspect if you are an immigrant, or if you are from certain parts of the world, or a certain skin tone, or a Muslim,” she said, angrily reminding her Republican assailants: “I am an American — an American who was sent here by her constituents to represent them in Congress.”
She closed with defiance. “My leadership and voice will not be diminished if I am not on this committee for one term,” she said. “So take your vote or not. I am here to stay.”
The hugs and tears she shared on the floor with her colleagues — Black, White and brown, Jewish, Christian and Muslim — were a powerful rejoinder to the Republicans’ reign of fear and loathing.
YE OLD SUPREME COURT? YOUR ORIGINALISM IS MAKING AMERICA UNSAFE.
By Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post
When the Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that the Second Amendment protects individuals’ right to gun ownership, it emphasized the ability “of law-abiding, responsible citizens to use arms in defense of hearth and home.” When it expanded that decision last year in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the court noted that “ordinary, law-abiding citizens have a similar right to carry handguns publicly for their self-defense.”
Over a six-week stretch from December 2020 to January 2021, Rahimi took part in five shootings around Arlington, Tex. He fired an AR-15 into the home of a man to whom he had sold Percocet. The next day, after a car accident, he pulled out a handgun, shot at the other driver and sped off — only to return, fire a different gun and flee again. Rahimi shot at a police car. When a friend’s credit card was declined at a fast-food restaurant, he fired several rounds into the air.
Or, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit put it in vacating Rahimi’s conviction for illegal gun possession, “Rahimi, while hardly a model citizen, is nonetheless part of the political community entitled to the Second Amendment’s guarantees, all other things equal.”
This is the insane state of Second Amendment law in the chaotic aftermath of Bruen. The problem isn’t that decision’s precise outcome, striking down New York state’s gun licensing law because it required a showing of “special need for self-protection” to obtain a concealed carry permit.
The problem is that in doing so, the six-justice conservative majority imposed a history-based test — a straitjacket, really — for assessing the constitutionality of gun laws. No longer can judges decide whether restrictions are a reasonable means to protect public safety.
Instead, they have to hunt down obscure, colonial-era statutes to determine if there are counterparts to modern rules. So it’s little surprise that conservative judges in the lower courts are now busy declaring all sorts of perfectly sensible gun laws unconstitutional.
Those cases are just making their way to the appellate level, and Thursday’s ruling by the Fifth Circuit is one of the earliest to be decided. The court may be the most conservative — and most dangerous — in the country. The ruling in Rahimi’s case, written by one Trump-appointed judge, Cory T. Wilson, and joined by Trump appointee James C. Ho and Reagan appointee Edith H. Jones, shows why.
When Arlington police searched Rahimi’s home, they found multiple guns — and a domestic violence restraining order imposed after Rahimi allegedly assaulted his ex-girlfriend. Federal law prohibits those subject to such orders from possessing guns, and Rahimi was indicted by a federal grand jury.
Before Bruen, the Fifth Circuit had upheld such charges against constitutional challenge, and it had previously rejected Rahimi’s claim that the law violated his Second Amendment rights. But on Thursday, it did an about-face.
“We know the increased risk women in abusive relationships face when the abuser has a gun, and the Fifth Circuit just essentially greenlighted arming domestic abusers,” Adam Skaggs, vice president of the Giffords Law Center, told me. “As a matter of public safety, this is a horrendous decision.”
Wilson, who was a fervent opponent of gun regulation as a Mississippi state legislator, strained to read the Supreme Court’s language about law-abiding citizens out of the precedents. That was just “shorthand,” he insisted, and “read in context, the Court’s phrasing does not add an implied gloss that constricts the Second Amendment’s reach.”
This is simply wrong. As the Justice Department argued, the court in Bruen emphasized that “nothing in our analysis” threatened licensing laws in 43 states, which, the court said, “are designed to ensure only that those bearing arms in the jurisdiction are, in fact, ‘law-abiding, responsible citizens.’” Such as, say, Texas, which prohibits those subject to domestic violence protective orders from obtaining licenses.
Wilson was having none of it. Under the government’s approach, he asked, “Could speeders be stripped of their right to keep and bear arms? Political nonconformists? People who do not recycle or drive an electric vehicle?”
Seriously? This isn’t about political correctness. It’s about a man accused of dragging his girlfriend into his car, shooting at a witness who saw him assault her, and warning the girlfriend that he would shoot her if she told anyone what had happened.
As to historical analogues, Wilson acknowledged that there were “laws in several colonies and states that disarmed classes of people considered to be dangerous, specifically including those unwilling to take an oath of allegiance, slaves, and Native Americans.”
But, he said, despite some “facial similarities” with laws disarming domestic abusers, “the purpose of these ‘dangerousness’ laws was the preservation of political and social order, not the protection of an identified person from the specific threat posed by another.”
As Pepperdine law professor Jacob Charles pointed out on Twitter, this criticism is “absolutely bonkers” — it faults the domestic abuse law for being “too tailored.” The law applies to those who have been determined, after a court hearing, to present a “credible threat to the physical safety” of an intimate partner or child.
All of which serves to underscore the real difficulty with the Supreme Court’s history fetish: As Bruen itself demonstrated, the matter of what historical examples to accept and what to reject is open to manipulation by judges predisposed to strike down gun laws.
And it poses a dilemma for the conservative justices, who are about to find this issue back in their laps. Are they going to instruct lower courts they have gone too far, or are they going to let it rip, while bullets fly and judges scour statutes from the age of muskets?
By Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post
When the Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that the Second Amendment protects individuals’ right to gun ownership, it emphasized the ability “of law-abiding, responsible citizens to use arms in defense of hearth and home.” When it expanded that decision last year in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the court noted that “ordinary, law-abiding citizens have a similar right to carry handguns publicly for their self-defense.”
Over a six-week stretch from December 2020 to January 2021, Rahimi took part in five shootings around Arlington, Tex. He fired an AR-15 into the home of a man to whom he had sold Percocet. The next day, after a car accident, he pulled out a handgun, shot at the other driver and sped off — only to return, fire a different gun and flee again. Rahimi shot at a police car. When a friend’s credit card was declined at a fast-food restaurant, he fired several rounds into the air.
Or, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit put it in vacating Rahimi’s conviction for illegal gun possession, “Rahimi, while hardly a model citizen, is nonetheless part of the political community entitled to the Second Amendment’s guarantees, all other things equal.”
This is the insane state of Second Amendment law in the chaotic aftermath of Bruen. The problem isn’t that decision’s precise outcome, striking down New York state’s gun licensing law because it required a showing of “special need for self-protection” to obtain a concealed carry permit.
The problem is that in doing so, the six-justice conservative majority imposed a history-based test — a straitjacket, really — for assessing the constitutionality of gun laws. No longer can judges decide whether restrictions are a reasonable means to protect public safety.
Instead, they have to hunt down obscure, colonial-era statutes to determine if there are counterparts to modern rules. So it’s little surprise that conservative judges in the lower courts are now busy declaring all sorts of perfectly sensible gun laws unconstitutional.
Those cases are just making their way to the appellate level, and Thursday’s ruling by the Fifth Circuit is one of the earliest to be decided. The court may be the most conservative — and most dangerous — in the country. The ruling in Rahimi’s case, written by one Trump-appointed judge, Cory T. Wilson, and joined by Trump appointee James C. Ho and Reagan appointee Edith H. Jones, shows why.
When Arlington police searched Rahimi’s home, they found multiple guns — and a domestic violence restraining order imposed after Rahimi allegedly assaulted his ex-girlfriend. Federal law prohibits those subject to such orders from possessing guns, and Rahimi was indicted by a federal grand jury.
Before Bruen, the Fifth Circuit had upheld such charges against constitutional challenge, and it had previously rejected Rahimi’s claim that the law violated his Second Amendment rights. But on Thursday, it did an about-face.
“We know the increased risk women in abusive relationships face when the abuser has a gun, and the Fifth Circuit just essentially greenlighted arming domestic abusers,” Adam Skaggs, vice president of the Giffords Law Center, told me. “As a matter of public safety, this is a horrendous decision.”
Wilson, who was a fervent opponent of gun regulation as a Mississippi state legislator, strained to read the Supreme Court’s language about law-abiding citizens out of the precedents. That was just “shorthand,” he insisted, and “read in context, the Court’s phrasing does not add an implied gloss that constricts the Second Amendment’s reach.”
This is simply wrong. As the Justice Department argued, the court in Bruen emphasized that “nothing in our analysis” threatened licensing laws in 43 states, which, the court said, “are designed to ensure only that those bearing arms in the jurisdiction are, in fact, ‘law-abiding, responsible citizens.’” Such as, say, Texas, which prohibits those subject to domestic violence protective orders from obtaining licenses.
Wilson was having none of it. Under the government’s approach, he asked, “Could speeders be stripped of their right to keep and bear arms? Political nonconformists? People who do not recycle or drive an electric vehicle?”
Seriously? This isn’t about political correctness. It’s about a man accused of dragging his girlfriend into his car, shooting at a witness who saw him assault her, and warning the girlfriend that he would shoot her if she told anyone what had happened.
As to historical analogues, Wilson acknowledged that there were “laws in several colonies and states that disarmed classes of people considered to be dangerous, specifically including those unwilling to take an oath of allegiance, slaves, and Native Americans.”
But, he said, despite some “facial similarities” with laws disarming domestic abusers, “the purpose of these ‘dangerousness’ laws was the preservation of political and social order, not the protection of an identified person from the specific threat posed by another.”
As Pepperdine law professor Jacob Charles pointed out on Twitter, this criticism is “absolutely bonkers” — it faults the domestic abuse law for being “too tailored.” The law applies to those who have been determined, after a court hearing, to present a “credible threat to the physical safety” of an intimate partner or child.
All of which serves to underscore the real difficulty with the Supreme Court’s history fetish: As Bruen itself demonstrated, the matter of what historical examples to accept and what to reject is open to manipulation by judges predisposed to strike down gun laws.
And it poses a dilemma for the conservative justices, who are about to find this issue back in their laps. Are they going to instruct lower courts they have gone too far, or are they going to let it rip, while bullets fly and judges scour statutes from the age of muskets?
2016 TRUMP CAMPAIGN TO PAY $450,000 TO SETTLE NONDISCLOSURE AGREEMENTS SUIT
The settlement with a former campaign aide who says she was the target of sexual discrimination effectively invalidates agreements hundreds of 2016 Trump campaign officials signed.
By Maggie Haberman, The New York Times
Former President Donald J. Trump’s 2016 campaign will pay $450,000 as part of a settlement of a long court fight over its use of nondisclosure agreements, according to documents filed on Friday in a New York federal court.
The proposed settlement with Jessica Denson, a former campaign aide whom the campaign tried to silence as she claimed she was the target of abusive treatment and sexual discrimination by another campaign member, effectively invalidates the nondisclosure agreements that hundreds of officials from Mr. Trump’s first presidential run signed.
Ms. Denson is set to receive $25,000, the filings show, and the rest will cover legal fees and other costs. The judge in the case, who has not yet approved the settlement, pushed back on efforts by the campaign to keep the paperwork sealed. The details were reported earlier by Bloomberg News.
“We think that this N.D.A. was entirely unreasonable from the beginning,” said David K. Bowles, one of the lawyers for Ms. Denson, who initially represented herself in the case. “No attorney should have ever drafted it, and no campaign worker should have ever been compelled to sign it. We think the unwinding of the N.D.A. is a triumph for free speech, for democracy and for Jessica Denson, in particular, and we are very proud of our accomplishment tonight.”
A representative for Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign did not respond to emails seeking comment.
Mr. Trump has made broad use of nondisclosure agreements throughout his business career and, later, his political career. The agreements have generally sought to keep people from disclosing information about Mr. Trump, but he has also used them as a cudgel against a wide variety of aides. In Ms. Denson’s case, her lawyers argued the agreement was overly broad, among other flaws.
Ms. Denson had been trying to make the suit a certified class action shortly before the matter was settled. She has a separate case pending related to her claim that she was sexually discriminated against by a superior on the campaign.
The settlement with a former campaign aide who says she was the target of sexual discrimination effectively invalidates agreements hundreds of 2016 Trump campaign officials signed.
By Maggie Haberman, The New York Times
Former President Donald J. Trump’s 2016 campaign will pay $450,000 as part of a settlement of a long court fight over its use of nondisclosure agreements, according to documents filed on Friday in a New York federal court.
The proposed settlement with Jessica Denson, a former campaign aide whom the campaign tried to silence as she claimed she was the target of abusive treatment and sexual discrimination by another campaign member, effectively invalidates the nondisclosure agreements that hundreds of officials from Mr. Trump’s first presidential run signed.
Ms. Denson is set to receive $25,000, the filings show, and the rest will cover legal fees and other costs. The judge in the case, who has not yet approved the settlement, pushed back on efforts by the campaign to keep the paperwork sealed. The details were reported earlier by Bloomberg News.
“We think that this N.D.A. was entirely unreasonable from the beginning,” said David K. Bowles, one of the lawyers for Ms. Denson, who initially represented herself in the case. “No attorney should have ever drafted it, and no campaign worker should have ever been compelled to sign it. We think the unwinding of the N.D.A. is a triumph for free speech, for democracy and for Jessica Denson, in particular, and we are very proud of our accomplishment tonight.”
A representative for Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign did not respond to emails seeking comment.
Mr. Trump has made broad use of nondisclosure agreements throughout his business career and, later, his political career. The agreements have generally sought to keep people from disclosing information about Mr. Trump, but he has also used them as a cudgel against a wide variety of aides. In Ms. Denson’s case, her lawyers argued the agreement was overly broad, among other flaws.
Ms. Denson had been trying to make the suit a certified class action shortly before the matter was settled. She has a separate case pending related to her claim that she was sexually discriminated against by a superior on the campaign.
CAN ANYTHING BE DONE TO ASSUAGE RURAL RAGE?
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
Rural resentment has become a central fact of American politics — in particular, a pillar of support for the rise of right-wing extremism. As the Republican Party has moved ever further into MAGAland, it has lost votes among educated suburban voters; but this has been offset by a drastic rightward shift in rural areas, which in some places has gone so far that the Democrats who remain face intimidation and are afraid to reveal their party affiliation.
But is this shift permanent? Can anything be done to assuage rural rage?
The answer will depend on two things: whether it’s possible to improve rural lives and restore rural communities, and whether the voters in these communities will give politicians credit for any improvements that do take place.
This week my colleague Thomas B. Edsall surveyed research on the rural Republican shift. I was struck by his summary of work by Katherine J. Cramer, who attributes rural resentment to perceptions that rural areas are ignored by policymakers, don’t get their fair share of resources and are disrespected by “city folks.”
As it happens, all three perceptions are largely wrong. I’m sure that my saying this will generate a tidal wave of hate mail, and lecturing rural Americans about policy reality isn’t going to move their votes. Nonetheless, it’s important to get our facts straight.
The truth is that ever since the New Deal rural America has received special treatment from policymakers. It’s not just farm subsidies, which ballooned under Donald Trump to the point where they accounted for around 40 percent of total farm income. Rural America also benefits from special programs that support housing, utilities and business in general.
In terms of resources, major federal programs disproportionately benefit rural areas, in part because such areas have a disproportionate number of seniors receiving Social Security and Medicare. But even means-tested programs — programs that Republicans often disparage as “welfare” — tilt rural. Notably, at this point rural Americans are more likely than urban Americans to be on Medicaid and receive food stamps.
And because rural America is poorer than urban America, it pays much less per person in federal taxes, so in practice major metropolitan areas hugely subsidize the countryside. These subsidies don’t just support incomes, they support economies: Government and the so-called health care and social assistance sector each employ more people in rural America than agriculture, and what do you think pays for those jobs?
What about rural perceptions of being disrespected? Well, many people have negative views about people with different lifestyles; that’s human nature. There is, however, an unwritten rule in American politics that it’s OK for politicians to seek rural votes by insulting big cities and their residents, but it would be unforgivable for urban politicians to return the favor. “I have to go to New York City soon,” tweeted J.D. Vance during his senatorial campaign. “I have heard it’s disgusting and violent there.” Can you imagine, say, Chuck Schumer saying something similar about rural Ohio, even as a joke?
So the ostensible justifications for rural resentment don’t withstand scrutiny — but that doesn’t mean things are fine. A changing economy has increasingly favored metropolitan areas with large college-educated work forces over small towns. The rural working-age population has been declining, leaving seniors behind. Rural men in their prime working years are much more likely than their metropolitan counterparts to not be working. Rural woes are real.
Ironically, however, the policy agenda of the party most rural voters support would make things even worse, slashing the safety-net programs these voters depend on. And Democrats shouldn’t be afraid to point this out.
But can they also have a positive agenda for rural renewal? As The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent recently pointed out, the infrastructure spending bills enacted under President Biden, while primarily intended to address climate change, will also create large numbers of blue-collar jobs in rural areas and small cities. They are, in practice, a form of the “place-based industrial policy” some economists have urged to fight America’s growing geographic disparities.
Will they work? The economic forces that have been hollowing out rural America are deep and not easily countered. But it’s certainly worth trying.
But even if these policies improve rural fortunes, will Democrats get any credit? It’s easy to be cynical. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the new governor of Arkansas, has pledged to get the “bureaucratic tyrants” of Washington “out of your wallets”; in 2019 the federal government spent almost twice as much in Arkansas as it collected in taxes, de facto providing the average Arkansas resident with $5,500 in aid. So even if Democratic policies greatly improve rural lives, will rural voters notice?
Still, anything that helps reverse rural America’s decline would be a good thing in itself. And maybe, just maybe, reducing the heartland’s economic desperation will also help reverse its political radicalization.
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
Rural resentment has become a central fact of American politics — in particular, a pillar of support for the rise of right-wing extremism. As the Republican Party has moved ever further into MAGAland, it has lost votes among educated suburban voters; but this has been offset by a drastic rightward shift in rural areas, which in some places has gone so far that the Democrats who remain face intimidation and are afraid to reveal their party affiliation.
But is this shift permanent? Can anything be done to assuage rural rage?
The answer will depend on two things: whether it’s possible to improve rural lives and restore rural communities, and whether the voters in these communities will give politicians credit for any improvements that do take place.
This week my colleague Thomas B. Edsall surveyed research on the rural Republican shift. I was struck by his summary of work by Katherine J. Cramer, who attributes rural resentment to perceptions that rural areas are ignored by policymakers, don’t get their fair share of resources and are disrespected by “city folks.”
As it happens, all three perceptions are largely wrong. I’m sure that my saying this will generate a tidal wave of hate mail, and lecturing rural Americans about policy reality isn’t going to move their votes. Nonetheless, it’s important to get our facts straight.
The truth is that ever since the New Deal rural America has received special treatment from policymakers. It’s not just farm subsidies, which ballooned under Donald Trump to the point where they accounted for around 40 percent of total farm income. Rural America also benefits from special programs that support housing, utilities and business in general.
In terms of resources, major federal programs disproportionately benefit rural areas, in part because such areas have a disproportionate number of seniors receiving Social Security and Medicare. But even means-tested programs — programs that Republicans often disparage as “welfare” — tilt rural. Notably, at this point rural Americans are more likely than urban Americans to be on Medicaid and receive food stamps.
And because rural America is poorer than urban America, it pays much less per person in federal taxes, so in practice major metropolitan areas hugely subsidize the countryside. These subsidies don’t just support incomes, they support economies: Government and the so-called health care and social assistance sector each employ more people in rural America than agriculture, and what do you think pays for those jobs?
What about rural perceptions of being disrespected? Well, many people have negative views about people with different lifestyles; that’s human nature. There is, however, an unwritten rule in American politics that it’s OK for politicians to seek rural votes by insulting big cities and their residents, but it would be unforgivable for urban politicians to return the favor. “I have to go to New York City soon,” tweeted J.D. Vance during his senatorial campaign. “I have heard it’s disgusting and violent there.” Can you imagine, say, Chuck Schumer saying something similar about rural Ohio, even as a joke?
So the ostensible justifications for rural resentment don’t withstand scrutiny — but that doesn’t mean things are fine. A changing economy has increasingly favored metropolitan areas with large college-educated work forces over small towns. The rural working-age population has been declining, leaving seniors behind. Rural men in their prime working years are much more likely than their metropolitan counterparts to not be working. Rural woes are real.
Ironically, however, the policy agenda of the party most rural voters support would make things even worse, slashing the safety-net programs these voters depend on. And Democrats shouldn’t be afraid to point this out.
But can they also have a positive agenda for rural renewal? As The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent recently pointed out, the infrastructure spending bills enacted under President Biden, while primarily intended to address climate change, will also create large numbers of blue-collar jobs in rural areas and small cities. They are, in practice, a form of the “place-based industrial policy” some economists have urged to fight America’s growing geographic disparities.
Will they work? The economic forces that have been hollowing out rural America are deep and not easily countered. But it’s certainly worth trying.
But even if these policies improve rural fortunes, will Democrats get any credit? It’s easy to be cynical. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the new governor of Arkansas, has pledged to get the “bureaucratic tyrants” of Washington “out of your wallets”; in 2019 the federal government spent almost twice as much in Arkansas as it collected in taxes, de facto providing the average Arkansas resident with $5,500 in aid. So even if Democratic policies greatly improve rural lives, will rural voters notice?
Still, anything that helps reverse rural America’s decline would be a good thing in itself. And maybe, just maybe, reducing the heartland’s economic desperation will also help reverse its political radicalization.
GEORGE SANTOS IS A FRAUD. EXPEL HIM FROM THE HOUSE.
By Eugene Robinson, The Washington Post
The people of New York’s 3rd Congressional District thought they were sending to the House a successful Jewish businessman who had attended an elite prep school, starred on the volleyball team at Baruch College, earned a graduate degree at New York University, worked at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, founded his own thriving asset-management firm, and served his community by running an animal-rescue charity.
Instead, they got none of the above.
They got Rep. George Santos (R), or “Anthony Devolder,” or “Anthony Zabrovsky,” or “Kitara Ravache.” Whoever he might be, he is not remotely the man those voters believed they were electing.
Santos defrauded his constituents, morally if not legally, and effectively disenfranchised them. More of his fabrications are revealed almost daily. His presence in the House chamber, where so much history has taken place, defiles and dishonors the institution — yes, that is still possible — and he should be promptly expelled.
This is something that Republicans and Democrats should be able to agree on. Almost every member of Congress I’ve ever met, from either party, at some level understands holding elective office as a sacred trust. To accept a brazen charlatan such as Santos as a colleague is to mock the hallowed place they love to call the “People’s House.”
The excuse for doing nothing that Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Santos have offered — that the people of his district decided Santos should represent them, and their will is sovereign — holds no water. Those voters chose a fictional character, a figment of Santos’s fertile imagination. Their will was not honored, but instead thwarted, by his myriad lies.
If Santos had, say, claimed a college degree that he fell just short of earning, or exaggerated his athletic prowess or his business acumen, I would understand a decision to let voters render their verdict in 2024. He would hardly be the first member of Congress to burnish a résumé. But I am aware of no precedent in which a representative or senator forged an entire gleaming persona out of patent lies.
There is no shame in capping one’s formal education with a high school equivalency diploma; Abraham Lincoln, who served a term in the House, never went to college, either. But to then claim both undergraduate and graduate degrees is indeed shameful, and dishonest, and perhaps pathological.
And given where his district is, it was unforgivable for Santos to falsely claim on his campaign website that his mother “was in her office in the South Tower” of the World Trade Center at the moment of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Santos said on Twitter that 9/11 “claimed my mother’s life.” He told voters that although she survived the attacks, she later died of cancer — implying that the illness was caused by toxic dust and debris from the towers’ collapse. There is no evidence that Santos’s mother worked at the World Trade Center on 9/11, and immigration records appear to show she was not even in the United States at the time.
In the parts of Queens and Long Island that Santos represents, many voters would have personally known office workers or firefighters who died on 9/11 or in the aftermath. For Santos to lie about having a personal connection to a tragedy so deeply felt by so many New Yorkers is cynical and sick.
I realize that calling for Santos to be expelled might sound quixotic. Yes, I know that Republicans have only a nine-seat House majority. I know McCarthy needed Santos’s vote to become speaker and will need his continuing support to keep that hard-won gavel. And I know there is a good chance that if Santos were tossed out, the seat might well go to a Democrat in a special election.
But even then, Republicans would still control the chamber. And McCarthy’s position is already precarious, since any member of the GOP caucus can force a vote on his ouster. Also, there is a practical question: How can McCarthy or anyone else in the House trust anything Santos ever says?
The House Ethics Committee is investigating Santos but usually moves at the speed of molasses in winter. Local and federal prosecutors, meanwhile, are following the money — looking into Santos’s personal and campaign finances — and McCarthy might be waiting to see what those probes unearth before taking any action.
If so, that is a mistake. It is already beyond dispute that injury has been done to the people of New York’s 3rd District, who are denied the representative they voted for. As speaker, McCarthy has a binary choice: Either he moves against Santos in defense of the House’s integrity — or he proves that it has none.
By Eugene Robinson, The Washington Post
The people of New York’s 3rd Congressional District thought they were sending to the House a successful Jewish businessman who had attended an elite prep school, starred on the volleyball team at Baruch College, earned a graduate degree at New York University, worked at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, founded his own thriving asset-management firm, and served his community by running an animal-rescue charity.
Instead, they got none of the above.
They got Rep. George Santos (R), or “Anthony Devolder,” or “Anthony Zabrovsky,” or “Kitara Ravache.” Whoever he might be, he is not remotely the man those voters believed they were electing.
Santos defrauded his constituents, morally if not legally, and effectively disenfranchised them. More of his fabrications are revealed almost daily. His presence in the House chamber, where so much history has taken place, defiles and dishonors the institution — yes, that is still possible — and he should be promptly expelled.
This is something that Republicans and Democrats should be able to agree on. Almost every member of Congress I’ve ever met, from either party, at some level understands holding elective office as a sacred trust. To accept a brazen charlatan such as Santos as a colleague is to mock the hallowed place they love to call the “People’s House.”
The excuse for doing nothing that Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Santos have offered — that the people of his district decided Santos should represent them, and their will is sovereign — holds no water. Those voters chose a fictional character, a figment of Santos’s fertile imagination. Their will was not honored, but instead thwarted, by his myriad lies.
If Santos had, say, claimed a college degree that he fell just short of earning, or exaggerated his athletic prowess or his business acumen, I would understand a decision to let voters render their verdict in 2024. He would hardly be the first member of Congress to burnish a résumé. But I am aware of no precedent in which a representative or senator forged an entire gleaming persona out of patent lies.
There is no shame in capping one’s formal education with a high school equivalency diploma; Abraham Lincoln, who served a term in the House, never went to college, either. But to then claim both undergraduate and graduate degrees is indeed shameful, and dishonest, and perhaps pathological.
And given where his district is, it was unforgivable for Santos to falsely claim on his campaign website that his mother “was in her office in the South Tower” of the World Trade Center at the moment of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Santos said on Twitter that 9/11 “claimed my mother’s life.” He told voters that although she survived the attacks, she later died of cancer — implying that the illness was caused by toxic dust and debris from the towers’ collapse. There is no evidence that Santos’s mother worked at the World Trade Center on 9/11, and immigration records appear to show she was not even in the United States at the time.
In the parts of Queens and Long Island that Santos represents, many voters would have personally known office workers or firefighters who died on 9/11 or in the aftermath. For Santos to lie about having a personal connection to a tragedy so deeply felt by so many New Yorkers is cynical and sick.
I realize that calling for Santos to be expelled might sound quixotic. Yes, I know that Republicans have only a nine-seat House majority. I know McCarthy needed Santos’s vote to become speaker and will need his continuing support to keep that hard-won gavel. And I know there is a good chance that if Santos were tossed out, the seat might well go to a Democrat in a special election.
But even then, Republicans would still control the chamber. And McCarthy’s position is already precarious, since any member of the GOP caucus can force a vote on his ouster. Also, there is a practical question: How can McCarthy or anyone else in the House trust anything Santos ever says?
The House Ethics Committee is investigating Santos but usually moves at the speed of molasses in winter. Local and federal prosecutors, meanwhile, are following the money — looking into Santos’s personal and campaign finances — and McCarthy might be waiting to see what those probes unearth before taking any action.
If so, that is a mistake. It is already beyond dispute that injury has been done to the people of New York’s 3rd District, who are denied the representative they voted for. As speaker, McCarthy has a binary choice: Either he moves against Santos in defense of the House’s integrity — or he proves that it has none.
THE GOP TAX PLAN IS TO LET THE RICH PAY LESS AND MAKE YOU PAY MORE
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
President Biden, consistent with his idea of building an economy from “the bottom up and the middle out,” has tried to get the rich and big corporations to pay more taxes. The MAGA GOP, abandoning all pretense of populism, has a scheme to junk the progressive tax code and replace it with a national sales tax, with devastating results for the middle class.
That tells you a lot about the contrasting visions of the two parties. One still fights for the little guy in practical, concrete terms while the other proposes one harebrained scheme after another with no regard to the needs of average Americans.
Biden’s American Rescue Plan expanded the child tax credit for a year and permanently made it fully refundable, meaning that parents receive the money regardless of how much they owe in taxes. Keeping his promises not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year and to get businesses to pay more, Biden raised $300 billion in revenue in the Inflation Reduction Act by placing a new tax on stock buybacks and enacting a minimum tax on big corporations. To the chagrin of tax cheats (and their sympathetic Republican politicians), the law also boosted funding for the Internal Revenue Service to crack down on tax evaders.
None of these were radical changes in the code. More far-reaching plans to increase the individual top marginal tax rate, to boost the corporate tax rate, to equalize tax treatment of capital gains and ordinary income for those making more than $400,000, and to eliminate the step-up basis for the estate tax never passed.
The principle underlying all of these measures, which would be comparatively small adjustments that would not hit the vast majority of Americans, was simple: The rich have made out very well and should pay more taxes; working- and middle-class taxpayers shouldn’t.
“Over the past 40 years, the wealthy have gotten wealthier, and too many corporations have lost their sense of responsibility to their workers, their communities and the country,” Biden said in a speech in September 2021. “CEOs used to make about 20 times the average worker in the company that they ran. Today, they make more than 350 times what the average worker in their corporation makes.” He added, “Since the pandemic began, billionaires have seen their wealth go up by $1.8 trillion. That is, everyone who was a billionaire before the pandemic began, the total accumulated wealth beyond the billions they already had has gone up by $1.8 trillion.”
That grotesque widening of income inequality offends most Americans, who consistently tell pollsters the rich should pay more.
GOP politicians and their wealthy donors see things differently. The first tax measure proposed by the MAGA House was to try to take back funding for the IRS to chase down tax cheats.
“The debate should focus on one accurate and alarming number: the IRS has 2,284 fewer skilled auditors to handle the sophisticated returns of wealthy taxpayers than it did in 1954,” Chuck Marr of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities wrote. “The decade-long, House Republican-driven budget cuts have created dysfunction at the IRS, where relatively few millionaires are now audited.”
But allowing tax cheats to avoid paying what they legally owe is not the sum total of the GOP thinking on taxes. “As part of his deal to become House speaker,” Semafor reported, “Kevin McCarthy reportedly promised his party’s conservative hardliners a vote on legislation that would scrap the entire American tax code and replace it with a jumbo-sized national sales tax.”
A mammoth 30 percent sales tax would be grossly regressive, socking it to the same working- and middle-class families Republicans ostensibly worry are paying more at the pump and grocery store because of inflation.
You know the idea is rotten when Grover Norquist, the head of Americans for Tax Reform, blasted the move. He told Semafor: “This is a political gift to Biden and the Democrats.” Even Norquist knows that because the poor and middle class spend a much higher percentage of their income on necessities such as food and clothing, the impact would be devastating.
Unsurprisingly Democrats leaped at the chance to blast the scheme. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tweeted:
Hold on: House Republicans want a national 30% sales tax on everything from groceries to gasoline? They want to raise taxes on working-class & middle-class families while slashing them for millionaires & billionaires? Are they TRYING to show exactly how out of touch they are? — Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) January 19, 2023
Biden also hammered Republicans: “National sales tax, that’s a great idea. It would raise taxes on the middle class by taxing thousands of everyday items from groceries to gas, while cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans.”
The GOP plan boils down to this: Let rich tax cheats get away with not paying what they owe while redoing the entire tax system so the overwhelming burden will fall on those less able to pay. Genius! Well, if you are a Democrat running in 2024.
The plan is unlikely even to get a vote. But it is indicative of the utter lack of seriousness that pervades the GOP. They throw out one boneheaded idea after another, hoping to please some segment of their base or donors, with nary a care in the world for the needs of their constituents nor for the actual challenges we face.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
President Biden, consistent with his idea of building an economy from “the bottom up and the middle out,” has tried to get the rich and big corporations to pay more taxes. The MAGA GOP, abandoning all pretense of populism, has a scheme to junk the progressive tax code and replace it with a national sales tax, with devastating results for the middle class.
That tells you a lot about the contrasting visions of the two parties. One still fights for the little guy in practical, concrete terms while the other proposes one harebrained scheme after another with no regard to the needs of average Americans.
Biden’s American Rescue Plan expanded the child tax credit for a year and permanently made it fully refundable, meaning that parents receive the money regardless of how much they owe in taxes. Keeping his promises not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year and to get businesses to pay more, Biden raised $300 billion in revenue in the Inflation Reduction Act by placing a new tax on stock buybacks and enacting a minimum tax on big corporations. To the chagrin of tax cheats (and their sympathetic Republican politicians), the law also boosted funding for the Internal Revenue Service to crack down on tax evaders.
None of these were radical changes in the code. More far-reaching plans to increase the individual top marginal tax rate, to boost the corporate tax rate, to equalize tax treatment of capital gains and ordinary income for those making more than $400,000, and to eliminate the step-up basis for the estate tax never passed.
The principle underlying all of these measures, which would be comparatively small adjustments that would not hit the vast majority of Americans, was simple: The rich have made out very well and should pay more taxes; working- and middle-class taxpayers shouldn’t.
“Over the past 40 years, the wealthy have gotten wealthier, and too many corporations have lost their sense of responsibility to their workers, their communities and the country,” Biden said in a speech in September 2021. “CEOs used to make about 20 times the average worker in the company that they ran. Today, they make more than 350 times what the average worker in their corporation makes.” He added, “Since the pandemic began, billionaires have seen their wealth go up by $1.8 trillion. That is, everyone who was a billionaire before the pandemic began, the total accumulated wealth beyond the billions they already had has gone up by $1.8 trillion.”
That grotesque widening of income inequality offends most Americans, who consistently tell pollsters the rich should pay more.
GOP politicians and their wealthy donors see things differently. The first tax measure proposed by the MAGA House was to try to take back funding for the IRS to chase down tax cheats.
“The debate should focus on one accurate and alarming number: the IRS has 2,284 fewer skilled auditors to handle the sophisticated returns of wealthy taxpayers than it did in 1954,” Chuck Marr of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities wrote. “The decade-long, House Republican-driven budget cuts have created dysfunction at the IRS, where relatively few millionaires are now audited.”
But allowing tax cheats to avoid paying what they legally owe is not the sum total of the GOP thinking on taxes. “As part of his deal to become House speaker,” Semafor reported, “Kevin McCarthy reportedly promised his party’s conservative hardliners a vote on legislation that would scrap the entire American tax code and replace it with a jumbo-sized national sales tax.”
A mammoth 30 percent sales tax would be grossly regressive, socking it to the same working- and middle-class families Republicans ostensibly worry are paying more at the pump and grocery store because of inflation.
You know the idea is rotten when Grover Norquist, the head of Americans for Tax Reform, blasted the move. He told Semafor: “This is a political gift to Biden and the Democrats.” Even Norquist knows that because the poor and middle class spend a much higher percentage of their income on necessities such as food and clothing, the impact would be devastating.
Unsurprisingly Democrats leaped at the chance to blast the scheme. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tweeted:
Hold on: House Republicans want a national 30% sales tax on everything from groceries to gasoline? They want to raise taxes on working-class & middle-class families while slashing them for millionaires & billionaires? Are they TRYING to show exactly how out of touch they are? — Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) January 19, 2023
Biden also hammered Republicans: “National sales tax, that’s a great idea. It would raise taxes on the middle class by taxing thousands of everyday items from groceries to gas, while cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans.”
The GOP plan boils down to this: Let rich tax cheats get away with not paying what they owe while redoing the entire tax system so the overwhelming burden will fall on those less able to pay. Genius! Well, if you are a Democrat running in 2024.
The plan is unlikely even to get a vote. But it is indicative of the utter lack of seriousness that pervades the GOP. They throw out one boneheaded idea after another, hoping to please some segment of their base or donors, with nary a care in the world for the needs of their constituents nor for the actual challenges we face.
TRUMP FINED NEARLY $1M FOR ‘REVENGE’ LAWSUIT AGAINST HILLARY CLINTON, OTHERS
By Adela Suliman, The Washington Post
Former president Donald Trump and his lawyer, Alina Habba, have been fined almost $1 million by a federal judge in Florida for what was ruled a frivolous lawsuit brought against his 2016 presidential rival Hillary Clinton and others.
Trump is a “prolific and sophisticated litigant who is repeatedly using the courts to seek revenge on political adversaries,” wrote U.S. District Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks in his searing 46-page judgment published late Thursday.
“He is the mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process, and he cannot be seen as a litigant blindly following the advice of a lawyer. He knew full well the impact of his actions,” said Middlebrooks. “As such, I find that sanctions should be imposed upon Mr. Trump and his lead counsel, Ms. Habba.”
Trump — who has announced his bid for the presidency in 2024 — Habba, and the Habba Madaio & Associates law firm are jointly liable for $937,989.39, the court found.
The suit was filed in March 2022, with Trump alleging that Clinton and others had orchestrated “a malicious conspiracy” to spread false information that his campaign had colluded with Russia during the 2016 presidential race that he won.
It was dismissed in September by Middlebrooks, who said there were “substantive defects” in the case and grievances for which a court was “not the appropriate forum.” Despite this, the judge said in his Thursday ruling that Habba had been “undeterred” after the case’s dismissal and continued to advance the claims, leading to the fine.
“Here, we are confronted with a lawsuit that should never have been filed, which was completely frivolous, both factually and legally, and which was brought in bad faith for an improper purpose,” Middlebrooks wrote, decrying what he called “abusive litigation tactics.”
In a blistering judgment, he said the case was “intended for a political purpose” and showed a “continuing pattern of misuse of the courts by Mr. Trump and his lawyers,” undermining the rule of law and diverting resources. “No reasonable lawyer would have filed it,” he added.
Representatives for Trump and Habba did not immediately respond to an overnight request for comment from The Washington Post.
Along with former secretary of state Clinton, Middlebrooks said 30 individuals and entities were “needlessly harmed” by the case in a bid to “advance a political narrative.” Among them were former FBI director James B. Comey, the Democratic National Committee and Christopher Steele, a former British spy hired by an opposition research firm working for the Clinton campaign who compiled a now-infamous dossier alleging ties between Trump and Russia.
Middlebrooks described the legal complaint as “a hodgepodge of disconnected, often immaterial events, followed by an implausible conclusion.” One example he cited was the alleged collusion between Comey and Clinton, a claim he said not only lacked substance, but was “categorically absurd” given the impact Comey’s announcements about the investigation into Clinton’s emails had on her 2016 campaign.
The judge also said Trump’s suit misrepresented the 2019 report by former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III by saying it had exonerated him. Mueller said only that his team had made no determination on “collusion” with the Russian government, and that it had not found sufficient evidence to charge any member of Trump’s campaign with criminal conspiracy.
“The Plaintiff consistently misrepresented and cherry-picked portions of public reports and filings to support a false factual narrative,” Thursday’s judgment found. “It happened too often to be accidental; its purpose was political, not legal.”
The September dismissal was a victory for Clinton, who in April had asked the judge to dismiss the case. David E. Kendall, an attorney for Clinton, issued a one-sentence statement at the time, noting that “the court’s opinion meticulously and comprehensively devastates Trump’s allegations.”
Trump’s team had previously unsuccessfully filed a motion to dismiss Middlebrooks, who was appointed to the bench in 1997 by President Bill Clinton.
The judgment also referenced Trump’s other lawsuits, saying they demonstrated “a pattern of abuse of the courts.” Among them were legal complaints against Twitter, CNN, New York Attorney General Letitia James and the Pulitzer Prize board for a 2018 award given jointly to The Post and the New York Times for coverage of alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
In a brief document filed Friday morning with Middlebrooks, Trump withdrew his lawsuit against James in Florida.
“Plaintiff, PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP, by and through his undersigned counsel and pursuant to Fed. R. Civ. P. 41(a)(1)(A)(i), hereby voluntarily dismisses his claims in this action against Defendant, LETITIA JAMES, without prejudice,” according to the document filed in U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Florida.
James has a $250 million lawsuit against Trump over a decade’s worth of allegedly fraudulent business practices.
By Adela Suliman, The Washington Post
Former president Donald Trump and his lawyer, Alina Habba, have been fined almost $1 million by a federal judge in Florida for what was ruled a frivolous lawsuit brought against his 2016 presidential rival Hillary Clinton and others.
Trump is a “prolific and sophisticated litigant who is repeatedly using the courts to seek revenge on political adversaries,” wrote U.S. District Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks in his searing 46-page judgment published late Thursday.
“He is the mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process, and he cannot be seen as a litigant blindly following the advice of a lawyer. He knew full well the impact of his actions,” said Middlebrooks. “As such, I find that sanctions should be imposed upon Mr. Trump and his lead counsel, Ms. Habba.”
Trump — who has announced his bid for the presidency in 2024 — Habba, and the Habba Madaio & Associates law firm are jointly liable for $937,989.39, the court found.
The suit was filed in March 2022, with Trump alleging that Clinton and others had orchestrated “a malicious conspiracy” to spread false information that his campaign had colluded with Russia during the 2016 presidential race that he won.
It was dismissed in September by Middlebrooks, who said there were “substantive defects” in the case and grievances for which a court was “not the appropriate forum.” Despite this, the judge said in his Thursday ruling that Habba had been “undeterred” after the case’s dismissal and continued to advance the claims, leading to the fine.
“Here, we are confronted with a lawsuit that should never have been filed, which was completely frivolous, both factually and legally, and which was brought in bad faith for an improper purpose,” Middlebrooks wrote, decrying what he called “abusive litigation tactics.”
In a blistering judgment, he said the case was “intended for a political purpose” and showed a “continuing pattern of misuse of the courts by Mr. Trump and his lawyers,” undermining the rule of law and diverting resources. “No reasonable lawyer would have filed it,” he added.
Representatives for Trump and Habba did not immediately respond to an overnight request for comment from The Washington Post.
Along with former secretary of state Clinton, Middlebrooks said 30 individuals and entities were “needlessly harmed” by the case in a bid to “advance a political narrative.” Among them were former FBI director James B. Comey, the Democratic National Committee and Christopher Steele, a former British spy hired by an opposition research firm working for the Clinton campaign who compiled a now-infamous dossier alleging ties between Trump and Russia.
Middlebrooks described the legal complaint as “a hodgepodge of disconnected, often immaterial events, followed by an implausible conclusion.” One example he cited was the alleged collusion between Comey and Clinton, a claim he said not only lacked substance, but was “categorically absurd” given the impact Comey’s announcements about the investigation into Clinton’s emails had on her 2016 campaign.
The judge also said Trump’s suit misrepresented the 2019 report by former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III by saying it had exonerated him. Mueller said only that his team had made no determination on “collusion” with the Russian government, and that it had not found sufficient evidence to charge any member of Trump’s campaign with criminal conspiracy.
“The Plaintiff consistently misrepresented and cherry-picked portions of public reports and filings to support a false factual narrative,” Thursday’s judgment found. “It happened too often to be accidental; its purpose was political, not legal.”
The September dismissal was a victory for Clinton, who in April had asked the judge to dismiss the case. David E. Kendall, an attorney for Clinton, issued a one-sentence statement at the time, noting that “the court’s opinion meticulously and comprehensively devastates Trump’s allegations.”
Trump’s team had previously unsuccessfully filed a motion to dismiss Middlebrooks, who was appointed to the bench in 1997 by President Bill Clinton.
The judgment also referenced Trump’s other lawsuits, saying they demonstrated “a pattern of abuse of the courts.” Among them were legal complaints against Twitter, CNN, New York Attorney General Letitia James and the Pulitzer Prize board for a 2018 award given jointly to The Post and the New York Times for coverage of alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
In a brief document filed Friday morning with Middlebrooks, Trump withdrew his lawsuit against James in Florida.
“Plaintiff, PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP, by and through his undersigned counsel and pursuant to Fed. R. Civ. P. 41(a)(1)(A)(i), hereby voluntarily dismisses his claims in this action against Defendant, LETITIA JAMES, without prejudice,” according to the document filed in U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Florida.
James has a $250 million lawsuit against Trump over a decade’s worth of allegedly fraudulent business practices.
WE NEED A FUNCTIONING DEMOCRACY. TEACHING MEDIA LITERACY CAN HELP.
New Jersey will now require schools to teach media literacy to K-12 students, helping them discern fact from fiction. Pennsylvania should follow the Garden State’s lead.
By The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
While the internet has increased access to information and has often been a force for good, it has also contributed to making many people misinformed, uninformed, and even radicalized.
That’s why it is welcome news to see New Jersey become the first state in the country to require schools to teach media literacy to K-12 students. Other states, including Pennsylvania, should follow the Garden State’s lead.
Students raised on mobile phones have a world of information — and disinformation — at their fingertips. Studies show many teens get their news from TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, barely regulated spaces where most anything goes. That is all the more reason why it’s essential for schools to teach students how to discern fact from fiction.
Researchers at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education found that 96% of high school students surveyed failed to see how a website’s ties to fossil fuel companies could affect its credibility on information regarding climate change. Two-thirds of students couldn’t tell the difference between news stories and advertising, even if it was labeled as “sponsored content.” And 52% of students believed a grainy video on Facebook claiming to capture ballot stuffing constituted “strong evidence” of voter fraud.
Sadly, many adults given the same survey may not fare much better.
Alexander Pope, the 18th-century poet and satirist, famously wrote that “a little learning is a dangerous thing.” That danger turned all too real when an angry mob of Donald Trump supporters staged a deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, fueled by misinformation that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
For months, Trump and his allies promoted the so-called “Big Lie” about election fraud. Two years later, the spread of misinformation remains a threat to democracy here and abroad.
That was underscored by the recent coup attempt in Brazil, which was also driven by lies and conspiracy theories pushed by its ousted far-right president — who received advice from Trump allies.
It is not just political misinformation that is dumbing down America. The pandemic fueled a range of conspiracies and an assault on science. Much of the misinformation was spread through social media and “news” outlets that put profits above the truth.
The result was a separate pandemic of misinformation, which cost lives and money. One study found falsehoods surrounding COVID-19 vaccines contributed to one-third of U.S. pandemic deaths, while another study put the cost between $50 million and $300 million each day.
Much of the bogus information is spread through social media and conservative news outlets. Many people claim they “do their own research.” But just because something is on the internet doesn’t make it real.
The firehose of information distributed on social media is especially pernicious. One study found fake news spreads faster on Twitter than real news. The same goes for Facebook, where a study found misinformation received six times more engagement than factual news.
The spread of misleading information has also increased political polarization and reduced trust in institutions such as the courts, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies.
Adding to the polarization and spread of falsehoods are reckless sites such as Infowars. A jury recently ordered founder Alex Jones to pay $473 million for promoting conspiracy theories surrounding the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. It is a rare case of accountability — one which came a decade and countless fabricated stories later.
But it’s not just fringe sites that are the problem. One study found that watching Fox News — the top-rated cable news network — resulted in decreased knowledge about science and society. Exhibit A is host Tucker Carlson, who repeatedly promotes misinformation about the pandemic along with a long list of other bogus claims.
The peril goes way beyond any political divide. Society can’t function well, or tackle critical issues such as climate change, when half the public is armed with facts and the other half traffics in lies and conspiracies.
It’s troubling enough when a small percentage of the population wrongly believes the moon landing was staged. But it is a whole other level of danger when 147 members of Congress vote to overturn the 2020 election. Or when lawmakers such as U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene promote off-the-wall conspiracies from QAnon, a group that believes the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles.
A well-informed public is key to a functioning democracy and a civil society. Teaching media literacy is one way to not only inoculate future generations from falling for misinformation but to also help solve the problems left behind by today’s leaders.
New Jersey will now require schools to teach media literacy to K-12 students, helping them discern fact from fiction. Pennsylvania should follow the Garden State’s lead.
By The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
While the internet has increased access to information and has often been a force for good, it has also contributed to making many people misinformed, uninformed, and even radicalized.
That’s why it is welcome news to see New Jersey become the first state in the country to require schools to teach media literacy to K-12 students. Other states, including Pennsylvania, should follow the Garden State’s lead.
Students raised on mobile phones have a world of information — and disinformation — at their fingertips. Studies show many teens get their news from TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, barely regulated spaces where most anything goes. That is all the more reason why it’s essential for schools to teach students how to discern fact from fiction.
Researchers at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education found that 96% of high school students surveyed failed to see how a website’s ties to fossil fuel companies could affect its credibility on information regarding climate change. Two-thirds of students couldn’t tell the difference between news stories and advertising, even if it was labeled as “sponsored content.” And 52% of students believed a grainy video on Facebook claiming to capture ballot stuffing constituted “strong evidence” of voter fraud.
Sadly, many adults given the same survey may not fare much better.
Alexander Pope, the 18th-century poet and satirist, famously wrote that “a little learning is a dangerous thing.” That danger turned all too real when an angry mob of Donald Trump supporters staged a deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, fueled by misinformation that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
For months, Trump and his allies promoted the so-called “Big Lie” about election fraud. Two years later, the spread of misinformation remains a threat to democracy here and abroad.
That was underscored by the recent coup attempt in Brazil, which was also driven by lies and conspiracy theories pushed by its ousted far-right president — who received advice from Trump allies.
It is not just political misinformation that is dumbing down America. The pandemic fueled a range of conspiracies and an assault on science. Much of the misinformation was spread through social media and “news” outlets that put profits above the truth.
The result was a separate pandemic of misinformation, which cost lives and money. One study found falsehoods surrounding COVID-19 vaccines contributed to one-third of U.S. pandemic deaths, while another study put the cost between $50 million and $300 million each day.
Much of the bogus information is spread through social media and conservative news outlets. Many people claim they “do their own research.” But just because something is on the internet doesn’t make it real.
The firehose of information distributed on social media is especially pernicious. One study found fake news spreads faster on Twitter than real news. The same goes for Facebook, where a study found misinformation received six times more engagement than factual news.
The spread of misleading information has also increased political polarization and reduced trust in institutions such as the courts, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies.
Adding to the polarization and spread of falsehoods are reckless sites such as Infowars. A jury recently ordered founder Alex Jones to pay $473 million for promoting conspiracy theories surrounding the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. It is a rare case of accountability — one which came a decade and countless fabricated stories later.
But it’s not just fringe sites that are the problem. One study found that watching Fox News — the top-rated cable news network — resulted in decreased knowledge about science and society. Exhibit A is host Tucker Carlson, who repeatedly promotes misinformation about the pandemic along with a long list of other bogus claims.
The peril goes way beyond any political divide. Society can’t function well, or tackle critical issues such as climate change, when half the public is armed with facts and the other half traffics in lies and conspiracies.
It’s troubling enough when a small percentage of the population wrongly believes the moon landing was staged. But it is a whole other level of danger when 147 members of Congress vote to overturn the 2020 election. Or when lawmakers such as U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene promote off-the-wall conspiracies from QAnon, a group that believes the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles.
A well-informed public is key to a functioning democracy and a civil society. Teaching media literacy is one way to not only inoculate future generations from falling for misinformation but to also help solve the problems left behind by today’s leaders.
BIDEN IS REVELING IN HIS STARK CONTRAST WITH THE MAGA CRAZIES
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
During President Biden’s first two years in office, critics often faulted his administration as being too absorbed with progressive issues that the average American didn’t care about, such as paid sick leave and universal pre-K, while ignoring hot topics that Republicans regularly attacked him on, such as border security and inflation.
What a difference a handful of House seats makes. Now that Biden has little hope of passing anything meaningful in the Republican-controlled House, he has shifted to touting his accomplishments and focusing on centrist priorities such as inflation and immigration. Republicans, meanwhile, seem to have lost interest in them.
Perhaps that’s because Republicans are a bit preoccupied. In the first two weeks of the new Congress, MAGA extremists have neutered House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.); gutted the Office of Congressional Ethics; tried to help tax cheats by voting to repeal funding for the IRS; and set up a committee to obstruct criminal investigations and gin up scandals about Biden and his family.
Voters are predictably disgusted. Navigator, a Democratic polling and messaging operation, found that “sizable majorities believe Republicans are focused on consolidating their power and fighting among themselves rather than serving the public.” Only 14 percent want Republicans to spend time investigating the Bidens. And just 44 percent of independents view McCarthy favorably, a 20-point drop from November.
Meanwhile, Biden’s approval ratings have improved. For that, he can likely thank inflation rates, which have declined for six months relative to the year prior. He can also boast about unemployment, which has fallen to a 53-year low.
Biden has spent much of his time over the past few weeks highlighting economic progress, demonstrating the benefits of his infrastructure program and touting new tech investment. He has also rolled out an enforcement plan for the border and vowed to regulate Big Tech companies to protect Americans’ privacy, prevent practices harmful to children, go after anti-competitive practices and demand greater transparency. These are all things Republicans say they are concerned about.
Has the White House become savvier, taking the advice of Democratic centrists to focus on these issues? Or did his position change once he lost the opportunity to pursue a progressive agenda? A little of both, perhaps.
What has really changed is a shift from legislating — and the agonizing sausage-making required in a party that includes fervent progressives and pro-fossil fuel conservatives such as Sen. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) — to implementing and messaging. Biden was obliged in the first half of his term to pursue voting rights reform and an expansive Build Back Better agenda even if they failed. Now, no one expects him to offer up items on the progressive wish list.
Moreover, Biden has always benefited from context and contrast. In the 2020 Democratic primaries, his centrism gave him broad-based appeal and convinced voters he was more electable than the raft of more progressive contenders. In the 2020 general election, his sanity, decency and even “boringness” were the antithesis of the radical, mean and unhinged incumbent president.
Now Biden has the opportunity to contrast himself with House Republicans, who are living up to Democrats’ characterization as unethical, power-hungry, chaotic and clueless. It’s as if they took Biden’s speech in Philadelphia last year decrying extreme MAGA Republicans as a playbook, not an indictment.
In a real sense, Biden has been thrown into the briar patch. Confronted with a radical GOP House, what’s a Democratic president to do? Well, I guess he’ll have to tout his achievements, stress bipartisanship, push for border security, remain tough on China, continue to show off his leadership of Western democracies against Russia, stand up for defense spending, rail against cruel forced-birth mandates, confirm as many judges as possible in the Democratic-controlled Senate and remind voters that MAGA radicals remain a threat to democracy.
That sure sounds like a winning platform for 2024. No wonder Democrats seem so cheery these days.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
During President Biden’s first two years in office, critics often faulted his administration as being too absorbed with progressive issues that the average American didn’t care about, such as paid sick leave and universal pre-K, while ignoring hot topics that Republicans regularly attacked him on, such as border security and inflation.
What a difference a handful of House seats makes. Now that Biden has little hope of passing anything meaningful in the Republican-controlled House, he has shifted to touting his accomplishments and focusing on centrist priorities such as inflation and immigration. Republicans, meanwhile, seem to have lost interest in them.
Perhaps that’s because Republicans are a bit preoccupied. In the first two weeks of the new Congress, MAGA extremists have neutered House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.); gutted the Office of Congressional Ethics; tried to help tax cheats by voting to repeal funding for the IRS; and set up a committee to obstruct criminal investigations and gin up scandals about Biden and his family.
Voters are predictably disgusted. Navigator, a Democratic polling and messaging operation, found that “sizable majorities believe Republicans are focused on consolidating their power and fighting among themselves rather than serving the public.” Only 14 percent want Republicans to spend time investigating the Bidens. And just 44 percent of independents view McCarthy favorably, a 20-point drop from November.
Meanwhile, Biden’s approval ratings have improved. For that, he can likely thank inflation rates, which have declined for six months relative to the year prior. He can also boast about unemployment, which has fallen to a 53-year low.
Biden has spent much of his time over the past few weeks highlighting economic progress, demonstrating the benefits of his infrastructure program and touting new tech investment. He has also rolled out an enforcement plan for the border and vowed to regulate Big Tech companies to protect Americans’ privacy, prevent practices harmful to children, go after anti-competitive practices and demand greater transparency. These are all things Republicans say they are concerned about.
Has the White House become savvier, taking the advice of Democratic centrists to focus on these issues? Or did his position change once he lost the opportunity to pursue a progressive agenda? A little of both, perhaps.
What has really changed is a shift from legislating — and the agonizing sausage-making required in a party that includes fervent progressives and pro-fossil fuel conservatives such as Sen. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) — to implementing and messaging. Biden was obliged in the first half of his term to pursue voting rights reform and an expansive Build Back Better agenda even if they failed. Now, no one expects him to offer up items on the progressive wish list.
Moreover, Biden has always benefited from context and contrast. In the 2020 Democratic primaries, his centrism gave him broad-based appeal and convinced voters he was more electable than the raft of more progressive contenders. In the 2020 general election, his sanity, decency and even “boringness” were the antithesis of the radical, mean and unhinged incumbent president.
Now Biden has the opportunity to contrast himself with House Republicans, who are living up to Democrats’ characterization as unethical, power-hungry, chaotic and clueless. It’s as if they took Biden’s speech in Philadelphia last year decrying extreme MAGA Republicans as a playbook, not an indictment.
In a real sense, Biden has been thrown into the briar patch. Confronted with a radical GOP House, what’s a Democratic president to do? Well, I guess he’ll have to tout his achievements, stress bipartisanship, push for border security, remain tough on China, continue to show off his leadership of Western democracies against Russia, stand up for defense spending, rail against cruel forced-birth mandates, confirm as many judges as possible in the Democratic-controlled Senate and remind voters that MAGA radicals remain a threat to democracy.
That sure sounds like a winning platform for 2024. No wonder Democrats seem so cheery these days.
CAN YOU GOVERN ON A LIE? HOUSE REPUBLICANS GIVE IT A TRY.
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
Ryan Zinke stepped up to the microphone and into the Twilight Zone.
“Despite the ‘deep state’s’ repeated attempts to stop me, I stand before you as a duly elected member of the United States Congress and tell you that a deep state exists and is perhaps the strongest covert weapon the left has against the American people,” he told the House. The Montana Republican, who has returned to Congress after a scandal-plagued stint in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet, informed his colleagues that “the deep state runs secret messaging campaigns” and is trying “to wipe out the American cowboy.”
Yee-haw! Zinke was speaking in support of a new Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, or, as Democrats call it, the “Tinfoil Hat Committee.” In substance, it’s the QAnon committee, with a remit to probe the “deep state” and other wacky conspiracy theories. With the panel’s creation, QAnon completes its journey from message board for the paranoid to official policy of the House Republican majority.
After the chaos of the first week of the 118th Congress, many Americans wondered: If it took them 15 ballots just to choose a speaker, how could Republicans possibly govern? Now we know. They are going to govern by fantasy and legislate on the basis of fiction.
On Monday, their first day of legislative business, they voted to repeal funding for a fictitious “87,000 IRS agents” who don’t exist and never will. On Wednesday, they approved legislation purporting to outlaw infanticide, which is already illegal and always has been. In between, they set up the deep state committee.
What next? Sorry, that’s secret. And therein might be the biggest falsehood of all. After numerous promises of “transparency” from the new leaders, they are refusing to reveal multiple backroom concessions Kevin McCarthy made to secure the speakership. You might even call it a conspiracy of silence.
···
Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.), the GOP conference chair, boasted this week that “we passed the most … transparent rules package in history.” McCarthy tweeted that the new rules would “increase transparency” and that “Republicans are keeping our commitment to make Congress more open.”
Alas, the transparency claims could not survive the light of day. Punchbowl News reported that McCarthy’s team had inked a secret three-page “addendum” to the rules package outlining the giveaways he bartered with holdouts blocking him from becoming speaker.
McCarthy, in a caucus meeting Tuesday, reportedly denied the addendum existed. Alas for McCarthy, other Republican lawmakers claimed to have read the document whose existence McCarthy denied.
Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.) told Axios he was personally reviewing the document. Rules Committee Chairman Tom Cole (R-Okla.) acknowledged that “it has to be out there.”
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), leaving the caucus meeting in the Capitol basement Tuesday, told a group of journalists that there remained “questions that I think many of us have about what side deals may or may not have been made.”
On the floor, where Democrats were hollering about the “secret three-page addendum,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.), who negotiated much of the deal, countered that it was “classic swamp speak” to be “talking about secret deals.” But negotiating such secret deals is totally fine?
One change Republicans did reveal is the gutting of the Office of Congressional Ethics (it won’t be able to hire new staff when current employees leave), which will help shield lawmakers’ wrongdoing from public scrutiny. Also made known: a commitment to vote on abolishing the IRS and eliminating income taxes.
The one beacon of transparency in this sea of opacity? McCarthy’s leading critic, Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.). He wants to free C-SPAN cameras to film the House floor the way they did during last week’s speaker-vote chaos — during which the incoming chairman of the Armed Services Committee was physically restrained from lunging at Gaetz.
···
Steve Scalise is the ideal majority leader for the post-truth era.
Boasting to reporters about passage of “the bill to repeal those 87,000 IRS agents,” he claimed that the Congressional Budget Office “confirmed” that those agents would “go after people making less than $200,000 a year,” including “the single mom who’s working two shifts at a restaurant.”
In reality, the IRS is hiring only about 6,500 agents — and that’s over a decade. In reality, the CBO said that only “a small fraction” of revenue from increased enforcement would come from taxpayers earning less than $400,000 a year.
Here’s what else CBO said: The Republicans’ bill to cut funds to the IRS — the new majority’s first legislation — would add $114 billion to the deficit. So much for fiscal responsibility.
But Republicans spent the entire debate repeating the outright falsehood that 87,000 “agents” would “target American working-class families” (Jason T. Smith, Mo.) and “harass and spy on middle-class and low-income families” (Michelle Steel, Calif.). Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.) falsely said the CBO had projected “as many as 700,000 more audits, [of] Americans making less than $75,000 a year.”
Beth Van Duyne (R-Tex.) added the inventive claim that the fake agents would “make the IRS larger than the Pentagon, State Department, FBI and Border Control together.” The Defense Department alone employs about 3 million people.
Former majority leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) told the House it was the “most dishonest, demagogic rhetoric that I have seen.” But he hadn’t yet witnessed the infanticide debate.
···
“If a baby is born alive, outside the womb, alive, how could you kill that baby and that be legal?” Scalise asked during debate on the Republicans’ “born-alive” abortion bill. “And yet in a number of states, it is legal and happening today.”
No, it isn’t. Infanticide, of course, has always been murder, and a 2002 “born alive” law affirmed that.
The dispute is limited to rare cases, typically involving a fetus born or aborted with a medical condition that isn’t survivable: Should it be treated with heroic measures or compassionate care? Infanticide isn’t on the table.
The bill was one of three antiabortion measures House Republicans prioritized in their first week of legislating: New House rules promising a vote on permanently banning federal abortion funds, a denunciation of violence against antiabortion groups and the born-alive bill.
It was a curious response to the 2022 elections, when voters angered by the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade propelled Democrats to better-than-expected results, and abortion rights supporters prevailed even in red states such as Kentucky and Kansas. “We learned nothing from the midterms if this is how we’re going to operate in the first week,” complained Mace, the South Carolina Republican. “What are we doing to protect victims of rape and victims of incest? Nothing.” She said her GOP colleagues were only “muddying the waters and paying lip service.”
Perhaps that’s to be expected from a GOP leadership in which, as Business Insider pointed out, there will be more guys named “Mike” running committees — six — than there are women in charge of them (just three of the 21 chairs). The old boys of the House Republican caucus might benefit from a Mike drop.
···
What will be the priorities of this new House majority? Well, let us take them at their word.
Fox News host Sean Hannity visited the Rayburn Room off the House floor this week where, under the watchful eye of a George Washington oil portrait, he broadcast interviews with McCarthy and his leadership team.
Total mentions of inflation: 1.
Total mentions of jobs: 1.
Total mentions of the economy: 2.
Total mentions of investigations: 20.
“Thank you, brother,” McCarthy said to Hannity before they got down to probing all of the planned probes: investigating the FBI, DOJ, China, the “weaponized” feds, the Afghanistan pullout, covid-19’s origins, Anthony Fauci, the “Biden family syndicate,” Hunter Biden’s laptop and more.
And now: President Biden’s handling of classified documents. Intelligence Committee Chairman Michael R. Turner (Ohio), who dismissed Trump’s hoarding of classified documents as a “bookkeeping issue,” now demands “a full and thorough review” of Biden’s conduct. Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (Ky.), who said probing the Trump documents would “not be a priority,” said of Biden’s documents: “We’re probing it.”
Oversight is important, but the deep state committee in particular goes beyond oversight and into the realm of vengeance. Under the chairmanship of the voluble Jim Jordan (Ohio), it gives lawmakers powers to interfere in active criminal investigations — including, potentially, investigations into themselves. (Six House Republicans requested pardons from then-President Trump for their role in trying to overturn the 2020 election.)
On the floor, the committee’s proponents didn’t hide their conspiracy beliefs. Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.) meandered into remarks about the FBI spying on Frank Sinatra before proclaiming: “Mr. Speaker, today we are putting the deep state on notice. We are coming for you.”
House Republicans gave themselves another tool of vengeance by reviving the Holman Rule, which allows lawmakers to cut the salaries of individual federal employees. They’re also planning to kick Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) off the Intelligence Committee, explicitly as punishment for handling Trump’s first impeachment.
By contrast, McCarthy has promised committee assignments to George Santos (R-N.Y.), who won election on a fabricated life story and résumé. Santos faces multiple investigations, and New York Republicans (including members of Congress) have called him a “fraud” and a “joke” and demanded he resign.
But McCarthy is having none of it. “He is seated,” said the man who chose to seat Santos. “If there is a concern, he will go through Ethics,” said the man who just disemboweled the Office of Congressional Ethics. McCarthy’s logic is as obvious as it is unprincipled: Without Santos, his four-vote majority would become a three-vote majority.
Even the four-vote majority is confounding McCarthy. House Republicans had planned this week to vote on a pair of symbolic resolutions expressing support for law enforcement. But they had to pull the bills from the floor; they didn’t have the votes.
If McCarthy can’t get his fractious caucus to agree on the easy stuff, what happens when he has to avoid defaulting on the federal debt in a few months? McCarthy, who promised not to approve a debt-limit increase without massive spending cuts, has no room to maneuver — and he has legislative rookies running key committees.
House Republicans and their usual allies in the media had already been trading epithets: “fraud.” “Harlot.” “Benedict Arnold.” “Insurrectionists.” And now comes word that Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (Pa.) and other Republican moderates, in a sign of their lack of faith in McCarthy, have begun talks with Democrats about a “discharge petition.” That would circumvent GOP leaders, increasing the debt limit without them.
Republican leaders are right to be paranoid about “weaponization.” But the biggest conspiracy comes from within.
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
Ryan Zinke stepped up to the microphone and into the Twilight Zone.
“Despite the ‘deep state’s’ repeated attempts to stop me, I stand before you as a duly elected member of the United States Congress and tell you that a deep state exists and is perhaps the strongest covert weapon the left has against the American people,” he told the House. The Montana Republican, who has returned to Congress after a scandal-plagued stint in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet, informed his colleagues that “the deep state runs secret messaging campaigns” and is trying “to wipe out the American cowboy.”
Yee-haw! Zinke was speaking in support of a new Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, or, as Democrats call it, the “Tinfoil Hat Committee.” In substance, it’s the QAnon committee, with a remit to probe the “deep state” and other wacky conspiracy theories. With the panel’s creation, QAnon completes its journey from message board for the paranoid to official policy of the House Republican majority.
After the chaos of the first week of the 118th Congress, many Americans wondered: If it took them 15 ballots just to choose a speaker, how could Republicans possibly govern? Now we know. They are going to govern by fantasy and legislate on the basis of fiction.
On Monday, their first day of legislative business, they voted to repeal funding for a fictitious “87,000 IRS agents” who don’t exist and never will. On Wednesday, they approved legislation purporting to outlaw infanticide, which is already illegal and always has been. In between, they set up the deep state committee.
What next? Sorry, that’s secret. And therein might be the biggest falsehood of all. After numerous promises of “transparency” from the new leaders, they are refusing to reveal multiple backroom concessions Kevin McCarthy made to secure the speakership. You might even call it a conspiracy of silence.
···
Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.), the GOP conference chair, boasted this week that “we passed the most … transparent rules package in history.” McCarthy tweeted that the new rules would “increase transparency” and that “Republicans are keeping our commitment to make Congress more open.”
Alas, the transparency claims could not survive the light of day. Punchbowl News reported that McCarthy’s team had inked a secret three-page “addendum” to the rules package outlining the giveaways he bartered with holdouts blocking him from becoming speaker.
McCarthy, in a caucus meeting Tuesday, reportedly denied the addendum existed. Alas for McCarthy, other Republican lawmakers claimed to have read the document whose existence McCarthy denied.
Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.) told Axios he was personally reviewing the document. Rules Committee Chairman Tom Cole (R-Okla.) acknowledged that “it has to be out there.”
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), leaving the caucus meeting in the Capitol basement Tuesday, told a group of journalists that there remained “questions that I think many of us have about what side deals may or may not have been made.”
On the floor, where Democrats were hollering about the “secret three-page addendum,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.), who negotiated much of the deal, countered that it was “classic swamp speak” to be “talking about secret deals.” But negotiating such secret deals is totally fine?
One change Republicans did reveal is the gutting of the Office of Congressional Ethics (it won’t be able to hire new staff when current employees leave), which will help shield lawmakers’ wrongdoing from public scrutiny. Also made known: a commitment to vote on abolishing the IRS and eliminating income taxes.
The one beacon of transparency in this sea of opacity? McCarthy’s leading critic, Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.). He wants to free C-SPAN cameras to film the House floor the way they did during last week’s speaker-vote chaos — during which the incoming chairman of the Armed Services Committee was physically restrained from lunging at Gaetz.
···
Steve Scalise is the ideal majority leader for the post-truth era.
Boasting to reporters about passage of “the bill to repeal those 87,000 IRS agents,” he claimed that the Congressional Budget Office “confirmed” that those agents would “go after people making less than $200,000 a year,” including “the single mom who’s working two shifts at a restaurant.”
In reality, the IRS is hiring only about 6,500 agents — and that’s over a decade. In reality, the CBO said that only “a small fraction” of revenue from increased enforcement would come from taxpayers earning less than $400,000 a year.
Here’s what else CBO said: The Republicans’ bill to cut funds to the IRS — the new majority’s first legislation — would add $114 billion to the deficit. So much for fiscal responsibility.
But Republicans spent the entire debate repeating the outright falsehood that 87,000 “agents” would “target American working-class families” (Jason T. Smith, Mo.) and “harass and spy on middle-class and low-income families” (Michelle Steel, Calif.). Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.) falsely said the CBO had projected “as many as 700,000 more audits, [of] Americans making less than $75,000 a year.”
Beth Van Duyne (R-Tex.) added the inventive claim that the fake agents would “make the IRS larger than the Pentagon, State Department, FBI and Border Control together.” The Defense Department alone employs about 3 million people.
Former majority leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) told the House it was the “most dishonest, demagogic rhetoric that I have seen.” But he hadn’t yet witnessed the infanticide debate.
···
“If a baby is born alive, outside the womb, alive, how could you kill that baby and that be legal?” Scalise asked during debate on the Republicans’ “born-alive” abortion bill. “And yet in a number of states, it is legal and happening today.”
No, it isn’t. Infanticide, of course, has always been murder, and a 2002 “born alive” law affirmed that.
The dispute is limited to rare cases, typically involving a fetus born or aborted with a medical condition that isn’t survivable: Should it be treated with heroic measures or compassionate care? Infanticide isn’t on the table.
The bill was one of three antiabortion measures House Republicans prioritized in their first week of legislating: New House rules promising a vote on permanently banning federal abortion funds, a denunciation of violence against antiabortion groups and the born-alive bill.
It was a curious response to the 2022 elections, when voters angered by the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade propelled Democrats to better-than-expected results, and abortion rights supporters prevailed even in red states such as Kentucky and Kansas. “We learned nothing from the midterms if this is how we’re going to operate in the first week,” complained Mace, the South Carolina Republican. “What are we doing to protect victims of rape and victims of incest? Nothing.” She said her GOP colleagues were only “muddying the waters and paying lip service.”
Perhaps that’s to be expected from a GOP leadership in which, as Business Insider pointed out, there will be more guys named “Mike” running committees — six — than there are women in charge of them (just three of the 21 chairs). The old boys of the House Republican caucus might benefit from a Mike drop.
···
What will be the priorities of this new House majority? Well, let us take them at their word.
Fox News host Sean Hannity visited the Rayburn Room off the House floor this week where, under the watchful eye of a George Washington oil portrait, he broadcast interviews with McCarthy and his leadership team.
Total mentions of inflation: 1.
Total mentions of jobs: 1.
Total mentions of the economy: 2.
Total mentions of investigations: 20.
“Thank you, brother,” McCarthy said to Hannity before they got down to probing all of the planned probes: investigating the FBI, DOJ, China, the “weaponized” feds, the Afghanistan pullout, covid-19’s origins, Anthony Fauci, the “Biden family syndicate,” Hunter Biden’s laptop and more.
And now: President Biden’s handling of classified documents. Intelligence Committee Chairman Michael R. Turner (Ohio), who dismissed Trump’s hoarding of classified documents as a “bookkeeping issue,” now demands “a full and thorough review” of Biden’s conduct. Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (Ky.), who said probing the Trump documents would “not be a priority,” said of Biden’s documents: “We’re probing it.”
Oversight is important, but the deep state committee in particular goes beyond oversight and into the realm of vengeance. Under the chairmanship of the voluble Jim Jordan (Ohio), it gives lawmakers powers to interfere in active criminal investigations — including, potentially, investigations into themselves. (Six House Republicans requested pardons from then-President Trump for their role in trying to overturn the 2020 election.)
On the floor, the committee’s proponents didn’t hide their conspiracy beliefs. Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.) meandered into remarks about the FBI spying on Frank Sinatra before proclaiming: “Mr. Speaker, today we are putting the deep state on notice. We are coming for you.”
House Republicans gave themselves another tool of vengeance by reviving the Holman Rule, which allows lawmakers to cut the salaries of individual federal employees. They’re also planning to kick Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) off the Intelligence Committee, explicitly as punishment for handling Trump’s first impeachment.
By contrast, McCarthy has promised committee assignments to George Santos (R-N.Y.), who won election on a fabricated life story and résumé. Santos faces multiple investigations, and New York Republicans (including members of Congress) have called him a “fraud” and a “joke” and demanded he resign.
But McCarthy is having none of it. “He is seated,” said the man who chose to seat Santos. “If there is a concern, he will go through Ethics,” said the man who just disemboweled the Office of Congressional Ethics. McCarthy’s logic is as obvious as it is unprincipled: Without Santos, his four-vote majority would become a three-vote majority.
Even the four-vote majority is confounding McCarthy. House Republicans had planned this week to vote on a pair of symbolic resolutions expressing support for law enforcement. But they had to pull the bills from the floor; they didn’t have the votes.
If McCarthy can’t get his fractious caucus to agree on the easy stuff, what happens when he has to avoid defaulting on the federal debt in a few months? McCarthy, who promised not to approve a debt-limit increase without massive spending cuts, has no room to maneuver — and he has legislative rookies running key committees.
House Republicans and their usual allies in the media had already been trading epithets: “fraud.” “Harlot.” “Benedict Arnold.” “Insurrectionists.” And now comes word that Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (Pa.) and other Republican moderates, in a sign of their lack of faith in McCarthy, have begun talks with Democrats about a “discharge petition.” That would circumvent GOP leaders, increasing the debt limit without them.
Republican leaders are right to be paranoid about “weaponization.” But the biggest conspiracy comes from within.
WHY REPUBLICAN POLITICIANS STILL HATE MEDICARE
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
The Republicans who now control the House will soon try to slash Social Security and Medicare. They plan to achieve this by holding the economy hostage, threatening to create a financial crisis by refusing to raise the federal debt ceiling. The interesting questions are why they want to do this, given that it appears politically suicidal, and how Democrats will respond.
Before I get into the puzzles, let me start by pointing out that the plot against the social safety net isn’t a conspiracy theory. The general shape of the scheme has been widely reported for months. The arithmetic is also clear: It isn’t possible to achieve huge reductions in the budget deficit, while at the same time depriving the I.R.S. of the resources it needs to go after tax cheats, without deep cuts in popular social programs.
And beyond all that, we now have it in black and white — well, blue on blue. CNN has obtained a screenshot of a slide presented at a closed-door Republican meeting on Tuesday. The first bullet point calls for balancing the budget within 10 years, which is mathematically impossible without deep cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The second calls for reforms to “mandatory spending” — which is budget-speak for those same programs. And the final point calls for refusing to raise the debt limit unless these demands are met.
So the plan isn’t a mystery. I would add only that if Republicans try to assure currently retired Americans that their benefits wouldn’t be affected, this promise isn’t feasible — not if they’re serious about balancing the budget within a decade.
But where is this determination to gut programs that are crucial to well over 100 million Americans coming from? These programs are, after all, extremely popular — even among Republican voters.
It’s true that self-identified Republicans say that they are vehemently opposed to “socialism.” But when an Economist/YouGov poll asked them which programs they considered socialistic, none of the big-ticket items made the cut. Social Security? Not socialism. Medicare — which is, by the way, a single-payer national health insurance program, which we’re often told Americans would never accept — also isn’t socialism.
Unfortunately, that poll didn’t ask about Medicaid, a program targeted at lower-income Americans that many Republicans consider a form of “welfare.” Even so, a Kaiser Family Foundation survey found far more Republicans approving of Medicaid than disapproving.
One reason even Republicans support major social programs may be that G.O.P. support comes disproportionately from older voters — and most of America’s social spending goes to seniors. This is obviously true for Social Security and Medicare, which kick in primarily when you reach a minimum age. But it’s even true for Medicaid: Most of Medicaid’s beneficiaries are relatively young, but almost two-thirds of the spending goes to seniors and the disabled, many in nursing homes.
The attitude of the Republican rank and file, then, seems to be that big government is bad — but when we get down to specifics, don’t cut you, don’t cut me, cut that fellow behind the tree. Which means that the priorities of the new House majority are wildly out of line with those of its own voters, let alone those of the electorate as a whole.
And history says that attacks on the safety net come with a heavy political price. George W. Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security in 2005 surely played a role in the Democratic takeover of Congress in 2006; Donald Trump’s attempt to kill Obamacare helped Nancy Pelosi regain the speakership in 2018.
So where is the push to gut Social Security and Medicare coming from? Ronald Reagan left the White House 34 years ago. The modern G.O.P. seems much less animated by small-government ideology than by the desire to wage culture war. And there’s no necessary connection between culture war and right-wing economics. For example, France’s anti-immigrant National Rally has, in effect, staked out an economic position somewhat to the left of the Macron government.
Put it this way: Advocating a welfare state for white people might well be politically effective. But in America, it’s a road not taken.
Here’s what I think is going on: Even now many, perhaps most Republicans in Congress aren’t culture-war zealots. Instead, they’re careerists who depend, both for campaign contributions and for post-Congress career prospects, on the same billionaires who have supported right-wing economic ideology for decades. They won’t stand up to the crazies and conspiracy theorists, but their own agenda is still tax cuts for the rich and benefit cuts for the poor and middle class.
And the culture warriors go along because they basically aren’t interested in policy substance.
I’m not completely sure that this analysis is right. But all indications are that at some point this year the Biden administration will have to deal with a full-scale effort at economic blackmail, a threat to blow up the economy unless the safety net is shredded. And I worry that Democrats still aren’t taking that threat seriously enough.
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
The Republicans who now control the House will soon try to slash Social Security and Medicare. They plan to achieve this by holding the economy hostage, threatening to create a financial crisis by refusing to raise the federal debt ceiling. The interesting questions are why they want to do this, given that it appears politically suicidal, and how Democrats will respond.
Before I get into the puzzles, let me start by pointing out that the plot against the social safety net isn’t a conspiracy theory. The general shape of the scheme has been widely reported for months. The arithmetic is also clear: It isn’t possible to achieve huge reductions in the budget deficit, while at the same time depriving the I.R.S. of the resources it needs to go after tax cheats, without deep cuts in popular social programs.
And beyond all that, we now have it in black and white — well, blue on blue. CNN has obtained a screenshot of a slide presented at a closed-door Republican meeting on Tuesday. The first bullet point calls for balancing the budget within 10 years, which is mathematically impossible without deep cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The second calls for reforms to “mandatory spending” — which is budget-speak for those same programs. And the final point calls for refusing to raise the debt limit unless these demands are met.
So the plan isn’t a mystery. I would add only that if Republicans try to assure currently retired Americans that their benefits wouldn’t be affected, this promise isn’t feasible — not if they’re serious about balancing the budget within a decade.
But where is this determination to gut programs that are crucial to well over 100 million Americans coming from? These programs are, after all, extremely popular — even among Republican voters.
It’s true that self-identified Republicans say that they are vehemently opposed to “socialism.” But when an Economist/YouGov poll asked them which programs they considered socialistic, none of the big-ticket items made the cut. Social Security? Not socialism. Medicare — which is, by the way, a single-payer national health insurance program, which we’re often told Americans would never accept — also isn’t socialism.
Unfortunately, that poll didn’t ask about Medicaid, a program targeted at lower-income Americans that many Republicans consider a form of “welfare.” Even so, a Kaiser Family Foundation survey found far more Republicans approving of Medicaid than disapproving.
One reason even Republicans support major social programs may be that G.O.P. support comes disproportionately from older voters — and most of America’s social spending goes to seniors. This is obviously true for Social Security and Medicare, which kick in primarily when you reach a minimum age. But it’s even true for Medicaid: Most of Medicaid’s beneficiaries are relatively young, but almost two-thirds of the spending goes to seniors and the disabled, many in nursing homes.
The attitude of the Republican rank and file, then, seems to be that big government is bad — but when we get down to specifics, don’t cut you, don’t cut me, cut that fellow behind the tree. Which means that the priorities of the new House majority are wildly out of line with those of its own voters, let alone those of the electorate as a whole.
And history says that attacks on the safety net come with a heavy political price. George W. Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security in 2005 surely played a role in the Democratic takeover of Congress in 2006; Donald Trump’s attempt to kill Obamacare helped Nancy Pelosi regain the speakership in 2018.
So where is the push to gut Social Security and Medicare coming from? Ronald Reagan left the White House 34 years ago. The modern G.O.P. seems much less animated by small-government ideology than by the desire to wage culture war. And there’s no necessary connection between culture war and right-wing economics. For example, France’s anti-immigrant National Rally has, in effect, staked out an economic position somewhat to the left of the Macron government.
Put it this way: Advocating a welfare state for white people might well be politically effective. But in America, it’s a road not taken.
Here’s what I think is going on: Even now many, perhaps most Republicans in Congress aren’t culture-war zealots. Instead, they’re careerists who depend, both for campaign contributions and for post-Congress career prospects, on the same billionaires who have supported right-wing economic ideology for decades. They won’t stand up to the crazies and conspiracy theorists, but their own agenda is still tax cuts for the rich and benefit cuts for the poor and middle class.
And the culture warriors go along because they basically aren’t interested in policy substance.
I’m not completely sure that this analysis is right. But all indications are that at some point this year the Biden administration will have to deal with a full-scale effort at economic blackmail, a threat to blow up the economy unless the safety net is shredded. And I worry that Democrats still aren’t taking that threat seriously enough.
WHOOPS! THE GOP ACCIDENTALLY ADMITS TAX CUTS DON’T PAY FOR THEMSELVES.
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
At long last, Republicans have admitted the obvious: Tax cuts don’t pay for themselves. Also: Republicans don’t actually care whether tax cuts pay for themselves.
The House rules package recently passed by the newly GOP-controlled House included some notable, occasionally troubling things. For example, one set of measures would kneecap congressional ethics probes. Another provision would make it harder to swiftly raise the debt ceiling.
But also tucked into the rules package, and attracting somewhat less attention, was a change to how lawmakers treat changes to tax law.
Specifically, they’ve rigged the system so that tax cuts will be much easier to pass, and tax rate increases harder to pass. On the other hand, investments in the poor and various other kinds of spending increases — on so-called mandatory programs, such as Medicare or food stamps — would be more challenging to get through.
Congress sets rules for what kinds of budgetary changes it can pass under what circumstances, including what kinds of programs must be “paid for” by nipping and tucking elsewhere in the budget. Often, lawmakers want to change the law in a way that would cost money (i.e., increase deficits), either by reducing tax revenue or increasing spending. In recent Congresses, when lawmakers made that kind of change, they were generally supposed to find something to offset the cost so that long-term deficits didn’t grow.
For example, if Congress wanted to cut Tax A, it was supposed to cut Spending Program B or else raise Tax C by at least as much (with some exceptions, of course).
This GOP-led House has done something a bit different.
Under the new rules package, the budgetary requirements are more one-sided — in favor of tax cuts. Going forward, tax cuts do not need to be offset with any sort of savings elsewhere in the budget. They can add trillions to the debt. No problem.
But this is not true of spending programs. Spending program increases still have to be paid for.
Not only that, but the savings to offset expansions of mandatory programs have to come from cuts to other spending programs. They cannot be offset by tax revenue increases. In practical terms: An expansion of food stamps can’t be paid for by raising taxes on the rich — only by cutting, say, Medicaid or disability benefits. So basically any attempt to provide more support for poor or middle-income people is likely to come from other programs that help those same groups.
House Republicans can theoretically choose to waive their own rule, though getting the votes to do so might be a bit rocky since they passed this big new rules package so recently and after much haggling.
Republicans have found other ways to stack the deck against raising taxes. A separate portion of the House’s rules package says that any increase in tax rates would require a three-fifths vote (rather than a simple majority, as in years past).
Additionally, in a side deal that Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) made as part of his concessions to get the speaker’s job, the House will also substantially cut spending for so-called discretionary spending programs, too. (Mandatory programs, such as Social Security, are generally set by formula, automatically expanding or shrinking based on how many people qualify; a specific dollar amount is appropriated for discretionary programs.)
There are a couple of big takeaways from these technicalities.
First is that, if you read between the lines, you’ll learn that even Republicans don’t believe their own long-standing promise that tax cuts will pay for themselves. After all, if the GOP genuinely believed this, they wouldn’t need to make it easier to pass tax cuts that don’t pay for themselves. Because such tax cuts … would not exist.
Second is who and what they care about.
“This is fundamentally about who pays for what, what are we investing in, and who’s left behind,” said Joel Friedman, a researcher for the Center on Budget Policies and Priorities. “It puts up barriers to the type of investments and public services that will help people through health care, education, supporting kids.”
As a result, we can expect more kids and poor families to face hardship, particularly if there is a downturn this year; and perhaps (even more) tax cuts for the rich.
Already, House Republicans have voted to effectively decrease the tax burden on the wealthy in all but name. They did so not by cutting tax rates, per se, but by voting to defund the Internal Revenue Service. Last year, Democrats gave an extra $80 billion to the IRS, largely to go after wealthy tax cheats whom the agency has struggled to audit because of insufficient resources; Republicans are now trying to undo this investment.
Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what your priorities are, President Biden often says. Well, Republicans have shown us: a lower tax burden on the rich, less help for the poor and the middle class.
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
At long last, Republicans have admitted the obvious: Tax cuts don’t pay for themselves. Also: Republicans don’t actually care whether tax cuts pay for themselves.
The House rules package recently passed by the newly GOP-controlled House included some notable, occasionally troubling things. For example, one set of measures would kneecap congressional ethics probes. Another provision would make it harder to swiftly raise the debt ceiling.
But also tucked into the rules package, and attracting somewhat less attention, was a change to how lawmakers treat changes to tax law.
Specifically, they’ve rigged the system so that tax cuts will be much easier to pass, and tax rate increases harder to pass. On the other hand, investments in the poor and various other kinds of spending increases — on so-called mandatory programs, such as Medicare or food stamps — would be more challenging to get through.
Congress sets rules for what kinds of budgetary changes it can pass under what circumstances, including what kinds of programs must be “paid for” by nipping and tucking elsewhere in the budget. Often, lawmakers want to change the law in a way that would cost money (i.e., increase deficits), either by reducing tax revenue or increasing spending. In recent Congresses, when lawmakers made that kind of change, they were generally supposed to find something to offset the cost so that long-term deficits didn’t grow.
For example, if Congress wanted to cut Tax A, it was supposed to cut Spending Program B or else raise Tax C by at least as much (with some exceptions, of course).
This GOP-led House has done something a bit different.
Under the new rules package, the budgetary requirements are more one-sided — in favor of tax cuts. Going forward, tax cuts do not need to be offset with any sort of savings elsewhere in the budget. They can add trillions to the debt. No problem.
But this is not true of spending programs. Spending program increases still have to be paid for.
Not only that, but the savings to offset expansions of mandatory programs have to come from cuts to other spending programs. They cannot be offset by tax revenue increases. In practical terms: An expansion of food stamps can’t be paid for by raising taxes on the rich — only by cutting, say, Medicaid or disability benefits. So basically any attempt to provide more support for poor or middle-income people is likely to come from other programs that help those same groups.
House Republicans can theoretically choose to waive their own rule, though getting the votes to do so might be a bit rocky since they passed this big new rules package so recently and after much haggling.
Republicans have found other ways to stack the deck against raising taxes. A separate portion of the House’s rules package says that any increase in tax rates would require a three-fifths vote (rather than a simple majority, as in years past).
Additionally, in a side deal that Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) made as part of his concessions to get the speaker’s job, the House will also substantially cut spending for so-called discretionary spending programs, too. (Mandatory programs, such as Social Security, are generally set by formula, automatically expanding or shrinking based on how many people qualify; a specific dollar amount is appropriated for discretionary programs.)
There are a couple of big takeaways from these technicalities.
First is that, if you read between the lines, you’ll learn that even Republicans don’t believe their own long-standing promise that tax cuts will pay for themselves. After all, if the GOP genuinely believed this, they wouldn’t need to make it easier to pass tax cuts that don’t pay for themselves. Because such tax cuts … would not exist.
Second is who and what they care about.
“This is fundamentally about who pays for what, what are we investing in, and who’s left behind,” said Joel Friedman, a researcher for the Center on Budget Policies and Priorities. “It puts up barriers to the type of investments and public services that will help people through health care, education, supporting kids.”
As a result, we can expect more kids and poor families to face hardship, particularly if there is a downturn this year; and perhaps (even more) tax cuts for the rich.
Already, House Republicans have voted to effectively decrease the tax burden on the wealthy in all but name. They did so not by cutting tax rates, per se, but by voting to defund the Internal Revenue Service. Last year, Democrats gave an extra $80 billion to the IRS, largely to go after wealthy tax cheats whom the agency has struggled to audit because of insufficient resources; Republicans are now trying to undo this investment.
Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what your priorities are, President Biden often says. Well, Republicans have shown us: a lower tax burden on the rich, less help for the poor and the middle class.
TRUMP’S COMPANY GETS MAXIMUM PUNISHMENT FOR EVADING TAXES
The Trump Organization must pay $1.6 million for giving executive off-the-books benefits and pay.
By Jonah E. Bromwich, Ben Protess and William K. Rashbaum, The New York Times
Former president Donald J. Trump’s family real estate business was ordered on Friday to pay a $1.6 million criminal penalty for its conviction on tax fraud and other charges, a stinging rebuke and the maximum possible punishment.
The sentence, handed down by a judge in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, caps a lengthy legal ordeal for Mr. Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, which was convicted in December of doling out off-the-books perks to some of its top executives. One of the executives who orchestrated the scheme, Allen H. Weisselberg, pleaded guilty and testified at the company’s trial. He was sentenced on Tuesday to serve five months at the notorious Rikers Island jail complex.
The financial penalty is a pittance to the company, and the former president, who collected hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue each year while in office. But the verdict branded the company a felon, exposed a culture that nurtured illegality for years and handed political ammunition to Mr. Trump’s opponents. Prosecutors also continue to press a criminal investigation against the man himself.
The Trump Organization’s lawyers on Friday sought a smaller penalty, pinning the blame on Mr. Weisselberg, who they say carried out the scheme without intending to benefit the Trump Organization. But Joshua Steinglass, a prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which led the case against the Trump Organization and Mr. Weisselberg, argued that the company carried out “a multi-dimensional scheme to defraud the tax authorities.”
“To avoid detection, they simply falsified the records,” he explained. “This conduct can only be described as egregious,” adding that although the maximum fines “may have limited impact on a multibillion corporation, this court should nonetheless impose such fines.”
And the judge overseeing the case, Juan Merchan, agreed, imposing the maximum $1.61 million.
The Trump Organization must pay $1.6 million for giving executive off-the-books benefits and pay.
By Jonah E. Bromwich, Ben Protess and William K. Rashbaum, The New York Times
Former president Donald J. Trump’s family real estate business was ordered on Friday to pay a $1.6 million criminal penalty for its conviction on tax fraud and other charges, a stinging rebuke and the maximum possible punishment.
The sentence, handed down by a judge in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, caps a lengthy legal ordeal for Mr. Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, which was convicted in December of doling out off-the-books perks to some of its top executives. One of the executives who orchestrated the scheme, Allen H. Weisselberg, pleaded guilty and testified at the company’s trial. He was sentenced on Tuesday to serve five months at the notorious Rikers Island jail complex.
The financial penalty is a pittance to the company, and the former president, who collected hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue each year while in office. But the verdict branded the company a felon, exposed a culture that nurtured illegality for years and handed political ammunition to Mr. Trump’s opponents. Prosecutors also continue to press a criminal investigation against the man himself.
The Trump Organization’s lawyers on Friday sought a smaller penalty, pinning the blame on Mr. Weisselberg, who they say carried out the scheme without intending to benefit the Trump Organization. But Joshua Steinglass, a prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which led the case against the Trump Organization and Mr. Weisselberg, argued that the company carried out “a multi-dimensional scheme to defraud the tax authorities.”
“To avoid detection, they simply falsified the records,” he explained. “This conduct can only be described as egregious,” adding that although the maximum fines “may have limited impact on a multibillion corporation, this court should nonetheless impose such fines.”
And the judge overseeing the case, Juan Merchan, agreed, imposing the maximum $1.61 million.
THE IRS HAS PROBLEMS. THEY AREN’T THE ONES REPUBLICANS COMPLAIN ABOUT.
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
For the past three years, the IRS has failed to do its most basic job: processing tax returns in a timely manner. There are many reasons. The pandemic upended almost everything for a while. Years of staffing and budget cuts left the agency shorthanded. Ancient computer systems hampered operations. And Congress kept asking the IRS to do more: implement the sweeping 2017 GOP tax code overhaul, then send stimulus checks — three times — to the vast majority of Americans during the pandemic. Any one of these issues would have been tough to manage. Together, they nearly sunk an agency that is critical to funding the U.S. government.
Yet House Republicans made it their first priority this year to pass legislation slashing IRS funding, which would worsen the agency’s problems — and the service it provides Americans.
House Republicans know better; they have heard from desperate constituents who have failed repeatedly to reach the IRS. Calling is almost impossible. The IRS answered just 13 percent of calls last year and 11 percent in 2021. Mailing documents to the IRS is also often unavailing. Millions of unprocessed paper tax returns and correspondence about problems with tax returns sit unopened in IRS facilities. At an IRS processing center in Austin, the situation was so dire that IRS officials took over the entire cafeteria to store boxes of unprocessed mail, Post columnist Catherine Rampell reported last year.
Now the nation is days away from the start of another tax-filing season, yet about 9 million unprocessed returns remain from prior years, according to the latest update from the National Taxpayer Advocate. That’s actually an improvement from the end of 2021, when there were 16 million unprocessed returns, but it underscores the deep processing problems that the IRS still faces.
Congress’s priority should be modernizing the IRS and getting it back to full functionality. That’s why Democrats passed $80 billion in extra funding for the agency over the next decade as part of last year’s Inflation Reduction Act. But House Republicans moved Monday to strip the IRS of $71 billion of the new funding and thwart the agency’s auditing process. They falsely claimed that money would fund 87,000 new auditors. In reality, that figure is an estimate of overall hiring needed at the IRS, not just for auditors. About half of the $80 billion is for bringing IT systems into the current century and hiring more people to answer phones and process returns.
Yes, some of the money is for hiring more auditors. But that also addresses a glaring need. “The IRS has fewer front-line, experienced examiners in the field than at any time since World War II, and fewer employees than at any time since the 1970s,” former IRS commissioner Charles Rettig, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, wrote in August. Put another way, the IRS has about 6,500 agents to audit 178 million tax returns. Millionaires are benefiting from this short-staffing. There were only 7,710 agent audits of tax returns listing over $1 million in income last year, down from 40,965 a decade ago. The IRS isn’t planning to use extra auditors to scrutinize more American families earning under $400,000 a year, as Mr. Rettig, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen and many others have tried to explain to House Republicans. The IRS needs extra staff to review the increasingly complex audits of large businesses and superwealthy families, ensuring they follow the rules. That is in the interest of everyday, law-abiding taxpayers who should not have to make up the difference for tax cheats.
Looking at recent IRS history is telling: In fiscal 2010, the IRS processed 152 million returns with just over 94,000 staff and a budget of about $12 billion. Last year, the IRS handled 178 million returns with just over 79,000 staff and an inflation-adjusted budget of $10.3 billion. Congress has already tried starving the IRS. It was a disaster. What’s needed now is to revive the agency so it can function properly — on all fronts.
Given the turmoil at the IRS, it would also be helpful to have a new IRS commissioner in place swiftly. In November, President Biden nominated Danny Werfel to be the IRS’s next leader. Werfel served as acting commissioner in 2013, when he had to navigate a government shutdown and restore trust in the agency after controversy around scrutiny of conservative nonprofits. He has the experience for the job, and the Senate should move on his nomination quickly.
House Republicans claim they want the tax agency to function better. It doesn’t get much more basic than having an IRS that operates on technology that’s newer than half a century old, can process returns in weeks, not months, and can evaluate tax-avoidance schemes by the superwealthy. This isn’t the time to cut. It’s the time to resuscitate.
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
For the past three years, the IRS has failed to do its most basic job: processing tax returns in a timely manner. There are many reasons. The pandemic upended almost everything for a while. Years of staffing and budget cuts left the agency shorthanded. Ancient computer systems hampered operations. And Congress kept asking the IRS to do more: implement the sweeping 2017 GOP tax code overhaul, then send stimulus checks — three times — to the vast majority of Americans during the pandemic. Any one of these issues would have been tough to manage. Together, they nearly sunk an agency that is critical to funding the U.S. government.
Yet House Republicans made it their first priority this year to pass legislation slashing IRS funding, which would worsen the agency’s problems — and the service it provides Americans.
House Republicans know better; they have heard from desperate constituents who have failed repeatedly to reach the IRS. Calling is almost impossible. The IRS answered just 13 percent of calls last year and 11 percent in 2021. Mailing documents to the IRS is also often unavailing. Millions of unprocessed paper tax returns and correspondence about problems with tax returns sit unopened in IRS facilities. At an IRS processing center in Austin, the situation was so dire that IRS officials took over the entire cafeteria to store boxes of unprocessed mail, Post columnist Catherine Rampell reported last year.
Now the nation is days away from the start of another tax-filing season, yet about 9 million unprocessed returns remain from prior years, according to the latest update from the National Taxpayer Advocate. That’s actually an improvement from the end of 2021, when there were 16 million unprocessed returns, but it underscores the deep processing problems that the IRS still faces.
Congress’s priority should be modernizing the IRS and getting it back to full functionality. That’s why Democrats passed $80 billion in extra funding for the agency over the next decade as part of last year’s Inflation Reduction Act. But House Republicans moved Monday to strip the IRS of $71 billion of the new funding and thwart the agency’s auditing process. They falsely claimed that money would fund 87,000 new auditors. In reality, that figure is an estimate of overall hiring needed at the IRS, not just for auditors. About half of the $80 billion is for bringing IT systems into the current century and hiring more people to answer phones and process returns.
Yes, some of the money is for hiring more auditors. But that also addresses a glaring need. “The IRS has fewer front-line, experienced examiners in the field than at any time since World War II, and fewer employees than at any time since the 1970s,” former IRS commissioner Charles Rettig, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, wrote in August. Put another way, the IRS has about 6,500 agents to audit 178 million tax returns. Millionaires are benefiting from this short-staffing. There were only 7,710 agent audits of tax returns listing over $1 million in income last year, down from 40,965 a decade ago. The IRS isn’t planning to use extra auditors to scrutinize more American families earning under $400,000 a year, as Mr. Rettig, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen and many others have tried to explain to House Republicans. The IRS needs extra staff to review the increasingly complex audits of large businesses and superwealthy families, ensuring they follow the rules. That is in the interest of everyday, law-abiding taxpayers who should not have to make up the difference for tax cheats.
Looking at recent IRS history is telling: In fiscal 2010, the IRS processed 152 million returns with just over 94,000 staff and a budget of about $12 billion. Last year, the IRS handled 178 million returns with just over 79,000 staff and an inflation-adjusted budget of $10.3 billion. Congress has already tried starving the IRS. It was a disaster. What’s needed now is to revive the agency so it can function properly — on all fronts.
Given the turmoil at the IRS, it would also be helpful to have a new IRS commissioner in place swiftly. In November, President Biden nominated Danny Werfel to be the IRS’s next leader. Werfel served as acting commissioner in 2013, when he had to navigate a government shutdown and restore trust in the agency after controversy around scrutiny of conservative nonprofits. He has the experience for the job, and the Senate should move on his nomination quickly.
House Republicans claim they want the tax agency to function better. It doesn’t get much more basic than having an IRS that operates on technology that’s newer than half a century old, can process returns in weeks, not months, and can evaluate tax-avoidance schemes by the superwealthy. This isn’t the time to cut. It’s the time to resuscitate.
THERE ARE NO MODERATE HOUSE REPUBLICANS
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Listen to the mainstream media’s coverage of House Republicans, and you might think there is a mass of “normal” Republicans who do not buy into election denial, who are not apologists for former president Donald Trump, and who understand that the party’s crazy talk and election conspiracy theories contributed to its historic underperformance in the 2022 midterms.
The mystery: Where are these people hiding?
Prime suspects would be the 18 Republicans from districts that Joe Biden won in 2020, such as Reps. David Schweikert (Ariz.), Don Bacon (Neb.) and Thomas H. Kean (N.J.). Yet every single one of them voted 15 times to make Kevin McCarthy, an election denier, the speaker of the House.
Every single one of them also voted for the rules package that the House passed this week, which sets up a standoff over the debt limit, creates a committee to “investigate” ongoing criminal cases and hobbles the Office of Congressional Ethics. And they didn’t bat an eye over reports that McCarthy (Calif.) promised to give more seats on the Rules Committee to MAGA radicals. Pretty immoderate behavior.
Occasionally, members such as Rep. Nancy Mace (S.C.) declare that it would be difficult to work with extreme members such as Rep. Matt Gaetz (Fla.), whom she called a “fraud” on CBS News’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday. She also questioned concessions McCarthy made to the party’s hard-liners to become speaker, such as his promise to cap spending at 2022 levels, which would amount to a $75 billion cut in defense spending. She even considered withholding her vote for the House rules package over the issue. Yet, in the end, she voted for the package all the same.
Then came the vote on Monday to repeal the $80 billion boost in funding for the Internal Revenue Service that Congress passed last year. Getting rid of this money would empower tax cheats and add some $115 billion to the deficit over the next decade. Yet every Republican voted for it. Again, there was no difference between how faux moderates and the worst of the election-denying extremists voted.
It should be clear now that these “normal” Republicans have deceived voters. Kean, for example, ran in the mold of his famous father, the moderate former New Jersey governor. And Bacon told The Post last month that moderates in the party “have to flex our muscles a little bit more and say, ‘We’re going to govern America.’” He added: "There’s a small number that want their way or the highway. Well, that’s how we fail. We can’t let 2 percent or 3 percent drive the whole Congress.”
But these two enable the extremists. All the time.
Likewise, a slew of Republicans are members of the Problem Solvers Caucus, but they seem to be part of the problem. Consider Rep. Young Kim (Calif.), who in her profile on the caucus’s website declares, “I came to Congress to break through the partisan gridlock and get things done.” Given that she refused to impeach Trump, backed McCarthy and regularly votes with the extreme right, that statement is about as credible as Rep. George Santos’s résumé.
Rarely if ever do the media grill these (im)moderate members on their enabling of the far right. Frankly, reporters do a disservice to the voters by characterizing them as somehow more sensible than the Freedom Caucus crazies. With the House as closely divided as it is, it would take only a few of them to defeat radical measures. Yet time and again, they cave.
Ultimately, this is the voters’ fault. They should have known when they cast ballots to reelect “moderate” incumbents that their voting records don’t match their rhetoric. Yet they sent them to Congress anyway — and often complain that Congress doesn’t get anything done. When 2024 rolls around, they should kick out members who voted to empower Freedom Caucus extremism. That would constitute real problem-solving.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Listen to the mainstream media’s coverage of House Republicans, and you might think there is a mass of “normal” Republicans who do not buy into election denial, who are not apologists for former president Donald Trump, and who understand that the party’s crazy talk and election conspiracy theories contributed to its historic underperformance in the 2022 midterms.
The mystery: Where are these people hiding?
Prime suspects would be the 18 Republicans from districts that Joe Biden won in 2020, such as Reps. David Schweikert (Ariz.), Don Bacon (Neb.) and Thomas H. Kean (N.J.). Yet every single one of them voted 15 times to make Kevin McCarthy, an election denier, the speaker of the House.
Every single one of them also voted for the rules package that the House passed this week, which sets up a standoff over the debt limit, creates a committee to “investigate” ongoing criminal cases and hobbles the Office of Congressional Ethics. And they didn’t bat an eye over reports that McCarthy (Calif.) promised to give more seats on the Rules Committee to MAGA radicals. Pretty immoderate behavior.
Occasionally, members such as Rep. Nancy Mace (S.C.) declare that it would be difficult to work with extreme members such as Rep. Matt Gaetz (Fla.), whom she called a “fraud” on CBS News’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday. She also questioned concessions McCarthy made to the party’s hard-liners to become speaker, such as his promise to cap spending at 2022 levels, which would amount to a $75 billion cut in defense spending. She even considered withholding her vote for the House rules package over the issue. Yet, in the end, she voted for the package all the same.
Then came the vote on Monday to repeal the $80 billion boost in funding for the Internal Revenue Service that Congress passed last year. Getting rid of this money would empower tax cheats and add some $115 billion to the deficit over the next decade. Yet every Republican voted for it. Again, there was no difference between how faux moderates and the worst of the election-denying extremists voted.
It should be clear now that these “normal” Republicans have deceived voters. Kean, for example, ran in the mold of his famous father, the moderate former New Jersey governor. And Bacon told The Post last month that moderates in the party “have to flex our muscles a little bit more and say, ‘We’re going to govern America.’” He added: "There’s a small number that want their way or the highway. Well, that’s how we fail. We can’t let 2 percent or 3 percent drive the whole Congress.”
But these two enable the extremists. All the time.
Likewise, a slew of Republicans are members of the Problem Solvers Caucus, but they seem to be part of the problem. Consider Rep. Young Kim (Calif.), who in her profile on the caucus’s website declares, “I came to Congress to break through the partisan gridlock and get things done.” Given that she refused to impeach Trump, backed McCarthy and regularly votes with the extreme right, that statement is about as credible as Rep. George Santos’s résumé.
Rarely if ever do the media grill these (im)moderate members on their enabling of the far right. Frankly, reporters do a disservice to the voters by characterizing them as somehow more sensible than the Freedom Caucus crazies. With the House as closely divided as it is, it would take only a few of them to defeat radical measures. Yet time and again, they cave.
Ultimately, this is the voters’ fault. They should have known when they cast ballots to reelect “moderate” incumbents that their voting records don’t match their rhetoric. Yet they sent them to Congress anyway — and often complain that Congress doesn’t get anything done. When 2024 rolls around, they should kick out members who voted to empower Freedom Caucus extremism. That would constitute real problem-solving.
HOUSE REPUBLICANS VOTE TO RESCIND I.R.S. FUNDING
The measure, one of the new majority’s first legislative moves, would cut billions in funding that Democrats passed to help crack down on tax cheats. It does not have enough votes to pass the Senate.
By Emily Cochrane and Alan Rappeport, The New York Times
WASHINGTON — House Republicans, in one of their first legislative moves, voted to cut funding for the Internal Revenue Service on Monday, as conservative lawmakers try to kneecap President Biden’s $80 billion overhaul of the beleaguered agency.
The measure does not have the votes to pass the Democratic-controlled Senate, let alone receive approval from Mr. Biden. It passed the House, 221 to 210 along party lines, with every Democrat in opposition and Republicans applauding upon passage.
But the legislation serves as an opening salvo from the new Republican majority, which is seeking to undercut the policy accomplishments of Democrats over the past two years, when they controlled both Congress and the White House.
The Biden administration issued a statement of policy on Monday confirming that the president would veto the measure and dismissing it as “a reckless bill.” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, said that “this is a giveaway to the multimillionaires and big corporations, and Democrats won’t let it happen.”
Shortly after winning his speaker position early Saturday, Kevin McCarthy of California reiterated his pledge to make defunding the I.R.S. the first bill of the Republican majority.
Democrats included an extra $80 billion for the I.R.S. in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, which passed over Republican opposition, saying it would help the agency crack down on tax evaders and ensure that the government was collecting the taxes it was owed. The money will be used to hire 87,000 I.R.S. employees and modernize the agency’s antiquated technology systems. That investment is expected to generate $180 billion in revenue over 10 years.
Yet despite denouncing the federal budget deficit and calling for more fiscal responsibility, Republicans have dismissed any revenue gain from beefing up the tax collector. Instead, they have falsely accused the administration of trying to create a “shadow army” to shake down small businesses with assault rifles.
On Monday, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said that the Republican bill to rescind billions of dollars in I.R.S. funding would actually increase the deficit by $114 billion through 2032.
“They don’t want a fairer tax administration — they think it’s bad for some of their supporters,” Representative Richard E. Neal of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, said in debate with Republicans on the House floor. “What they’re attempting to do tonight is bad for middle-class families. It’s bad for small businesses.”
The money is intended to invest in an agency that has become depleted over the years. The effects of years of neglect and Republican cuts on the I.R.S. budget were highlighted by reports recently published by the Ways and Means Committee as it released former President Donald J. Trump’s taxes.
The Biden administration has promised to prioritize using the additional funding to improve customer service at the I.R.S. so that it is easier for taxpayers to get answers to questions. It has also pledged that audit rates for taxpayers earning less than $400,000 a year will not go up.
“House Republicans’ legislation would allow wealthy and corporate tax evaders to continue avoiding taxes owed, increasing the burden on honest, hardworking families who pay their taxes with every paycheck,” said Ashley Schapitl, a Treasury Department spokeswoman. “The I.R.S. audits nearly 80 percent fewer millionaires than a decade ago, and this legislation would deny the agency much-needed resources to hire top talent to go after the $163 billion in taxes avoided by the top 1 percent annually.”
The measure, one of the new majority’s first legislative moves, would cut billions in funding that Democrats passed to help crack down on tax cheats. It does not have enough votes to pass the Senate.
By Emily Cochrane and Alan Rappeport, The New York Times
WASHINGTON — House Republicans, in one of their first legislative moves, voted to cut funding for the Internal Revenue Service on Monday, as conservative lawmakers try to kneecap President Biden’s $80 billion overhaul of the beleaguered agency.
The measure does not have the votes to pass the Democratic-controlled Senate, let alone receive approval from Mr. Biden. It passed the House, 221 to 210 along party lines, with every Democrat in opposition and Republicans applauding upon passage.
But the legislation serves as an opening salvo from the new Republican majority, which is seeking to undercut the policy accomplishments of Democrats over the past two years, when they controlled both Congress and the White House.
The Biden administration issued a statement of policy on Monday confirming that the president would veto the measure and dismissing it as “a reckless bill.” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, said that “this is a giveaway to the multimillionaires and big corporations, and Democrats won’t let it happen.”
Shortly after winning his speaker position early Saturday, Kevin McCarthy of California reiterated his pledge to make defunding the I.R.S. the first bill of the Republican majority.
Democrats included an extra $80 billion for the I.R.S. in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, which passed over Republican opposition, saying it would help the agency crack down on tax evaders and ensure that the government was collecting the taxes it was owed. The money will be used to hire 87,000 I.R.S. employees and modernize the agency’s antiquated technology systems. That investment is expected to generate $180 billion in revenue over 10 years.
Yet despite denouncing the federal budget deficit and calling for more fiscal responsibility, Republicans have dismissed any revenue gain from beefing up the tax collector. Instead, they have falsely accused the administration of trying to create a “shadow army” to shake down small businesses with assault rifles.
On Monday, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said that the Republican bill to rescind billions of dollars in I.R.S. funding would actually increase the deficit by $114 billion through 2032.
“They don’t want a fairer tax administration — they think it’s bad for some of their supporters,” Representative Richard E. Neal of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, said in debate with Republicans on the House floor. “What they’re attempting to do tonight is bad for middle-class families. It’s bad for small businesses.”
The money is intended to invest in an agency that has become depleted over the years. The effects of years of neglect and Republican cuts on the I.R.S. budget were highlighted by reports recently published by the Ways and Means Committee as it released former President Donald J. Trump’s taxes.
The Biden administration has promised to prioritize using the additional funding to improve customer service at the I.R.S. so that it is easier for taxpayers to get answers to questions. It has also pledged that audit rates for taxpayers earning less than $400,000 a year will not go up.
“House Republicans’ legislation would allow wealthy and corporate tax evaders to continue avoiding taxes owed, increasing the burden on honest, hardworking families who pay their taxes with every paycheck,” said Ashley Schapitl, a Treasury Department spokeswoman. “The I.R.S. audits nearly 80 percent fewer millionaires than a decade ago, and this legislation would deny the agency much-needed resources to hire top talent to go after the $163 billion in taxes avoided by the top 1 percent annually.”
HOW THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION CAN SLOW THE GOP’S DANGEROUS SCHEMES
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
The rules package that House Republicans passed Monday night provides an indication of just how much damage House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has wrought in capitulating to the most extreme members of his caucus. The good news is that the Biden administration can thwart McCarthy’s schemes.
For starters, the House GOP is spoiling for a fight on the debt limit. The rules package eliminates a long-existing parliamentary rule that automatically raised the debt ceiling whenever the House passed a budget. This will empower the House to hold the economy hostage to extract dangerous cuts to national security and crippling reductions in entitlements.
But the White House can defuse the extortionists’ bomb before it is detonated. It should plainly state that the president has the power to ensure Congress does not sabotage the full faith and credit of the United States.
Section 8 of Article I of the Constitution states that Congress has the power “to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts.” It further states that Congress has the power to borrow “on the credit” of the United States. Plainly, the Founding Fathers did not envision lawmakers deliberately refusing payment of debts and destroying the credit of the United States.
But the 14th Amendment makes clear that this power does not include the power to trigger a default. As constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe succinctly tweeted, “The debt ceiling is a misnomer: it does nothing to cap spending but just creates an illusory threat to stiff our creditors.” That’s because “[Section] 4 of 14th Amendment forbids defaulting on the nation’s debts.”
In other words, the Constitution compels the government to honor its debts. The administration shouldn’t need congressional action to do that.
The Biden administration should request a formal legal opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel, the office responsible for constitutional advice to the administration. If the OLC agrees that the president can act on his own, the White House could clarify that its preference is to work with Congress to raise the debt ceiling, but explicitly retain the constitutional prerogative to act unilaterally. In short, the White House should seize the initiative to disarm Congress now, before a loaded gun is put to the nation’s head.
The GOP rules package also sets up a blatant violation of separation of powers that would undermine the fair and impartial administration of justice. It would do this by establishing a subcommittee on the “weaponization of the federal government,” which would be authorized to review ongoing criminal investigations.
Former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance explains in a Substack post, this would “go far beyond the legitimate scope of oversight. Reviewing criminal cases while they’re in progress, which DOJ won’t permit (although it will be forced to waste a lot of time and resources fending off the committee’s requests), would overstep Congress’s bounds and violate the separation of powers.”
It’s no secret what the Republicans are up to. Vance writes: “This is little more than a mechanism for House Republicans to try to interfere with any investigations into Trump, or any other Republicans, like George Santos or Matt Gaetz, who may be the subject of non-January-6-related matters.” She adds that Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who will likely lead the subcommittee, “will be able to issue subpoenas regarding the Hunter Biden investigation, which is being handled by a Trump-holdover U.S. Attorney in Delaware to try to embarrass President Joe Biden and argue that his Justice Department is giving favorable treatment to his son, which it clearly isn’t doing.”
The Justice Department has a well-established practice to prevent Congress from meddling in ongoing investigations and prosecutions. As the Justice Department explained in a letter to a congressional subcommittee in 2000, “Although Congress has a clearly legitimate interest in determining how the Department enforces statutes, Congressional inquiries during the pendency of a matter pose an inherent threat to the integrity of the Department’s law enforcement and litigation functions.” The letter continued, “Such inquiries inescapably create the risk that the public and the courts will perceive undue political and Congressional influence over law enforcement and litigation decisions. Such inquiries also often seek records and other information that our responsibilities for these matters preclude us from disclosing.”
Attorney General Merrick Garland should respond similarly to any MAGA overreach. He should make clear that proper oversight is the bread and butter of congressional power and that it is entirely proper for Congress to probe, for example, the FBI’s failure to adequately prepare for the Jan. 6 attack or its failure to collect data about domestic terrorism, as required by law. But he will not permit Congress to unconstitutionally impede ongoing investigations and prosecutions.
In sum, the administration can proactively short-circuit the proposed House rules. In doing so, it would reassure the markets and the American people. Biden should not miss this opportunity to make clear that McCarthy’s rules are the result of MAGA Republicans’ extortion and are as worthless as his speakership.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
The rules package that House Republicans passed Monday night provides an indication of just how much damage House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has wrought in capitulating to the most extreme members of his caucus. The good news is that the Biden administration can thwart McCarthy’s schemes.
For starters, the House GOP is spoiling for a fight on the debt limit. The rules package eliminates a long-existing parliamentary rule that automatically raised the debt ceiling whenever the House passed a budget. This will empower the House to hold the economy hostage to extract dangerous cuts to national security and crippling reductions in entitlements.
But the White House can defuse the extortionists’ bomb before it is detonated. It should plainly state that the president has the power to ensure Congress does not sabotage the full faith and credit of the United States.
Section 8 of Article I of the Constitution states that Congress has the power “to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts.” It further states that Congress has the power to borrow “on the credit” of the United States. Plainly, the Founding Fathers did not envision lawmakers deliberately refusing payment of debts and destroying the credit of the United States.
But the 14th Amendment makes clear that this power does not include the power to trigger a default. As constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe succinctly tweeted, “The debt ceiling is a misnomer: it does nothing to cap spending but just creates an illusory threat to stiff our creditors.” That’s because “[Section] 4 of 14th Amendment forbids defaulting on the nation’s debts.”
In other words, the Constitution compels the government to honor its debts. The administration shouldn’t need congressional action to do that.
The Biden administration should request a formal legal opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel, the office responsible for constitutional advice to the administration. If the OLC agrees that the president can act on his own, the White House could clarify that its preference is to work with Congress to raise the debt ceiling, but explicitly retain the constitutional prerogative to act unilaterally. In short, the White House should seize the initiative to disarm Congress now, before a loaded gun is put to the nation’s head.
The GOP rules package also sets up a blatant violation of separation of powers that would undermine the fair and impartial administration of justice. It would do this by establishing a subcommittee on the “weaponization of the federal government,” which would be authorized to review ongoing criminal investigations.
Former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance explains in a Substack post, this would “go far beyond the legitimate scope of oversight. Reviewing criminal cases while they’re in progress, which DOJ won’t permit (although it will be forced to waste a lot of time and resources fending off the committee’s requests), would overstep Congress’s bounds and violate the separation of powers.”
It’s no secret what the Republicans are up to. Vance writes: “This is little more than a mechanism for House Republicans to try to interfere with any investigations into Trump, or any other Republicans, like George Santos or Matt Gaetz, who may be the subject of non-January-6-related matters.” She adds that Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who will likely lead the subcommittee, “will be able to issue subpoenas regarding the Hunter Biden investigation, which is being handled by a Trump-holdover U.S. Attorney in Delaware to try to embarrass President Joe Biden and argue that his Justice Department is giving favorable treatment to his son, which it clearly isn’t doing.”
The Justice Department has a well-established practice to prevent Congress from meddling in ongoing investigations and prosecutions. As the Justice Department explained in a letter to a congressional subcommittee in 2000, “Although Congress has a clearly legitimate interest in determining how the Department enforces statutes, Congressional inquiries during the pendency of a matter pose an inherent threat to the integrity of the Department’s law enforcement and litigation functions.” The letter continued, “Such inquiries inescapably create the risk that the public and the courts will perceive undue political and Congressional influence over law enforcement and litigation decisions. Such inquiries also often seek records and other information that our responsibilities for these matters preclude us from disclosing.”
Attorney General Merrick Garland should respond similarly to any MAGA overreach. He should make clear that proper oversight is the bread and butter of congressional power and that it is entirely proper for Congress to probe, for example, the FBI’s failure to adequately prepare for the Jan. 6 attack or its failure to collect data about domestic terrorism, as required by law. But he will not permit Congress to unconstitutionally impede ongoing investigations and prosecutions.
In sum, the administration can proactively short-circuit the proposed House rules. In doing so, it would reassure the markets and the American people. Biden should not miss this opportunity to make clear that McCarthy’s rules are the result of MAGA Republicans’ extortion and are as worthless as his speakership.
MAGA HOUSE MEMBERS’ DEFENSE CUTS ENCOURAGE AMERICA’S ENEMIES
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
In his furious wheeling and dealing to obtain power, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) could well have made promises to the most radical members that he cannot deliver or has no intention of acting on. A cynical speaker and cynical MAGA dissidents may be conning each other as part of their performance politics to impress the base. But this goes beyond partisan intrigue. In the case of defense spending, even an empty promise may have serious national security ramifications.
Bloomberg reported that part of the agreement under discussion was to “cap fiscal year 2024 discretionary spending across government at 2022 levels.” In that year, Pentagon spending was set at roughly $782 billion — $75 billion less than in fiscal 2023. Therefore, if you take McCarthy at his word, he intends to cut $75 billion from defense.
Recall that one of the big gets for Senate Republicans in the end-of-year budget talks was a bigger defense budget. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) crowed, “This bill will significantly grow the baseline for defense and significantly cut the baseline for non-defense, non-veterans, after inflation. A big real-dollar increase for the defense baseline.” He might want to check with the MAGA House Republicans if he wants to sustain that level of funding.
Mackenzie Eaglen of the American Enterprise Institute tells me such a defense budget “makes only authoritarians, despots and dictators smile.” She adds, “It completely ignores the troops and is entirely divorced from strategic thought or the many and varied threats the country faces.”
Responsible Democrats and Republicans were justifiably horrified. Former CIA agent Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.), who sits on the Foreign Affairs Committee, also raised the red flag. “As the Chinese Communist Party is increasing its military spending, Ukraine is under siege, and Iran and North Korea are watching, cutting our nation’s defense spending is shortsighted and dangerous,” she tweeted. “And doing it for Speaker votes is unconscionable.”
Former GOP House member Liz Cheney, a ferocious hawk and McCarthy critic, likewise warned, “Ronald Reagan taught us that weakness is provocative. China and Russia are watching. If [McCarthy] agreed to weaken our national defense for his own personal gain, that will be his legacy, and our nation will suffer.”
If the members manhandling McCarthy aren’t serious and he is handing out empty promises, America’s enemies are unlikely to understand the fine points of MAGA internal deceit. They will certainly interpret talk of a massive defense cut as a sign that this Congress will tie up U.S. national security spending, including support for Ukraine and Taiwan. The suggestion that lawmakers are less than resolute will, as Cheney suggests, raise the risk they will challenge U.S. interests.
The Republicans’ promise is a telling indication of the party’s direction. “These guys are determined to complete the transformation of the GOP into an isolationist party that doesn’t give a damn about what happens outside America’s borders, so long as we can keep people from ever crossing our borders,” said Tom Malinowski, a former Democratic congressman from New Jersey and State Department official. “You can say all day to these people that if we gut defense spending and withdraw from global leadership, [Vladimir] Putin and Xi Jinping will win, but they honestly don’t care.”
As a political matter, House MAGA Republicans seem bent on making themselves and whoever gets their presidential nomination unelectable in 2024. They’ve already demonstrated a dangerous lack of competence and seriousness about the needs of the country.
McCarthy, at the beck and call of the insurrectionist caucus, cannot very well deny he made such deal. Hanging over his head is the potential that any single member could move to vacate the chair (i.e., kick him out). Alternatively, he could rely on the Senate to nix the sort of draconian budget the MAGA gang has in mind. Then what? The dissidents could insist on a shutdown or, worse, force a default on the debt.
This is only the beginning of the chaos that may ensue when a speaker allows the most irresponsible elements in his party to neuter him. As GOP dysfunction stymies the House, Senate Republicans and 2024 presidential contenders auditioning to be commander in chief will have to say whether they approve of the MAGA House antics.
The danger for the GOP has always been that a short stint in irresponsible governance will wake up the electorate to their manifest unfitness, thereby dooming the party’s chances in 2024. The danger for the country is that, in the meantime, the MAGA extremists will do permanent damage to the U.S. economy and national security.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
In his furious wheeling and dealing to obtain power, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) could well have made promises to the most radical members that he cannot deliver or has no intention of acting on. A cynical speaker and cynical MAGA dissidents may be conning each other as part of their performance politics to impress the base. But this goes beyond partisan intrigue. In the case of defense spending, even an empty promise may have serious national security ramifications.
Bloomberg reported that part of the agreement under discussion was to “cap fiscal year 2024 discretionary spending across government at 2022 levels.” In that year, Pentagon spending was set at roughly $782 billion — $75 billion less than in fiscal 2023. Therefore, if you take McCarthy at his word, he intends to cut $75 billion from defense.
Recall that one of the big gets for Senate Republicans in the end-of-year budget talks was a bigger defense budget. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) crowed, “This bill will significantly grow the baseline for defense and significantly cut the baseline for non-defense, non-veterans, after inflation. A big real-dollar increase for the defense baseline.” He might want to check with the MAGA House Republicans if he wants to sustain that level of funding.
Mackenzie Eaglen of the American Enterprise Institute tells me such a defense budget “makes only authoritarians, despots and dictators smile.” She adds, “It completely ignores the troops and is entirely divorced from strategic thought or the many and varied threats the country faces.”
Responsible Democrats and Republicans were justifiably horrified. Former CIA agent Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.), who sits on the Foreign Affairs Committee, also raised the red flag. “As the Chinese Communist Party is increasing its military spending, Ukraine is under siege, and Iran and North Korea are watching, cutting our nation’s defense spending is shortsighted and dangerous,” she tweeted. “And doing it for Speaker votes is unconscionable.”
Former GOP House member Liz Cheney, a ferocious hawk and McCarthy critic, likewise warned, “Ronald Reagan taught us that weakness is provocative. China and Russia are watching. If [McCarthy] agreed to weaken our national defense for his own personal gain, that will be his legacy, and our nation will suffer.”
If the members manhandling McCarthy aren’t serious and he is handing out empty promises, America’s enemies are unlikely to understand the fine points of MAGA internal deceit. They will certainly interpret talk of a massive defense cut as a sign that this Congress will tie up U.S. national security spending, including support for Ukraine and Taiwan. The suggestion that lawmakers are less than resolute will, as Cheney suggests, raise the risk they will challenge U.S. interests.
The Republicans’ promise is a telling indication of the party’s direction. “These guys are determined to complete the transformation of the GOP into an isolationist party that doesn’t give a damn about what happens outside America’s borders, so long as we can keep people from ever crossing our borders,” said Tom Malinowski, a former Democratic congressman from New Jersey and State Department official. “You can say all day to these people that if we gut defense spending and withdraw from global leadership, [Vladimir] Putin and Xi Jinping will win, but they honestly don’t care.”
As a political matter, House MAGA Republicans seem bent on making themselves and whoever gets their presidential nomination unelectable in 2024. They’ve already demonstrated a dangerous lack of competence and seriousness about the needs of the country.
McCarthy, at the beck and call of the insurrectionist caucus, cannot very well deny he made such deal. Hanging over his head is the potential that any single member could move to vacate the chair (i.e., kick him out). Alternatively, he could rely on the Senate to nix the sort of draconian budget the MAGA gang has in mind. Then what? The dissidents could insist on a shutdown or, worse, force a default on the debt.
This is only the beginning of the chaos that may ensue when a speaker allows the most irresponsible elements in his party to neuter him. As GOP dysfunction stymies the House, Senate Republicans and 2024 presidential contenders auditioning to be commander in chief will have to say whether they approve of the MAGA House antics.
The danger for the GOP has always been that a short stint in irresponsible governance will wake up the electorate to their manifest unfitness, thereby dooming the party’s chances in 2024. The danger for the country is that, in the meantime, the MAGA extremists will do permanent damage to the U.S. economy and national security.
MAKING AMERICA THE OPPOSITE OF GREAT
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
I admit it: Like many liberals, I’m feeling a fair bit of MAGAfreude — taking some pleasure in the self-destruction of the American right.
There has, after all, never been a spectacle like the chaos we’ve seen in the House of Representatives this week. It had been a century since a speaker wasn’t chosen on the first ballot — and the last time that happened, there was an actual substantive dispute: Republican progressives (yes, they existed back then) demanded, and eventually received, procedural reforms that they hoped would favor their agenda.
This time, there has been no significant dispute about policy — Kevin McCarthy and his opponents agree on key policy issues like investigating Hunter Biden’s laptop and depriving the Internal Revenue Service of the resources it needs to go after wealthy tax cheats. Long after he tried to appease his opponents by surrendering his dignity, the voting went on.
But while the spectacle has been amazing and, yes, entertaining, neither I nor, I believe, many other liberals are experiencing the kind of glee Republicans would be feeling if the parties’ roles were reversed. For one thing, liberals want the U.S. government to function, which among other things means that we need a duly constituted House of Representatives, even if it’s run by people we don’t like. For another, I don’t think there are many on the U.S. left (such as it is) who define themselves the way so many on the right do: by their resentments.
And yes, I mean “resentments” rather than “grievances.” Grievances are about things you believe you deserve, and might be diminished if you get some of what you want. Resentment is about feeling that you’re being looked down on, and can only be assuaged by hurting the people you, at some level, envy.
Consider the phrase (and associated sentiment), popular on the right, “owning the libs.” In context, “owning” doesn’t mean defeating progressive policies, say by repealing the Affordable Care Act. It means, instead, humiliating liberals personally — making them look weak and foolish.
I won’t claim that liberals are immune to such sentiments. As I said, MAGAfreude is a real thing, and I’m feeling a bit of it myself. But liberals have never seemed remotely as interested in humiliating conservatives as conservatives are in humiliating liberals. And a substantial part of what has been going on in the House seems to be that some Republicans who expected to own the libs after a red wave election have acted out their disappointment by owning Kevin McCarthy instead.
And does anyone doubt that resentment on the part of those who felt disrespected was central to the rise of Donald Trump? Are there any pundits left who still believe that it was largely about “economic anxiety”?
I’m not saying that the decline of manufacturing jobs in the heartland was a myth: It really did happen, and it hurt millions of Americans. But the failure of Trump’s trade wars to deliver a manufacturing revival doesn’t seem to have turned off his base. Why?
The likely answer is that Trump’s anti-globalism, his promise to Make America Great Again, had less to do with trade balances and job creation than with a sense that snooty foreigners considered us chumps. “The world is laughing at us” was a consistent theme of Trump speeches, and his supporters surely imagined that the same was true of domestic globalist elites.
And I have a theory that Trump’s own underlying ludicrousness, his manifest lack of the intellectual capacity and emotional maturity to be president, was part of what endeared him to his base. You fancy liberals think you’re so smart? Well, we’ll show you, by electing someone you consider a clown!
The irony is that the MAGA movement has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of sinister globalists (if any exist) in making America the opposite of great. Right now the world really is laughing at us, although it’s terrified, too. America is still the essential nation, on multiple fronts. When the world’s greatest economic and military power seemingly can’t even get a functioning government up and running, the risks are global.
I mean, even with a speaker in place, how likely is it that the people we’ve been watching the past few days will agree to raise the debt ceiling, even if failing to do so creates a huge financial crisis? And there may be many other risks requiring emergency congressional action even before we get to that point.
Of course, the world is laughing even harder at Republicans, both the ultraright refuseniks and the spineless careerists like McCarthy who helped empower the crazies. For what shall it profit a man, if he shall lose his own soul, and still not gain enough votes to become speaker of the House?
I’m not sure what we are in store for, nor is anyone else. One thing is sure, however: America is already less great than it was when Nancy Pelosi ran the House, and it’s shrinking by the day.
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
I admit it: Like many liberals, I’m feeling a fair bit of MAGAfreude — taking some pleasure in the self-destruction of the American right.
There has, after all, never been a spectacle like the chaos we’ve seen in the House of Representatives this week. It had been a century since a speaker wasn’t chosen on the first ballot — and the last time that happened, there was an actual substantive dispute: Republican progressives (yes, they existed back then) demanded, and eventually received, procedural reforms that they hoped would favor their agenda.
This time, there has been no significant dispute about policy — Kevin McCarthy and his opponents agree on key policy issues like investigating Hunter Biden’s laptop and depriving the Internal Revenue Service of the resources it needs to go after wealthy tax cheats. Long after he tried to appease his opponents by surrendering his dignity, the voting went on.
But while the spectacle has been amazing and, yes, entertaining, neither I nor, I believe, many other liberals are experiencing the kind of glee Republicans would be feeling if the parties’ roles were reversed. For one thing, liberals want the U.S. government to function, which among other things means that we need a duly constituted House of Representatives, even if it’s run by people we don’t like. For another, I don’t think there are many on the U.S. left (such as it is) who define themselves the way so many on the right do: by their resentments.
And yes, I mean “resentments” rather than “grievances.” Grievances are about things you believe you deserve, and might be diminished if you get some of what you want. Resentment is about feeling that you’re being looked down on, and can only be assuaged by hurting the people you, at some level, envy.
Consider the phrase (and associated sentiment), popular on the right, “owning the libs.” In context, “owning” doesn’t mean defeating progressive policies, say by repealing the Affordable Care Act. It means, instead, humiliating liberals personally — making them look weak and foolish.
I won’t claim that liberals are immune to such sentiments. As I said, MAGAfreude is a real thing, and I’m feeling a bit of it myself. But liberals have never seemed remotely as interested in humiliating conservatives as conservatives are in humiliating liberals. And a substantial part of what has been going on in the House seems to be that some Republicans who expected to own the libs after a red wave election have acted out their disappointment by owning Kevin McCarthy instead.
And does anyone doubt that resentment on the part of those who felt disrespected was central to the rise of Donald Trump? Are there any pundits left who still believe that it was largely about “economic anxiety”?
I’m not saying that the decline of manufacturing jobs in the heartland was a myth: It really did happen, and it hurt millions of Americans. But the failure of Trump’s trade wars to deliver a manufacturing revival doesn’t seem to have turned off his base. Why?
The likely answer is that Trump’s anti-globalism, his promise to Make America Great Again, had less to do with trade balances and job creation than with a sense that snooty foreigners considered us chumps. “The world is laughing at us” was a consistent theme of Trump speeches, and his supporters surely imagined that the same was true of domestic globalist elites.
And I have a theory that Trump’s own underlying ludicrousness, his manifest lack of the intellectual capacity and emotional maturity to be president, was part of what endeared him to his base. You fancy liberals think you’re so smart? Well, we’ll show you, by electing someone you consider a clown!
The irony is that the MAGA movement has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of sinister globalists (if any exist) in making America the opposite of great. Right now the world really is laughing at us, although it’s terrified, too. America is still the essential nation, on multiple fronts. When the world’s greatest economic and military power seemingly can’t even get a functioning government up and running, the risks are global.
I mean, even with a speaker in place, how likely is it that the people we’ve been watching the past few days will agree to raise the debt ceiling, even if failing to do so creates a huge financial crisis? And there may be many other risks requiring emergency congressional action even before we get to that point.
Of course, the world is laughing even harder at Republicans, both the ultraright refuseniks and the spineless careerists like McCarthy who helped empower the crazies. For what shall it profit a man, if he shall lose his own soul, and still not gain enough votes to become speaker of the House?
I’m not sure what we are in store for, nor is anyone else. One thing is sure, however: America is already less great than it was when Nancy Pelosi ran the House, and it’s shrinking by the day.
FIRST ORDER OF BUSINESS FOR THE GOP HOUSE? DEFUNDING THE TAX POLICE.
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
House Republicans might be struggling to choose a leader, but they already know what that leader’s first order of business will be: Defunding the tax police.
In recent weeks, high-level Republicans have said their top legislative priority is clawing back the $80 billion that Democrats recently appropriated to the Internal Revenue Service over the next decade. About half of this money will go toward beefing up enforcement; the rest for other functions such as improving customer service and modernizing the agency’s embarrassingly decrepit IT systems.
If you’ve ever seen a photo of the IRS cafeteria — stacked end-to-end and shoulder-high with backlogged paper tax returns — you’ll understand why it desperately needs an IT upgrade. But what about all that enforcement money? Surely you’ve heard the scary stories about the “army” of 87,000 supposedly gun-toting IRS agents coming to terrorize you and your innocent, working-class neighbors.
None of that is true, not even the 87,000 figure (which refers to broader IRS hiring, not just hiring of auditors, and doesn’t subtract the many expected to retire over the next few years). But more to the point, the IRS desperately needs to increase enforcement, particularly against wealthy tax scofflaws.
By now, we know that the IRS mysteriously dropped the ball in auditing the highest-profile of tax targets, Donald Trump. Whatever happened there — and we still don’t know why the agency didn’t enforce its own policy of mandatory audits of the sitting president — Trump is far from the only deep-pocketed taxpayer with dodgy or aggressive tax practices who has escaped scrutiny in recent years.
Audit rates of mega-corporations and millionaires have plummeted over the past decade. In 2012, for example, 93 percent of companies with at least $20 billion in assets were subject to audit, versus just 38 percent by 2020, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC. We’ve seen even sharper declines in audits of millionaires.
This is all happening thanks to enormous cuts to the agency’s budget following the tea party’s takeover of Congress a little over a decade ago.
Over that time, the tax code has become more complex; the IRS has taken on more responsibilities; and the affluent remain shielded by armies of accountants and tax attorneys to help them either avoid or evade their tax obligations. Meanwhile, the tax police force has shrunk: the number of IRS personnel in key enforcement occupations has fallen by more than 40 percent since the recent peak in 2010.
Uncle Sam is losing revenue as a result.
Audits in 2012 of those corporate giants had turned up an additional $10 billion in unreported taxes, TRAC found; less than half that ($4.1 billion) was found as a result of those reduced audits in 2020.
Estimates of the nation’s overall “tax gap” — the difference between all taxes legally owed and those actually paid — vary, but most place it somewhere around half a trillion dollars annually in recent years.
Shirking tax obligations is not a victimless crime. If Trump (or whoever) doesn’t pay all the taxes he legally owes, that means the rest of us who actually are honest — Leona Helmsley’s “little people” — must make up the difference through higher tax rates. Right now, Americans are overwhelmingly tax-compliant, and regard paying taxes as a civic duty. But the worse IRS customer service gets, and the more flagrantly some high-profile figures shirk, the more resentful the rest of the population might become — and the more tempted to cheat, too.
After all, among the taxpayers with the highest audit rates are low-income wage earners receiving the earned income tax credit. This population is 5½ times as likely to be audited as everyone else because, as TRAC puts it, they are “easy marks.”
In other words: Going after rich tax cheats is hard, because they have complex tax returns and sophisticated counsel; going after EITC claimants is simpler, even if the dollars available from each are fewer. Investing in the agency’s enforcement, reporting and IT capabilities, if the investment is designed wisely, should enable the agency to concentrate on higher-value targets.
For whatever reason, Republicans have decided to stay on the side of the rich tax cheats. Last month, they forced a 2 percent cut in regular IRS appropriations as part of the omnibus spending bill for fiscal 2023. Now, they’re gunning to rescind nearly all of that bigger chunk of IRS funding, including money for increased enforcement and for creating a new free-file program that would make it easier for people with simple tax returns to file. Republicans have given their legislation the Orwellian name of “Family and Small Business Taxpayer Protection Act.”
Between this and efforts to gut the House ethics office, it’s almost like Republicans don’t care about law and order at all.
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
House Republicans might be struggling to choose a leader, but they already know what that leader’s first order of business will be: Defunding the tax police.
In recent weeks, high-level Republicans have said their top legislative priority is clawing back the $80 billion that Democrats recently appropriated to the Internal Revenue Service over the next decade. About half of this money will go toward beefing up enforcement; the rest for other functions such as improving customer service and modernizing the agency’s embarrassingly decrepit IT systems.
If you’ve ever seen a photo of the IRS cafeteria — stacked end-to-end and shoulder-high with backlogged paper tax returns — you’ll understand why it desperately needs an IT upgrade. But what about all that enforcement money? Surely you’ve heard the scary stories about the “army” of 87,000 supposedly gun-toting IRS agents coming to terrorize you and your innocent, working-class neighbors.
None of that is true, not even the 87,000 figure (which refers to broader IRS hiring, not just hiring of auditors, and doesn’t subtract the many expected to retire over the next few years). But more to the point, the IRS desperately needs to increase enforcement, particularly against wealthy tax scofflaws.
By now, we know that the IRS mysteriously dropped the ball in auditing the highest-profile of tax targets, Donald Trump. Whatever happened there — and we still don’t know why the agency didn’t enforce its own policy of mandatory audits of the sitting president — Trump is far from the only deep-pocketed taxpayer with dodgy or aggressive tax practices who has escaped scrutiny in recent years.
Audit rates of mega-corporations and millionaires have plummeted over the past decade. In 2012, for example, 93 percent of companies with at least $20 billion in assets were subject to audit, versus just 38 percent by 2020, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC. We’ve seen even sharper declines in audits of millionaires.
This is all happening thanks to enormous cuts to the agency’s budget following the tea party’s takeover of Congress a little over a decade ago.
Over that time, the tax code has become more complex; the IRS has taken on more responsibilities; and the affluent remain shielded by armies of accountants and tax attorneys to help them either avoid or evade their tax obligations. Meanwhile, the tax police force has shrunk: the number of IRS personnel in key enforcement occupations has fallen by more than 40 percent since the recent peak in 2010.
Uncle Sam is losing revenue as a result.
Audits in 2012 of those corporate giants had turned up an additional $10 billion in unreported taxes, TRAC found; less than half that ($4.1 billion) was found as a result of those reduced audits in 2020.
Estimates of the nation’s overall “tax gap” — the difference between all taxes legally owed and those actually paid — vary, but most place it somewhere around half a trillion dollars annually in recent years.
Shirking tax obligations is not a victimless crime. If Trump (or whoever) doesn’t pay all the taxes he legally owes, that means the rest of us who actually are honest — Leona Helmsley’s “little people” — must make up the difference through higher tax rates. Right now, Americans are overwhelmingly tax-compliant, and regard paying taxes as a civic duty. But the worse IRS customer service gets, and the more flagrantly some high-profile figures shirk, the more resentful the rest of the population might become — and the more tempted to cheat, too.
After all, among the taxpayers with the highest audit rates are low-income wage earners receiving the earned income tax credit. This population is 5½ times as likely to be audited as everyone else because, as TRAC puts it, they are “easy marks.”
In other words: Going after rich tax cheats is hard, because they have complex tax returns and sophisticated counsel; going after EITC claimants is simpler, even if the dollars available from each are fewer. Investing in the agency’s enforcement, reporting and IT capabilities, if the investment is designed wisely, should enable the agency to concentrate on higher-value targets.
For whatever reason, Republicans have decided to stay on the side of the rich tax cheats. Last month, they forced a 2 percent cut in regular IRS appropriations as part of the omnibus spending bill for fiscal 2023. Now, they’re gunning to rescind nearly all of that bigger chunk of IRS funding, including money for increased enforcement and for creating a new free-file program that would make it easier for people with simple tax returns to file. Republicans have given their legislation the Orwellian name of “Family and Small Business Taxpayer Protection Act.”
Between this and efforts to gut the House ethics office, it’s almost like Republicans don’t care about law and order at all.
WHAT THE HECK DOES ‘WEAPONIZING THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT’ EVEN MEAN?
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), in his failed attempt to help House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) secure the speakership on Tuesday, hollered that the government “has been weaponized against ‘we the people,’ the very people we represent.” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) later insisted that he wants his party’s leadership to stop the “swamp” in D.C. from “running over” and “stepping” on average Americans.
What the heck are they talking about?
Unsurprisingly, Republicans rarely explain just how they think the federal government is tormenting people. The overwhelming number of Americans, for example, don’t think it’s tyrannical for the government to secure $35 per month insulin for seniors, give them green energy credits or expand access to health care to veterans exposed to burn pits during war.
Perhaps Republicans are referring to the mythical 87,000 new IRS agents who they claim are about to knock down the doors of ordinary taxpayers. But as the New York Times explained, “The 87,000 figure refers to a May 2021 estimate from the Treasury Department of the total number of employees — not just auditors — the I.R.S. proposes to hire over the next 10 years with funding requested by Mr. Biden. And while the I.R.S. plans to conduct more audits, wealthy Americans and businesses will bear the brunt of that scrutiny, not, as Republicans have suggested, working families.”
If “weaponizing” government amounts to forcing rich Americans to pay taxes owed under existing law, then Republicans should come out and say that.
Then again, maybe Republicans object to prosecuting Jan. 6 insurrectionists who attacked and injured police officers, destroyed public property, and attempted to halt the peaceful transfer of power. In the eyes of a number of MAGA types, the insurrectionists are the innocent victims, while the police, FBI and National Guard are the enemies.
So much for “back the blue.” As Aquilino Gonell, one of the Capitol Police officers injured while defending members of Congress, wrote in an op-ed for the Times condemning former president Donald Trump for his role in the insurrection, “Even more galling are the Republicans who still refuse to provide testimony under oath and instead dangerously downplay how close we came to losing our democracy.” In fact, 21 House Republicans voted against giving Congressional Gold Medals to the heroic police.
Maybe Republican are still harping on the federal government’s efforts to prevent Americans from dying of covid-19. Requirements for masks, vaccines, social distancing — the horror!
MAGA extremists seem to have sympathy for the Republican governors who resisted lifesaving measures, resulting in disproportionate deaths in red locales. As Scientific American found, “Republican-leaning ‘red’ states were much more resistant to health measures. The consequences of those differences emerged by the end of 2020, when rates of hospitalization and death from COVID rose in conservative counties and dropped in liberal ones.” (Oddly, these same Republicans favor using the government to force women to remain pregnant and give birth, a practice straight from Communist China’s playbook.)
Indeed, right-wing authoritarians seem to be engaged in a giant exercise in projection. You want examples of abusive government? Take a look at red-state governors who seek to use the power of the state to target LGBTQ youths, deny the right of assembly, silence dissent and suppress voting rights.
So if you are confused about what in the world Jordan, Roy and the other MAGA radicals are hollering about, you are not alone. Their party of nihilists insists that legitimate functions of government amount to tyranny, while their own abuse of power represents the will of “real Americans.” Whether they believe this nonsense is irrelevant; what we know is that the same delusional thinking that triggered the 2021 coup attempt is alive and well, fanned by right-wing hucksters who can dupe Americans into sending a few more bucks to fight “socialists” — or something.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), in his failed attempt to help House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) secure the speakership on Tuesday, hollered that the government “has been weaponized against ‘we the people,’ the very people we represent.” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) later insisted that he wants his party’s leadership to stop the “swamp” in D.C. from “running over” and “stepping” on average Americans.
What the heck are they talking about?
Unsurprisingly, Republicans rarely explain just how they think the federal government is tormenting people. The overwhelming number of Americans, for example, don’t think it’s tyrannical for the government to secure $35 per month insulin for seniors, give them green energy credits or expand access to health care to veterans exposed to burn pits during war.
Perhaps Republicans are referring to the mythical 87,000 new IRS agents who they claim are about to knock down the doors of ordinary taxpayers. But as the New York Times explained, “The 87,000 figure refers to a May 2021 estimate from the Treasury Department of the total number of employees — not just auditors — the I.R.S. proposes to hire over the next 10 years with funding requested by Mr. Biden. And while the I.R.S. plans to conduct more audits, wealthy Americans and businesses will bear the brunt of that scrutiny, not, as Republicans have suggested, working families.”
If “weaponizing” government amounts to forcing rich Americans to pay taxes owed under existing law, then Republicans should come out and say that.
Then again, maybe Republicans object to prosecuting Jan. 6 insurrectionists who attacked and injured police officers, destroyed public property, and attempted to halt the peaceful transfer of power. In the eyes of a number of MAGA types, the insurrectionists are the innocent victims, while the police, FBI and National Guard are the enemies.
So much for “back the blue.” As Aquilino Gonell, one of the Capitol Police officers injured while defending members of Congress, wrote in an op-ed for the Times condemning former president Donald Trump for his role in the insurrection, “Even more galling are the Republicans who still refuse to provide testimony under oath and instead dangerously downplay how close we came to losing our democracy.” In fact, 21 House Republicans voted against giving Congressional Gold Medals to the heroic police.
Maybe Republican are still harping on the federal government’s efforts to prevent Americans from dying of covid-19. Requirements for masks, vaccines, social distancing — the horror!
MAGA extremists seem to have sympathy for the Republican governors who resisted lifesaving measures, resulting in disproportionate deaths in red locales. As Scientific American found, “Republican-leaning ‘red’ states were much more resistant to health measures. The consequences of those differences emerged by the end of 2020, when rates of hospitalization and death from COVID rose in conservative counties and dropped in liberal ones.” (Oddly, these same Republicans favor using the government to force women to remain pregnant and give birth, a practice straight from Communist China’s playbook.)
Indeed, right-wing authoritarians seem to be engaged in a giant exercise in projection. You want examples of abusive government? Take a look at red-state governors who seek to use the power of the state to target LGBTQ youths, deny the right of assembly, silence dissent and suppress voting rights.
So if you are confused about what in the world Jordan, Roy and the other MAGA radicals are hollering about, you are not alone. Their party of nihilists insists that legitimate functions of government amount to tyranny, while their own abuse of power represents the will of “real Americans.” Whether they believe this nonsense is irrelevant; what we know is that the same delusional thinking that triggered the 2021 coup attempt is alive and well, fanned by right-wing hucksters who can dupe Americans into sending a few more bucks to fight “socialists” — or something.
REPUBLICANS WANT TO GUT THE HOUSE ETHICS OFFICE. THEY WILL REGRET IT.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
House Republicans might have gotten off to a chaotic start on Tuesday as they struggled to elect a House speaker. But not to worry: Once they figure out how to resolve their leadership dispute (however long that will take), they will get straight to work disrupting good governance.
Among their first tasks: neutering the Office of Congressional Ethics.
The OCE, which Democrats created in 2008, was designed as an independent office with the power to investigate ethics violations among House members. (The OCE, however, can only conduct preliminary investigations and make recommendations, leaving it to the House Ethics Committee to decide whether to investigate further and enact punishment.)
Ever since the office’s conception, Republicans seeking to avoid independent scrutiny have attempted to dismantle it. So it should come as no surprise that while they cannot agree on a speaker, Republicans have apparently agreed to introduce rules changes that would hamper the OCE’s ability to do its job, including imposing term limits on its board and severely restricting its ability to hire new staff.
Even Donald Trump seems to understand the danger of this move. As the New York Times reported in 2017, “The day after House Republicans voted to eliminate an independent ethics body, members returned to work on Tuesday to find their offices inundated with angry missives from constituents amid a national uproar.” They were soon in retreat. “By midmorning, Mr. Trump had weighed in, questioning the members’ priorities on Twitter. Shortly after, lawmakers were summoned to the basement of the Capitol for a hastily convened meeting with Republican leaders.” They were forced to back down.
Apparently, Republicans today have less ethical and political sense than the disgraced president had then.
The MAGA majority’s current plan to gut the OCE is telling. As Norman Eisen, who served as ethics counsel in the Obama administration, observed, “When there is a change of control in a branch of our government, incoming leaders usually like to signal their commitment to ethics as the first order of business. But the new House GOP majority is doing the exact opposite.” They might see the tactic as a short-term solution to shield Republican members from ethics investigations, but, as Eisen notes, “the Republican caucus is inviting more corruption in their ranks.”
Consider the case of George Santos, the New York Republican entering Congress with a litany of scandals. Do Republicans really want to make it easier for the habitual liar to remain in their midst? “Maybe that’s the point,” Eisen muses. But that would undoubtedly come back to haunt them. The caucus — which includes a number of members who have expressed sympathy for insurrectionists and the promotion of the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen — is not one to take the oath of office seriously. Asking Republicans to exercise personal restraint is like asking a tiger to go vegan.
Fred Wertheimer, founder and president of the nonprofit group Democracy 21, warned in a written statement: “There is no basis for gutting the effective and successful OCE other than to make it easier for unethical Representatives to break House ethics rules without facing consequences for their actions.” He concludes that Republicans’ proposal could “seriously discredit the House as an institution in the eyes of an already skeptical public.”
Downgrading the ethical guardrails that Congress has erected would only serve as an invitation for unscrupulous and opportunistic members to run amok in the next two years. That might further hamper the GOP’s effort to hang on to its narrow majority in 2024.
Republicans, after all, have made it clear they will pursue nonstop investigations of the Biden administration, the president’s family and whatever conspiracy theory pops into their heads. So one can only describe their resistance to scrutiny as hypocrisy.
When the inquisitors exempt themselves from ethical restraints, they send the message that rules are only for Democrats. Democrats, in turn, will send the message in 2024 that it’s time to return to honest, competent governance.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
House Republicans might have gotten off to a chaotic start on Tuesday as they struggled to elect a House speaker. But not to worry: Once they figure out how to resolve their leadership dispute (however long that will take), they will get straight to work disrupting good governance.
Among their first tasks: neutering the Office of Congressional Ethics.
The OCE, which Democrats created in 2008, was designed as an independent office with the power to investigate ethics violations among House members. (The OCE, however, can only conduct preliminary investigations and make recommendations, leaving it to the House Ethics Committee to decide whether to investigate further and enact punishment.)
Ever since the office’s conception, Republicans seeking to avoid independent scrutiny have attempted to dismantle it. So it should come as no surprise that while they cannot agree on a speaker, Republicans have apparently agreed to introduce rules changes that would hamper the OCE’s ability to do its job, including imposing term limits on its board and severely restricting its ability to hire new staff.
Even Donald Trump seems to understand the danger of this move. As the New York Times reported in 2017, “The day after House Republicans voted to eliminate an independent ethics body, members returned to work on Tuesday to find their offices inundated with angry missives from constituents amid a national uproar.” They were soon in retreat. “By midmorning, Mr. Trump had weighed in, questioning the members’ priorities on Twitter. Shortly after, lawmakers were summoned to the basement of the Capitol for a hastily convened meeting with Republican leaders.” They were forced to back down.
Apparently, Republicans today have less ethical and political sense than the disgraced president had then.
The MAGA majority’s current plan to gut the OCE is telling. As Norman Eisen, who served as ethics counsel in the Obama administration, observed, “When there is a change of control in a branch of our government, incoming leaders usually like to signal their commitment to ethics as the first order of business. But the new House GOP majority is doing the exact opposite.” They might see the tactic as a short-term solution to shield Republican members from ethics investigations, but, as Eisen notes, “the Republican caucus is inviting more corruption in their ranks.”
Consider the case of George Santos, the New York Republican entering Congress with a litany of scandals. Do Republicans really want to make it easier for the habitual liar to remain in their midst? “Maybe that’s the point,” Eisen muses. But that would undoubtedly come back to haunt them. The caucus — which includes a number of members who have expressed sympathy for insurrectionists and the promotion of the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen — is not one to take the oath of office seriously. Asking Republicans to exercise personal restraint is like asking a tiger to go vegan.
Fred Wertheimer, founder and president of the nonprofit group Democracy 21, warned in a written statement: “There is no basis for gutting the effective and successful OCE other than to make it easier for unethical Representatives to break House ethics rules without facing consequences for their actions.” He concludes that Republicans’ proposal could “seriously discredit the House as an institution in the eyes of an already skeptical public.”
Downgrading the ethical guardrails that Congress has erected would only serve as an invitation for unscrupulous and opportunistic members to run amok in the next two years. That might further hamper the GOP’s effort to hang on to its narrow majority in 2024.
Republicans, after all, have made it clear they will pursue nonstop investigations of the Biden administration, the president’s family and whatever conspiracy theory pops into their heads. So one can only describe their resistance to scrutiny as hypocrisy.
When the inquisitors exempt themselves from ethical restraints, they send the message that rules are only for Democrats. Democrats, in turn, will send the message in 2024 that it’s time to return to honest, competent governance.
DON’T LOWER THE BAR FOR THE INCOMING GOP HOUSE MAJORITY
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
As voters watch the House Republicans’ dysfunctional circus roll into town, they may be tempted to lower their expectations for the party’s performance. But they should not forget how a responsible House majority acts when the other party controls the White House.
There are plenty of examples with which to compare the coming GOP majority. Democrats held the House for the last two years of President Donald Trump’s term and the last two years of President George W. Bush’s second term. While there were real policy differences between the two parties during those years, House Democratic majorities exercised restraint and responsibly carried out their constitutional duties.
For instance, despite Democrats’ strong opposition to the Iraq War under Bush, they did not vote to cut off funding for the conflict or threaten to default on the national debt if Republicans didn’t cave in to their demands. They also refrained from impeaching Bush when it became clear that the pretext for the war — the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — was false.
Under Trump, Democrats did not investigate his adult children for their manifest conflicts of interest. Nor did Democrats toss qualified sitting members of the opposite party off committees for the sake of political vengeance.
How would the incoming GOP majority conduct itself in a make-believe world in which the party was led by sober, responsible adults? First, it would propose a budget and pass serious legislation, even if it expected the Senate to become a graveyard for such measures, as was the case when Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) controlled the chamber. For example, they could put forward ideas to contain prescription drug costs, curb health insurance fraudsters and address the needs of rural Americans, whom many of them represent.
This fantasy Republican Party would also develop a plan to fight inflation. This would not include measures that make inflation worse -- cutting taxes for the rich, growing the deficit and repealing cost containment plans to limit prescription-drug price gouging. Likewise, after complaining for years that the U.S. labor participation rate is unacceptably low, responsible Republicans would hold serious hearings to explore the reasons for the problem (e.g., women can’t find child care, the rate of retirement has been accelerating) and concrete proposals to fix the problem.
Furthermore, Republican leaders who declared that there should be no blank checks for Ukraine would hold serious hearings on the conflict there. How much has the United States spent to help Ukraine fight back against Russia? How are U.S. sanctions against Russia working? What’s the human rights situation in Russia? Republicans actually could improve their own image and benefit the country with proper oversight of the Pentagon instead of using hearings as political stunts.
The GOP would also strengthen its internal organization. It’s easy to forget that during the past 30 years or so (since Jim Wright resigned as House speaker in an ethics scandal in 1989), Democrats have had orderly leadership transitions and relatively tight control of their left flank. No Democratic speaker has had to bargain away the threshold for a motion to vacate the chair, thereby rendering their leadership unstable. Republicans are obligated to get their act together.
Finally, competent GOP leadership would deal with the ethics debacles on its own side. That would follow the example set by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her caucus in 2010, when they eased out Democratic Rep. Charles B. Rangel, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, amid multiple ethics scandals. In 2006, then-Minority Leader Pelosi also took the lead role in forcing Rep. Alan B. Mollohan of West Virginia to step down as the ranking Democrat on the House Ethics Committee when he ran into problems.
That’s the standard against which Republicans should be judged. As the Campaign Legal Center recounted, “Pelosi is one of four speakers who did not have an ethics scandal, and, of the four, she is the only one to push for and pass extensive ethics reform. … When she ultimately took over in 2007, she championed the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, extensive reform that tightened lobbying, campaign finance and ethics laws.”
Simply because House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is weak and his members so crazed does not mean voters should lower the bar for assessing their tenure. Republicans have an obligation to govern, address the problems they ran on, respect the other party’s committee appointments and focus their oversight on legitimate issues. If they cannot manage that, voters have every reason to kick them out in two years.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
As voters watch the House Republicans’ dysfunctional circus roll into town, they may be tempted to lower their expectations for the party’s performance. But they should not forget how a responsible House majority acts when the other party controls the White House.
There are plenty of examples with which to compare the coming GOP majority. Democrats held the House for the last two years of President Donald Trump’s term and the last two years of President George W. Bush’s second term. While there were real policy differences between the two parties during those years, House Democratic majorities exercised restraint and responsibly carried out their constitutional duties.
For instance, despite Democrats’ strong opposition to the Iraq War under Bush, they did not vote to cut off funding for the conflict or threaten to default on the national debt if Republicans didn’t cave in to their demands. They also refrained from impeaching Bush when it became clear that the pretext for the war — the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — was false.
Under Trump, Democrats did not investigate his adult children for their manifest conflicts of interest. Nor did Democrats toss qualified sitting members of the opposite party off committees for the sake of political vengeance.
How would the incoming GOP majority conduct itself in a make-believe world in which the party was led by sober, responsible adults? First, it would propose a budget and pass serious legislation, even if it expected the Senate to become a graveyard for such measures, as was the case when Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) controlled the chamber. For example, they could put forward ideas to contain prescription drug costs, curb health insurance fraudsters and address the needs of rural Americans, whom many of them represent.
This fantasy Republican Party would also develop a plan to fight inflation. This would not include measures that make inflation worse -- cutting taxes for the rich, growing the deficit and repealing cost containment plans to limit prescription-drug price gouging. Likewise, after complaining for years that the U.S. labor participation rate is unacceptably low, responsible Republicans would hold serious hearings to explore the reasons for the problem (e.g., women can’t find child care, the rate of retirement has been accelerating) and concrete proposals to fix the problem.
Furthermore, Republican leaders who declared that there should be no blank checks for Ukraine would hold serious hearings on the conflict there. How much has the United States spent to help Ukraine fight back against Russia? How are U.S. sanctions against Russia working? What’s the human rights situation in Russia? Republicans actually could improve their own image and benefit the country with proper oversight of the Pentagon instead of using hearings as political stunts.
The GOP would also strengthen its internal organization. It’s easy to forget that during the past 30 years or so (since Jim Wright resigned as House speaker in an ethics scandal in 1989), Democrats have had orderly leadership transitions and relatively tight control of their left flank. No Democratic speaker has had to bargain away the threshold for a motion to vacate the chair, thereby rendering their leadership unstable. Republicans are obligated to get their act together.
Finally, competent GOP leadership would deal with the ethics debacles on its own side. That would follow the example set by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her caucus in 2010, when they eased out Democratic Rep. Charles B. Rangel, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, amid multiple ethics scandals. In 2006, then-Minority Leader Pelosi also took the lead role in forcing Rep. Alan B. Mollohan of West Virginia to step down as the ranking Democrat on the House Ethics Committee when he ran into problems.
That’s the standard against which Republicans should be judged. As the Campaign Legal Center recounted, “Pelosi is one of four speakers who did not have an ethics scandal, and, of the four, she is the only one to push for and pass extensive ethics reform. … When she ultimately took over in 2007, she championed the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, extensive reform that tightened lobbying, campaign finance and ethics laws.”
Simply because House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is weak and his members so crazed does not mean voters should lower the bar for assessing their tenure. Republicans have an obligation to govern, address the problems they ran on, respect the other party’s committee appointments and focus their oversight on legitimate issues. If they cannot manage that, voters have every reason to kick them out in two years.
IN GEORGE SANTOS, THE GOP GETS THE REPRESENTATIVE-ELECT IT DESERVES
By Eugene Robinson, The Washington Post
Sooner or later, the Republican Party’s devolution was bound to saddle GOP leaders with someone exactly like Rep.-elect George Santos of New York: a glib, successful candidate for high office who turns out to be pure fantasy with zero substance.
Santos, 34, who helped give Republicans their slim House majority by winning an open Long Island seat previously held by a Democrat, has admitted to “embellishing” his résumé and using a “poor choice of words” in touting his credentials. Those are understatements akin to calling the Amazon a creek or the Grand Canyon a ditch.
After initial reporting by the New York Times, journalists have discovered that, basically, Santos’s whole life story — as he sold it to voters — is a lie. He did not attend the exclusive Horace Mann Prep school in the Bronx, according to school officials. He did not graduate from Baruch College, as he had claimed. He did not climb the ladder of Wall Street success via Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, as he boasted. He is not “a proud American Jew,” as he wrote in a campaign document seeking support from pro-Israel groups, but instead considers himself “Jew-ish, as in ‘ish.’” Which apparently means not being Jewish at all.
Those are just a few of the acknowledged or apparent lies Santos told. He presented himself as the made-for-television incarnation of the vitality and diversity the Republican Party would like to project: a handsome gay Latino man, wealthy and self-made, whose very existence refuted the charge that today’s GOP shamelessly panders to racism and bigotry.
With that existence now revealed to be an illusion — with the “George Santos” voters elected shown to be a fictional character — most leading figures in the GOP have been silent. One exception is Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), who defended him with tweets acknowledging that Santos lied but accusing “the left” of lying, too, although most of the examples she cited were not lies at all. “The left said George Floyd didn’t die of a drug overdose, they lied,” she wrote. Fact check: Floyd was murdered, and a jury convicted former police officer Derek Chauvin of the crime.
Some Democrats have called for Santos not to be seated in the new Congress; others have called for an immediate House Ethics Committee investigation. GOP leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), hoping for Santos’s vote to help him be elected House speaker, has offered no comment as to what steps, if any, the incoming Republican majority might take.
The most honest thing House Republicans could do, in my view, is welcome Santos with open arms. The party embarked on the path of make-believe politics long before Santos came onto the scene. All he did was expand the frontier.
For me, the key moment came when Republicans decided not to write a platform for the 2020 presidential election — when, in effect, they refused to tell voters what they would do if elected. They pledged only to enact whatever policies President Donald Trump might propose, ceding their political philosophy to a man who, by Post count, told more than 30,000 lies during his four years in the White House.
The party can’t blame it all on Trump, though. In today’s GOP, a leading figure such as Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) — a cum laude graduate of Princeton University and a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School who clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist — routinely rails against smarty-pants “elites” who supposedly look down on regular folks like him.
Greene and others have shown that the way to prominence in the party is not through legislative or administrative accomplishments but via attention-grabbing displays of performative outrage. If you can “own the libs” on Fox News and on Twitter, you can raise a lot of campaign cash; and if you can raise tons of money, you can have tons of power. What does it matter if what you say has no grounding in fact? By the time you get called on it, you’re off to the next over-the-top statement.
Santos’s carapace of lies is so elaborate and encompassing that it may suggest psychological issues we should hope he gets help in addressing. And there are serious legal questions about the source of $700,000 he reported lending to his campaign, with both local and federal prosecutors now said to be investigating.
But his idea of building a political career in the Republican Party on sharp-edged rhetoric and audacious lies was hardly original. Santos just took that routine further than his soon-to-be colleagues have done. We’ve had lots of metaphorical empty suits in Congress over the years. Now comes the emptiest yet.
By Eugene Robinson, The Washington Post
Sooner or later, the Republican Party’s devolution was bound to saddle GOP leaders with someone exactly like Rep.-elect George Santos of New York: a glib, successful candidate for high office who turns out to be pure fantasy with zero substance.
Santos, 34, who helped give Republicans their slim House majority by winning an open Long Island seat previously held by a Democrat, has admitted to “embellishing” his résumé and using a “poor choice of words” in touting his credentials. Those are understatements akin to calling the Amazon a creek or the Grand Canyon a ditch.
After initial reporting by the New York Times, journalists have discovered that, basically, Santos’s whole life story — as he sold it to voters — is a lie. He did not attend the exclusive Horace Mann Prep school in the Bronx, according to school officials. He did not graduate from Baruch College, as he had claimed. He did not climb the ladder of Wall Street success via Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, as he boasted. He is not “a proud American Jew,” as he wrote in a campaign document seeking support from pro-Israel groups, but instead considers himself “Jew-ish, as in ‘ish.’” Which apparently means not being Jewish at all.
Those are just a few of the acknowledged or apparent lies Santos told. He presented himself as the made-for-television incarnation of the vitality and diversity the Republican Party would like to project: a handsome gay Latino man, wealthy and self-made, whose very existence refuted the charge that today’s GOP shamelessly panders to racism and bigotry.
With that existence now revealed to be an illusion — with the “George Santos” voters elected shown to be a fictional character — most leading figures in the GOP have been silent. One exception is Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), who defended him with tweets acknowledging that Santos lied but accusing “the left” of lying, too, although most of the examples she cited were not lies at all. “The left said George Floyd didn’t die of a drug overdose, they lied,” she wrote. Fact check: Floyd was murdered, and a jury convicted former police officer Derek Chauvin of the crime.
Some Democrats have called for Santos not to be seated in the new Congress; others have called for an immediate House Ethics Committee investigation. GOP leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), hoping for Santos’s vote to help him be elected House speaker, has offered no comment as to what steps, if any, the incoming Republican majority might take.
The most honest thing House Republicans could do, in my view, is welcome Santos with open arms. The party embarked on the path of make-believe politics long before Santos came onto the scene. All he did was expand the frontier.
For me, the key moment came when Republicans decided not to write a platform for the 2020 presidential election — when, in effect, they refused to tell voters what they would do if elected. They pledged only to enact whatever policies President Donald Trump might propose, ceding their political philosophy to a man who, by Post count, told more than 30,000 lies during his four years in the White House.
The party can’t blame it all on Trump, though. In today’s GOP, a leading figure such as Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) — a cum laude graduate of Princeton University and a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School who clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist — routinely rails against smarty-pants “elites” who supposedly look down on regular folks like him.
Greene and others have shown that the way to prominence in the party is not through legislative or administrative accomplishments but via attention-grabbing displays of performative outrage. If you can “own the libs” on Fox News and on Twitter, you can raise a lot of campaign cash; and if you can raise tons of money, you can have tons of power. What does it matter if what you say has no grounding in fact? By the time you get called on it, you’re off to the next over-the-top statement.
Santos’s carapace of lies is so elaborate and encompassing that it may suggest psychological issues we should hope he gets help in addressing. And there are serious legal questions about the source of $700,000 he reported lending to his campaign, with both local and federal prosecutors now said to be investigating.
But his idea of building a political career in the Republican Party on sharp-edged rhetoric and audacious lies was hardly original. Santos just took that routine further than his soon-to-be colleagues have done. We’ve had lots of metaphorical empty suits in Congress over the years. Now comes the emptiest yet.
THE JAN. 6 REPORT’S MOST IMPORTANT FINDING: TRUMP ENABLED EXTREMIST GROUPS
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
It will take weeks to absorb the massive, 845-page report from the House Jan. 6 select committee. No doubt, certain sections will receive more attention than others, such as Chapter 1, about Donald Trump’s role in constructing election lies, and Chapter 7, about the near-total absence of White House records during the four-hour siege of the U.S. Capitol. (Was any evidence destroyed?)
But from a historical, legal and national security perspective, the most alarming information comes in Chapters 6 and 8 and Appendix 1. Those sections cover the right-wing extremists who jointly planned and executed the violent uprising — and the degree to which Trump enabled their attack.
First and foremost, the report busts a myth promoted by right-wing apologists that because some insurrectionists began the assault on the Capitol before Trump concluded his “Stop the Steal” speech, he was not the inspiration for the attack. Wrong.
Chapter 6 details the degree to which members of extremist groups (e.g., Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, Three Percenters) seized upon Trump’s “big lie” of a stolen election. They heard his call to come to D.C. and believed he wanted them to do what was needed to keep him in power. The Proud Boys planned to move ahead of the crowd, which later — at Trump’s instruction — followed them down Pennsylvania Avenue.
In Chapter 8, the report details the early removal of barricades at the Peace Circle by the Proud Boys and their associates. That cleared the way for thousands of protesters to move down Pennsylvania Avenue directly to the Capitol. That provides evidence of the meticulous preparation that went into the assault.
The report also underscores how Trump’s own conduct prevented law enforcement from predicting the size and ferocity of the crowd. Appendix 1 shows that there had been coordination and discussion among agencies, but it was far from sufficient. The report concludes:
While the danger to the Capitol posed by an armed and angry crowd was foreseeable, the fact that the President of the United States would be the catalyst of their fury and facilitate the attack was unprecedented in American history. If we lacked the imagination to suppose that a President would incite an attack on his own Government, urging his supporters to “fight like hell,” we lack that insight no more.
In other words, law enforcement officials were likely unprepared for the assault because they never imagined the president of the United States would inflame so many people as a few hundred extremists barreled toward the Capitol. The police might have been able to hold off those few hundred deranged election deniers, but the size of the larger crowd made that impossible.
Another critical detail that demonstrates Trump’s relationship with the extremist groups: When “Stop the Steal” rallies were held in D.C. before Jan. 6, Trump drove or flew by to lend moral support. The report explains:
President Trump made sure to let the protestors in Washington know that he personally approved of their mission. During the November rally, President Trump waved to the crowd from his presidential motorcade. Then, on the morning of December 12th, President Trump tweeted: “Wow! Thousands of people forming in Washington (D.C.) for Stop the Steal. Didn’t know about this, but I’ll be seeing them! #MAGA.” Later that day, President Trump flew over the protestors in Marine One.
The crowd was emboldened by his presence, and he was energized by their reaction. He saw himself as leader of the ragtag band and wanted desperately to repeat this experience on Jan. 6.
Moreover, several people in Trump’s inner circle were intimately involved with the insurrectionists. This includes former White House advisers Stephen K. Bannon and Michael Flynn and Trump’s longtime confidant Roger Stone. These individuals met with members of extremist groups, encouraged them to act and amplified their message. Bannon, of course, had a direct line to the president. (The committee reports that the two communicated on Jan. 5.) Trump was also in regular contact with Stone. The report does not connect Trump to the armed insurrectionists directly, but it gets alarmingly close.
In fact, Trump wanted a few of the most extreme figures tied to the extremist groups to speak from the podium on Jan. 6. The committee explains in Chapter 6:
President Trump wanted to include the “Stop the Steal” leaders in the January 6th event. As [Trump campaign spokesperson Katrina Pierson] put it in a text message to [Jan. 6 rally organizer Kylie Kremer]: “POTUS . . . likes the crazies.” Pierson said that she believed this was the case because President Trump “loved people who viciously defended him in public.” But their “vicious” defenses of the President clearly troubled Pierson.
Pierson tried to trim the speaker lineup — which still included the “Stop the Steal” trio of Stone, [conspiracy theorist Alex Jones], and [Stop the Steal group organizer Ali Alexander]. ... During their January 4th meeting, Pierson tried to convince President Trump to minimize the role of these potentially explosive figures at the Ellipse. She offered to place them at a planned event the night before in Freedom Plaza or on other stages in DC on January 6th. ...
President Trump was still unwilling to remove them from the lineup entirely. The President instructed Pierson to give Stone a speaking slot on January 5th and asked for more information about Ali Alexander. After discussing the matter with [former White House communications official Dan Scavino], President Trump also requested that Alexander be given a speaking slot. ...
In the end, the “Stop the Steal” leaders — Stone, Jones and Alexander — did not appear on the stage at the Ellipse on January 6th, although they did speak at other planned events, consistent with the President’s request.
These facts are particularly troubling given the revelation from testimony before the committee that Trump demanded that armed people be able to pass through the magnetometers at his rally. He also failed to send forces to put down the insurrection once rioters reached the Capitol.
Plus, exchanges between former White House adviser Hope Hicks and other Trump aides reflect that they appealed to Trump before Jan. 6 to ask his supporters to behave peacefully. As Hicks texted one campaign aide on Jan. 6, “I suggested it several times Monday and Tuesday and he refused.”
The House committee lacked the ability to immunize witnesses to obtain cooperation. But special counsel Jack Smith, whom Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed to oversee investigations into Trump, does have that power. He will therefore be able to probe further to answer questions. For example: What communication took place between the White House and the Trump team’s “command center” at the Willard Hotel? How much did Trump know about the violent groups he was inciting?
The role of violent extremist groups cannot be minimized. In the next Congress, Republicans will likely ignore or play down their existence. Some will attempt to paint law enforcement action against such groups as oppressive and tyrannical. Nevertheless, Democrats and other sober-minded Americans must insist that law enforcement remain vigilant against them.
The overarching takeaway from the report is that the Jan. 6 assault was a highly organized operation by groups that joined together to keep Trump in power with violence. Trump knew they were armed, had close associates directly engaged with them, let them run rampant for hours and even egged them on during that time by demonizing his vice president.
If that does not amount to giving “aid or comfort” to those engaging in an insurrection against the United States, I don’t know what does.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
It will take weeks to absorb the massive, 845-page report from the House Jan. 6 select committee. No doubt, certain sections will receive more attention than others, such as Chapter 1, about Donald Trump’s role in constructing election lies, and Chapter 7, about the near-total absence of White House records during the four-hour siege of the U.S. Capitol. (Was any evidence destroyed?)
But from a historical, legal and national security perspective, the most alarming information comes in Chapters 6 and 8 and Appendix 1. Those sections cover the right-wing extremists who jointly planned and executed the violent uprising — and the degree to which Trump enabled their attack.
First and foremost, the report busts a myth promoted by right-wing apologists that because some insurrectionists began the assault on the Capitol before Trump concluded his “Stop the Steal” speech, he was not the inspiration for the attack. Wrong.
Chapter 6 details the degree to which members of extremist groups (e.g., Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, Three Percenters) seized upon Trump’s “big lie” of a stolen election. They heard his call to come to D.C. and believed he wanted them to do what was needed to keep him in power. The Proud Boys planned to move ahead of the crowd, which later — at Trump’s instruction — followed them down Pennsylvania Avenue.
In Chapter 8, the report details the early removal of barricades at the Peace Circle by the Proud Boys and their associates. That cleared the way for thousands of protesters to move down Pennsylvania Avenue directly to the Capitol. That provides evidence of the meticulous preparation that went into the assault.
The report also underscores how Trump’s own conduct prevented law enforcement from predicting the size and ferocity of the crowd. Appendix 1 shows that there had been coordination and discussion among agencies, but it was far from sufficient. The report concludes:
While the danger to the Capitol posed by an armed and angry crowd was foreseeable, the fact that the President of the United States would be the catalyst of their fury and facilitate the attack was unprecedented in American history. If we lacked the imagination to suppose that a President would incite an attack on his own Government, urging his supporters to “fight like hell,” we lack that insight no more.
In other words, law enforcement officials were likely unprepared for the assault because they never imagined the president of the United States would inflame so many people as a few hundred extremists barreled toward the Capitol. The police might have been able to hold off those few hundred deranged election deniers, but the size of the larger crowd made that impossible.
Another critical detail that demonstrates Trump’s relationship with the extremist groups: When “Stop the Steal” rallies were held in D.C. before Jan. 6, Trump drove or flew by to lend moral support. The report explains:
President Trump made sure to let the protestors in Washington know that he personally approved of their mission. During the November rally, President Trump waved to the crowd from his presidential motorcade. Then, on the morning of December 12th, President Trump tweeted: “Wow! Thousands of people forming in Washington (D.C.) for Stop the Steal. Didn’t know about this, but I’ll be seeing them! #MAGA.” Later that day, President Trump flew over the protestors in Marine One.
The crowd was emboldened by his presence, and he was energized by their reaction. He saw himself as leader of the ragtag band and wanted desperately to repeat this experience on Jan. 6.
Moreover, several people in Trump’s inner circle were intimately involved with the insurrectionists. This includes former White House advisers Stephen K. Bannon and Michael Flynn and Trump’s longtime confidant Roger Stone. These individuals met with members of extremist groups, encouraged them to act and amplified their message. Bannon, of course, had a direct line to the president. (The committee reports that the two communicated on Jan. 5.) Trump was also in regular contact with Stone. The report does not connect Trump to the armed insurrectionists directly, but it gets alarmingly close.
In fact, Trump wanted a few of the most extreme figures tied to the extremist groups to speak from the podium on Jan. 6. The committee explains in Chapter 6:
President Trump wanted to include the “Stop the Steal” leaders in the January 6th event. As [Trump campaign spokesperson Katrina Pierson] put it in a text message to [Jan. 6 rally organizer Kylie Kremer]: “POTUS . . . likes the crazies.” Pierson said that she believed this was the case because President Trump “loved people who viciously defended him in public.” But their “vicious” defenses of the President clearly troubled Pierson.
Pierson tried to trim the speaker lineup — which still included the “Stop the Steal” trio of Stone, [conspiracy theorist Alex Jones], and [Stop the Steal group organizer Ali Alexander]. ... During their January 4th meeting, Pierson tried to convince President Trump to minimize the role of these potentially explosive figures at the Ellipse. She offered to place them at a planned event the night before in Freedom Plaza or on other stages in DC on January 6th. ...
President Trump was still unwilling to remove them from the lineup entirely. The President instructed Pierson to give Stone a speaking slot on January 5th and asked for more information about Ali Alexander. After discussing the matter with [former White House communications official Dan Scavino], President Trump also requested that Alexander be given a speaking slot. ...
In the end, the “Stop the Steal” leaders — Stone, Jones and Alexander — did not appear on the stage at the Ellipse on January 6th, although they did speak at other planned events, consistent with the President’s request.
These facts are particularly troubling given the revelation from testimony before the committee that Trump demanded that armed people be able to pass through the magnetometers at his rally. He also failed to send forces to put down the insurrection once rioters reached the Capitol.
Plus, exchanges between former White House adviser Hope Hicks and other Trump aides reflect that they appealed to Trump before Jan. 6 to ask his supporters to behave peacefully. As Hicks texted one campaign aide on Jan. 6, “I suggested it several times Monday and Tuesday and he refused.”
The House committee lacked the ability to immunize witnesses to obtain cooperation. But special counsel Jack Smith, whom Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed to oversee investigations into Trump, does have that power. He will therefore be able to probe further to answer questions. For example: What communication took place between the White House and the Trump team’s “command center” at the Willard Hotel? How much did Trump know about the violent groups he was inciting?
The role of violent extremist groups cannot be minimized. In the next Congress, Republicans will likely ignore or play down their existence. Some will attempt to paint law enforcement action against such groups as oppressive and tyrannical. Nevertheless, Democrats and other sober-minded Americans must insist that law enforcement remain vigilant against them.
The overarching takeaway from the report is that the Jan. 6 assault was a highly organized operation by groups that joined together to keep Trump in power with violence. Trump knew they were armed, had close associates directly engaged with them, let them run rampant for hours and even egged them on during that time by demonizing his vice president.
If that does not amount to giving “aid or comfort” to those engaging in an insurrection against the United States, I don’t know what does.
TRUMP’S TAXES: RED FLAGS, BIG LOSSES AND A WINDFALL FROM HIS FATHER
The presidency of Donald J. Trump, a congressional report reveals, was marked by some of the same questionable tax maneuvers that had characterized his business career. Donald J. Trump received a cash infusion during his presidency from the sale of Starrett City, a Brooklyn housing complex his father had invested in during the 1970s.Credit...Dave Sanders for The New York Times
By Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig and Mike McIntire, The New York Times
At first glance, the income-tax data released this week by a House committee seems to show a turnaround in 2018 for former President Donald J. Trump. After a decade in which he declared no taxable income, his 2018 return reported taxable income of more than $24 million. He paid nearly a million dollars in federal income taxes.
In fact, his year in the black appears to have resulted largely from the final windfall of the vast inheritance that financed much of his business career — more than $14 million in gains from the sale of his father’s 1970s investment in the Brooklyn housing development of Starrett City.
But precedent soon reasserted itself. Because of business losses, he paid no income taxes in 2020, his last year in the White House.
That year, after obtaining more than two decades of Mr. Trump’s tax returns, The New York Times traced the boom-and-bust arcs that had marked his financial history: dubious tax avoidance, huge losses and a life buttressed by an inherited fortune. The newly released tax information, from 2015 to 2020, shows how that pattern extended through his years in Washington.
The new material, obtained by the House Ways and Means Committee after a yearslong legal battle, raised a multitude of questions about the methods Mr. Trump had employed while president to lower his income taxes, and about failures by the Internal Revenue Service to fully investigate those deductions.
The congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, a bipartisan panel that is known for reviewing the impact of tax legislation and has a staff with deep tax law expertise, reviewed the Trump returns and found dozens of red flags that it believed required further investigation.
One involved transactions with his children. According to the tax data, Mr. Trump annually received tens of thousands of dollars in interest income from three of his grown children — Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric — money that stemmed from what his returns described as personal loans to them. The committee questioned whether the loans actually “were disguised gifts” to evade gift taxes and allow the children to write off interest payments to their father.
The congressional report said the I.R.S. explored whether Mr. Trump correctly deducted the $21 million he had paid to settle a series of fraud claims against the now-defunct Trump University. It was not clear, the report said, whether Mr. Trump had received any insurance proceeds that offset some portion of the settlement. The outcome of that review was not known.
The committee also questioned whether Mr. Trump had charged expenses from his personal life and hobbies as business expenses, mentioning travel on his aircraft in particular. The Times’s 2020 investigation found that he had frequently written off questionable expenses, including more than $70,000 paid to style his hair during his years on “The Apprentice.”
One point of potential trouble for Mr. Trump emerged from the report. The I.R.S. is considering disallowing the $21 million write-off Mr. Trump claimed in 2015 for agreeing not to develop much of the land on a sprawling estate in Westchester County, N.Y., known as Seven Springs. After not examining the transaction for a period of time, the agency is exploring whether the value Mr. Trump claimed was based on a qualified appraisal.
The committee requested that the I.R.S. also verify charitable contributions Mr. Trump reported making with cash, checks or credit cards.
Besides Mr. Trump’s returns, the Ways and Means committee obtained roughly 1,100 electronic files containing working papers, memos and other internal documents showing how the I.R.S. had handled them. The records, according to the report, depict an agency that seemed reluctant to aggressively examine a wealthy taxpayer who was difficult to deal with and had complex returns.
After The Times published its investigation revealing years of Mr. Trump’s tax data, I.R.S. officials met to decide how to respond to the numerous revelations, including questionable deductions, tax credits and cancellation of debt. Yet the agency set a high bar for what to examine.
For instance, The Times reported that Mr. Trump had a pattern of writing off payments to unidentified consultants, totaling $26 million over nine years across all of his projects, and that at least some of that money went to his daughter Ivanka, even though she was earning a salary as an executive at his company. It raised the question of whether the payments reflected actual consulting work or were simply a way to claim an unwarranted tax deduction.
The I.R.S. seemed to find the payments worthy of scrutiny, but worried that, because they were spread out over many years and were made by numerous corporate entities, “the resources needed to examine would far outweigh any potential benefits,” the report said. In a bit of circular reasoning, the agency ultimately determined that the fees were too “difficult to examine unless they were found to be fraudulent payments.”
Similarly, agency officials initially flagged a detail in The Times’s reporting about how Mr. Trump had used $9.7 million in business investment credits, in part related to the renovation of the Old Post Office hotel in Washington, to wipe out his tax obligations for 2016 and 2017. But to pursue it further, they concluded, “the credits would need to be material,” and the committee found that the I.R.S. was ultimately “not interested.” Mr. Trump is currently seeking a refund of nearly all of the $641,931 in income taxes he paid for 2015 using the same credit for historic rehabilitation, the report noted. He wants a refund for all but $750, the same total income tax he paid in both of the following two years.
The internal records indicated that, in determining which issues to pursue, I.R.S. officials discussed “the history of difficult negotiations between Mr. Trump’s counsel and I.R.S. personnel” and fretted that opening new examinations of past tax returns could damage the “good relationship” they had recently established with Mr. Trump’s representatives.
Steven M. Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, said the committee’s findings “just goes to show you how far behind the ball the I.R.S. is.”
“It’s unfortunate that they just don’t have the resources or the expertise to keep up with a sophisticated taxpayer like Trump,” he said, “let alone a sophisticated taxpayer like Trump who specializes in obstruction and delay.”
The presidency of Donald J. Trump, a congressional report reveals, was marked by some of the same questionable tax maneuvers that had characterized his business career. Donald J. Trump received a cash infusion during his presidency from the sale of Starrett City, a Brooklyn housing complex his father had invested in during the 1970s.Credit...Dave Sanders for The New York Times
By Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig and Mike McIntire, The New York Times
At first glance, the income-tax data released this week by a House committee seems to show a turnaround in 2018 for former President Donald J. Trump. After a decade in which he declared no taxable income, his 2018 return reported taxable income of more than $24 million. He paid nearly a million dollars in federal income taxes.
In fact, his year in the black appears to have resulted largely from the final windfall of the vast inheritance that financed much of his business career — more than $14 million in gains from the sale of his father’s 1970s investment in the Brooklyn housing development of Starrett City.
But precedent soon reasserted itself. Because of business losses, he paid no income taxes in 2020, his last year in the White House.
That year, after obtaining more than two decades of Mr. Trump’s tax returns, The New York Times traced the boom-and-bust arcs that had marked his financial history: dubious tax avoidance, huge losses and a life buttressed by an inherited fortune. The newly released tax information, from 2015 to 2020, shows how that pattern extended through his years in Washington.
The new material, obtained by the House Ways and Means Committee after a yearslong legal battle, raised a multitude of questions about the methods Mr. Trump had employed while president to lower his income taxes, and about failures by the Internal Revenue Service to fully investigate those deductions.
The congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, a bipartisan panel that is known for reviewing the impact of tax legislation and has a staff with deep tax law expertise, reviewed the Trump returns and found dozens of red flags that it believed required further investigation.
One involved transactions with his children. According to the tax data, Mr. Trump annually received tens of thousands of dollars in interest income from three of his grown children — Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric — money that stemmed from what his returns described as personal loans to them. The committee questioned whether the loans actually “were disguised gifts” to evade gift taxes and allow the children to write off interest payments to their father.
The congressional report said the I.R.S. explored whether Mr. Trump correctly deducted the $21 million he had paid to settle a series of fraud claims against the now-defunct Trump University. It was not clear, the report said, whether Mr. Trump had received any insurance proceeds that offset some portion of the settlement. The outcome of that review was not known.
The committee also questioned whether Mr. Trump had charged expenses from his personal life and hobbies as business expenses, mentioning travel on his aircraft in particular. The Times’s 2020 investigation found that he had frequently written off questionable expenses, including more than $70,000 paid to style his hair during his years on “The Apprentice.”
One point of potential trouble for Mr. Trump emerged from the report. The I.R.S. is considering disallowing the $21 million write-off Mr. Trump claimed in 2015 for agreeing not to develop much of the land on a sprawling estate in Westchester County, N.Y., known as Seven Springs. After not examining the transaction for a period of time, the agency is exploring whether the value Mr. Trump claimed was based on a qualified appraisal.
The committee requested that the I.R.S. also verify charitable contributions Mr. Trump reported making with cash, checks or credit cards.
Besides Mr. Trump’s returns, the Ways and Means committee obtained roughly 1,100 electronic files containing working papers, memos and other internal documents showing how the I.R.S. had handled them. The records, according to the report, depict an agency that seemed reluctant to aggressively examine a wealthy taxpayer who was difficult to deal with and had complex returns.
After The Times published its investigation revealing years of Mr. Trump’s tax data, I.R.S. officials met to decide how to respond to the numerous revelations, including questionable deductions, tax credits and cancellation of debt. Yet the agency set a high bar for what to examine.
For instance, The Times reported that Mr. Trump had a pattern of writing off payments to unidentified consultants, totaling $26 million over nine years across all of his projects, and that at least some of that money went to his daughter Ivanka, even though she was earning a salary as an executive at his company. It raised the question of whether the payments reflected actual consulting work or were simply a way to claim an unwarranted tax deduction.
The I.R.S. seemed to find the payments worthy of scrutiny, but worried that, because they were spread out over many years and were made by numerous corporate entities, “the resources needed to examine would far outweigh any potential benefits,” the report said. In a bit of circular reasoning, the agency ultimately determined that the fees were too “difficult to examine unless they were found to be fraudulent payments.”
Similarly, agency officials initially flagged a detail in The Times’s reporting about how Mr. Trump had used $9.7 million in business investment credits, in part related to the renovation of the Old Post Office hotel in Washington, to wipe out his tax obligations for 2016 and 2017. But to pursue it further, they concluded, “the credits would need to be material,” and the committee found that the I.R.S. was ultimately “not interested.” Mr. Trump is currently seeking a refund of nearly all of the $641,931 in income taxes he paid for 2015 using the same credit for historic rehabilitation, the report noted. He wants a refund for all but $750, the same total income tax he paid in both of the following two years.
The internal records indicated that, in determining which issues to pursue, I.R.S. officials discussed “the history of difficult negotiations between Mr. Trump’s counsel and I.R.S. personnel” and fretted that opening new examinations of past tax returns could damage the “good relationship” they had recently established with Mr. Trump’s representatives.
Steven M. Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, said the committee’s findings “just goes to show you how far behind the ball the I.R.S. is.”
“It’s unfortunate that they just don’t have the resources or the expertise to keep up with a sophisticated taxpayer like Trump,” he said, “let alone a sophisticated taxpayer like Trump who specializes in obstruction and delay.”
THE JAN. 6 COMMITTEE JUST MADE HISTORY. HERE’S WHAT THAT MEANS FOR PROSECUTORS.
By Norman Eisen, E. Danya Perry and Fred Wertheimer
Mr. Eisen and Ms. Perry are among the authors of “Trump on Trial,” a Brookings Institution report on the Jan. 6 committee. Mr. Wertheimer is president of Democracy 21, a nonpartisan nonprofit that works to strengthen American democracy.
In voting on Monday to issue a sweeping final report, the Jan. 6 committee has honored its duty and the Constitution. When the full report is released this week, there will be much to review and process for our country, our government and American history. But given the facts that have been revealed, these hearings had to end with criminal referrals against Donald Trump and his minions.
The House committee articulated a powerful legal case encompassing the many schemes of Mr. Trump, John Eastman and others, including the audacious promotion of false electoral slates. The committee also recommended prosecution of Mr. Trump on charges of inciting insurrection and giving aid or comfort to insurrectionists — a charge unseen since the Civil War. The referrals make clear to prosecutors and to Americans just how dangerous the attempted coup was, and how vulnerable our system was (and is) to such assaults.
The committee demonstrated its seriousness of purpose by refusing to put forth a laundry list of defendants. The committee members have all along thought as legislators and public educators, but also have put themselves in the minds of prosecutors. That led them to rightly focus on a short list of prospective defendants against whom the evidence is most damning, providing critical context to the prosecutors. Focusing on the very best cases avoids diluting the effect of the referrals with more tenuous theories against a large number of actors, and emphasizes the cases the prosecutors can actually win.
There is a logic to suggesting the consideration of charges against Mr. Eastman, who was the outside coup counsel, together with his client Mr. Trump and others such as Jeffrey Clark, who was instrumental in advocating the coup from within as a government lawyer. The committee wrote that Mr. Clark “stands out as a participant in the conspiracy.” A focus on the client and his counsel is not only powerfully symbolic — this was, after all, an attempted coup that was advanced by attorneys, not soldiers — it’s also driven by the evidence that the committee has accumulated. It indicates that a strong case can be advanced against Mr. Trump, Mr. Eastman and others for their scheme to fraudulently declare Mr. Trump president by pushing a staggering variety of falsehoods culminating in proposed fake electoral slates.
The evidence detailed in the committee’s hearings and the executive summary of the committee report reveal how Mr. Eastman and Mr. Clark worked to advance Mr. Trump’s goal of overturning the election. Mr. Trump loudly challenged the outcome, and Mr. Eastman amplified those false claims in litigation, testimony and advocacy. Mr. Clark urged those false claims within the halls of the Department of Justice, where he was the acting head of the civil division.
The committee exposed how, as other ploys failed, the scheme to send false electors to Congress intensified. One of the most striking moments of the nine committee hearings was the video testimony of Ronna Romney McDaniel, the Republican National Committee chairwoman, describing how Mr. Trump called her and then “turned the call over” to Mr. Eastman, who asked for her help in gathering the false electors in key states. No less startling was the testimony by Mr. Clark’s superiors at the Justice Department about his proposed letter to Georgia election officials to try to get them to open the door to the false electors effort. (Disclosure: Mr. Eisen was part of bar complaints against Mr. Eastman and Mr. Clark.)
It is not just the evidence the committee has derived that makes the referrals so strong, but also the law. The legal theories in the executive summary should be persuasive to prosecutors and the public for the discipline of what they include — and for what they omit. Two of the statutory bases for the referrals — conspiracy to defraud and obstruction of an official proceeding — were already the subject of the “more likely than not” criminal findings made by a federal district court litigating a committee subpoena. But the other two statutory bases for the criminal referrals are notable. The committee has gripped the nation by constantly offering surprises, and it has here served them up yet again.
Perhaps the biggest of those surprises is the inclusion of a referral for inciting and assisting an insurrection and giving aid or comfort to insurrectionists under 18 U.S.C. 2383. That law derives from one first enacted in 1862 during the Civil War to provide for criminal penalties against Confederates and their accomplices attempting a violent secession from the Union.
Although the statute is seldom used, the committee is correct in its assessment that it applies to Mr. Trump’s conduct by summoning and whipping up the insurrectionists on Jan. 6 and then by failing to take action for three hours. The committee offers numerous examples of relevant misconduct, from Mr. Trump’s infamous remarks on the Ellipse, knowing that some of his listeners were armed, to his tweet attacking his vice president, Mike Pence, while the insurrection was underway, to his affectionate comments that day about the rioters (even if asking them to respect law enforcement).
This referral parallels the expected obstruction of Congress recommendation, providing a belt-and-suspenders approach to securing justice for the events of Jan. 6. Moreover, the Section 2383 referral sets up possible disqualification of Mr. Trump as a presidential candidate. That is because the statute tracks Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which prohibits someone who has “given aid or comfort to the enemies” of the United States from serving in an elected, judicial or military office. Thus, the committee’s evidence and analysis will be useful to those asking election officials and courts to consider whether Mr. Trump must be excluded from primary ballots.
And who knows, it just may persuade prosecutors, too. After all, seditious conspiracy charges were also rare until this month’s landmark convictions of Stewart Rhodes and Kelly Meggs for conspiring to promote violent insurrection on Jan. 6.
In the 14th Amendment context, citizens could use the committee report to go to their state election officials to argue that Mr. Trump is prohibited from holding office and so from appearing on the ballot. There need not be a criminal conviction or even criminal charges; these citizens can point out that the constitutional prohibition has been prompted by the committee’s evidence. However those decisions by election officials turn out, the next stop will be the courts, which have already held that Section 3 violators can indeed be barred.
The committee also advances a false statements theory under 18 U.S.C. 1001. Here it makes the case that the fake electoral slates pressed on Congress and the National Archives by Mr. Trump and his associates are actionable as false statements.
There’s a simplicity to the false statements that complements the more sweeping nature of the broad 18 U.S.C. 371 conspiracy to defraud the United States that the committee also articulates. You can’t press phony electoral slates on Congress any more than you can spend counterfeit cash in the House cafeteria. It is not complicated, and it is a valuable addition to the public discourse and to prosecutors’ thinking.
There’s much more that could be said about everything else in the executive summary the committee just approved. The focus on Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman should not be read to exclude others who are named as apparent co-conspirators from further investigation by the Department of Justice. Prominent among them, in addition to Mr. Clark, are Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows and the outside attorney Kenneth Chesebro. However, in a further showing of the committee’s restraint, the executive summary notes that it “does not attempt to determine all of the participants” in the offenses referred — but that federal and state prosecutors have the additional investigative tools to make those determinations. They should do so expeditiously.
But for now the referrals are the main event. By focusing on a short list of potential defendants and charges, and substantiating them, the committee has provided the public, the press and above all federal prosecutors with a powerful aid. A well-reasoned outside opinion is rare and valuable as prosecutors make these highly consequential decisions.
Still, these are largely unprecedented cases. They will not be easy to bring or to win. Ultimately, that is why the committee’s referrals are so meaningful. Prosecutors need all the help they can get, and the Jan. 6 committee just gave it to them.
By Norman Eisen, E. Danya Perry and Fred Wertheimer
Mr. Eisen and Ms. Perry are among the authors of “Trump on Trial,” a Brookings Institution report on the Jan. 6 committee. Mr. Wertheimer is president of Democracy 21, a nonpartisan nonprofit that works to strengthen American democracy.
In voting on Monday to issue a sweeping final report, the Jan. 6 committee has honored its duty and the Constitution. When the full report is released this week, there will be much to review and process for our country, our government and American history. But given the facts that have been revealed, these hearings had to end with criminal referrals against Donald Trump and his minions.
The House committee articulated a powerful legal case encompassing the many schemes of Mr. Trump, John Eastman and others, including the audacious promotion of false electoral slates. The committee also recommended prosecution of Mr. Trump on charges of inciting insurrection and giving aid or comfort to insurrectionists — a charge unseen since the Civil War. The referrals make clear to prosecutors and to Americans just how dangerous the attempted coup was, and how vulnerable our system was (and is) to such assaults.
The committee demonstrated its seriousness of purpose by refusing to put forth a laundry list of defendants. The committee members have all along thought as legislators and public educators, but also have put themselves in the minds of prosecutors. That led them to rightly focus on a short list of prospective defendants against whom the evidence is most damning, providing critical context to the prosecutors. Focusing on the very best cases avoids diluting the effect of the referrals with more tenuous theories against a large number of actors, and emphasizes the cases the prosecutors can actually win.
There is a logic to suggesting the consideration of charges against Mr. Eastman, who was the outside coup counsel, together with his client Mr. Trump and others such as Jeffrey Clark, who was instrumental in advocating the coup from within as a government lawyer. The committee wrote that Mr. Clark “stands out as a participant in the conspiracy.” A focus on the client and his counsel is not only powerfully symbolic — this was, after all, an attempted coup that was advanced by attorneys, not soldiers — it’s also driven by the evidence that the committee has accumulated. It indicates that a strong case can be advanced against Mr. Trump, Mr. Eastman and others for their scheme to fraudulently declare Mr. Trump president by pushing a staggering variety of falsehoods culminating in proposed fake electoral slates.
The evidence detailed in the committee’s hearings and the executive summary of the committee report reveal how Mr. Eastman and Mr. Clark worked to advance Mr. Trump’s goal of overturning the election. Mr. Trump loudly challenged the outcome, and Mr. Eastman amplified those false claims in litigation, testimony and advocacy. Mr. Clark urged those false claims within the halls of the Department of Justice, where he was the acting head of the civil division.
The committee exposed how, as other ploys failed, the scheme to send false electors to Congress intensified. One of the most striking moments of the nine committee hearings was the video testimony of Ronna Romney McDaniel, the Republican National Committee chairwoman, describing how Mr. Trump called her and then “turned the call over” to Mr. Eastman, who asked for her help in gathering the false electors in key states. No less startling was the testimony by Mr. Clark’s superiors at the Justice Department about his proposed letter to Georgia election officials to try to get them to open the door to the false electors effort. (Disclosure: Mr. Eisen was part of bar complaints against Mr. Eastman and Mr. Clark.)
It is not just the evidence the committee has derived that makes the referrals so strong, but also the law. The legal theories in the executive summary should be persuasive to prosecutors and the public for the discipline of what they include — and for what they omit. Two of the statutory bases for the referrals — conspiracy to defraud and obstruction of an official proceeding — were already the subject of the “more likely than not” criminal findings made by a federal district court litigating a committee subpoena. But the other two statutory bases for the criminal referrals are notable. The committee has gripped the nation by constantly offering surprises, and it has here served them up yet again.
Perhaps the biggest of those surprises is the inclusion of a referral for inciting and assisting an insurrection and giving aid or comfort to insurrectionists under 18 U.S.C. 2383. That law derives from one first enacted in 1862 during the Civil War to provide for criminal penalties against Confederates and their accomplices attempting a violent secession from the Union.
Although the statute is seldom used, the committee is correct in its assessment that it applies to Mr. Trump’s conduct by summoning and whipping up the insurrectionists on Jan. 6 and then by failing to take action for three hours. The committee offers numerous examples of relevant misconduct, from Mr. Trump’s infamous remarks on the Ellipse, knowing that some of his listeners were armed, to his tweet attacking his vice president, Mike Pence, while the insurrection was underway, to his affectionate comments that day about the rioters (even if asking them to respect law enforcement).
This referral parallels the expected obstruction of Congress recommendation, providing a belt-and-suspenders approach to securing justice for the events of Jan. 6. Moreover, the Section 2383 referral sets up possible disqualification of Mr. Trump as a presidential candidate. That is because the statute tracks Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which prohibits someone who has “given aid or comfort to the enemies” of the United States from serving in an elected, judicial or military office. Thus, the committee’s evidence and analysis will be useful to those asking election officials and courts to consider whether Mr. Trump must be excluded from primary ballots.
And who knows, it just may persuade prosecutors, too. After all, seditious conspiracy charges were also rare until this month’s landmark convictions of Stewart Rhodes and Kelly Meggs for conspiring to promote violent insurrection on Jan. 6.
In the 14th Amendment context, citizens could use the committee report to go to their state election officials to argue that Mr. Trump is prohibited from holding office and so from appearing on the ballot. There need not be a criminal conviction or even criminal charges; these citizens can point out that the constitutional prohibition has been prompted by the committee’s evidence. However those decisions by election officials turn out, the next stop will be the courts, which have already held that Section 3 violators can indeed be barred.
The committee also advances a false statements theory under 18 U.S.C. 1001. Here it makes the case that the fake electoral slates pressed on Congress and the National Archives by Mr. Trump and his associates are actionable as false statements.
There’s a simplicity to the false statements that complements the more sweeping nature of the broad 18 U.S.C. 371 conspiracy to defraud the United States that the committee also articulates. You can’t press phony electoral slates on Congress any more than you can spend counterfeit cash in the House cafeteria. It is not complicated, and it is a valuable addition to the public discourse and to prosecutors’ thinking.
There’s much more that could be said about everything else in the executive summary the committee just approved. The focus on Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman should not be read to exclude others who are named as apparent co-conspirators from further investigation by the Department of Justice. Prominent among them, in addition to Mr. Clark, are Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows and the outside attorney Kenneth Chesebro. However, in a further showing of the committee’s restraint, the executive summary notes that it “does not attempt to determine all of the participants” in the offenses referred — but that federal and state prosecutors have the additional investigative tools to make those determinations. They should do so expeditiously.
But for now the referrals are the main event. By focusing on a short list of potential defendants and charges, and substantiating them, the committee has provided the public, the press and above all federal prosecutors with a powerful aid. A well-reasoned outside opinion is rare and valuable as prosecutors make these highly consequential decisions.
Still, these are largely unprecedented cases. They will not be easy to bring or to win. Ultimately, that is why the committee’s referrals are so meaningful. Prosecutors need all the help they can get, and the Jan. 6 committee just gave it to them.
THE JAN. 6 COMMITTEE LOWERED THE BOOM ON TRUMP. NOW THE BALL IS IN DOJ’S COURT.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Donald Trump cannot pass off the House Jan. 6 select committee’s final report as mere partisan opinion. His criminal liability is based on a mound of evidence, as the committee meticulously detailed.
Moreover, the committee’s “roadmap to justice” is not just a restatement of facts already made public by the committee. It is the foundation that the Justice Department could use to prosecute the former president and his underlings to the fullest extent of the law.
The report’s executive summary, which the committee released on Monday, includes four criminal referrals for Trump: insurrection, obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States and conspiracy to make a false statement. Trump lawyer John Eastman is also slated to be referred for obstruction of a congressional proceeding and conspiracy to defraud the United States. The committee leaves open the possibility that others might be referred for participation in such crimes, leaving it to the Justice Department to investigate.
At its core, the report lays out the evidence for critical facts:
Never in the history of the republic has Congress taken such a momentous step of issuing a criminal referral of a former president. Then again, never in our history has a president attempted to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.
While a referral has no legal significance, the roadmap puts great pressure on the Justice Department. If special counsel Jack Smith decides not to indict Trump, he will have to explain why his judgment differs from that of a congressional committee that painstakingly examined the evidence and presented it to the American people.
Let’s take a look at each of the potential charges against Trump:
Insurrection
In some sense, this referral should come as no surprise. The entire country saw Trump unleash the mob to stop Congress from counting the electoral votes. A majority of the House impeached Trump specifically for incitement of insurrection. And 57 senators voted to convict him on that charge.
The statute concerning such a criminal charge is fairly straightforward. Section 2383 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code states: “Whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.” The committee argues that Trump “gave aid and comfort" to the Jan. 6 insurrectionists with his actions that day.
As several legal commentators have noted, prosecutors in an insurrection case would not need to prove that Trump agreed to overthrow the government, as would be required for a seditious conspiracy charge. They would only need prove he assisted in opposing the authority of the government.
Moreover, conviction under Section 2383 would bar Trump from holding federal office. In essence, a successful prosecution on these lines would accomplish what Republican senators refused to do in the impeachment trial: prevent Trump from ever regaining the presidency.
Yes, proving that Trump “gave aid or comfort” (as opposed to mere cheerleading) would be difficult. Prosecutors would likely have to overcome a First Amendment defense. But the committee’s job was not to make a final prosecutorial judgment about whether a conviction is possible; it was to confirm that the country collectively witnessed an unprecedented crime. In setting forth a voluminous record and encouraging criminal charges, it puts the onus on Smith to decide whether the totality of evidence would not be enough to persuade a jury to convict Trump of insurrection.
Obstructing a congressional proceeding and conspiracy to defraud the United States
These potential charges are nothing new. Legal scholars as well as federal District Judge David O. Carter (in adjudicating Eastman’s attempts to avoid complying with congressional subpoenas based on client-attorney privilege) have found it more likely than not that Trump committed such crimes. (The committee’s summary devotes substantial space to reviewing Carter’s analysis.)
In fact, multiple Jan. 6 insurrectionists have either pleaded guilty to or been convicted of obstructing a congressional proceeding under Section 1512(c) of Title 18. The executive summary released by the committee explains:
Sufficient evidence exists of one or more potential violations of 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c) for a criminal referral of President Trump based solely on his plan to get Vice President Pence to prevent certification of the election at the Joint Session of Congress. Those facts standing alone are sufficient. But such a charge under that statute can also be based on the plan to create and transmit to the Executive and Legislative branches fraudulent electoral slates, which were ultimately intended to facilitate an unlawful action by Vice President Pence – to refuse to count legitimate, certified electoral votes during Congress’s official January 6th proceeding.
Additionally, evidence developed about the many other elements of President Trump’s plans to overturn the election, including soliciting State legislatures, State officials, and others to alter official electoral outcomes, provides further evidence that President Trump was attempting through multiple means to corruptly obstruct, impede or influence the counting of electoral votes on January 6th. This is also true of President Trump’s personal directive to the Department of Justice to “just say that the election was was [sic] corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R[epublican] Congressmen.”
Trump’s plot to create alternative electors warrants a conspiracy to defraud charge for similar reasons. This is based on Section 371 of Title 18, which the Supreme Court has ruled makes it a crime to obstruct lawful governmental functions through "deceit, craft or trickery, [or] by means that are dishonest.”
As the committee’s executive summary points out, “The evidence of this element overlaps greatly with the evidence of the Section 1512(c)(2) violations. ... President Trump engaged in a multi-part plan described in this Report to obstruct a lawful certification of the election.”
Conspiracy to make a false statement
This is based on Section 1001 of Title 18, which applies to anyone who “makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation” to Congress or who “makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry.”
Trump’s attempt to compile phony alternate electors to submit to Congress could subject him to prosecution for this crime. The committee finds:
The Committee believes that sufficient evidence exists for a criminal referral of President Trump for illegally engaging in a conspiracy to violate Section 1001; the evidence indicates that he entered into an agreement with Eastman and others to make the false statement (the fake electoral certificates), by deceitful or dishonest means, and at least one member of the conspiracy engaged in at least one overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy (e.g. President Trump and Eastman’s call to Ronna McDaniel).
Other potential avenues for accountability
The Justice Department is by no means limited to these pathways of prosecution. The committee holds out the possibility that the department might pursue other charges such as seditious conspiracy if it uncovers evidence that Trump conspired with the violent armed groups that stormed the Capitol.
The Justice Department might also prosecute him under another statute (Section 372) for conspiring “to prevent, by force, intimidation, or threat, any person from accepting or holding any office, trust, or place of confidence under the United States, or from discharging any duties thereof." As the committee noted, there were “potential efforts to obstruct its investigation, including by certain counsel (some paid by groups connected to the former President) who may have advised clients to provide false or misleading testimony to the Committee.”
The committee also included this stunning revelation: “The Select Committee is aware of multiple efforts by President Trump to contact Select Committee witnesses. The Department of Justice is aware of at least one of those circumstances.”
By leaving certain matters and certain potential defendants to the discretion of the Justice Department, the committee establishes its own credibility and underscores its own limits in accumulating evidence.
Beyond prosecution, the report cites members of Congress who failed to comply with subpoenas issued to them, which the committee will refer to the House Ethics Committee for further action. This includes House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Scott Perry (R-Pa.).
Many Americans have rightly wondered whether Trump would ever be held accountable for his misdeeds. Today marks a critical, unprecedented and justifiable step toward making that happen. The ball is now in Jack Smith’s court to uphold the rule of law.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Donald Trump cannot pass off the House Jan. 6 select committee’s final report as mere partisan opinion. His criminal liability is based on a mound of evidence, as the committee meticulously detailed.
Moreover, the committee’s “roadmap to justice” is not just a restatement of facts already made public by the committee. It is the foundation that the Justice Department could use to prosecute the former president and his underlings to the fullest extent of the law.
The report’s executive summary, which the committee released on Monday, includes four criminal referrals for Trump: insurrection, obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States and conspiracy to make a false statement. Trump lawyer John Eastman is also slated to be referred for obstruction of a congressional proceeding and conspiracy to defraud the United States. The committee leaves open the possibility that others might be referred for participation in such crimes, leaving it to the Justice Department to investigate.
At its core, the report lays out the evidence for critical facts:
- Trump attempted to stay in power despite the vote of the American people.
- He tried to concoct phony slates of electors to change the electoral vote.
- He tried to pressure former vice president Mike Pence to disregard the electoral count.
- When that did not work, he summoned the mob to the capital on Jan. 6, 2021, urged rally attendees (some of whom were armed) to march to the Capitol and did nothing for 187 minutes to stop the violence that ensued. In fact, while the insurrection was underway, he sent out a tweet putting a target on Pence’s back.
Never in the history of the republic has Congress taken such a momentous step of issuing a criminal referral of a former president. Then again, never in our history has a president attempted to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.
While a referral has no legal significance, the roadmap puts great pressure on the Justice Department. If special counsel Jack Smith decides not to indict Trump, he will have to explain why his judgment differs from that of a congressional committee that painstakingly examined the evidence and presented it to the American people.
Let’s take a look at each of the potential charges against Trump:
Insurrection
In some sense, this referral should come as no surprise. The entire country saw Trump unleash the mob to stop Congress from counting the electoral votes. A majority of the House impeached Trump specifically for incitement of insurrection. And 57 senators voted to convict him on that charge.
The statute concerning such a criminal charge is fairly straightforward. Section 2383 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code states: “Whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.” The committee argues that Trump “gave aid and comfort" to the Jan. 6 insurrectionists with his actions that day.
As several legal commentators have noted, prosecutors in an insurrection case would not need to prove that Trump agreed to overthrow the government, as would be required for a seditious conspiracy charge. They would only need prove he assisted in opposing the authority of the government.
Moreover, conviction under Section 2383 would bar Trump from holding federal office. In essence, a successful prosecution on these lines would accomplish what Republican senators refused to do in the impeachment trial: prevent Trump from ever regaining the presidency.
Yes, proving that Trump “gave aid or comfort” (as opposed to mere cheerleading) would be difficult. Prosecutors would likely have to overcome a First Amendment defense. But the committee’s job was not to make a final prosecutorial judgment about whether a conviction is possible; it was to confirm that the country collectively witnessed an unprecedented crime. In setting forth a voluminous record and encouraging criminal charges, it puts the onus on Smith to decide whether the totality of evidence would not be enough to persuade a jury to convict Trump of insurrection.
Obstructing a congressional proceeding and conspiracy to defraud the United States
These potential charges are nothing new. Legal scholars as well as federal District Judge David O. Carter (in adjudicating Eastman’s attempts to avoid complying with congressional subpoenas based on client-attorney privilege) have found it more likely than not that Trump committed such crimes. (The committee’s summary devotes substantial space to reviewing Carter’s analysis.)
In fact, multiple Jan. 6 insurrectionists have either pleaded guilty to or been convicted of obstructing a congressional proceeding under Section 1512(c) of Title 18. The executive summary released by the committee explains:
Sufficient evidence exists of one or more potential violations of 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c) for a criminal referral of President Trump based solely on his plan to get Vice President Pence to prevent certification of the election at the Joint Session of Congress. Those facts standing alone are sufficient. But such a charge under that statute can also be based on the plan to create and transmit to the Executive and Legislative branches fraudulent electoral slates, which were ultimately intended to facilitate an unlawful action by Vice President Pence – to refuse to count legitimate, certified electoral votes during Congress’s official January 6th proceeding.
Additionally, evidence developed about the many other elements of President Trump’s plans to overturn the election, including soliciting State legislatures, State officials, and others to alter official electoral outcomes, provides further evidence that President Trump was attempting through multiple means to corruptly obstruct, impede or influence the counting of electoral votes on January 6th. This is also true of President Trump’s personal directive to the Department of Justice to “just say that the election was was [sic] corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R[epublican] Congressmen.”
Trump’s plot to create alternative electors warrants a conspiracy to defraud charge for similar reasons. This is based on Section 371 of Title 18, which the Supreme Court has ruled makes it a crime to obstruct lawful governmental functions through "deceit, craft or trickery, [or] by means that are dishonest.”
As the committee’s executive summary points out, “The evidence of this element overlaps greatly with the evidence of the Section 1512(c)(2) violations. ... President Trump engaged in a multi-part plan described in this Report to obstruct a lawful certification of the election.”
Conspiracy to make a false statement
This is based on Section 1001 of Title 18, which applies to anyone who “makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation” to Congress or who “makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry.”
Trump’s attempt to compile phony alternate electors to submit to Congress could subject him to prosecution for this crime. The committee finds:
The Committee believes that sufficient evidence exists for a criminal referral of President Trump for illegally engaging in a conspiracy to violate Section 1001; the evidence indicates that he entered into an agreement with Eastman and others to make the false statement (the fake electoral certificates), by deceitful or dishonest means, and at least one member of the conspiracy engaged in at least one overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy (e.g. President Trump and Eastman’s call to Ronna McDaniel).
Other potential avenues for accountability
The Justice Department is by no means limited to these pathways of prosecution. The committee holds out the possibility that the department might pursue other charges such as seditious conspiracy if it uncovers evidence that Trump conspired with the violent armed groups that stormed the Capitol.
The Justice Department might also prosecute him under another statute (Section 372) for conspiring “to prevent, by force, intimidation, or threat, any person from accepting or holding any office, trust, or place of confidence under the United States, or from discharging any duties thereof." As the committee noted, there were “potential efforts to obstruct its investigation, including by certain counsel (some paid by groups connected to the former President) who may have advised clients to provide false or misleading testimony to the Committee.”
The committee also included this stunning revelation: “The Select Committee is aware of multiple efforts by President Trump to contact Select Committee witnesses. The Department of Justice is aware of at least one of those circumstances.”
By leaving certain matters and certain potential defendants to the discretion of the Justice Department, the committee establishes its own credibility and underscores its own limits in accumulating evidence.
Beyond prosecution, the report cites members of Congress who failed to comply with subpoenas issued to them, which the committee will refer to the House Ethics Committee for further action. This includes House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Scott Perry (R-Pa.).
Many Americans have rightly wondered whether Trump would ever be held accountable for his misdeeds. Today marks a critical, unprecedented and justifiable step toward making that happen. The ball is now in Jack Smith’s court to uphold the rule of law.
AN ‘IMPERIAL SUPREME COURT’ ASSERTS ITS POWER, ALARMING SCHOLARS
Several new studies document the current court’s distinctive insistence on its dominance and the justices’ willingness to use procedural shortcuts to achieve it.
By Adam Liptak, The New York Times
WASHINGTON — The conventional critique of the Supreme Court these days is that it has lurched to the right and is out of step with the public on many issues. That is true so far as it goes.
But a burst of recent legal scholarship makes a deeper point, saying the current court is distinctive in a different way: It has rapidly been accumulating power at the expense of every other part of the government.
The phenomenon was documented last month by Mark A. Lemley, a law professor at Stanford, in an article called “The Imperial Supreme Court” in The Harvard Law Review.
“The court has not been favoring one branch of government over another, or favoring states over the federal government, or the rights of people over governments,” Professor Lemley wrote. “Rather, it is withdrawing power from all of them at once.”
He added, “It is a court that is consolidating its power, systematically undercutting any branch of government, federal or state, that might threaten that power, while at the same time undercutting individual rights.”
The arguments this month over the role of state legislatures in setting rules for federal elections seemed to illustrate the point. The questioning suggested that the court was not prepared to adopt a novel legal theory that would upset the ordinary checks and balances at the state level in election litigation.
Rather, the justices seemed ready to elevate their own role in the process, giving themselves the right to do something ordinarily forbidden: second-guess state courts’ interpretations of state law.
In a similar vein, Justice Elena Kagan noted the majority’s imperial impulses in a dissent from a decision in June that limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to address climate change.
“The court appoints itself — instead of Congress or the expert agency — the decision maker on climate policy,” she wrote. “I cannot think of many things more frightening.”
A second study, to be published in Presidential Studies Quarterly, concentrated on cases involving the executive branch and backed up Professor Lemley’s observations with data. Taking account of 3,660 decisions since 1937, the study found that the court led since 2005 by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has been “uniquely willing to check executive authority.”
This trend was even more pronounced in cases discussed in law school casebooks and featured on the front page of this newspaper. The executive branch in the Roberts court era won just 35 percent of the time in those cases, a rate more than 20 percentage points lower than the historical average.
The study’s authors, Rebecca L. Brown and Lee Epstein, both of the University of Southern California, wrote that “there is little indication that the Roberts court’s willingness to rule against the president bears any reliable relation to preserving the balance among the branches or the workings and accountability of the democratic process.”
“Instead,” they wrote, “there are increasingly frequent indications that the court is establishing a position of judicial supremacy over the president and Congress.”
Professor Brown added in an interview that the nature of the court’s reasoning has shifted.
“When the court used to rule in favor of the president, they would do so with a sort of humility,” she said. “They would say: ‘It’s not up to us to decide this. We will defer to the president. He wins.’ Now the court says, ‘The president wins because we think he’s right.’”
Nor does the Supreme Court seem to trust lower federal courts. It has, for instance, made a habit of hearing cases before federal appeals courts have ruled on them, using a procedure called “certiorari before judgment.” It used to be reserved for exceptional cases like President Richard M. Nixon’s refusal to turn over tape recordings to a special prosecutor or President Harry S. Truman’s seizure of the steel industry.
Before 2019, the court had not used the procedure for 15 years, according to statistics compiled by Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Since then, he found, the court has used it 19 times.
The court has been using another kind of shortcut to enhance its power, as two law professors — Lisa Tucker of Drexel University and Stefanie A. Lindquist of Arizona State University — demonstrated in a recent guest essay. The court has been, they wrote, “increasingly setting aside legally significant decisions from the lower courts as if they had never happened, invalidating them in brief procedural orders.”
Yet another study, from Tejas Narechania, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, examined the cases selected by the justices for full-blown review on the merits.
“The Roberts court, more than any other court in history, uses its docket-setting discretion to select cases that allow it to revisit and overrule precedent,” Professor Narechania found in the study, which will be published in the St. Louis University Law Journal and built on an earlier one in the Columbia Law Review.
In September, in remarks at a judicial conference, Chief Justice Roberts insisted on the court’s primacy.
“You don’t want the political branches telling you what the law is,” he said, echoing Chief Justice John Marshall’s famous statement in Marbury v. Madison, the foundational 1803 decision: “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial branch to say what the law is.”
The statement is popular with the current court. “Over half of the total number of majority or concurring opinions in Supreme Court history to have quoted this language from Marbury,” Professors Brown and Epstein wrote, “have been penned by the Roberts court.”
Several new studies document the current court’s distinctive insistence on its dominance and the justices’ willingness to use procedural shortcuts to achieve it.
By Adam Liptak, The New York Times
WASHINGTON — The conventional critique of the Supreme Court these days is that it has lurched to the right and is out of step with the public on many issues. That is true so far as it goes.
But a burst of recent legal scholarship makes a deeper point, saying the current court is distinctive in a different way: It has rapidly been accumulating power at the expense of every other part of the government.
The phenomenon was documented last month by Mark A. Lemley, a law professor at Stanford, in an article called “The Imperial Supreme Court” in The Harvard Law Review.
“The court has not been favoring one branch of government over another, or favoring states over the federal government, or the rights of people over governments,” Professor Lemley wrote. “Rather, it is withdrawing power from all of them at once.”
He added, “It is a court that is consolidating its power, systematically undercutting any branch of government, federal or state, that might threaten that power, while at the same time undercutting individual rights.”
The arguments this month over the role of state legislatures in setting rules for federal elections seemed to illustrate the point. The questioning suggested that the court was not prepared to adopt a novel legal theory that would upset the ordinary checks and balances at the state level in election litigation.
Rather, the justices seemed ready to elevate their own role in the process, giving themselves the right to do something ordinarily forbidden: second-guess state courts’ interpretations of state law.
In a similar vein, Justice Elena Kagan noted the majority’s imperial impulses in a dissent from a decision in June that limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to address climate change.
“The court appoints itself — instead of Congress or the expert agency — the decision maker on climate policy,” she wrote. “I cannot think of many things more frightening.”
A second study, to be published in Presidential Studies Quarterly, concentrated on cases involving the executive branch and backed up Professor Lemley’s observations with data. Taking account of 3,660 decisions since 1937, the study found that the court led since 2005 by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has been “uniquely willing to check executive authority.”
This trend was even more pronounced in cases discussed in law school casebooks and featured on the front page of this newspaper. The executive branch in the Roberts court era won just 35 percent of the time in those cases, a rate more than 20 percentage points lower than the historical average.
The study’s authors, Rebecca L. Brown and Lee Epstein, both of the University of Southern California, wrote that “there is little indication that the Roberts court’s willingness to rule against the president bears any reliable relation to preserving the balance among the branches or the workings and accountability of the democratic process.”
“Instead,” they wrote, “there are increasingly frequent indications that the court is establishing a position of judicial supremacy over the president and Congress.”
Professor Brown added in an interview that the nature of the court’s reasoning has shifted.
“When the court used to rule in favor of the president, they would do so with a sort of humility,” she said. “They would say: ‘It’s not up to us to decide this. We will defer to the president. He wins.’ Now the court says, ‘The president wins because we think he’s right.’”
Nor does the Supreme Court seem to trust lower federal courts. It has, for instance, made a habit of hearing cases before federal appeals courts have ruled on them, using a procedure called “certiorari before judgment.” It used to be reserved for exceptional cases like President Richard M. Nixon’s refusal to turn over tape recordings to a special prosecutor or President Harry S. Truman’s seizure of the steel industry.
Before 2019, the court had not used the procedure for 15 years, according to statistics compiled by Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Since then, he found, the court has used it 19 times.
The court has been using another kind of shortcut to enhance its power, as two law professors — Lisa Tucker of Drexel University and Stefanie A. Lindquist of Arizona State University — demonstrated in a recent guest essay. The court has been, they wrote, “increasingly setting aside legally significant decisions from the lower courts as if they had never happened, invalidating them in brief procedural orders.”
Yet another study, from Tejas Narechania, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, examined the cases selected by the justices for full-blown review on the merits.
“The Roberts court, more than any other court in history, uses its docket-setting discretion to select cases that allow it to revisit and overrule precedent,” Professor Narechania found in the study, which will be published in the St. Louis University Law Journal and built on an earlier one in the Columbia Law Review.
In September, in remarks at a judicial conference, Chief Justice Roberts insisted on the court’s primacy.
“You don’t want the political branches telling you what the law is,” he said, echoing Chief Justice John Marshall’s famous statement in Marbury v. Madison, the foundational 1803 decision: “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial branch to say what the law is.”
The statement is popular with the current court. “Over half of the total number of majority or concurring opinions in Supreme Court history to have quoted this language from Marbury,” Professors Brown and Epstein wrote, “have been penned by the Roberts court.”
VACCINES SAVED LIVES. DESANTIS THREATENS THAT PROGRESS.
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
Vaccines saved millions of lives in the pandemic, and the mRNA technology was rolled out in record time. It counts as a massive success and might help fight other diseases, too. Nonetheless, populist Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) last week demanded a grand jury investigate “criminal or wrongful activity in Florida” involving the “development, promotion and distribution” of coronavirus vaccines. As public opinion shows vaccine hesitancy is growing, Mr. DeSantis’s move is not only absurd but also dangerous.
Vaccines work. A mathematical model, based on country-level data, found they directly saved some 15.5 million lives worldwide in the first year they were available, and millions more indirectly. The speed with which mRNA vaccines reached people was a spectacular scientific achievement, given the history of vaccine development. Three decades of research has yet to produce a viable vaccine to prevent or treat HIV/AIDS.
The coronavirus vaccine had some drawbacks. Over time, effectiveness waned from the initial clinical trial results of more than 90 percent efficacy. Hence the need for boosters — although vaccines remain a bulwark against severe illness, hospitalization and death. Adults who received the latest booster shots cut their risk of having to visit an emergency room or being hospitalized by 50 percent or more, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Dec. 16.
Mr. DeSantis, who is positioning himself to seek the 2024 Republican presidential nomination — and by one recent poll is running ahead of former president Donald Trump — has not been shy about politicizing public health measures, attacking lockdowns and mask and vaccine mandates. Now he has taken it a step further with a petition to the Florida Supreme Court seeking empanelment of a statewide grand jury — which in Florida can carry out broader investigations of government — on vaccines. In a crude appeal to the anti-vaccine movement, Mr. DeSantis’s petition darkly implies that public reassurances of vaccine efficacy were driven by “financial gain.”
The vaccine hesitancy that has spread during the pandemic carries real-world impact. Professor Peter Hotez, who co-led development of a vaccine for low- and middle-income countries at the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, has pointed out that some 200,000 Americans “needlessly lost their lives in the last half of 2021 and into early 2022 because they refused a coronavirus vaccine during our terrible delta wave.” Even now, booster uptake is low. Meanwhile, the Kaiser Family Foundation reports that support for the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine requirement for healthy children to attend public school has declined from 82 percent in October 2019 to 71 percent today. Twenty-eight percent of those polled “now say that parents should be able to decide not to vaccinate their school-age children, even if this creates health risks for others,” up from 16 percent in 2019. Want to see life without vaccines? Just look at the way measles spread like wildfire among unvaccinated children in Columbus, Ohio, recently.
A scientific achievement so overwhelmingly beneficial to humanity ought not be forsaken in the interest of scoring political points. The truth is as simple as this: Vaccines save lives.
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
Vaccines saved millions of lives in the pandemic, and the mRNA technology was rolled out in record time. It counts as a massive success and might help fight other diseases, too. Nonetheless, populist Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) last week demanded a grand jury investigate “criminal or wrongful activity in Florida” involving the “development, promotion and distribution” of coronavirus vaccines. As public opinion shows vaccine hesitancy is growing, Mr. DeSantis’s move is not only absurd but also dangerous.
Vaccines work. A mathematical model, based on country-level data, found they directly saved some 15.5 million lives worldwide in the first year they were available, and millions more indirectly. The speed with which mRNA vaccines reached people was a spectacular scientific achievement, given the history of vaccine development. Three decades of research has yet to produce a viable vaccine to prevent or treat HIV/AIDS.
The coronavirus vaccine had some drawbacks. Over time, effectiveness waned from the initial clinical trial results of more than 90 percent efficacy. Hence the need for boosters — although vaccines remain a bulwark against severe illness, hospitalization and death. Adults who received the latest booster shots cut their risk of having to visit an emergency room or being hospitalized by 50 percent or more, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Dec. 16.
Mr. DeSantis, who is positioning himself to seek the 2024 Republican presidential nomination — and by one recent poll is running ahead of former president Donald Trump — has not been shy about politicizing public health measures, attacking lockdowns and mask and vaccine mandates. Now he has taken it a step further with a petition to the Florida Supreme Court seeking empanelment of a statewide grand jury — which in Florida can carry out broader investigations of government — on vaccines. In a crude appeal to the anti-vaccine movement, Mr. DeSantis’s petition darkly implies that public reassurances of vaccine efficacy were driven by “financial gain.”
The vaccine hesitancy that has spread during the pandemic carries real-world impact. Professor Peter Hotez, who co-led development of a vaccine for low- and middle-income countries at the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, has pointed out that some 200,000 Americans “needlessly lost their lives in the last half of 2021 and into early 2022 because they refused a coronavirus vaccine during our terrible delta wave.” Even now, booster uptake is low. Meanwhile, the Kaiser Family Foundation reports that support for the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine requirement for healthy children to attend public school has declined from 82 percent in October 2019 to 71 percent today. Twenty-eight percent of those polled “now say that parents should be able to decide not to vaccinate their school-age children, even if this creates health risks for others,” up from 16 percent in 2019. Want to see life without vaccines? Just look at the way measles spread like wildfire among unvaccinated children in Columbus, Ohio, recently.
A scientific achievement so overwhelmingly beneficial to humanity ought not be forsaken in the interest of scoring political points. The truth is as simple as this: Vaccines save lives.
BOOK BANNING IS BAD POLICY. LET’S MAKE IT BAD POLITICS.
By E.J. Dionne Jr., The Washington Post
There was a time when the term “Banned in Boston” was one of the best things that could happen to a book, a play or a movie. From roughly the 1880s to the mid-20th century, a censoriousness rooted in the city’s Puritan past supported especially aggressive laws aimed at suppressing material seen as salacious or dangerous. For many, the label was a guarantee that whatever was banned must have been, well, interesting.
Over time, such statutes were overturned in the name of free expression, but the phrase is a reminder that the current spate of book banning is not new. That doesn’t make it any less dangerous. A new round of censorship has sturdy roots in a right-wing movement that uses slogans around “parental rights” to defend removing books from libraries in the name of “protecting” children.
Actually, that’s not what we believe, and 2023 should be the year when progressives change the terms of debate on a series of cultural issues in the right wing’s arsenal. Battling book bans is one of the most important.
The shift requires moving from defense to offense and insisting that efforts to close the minds of the next generation will not make its members stronger, more resilient, more intelligent or, for that matter, more moral.
Opponents of censorship heartily agree that parents should have an important say in how schools work and how public libraries serve our children. What we’re against is a willful ideological minority imposing its views on everyone else, dictating which ideas should be forbidden in public institutions that instruct the young.
Most Americans agree with us.
Here, for example, is the conclusion of a report from the group More in Common earlier this month on attitudes toward the teaching of our country’s history, a topic that has roiled politics because of resistance to discussing racism and slavery:
“We found that Americans of all political orientations want their children to learn a history that celebrates our strengths and also examines our failures. Americans overwhelmingly agree that the experiences of minority groups are an important part of that history. And they agree that if students are better informed about America’s past there’s a better chance of not repeating past failures.”
Starting with what we agree on exposes the radical right’s efforts to divide us by picking fights that most of us don’t even want to have.
Worries about a new censorship are not figments of left-wing imaginations. A report by the freedom of expression group PEN America found 1,586 instances of individual books being banned between July 1, 2021, and March 31, 2022, affecting 1,145 unique book titles. In September, the American Library Association reported that there would be more challenges to books in 2022 than there were in 2021, which was a record year.
The right wing is eager for parents to think that progressives support the equivalent of hardcore porn in school libraries.
Thus the finding of an October Rasmussen poll for the Capitol Resource Institute, which describes its purpose as helping “parents counteract progressivism in public schools.” The survey, Rasmussen reported, found that 69 percent of voters “believe books containing explicit sexual depictions of sex acts, including homosexual sex, should not be present in public high school libraries.” The words “explicit sexual depictions of sex acts” and “homosexual sex” do a lot of work here.
Contrast this with a Hart Research Associates and North Star Opinion Research survey for the American Library Association in March. It asked: “Would you support or oppose efforts to remove books from local public libraries because some people find them offensive or inappropriate and do not think young people should be exposed to them?” It found 71 percent were opposed.
These dueling surveys tell us that the right wing can win these battles only with the most lurid, over-the-top arguments that have little to do with the movement’s real objectives, a wholesale war on anything that smacks of “progressivism,” with a particular animus directed against LGBTQ people. “There is an appeal to the idea that parents should have some control over what their children learn,” Hart Research’s Guy Molyneux, who has polled extensively on educational issues, told me. “But parents don’t want a situation where the most upset parent determines what other children learn or what books are in the school library.”
The vast majority of parents want their kids’ schools to be open and welcoming settings for education, not battlefields in culture wars designed primarily to goose conservative turnout at election time. Opponents of book bans represent this mainstream. We should not be afraid to claim it.
By E.J. Dionne Jr., The Washington Post
There was a time when the term “Banned in Boston” was one of the best things that could happen to a book, a play or a movie. From roughly the 1880s to the mid-20th century, a censoriousness rooted in the city’s Puritan past supported especially aggressive laws aimed at suppressing material seen as salacious or dangerous. For many, the label was a guarantee that whatever was banned must have been, well, interesting.
Over time, such statutes were overturned in the name of free expression, but the phrase is a reminder that the current spate of book banning is not new. That doesn’t make it any less dangerous. A new round of censorship has sturdy roots in a right-wing movement that uses slogans around “parental rights” to defend removing books from libraries in the name of “protecting” children.
Actually, that’s not what we believe, and 2023 should be the year when progressives change the terms of debate on a series of cultural issues in the right wing’s arsenal. Battling book bans is one of the most important.
The shift requires moving from defense to offense and insisting that efforts to close the minds of the next generation will not make its members stronger, more resilient, more intelligent or, for that matter, more moral.
Opponents of censorship heartily agree that parents should have an important say in how schools work and how public libraries serve our children. What we’re against is a willful ideological minority imposing its views on everyone else, dictating which ideas should be forbidden in public institutions that instruct the young.
Most Americans agree with us.
Here, for example, is the conclusion of a report from the group More in Common earlier this month on attitudes toward the teaching of our country’s history, a topic that has roiled politics because of resistance to discussing racism and slavery:
“We found that Americans of all political orientations want their children to learn a history that celebrates our strengths and also examines our failures. Americans overwhelmingly agree that the experiences of minority groups are an important part of that history. And they agree that if students are better informed about America’s past there’s a better chance of not repeating past failures.”
Starting with what we agree on exposes the radical right’s efforts to divide us by picking fights that most of us don’t even want to have.
Worries about a new censorship are not figments of left-wing imaginations. A report by the freedom of expression group PEN America found 1,586 instances of individual books being banned between July 1, 2021, and March 31, 2022, affecting 1,145 unique book titles. In September, the American Library Association reported that there would be more challenges to books in 2022 than there were in 2021, which was a record year.
The right wing is eager for parents to think that progressives support the equivalent of hardcore porn in school libraries.
Thus the finding of an October Rasmussen poll for the Capitol Resource Institute, which describes its purpose as helping “parents counteract progressivism in public schools.” The survey, Rasmussen reported, found that 69 percent of voters “believe books containing explicit sexual depictions of sex acts, including homosexual sex, should not be present in public high school libraries.” The words “explicit sexual depictions of sex acts” and “homosexual sex” do a lot of work here.
Contrast this with a Hart Research Associates and North Star Opinion Research survey for the American Library Association in March. It asked: “Would you support or oppose efforts to remove books from local public libraries because some people find them offensive or inappropriate and do not think young people should be exposed to them?” It found 71 percent were opposed.
These dueling surveys tell us that the right wing can win these battles only with the most lurid, over-the-top arguments that have little to do with the movement’s real objectives, a wholesale war on anything that smacks of “progressivism,” with a particular animus directed against LGBTQ people. “There is an appeal to the idea that parents should have some control over what their children learn,” Hart Research’s Guy Molyneux, who has polled extensively on educational issues, told me. “But parents don’t want a situation where the most upset parent determines what other children learn or what books are in the school library.”
The vast majority of parents want their kids’ schools to be open and welcoming settings for education, not battlefields in culture wars designed primarily to goose conservative turnout at election time. Opponents of book bans represent this mainstream. We should not be afraid to claim it.
CHILDHOOD’S GREATEST DANGER: THE DATA ON KIDS AND GUN VIOLENCE
Gun violence recently surpassed car accidents as the leading cause of death for American children.
By Robert Gebeloff, Danielle Ivory, Bill Marsh, Allison McCann and Albert Sun, The New York Times
For much of the nation’s history, disease was the No. 1 killer of children. Then America became the land of the automobile, and by the 1960s, motor-vehicle crashes were the most common way for children to die. Twenty years ago, well after the advent of the seatbelt, an American child was still three times as likely to die in a car accident as to be killed by a firearm. We’re now living in the era of the gun.
The gun-death rate for children is nearly five in every 100,000. It was flat for more than a decade starting in 2000, and most years fewer than three in every 100,000 children were killed by guns. In 2014, the rate began to creep up, and by 2020 guns became the leading killer.
Last year was a particularly violent one: 3,597 children died by gunfire, according to provisional statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The death rate from guns was the highest it has been in more than 20 years. While the statistics for this year are incomplete, it is clear that the carnage has not receded.
In May, the nation watched as horror unfolded in Uvalde, Texas. Yet another school ripped apart by bullets — yet another group of children to mourn. Yet another shooting in a long line of school shootings. And though the number of school shootings has recently risen to the highest level on record, the overall picture is so much worse; these shootings account for less than 1 percent of the total gun deaths suffered by American children.
No group of American children has been spared, but some have fared far worse. Last year, nearly two-thirds of gun deaths involving children — 2,279 — were homicides. Since 2018, they have increased by more than 73 percent. Most homicides involved Black children, who make up a small share of all children but shoulder the burden of gun violence more than any others, a disparity that is growing sharply.
The number of children who die by suicide with a gun has also risen to a historical high over the last decade. Last year, suicides made up nearly 30 percent of child gun deaths — 1,078. Unlike homicides, suicides disproportionately involve white children, mostly teenage boys. A decade ago, the number of white children who killed themselves with a gun totaled around 500 annually; in three of the last five years, that figure has surpassed 700.
The share of gun suicides for Black and Hispanic children has been growing, too. Still, in America, among children who die by gunfire, Black and Hispanic children are more likely to be killed by others, and white children are more likely to kill themselves.
Gun accidents that kill children have also ticked up in the last decade, though they are relatively uncommon, totaling fewer than 150 in most years.
Researchers who study gun violence say that it is difficult to explain exactly why gun deaths among children have risen so quickly, but most emphasize that the increased availability of guns — especially handguns, which tend to be used in homicides and suicides and also tend to be stored less safely than some other types of guns — has most likely played a role.
What is clear is that the United States is an extreme outlier when it comes to gun fatalities among children. When researchers at the Kaiser Family Foundation recently compared a set of similarly large and wealthy nations, they found that among this group, the United States accounted for 46 percent of the child population but 97 percent of all child gun deaths.
There is no comprehensive data describing the nature of each fatal shooting in America — say, the number of children who died in circumstances related to domestic violence or gang-related fights or accidental shootings. The C.D.C. collects information on the gender and race of each child shot and killed. The Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit organization that has tracked deaths and injuries related to gun violence since 2014, compiles location and other data for thousands of fatal shootings.
Using this data, The New York Times set out to examine how guns are shaping American childhood, and to understand which children have been most at risk. The analysis focused on children ages 1 through 18, which includes many high school seniors. (Infants have their own distinct mortality risks, and their deaths are often studied separately from children ages 1 and older.)
David Hemenway, a professor of health policy at Harvard University and co-director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, said that gun-ownership rates and other factors may explain some of the demographic differences in how children die by gunfire, but more data is needed to answer the question definitively.
Overall, he said, he worried that the proliferation of guns in America would lead to more and more deaths among children. “Where there are more guns around, there’s more death,” he said. “It’s just so easy when you get in arguments, when you rob somebody — if you have a gun, it’s so much easier to kill.”
Rossin-Slater said she worried that the peers of the children killed were being affected by this trauma during the most formative years of their childhood and adolescence, which would have negative downstream effects for their mental and physical health, educational trajectories, economic stability and, broadly, their happiness.
“We have to think about the repercussions of it,” she said, “for decades to come.”
Gun violence recently surpassed car accidents as the leading cause of death for American children.
By Robert Gebeloff, Danielle Ivory, Bill Marsh, Allison McCann and Albert Sun, The New York Times
For much of the nation’s history, disease was the No. 1 killer of children. Then America became the land of the automobile, and by the 1960s, motor-vehicle crashes were the most common way for children to die. Twenty years ago, well after the advent of the seatbelt, an American child was still three times as likely to die in a car accident as to be killed by a firearm. We’re now living in the era of the gun.
The gun-death rate for children is nearly five in every 100,000. It was flat for more than a decade starting in 2000, and most years fewer than three in every 100,000 children were killed by guns. In 2014, the rate began to creep up, and by 2020 guns became the leading killer.
Last year was a particularly violent one: 3,597 children died by gunfire, according to provisional statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The death rate from guns was the highest it has been in more than 20 years. While the statistics for this year are incomplete, it is clear that the carnage has not receded.
In May, the nation watched as horror unfolded in Uvalde, Texas. Yet another school ripped apart by bullets — yet another group of children to mourn. Yet another shooting in a long line of school shootings. And though the number of school shootings has recently risen to the highest level on record, the overall picture is so much worse; these shootings account for less than 1 percent of the total gun deaths suffered by American children.
No group of American children has been spared, but some have fared far worse. Last year, nearly two-thirds of gun deaths involving children — 2,279 — were homicides. Since 2018, they have increased by more than 73 percent. Most homicides involved Black children, who make up a small share of all children but shoulder the burden of gun violence more than any others, a disparity that is growing sharply.
The number of children who die by suicide with a gun has also risen to a historical high over the last decade. Last year, suicides made up nearly 30 percent of child gun deaths — 1,078. Unlike homicides, suicides disproportionately involve white children, mostly teenage boys. A decade ago, the number of white children who killed themselves with a gun totaled around 500 annually; in three of the last five years, that figure has surpassed 700.
The share of gun suicides for Black and Hispanic children has been growing, too. Still, in America, among children who die by gunfire, Black and Hispanic children are more likely to be killed by others, and white children are more likely to kill themselves.
Gun accidents that kill children have also ticked up in the last decade, though they are relatively uncommon, totaling fewer than 150 in most years.
Researchers who study gun violence say that it is difficult to explain exactly why gun deaths among children have risen so quickly, but most emphasize that the increased availability of guns — especially handguns, which tend to be used in homicides and suicides and also tend to be stored less safely than some other types of guns — has most likely played a role.
What is clear is that the United States is an extreme outlier when it comes to gun fatalities among children. When researchers at the Kaiser Family Foundation recently compared a set of similarly large and wealthy nations, they found that among this group, the United States accounted for 46 percent of the child population but 97 percent of all child gun deaths.
There is no comprehensive data describing the nature of each fatal shooting in America — say, the number of children who died in circumstances related to domestic violence or gang-related fights or accidental shootings. The C.D.C. collects information on the gender and race of each child shot and killed. The Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit organization that has tracked deaths and injuries related to gun violence since 2014, compiles location and other data for thousands of fatal shootings.
Using this data, The New York Times set out to examine how guns are shaping American childhood, and to understand which children have been most at risk. The analysis focused on children ages 1 through 18, which includes many high school seniors. (Infants have their own distinct mortality risks, and their deaths are often studied separately from children ages 1 and older.)
David Hemenway, a professor of health policy at Harvard University and co-director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, said that gun-ownership rates and other factors may explain some of the demographic differences in how children die by gunfire, but more data is needed to answer the question definitively.
Overall, he said, he worried that the proliferation of guns in America would lead to more and more deaths among children. “Where there are more guns around, there’s more death,” he said. “It’s just so easy when you get in arguments, when you rob somebody — if you have a gun, it’s so much easier to kill.”
Rossin-Slater said she worried that the peers of the children killed were being affected by this trauma during the most formative years of their childhood and adolescence, which would have negative downstream effects for their mental and physical health, educational trajectories, economic stability and, broadly, their happiness.
“We have to think about the repercussions of it,” she said, “for decades to come.”
AMERICA’S TOXIC GUN CULTURE
By The New York Times Editorial Board
A year ago, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky posted a Christmas photo on Twitter. In it, Mr. Massie, his wife and five children pose in front of their ornament-bedecked tree. Each person is wearing a big grin and holding an assault weapon. “Merry Christmas! ps. Santa, please bring ammo,” Mr. Massie wrote on Twitter.
The photo was posted on Dec. 4, just four days after a mass shooting at a school in Oxford, Mich., that left four students dead and seven other people injured.
The grotesque timing led many Democrats and several Republicans to criticize Mr. Massie for sharing the photo. Others lauded it and nearly 80,000 people liked his tweet. “That’s my kind of Christmas card!” wrote Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who then posted a photo of her four sons brandishing similar weapons.
These weapons, lightweight and endlessly customizable, aren’t often used in the way their devotees imagine — to defend themselves and their families. (In a recent comprehensive survey, only 13 percent of all defensive use of guns involved any type of rifle.) Nevertheless, in the 18 years since the end of the federal assault weapons ban, the country has been flooded with an estimated 25 million AR-15-style semiautomatic rifles, making them one of the most popular in the United States. When used in mass shootings, the AR-15 makes those acts of violence far more deadly. It has become the gun of choice for mass killers, from Las Vegas to Uvalde, Sandy Hook to Buffalo.
The AR-15 has also become a potent talisman for right-wing politicians and many of their voters. That’s a particularly disturbing trend at a time when violent political rhetoric and actual political violence in the United States are rising.
Addressing violent right-wing extremism is a challenge on many fronts: This board has argued for stronger enforcement of state anti-militia laws, better tracking of extremists in law enforcement and the military, and stronger international cooperation to tackle it as a transnational issue. Most important, there is a civil war raging inside the Republican Party between those who support democracy and peaceful politics and those who support far-right extremism. That conflict has repercussions for all of us, and the fetishization of guns is a pervasive part of it.
The prominence of guns in campaign ads is a good barometer of their political potency. Democrats have sometimes used guns in ads — in 2010, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, running for the Senate, shot a hole through a copy of the cap-and-trade climate bill with a single-shot hunting rifle. Since then, guns have all but disappeared from Democratic messaging. But in the most recent midterm elections, Republican politicians ran more than 100 ads featuring guns and more than a dozen that featured semiautomatic military-style rifles.
In one of the most violent of those ads, Eric Greitens, a Republican candidate for Senate in Missouri and a former Navy SEAL, kicks in the door of a house and barges in with a group of men dressed in tactical gear and holding assault rifles. Mr. Greitens boasts that the group is hunting RINOs — a derogatory term for “Republicans in name only.” The ad continues, “Get a RINO hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.”
Twitter flagged the ad, Facebook banned it for violating its terms of service, and Mr. Greitens lost his race for office. He may have been playacting in the ad, but many other heavily armed people with far-right political views are not. Openly carried assault rifles have become an all too common feature of political events around the country and are having a chilling effect on the exercise of political speech.
This intimidating display of weaponry isn’t a bipartisan phenomenon: A recent New York Times analysis examined more than 700 demonstrations where people openly carrying guns showed up. At about 77 percent of the protests, those who were armed “represented right-wing views, such as opposition to L.G.B.T.Q. rights and abortion access, hostility to racial justice rallies and support for former President Donald J. Trump’s lie of winning the 2020 election.”
As we’ve seen at libraries that host drag queen book readings, Juneteenth celebrations and Pride marches, the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms is fast running up against the First Amendment’s right to peaceably assemble. Securing that right, and addressing political violence in general, requires addressing the armed intimidation that has become commonplace in public places and the gun culture that makes it possible.
A growing number of American civilians have an unhealthy obsession with “tactical culture” and rifles like the AR-15. It’s a fringe movement among the 81 million American gun owners, but it is one of several alarming trends that have coincided with the increase in political violence in this country, along with the spread of far-right extremist groups, an explosion of anti-government sentiment and the embrace of deranged conspiracy theories by many Republican politicians. Understanding how these currents feed one another is crucial to understanding and reversing political violence and right-wing extremism.
The American gun industry has reaped an estimated $1 billion in sales over the past decade from AR-15-style guns, and it has done so by using and cultivating their status as near mythical emblems of power, hyper-patriotism and manhood. Earlier this year, an investigation by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform found that the gun industry explicitly markets its products by touting their military pedigree and making “covert references to violent white supremacists like the Boogaloo Boys.” These tactics “prey on young men’s insecurities by claiming their weapons will put them ‘at the top of the testosterone food chain.’”
This marketing and those sales come at a significant cost to America’s social fabric.
In his recent book “Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry That Radicalized America,” Ryan Busse, a former firearms company executive, described attending a Black Lives Matter rally with his son in Montana in 2020. At the rally, dozens of armed men, some of them wearing insignia from two paramilitary groups — the 3 Percenters and the Oath Keepers — appeared, carrying assault rifles. After one of the armed men assaulted his 12-year-old son, Mr. Busse had his epiphany.
“For years prior to this protest, advertising executives in the gun industry had been encouraging the ‘tactical lifestyle,’” Mr. Busse wrote. The gun industry created a culture that “glorified weapons of war and encouraged followers to ‘own the libs.’”
The formula is a simple one: More rage, more fear, more gun sales.
A portion of those proceeds are then funneled back into politics through millions of dollars in direct contributions, lobbying and spending on outside groups, most often in support of Republicans.
All told, gun rights groups spent a record $15.8 million on lobbying in 2021 and $2 million in the first quarter of 2022, the transparency group OpenSecrets reported. “From 1989 to 2022, gun rights groups contributed $50.5 million to federal candidates and party committees,” the group found. “Of that, 99 percent of direct contributions went to Republicans.”
It is important, of course, to distinguish between the large majority of law-abiding gun owners and the small number of extremists. Only about 30 percent of gun owners have owned an AR-15 or similar rifle, a majority support common sense gun restrictions and a majority reject political violence.
Institutions and individuals — prominent politicians, for instance, and responsible gun owners — could do far more to insist that assault weapons have no place in public spaces, even if they are permitted in many states, where the open carry of firearms is legal. Public condemnation of such displays is a good place to start.
Republicans should also show more courage in condemning extremists in their own ranks. When Representative Massie posted his Christmas photo, Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois responded on Twitter: “I’m pro second amendment, but this isn’t supporting right to keep and bear arms, this is a gun fetish.” There’s a difference between celebrating Christmas secure in the knowledge that you have a weapon to defend your home and family and sending out a photo of your arsenal days after a school shooting.
Democrats, while they may hope for stricter gun laws overall, should also recognize that they do share common ground with many gun owners — armed right-wing extremists and those who fetishize AR-15s do not represent typical American gun owners or their beliefs. That’s especially true given the changing nature of who owns guns in the United States: women and Black Americans are among the fastest-growing demographics.
This summer, for the first time in decades, Congress passed major bipartisan gun safety legislation — a major accomplishment and a sign that common ground is not terra incognita. It should have gone further — and can in the future: preventing anyone under 21 from buying a semiautomatic weapon, for instance, and erasing the 10-year sunset of the background-check provision. States should also be compelled to pass tougher red-flag laws to take guns out of the hands of suicidal or potentially violent people. Mandatory gun-liability insurance is also an idea with merit.
States and the federal government should also pass far tougher regulations on the gun industry, particularly through restrictions on the marketing of guns, which have helped supercharge the cult of the AR-15. New York’s law, which allows parties like victims of gun violence and the state government to sue gun sellers, manufacturers and distributors, is a good model for other states to follow.
Federal regulators should also do more to regulate the arms industry’s marketing practices, which are becoming more deadly and deranged by the year. They have the legal authority to do so but, thus far, not the will to act.
Americans are going to live with a lot of guns for a long time. There are already more than 415 million guns in circulation, including 25 million semiautomatic military-style rifles. Calls for confiscating them — or even calls for another assault weapons ban — are well intentioned and completely unrealistic. With proper care and maintenance, guns made today will still fire decades from now. Each month, Americans add nearly two million more to the national stockpile.
But even if common-sense regulation of guns is far from political reality, Americans do not have to accept the worst of gun culture becoming pervasive in our politics. The only hope the nation has for living in and around so many deadly weapons is a political system capable of resolving our many differences without the need to use them.
By The New York Times Editorial Board
A year ago, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky posted a Christmas photo on Twitter. In it, Mr. Massie, his wife and five children pose in front of their ornament-bedecked tree. Each person is wearing a big grin and holding an assault weapon. “Merry Christmas! ps. Santa, please bring ammo,” Mr. Massie wrote on Twitter.
The photo was posted on Dec. 4, just four days after a mass shooting at a school in Oxford, Mich., that left four students dead and seven other people injured.
The grotesque timing led many Democrats and several Republicans to criticize Mr. Massie for sharing the photo. Others lauded it and nearly 80,000 people liked his tweet. “That’s my kind of Christmas card!” wrote Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who then posted a photo of her four sons brandishing similar weapons.
These weapons, lightweight and endlessly customizable, aren’t often used in the way their devotees imagine — to defend themselves and their families. (In a recent comprehensive survey, only 13 percent of all defensive use of guns involved any type of rifle.) Nevertheless, in the 18 years since the end of the federal assault weapons ban, the country has been flooded with an estimated 25 million AR-15-style semiautomatic rifles, making them one of the most popular in the United States. When used in mass shootings, the AR-15 makes those acts of violence far more deadly. It has become the gun of choice for mass killers, from Las Vegas to Uvalde, Sandy Hook to Buffalo.
The AR-15 has also become a potent talisman for right-wing politicians and many of their voters. That’s a particularly disturbing trend at a time when violent political rhetoric and actual political violence in the United States are rising.
Addressing violent right-wing extremism is a challenge on many fronts: This board has argued for stronger enforcement of state anti-militia laws, better tracking of extremists in law enforcement and the military, and stronger international cooperation to tackle it as a transnational issue. Most important, there is a civil war raging inside the Republican Party between those who support democracy and peaceful politics and those who support far-right extremism. That conflict has repercussions for all of us, and the fetishization of guns is a pervasive part of it.
The prominence of guns in campaign ads is a good barometer of their political potency. Democrats have sometimes used guns in ads — in 2010, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, running for the Senate, shot a hole through a copy of the cap-and-trade climate bill with a single-shot hunting rifle. Since then, guns have all but disappeared from Democratic messaging. But in the most recent midterm elections, Republican politicians ran more than 100 ads featuring guns and more than a dozen that featured semiautomatic military-style rifles.
In one of the most violent of those ads, Eric Greitens, a Republican candidate for Senate in Missouri and a former Navy SEAL, kicks in the door of a house and barges in with a group of men dressed in tactical gear and holding assault rifles. Mr. Greitens boasts that the group is hunting RINOs — a derogatory term for “Republicans in name only.” The ad continues, “Get a RINO hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.”
Twitter flagged the ad, Facebook banned it for violating its terms of service, and Mr. Greitens lost his race for office. He may have been playacting in the ad, but many other heavily armed people with far-right political views are not. Openly carried assault rifles have become an all too common feature of political events around the country and are having a chilling effect on the exercise of political speech.
This intimidating display of weaponry isn’t a bipartisan phenomenon: A recent New York Times analysis examined more than 700 demonstrations where people openly carrying guns showed up. At about 77 percent of the protests, those who were armed “represented right-wing views, such as opposition to L.G.B.T.Q. rights and abortion access, hostility to racial justice rallies and support for former President Donald J. Trump’s lie of winning the 2020 election.”
As we’ve seen at libraries that host drag queen book readings, Juneteenth celebrations and Pride marches, the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms is fast running up against the First Amendment’s right to peaceably assemble. Securing that right, and addressing political violence in general, requires addressing the armed intimidation that has become commonplace in public places and the gun culture that makes it possible.
A growing number of American civilians have an unhealthy obsession with “tactical culture” and rifles like the AR-15. It’s a fringe movement among the 81 million American gun owners, but it is one of several alarming trends that have coincided with the increase in political violence in this country, along with the spread of far-right extremist groups, an explosion of anti-government sentiment and the embrace of deranged conspiracy theories by many Republican politicians. Understanding how these currents feed one another is crucial to understanding and reversing political violence and right-wing extremism.
The American gun industry has reaped an estimated $1 billion in sales over the past decade from AR-15-style guns, and it has done so by using and cultivating their status as near mythical emblems of power, hyper-patriotism and manhood. Earlier this year, an investigation by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform found that the gun industry explicitly markets its products by touting their military pedigree and making “covert references to violent white supremacists like the Boogaloo Boys.” These tactics “prey on young men’s insecurities by claiming their weapons will put them ‘at the top of the testosterone food chain.’”
This marketing and those sales come at a significant cost to America’s social fabric.
In his recent book “Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry That Radicalized America,” Ryan Busse, a former firearms company executive, described attending a Black Lives Matter rally with his son in Montana in 2020. At the rally, dozens of armed men, some of them wearing insignia from two paramilitary groups — the 3 Percenters and the Oath Keepers — appeared, carrying assault rifles. After one of the armed men assaulted his 12-year-old son, Mr. Busse had his epiphany.
“For years prior to this protest, advertising executives in the gun industry had been encouraging the ‘tactical lifestyle,’” Mr. Busse wrote. The gun industry created a culture that “glorified weapons of war and encouraged followers to ‘own the libs.’”
The formula is a simple one: More rage, more fear, more gun sales.
A portion of those proceeds are then funneled back into politics through millions of dollars in direct contributions, lobbying and spending on outside groups, most often in support of Republicans.
All told, gun rights groups spent a record $15.8 million on lobbying in 2021 and $2 million in the first quarter of 2022, the transparency group OpenSecrets reported. “From 1989 to 2022, gun rights groups contributed $50.5 million to federal candidates and party committees,” the group found. “Of that, 99 percent of direct contributions went to Republicans.”
It is important, of course, to distinguish between the large majority of law-abiding gun owners and the small number of extremists. Only about 30 percent of gun owners have owned an AR-15 or similar rifle, a majority support common sense gun restrictions and a majority reject political violence.
Institutions and individuals — prominent politicians, for instance, and responsible gun owners — could do far more to insist that assault weapons have no place in public spaces, even if they are permitted in many states, where the open carry of firearms is legal. Public condemnation of such displays is a good place to start.
Republicans should also show more courage in condemning extremists in their own ranks. When Representative Massie posted his Christmas photo, Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois responded on Twitter: “I’m pro second amendment, but this isn’t supporting right to keep and bear arms, this is a gun fetish.” There’s a difference between celebrating Christmas secure in the knowledge that you have a weapon to defend your home and family and sending out a photo of your arsenal days after a school shooting.
Democrats, while they may hope for stricter gun laws overall, should also recognize that they do share common ground with many gun owners — armed right-wing extremists and those who fetishize AR-15s do not represent typical American gun owners or their beliefs. That’s especially true given the changing nature of who owns guns in the United States: women and Black Americans are among the fastest-growing demographics.
This summer, for the first time in decades, Congress passed major bipartisan gun safety legislation — a major accomplishment and a sign that common ground is not terra incognita. It should have gone further — and can in the future: preventing anyone under 21 from buying a semiautomatic weapon, for instance, and erasing the 10-year sunset of the background-check provision. States should also be compelled to pass tougher red-flag laws to take guns out of the hands of suicidal or potentially violent people. Mandatory gun-liability insurance is also an idea with merit.
States and the federal government should also pass far tougher regulations on the gun industry, particularly through restrictions on the marketing of guns, which have helped supercharge the cult of the AR-15. New York’s law, which allows parties like victims of gun violence and the state government to sue gun sellers, manufacturers and distributors, is a good model for other states to follow.
Federal regulators should also do more to regulate the arms industry’s marketing practices, which are becoming more deadly and deranged by the year. They have the legal authority to do so but, thus far, not the will to act.
Americans are going to live with a lot of guns for a long time. There are already more than 415 million guns in circulation, including 25 million semiautomatic military-style rifles. Calls for confiscating them — or even calls for another assault weapons ban — are well intentioned and completely unrealistic. With proper care and maintenance, guns made today will still fire decades from now. Each month, Americans add nearly two million more to the national stockpile.
But even if common-sense regulation of guns is far from political reality, Americans do not have to accept the worst of gun culture becoming pervasive in our politics. The only hope the nation has for living in and around so many deadly weapons is a political system capable of resolving our many differences without the need to use them.
SO REPUBLICANS WANT TO READ THE CONSTITUTION? THEY SHOULD LOOK AT THESE PARTS.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Republican leaders have announced their intention to read the Constitution on the House floor during the first day of the new Congress. That’s all well and good, but they need to understand it as well.
Unfortunately, Republicans have shown a troubling lack of comprehension of our founding document in recent years. So here’s some assistance with some sections that seem to trip them up.
Let’s start with Article II, Section 1, Clause 7: “The President shall, at stated Times, receive for his Services, a Compensation, which shall neither be encreased nor diminished during the Period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them.”
This provision should have prevented former president Donald Trump from reaping income from foreigners, including foreign government officials who stayed at his properties. Yet Republicans chose to ignore it.
This is particularly important now, as Forbes recently revealed that Trump failed to disclose that he had a loan with Daewoo, a South Korean conglomerate, while running for president in 2016. Forbes reports, “There’s little doubt that if the world had known about the debt while Trump was president, it would have sparked conflicts-of-interest concerns, perhaps heightened by Daewoo’s historical ties to North Korea. (In the mid-1990s, the firm was the only South Korean company permitted to operate a business inside the country.)” Perhaps Republicans might want to pass legislation prohibiting any president from continuing to do business with foreigners while in office? Just a thought.
Next up is Article II, Section 1, Clause 8: “Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, [the president] shall take the following Oath or Affirmation: I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Enough said, right?
Here’s another critical one: Article II, Section 4. “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
Inciting an insurrection, refusing to come to the aid of Congress and the vice president during an attack on the U.S. Capitol, cooking up a scheme to throw out electors, and extorting Ukraine for political favors all meet the definition of “high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Again, Republicans seemed not to care.
Let’s skip over to Article III, Section 2, Clause 2: “In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”
This should serve as a warning to Republicans and the partisan right-wing hacks they put on the Supreme Court. Should Democrats win back the House and keep the Senate and White House in 2024, they can alter (even abolish!) the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction. They could reasonably argue that a court that operates like a partisan body, not a judicial one, shouldn’t be reviewing the decisions of lower courts.
Presumably, Republicans will include in their reading the amendments to the Constitution. The First Amendment reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Note that it does not say “Twitter shall make no law.” Nor that “publishers can reject no book.” The notion, as many on the right suggest, that it is unconstitutional for private companies to refuse to serve as a platform for misinformation or noxious views is nonsense.
It’s also worth calling attention to the “establishment of religion” clause. The framers might be shocked to learn that, according to the right-wing Supreme Court, this doesn’t prohibit organized prayer at school events,government funding of religious schools and the imposition of health-care decisions based on sectarian views.
Republicans should also mull over the 14th Amendment: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
That doesn’t divide Americans into “real Americans” and “elites,” as Republicans so often do. No individual or group is entitled to maintain a grip on power, no matter what Christian nationalists say.
Let’s end on one of my personal favorites, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who … shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
Republicans should understand that no former president or member of Congress who attempted to prevent the transfer of power in January 2021 should be eligible to serve. Though they shouldn’t need to consult the Constitution to know that.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Republican leaders have announced their intention to read the Constitution on the House floor during the first day of the new Congress. That’s all well and good, but they need to understand it as well.
Unfortunately, Republicans have shown a troubling lack of comprehension of our founding document in recent years. So here’s some assistance with some sections that seem to trip them up.
Let’s start with Article II, Section 1, Clause 7: “The President shall, at stated Times, receive for his Services, a Compensation, which shall neither be encreased nor diminished during the Period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them.”
This provision should have prevented former president Donald Trump from reaping income from foreigners, including foreign government officials who stayed at his properties. Yet Republicans chose to ignore it.
This is particularly important now, as Forbes recently revealed that Trump failed to disclose that he had a loan with Daewoo, a South Korean conglomerate, while running for president in 2016. Forbes reports, “There’s little doubt that if the world had known about the debt while Trump was president, it would have sparked conflicts-of-interest concerns, perhaps heightened by Daewoo’s historical ties to North Korea. (In the mid-1990s, the firm was the only South Korean company permitted to operate a business inside the country.)” Perhaps Republicans might want to pass legislation prohibiting any president from continuing to do business with foreigners while in office? Just a thought.
Next up is Article II, Section 1, Clause 8: “Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, [the president] shall take the following Oath or Affirmation: I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Enough said, right?
Here’s another critical one: Article II, Section 4. “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
Inciting an insurrection, refusing to come to the aid of Congress and the vice president during an attack on the U.S. Capitol, cooking up a scheme to throw out electors, and extorting Ukraine for political favors all meet the definition of “high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Again, Republicans seemed not to care.
Let’s skip over to Article III, Section 2, Clause 2: “In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”
This should serve as a warning to Republicans and the partisan right-wing hacks they put on the Supreme Court. Should Democrats win back the House and keep the Senate and White House in 2024, they can alter (even abolish!) the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction. They could reasonably argue that a court that operates like a partisan body, not a judicial one, shouldn’t be reviewing the decisions of lower courts.
Presumably, Republicans will include in their reading the amendments to the Constitution. The First Amendment reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Note that it does not say “Twitter shall make no law.” Nor that “publishers can reject no book.” The notion, as many on the right suggest, that it is unconstitutional for private companies to refuse to serve as a platform for misinformation or noxious views is nonsense.
It’s also worth calling attention to the “establishment of religion” clause. The framers might be shocked to learn that, according to the right-wing Supreme Court, this doesn’t prohibit organized prayer at school events,
Republicans should also mull over the 14th Amendment: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
That doesn’t divide Americans into “real Americans” and “elites,” as Republicans so often do. No individual or group is entitled to maintain a grip on power, no matter what Christian nationalists say.
Let’s end on one of my personal favorites, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who … shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
Republicans should understand that no former president or member of Congress who attempted to prevent the transfer of power in January 2021 should be eligible to serve. Though they shouldn’t need to consult the Constitution to know that.
REPUBLICANS SHOULD HAVE BOOTED TRUMP LONG BEFORE HE THREATENED THE CONSTITUTION
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
president Donald Trump, within the space of two weeks, sat down to dine with two antisemites (one of whom later declared his love of Hitler) and declared on Truth Social that the U.S. Constitution should be subject to “termination” so he could be installed as president. Rarely has an authoritarian insurrectionist under criminal investigation for attempting to overthrow the government issued so candid a confession.
The White House responded, “You cannot only love America when you win. The American Constitution is a sacrosanct document that for over 200 years has guaranteed that freedom and the rule of law prevail in our great country.” Its statement continued: “The Constitution brings the American people together — regardless of party — and elected leaders swear to uphold it. It’s the ultimate monument to all of the Americans who have given their lives to defeat self-serving despots that abused their power and trampled on fundamental rights.”
In a healthy democracy with two sane, stable and pro-democratic parties, it never would have come to this. In such a world, Republicans never would have nominated and elected in 2016 an openly racist character who fanned birtherism; Republicans never would have renominated him and never would have acquitted him twice in impeachment hearings. Republicans in our parallel universe would have disowned him after Jan. 6, 2021. repudiated him when he issued antisemitic insults and continued to lie about 2020. They would have disowned him when he renounced fidelity to the Constitution.
It would hardly come as a surprise that a parade of spineless Republicans appearing on the Sunday shows refused to declare him unfit to be president. Rep. Michael R. Turner (R-Ohio), ready to claim the chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee, said that he “vehemently disagree[d]” with the remark and managed to acknowledge that Trump’s repudiation of the Constitution was “not consistent with the oath that we all take.” Though he finally agreed that he would condemn Trump’s comments, he insisted there was a “political process” to play out to determine the party’s 2024 nominee. In refusing to rule out Trump as the nominee, he personifies the moral cowardice of today’s GOP.
Likewise, Rep.-elect Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) would merely say he didn’t “endorse” the threat to overturn the Constitution. (That’s a relief!) And Rep. David Joyce (R-Ohio), who chairs something called the Republican Governance Group, offered only that Trump “says a lot of things.” Worse, he explicitly declared that he would “support whoever the Republican nominee is,” without ruling out Trump. (At least Marc Short, former chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence, acknowledged, “The president’s remarks, the company he’s keeping, I think is way beyond the fold.”)
This is precisely how we got to this shameful state of affairs: Republicans lack the spine, decency and loyalty to the Constitution to denounce Trump by name and declare him unfit to seek the presidency. In 1992, the Republican Party denounced former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke when he attempted to run for president. Don’t expect it to have any such standards now.
Republicans continue to cower in fear of the radicalized base (which they helped rile up by standing by the “big lie” that the 2020 race was stolen). They fret that Trump might run as an independent or instruct his base to stay home if they turn on him. (Spoiler: He’ll do that anyway unless they hand him the nomination.)
We await a contender for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024 (aside from Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming) to declare he or she will not support him if he is the party’s nominee. Their silence amounts to complicity in the repudiation of our democracy. They are implicitly telling us that someone who rejects the Constitution is a valid contender for the presidential nomination.
No member of the media should allow Republican candidates, officeholders or operatives to escape an interview without declaring whether they would support for president a self-described opponent of the Constitution. Too many in the political press continue to treat the GOP as an ordinary party and focus on the horserace for 2024. It should not be too much to ask that serious media outlets label the GOP accurately as a threat to constitutional government and to democracy. At the very least, might mainstream reporters and pundits stop ridiculing President Biden for condemning the “semi-fascist” MAGA movement and repeatedly defending the rule of law?
Neither the press nor the American people can afford to ignore a MAGA GOP that embraces a racist, an antisemite and an enemy of democracy. Trump’s rants are more than just “talk”; they’re an invitation to repeat the horrors of Jan. 6.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
president Donald Trump, within the space of two weeks, sat down to dine with two antisemites (one of whom later declared his love of Hitler) and declared on Truth Social that the U.S. Constitution should be subject to “termination” so he could be installed as president. Rarely has an authoritarian insurrectionist under criminal investigation for attempting to overthrow the government issued so candid a confession.
The White House responded, “You cannot only love America when you win. The American Constitution is a sacrosanct document that for over 200 years has guaranteed that freedom and the rule of law prevail in our great country.” Its statement continued: “The Constitution brings the American people together — regardless of party — and elected leaders swear to uphold it. It’s the ultimate monument to all of the Americans who have given their lives to defeat self-serving despots that abused their power and trampled on fundamental rights.”
In a healthy democracy with two sane, stable and pro-democratic parties, it never would have come to this. In such a world, Republicans never would have nominated and elected in 2016 an openly racist character who fanned birtherism; Republicans never would have renominated him and never would have acquitted him twice in impeachment hearings. Republicans in our parallel universe would have disowned him after Jan. 6, 2021. repudiated him when he issued antisemitic insults and continued to lie about 2020. They would have disowned him when he renounced fidelity to the Constitution.
It would hardly come as a surprise that a parade of spineless Republicans appearing on the Sunday shows refused to declare him unfit to be president. Rep. Michael R. Turner (R-Ohio), ready to claim the chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee, said that he “vehemently disagree[d]” with the remark and managed to acknowledge that Trump’s repudiation of the Constitution was “not consistent with the oath that we all take.” Though he finally agreed that he would condemn Trump’s comments, he insisted there was a “political process” to play out to determine the party’s 2024 nominee. In refusing to rule out Trump as the nominee, he personifies the moral cowardice of today’s GOP.
Likewise, Rep.-elect Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) would merely say he didn’t “endorse” the threat to overturn the Constitution. (That’s a relief!) And Rep. David Joyce (R-Ohio), who chairs something called the Republican Governance Group, offered only that Trump “says a lot of things.” Worse, he explicitly declared that he would “support whoever the Republican nominee is,” without ruling out Trump. (At least Marc Short, former chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence, acknowledged, “The president’s remarks, the company he’s keeping, I think is way beyond the fold.”)
This is precisely how we got to this shameful state of affairs: Republicans lack the spine, decency and loyalty to the Constitution to denounce Trump by name and declare him unfit to seek the presidency. In 1992, the Republican Party denounced former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke when he attempted to run for president. Don’t expect it to have any such standards now.
Republicans continue to cower in fear of the radicalized base (which they helped rile up by standing by the “big lie” that the 2020 race was stolen). They fret that Trump might run as an independent or instruct his base to stay home if they turn on him. (Spoiler: He’ll do that anyway unless they hand him the nomination.)
We await a contender for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024 (aside from Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming) to declare he or she will not support him if he is the party’s nominee. Their silence amounts to complicity in the repudiation of our democracy. They are implicitly telling us that someone who rejects the Constitution is a valid contender for the presidential nomination.
No member of the media should allow Republican candidates, officeholders or operatives to escape an interview without declaring whether they would support for president a self-described opponent of the Constitution. Too many in the political press continue to treat the GOP as an ordinary party and focus on the horserace for 2024. It should not be too much to ask that serious media outlets label the GOP accurately as a threat to constitutional government and to democracy. At the very least, might mainstream reporters and pundits stop ridiculing President Biden for condemning the “semi-fascist” MAGA movement and repeatedly defending the rule of law?
Neither the press nor the American people can afford to ignore a MAGA GOP that embraces a racist, an antisemite and an enemy of democracy. Trump’s rants are more than just “talk”; they’re an invitation to repeat the horrors of Jan. 6.
THE GOP IS STUCK IN A DOOM LOOP BEGUN 30 YEARS AGO
By David Von Drehle, The Washington Post
One cannot be surprised to find the Republican Party adrift. This is what happens to ships boarded by pirates, plundered and set aflame on the high seas.
Poor Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), leader of the House majority-to-be: How glum he looks as the Cuckoo Caucus binds his hands to walk the plank of a doomed speakership. He knows he will soon bob helplessly amid the same swarm of sharks that devoured predecessors Paul D. Ryan and John A. Boehner.
GOP. But it won’t be a quick fix, because righting the ship is not simply a matter of striking the orange skull and crossbones and raising the standard of some better-behaved buccaneer. Deeper problems made the party vulnerable to raiding in the first place.
Americans have voted in eight presidential elections in the three previous decades. Only once, in 2004, has the Republican won a majority of the popular vote. Running as an incumbent in wartime, George W. Bush eked out 51 percent of the popular vote against a weak opponent named John F. Kerry.
What happened? Until the GOP faces the answer, it will continue to drift as a national party.
Many Republicans remember 1992 as the year Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot flew a suicide mission into George H.W. Bush’s reelection campaign. But the first fatal blow to Bush Sr. was dealt by hard-right pundit Patrick J. Buchanan. His angry populist campaign carried all the way to the convention, where he traded a grudging endorsement of Bush for influence over the opening-night program. Buchanan anchored an evening of hatreds and resentments that presaged the politics of today.
With Bush Sr. gone, de facto leadership of the GOP passed to Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who had risen from the backbenches of the House by perfecting a politics of personal destruction. Gingrich was the first speaker of the House to stir up a presidential impeachment that had no chance of success in the Senate — a bad idea on which the Democrats later doubled down.
One of the fathers of modern American conservatism, William F. Buckley Jr., had Buchanan on his mind in the months leading up to that fateful 1992 campaign. In a 40,000-word essay published late in 1991, Buckley examined the pitchfork populist’s tendency to deal in antisemitic tropes and allusions. His conclusion: “I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism, whatever it was that drove him to say and do it.”
George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign was a repudiation of the Buchanan movement. Bush promised to govern as a “compassionate conservative” — welcoming of immigrants, tolerant of difference, approving of compromise. But he did no more to vindicate this approach than his father had, leaving office amid a failing war and a crashed economy.
Buchananism, with its ugly undertones and shades of paranoid grievance, was the only energy remaining in the GOP. It expressed itself in the tea party movement of 2010. Mitt Romney’s failed 2012 campaign was the last gasp of the party elite, which was too exhausted to resist Donald Trump’s takeover four years later.
From Buchanan to Gingrich to Trump, the drivers of the Republican Party have pushed relentlessly toward anger, accusation, isolationism, pessimism and paranoia. In the guise of battling the left, they wage their most effective warfare against their fellow Republicans. Having purged proponents of the overwhelmingly popular ideas of the 1970s and 1980s — strong alliances and free markets, individual freedom and personal responsibility, the rule of law, faith in the future — they offer nothing positive. Literally: In 2020, the GOP did not offer any platform.
Trump’s supper with a Holocaust denier brings Buchanan’s assault on the GOP to its dismal conclusion — at a hateful dead end. Individual Republicans will continue to win races, if only because the Democrats have their own self-destructive elements. But the party will not be popular as long as the Dark Side is in charge.
By David Von Drehle, The Washington Post
One cannot be surprised to find the Republican Party adrift. This is what happens to ships boarded by pirates, plundered and set aflame on the high seas.
Poor Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), leader of the House majority-to-be: How glum he looks as the Cuckoo Caucus binds his hands to walk the plank of a doomed speakership. He knows he will soon bob helplessly amid the same swarm of sharks that devoured predecessors Paul D. Ryan and John A. Boehner.
GOP. But it won’t be a quick fix, because righting the ship is not simply a matter of striking the orange skull and crossbones and raising the standard of some better-behaved buccaneer. Deeper problems made the party vulnerable to raiding in the first place.
Americans have voted in eight presidential elections in the three previous decades. Only once, in 2004, has the Republican won a majority of the popular vote. Running as an incumbent in wartime, George W. Bush eked out 51 percent of the popular vote against a weak opponent named John F. Kerry.
What happened? Until the GOP faces the answer, it will continue to drift as a national party.
Many Republicans remember 1992 as the year Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot flew a suicide mission into George H.W. Bush’s reelection campaign. But the first fatal blow to Bush Sr. was dealt by hard-right pundit Patrick J. Buchanan. His angry populist campaign carried all the way to the convention, where he traded a grudging endorsement of Bush for influence over the opening-night program. Buchanan anchored an evening of hatreds and resentments that presaged the politics of today.
With Bush Sr. gone, de facto leadership of the GOP passed to Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who had risen from the backbenches of the House by perfecting a politics of personal destruction. Gingrich was the first speaker of the House to stir up a presidential impeachment that had no chance of success in the Senate — a bad idea on which the Democrats later doubled down.
One of the fathers of modern American conservatism, William F. Buckley Jr., had Buchanan on his mind in the months leading up to that fateful 1992 campaign. In a 40,000-word essay published late in 1991, Buckley examined the pitchfork populist’s tendency to deal in antisemitic tropes and allusions. His conclusion: “I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism, whatever it was that drove him to say and do it.”
George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign was a repudiation of the Buchanan movement. Bush promised to govern as a “compassionate conservative” — welcoming of immigrants, tolerant of difference, approving of compromise. But he did no more to vindicate this approach than his father had, leaving office amid a failing war and a crashed economy.
Buchananism, with its ugly undertones and shades of paranoid grievance, was the only energy remaining in the GOP. It expressed itself in the tea party movement of 2010. Mitt Romney’s failed 2012 campaign was the last gasp of the party elite, which was too exhausted to resist Donald Trump’s takeover four years later.
From Buchanan to Gingrich to Trump, the drivers of the Republican Party have pushed relentlessly toward anger, accusation, isolationism, pessimism and paranoia. In the guise of battling the left, they wage their most effective warfare against their fellow Republicans. Having purged proponents of the overwhelmingly popular ideas of the 1970s and 1980s — strong alliances and free markets, individual freedom and personal responsibility, the rule of law, faith in the future — they offer nothing positive. Literally: In 2020, the GOP did not offer any platform.
Trump’s supper with a Holocaust denier brings Buchanan’s assault on the GOP to its dismal conclusion — at a hateful dead end. Individual Republicans will continue to win races, if only because the Democrats have their own self-destructive elements. But the party will not be popular as long as the Dark Side is in charge.
CYNICAL MAGA CENSORS ARE DAMAGING PUBLIC EDUCATION
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
MAGA culture warriors have heightened their threats against teachers and school administrators. Our public education system is now paying the price.
That’s the takeaway from an alarming study from a group of researchers from the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of California at Riverside. They found that the “virulent stream of hyperpartisan political conflict" has had "a chilling effect on high school education.” Teachers are seeking to avoid controversy by "pulling back on teaching lessons in civics, politics, and the history and experiences of America’s minority communities”; incidents of verbal harassment of LGBTQ students are on the rise; and many teachers and administrator are planning to leave their jobs.
The authors of the report surveyed 682 public high school principals, who confirmed that organized campaigns have attempted to intimidate public schools and force changes to align with right-wing ideology. The researchers write, “Our survey data make clear that political conflict over a set of hot button issues occurred at more than two-thirds (69%) of public schools across the nation during the 2021-2022 school year.” Moreover, “Half of all principals report that parents or other community members sought to limit or challenge teaching and learning about issues of race and racism. Nearly half report challenges to school policies and practices related to LGBTQ student rights.” And a third of principals said “parents or community members raised challenges to school library books they deemed inappropriate.”
This is not about parents getting involved in shaping how children learn in a healthy or respectful manner. Rather, the authors stress, this is about individuals trying to "spread falsehoods, deny civil liberties, and employ hostile and violent rhetoric or intimidating action.”
That kind of onslaught is most intense in purple communities where competing factions vie for control of schools. “Outside groups have specifically targeted these communities through a ‘conflict campaign’ to gain partisan advantage,” the study finds. In most cases, a relatively small group of hostile parents and community members are leading the charge, thwarting the wishes of the majority of parents and others who want kids to have an accurate, inclusive and skills-building education.
The authors write:
For example, a recent national survey finds that over 95% of Americans want high school students to learn about slavery, and 85% want high school students to learn about racial inequality. These practices are important indicators because they help prepare youth for life in a diverse democracy, the public is broadly supportive of them, and yet there is reason to fear that they may be subject to a chilling effect due to current political dynamics.
Such partisan hullabaloo not only distracts educators, but also spreads an atmosphere of incivility and prompts teachers and administrators to shy away from “discussion of current controversial issues.” As a result, fewer students are learning to debate issues. Again, this is contrary to the wishes of the 80 percent of U.S. adults who “believe that controversial issues such as immigration, the second amendment, and income inequality should be discussed in high schools.”
Intimidation also affects students’ ability to identify misinformation, to the detriment of their development and our democracy more generally. The authors write, “If educational efforts are to address this polarization and conflict, and if they are to prepare youth to participate in productive forms of democratic deliberation, it is of paramount importance that public schools better prepare students to judge the accuracy of information.”
The bottom line, according to the study’s authors: Right-wing advocacy organizations and media are impairing the ability of schools to uphold values of "diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
Teachers, principals and school officials can try to manage the swirl of political conflict and demand civility within schools. Many are encouraging students to attend school board meetings and lead their own forums to discuss these issues. But until communities as a whole defend the mission of public education and the ideals of respectful and inclusive debate, teachers and administrators will continue to abandon their profession. Meanwhile, students will continue to lose skills needed to function in a diverse democracy.
Letting a small cadre of partisan bullies to prevail will have serious consequences for American society.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
MAGA culture warriors have heightened their threats against teachers and school administrators. Our public education system is now paying the price.
That’s the takeaway from an alarming study from a group of researchers from the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of California at Riverside. They found that the “virulent stream of hyperpartisan political conflict" has had "a chilling effect on high school education.” Teachers are seeking to avoid controversy by "pulling back on teaching lessons in civics, politics, and the history and experiences of America’s minority communities”; incidents of verbal harassment of LGBTQ students are on the rise; and many teachers and administrator are planning to leave their jobs.
The authors of the report surveyed 682 public high school principals, who confirmed that organized campaigns have attempted to intimidate public schools and force changes to align with right-wing ideology. The researchers write, “Our survey data make clear that political conflict over a set of hot button issues occurred at more than two-thirds (69%) of public schools across the nation during the 2021-2022 school year.” Moreover, “Half of all principals report that parents or other community members sought to limit or challenge teaching and learning about issues of race and racism. Nearly half report challenges to school policies and practices related to LGBTQ student rights.” And a third of principals said “parents or community members raised challenges to school library books they deemed inappropriate.”
This is not about parents getting involved in shaping how children learn in a healthy or respectful manner. Rather, the authors stress, this is about individuals trying to "spread falsehoods, deny civil liberties, and employ hostile and violent rhetoric or intimidating action.”
That kind of onslaught is most intense in purple communities where competing factions vie for control of schools. “Outside groups have specifically targeted these communities through a ‘conflict campaign’ to gain partisan advantage,” the study finds. In most cases, a relatively small group of hostile parents and community members are leading the charge, thwarting the wishes of the majority of parents and others who want kids to have an accurate, inclusive and skills-building education.
The authors write:
For example, a recent national survey finds that over 95% of Americans want high school students to learn about slavery, and 85% want high school students to learn about racial inequality. These practices are important indicators because they help prepare youth for life in a diverse democracy, the public is broadly supportive of them, and yet there is reason to fear that they may be subject to a chilling effect due to current political dynamics.
Such partisan hullabaloo not only distracts educators, but also spreads an atmosphere of incivility and prompts teachers and administrators to shy away from “discussion of current controversial issues.” As a result, fewer students are learning to debate issues. Again, this is contrary to the wishes of the 80 percent of U.S. adults who “believe that controversial issues such as immigration, the second amendment, and income inequality should be discussed in high schools.”
Intimidation also affects students’ ability to identify misinformation, to the detriment of their development and our democracy more generally. The authors write, “If educational efforts are to address this polarization and conflict, and if they are to prepare youth to participate in productive forms of democratic deliberation, it is of paramount importance that public schools better prepare students to judge the accuracy of information.”
The bottom line, according to the study’s authors: Right-wing advocacy organizations and media are impairing the ability of schools to uphold values of "diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
Teachers, principals and school officials can try to manage the swirl of political conflict and demand civility within schools. Many are encouraging students to attend school board meetings and lead their own forums to discuss these issues. But until communities as a whole defend the mission of public education and the ideals of respectful and inclusive debate, teachers and administrators will continue to abandon their profession. Meanwhile, students will continue to lose skills needed to function in a diverse democracy.
Letting a small cadre of partisan bullies to prevail will have serious consequences for American society.
RON DESANTIS IS AN OPTICAL ILLUSION
By Frank Bruni, The New York Times
Elon Musk is a geyser of gibberish, so it’s important not to make too much of anything he says. But a recent Twitter thread of his deserved the attention it got, if not for the specific detail on which most journalists focused.
They led with Musk’s statement that he would support a Ron DeSantis candidacy for the presidency in 2024. That obviously disses one Donald Trump, though it should come as no surprise: Magnates like Musk typically cling to the moment’s shiniest toys, and DeSantis, fresh off his re-election, is a curiously gleaming action figure.
But how Musk framed his attraction to the Florida governor was revealing — and troubling. He expressed a desire for a candidate who’s “sensible and centrist,” implying that DeSantis is both.
In what universe? He’s “sensible and centrist” only by the warped yardsticks of Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kari Lake and the like. But those yardsticks will be used frequently as various Republicans join the 2024 fray. And therein lies real danger.
Trump’s challengers will be defined in relation to him, casting them in a deceptively flattering light. They’ll be deemed steady because he’s not, on the ball because he’s out to lunch, enlightened because they don’t sup with Holocaust deniers. They’ll be realists to his fantasist, institutionalists to his nihilist, preservationists to his arsonist.
None of those descriptions will be true. Some will be persuasive nonetheless.
That dynamic is already doing wonders for DeSantis as he flies high over a very low bar. “Look!” say Republicans eager to take back the White House. “It’s Superman!” Hardly. But his promoters are hoping that the shadow of Trump produces such an optical illusion.
“Plenty of Americans across the partisan divide would have good reason to root for him,” Jim Geraghty, the senior political correspondent for the conservative journal National Review, wrote in a recent essay in The Washington Post that praised DeSantis. Parts of it made DeSantis sound consensus-minded, conciliatory. That’s some trick.
Geraghty added: “Given the bizarre state of American politics during the Trump era, DeSantis would represent a return to normality.” The “given” in that sentence is working overtime, and “normality” fits DeSantis about as well as “sensible” and “centrist” do.
It is not normal to release a campaign ad, as DeSantis did last month, that explicitly identifies you as someone created and commanded by God to pursue the precise political agenda that you’re pursuing. Better words for that include “messianic,” “megalomaniacal” and “delusional.”
It is not sensible to open a new state office devoted to election crimes when there is scant evidence of any need for it. That is called “pandering.” It is also known as a “stunt.”
It is not centrist to have a key aide who tweeted that anyone who opposed the “Don’t Say Gay” education law in Florida was “probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children.” Those were the words of Christina Pushaw, who was then DeSantis’s press secretary and “transformed the governor’s state messaging office into a hyperpartisan extension of his political efforts,” as Matt Dixon noted in Politico, adding that she “used the position to regularly pick public fights with reporters on social media, amplify right-wing media outlets and conservative personalities and attack individuals who oppose or challenge DeSantis.”
DeSantis’s response to her derisive and divisive antics? He made her the “rapid response director” for his re-election campaign. Because that’s the normal, sensible, centrist thing to do.
DeSantis used his power as governor to punish Disney for daring to dissent from his political views. He used migrants as political pawns and sent two planes full of them to Martha’s Vineyard. He pushed for an extreme gerrymander in Florida that marginalized minority voters. He’s a darling of the National Rifle Association.
The extremists and conspiracists so prevalent in today’s Republican Party have distorted the frame for everyone else, permitting the peddling of DeSantis as some paragon of reason. Be savvier than Musk. Don’t buy it.
By Frank Bruni, The New York Times
Elon Musk is a geyser of gibberish, so it’s important not to make too much of anything he says. But a recent Twitter thread of his deserved the attention it got, if not for the specific detail on which most journalists focused.
They led with Musk’s statement that he would support a Ron DeSantis candidacy for the presidency in 2024. That obviously disses one Donald Trump, though it should come as no surprise: Magnates like Musk typically cling to the moment’s shiniest toys, and DeSantis, fresh off his re-election, is a curiously gleaming action figure.
But how Musk framed his attraction to the Florida governor was revealing — and troubling. He expressed a desire for a candidate who’s “sensible and centrist,” implying that DeSantis is both.
In what universe? He’s “sensible and centrist” only by the warped yardsticks of Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kari Lake and the like. But those yardsticks will be used frequently as various Republicans join the 2024 fray. And therein lies real danger.
Trump’s challengers will be defined in relation to him, casting them in a deceptively flattering light. They’ll be deemed steady because he’s not, on the ball because he’s out to lunch, enlightened because they don’t sup with Holocaust deniers. They’ll be realists to his fantasist, institutionalists to his nihilist, preservationists to his arsonist.
None of those descriptions will be true. Some will be persuasive nonetheless.
That dynamic is already doing wonders for DeSantis as he flies high over a very low bar. “Look!” say Republicans eager to take back the White House. “It’s Superman!” Hardly. But his promoters are hoping that the shadow of Trump produces such an optical illusion.
“Plenty of Americans across the partisan divide would have good reason to root for him,” Jim Geraghty, the senior political correspondent for the conservative journal National Review, wrote in a recent essay in The Washington Post that praised DeSantis. Parts of it made DeSantis sound consensus-minded, conciliatory. That’s some trick.
Geraghty added: “Given the bizarre state of American politics during the Trump era, DeSantis would represent a return to normality.” The “given” in that sentence is working overtime, and “normality” fits DeSantis about as well as “sensible” and “centrist” do.
It is not normal to release a campaign ad, as DeSantis did last month, that explicitly identifies you as someone created and commanded by God to pursue the precise political agenda that you’re pursuing. Better words for that include “messianic,” “megalomaniacal” and “delusional.”
It is not sensible to open a new state office devoted to election crimes when there is scant evidence of any need for it. That is called “pandering.” It is also known as a “stunt.”
It is not centrist to have a key aide who tweeted that anyone who opposed the “Don’t Say Gay” education law in Florida was “probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children.” Those were the words of Christina Pushaw, who was then DeSantis’s press secretary and “transformed the governor’s state messaging office into a hyperpartisan extension of his political efforts,” as Matt Dixon noted in Politico, adding that she “used the position to regularly pick public fights with reporters on social media, amplify right-wing media outlets and conservative personalities and attack individuals who oppose or challenge DeSantis.”
DeSantis’s response to her derisive and divisive antics? He made her the “rapid response director” for his re-election campaign. Because that’s the normal, sensible, centrist thing to do.
DeSantis used his power as governor to punish Disney for daring to dissent from his political views. He used migrants as political pawns and sent two planes full of them to Martha’s Vineyard. He pushed for an extreme gerrymander in Florida that marginalized minority voters. He’s a darling of the National Rifle Association.
The extremists and conspiracists so prevalent in today’s Republican Party have distorted the frame for everyone else, permitting the peddling of DeSantis as some paragon of reason. Be savvier than Musk. Don’t buy it.
MEDICARE ADVANTAGE? MORE LIKE MEDICARE DISADVANTAGE.
By Helaine Olen, The Washington Post
When the annual enrollment period for Medicare ends on Dec. 7, analysts expect that, for the first time, more seniors will receive their 2023 health-care coverage from Medicare Advantage than the traditional program.
That’s not a good thing for either elderly Americans or federal coffers. And while seniors are well advised to approach these plans with caution, we should all be paying attention to what’s going on.
Medicare Advantage plans, which are private insurance plans for seniors paid for with federal dollars, originated as a government savings strategy, on the theory that the private sector could improve on government performance at a lower cost. But over the past two decades, it has become clear that Medicare Advantage does not result in improved care for less money. Instead, it will come as no surprise to Americans familiar with the health insurance industry that insurers found a way to turn it into yet another profit center, while putting bureaucratic roadblocks in the way of patients.
The problems are so pronounced that Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) — both advocates of Medicare-for-all — recently introduced little-noticed legislation that would ban private insurers from using the word “Medicare” in their names or advertisements.
“Medicare implies universal coverage. You can go to any doctor, you can get your claims reimbursed,” Khanna told me. “You shouldn’t be able to appropriate the trust and faith people have in Medicare to sell a private product for personal profit that doesn’t have the same rules.”
Insurers in Medicare Advantage are paid a flat fee by the government, based on the enrollee’s health. These insurance companies often want their members to appear as ill as possible — at least as far as the Feds are concerned. They might “upcode,” in doctor speak, maximizing the amount of money they receive. (The federal government calls that practice “fraud” and has sued several of the largest insurers in federal court for it, including Anthem and Cigna, in cases still ongoing.)
As a result, multiple studies have found that seniors on Medicare Advantage cost the government more than those in the traditional program, exactly the opposite of what is intended. A government advisory panel recently estimated the overpayment was $12 billion in 2020.
This flood of money is fattening the bottom line of the health insurance giants even as they’re increasing pressure on the Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund, which is projected to run out of funds in 2026. And Congress is loath to crack down, thanks to the combined power of health insurance lobbying and the program’s popularity with cash-strapped seniors.
Meanwhile, it’s not like seniors are getting better care for the money the federal government is spending — in fact, it can be worse. A research brief posted on the National Bureau of Economic Research website found picking the right plan could literally be a matter of life or death.
It’s “widespread” for Medicare Advantage plans to initially deny coverage for doctor-advised care, according to a report released this year by the Department of Health and Human Services. Plans erect roadblocks to treatment by demanding prior authorization for services traditional Medicare covers without questions. Plans can — and sometimes do — refuse to cover necessary prescription drugs. There are increasing complaints that private insurers rush patients out of skilled nursing and rehab facilities.
So why do people sign up? Traditional Medicare is not simple. It’s a complicated stew of different parts — for hospitalization, for doctors and for prescriptions. Seniors might feel they have to purchase supplemental coverage known as Medigap, which helps cover the co-pays and deductibles that Medicare does not cover.
Many Medicare Advantage plans eliminate or significantly reduce these out-of-pocket costs, as long as beneficiaries stay within their approved network. The private policies also frequently offer vision and dental coverage, not to mention gym memberships, something not on offer in Medicare itself.
These extras have an appeal. But a streamlined plan that can end up costing seniors more is no bargain — and Medicare Advantage sometimes relies on deceptive marketing to get them in the door. A report issued earlier this year by the Senate Finance Committee’s Democratic majority found that unscrupulous insurance agents — who are paid significantly more to sign up seniors for Medicare Advantage plans than for the traditional offering — will sometimes be misleading about networks and benefits, and even pursue seniors suffering from dementia. Ads featuring celebrities claim the plans will put more money in seniors’ pockets.
Medicare Advantage defenders are quick to point out that surveys show their enrollees are more likely to receive such preventive health and wellness services as monitoring of high blood pressure than those with the traditional program. But it’s usually when someone gets seriously ill that Medicare Advantage’s weaknesses become clear.
What would be best would be to fix Medicare, to make it more generous to enrollees and less generous to insurers. That’s unlikely to happen. But we can at least insist on calling it out for what it is: Try Medicare Disadvantage.
By Helaine Olen, The Washington Post
When the annual enrollment period for Medicare ends on Dec. 7, analysts expect that, for the first time, more seniors will receive their 2023 health-care coverage from Medicare Advantage than the traditional program.
That’s not a good thing for either elderly Americans or federal coffers. And while seniors are well advised to approach these plans with caution, we should all be paying attention to what’s going on.
Medicare Advantage plans, which are private insurance plans for seniors paid for with federal dollars, originated as a government savings strategy, on the theory that the private sector could improve on government performance at a lower cost. But over the past two decades, it has become clear that Medicare Advantage does not result in improved care for less money. Instead, it will come as no surprise to Americans familiar with the health insurance industry that insurers found a way to turn it into yet another profit center, while putting bureaucratic roadblocks in the way of patients.
The problems are so pronounced that Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) — both advocates of Medicare-for-all — recently introduced little-noticed legislation that would ban private insurers from using the word “Medicare” in their names or advertisements.
“Medicare implies universal coverage. You can go to any doctor, you can get your claims reimbursed,” Khanna told me. “You shouldn’t be able to appropriate the trust and faith people have in Medicare to sell a private product for personal profit that doesn’t have the same rules.”
Insurers in Medicare Advantage are paid a flat fee by the government, based on the enrollee’s health. These insurance companies often want their members to appear as ill as possible — at least as far as the Feds are concerned. They might “upcode,” in doctor speak, maximizing the amount of money they receive. (The federal government calls that practice “fraud” and has sued several of the largest insurers in federal court for it, including Anthem and Cigna, in cases still ongoing.)
As a result, multiple studies have found that seniors on Medicare Advantage cost the government more than those in the traditional program, exactly the opposite of what is intended. A government advisory panel recently estimated the overpayment was $12 billion in 2020.
This flood of money is fattening the bottom line of the health insurance giants even as they’re increasing pressure on the Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund, which is projected to run out of funds in 2026. And Congress is loath to crack down, thanks to the combined power of health insurance lobbying and the program’s popularity with cash-strapped seniors.
Meanwhile, it’s not like seniors are getting better care for the money the federal government is spending — in fact, it can be worse. A research brief posted on the National Bureau of Economic Research website found picking the right plan could literally be a matter of life or death.
It’s “widespread” for Medicare Advantage plans to initially deny coverage for doctor-advised care, according to a report released this year by the Department of Health and Human Services. Plans erect roadblocks to treatment by demanding prior authorization for services traditional Medicare covers without questions. Plans can — and sometimes do — refuse to cover necessary prescription drugs. There are increasing complaints that private insurers rush patients out of skilled nursing and rehab facilities.
So why do people sign up? Traditional Medicare is not simple. It’s a complicated stew of different parts — for hospitalization, for doctors and for prescriptions. Seniors might feel they have to purchase supplemental coverage known as Medigap, which helps cover the co-pays and deductibles that Medicare does not cover.
Many Medicare Advantage plans eliminate or significantly reduce these out-of-pocket costs, as long as beneficiaries stay within their approved network. The private policies also frequently offer vision and dental coverage, not to mention gym memberships, something not on offer in Medicare itself.
These extras have an appeal. But a streamlined plan that can end up costing seniors more is no bargain — and Medicare Advantage sometimes relies on deceptive marketing to get them in the door. A report issued earlier this year by the Senate Finance Committee’s Democratic majority found that unscrupulous insurance agents — who are paid significantly more to sign up seniors for Medicare Advantage plans than for the traditional offering — will sometimes be misleading about networks and benefits, and even pursue seniors suffering from dementia. Ads featuring celebrities claim the plans will put more money in seniors’ pockets.
Medicare Advantage defenders are quick to point out that surveys show their enrollees are more likely to receive such preventive health and wellness services as monitoring of high blood pressure than those with the traditional program. But it’s usually when someone gets seriously ill that Medicare Advantage’s weaknesses become clear.
What would be best would be to fix Medicare, to make it more generous to enrollees and less generous to insurers. That’s unlikely to happen. But we can at least insist on calling it out for what it is: Try Medicare Disadvantage.
THE TABLE FOR TRUMP’S ANTISEMITIC BANQUET WAS SET LONG AGO
By Bret Stephens, The New York Times
The former president, who is running for his former office, invites to his home one of the most notorious antisemites in the United States, who brings along a well-known Holocaust denier. So far, to my knowledge, the only member of Donald Trump’s cabinet to publicly condemn his former boss by name is Mike Pence. Nor, with a handful of exceptions, have top Republicans or the major organs of right-wing media, and even for them the indictment is mainly that Trump was sloppy about vetting his guest list.
If he were to win again, all this would be swept under the rug, just as it was the last time. This is the new normal. We shouldn’t be surprised. The ground for it was laid long ago.
It was laid when Republicans normalized Trump’s various ethnic bigotries. Remember when, during the 2016 campaign, he said he couldn’t expect to get a fair trial in a fraud case from a judge with Mexican heritage and Paul Ryan, who was then the speaker of the House, called it a “textbook definition of a racist comment”? Ryan endorsed him anyway.
It was laid when Republicans normalized Trump’s conspiracy theories. His birtherism should have been disqualification enough. But the problem with conspiracy thinking is that one theory always leads to another — and the ultimate conspiracy theory, the secret to the secret to the secret, is that the Jews did it. People who can be led to believe anything about anything will eventually believe anything about Jews.
It was laid when Trump and much of conservative media made Republicans the party of immigrant bashers, something they emphatically were not when their standard bearers were Ronald Reagan, the Bushes and John McCain. “You too must befriend the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt,” says the Book of Deuteronomy, which helps explain why the words on the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal were composed by a Jewish poet. It’s also why a fanatic murdered 11 Jewish congregants in a Pittsburgh synagogue in a plot to attack immigration.
It was laid when Trump called the news media the “enemy of the American people.” It should not be controversial to say the mainstream news media is frequently blinkered by groupthink, liberal bias and self-flattering assumptions about its own goodness. But Trump forwent critique for the demonization of an industry that, along with banks and entertainment, is all but synonymous with “Jewish” among hardened antisemites.
It was laid when the conservative movement came to despise intellectualism of any sort, including conservative intellectuals. Though the moment was long in coming, it arrived when Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly publicly ripped into the Washington Post columnist George Will for the latter’s unflattering review of the TV host’s idiotic “Killing Reagan” book, after which Will lost his Fox News contract but retained his honor. (O’Reilly ended up losing both.) The Trumpian right’s hatred of anything that conveys a sense of erudition or culture is not in itself antisemitic. But it has a way of leaning in that direction.
It was laid when “globalist,” another dog-whistle word for “Jew,” became a slur used by the right. The notion that a shadowy group of financiers who share an allegiance to no country, are in it only for themselves and will gladly make the working classes suffer for their profits is the theory behind the “Jews will not replace us” chant adopted by the neo-Nazi marchers at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017.
It was laid when management at Fox News repeatedly stood by its star bigot even as he championed replacement theory, went after the “vulture capitalism” of a prominent Jewish hedge funder and showered praise on Kanye West as a “bold” truth-teller while reportedly editing out Ye’s antisemitic comments.
It was laid when the right repeatedly looked the other way at Trump’s persistent overtures to the radical wing of the party, whether it was tweeting antisemitic images, lying about David Duke or refusing to repudiate white supremacists in Trump’s first debate with Joe Biden — telling the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” This foul courtship has always been part of Trump’s playbook, which is why his most recent dinner should come as a surprise to nobody.
It was laid when pundits on the right justly decried antisemitism on the left — the noxiousness of an Ilhan Omar or a Jeremy Corbyn or the anti-Zionists whose unhinged criticisms of Israel so often mimic ancient antisemitic tropes and behaviors — while remaining practically mute to the antisemitism of a Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Viktor Orban and the QAnon right. “First cast out the beam out of thine own eye” may be a Christian phrase, but it behooves a conservative movement to clean up its own house when it comes to antisemitism before it considers the mote in the eye of its opponents.
A final note: I was reluctant to write this column, because I think the former president is a spent political force and because, as Patti Davis observed on Monday, often the best way to defeat a bully is to ignore him. But the bigotries Trump has unleashed are not spent and cannot be ignored. And they won’t be defeated until they are unequivocally denounced by Republicans.
By Bret Stephens, The New York Times
The former president, who is running for his former office, invites to his home one of the most notorious antisemites in the United States, who brings along a well-known Holocaust denier. So far, to my knowledge, the only member of Donald Trump’s cabinet to publicly condemn his former boss by name is Mike Pence. Nor, with a handful of exceptions, have top Republicans or the major organs of right-wing media, and even for them the indictment is mainly that Trump was sloppy about vetting his guest list.
If he were to win again, all this would be swept under the rug, just as it was the last time. This is the new normal. We shouldn’t be surprised. The ground for it was laid long ago.
It was laid when Republicans normalized Trump’s various ethnic bigotries. Remember when, during the 2016 campaign, he said he couldn’t expect to get a fair trial in a fraud case from a judge with Mexican heritage and Paul Ryan, who was then the speaker of the House, called it a “textbook definition of a racist comment”? Ryan endorsed him anyway.
It was laid when Republicans normalized Trump’s conspiracy theories. His birtherism should have been disqualification enough. But the problem with conspiracy thinking is that one theory always leads to another — and the ultimate conspiracy theory, the secret to the secret to the secret, is that the Jews did it. People who can be led to believe anything about anything will eventually believe anything about Jews.
It was laid when Trump and much of conservative media made Republicans the party of immigrant bashers, something they emphatically were not when their standard bearers were Ronald Reagan, the Bushes and John McCain. “You too must befriend the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt,” says the Book of Deuteronomy, which helps explain why the words on the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal were composed by a Jewish poet. It’s also why a fanatic murdered 11 Jewish congregants in a Pittsburgh synagogue in a plot to attack immigration.
It was laid when Trump called the news media the “enemy of the American people.” It should not be controversial to say the mainstream news media is frequently blinkered by groupthink, liberal bias and self-flattering assumptions about its own goodness. But Trump forwent critique for the demonization of an industry that, along with banks and entertainment, is all but synonymous with “Jewish” among hardened antisemites.
It was laid when the conservative movement came to despise intellectualism of any sort, including conservative intellectuals. Though the moment was long in coming, it arrived when Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly publicly ripped into the Washington Post columnist George Will for the latter’s unflattering review of the TV host’s idiotic “Killing Reagan” book, after which Will lost his Fox News contract but retained his honor. (O’Reilly ended up losing both.) The Trumpian right’s hatred of anything that conveys a sense of erudition or culture is not in itself antisemitic. But it has a way of leaning in that direction.
It was laid when “globalist,” another dog-whistle word for “Jew,” became a slur used by the right. The notion that a shadowy group of financiers who share an allegiance to no country, are in it only for themselves and will gladly make the working classes suffer for their profits is the theory behind the “Jews will not replace us” chant adopted by the neo-Nazi marchers at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017.
It was laid when management at Fox News repeatedly stood by its star bigot even as he championed replacement theory, went after the “vulture capitalism” of a prominent Jewish hedge funder and showered praise on Kanye West as a “bold” truth-teller while reportedly editing out Ye’s antisemitic comments.
It was laid when the right repeatedly looked the other way at Trump’s persistent overtures to the radical wing of the party, whether it was tweeting antisemitic images, lying about David Duke or refusing to repudiate white supremacists in Trump’s first debate with Joe Biden — telling the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” This foul courtship has always been part of Trump’s playbook, which is why his most recent dinner should come as a surprise to nobody.
It was laid when pundits on the right justly decried antisemitism on the left — the noxiousness of an Ilhan Omar or a Jeremy Corbyn or the anti-Zionists whose unhinged criticisms of Israel so often mimic ancient antisemitic tropes and behaviors — while remaining practically mute to the antisemitism of a Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Viktor Orban and the QAnon right. “First cast out the beam out of thine own eye” may be a Christian phrase, but it behooves a conservative movement to clean up its own house when it comes to antisemitism before it considers the mote in the eye of its opponents.
A final note: I was reluctant to write this column, because I think the former president is a spent political force and because, as Patti Davis observed on Monday, often the best way to defeat a bully is to ignore him. But the bigotries Trump has unleashed are not spent and cannot be ignored. And they won’t be defeated until they are unequivocally denounced by Republicans.
GAS DRILLER PLEADS NO CONTEST TO POLLUTING TOWN’S WATER
Pennsylvania’s most active gas driller has pleaded no contest to criminal environmental charges in a landmark pollution case
By Michael Rubinkam, Associated Press
MONTROSE, Pa. — Pennsylvania’s most active gas driller pleaded no contest Tuesday to criminal charges, capping a landmark environmental case against a company that prosecutors say polluted a rural community’s drinking water 14 years ago and then tried to evade responsibility.
Residents of the tiny crossroads of Dimock in northeastern Pennsylvania say they have gone more than a decade without a clean, reliable source of drinking water after their aquifer was ruined by Houston-based Coterra Energy Inc.
Under a plea deal entered in Susquehanna County Court, Coterra agreed to pay $16.29 million to fund construction of a new public water system and pay the impacted residents’ water bills for the next 75 years.
“After more than decade of denials, of shirking responsibility and accountability, Coterra pleaded to their crime, and the people of Dimock finally had their day in court,” Attorney General Josh Shapiro, the state’s incoming governor, said outside the courtroom. “Today is further proof that you don’t get to just walk away from the harm you do here in Pennsylvania.”
The plea — the result of years of negotiations between Coterra and the attorney general’s office — represents a milestone in one of the most prominent pollution cases ever to emerge from the U.S. drilling and fracking boom. Dimock drew national notoriety after residents were filmed lighting their tap water on fire in the Emmy Award-winning 2010 documentary “Gasland.”
Coterra’s corporate predecessor, Cabot Oil & Gas Corp., was charged in June 2020 with 15 criminal counts, most of them felonies, after a grand jury investigation found the company drilled faulty gas wells that leaked flammable methane into residential water supplies in Dimock and surrounding communities.
The grand jury blasted what it called Cabot’s “long-term indifference to the damage it caused to the environment and citizens of Susquehanna County.”
Cabot, which merged with Denver-based Cimarex Energy Co. to form Coterra, has long maintained the gas in residents’ water was naturally occurring.
Coterra pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of prohibition against discharge of industrial wastes under the state’s Clean Streams Law. The plea means Coterra does not admit guilt but agreed to accept criminal responsibility.
“Coterra has worked closely with the Office of Attorney General to resolve historical matters and create a path forward for all parties,” company spokesperson George Stark said via email. He said Coterra “strives to follow best practices, exceed industry standards, and to continue to be a valuable community partner.”
Many residents have avoided using their well water since the aquifer was contaminated with methane and heavy metals, using bottled water, bulk water purchased commercially, and even water drawn from creeks and artesian wells instead.
“These people had to find very creative ways to get water for their homes, water for their families, their kids, their critters, and it was not pretty,” Dimock resident Victoria Switzer said Tuesday. “It was just crazy, people trying to find water.”
Switzer, whose house will be connected to the new water line, called it “wonderful news” — and a long time coming.
Another resident, Scott Ely, said some of his neighbors had moved away or developed health problems as a result of Coterra’s practices, while his own children, now in college, had grown up “without a safe water source.”
“There’s so much heartache,” he said.
Residents were informed of the plea deal last week. A public utility, Pennsylvania American Water, plans to drill two wells — what it calls a “public groundwater system” — and build a treatment plant that will remove any contaminants from the water before piping it to about 20 homes in Dimock. The utility estimates that construction will take about three years, during which Coterra will be required to provide individual treatment systems and bottled water to impacted residents.
The settlement comes near the end of Shapiro’s tenure as attorney general.
On Tuesday, Shapiro, a Democrat who will be sworn in as governor in January, pledged more aggressive regulatory oversight of the industry.
“We have to change our regulatory structure here in the commonwealth,” Shapiro said. “We have to make sure we are setting clear rules of the road and holding industry accountable. If the regulators fail to do that, then industry is not going to be constrained and they’re going to go ahead and put profits before people. And that’s where the danger comes in.”
Shapiro demurred on the question of whether Coterra would be permitted to resume drilling in a 9-square-mile (23-square-kilometer) area of Dimock where it has long been banned. Shpairo said he would review the matter with his new environmental secretary after taking office as governor.
The criminal case has not slowed Coterra’s business. It is the leading shale gas driller in the nation’s No. 2 natural gas-producing state.
Pennsylvania’s most active gas driller has pleaded no contest to criminal environmental charges in a landmark pollution case
By Michael Rubinkam, Associated Press
MONTROSE, Pa. — Pennsylvania’s most active gas driller pleaded no contest Tuesday to criminal charges, capping a landmark environmental case against a company that prosecutors say polluted a rural community’s drinking water 14 years ago and then tried to evade responsibility.
Residents of the tiny crossroads of Dimock in northeastern Pennsylvania say they have gone more than a decade without a clean, reliable source of drinking water after their aquifer was ruined by Houston-based Coterra Energy Inc.
Under a plea deal entered in Susquehanna County Court, Coterra agreed to pay $16.29 million to fund construction of a new public water system and pay the impacted residents’ water bills for the next 75 years.
“After more than decade of denials, of shirking responsibility and accountability, Coterra pleaded to their crime, and the people of Dimock finally had their day in court,” Attorney General Josh Shapiro, the state’s incoming governor, said outside the courtroom. “Today is further proof that you don’t get to just walk away from the harm you do here in Pennsylvania.”
The plea — the result of years of negotiations between Coterra and the attorney general’s office — represents a milestone in one of the most prominent pollution cases ever to emerge from the U.S. drilling and fracking boom. Dimock drew national notoriety after residents were filmed lighting their tap water on fire in the Emmy Award-winning 2010 documentary “Gasland.”
Coterra’s corporate predecessor, Cabot Oil & Gas Corp., was charged in June 2020 with 15 criminal counts, most of them felonies, after a grand jury investigation found the company drilled faulty gas wells that leaked flammable methane into residential water supplies in Dimock and surrounding communities.
The grand jury blasted what it called Cabot’s “long-term indifference to the damage it caused to the environment and citizens of Susquehanna County.”
Cabot, which merged with Denver-based Cimarex Energy Co. to form Coterra, has long maintained the gas in residents’ water was naturally occurring.
Coterra pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of prohibition against discharge of industrial wastes under the state’s Clean Streams Law. The plea means Coterra does not admit guilt but agreed to accept criminal responsibility.
“Coterra has worked closely with the Office of Attorney General to resolve historical matters and create a path forward for all parties,” company spokesperson George Stark said via email. He said Coterra “strives to follow best practices, exceed industry standards, and to continue to be a valuable community partner.”
Many residents have avoided using their well water since the aquifer was contaminated with methane and heavy metals, using bottled water, bulk water purchased commercially, and even water drawn from creeks and artesian wells instead.
“These people had to find very creative ways to get water for their homes, water for their families, their kids, their critters, and it was not pretty,” Dimock resident Victoria Switzer said Tuesday. “It was just crazy, people trying to find water.”
Switzer, whose house will be connected to the new water line, called it “wonderful news” — and a long time coming.
Another resident, Scott Ely, said some of his neighbors had moved away or developed health problems as a result of Coterra’s practices, while his own children, now in college, had grown up “without a safe water source.”
“There’s so much heartache,” he said.
Residents were informed of the plea deal last week. A public utility, Pennsylvania American Water, plans to drill two wells — what it calls a “public groundwater system” — and build a treatment plant that will remove any contaminants from the water before piping it to about 20 homes in Dimock. The utility estimates that construction will take about three years, during which Coterra will be required to provide individual treatment systems and bottled water to impacted residents.
The settlement comes near the end of Shapiro’s tenure as attorney general.
On Tuesday, Shapiro, a Democrat who will be sworn in as governor in January, pledged more aggressive regulatory oversight of the industry.
“We have to change our regulatory structure here in the commonwealth,” Shapiro said. “We have to make sure we are setting clear rules of the road and holding industry accountable. If the regulators fail to do that, then industry is not going to be constrained and they’re going to go ahead and put profits before people. And that’s where the danger comes in.”
Shapiro demurred on the question of whether Coterra would be permitted to resume drilling in a 9-square-mile (23-square-kilometer) area of Dimock where it has long been banned. Shpairo said he would review the matter with his new environmental secretary after taking office as governor.
The criminal case has not slowed Coterra’s business. It is the leading shale gas driller in the nation’s No. 2 natural gas-producing state.
THE GOP’S SICKNESS IS FAR WORSE THAN A ‘TRUMP PROBLEM’
By Karen Tumulty, The Washington Post
No one is buying the idea that Donald Trump’s dinner last week at Mar-a-Lago with antisemite and white nationalist Nick Fuentes was some sort of aberration — even if Trump’s claim is true that Fuentes showed up unannounced in the company of rapper (and fellow antisemite) Ye, formerly known as Kanye West.
That Trump would meet with bigots and conspiracy theorists was very much on brand for someone who sees loyalty to himself as the only character trait that matters. Trump, after all, claimed moral equivalence (“very fine people on both sides”) between the neo-Nazis who chanted in Charlottesville that Jews would not replace them and a group of counterprotesters, one of whom was murdered.
Which means things like the Mar-a-Lago dinner are surely going to continue to happen as Trump forges ahead with his bid for the GOP’s 2024 presidential nomination. And with each instance, the far-right extremists who spew hate will continue nudging their way from the fringes into the mainstream of the Republican Party.
In the wake of the GOP’s disappointing performance in the midterm elections, it is plainly self evident that the party has a “Trump problem.” But there is a deeper problem, and that is the Republican Party itself.
Republicans cannot move past Trump, as long as they cannot bring themselves to confront him and, by association, the element he attracts. This is not the party that had the fortitude to purge the hateful John Birch Society from its ranks in the mid-1960s. As former Republican National Committee spokesman Doug Heye put it to me, today’s Republicans still think they can “outrun the crocodile.”
Since the dinner became public over the weekend, we have heard plenty of prominent Republicans denounce antisemitism, as though doing that is anything other than basic human decency. Former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, who is reported to be considering a presidential bid of his own, tweeted that antisemitism is “a cancer” and declared: “We stand with the Jewish people in the fight against the world’s oldest bigotry.”
But depressingly few were willing to even mention Trump himself.
Come January, there will be fewer Republicans left in Congress willing to speak out when Trump does what he keeps doing. That in itself is a testament to where the party has positioned itself with regard to the crocodile, given how many of those who did take issue with him were either wiped out in Republican primaries this year or chose to retire.
And those who have followed Trump’s example in associating themselves with extremists and their ideas will have more clout within the institution. Earlier this year, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) spoke at a conference organized by Fuentes, later claiming (as Trump has about last week’s dinner) that she didn’t know who he was; House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy has promised, if he becomes speaker, to restore her committee assignments, which the Democratic-controlled House stripped the Georgia congresswoman of in 2021 because of her incendiary comments.
So Republican leaders should quit deluding themselves about the possibility of moving on from the former president, who continues to bring the worst people into their fold. They are along for the ride — even as it takes them over a cliff.
By Karen Tumulty, The Washington Post
No one is buying the idea that Donald Trump’s dinner last week at Mar-a-Lago with antisemite and white nationalist Nick Fuentes was some sort of aberration — even if Trump’s claim is true that Fuentes showed up unannounced in the company of rapper (and fellow antisemite) Ye, formerly known as Kanye West.
That Trump would meet with bigots and conspiracy theorists was very much on brand for someone who sees loyalty to himself as the only character trait that matters. Trump, after all, claimed moral equivalence (“very fine people on both sides”) between the neo-Nazis who chanted in Charlottesville that Jews would not replace them and a group of counterprotesters, one of whom was murdered.
Which means things like the Mar-a-Lago dinner are surely going to continue to happen as Trump forges ahead with his bid for the GOP’s 2024 presidential nomination. And with each instance, the far-right extremists who spew hate will continue nudging their way from the fringes into the mainstream of the Republican Party.
In the wake of the GOP’s disappointing performance in the midterm elections, it is plainly self evident that the party has a “Trump problem.” But there is a deeper problem, and that is the Republican Party itself.
Republicans cannot move past Trump, as long as they cannot bring themselves to confront him and, by association, the element he attracts. This is not the party that had the fortitude to purge the hateful John Birch Society from its ranks in the mid-1960s. As former Republican National Committee spokesman Doug Heye put it to me, today’s Republicans still think they can “outrun the crocodile.”
Since the dinner became public over the weekend, we have heard plenty of prominent Republicans denounce antisemitism, as though doing that is anything other than basic human decency. Former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, who is reported to be considering a presidential bid of his own, tweeted that antisemitism is “a cancer” and declared: “We stand with the Jewish people in the fight against the world’s oldest bigotry.”
But depressingly few were willing to even mention Trump himself.
Come January, there will be fewer Republicans left in Congress willing to speak out when Trump does what he keeps doing. That in itself is a testament to where the party has positioned itself with regard to the crocodile, given how many of those who did take issue with him were either wiped out in Republican primaries this year or chose to retire.
And those who have followed Trump’s example in associating themselves with extremists and their ideas will have more clout within the institution. Earlier this year, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) spoke at a conference organized by Fuentes, later claiming (as Trump has about last week’s dinner) that she didn’t know who he was; House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy has promised, if he becomes speaker, to restore her committee assignments, which the Democratic-controlled House stripped the Georgia congresswoman of in 2021 because of her incendiary comments.
So Republican leaders should quit deluding themselves about the possibility of moving on from the former president, who continues to bring the worst people into their fold. They are along for the ride — even as it takes them over a cliff.
LAW ENFORCEMENT IS FAILING TO CRACK DOWN ON DOMESTIC TERRORISM
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Given the spate of domestic terrorism attacks in recent years — the slaughter at the Tree of Life synagogue, the massacre in Buffalo, N.Y., and the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection; for example — you would think law enforcement agencies are engaged in a robust effort to combat such violence, right? Wrong.
Earlier this month, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee released a largely overlooked — yet damning — report detailing the failures of national security agencies on this front.
“Over the past two decades, acts of domestic terrorism have dramatically increased," the committee reports. "National security agencies now identify domestic terrorism as the most persistent and lethal terrorist threat to the homeland.” The uptick is predominately attributable to “white supremacist and anti-government extremist individuals and groups.” Yet “without better data, it is difficult to evaluate whether federal agencies are appropriately allocating resources and setting priorities.”
The report arrived just as billionaire Elon Musk opened the floodgates to right-wing extremists and purveyors of disinformation on Twitter. The committee notes, “Social media platforms have played an increasing role in the spread of extremist content that translates into real world violence, due in part to business models that incentivize user engagement over safety.” It also found that these companies’ business models "are designed to increase user engagement (i.e., keep people viewing content online) and that, as experts testified before this Committee, more extreme content tends to increase user engagement, thus leading such content to be amplified.”
The extent of the threat is staggering. The report mentions a 2021 study from the Center for Strategic and International Studies that found there were 110 domestic terrorist plots in 2020 alone, a 244 percent increase from 2019. The Anti-Defamation League also reports that over the past decade, domestic extremists have killed 443 people. More than half of the deaths were attributable to white supremacists. Had foreign terrorists committed such crimes, Republicans would have raised a ruckus.
Although FBI Director Christopher A. Wray testified about the threat of domestic terrorism in March 2021 and pledged to work with the Senate committee on reporting, his agency has done little to address it. The committee reports, "the federal government — specifically FBI and [the Department of Homeland Security] — has failed to systematically track and report data on domestic terrorism as required by federal law, has not appropriately allocated its resources to match the current threat, and has not aligned its definitions to make its investigations consistent and its actions proportional to the threat of domestic terrorism.” And even when the feds have accumulated data, “DHS and FBI have not appropriately allocated their resources to match the current threat, despite recent increased investments and efforts.”
Former assistant FBI director Frank Figliuzzi tells me, “The Senate report raises questions as to why the FBI and DHS still don’t have their act together." He also notes that the FBI’s decision to merge data on white supremacy cases with black nationalist cases into a “race-based” category "takes political correctness to a dangerous extreme.” He adds, "This work demands transparency not politics.”
Certainly both the DHS and FBI have many pressing priorities. Border control takes up much of DHS’s attention, and the FBI covers everything from cyberterrorism to white collar crime to foreign espionage. Nevertheless, there’s a nagging sense that the two institutions are uncomfortable with cracking down on domestic terrorists, either because of legitimate concerns for civil liberties or because a handful of agents sympathize with right-wing authoritarianism (as is the case in law enforcement and the military).
“The difficulty with addressing violent domestic terror has all too often been that the ‘bad guys’ look too much like the rest of us,” former prosecutor Joyce White Vance tells me. She adds that the FBI often grouped white supremacist domestic terrorist movements with other, less dangerous groups and insisted they all be treated the same. “We are paying the price for that failure now,” she said.
Reaction to the report from groups that track domestic terrorism has been harsh. The Anti-Defamation League tweeted that law enforcement must "treat this dangerous threat with the necessary urgency & resources.” The progressive Brennan Center similarly spotted a lack of urgency:
Public concerns regarding far-right violence increased in the aftermath of the 2015 racially motivated mass shooting at the Mother Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopalian Church in Charleston, South Carolina, which then-FBI Director James Comey refused to call an act of terrorism. Concerns intensified after law enforcement failed to stop multiple incidents of white supremacist violence committed at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and a leaked FBI report revealed it had created a new domestic terrorism category called “Black Identity Extremists” that labeled Black activists protesting racist police violence as threats. . . .
Throughout this time, the FBI failed to provide basic facts about its domestic terrorism program that would enable an assessment of whether it was appropriately targeting its counterterrorism resources. This lack of transparency triggered several legislative efforts to compel the FBI to publish data documenting each domestic terrorism incident, the number of investigations it initiated, and the number of convictions, all broken down by the various categories the FBI used to manage its work, which then included white supremacists, so-called Black Identity Extremists, animal rights extremists, and others.
In fact, Congress passed a law in 2019 requiring intelligence agencies to produce a report on domestic terrorism threats, but they failed to do so. The Brennan Center explains, “In reports filed in 2021 and 2022, the FBI argued that while it could provide topline statistics regarding the number of investigations it opened, it couldn’t provide data regarding domestic terrorism incidents because the bureau didn’t collect it and no law required state and local law enforcement agencies to report it.”
Part of the problem is that whenever law enforcement indicates an interest in pursuing such threats, right-wing actors go nuts. When Attorney General Merrick Garland vowed to investigate violent threats against public officials, Republicans wrongly accused him of suppressing dissent and labeling ordinary Americans as “domestic terrorists.” To his credit, Garland created a unit within the Justice Department to combat domestic terrorism, but it must rely on the FBI and other law enforcement groups to track and investigate crimes.
Congress must lead the way for reform. The House Jan. 6 select committee, which is investigating the FBI’s failure to respond to credible threats to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, can address the lapses and make specific recommendations to correct the problem. And in the new Congress, Senate Democrats must be unstinting in holding Wray accountable for complying with information-gathering requirements.
Meanwhile, as Republicans grill (and possibly even impeach) DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, House Democrats should use their time during such hearings to explore the response to domestic terrorism in Mayorkas’s ranks. A DHS official insisted that domestic violent extremism is a “top priority," that the agency has worked with state and local partners, and has produced 110 “intelligence products.” But despite setting up a domestic terrorism branch within the DHS, the report documents shortcomings in data collection and sharing.
Finally, lawmakers need to take a hard look not only at Twitter, but also TikTok, Facebook and YouTube for providing platforms to violent and extremist individuals and groups. Without infringing on First Amendment rights, Congress should compel these companies to be more transparent about their moderation policies.
Yaël Eisenstat, ADL’s vice president for technology and society, tells me, “It is encouraging that the Senate report acknowledges and underscores social media’s role in enabling, amplifying, and normalizing hate and extremism.” She adds that “the existence and viral amplification of hate content and disinformation is a feature, not a bug, of social media platforms.”
If the government had made such little effort to crack down on foreign terrorism after the 9/11 attacks, the political backlash would have been intense. The same must be true of domestic terrorism. Federal agencies and social media companies should not get a pass.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Given the spate of domestic terrorism attacks in recent years — the slaughter at the Tree of Life synagogue, the massacre in Buffalo, N.Y., and the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection; for example — you would think law enforcement agencies are engaged in a robust effort to combat such violence, right? Wrong.
Earlier this month, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee released a largely overlooked — yet damning — report detailing the failures of national security agencies on this front.
“Over the past two decades, acts of domestic terrorism have dramatically increased," the committee reports. "National security agencies now identify domestic terrorism as the most persistent and lethal terrorist threat to the homeland.” The uptick is predominately attributable to “white supremacist and anti-government extremist individuals and groups.” Yet “without better data, it is difficult to evaluate whether federal agencies are appropriately allocating resources and setting priorities.”
The report arrived just as billionaire Elon Musk opened the floodgates to right-wing extremists and purveyors of disinformation on Twitter. The committee notes, “Social media platforms have played an increasing role in the spread of extremist content that translates into real world violence, due in part to business models that incentivize user engagement over safety.” It also found that these companies’ business models "are designed to increase user engagement (i.e., keep people viewing content online) and that, as experts testified before this Committee, more extreme content tends to increase user engagement, thus leading such content to be amplified.”
The extent of the threat is staggering. The report mentions a 2021 study from the Center for Strategic and International Studies that found there were 110 domestic terrorist plots in 2020 alone, a 244 percent increase from 2019. The Anti-Defamation League also reports that over the past decade, domestic extremists have killed 443 people. More than half of the deaths were attributable to white supremacists. Had foreign terrorists committed such crimes, Republicans would have raised a ruckus.
Although FBI Director Christopher A. Wray testified about the threat of domestic terrorism in March 2021 and pledged to work with the Senate committee on reporting, his agency has done little to address it. The committee reports, "the federal government — specifically FBI and [the Department of Homeland Security] — has failed to systematically track and report data on domestic terrorism as required by federal law, has not appropriately allocated its resources to match the current threat, and has not aligned its definitions to make its investigations consistent and its actions proportional to the threat of domestic terrorism.” And even when the feds have accumulated data, “DHS and FBI have not appropriately allocated their resources to match the current threat, despite recent increased investments and efforts.”
Former assistant FBI director Frank Figliuzzi tells me, “The Senate report raises questions as to why the FBI and DHS still don’t have their act together." He also notes that the FBI’s decision to merge data on white supremacy cases with black nationalist cases into a “race-based” category "takes political correctness to a dangerous extreme.” He adds, "This work demands transparency not politics.”
Certainly both the DHS and FBI have many pressing priorities. Border control takes up much of DHS’s attention, and the FBI covers everything from cyberterrorism to white collar crime to foreign espionage. Nevertheless, there’s a nagging sense that the two institutions are uncomfortable with cracking down on domestic terrorists, either because of legitimate concerns for civil liberties or because a handful of agents sympathize with right-wing authoritarianism (as is the case in law enforcement and the military).
“The difficulty with addressing violent domestic terror has all too often been that the ‘bad guys’ look too much like the rest of us,” former prosecutor Joyce White Vance tells me. She adds that the FBI often grouped white supremacist domestic terrorist movements with other, less dangerous groups and insisted they all be treated the same. “We are paying the price for that failure now,” she said.
Reaction to the report from groups that track domestic terrorism has been harsh. The Anti-Defamation League tweeted that law enforcement must "treat this dangerous threat with the necessary urgency & resources.” The progressive Brennan Center similarly spotted a lack of urgency:
Public concerns regarding far-right violence increased in the aftermath of the 2015 racially motivated mass shooting at the Mother Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopalian Church in Charleston, South Carolina, which then-FBI Director James Comey refused to call an act of terrorism. Concerns intensified after law enforcement failed to stop multiple incidents of white supremacist violence committed at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and a leaked FBI report revealed it had created a new domestic terrorism category called “Black Identity Extremists” that labeled Black activists protesting racist police violence as threats. . . .
Throughout this time, the FBI failed to provide basic facts about its domestic terrorism program that would enable an assessment of whether it was appropriately targeting its counterterrorism resources. This lack of transparency triggered several legislative efforts to compel the FBI to publish data documenting each domestic terrorism incident, the number of investigations it initiated, and the number of convictions, all broken down by the various categories the FBI used to manage its work, which then included white supremacists, so-called Black Identity Extremists, animal rights extremists, and others.
In fact, Congress passed a law in 2019 requiring intelligence agencies to produce a report on domestic terrorism threats, but they failed to do so. The Brennan Center explains, “In reports filed in 2021 and 2022, the FBI argued that while it could provide topline statistics regarding the number of investigations it opened, it couldn’t provide data regarding domestic terrorism incidents because the bureau didn’t collect it and no law required state and local law enforcement agencies to report it.”
Part of the problem is that whenever law enforcement indicates an interest in pursuing such threats, right-wing actors go nuts. When Attorney General Merrick Garland vowed to investigate violent threats against public officials, Republicans wrongly accused him of suppressing dissent and labeling ordinary Americans as “domestic terrorists.” To his credit, Garland created a unit within the Justice Department to combat domestic terrorism, but it must rely on the FBI and other law enforcement groups to track and investigate crimes.
Congress must lead the way for reform. The House Jan. 6 select committee, which is investigating the FBI’s failure to respond to credible threats to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, can address the lapses and make specific recommendations to correct the problem. And in the new Congress, Senate Democrats must be unstinting in holding Wray accountable for complying with information-gathering requirements.
Meanwhile, as Republicans grill (and possibly even impeach) DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, House Democrats should use their time during such hearings to explore the response to domestic terrorism in Mayorkas’s ranks. A DHS official insisted that domestic violent extremism is a “top priority," that the agency has worked with state and local partners, and has produced 110 “intelligence products.” But despite setting up a domestic terrorism branch within the DHS, the report documents shortcomings in data collection and sharing.
Finally, lawmakers need to take a hard look not only at Twitter, but also TikTok, Facebook and YouTube for providing platforms to violent and extremist individuals and groups. Without infringing on First Amendment rights, Congress should compel these companies to be more transparent about their moderation policies.
Yaël Eisenstat, ADL’s vice president for technology and society, tells me, “It is encouraging that the Senate report acknowledges and underscores social media’s role in enabling, amplifying, and normalizing hate and extremism.” She adds that “the existence and viral amplification of hate content and disinformation is a feature, not a bug, of social media platforms.”
If the government had made such little effort to crack down on foreign terrorism after the 9/11 attacks, the political backlash would have been intense. The same must be true of domestic terrorism. Federal agencies and social media companies should not get a pass.
BEWARE, DESANTIS IS AS MUCH A THREAT TO AMERICA AS TRUMP
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
If you believe Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis would be a less dangerous presidential candidate than former president Donald Trump, take a moment to consider the recent ruling striking down DeSantis’s “Stop WOKE Act.” That opinion — as well as other rulings against his attempts to inhibit dissent — makes clear that DeSantis is just as willing as Trump to embrace the GOP’s authoritarian element and use state power to punish his enemies.
To recap, the Stop WOKE Act — also perversely known as the Individual Freedom Act — is the Orwellian scheme that DeSantis signed into law earlier this year to muzzle the candid discussion of race and racism in classrooms and the workplace. As U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker explains in his opinion, “The law officially bans professors from expressing disfavored viewpoints in university classrooms while permitting unfettered expression of the opposite viewpoints.” He dryly continued, “Defendants argue that, under this Act, professors enjoy ‘academic freedom’ so long as they express only those viewpoints of which the State approves.”
DeSantis, in attempting to curtail the discussion of political positions of which he disapproves, followed in a long line of authoritarians who have attempted to paint dissent as dangerous and, therefore, unprotected.
The law, for example, bars discussion of the concept that a person “by virtue of his or her race, color, national origin, or sex should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment to achieve diversity, equity, or inclusion.” During oral arguments, when asked if this would bar professors from supporting affirmative action in classroom settings, attorneys for the state government answered, “Your Honor, yes.”
Walker cited that admission, finding:
Thus, Defendants assert the idea of affirmative action is so “repugnant” that instructors can no longer express approval of affirmative action as an idea worthy of merit during class instruction. … What does this mean in practical terms? Assuming the University of Florida Levin College of Law decided to invite Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor to speak to a class of law students, she would be unable to offer this poignant reflection about her own lived experience, because it endorses affirmative action.
The law so blatantly violates the concept of free speech that one wonders if remedial constitutional education should be a requirement for Florida officeholders.
Walker tore into DeSantis and the GOP legislature, holding that the law “is antithetical to academic freedom and has cast a leaden pall of orthodoxy over Florida’s state universities.” He declined to mince words: “In this case, the State of Florida lays the cornerstone of its own Ministry of Truth under the guise of the Individual Freedom Act, declaring which viewpoints shall be orthodox and which shall be verboten in its university classrooms,” he wrote. “The First Amendment does not permit the State of Florida to muzzle its university professors, impose its own orthodoxy of viewpoints, and cast us all into the dark.”
That is the essence of authoritarianism. DeSantis’s willingness to back such a monstrous violation of free expression should send up warning flags about his commitment to uphold the Constitution.
Walker is the same judge who struck down another DeSantis assault on the First Amendment — his vague anti-riot law to quell demonstrations. In that opinion, Walker recalled, “In 1956 and 1961, Florida’s anti-riot laws were used to suppress activities threatening the state’s Jim Crow status quo.” DeSantis apparently considered such efforts commendable.
“What’s past is prologue,” Walker wrote. “Now this Court is faced with a new definition of ‘riot’ — one that the Florida Legislature created following a summer of nationwide protest for racial justice, against police violence and the murder of George Floyd and many other people of color, and in support of the powerful statement that Black lives matter.” He added, “The question before this Court is whether the new definition is constitutional.” Spoiler alert: It’s not, just as Jim Crow-era laws to prevent civil rights demonstrations were not constitutional.
As the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida explained, the anti-riot law “risks criminalizing peaceful protest and shields those who injure or kill protesters — for example, by ramming their vehicles into protesters — from civil penalties.” DeSantis all but admitted as such when he boasted the measure was “the strongest anti-rioting, pro-law enforcement piece of legislation in the country” and vowed that “a ton of bricks [will] rain down on” those who violate it.
DeSantis seems to have no fondness for the basic rights our Constitution confers on Americans. Instead, he delights in using state power to demonstrate his contempt for the expression of views he dislikes. This forms the core of his political brand, underscored by his “don’t say gay” law, his statute banning “critical race theory” in schools and his firing of a county prosecutor who criticized his abortion policies. DeSantis has also regularly flexed his power as governor: excluding media from events, taking public proceedings behind closed doors (including the selection of the University of Florida’s president) and exacting revenge on supposedly woke corporations such as Disney.
DeSantis’s contempt for dissent and his crackdown on critics should not be discounted. This is the profile of a constitutional ignoramus, a bully and a strongman. Voters should be forewarned.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
If you believe Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis would be a less dangerous presidential candidate than former president Donald Trump, take a moment to consider the recent ruling striking down DeSantis’s “Stop WOKE Act.” That opinion — as well as other rulings against his attempts to inhibit dissent — makes clear that DeSantis is just as willing as Trump to embrace the GOP’s authoritarian element and use state power to punish his enemies.
To recap, the Stop WOKE Act — also perversely known as the Individual Freedom Act — is the Orwellian scheme that DeSantis signed into law earlier this year to muzzle the candid discussion of race and racism in classrooms and the workplace. As U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker explains in his opinion, “The law officially bans professors from expressing disfavored viewpoints in university classrooms while permitting unfettered expression of the opposite viewpoints.” He dryly continued, “Defendants argue that, under this Act, professors enjoy ‘academic freedom’ so long as they express only those viewpoints of which the State approves.”
DeSantis, in attempting to curtail the discussion of political positions of which he disapproves, followed in a long line of authoritarians who have attempted to paint dissent as dangerous and, therefore, unprotected.
The law, for example, bars discussion of the concept that a person “by virtue of his or her race, color, national origin, or sex should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment to achieve diversity, equity, or inclusion.” During oral arguments, when asked if this would bar professors from supporting affirmative action in classroom settings, attorneys for the state government answered, “Your Honor, yes.”
Walker cited that admission, finding:
Thus, Defendants assert the idea of affirmative action is so “repugnant” that instructors can no longer express approval of affirmative action as an idea worthy of merit during class instruction. … What does this mean in practical terms? Assuming the University of Florida Levin College of Law decided to invite Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor to speak to a class of law students, she would be unable to offer this poignant reflection about her own lived experience, because it endorses affirmative action.
The law so blatantly violates the concept of free speech that one wonders if remedial constitutional education should be a requirement for Florida officeholders.
Walker tore into DeSantis and the GOP legislature, holding that the law “is antithetical to academic freedom and has cast a leaden pall of orthodoxy over Florida’s state universities.” He declined to mince words: “In this case, the State of Florida lays the cornerstone of its own Ministry of Truth under the guise of the Individual Freedom Act, declaring which viewpoints shall be orthodox and which shall be verboten in its university classrooms,” he wrote. “The First Amendment does not permit the State of Florida to muzzle its university professors, impose its own orthodoxy of viewpoints, and cast us all into the dark.”
That is the essence of authoritarianism. DeSantis’s willingness to back such a monstrous violation of free expression should send up warning flags about his commitment to uphold the Constitution.
Walker is the same judge who struck down another DeSantis assault on the First Amendment — his vague anti-riot law to quell demonstrations. In that opinion, Walker recalled, “In 1956 and 1961, Florida’s anti-riot laws were used to suppress activities threatening the state’s Jim Crow status quo.” DeSantis apparently considered such efforts commendable.
“What’s past is prologue,” Walker wrote. “Now this Court is faced with a new definition of ‘riot’ — one that the Florida Legislature created following a summer of nationwide protest for racial justice, against police violence and the murder of George Floyd and many other people of color, and in support of the powerful statement that Black lives matter.” He added, “The question before this Court is whether the new definition is constitutional.” Spoiler alert: It’s not, just as Jim Crow-era laws to prevent civil rights demonstrations were not constitutional.
As the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida explained, the anti-riot law “risks criminalizing peaceful protest and shields those who injure or kill protesters — for example, by ramming their vehicles into protesters — from civil penalties.” DeSantis all but admitted as such when he boasted the measure was “the strongest anti-rioting, pro-law enforcement piece of legislation in the country” and vowed that “a ton of bricks [will] rain down on” those who violate it.
DeSantis seems to have no fondness for the basic rights our Constitution confers on Americans. Instead, he delights in using state power to demonstrate his contempt for the expression of views he dislikes. This forms the core of his political brand, underscored by his “don’t say gay” law, his statute banning “critical race theory” in schools and his firing of a county prosecutor who criticized his abortion policies. DeSantis has also regularly flexed his power as governor: excluding media from events, taking public proceedings behind closed doors (including the selection of the University of Florida’s president) and exacting revenge on supposedly woke corporations such as Disney.
DeSantis’s contempt for dissent and his crackdown on critics should not be discounted. This is the profile of a constitutional ignoramus, a bully and a strongman. Voters should be forewarned.
THIS WEEK, BILLIONAIRES MADE A STRONG CASE FOR ABOLISHING THEMSELVES
By Anand Giridharadas, author of “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World” and other books.
In recent years, a swelling chorus of Americans has grown critical of the nation’s bajillionaires. But in the extraordinary week gone by, that chorus was drowned out by a far louder and more urgent case against them. It was made by the bajillionaires themselves.
One after another, four of our best-known billionaires laid waste to the image of benevolent saviors carefully cultivated by their class.
It is a commendable sacrifice on their part, because billionaires, remember, exist at our collective pleasure. If enough of us decided to, we could enact labor, tax, antitrust and regulatory policies to make it hard for anyone to amass that much wealth while so many beg for scraps. It is not only the vast political power of billionaires that keeps us keeping them around, it’s also the popular embrace of certain myths — about the generosity, the genius, the renegade spirit, the above-it-ness of billionaires, to name a few.
As of this writing, Elon Musk is running Twitter into the ground, with much of the company’s staff fired or quitting, outages spiking and everyone on my timeline hurrying to tell the app the things they have been meaning to say before it departs for app heaven (or hell?).
In tweeting through one of the most extraordinary corporate meltdowns in history, Mr. Musk has been performing a vital public service: shredding the myth of the billionaire genius.
His particular pretension of benevolence is that his uncontainable genius can solve any challenge. Now he is lavishing his mind and time on electronic money, now on colonizing Mars, now on electric cars and solar panels, now on saving Thai soccer players trapped in a cave, now on liberating speech from its liberal oppressors.
Mr. Musk’s genius pose has long been undermined by his actual record, which is defined by claiming credit for what others have built and is shot through with complaints of discrimination, mismanagement and fraud.
But it wasn’t until Mr. Musk took over Twitter that his claim of infinitely transferable genius truly fell apart. That what Mr. Musk has called the global town square can be eviscerated in a time period somewhere between a Scaramucci and a Truss makes one wonder if we should be more skeptical of all the other billionaire geniuses with ideas for our schools, public health systems and politics.
For example, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who this week was doing his part to undermine another pretension of billionaire benevolence: the generosity pose.
On Monday, he made a big splash when CNN released an interview in which he announced that he was giving the great bulk of his more than $120 billion fortune away, with a focus on fighting climate change and promoting unity.
That sure sounds impressive, but his gesture wasn’t about generosity any more than Herschel Walker’s Senate candidacy in Georgia is for the children. After all, the money Mr. Bezos is now so magnanimously distributing was made through his dehumanizing labor practices, his tax avoidance, his influence peddling, his monopolistic power and other tactics that make him a cause of the problems of modern American life rather than a swashbuckling solution.
It’s too soon to tell if Mr. Bezos’s philanthropy will help others, but what’s certain is that it will help Mr. Bezos a lot. Mega-philanthropists of his ilk tend to give through foundations, which they establish in ways that save them an immense amount in taxes, sometimes merely by moving the money from one of their own accounts to another. Giving will also burnish Mr. Bezos’s reputation, in that way preserving and protecting his opportunity to earn yet more money — and to do more social damage.
And it will increase his already gigantic power over public life. For plutocrats like Mr. Bezos, that may be the biggest payoff of all. Their wealth is so vast that by distributing even a small fraction of it, they skew the public agenda toward the kind of social change they can stomach — the kind that doesn’t threaten them or their class. Shortly before his big announcement, Mr. Bezos gave Dolly Parton a $100 million “Courage and Civility Award” to spend on her chosen causes. Ms. Parton is indeed courageous and civil, but so are the workers fighting to unionize Amazon facilities, and I don’t see anyone offering them nine-digit thank-you bonuses.
But once again, instead of the usual critics having to make this case, this week Mr. Bezos took the wheel. Just minutes after his philanthropy announcement on CNN, news broke that Amazon would be laying off thousands of workers, reminding everyone of what was really going on.
At first glance, the two stories might seem like matter and antimatter, or at least two opposite realities. But they are the same story: The system that treats human beings as disposable commodities upholds and reproduces itself by sprinkling some fairy dust and hoping that we will forget the injustice that paid for it.
Then, of course, there was Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced crypto kingpin whose spectacular downfall, along with that of FTX, the company he founded, caused $32 billion to disappear, much of it belonging to hundreds of thousands of regular people.
Mr. Bankman-Fried embodies another pretension of plutocratic benevolence: that of the renegade, the people’s billionaire. Like many others, he hawked cryptocurrency as a fight against the establishment, against the big banks, against the powers that be, man. He has said his work was motivated by the ideals of effective altruism, a trendy school of thought that encourages people to go out and make as big a heap of money as they can so that they can use it to heal the world. But, as he admitted in an interview this week with Kelsey Piper of Vox, Mr. Bankman-Fried’s claims about the ethical nature of his pursuit were an example of “this dumb game we woke Westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.”
Finally, of course, this week there was Donald Trump (because let’s face it, there’s always Donald Trump), who has incarnated the most dangerous billionaire pretension of all: that of the hero who in all the world is the only one who can save us. He gamed the system so effectively that only he knows how to un-game it; he manipulated politicians so much that only he knows how to drain the swamp; he amassed so much money that only he is above corruption.
On Tuesday night he addressed a crowded room at Mar-a-Lago and, as expected, announced that he was going to run for president again. He said the usual things that politicians are supposed to say, about how he was doing it for America’s benefit. But this time it was no longer possible to imagine that even he believed it. After all, only a week had passed since America had voted in the midterm elections and rejected most of the high-profile candidates he endorsed — in the process, even Republican commentators agree, rejecting him. He dragged the party down so far that it did not regain the Senate and only barely regained the House.
Fearing even more disastrous outcomes, trusted advisers and allies encouraged him not to run again, or at least to delay his announcement. But they were wasting their time. Standing up there onstage, so low-energy that even Jeb Bush’s son felt compelled to comment, Mr. Trump took in the applause but offered no new ideas or directions. It was a variant of the performance that the others had been putting on, but with one crucial difference: Unlike Mr. Musk and Mr. Bezos and Mr. Bankman-Fried, who strain to show us how public-spirited they are, Mr. Trump could hardly be bothered to care.
It was a particularly unsubtle reminder that billionaires are not our saviors. They are our mistake.
By Anand Giridharadas, author of “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World” and other books.
In recent years, a swelling chorus of Americans has grown critical of the nation’s bajillionaires. But in the extraordinary week gone by, that chorus was drowned out by a far louder and more urgent case against them. It was made by the bajillionaires themselves.
One after another, four of our best-known billionaires laid waste to the image of benevolent saviors carefully cultivated by their class.
It is a commendable sacrifice on their part, because billionaires, remember, exist at our collective pleasure. If enough of us decided to, we could enact labor, tax, antitrust and regulatory policies to make it hard for anyone to amass that much wealth while so many beg for scraps. It is not only the vast political power of billionaires that keeps us keeping them around, it’s also the popular embrace of certain myths — about the generosity, the genius, the renegade spirit, the above-it-ness of billionaires, to name a few.
As of this writing, Elon Musk is running Twitter into the ground, with much of the company’s staff fired or quitting, outages spiking and everyone on my timeline hurrying to tell the app the things they have been meaning to say before it departs for app heaven (or hell?).
In tweeting through one of the most extraordinary corporate meltdowns in history, Mr. Musk has been performing a vital public service: shredding the myth of the billionaire genius.
His particular pretension of benevolence is that his uncontainable genius can solve any challenge. Now he is lavishing his mind and time on electronic money, now on colonizing Mars, now on electric cars and solar panels, now on saving Thai soccer players trapped in a cave, now on liberating speech from its liberal oppressors.
Mr. Musk’s genius pose has long been undermined by his actual record, which is defined by claiming credit for what others have built and is shot through with complaints of discrimination, mismanagement and fraud.
But it wasn’t until Mr. Musk took over Twitter that his claim of infinitely transferable genius truly fell apart. That what Mr. Musk has called the global town square can be eviscerated in a time period somewhere between a Scaramucci and a Truss makes one wonder if we should be more skeptical of all the other billionaire geniuses with ideas for our schools, public health systems and politics.
For example, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who this week was doing his part to undermine another pretension of billionaire benevolence: the generosity pose.
On Monday, he made a big splash when CNN released an interview in which he announced that he was giving the great bulk of his more than $120 billion fortune away, with a focus on fighting climate change and promoting unity.
That sure sounds impressive, but his gesture wasn’t about generosity any more than Herschel Walker’s Senate candidacy in Georgia is for the children. After all, the money Mr. Bezos is now so magnanimously distributing was made through his dehumanizing labor practices, his tax avoidance, his influence peddling, his monopolistic power and other tactics that make him a cause of the problems of modern American life rather than a swashbuckling solution.
It’s too soon to tell if Mr. Bezos’s philanthropy will help others, but what’s certain is that it will help Mr. Bezos a lot. Mega-philanthropists of his ilk tend to give through foundations, which they establish in ways that save them an immense amount in taxes, sometimes merely by moving the money from one of their own accounts to another. Giving will also burnish Mr. Bezos’s reputation, in that way preserving and protecting his opportunity to earn yet more money — and to do more social damage.
And it will increase his already gigantic power over public life. For plutocrats like Mr. Bezos, that may be the biggest payoff of all. Their wealth is so vast that by distributing even a small fraction of it, they skew the public agenda toward the kind of social change they can stomach — the kind that doesn’t threaten them or their class. Shortly before his big announcement, Mr. Bezos gave Dolly Parton a $100 million “Courage and Civility Award” to spend on her chosen causes. Ms. Parton is indeed courageous and civil, but so are the workers fighting to unionize Amazon facilities, and I don’t see anyone offering them nine-digit thank-you bonuses.
But once again, instead of the usual critics having to make this case, this week Mr. Bezos took the wheel. Just minutes after his philanthropy announcement on CNN, news broke that Amazon would be laying off thousands of workers, reminding everyone of what was really going on.
At first glance, the two stories might seem like matter and antimatter, or at least two opposite realities. But they are the same story: The system that treats human beings as disposable commodities upholds and reproduces itself by sprinkling some fairy dust and hoping that we will forget the injustice that paid for it.
Then, of course, there was Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced crypto kingpin whose spectacular downfall, along with that of FTX, the company he founded, caused $32 billion to disappear, much of it belonging to hundreds of thousands of regular people.
Mr. Bankman-Fried embodies another pretension of plutocratic benevolence: that of the renegade, the people’s billionaire. Like many others, he hawked cryptocurrency as a fight against the establishment, against the big banks, against the powers that be, man. He has said his work was motivated by the ideals of effective altruism, a trendy school of thought that encourages people to go out and make as big a heap of money as they can so that they can use it to heal the world. But, as he admitted in an interview this week with Kelsey Piper of Vox, Mr. Bankman-Fried’s claims about the ethical nature of his pursuit were an example of “this dumb game we woke Westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.”
Finally, of course, this week there was Donald Trump (because let’s face it, there’s always Donald Trump), who has incarnated the most dangerous billionaire pretension of all: that of the hero who in all the world is the only one who can save us. He gamed the system so effectively that only he knows how to un-game it; he manipulated politicians so much that only he knows how to drain the swamp; he amassed so much money that only he is above corruption.
On Tuesday night he addressed a crowded room at Mar-a-Lago and, as expected, announced that he was going to run for president again. He said the usual things that politicians are supposed to say, about how he was doing it for America’s benefit. But this time it was no longer possible to imagine that even he believed it. After all, only a week had passed since America had voted in the midterm elections and rejected most of the high-profile candidates he endorsed — in the process, even Republican commentators agree, rejecting him. He dragged the party down so far that it did not regain the Senate and only barely regained the House.
Fearing even more disastrous outcomes, trusted advisers and allies encouraged him not to run again, or at least to delay his announcement. But they were wasting their time. Standing up there onstage, so low-energy that even Jeb Bush’s son felt compelled to comment, Mr. Trump took in the applause but offered no new ideas or directions. It was a variant of the performance that the others had been putting on, but with one crucial difference: Unlike Mr. Musk and Mr. Bezos and Mr. Bankman-Fried, who strain to show us how public-spirited they are, Mr. Trump could hardly be bothered to care.
It was a particularly unsubtle reminder that billionaires are not our saviors. They are our mistake.
AS REPUBLICANS TAKE THE HOUSE, THE CRAZIES TAKE THE WHEEL
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
Wednesday evening, Republicans formally won control of the House.
Thursday morning, in the first public act of the new majority, senior House Republicans revealed their most urgent priority: They would investigate Hunter Biden.
The incoming chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the incoming chairman of the Oversight Committee, James Comer (R-Ky.), and about 10 other members of the brand-new majority walked into the House TV studio first thing Thursday to announce multiple probes into the president’s son.
“Hunter Biden was conducting business with suspected human traffickers,” they asserted, and “Hunter Biden and Joe Biden were involved in a scheme to try to get China to buy liquefied natural gas,” and “credit cards and bank accounts of Hunter and Joe Biden were commingled,” and “Hunter wanted keys made for Joe Biden” to his office. They mentioned Hunter two dozen times in their opening statements alone.
Reporters tried to ask questions about other topics. Comer cut them off. “If we could keep it about Hunter Biden, that would be great,” he said, explaining that “this is kind of a big deal, we think.”
“Why make this your very first visible order of business?” one reporter asked.
Comer assured her that other pressing issues would also be addressed: “Kevin [McCarthy] said the first legislation we’re going to vote on is to repeal the 87,000 IRS agents.”
Great idea! After a GOP campaign focused on crime, their first legislative act will be to protect criminals. They’ll try to block the hiring of IRS enforcement personnel (the true number is much less than 87,000) assigned to crack down on the wealthiest tax cheats. Voters who elected Republicans to fight inflation and gas prices might be feeling puzzled, if not swindled.
But, in fairness, the noisiest voices in the GOP have other plans, too: They also want to cut off military aid to Ukraine as it fights off Russia’s invasion.
A few hours after the Comer and Jordan show, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) took the same stage to announce plans to force a vote on ending funds for Ukraine. “Is Ukraine now the 51st state?” asked Greene, who alleged an elaborate cryptocurrency conspiracy in which military aid for Ukraine actually funds Democrats’ campaigns.
Not too long ago, the Republican Party stood against Russian aggression. But with the GOP’s single-digit majority in the new House, the oddballs hold all the power. “You’ve heard Leader McCarthy say publicly that he doesn’t see very good odds for much funding for Ukraine going forward in a Republican-controlled conference,” Greene pointed out.
Fellow crank Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) agreed: “I will not vote for one more dollar to Ukraine!”
It was heartwarming to see Greene and Gaetz on the same page again. Earlier in the week, they were feuding about whether to deny McCarthy the speakership. (The defection of even a couple of Republicans could doom him.)
Greene backed McCarthy for speaker and told McCarthy’s critics (including many of her fellow members of the far-right Freedom Caucus) to bring it on. “I’m not afraid of the civil war in the GOP — I lean into it,” she said on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s podcast.
Gaetz shot back: “Whatever Kevin has promised Marjorie Taylor Greene, I guarantee you this: At the first opportunity, he will zap her faster than you can say ‘Jewish space laser’” — a reference to the antisemitic sentiments that got Greene kicked off her committees. McCarthy has promised to restore her privileges.
McCarthy’s age-old ambition to be speaker is again teetering. Thirty-one House Republicans opposed his nomination as speaker this week — many times the number needed to sink him when the full House votes in January.
Even if he wins the job, he might soon wish he hadn’t. That’s because he’ll get it only by signing an endless pile of IOUs the crazies are demanding: impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Multiple Hunter Biden investigations. A select committee to investigate China. An investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, investigation. Investigations of Anthony Fauci and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And a panoply of probes into the Justice Department and the FBI. McCarthy is going to be held “completely hostage,” outgoing Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) predicted.
The same day Republicans were yammering about investigating Hunter and defunding Ukraine, outgoing Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced her retirement from leadership after two decades in charge of House Democrats. She was the first woman to be speaker and one of the most effective ever to hold that role.
Yet most Republicans skipped Pelosi’s announcement on the House floor (and a few opted for social media taunts). Among the missing was McCarthy, who explained: “I had meetings.”
One of those meetings McCarthy had Thursday was with Greene, who informed him of her anti-Ukraine maneuver. “I said, ‘I’m having a press conference at 4,’” Greene recounted. “And he said, ‘Okay.’”
Of course he did. The crazies are all knocking at his door. And if he wants to be speaker, there is only one answer to their demands: “Okay.”
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
Wednesday evening, Republicans formally won control of the House.
Thursday morning, in the first public act of the new majority, senior House Republicans revealed their most urgent priority: They would investigate Hunter Biden.
The incoming chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the incoming chairman of the Oversight Committee, James Comer (R-Ky.), and about 10 other members of the brand-new majority walked into the House TV studio first thing Thursday to announce multiple probes into the president’s son.
“Hunter Biden was conducting business with suspected human traffickers,” they asserted, and “Hunter Biden and Joe Biden were involved in a scheme to try to get China to buy liquefied natural gas,” and “credit cards and bank accounts of Hunter and Joe Biden were commingled,” and “Hunter wanted keys made for Joe Biden” to his office. They mentioned Hunter two dozen times in their opening statements alone.
Reporters tried to ask questions about other topics. Comer cut them off. “If we could keep it about Hunter Biden, that would be great,” he said, explaining that “this is kind of a big deal, we think.”
“Why make this your very first visible order of business?” one reporter asked.
Comer assured her that other pressing issues would also be addressed: “Kevin [McCarthy] said the first legislation we’re going to vote on is to repeal the 87,000 IRS agents.”
Great idea! After a GOP campaign focused on crime, their first legislative act will be to protect criminals. They’ll try to block the hiring of IRS enforcement personnel (the true number is much less than 87,000) assigned to crack down on the wealthiest tax cheats. Voters who elected Republicans to fight inflation and gas prices might be feeling puzzled, if not swindled.
But, in fairness, the noisiest voices in the GOP have other plans, too: They also want to cut off military aid to Ukraine as it fights off Russia’s invasion.
A few hours after the Comer and Jordan show, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) took the same stage to announce plans to force a vote on ending funds for Ukraine. “Is Ukraine now the 51st state?” asked Greene, who alleged an elaborate cryptocurrency conspiracy in which military aid for Ukraine actually funds Democrats’ campaigns.
Not too long ago, the Republican Party stood against Russian aggression. But with the GOP’s single-digit majority in the new House, the oddballs hold all the power. “You’ve heard Leader McCarthy say publicly that he doesn’t see very good odds for much funding for Ukraine going forward in a Republican-controlled conference,” Greene pointed out.
Fellow crank Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) agreed: “I will not vote for one more dollar to Ukraine!”
It was heartwarming to see Greene and Gaetz on the same page again. Earlier in the week, they were feuding about whether to deny McCarthy the speakership. (The defection of even a couple of Republicans could doom him.)
Greene backed McCarthy for speaker and told McCarthy’s critics (including many of her fellow members of the far-right Freedom Caucus) to bring it on. “I’m not afraid of the civil war in the GOP — I lean into it,” she said on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s podcast.
Gaetz shot back: “Whatever Kevin has promised Marjorie Taylor Greene, I guarantee you this: At the first opportunity, he will zap her faster than you can say ‘Jewish space laser’” — a reference to the antisemitic sentiments that got Greene kicked off her committees. McCarthy has promised to restore her privileges.
McCarthy’s age-old ambition to be speaker is again teetering. Thirty-one House Republicans opposed his nomination as speaker this week — many times the number needed to sink him when the full House votes in January.
Even if he wins the job, he might soon wish he hadn’t. That’s because he’ll get it only by signing an endless pile of IOUs the crazies are demanding: impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Multiple Hunter Biden investigations. A select committee to investigate China. An investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, investigation. Investigations of Anthony Fauci and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And a panoply of probes into the Justice Department and the FBI. McCarthy is going to be held “completely hostage,” outgoing Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) predicted.
The same day Republicans were yammering about investigating Hunter and defunding Ukraine, outgoing Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced her retirement from leadership after two decades in charge of House Democrats. She was the first woman to be speaker and one of the most effective ever to hold that role.
Yet most Republicans skipped Pelosi’s announcement on the House floor (and a few opted for social media taunts). Among the missing was McCarthy, who explained: “I had meetings.”
One of those meetings McCarthy had Thursday was with Greene, who informed him of her anti-Ukraine maneuver. “I said, ‘I’m having a press conference at 4,’” Greene recounted. “And he said, ‘Okay.’”
Of course he did. The crazies are all knocking at his door. And if he wants to be speaker, there is only one answer to their demands: “Okay.”
THE OLD FIGHT AGAINST TRUMP BEGINS ANEW
Defenders of democracy may be tired, but the price of keeping Trump out of the White House is eternal vigilance.
By The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
It hasn’t been two weeks since a majority of voters turned out to oppose extremist views, conspiracy peddlers, and election deniers. Yet there will be no rest for weary defenders of democracy. Just like a bad Hollywood sequel, Donald Trump is back.
Direct from Mar-a-Lago, Trump announced Tuesday he is running for president — again. At least his third bid for the White House has received a cool reception from the Republican establishment — so far.
GOP House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy practically ran from reporters asking if he will endorse Trump, while mega donors are abandoning the former president.
Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing media properties — including Fox News, the New York Post, and the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board — have turned against Trump. His own daughter Ivanka did not attend her father’s announcement and said she would not be involved in his campaign.
Even Trump seemed bored with his MAGA schtick. His rambling, hour-long announcement lacked energy and recycled old hits. He spent most of the time looking back to the long-ago, halcyon days when he alone could fix it. Of course, it was filled with lies.
Could the long national Trump nightmare finally be winding down? Not so fast. We’ve been here before. Republicans have distanced themselves from Trump at several turns only to come slithering back.
Most Americans have long known Trump is a joke. Indeed, everyone laughed in 2011 when President Barack Obama roasted Trump during the White House correspondents’ dinner, exposing him as a failed businessman and pathetic reality TV show host.
Trump’s first White House bid was written off the moment it was launched in 2015 after he descended the infamous escalator, railing about Mexicans bringing drugs, rapists and crime to America.
Surely, Trump would lose after the Access Hollywood tape emerged in the closing weeks of the 2016 campaign as he bragged about grabbing women by their genitals. If only.
Despite losing the popular vote, Trump eked into the White House, thanks to Russian interference, Facebook disinformation, and then-FBI Director James Comey’s letter regarding the breathless investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails.
Once in the Oval Office, Trump proceeded to lie and line his pockets. He cozied up to dictators, undermined alliances, and damaged America’s reputation abroad.
The Republican establishment looked away as Trump was exposed as a tax cheat with a history of racist and sexist comments. His hapless mismanagement of the pandemic resulted in thousands of needless deaths.
The GOP yawned as Trump churned through staff and cabinet members at a record pace, while a long list of associates ran into legal trouble.
Republican lawmakers stood by Trump as he was impeached for extorting Ukraine. Some Republicans tried to inch away after Trump incited a deadly insurrection, but most couldn’t find the courage to convict him after he was impeached a second time.
At every turn, Republican elected officials chose political expediency over their sworn oath to defend the country from all enemies both foreign and domestic. Will this time be different? It is telling that after all of Trump’s unfathomable abuses, Republican elites are most upset about losing elections.
While the mainstream wing of the party may now want to move on, Trump’s base of MAGA supporters appears unshakable. About the only truthful thing Trump has said is that he could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose any voters.
At this point, he remains the favorite to get the GOP nomination in 2024. Of course, much can and will happen before the next presidential election. Trump still faces five state and federal investigations. He may be indicted for taking classified documents, inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, or attempting to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia. Or all the above.
Beyond revenge, perhaps the main reason Trump announced his candidacy so early is to stay one step ahead of the law. He will use the campaign to claim prosecutors are politically motivated, so get ready for nonstop whining about witch hunts.
A brief pause here to acknowledge the facts detailed above are only a partial list of Trump’s misdeeds, yet he remains a viable candidate for president again. That his supporters stand by this loathsome, crooked, incompetent, narcissist who does not care about them or the country is beyond comprehension.
The good news is the majority of Americans, including most independent voters, don’t want Trump to be president again. Indeed, most Trump-backed candidates in competitive 2022 midterm races failed to win elective office.
But the fight is not over. The next two years will be exhausting. Voters who care about decency and democracy — especially in pivotal Pennsylvania — must stay on guard. The ever-dangerous Trump remains at large.
Defenders of democracy may be tired, but the price of keeping Trump out of the White House is eternal vigilance.
By The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
It hasn’t been two weeks since a majority of voters turned out to oppose extremist views, conspiracy peddlers, and election deniers. Yet there will be no rest for weary defenders of democracy. Just like a bad Hollywood sequel, Donald Trump is back.
Direct from Mar-a-Lago, Trump announced Tuesday he is running for president — again. At least his third bid for the White House has received a cool reception from the Republican establishment — so far.
GOP House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy practically ran from reporters asking if he will endorse Trump, while mega donors are abandoning the former president.
Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing media properties — including Fox News, the New York Post, and the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board — have turned against Trump. His own daughter Ivanka did not attend her father’s announcement and said she would not be involved in his campaign.
Even Trump seemed bored with his MAGA schtick. His rambling, hour-long announcement lacked energy and recycled old hits. He spent most of the time looking back to the long-ago, halcyon days when he alone could fix it. Of course, it was filled with lies.
Could the long national Trump nightmare finally be winding down? Not so fast. We’ve been here before. Republicans have distanced themselves from Trump at several turns only to come slithering back.
Most Americans have long known Trump is a joke. Indeed, everyone laughed in 2011 when President Barack Obama roasted Trump during the White House correspondents’ dinner, exposing him as a failed businessman and pathetic reality TV show host.
Trump’s first White House bid was written off the moment it was launched in 2015 after he descended the infamous escalator, railing about Mexicans bringing drugs, rapists and crime to America.
Surely, Trump would lose after the Access Hollywood tape emerged in the closing weeks of the 2016 campaign as he bragged about grabbing women by their genitals. If only.
Despite losing the popular vote, Trump eked into the White House, thanks to Russian interference, Facebook disinformation, and then-FBI Director James Comey’s letter regarding the breathless investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails.
Once in the Oval Office, Trump proceeded to lie and line his pockets. He cozied up to dictators, undermined alliances, and damaged America’s reputation abroad.
The Republican establishment looked away as Trump was exposed as a tax cheat with a history of racist and sexist comments. His hapless mismanagement of the pandemic resulted in thousands of needless deaths.
The GOP yawned as Trump churned through staff and cabinet members at a record pace, while a long list of associates ran into legal trouble.
Republican lawmakers stood by Trump as he was impeached for extorting Ukraine. Some Republicans tried to inch away after Trump incited a deadly insurrection, but most couldn’t find the courage to convict him after he was impeached a second time.
At every turn, Republican elected officials chose political expediency over their sworn oath to defend the country from all enemies both foreign and domestic. Will this time be different? It is telling that after all of Trump’s unfathomable abuses, Republican elites are most upset about losing elections.
While the mainstream wing of the party may now want to move on, Trump’s base of MAGA supporters appears unshakable. About the only truthful thing Trump has said is that he could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose any voters.
At this point, he remains the favorite to get the GOP nomination in 2024. Of course, much can and will happen before the next presidential election. Trump still faces five state and federal investigations. He may be indicted for taking classified documents, inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, or attempting to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia. Or all the above.
Beyond revenge, perhaps the main reason Trump announced his candidacy so early is to stay one step ahead of the law. He will use the campaign to claim prosecutors are politically motivated, so get ready for nonstop whining about witch hunts.
A brief pause here to acknowledge the facts detailed above are only a partial list of Trump’s misdeeds, yet he remains a viable candidate for president again. That his supporters stand by this loathsome, crooked, incompetent, narcissist who does not care about them or the country is beyond comprehension.
The good news is the majority of Americans, including most independent voters, don’t want Trump to be president again. Indeed, most Trump-backed candidates in competitive 2022 midterm races failed to win elective office.
But the fight is not over. The next two years will be exhausting. Voters who care about decency and democracy — especially in pivotal Pennsylvania — must stay on guard. The ever-dangerous Trump remains at large.
AMERICA DESERVES BETTER THAN DONALD TRUMP
By The New York Times Editorial Board
Donald Trump, twice impeached for seeking to undermine the integrity of the 2020 presidential election, says he is running for president again in 2024.
His new campaign has begun with the same ugliness, lies and chaos as the last, but it poses even greater dangers to American democracy.
Mr. Trump and his supporters can no longer pretend to be good-faith participants in the democratic process. They have enshrined the refusal to accept adverse election results as a defining feature of their political movement, sought to install true believers in local and state election offices and demonstrated a willingness to resort to violence.
Mr. Trump is unfit for public office. As president, he showed himself to be incompetent and self-dealing. He should have been convicted by the Senate in 2019 for abusing his power and in 2021 for inciting an insurrection. Voters repudiated him at the ballot box after his second campaign, but he has the legal right to try again, so Americans must weather the trial of a third candidacy. If he is still in the race when the first votes are cast in 2024, the election will once again be a referendum on American democracy, because if our system of government is to survive, voters must choose leaders who accept and submit to the rule of law.
The first state primaries, however, are still over a year away, and before then, there is work to be done.
Congress needs to pass a bill overhauling the Electoral Count Act before the end of the year to make it harder for congressional supporters of Mr. Trump, or any other presidential candidate, to challenge the election results that are submitted by the states. The legislation also includes other safeguards. For example, it would steer disputes over vote tallies to the courts, giving the final say to judges and not partisan officials.
American voters last week rejected every one of the most dangerous election deniers running for key state offices in battleground states — from Mark Finchem and Jim Marchant to Tudor Dixon and Kari Lake. Still, there is a real danger of meddling by state and local election officials and members of Congress who deny that Mr. Trump lost the 2020 election.
Legal proceedings against Mr. Trump and investigations related to his actions around Jan. 6, election interference in Georgia and his mishandling of classified information at his home in Florida also need to continue. Allowing him to avoid legal accountability by declaring himself a candidate for office would be dangerous.
Mr. Trump has many loyal supporters, who regard him as a flawed but effective champion. His rise to power was built on the idea that he is a winner and, for many Republicans, his victory in 2016 was sufficient justification for having supported him. It allowed the party to cut taxes and take firm control of the Supreme Court, opening an era of conservative jurisprudence, including the reversal of Roe v. Wade this year.
But Republicans, even those who share Mr. Trump’s views on issues like China, trade and immigration, should recognize that it is shortsighted to pursue such goals by undermining the integrity of the political process. If Americans doubt the legitimacy of elections and their leaders fuel and inflame those doubts, they will no longer accept the legitimacy of decisions or policies of the federal government that contradict their views. Without that fundamental principle of democratic governance, American democracy crumbles.
The leadership of the Republican Party initially tried to prevent his rise, but over the four years of Mr. Trump’s presidency they failed to hold him accountable every time they had a chance to do so. Since he left office, they have continued to allow the cult of personality around him to grow unchecked, even as he demands personal loyalty and punishes those in the party who defy him, and many have refused to condemn even his worst excesses.
To see the extent of the damage that support for Mr. Trump has wrought, Republicans might look to any of the communities and institutions — schools, universities, churches and the armed forces, among others — to which their supporters belong. Trumpism has proved to be a damaging and divisive force even among conservative stalwarts. Evangelical Christians, for example, have become deeply divided, not along party lines but because, as Peter Wehner wrote last year in The Atlantic, in many churches, being considered faithful now means professing blind loyalty to one former president.
Mr. Trump’s candidacy should serve as a clarion call to those who are willing to fight for the soul of the Republican Party. While this board does not support many of their policy positions, some leading figures in the party — including former Vice President Mike Pence, Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina and Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, among others — have demonstrated a commitment to the rule of law and an ability to govern.
The country and the Republican Party need a robust nomination fight in which Mr. Trump’s record is scrutinized and held to account by other Republicans, and where alternative visions of the country and the party are presented and debated.
The case against Mr. Trump is straightforward. He uses demagogy to stoke racism. He lies about matters great and small. As president, he frequently placed his personal interests above the national interest. He promised to lift up ordinary Americans and instead delivered tax cuts for the wealthy that significantly increased the federal debt. He was a friend to dictators and an inconstant ally to liberal democracies. He made the country’s military position in the world demonstrably weaker by foolishly withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, which even a senior Israeli official now concedes was a serious self-inflicted wound. And in perhaps his greatest test as president, he treated the Covid-19 pandemic as a public relations problem, downplaying the danger and resisting basic safety measures that would have saved lives.
If he is elected, a second Trump term would lack whatever guardrails were in place during the first. Over the course of those four years, Mr. Trump grew bolder in his defiance of the other branches of government, disregard for the law and flagrant abuses of presidential power. This time, he would be running with the support of those who are not only aware of his worst abuses but have also embraced him as the wronged party. He is likely to be surrounded even more completely by sycophants. Consider, for example, whom Mr. Trump might choose as an attorney general. At the end of his term, Mr. Trump forced out his own attorney general, Bill Barr — a loyal supporter but someone who was unwilling to openly break the law — and tried to install a midlevel Justice Department official whose primary qualification was an apparent willingness to do exactly that on Mr. Trump’s behalf. A second term promises to be a revenge tour of grievances and political payback.
The Democratic Party has an obligation to do more than simply point to those possibilities. Democrats must take seriously the challenge of offering to Americans an appealing alternative. The ultimate justification for democracy and upholding the rule of law is that it is the system of government that provides the best life for the most people. Democrats argue, correctly, that voting against Mr. Trump and his allies is the principled course. They must also show voters that democracy is worth defending, and that it will improve their lives and the lives of their children. In countries where weak, ineffective opposition parties leave people without hope or good alternatives, it is easier for autocrats to fill the void.
Mr. Trump gravely damaged American democracy, but there are promising signs that the wounds are beginning to heal. Nearly without exception, the losing candidates in the recent midterm elections have conceded with grace — even some of those who had attacked the integrity of the election system during their campaigns. The return of Mr. Trump’s dark circus threatens that progress. He will once again tempt Americans with misinformation and outright lies, veiled threats and outright calls for violence, insults and provocations. By rejecting his bid for a political revival, Americans can put Mr. Trump in the past, and get back to the hard but necessary work of self-government.
By The New York Times Editorial Board
Donald Trump, twice impeached for seeking to undermine the integrity of the 2020 presidential election, says he is running for president again in 2024.
His new campaign has begun with the same ugliness, lies and chaos as the last, but it poses even greater dangers to American democracy.
Mr. Trump and his supporters can no longer pretend to be good-faith participants in the democratic process. They have enshrined the refusal to accept adverse election results as a defining feature of their political movement, sought to install true believers in local and state election offices and demonstrated a willingness to resort to violence.
Mr. Trump is unfit for public office. As president, he showed himself to be incompetent and self-dealing. He should have been convicted by the Senate in 2019 for abusing his power and in 2021 for inciting an insurrection. Voters repudiated him at the ballot box after his second campaign, but he has the legal right to try again, so Americans must weather the trial of a third candidacy. If he is still in the race when the first votes are cast in 2024, the election will once again be a referendum on American democracy, because if our system of government is to survive, voters must choose leaders who accept and submit to the rule of law.
The first state primaries, however, are still over a year away, and before then, there is work to be done.
Congress needs to pass a bill overhauling the Electoral Count Act before the end of the year to make it harder for congressional supporters of Mr. Trump, or any other presidential candidate, to challenge the election results that are submitted by the states. The legislation also includes other safeguards. For example, it would steer disputes over vote tallies to the courts, giving the final say to judges and not partisan officials.
American voters last week rejected every one of the most dangerous election deniers running for key state offices in battleground states — from Mark Finchem and Jim Marchant to Tudor Dixon and Kari Lake. Still, there is a real danger of meddling by state and local election officials and members of Congress who deny that Mr. Trump lost the 2020 election.
Legal proceedings against Mr. Trump and investigations related to his actions around Jan. 6, election interference in Georgia and his mishandling of classified information at his home in Florida also need to continue. Allowing him to avoid legal accountability by declaring himself a candidate for office would be dangerous.
Mr. Trump has many loyal supporters, who regard him as a flawed but effective champion. His rise to power was built on the idea that he is a winner and, for many Republicans, his victory in 2016 was sufficient justification for having supported him. It allowed the party to cut taxes and take firm control of the Supreme Court, opening an era of conservative jurisprudence, including the reversal of Roe v. Wade this year.
But Republicans, even those who share Mr. Trump’s views on issues like China, trade and immigration, should recognize that it is shortsighted to pursue such goals by undermining the integrity of the political process. If Americans doubt the legitimacy of elections and their leaders fuel and inflame those doubts, they will no longer accept the legitimacy of decisions or policies of the federal government that contradict their views. Without that fundamental principle of democratic governance, American democracy crumbles.
The leadership of the Republican Party initially tried to prevent his rise, but over the four years of Mr. Trump’s presidency they failed to hold him accountable every time they had a chance to do so. Since he left office, they have continued to allow the cult of personality around him to grow unchecked, even as he demands personal loyalty and punishes those in the party who defy him, and many have refused to condemn even his worst excesses.
To see the extent of the damage that support for Mr. Trump has wrought, Republicans might look to any of the communities and institutions — schools, universities, churches and the armed forces, among others — to which their supporters belong. Trumpism has proved to be a damaging and divisive force even among conservative stalwarts. Evangelical Christians, for example, have become deeply divided, not along party lines but because, as Peter Wehner wrote last year in The Atlantic, in many churches, being considered faithful now means professing blind loyalty to one former president.
Mr. Trump’s candidacy should serve as a clarion call to those who are willing to fight for the soul of the Republican Party. While this board does not support many of their policy positions, some leading figures in the party — including former Vice President Mike Pence, Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina and Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, among others — have demonstrated a commitment to the rule of law and an ability to govern.
The country and the Republican Party need a robust nomination fight in which Mr. Trump’s record is scrutinized and held to account by other Republicans, and where alternative visions of the country and the party are presented and debated.
The case against Mr. Trump is straightforward. He uses demagogy to stoke racism. He lies about matters great and small. As president, he frequently placed his personal interests above the national interest. He promised to lift up ordinary Americans and instead delivered tax cuts for the wealthy that significantly increased the federal debt. He was a friend to dictators and an inconstant ally to liberal democracies. He made the country’s military position in the world demonstrably weaker by foolishly withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, which even a senior Israeli official now concedes was a serious self-inflicted wound. And in perhaps his greatest test as president, he treated the Covid-19 pandemic as a public relations problem, downplaying the danger and resisting basic safety measures that would have saved lives.
If he is elected, a second Trump term would lack whatever guardrails were in place during the first. Over the course of those four years, Mr. Trump grew bolder in his defiance of the other branches of government, disregard for the law and flagrant abuses of presidential power. This time, he would be running with the support of those who are not only aware of his worst abuses but have also embraced him as the wronged party. He is likely to be surrounded even more completely by sycophants. Consider, for example, whom Mr. Trump might choose as an attorney general. At the end of his term, Mr. Trump forced out his own attorney general, Bill Barr — a loyal supporter but someone who was unwilling to openly break the law — and tried to install a midlevel Justice Department official whose primary qualification was an apparent willingness to do exactly that on Mr. Trump’s behalf. A second term promises to be a revenge tour of grievances and political payback.
The Democratic Party has an obligation to do more than simply point to those possibilities. Democrats must take seriously the challenge of offering to Americans an appealing alternative. The ultimate justification for democracy and upholding the rule of law is that it is the system of government that provides the best life for the most people. Democrats argue, correctly, that voting against Mr. Trump and his allies is the principled course. They must also show voters that democracy is worth defending, and that it will improve their lives and the lives of their children. In countries where weak, ineffective opposition parties leave people without hope or good alternatives, it is easier for autocrats to fill the void.
Mr. Trump gravely damaged American democracy, but there are promising signs that the wounds are beginning to heal. Nearly without exception, the losing candidates in the recent midterm elections have conceded with grace — even some of those who had attacked the integrity of the election system during their campaigns. The return of Mr. Trump’s dark circus threatens that progress. He will once again tempt Americans with misinformation and outright lies, veiled threats and outright calls for violence, insults and provocations. By rejecting his bid for a political revival, Americans can put Mr. Trump in the past, and get back to the hard but necessary work of self-government.
TRUMP IS OUT FOR VENGEANCE — AND TO PROTECT HIMSELF FROM PROSECUTION
By George T. Conway III, The Washington Post
He was always going to run. Absent incarceration or interment, and perhaps only the latter, he inevitably would seek the presidency again. His narcissism, his megalomania, his delicate yet illimitable ego, would have it no other way.
Donald Trump craves the power. Even more, he craves the attention. And more than ever — after an unprecedented two impeachments, a humiliating reelection defeat that he can’t even admit, and amid multiple criminal investigations and civil suits — he seeks vengeance. The l’état c’est moi president who apparently tried to sic the IRS on his enemies (and perhaps succeeded), and who tried to extort Ukraine into smearing Joe Biden, can’t wait to get back on the job.
Trump won’t succeed, as his successive losses of the House, Senate, presidency and last week’s midterm results show. Too many Americans would crawl on broken glass to vote against him, no matter who his general election opponent may be. They have seen enough.
Legacy? Trump has none, other than his impeachments and the stain of Jan. 6, 2021. He’ll never be remembered for much else. Historians will perpetually rank him as among the worst — if not the worst — in the presidential pantheon. As they should, befitting a man who, despite having sworn an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, did his level best to destroy it.
Trump can’t ruin a legacy he doesn’t have, but he could easily wreck something else: the Republican Party. Which is why so many in the GOP are, at long last, so alarmed. And why Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, the right-wing donor class and so many Republican Party operatives seek an alternative. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, they hope, will save the day.
Who could beat Trump one-on-one? Certainly not the one Republican sure to run: former vice president Mike Pence, who’ll run for no better reason than that he has nothing else to do. Here I agree with Trump: Pence is weak. Sure, he did the right thing on Jan. 6, for which he deserves eternal credit. But it took a titanic struggle of conscience for him to do what his constitutional oath so manifestly required. And it took nearly two years for him to muster the backbone, as he did this week, to say he was angry at Trump — the man who all but set the mob after him.
DeSantis would have a chance to beat Trump one-on-one, but why should he try? He’s ambitious to be sure, but running against Trump would be a brutal mud bath. To beat Trump, an opponent would have to go after Trump hammer and tong, battering his ego to trigger him into narcissistic, self-defeating, unhinged rages. That would be fun to watch: Hey, Donald, where’s the wall? Where’s that check from Mexico? Why did you stand by your buddy Anthony S. Fauci for so long?
But does DeSantis have that in him? We don’t know yet. He’s not the accomplished orator some make him out to be. Most importantly, he’s only 44. He’ll be 48 when he serves out his new gubernatorial term in 2026. Why not just sit back and keep building his war chest? Even if DeSantis wins the 2024 nomination, he’ll wind up with the Always Trump 40 percent hating his guts. The alternatives for the GOP aren’t pretty: Another national defeat led by Trump, or intraparty civil war.
But if you think that’s great for the rest of us, I’ve got bad news for you. A big reason Trump announced his run is he fears criminal prosecution. He’s a desperate man, a threatened and rabid animal, who could face multiple indictments (the stolen classified documents, Georgia) over the next year.
He thinks running for president, and the specter of violence from his fringiest supporters, will protect him from the prosecutors. If he’s indicted, he promises “problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen before.” And he’ll make good on that promise: As Sen. Mitch McConnell said last year, Trump was “determined” to “torch our institutions on the way out” in January 2021, merely because he lost an election.
So just imagine what Trump would do to stay out of jail.
By George T. Conway III, The Washington Post
He was always going to run. Absent incarceration or interment, and perhaps only the latter, he inevitably would seek the presidency again. His narcissism, his megalomania, his delicate yet illimitable ego, would have it no other way.
Donald Trump craves the power. Even more, he craves the attention. And more than ever — after an unprecedented two impeachments, a humiliating reelection defeat that he can’t even admit, and amid multiple criminal investigations and civil suits — he seeks vengeance. The l’état c’est moi president who apparently tried to sic the IRS on his enemies (and perhaps succeeded), and who tried to extort Ukraine into smearing Joe Biden, can’t wait to get back on the job.
Trump won’t succeed, as his successive losses of the House, Senate, presidency and last week’s midterm results show. Too many Americans would crawl on broken glass to vote against him, no matter who his general election opponent may be. They have seen enough.
Legacy? Trump has none, other than his impeachments and the stain of Jan. 6, 2021. He’ll never be remembered for much else. Historians will perpetually rank him as among the worst — if not the worst — in the presidential pantheon. As they should, befitting a man who, despite having sworn an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, did his level best to destroy it.
Trump can’t ruin a legacy he doesn’t have, but he could easily wreck something else: the Republican Party. Which is why so many in the GOP are, at long last, so alarmed. And why Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, the right-wing donor class and so many Republican Party operatives seek an alternative. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, they hope, will save the day.
Who could beat Trump one-on-one? Certainly not the one Republican sure to run: former vice president Mike Pence, who’ll run for no better reason than that he has nothing else to do. Here I agree with Trump: Pence is weak. Sure, he did the right thing on Jan. 6, for which he deserves eternal credit. But it took a titanic struggle of conscience for him to do what his constitutional oath so manifestly required. And it took nearly two years for him to muster the backbone, as he did this week, to say he was angry at Trump — the man who all but set the mob after him.
DeSantis would have a chance to beat Trump one-on-one, but why should he try? He’s ambitious to be sure, but running against Trump would be a brutal mud bath. To beat Trump, an opponent would have to go after Trump hammer and tong, battering his ego to trigger him into narcissistic, self-defeating, unhinged rages. That would be fun to watch: Hey, Donald, where’s the wall? Where’s that check from Mexico? Why did you stand by your buddy Anthony S. Fauci for so long?
But does DeSantis have that in him? We don’t know yet. He’s not the accomplished orator some make him out to be. Most importantly, he’s only 44. He’ll be 48 when he serves out his new gubernatorial term in 2026. Why not just sit back and keep building his war chest? Even if DeSantis wins the 2024 nomination, he’ll wind up with the Always Trump 40 percent hating his guts. The alternatives for the GOP aren’t pretty: Another national defeat led by Trump, or intraparty civil war.
But if you think that’s great for the rest of us, I’ve got bad news for you. A big reason Trump announced his run is he fears criminal prosecution. He’s a desperate man, a threatened and rabid animal, who could face multiple indictments (the stolen classified documents, Georgia) over the next year.
He thinks running for president, and the specter of violence from his fringiest supporters, will protect him from the prosecutors. If he’s indicted, he promises “problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen before.” And he’ll make good on that promise: As Sen. Mitch McConnell said last year, Trump was “determined” to “torch our institutions on the way out” in January 2021, merely because he lost an election.
So just imagine what Trump would do to stay out of jail.
IF THE GOP CAN’T GET RID OF TRUMP, MAYBE GEORGIA’S PROSECUTORS CAN
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Despite dragging his party to defeat in the midterms, former president Donald Trump is expected to announce his 2024 presidential campaign this week. This would not only obliterate the GOP’s chance to win the runoff election for Georgia’s U.S. Senate seat, but also threaten his party’s prospects two years from now.
But Republicans will likely learn in the near future that Trump’s latest political humiliation is the least of his worries. He remains in grave legal peril on multiple fronts, and no criminal investigation is a greater threat to him than the one being conducted by Fani Willis, the district attorney for Fulton County, Ga.
Willis is teeing up a strong criminal case against Trump for his attempt to pressure Georgia election officials to overturn the state’s 2020 results. She has been calling the former president’s cronies to testify before a grand jury and is successfully beating back specious challenges to subpoenas from key figures — including former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey O. Graham.
A voluminous new report from the Brookings Institution provides a legal road map for the potential prosecution of Trump. The report debunks defenses that Trump will likely deploy and underscores the real possibility that his closest associates might flip in the case, given how many might face criminal liability.
The report sums up the damning facts in the case:
[Trump] and those around him, including his chief of staff and others, made multiple attempts to intervene and overturn the state’s election results. His personal attorneys testified falsely in the state legislature. His campaign pursued a plan to organize false electors that included a bogus slate in Georgia. Trump attempted to replace his own attorney general to seek the unlawful intervention of the Georgia legislature. . . .
Most notably, on Saturday, January 2, 2021, Trump placed a call to Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Trump urged and ultimately threatened Raffensperger to reverse the election outcome — including a demand that Raffensperger “find 11,780 votes” that could be deemed fraudulent and tossed out. That number was exactly one more vote than the margin of Joe Biden’s 11,779-vote victory in the state. If Raffensperger’s office complied with his request, Trump would be named the winner of the state’s presidential election, and presumably could use that development to seek a broader unraveling of the certified election results in other states confirming his defeat.
Trump’s call to Raffensperger is by no means the only action he took demonstrating his intentions. Indeed, the evidence presented in the Brookings report should remove any reasonable doubt the former president was out to steal the election. This includes:
Much of these details emerged during hearings conducted by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection. Altogether, the evidence against Trump that would be introduced to a trial jury would be staggering.
The Brookings report then applies several Georgia criminal laws to the facts:
These include four principal relevant criminal statutes: 1) solicitation to commit election fraud, Ga. Code Ann. § 21-2-604(a); 2) intentional interference with performance of election duties, Ga. Code Ann. § 21-2-597; 3) interference with primaries and elections, Ga. Code Ann. § 21-2-566; and 4) conspiracy to commit election fraud, Ga. Code Ann. § 21-2-603.
Reading through the report’s compilation of law and facts, it is clear not only that a district attorney could bring such a case against Trump, but also that it is virtually inconceivable that one would refuse to do so. As Norman Eisen, one of the report’s authors and a former co-counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during Trump’s first impeachment, tells me, “We are no longer a democracy if an ex-president can get away with conduct that would lead anyone else to be charged.” While Eisen notes that there might be some exonerating evidence that has yet to come to light, he adds “what [evidence] is known is so strong that charges against Trump are likely.”
Republicans still loyal to Trump who think the former president would be able to evade prosecution should reconsider. The Brookings report analyzes a list of defenses that Trump is likely to make, including “assertions of immunity by virtue of his status as a former president; claims that his conduct was protected by the First Amendment; accusations of selective or retaliatory prosecution; and an insistence that his conduct is shielded from liability because he truly believed his own claims of widespread election fraud.” None of these arguments, the report’s authors conclude, would have any merit.
The report is a sobering reminder of the extent to which a would-be authoritarian would go to retain power illegally. As Eisen tells me, “election denial is a danger to the republic, and unless the election denier-in-chief is charged for his past conduct that appears to have crossed the line to criminality, the threat will persist.”
And so it comes back to Republicans. After torpedoing arguably their best opportunity to win control of both the House and Senate, Trump is demanding that his party ignore his political failures as well as the exceedingly strong chance he will be indicted in the weeks ahead. Given that Republicans have never shown the nerve to abandon Trump, they might owe a debt of gratitude to Willis should she issue an indictment.
Leave it to a courageous woman to do what hordes of sniveling Republican politicians, donors and insiders cannot: hold Trump accountable.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Despite dragging his party to defeat in the midterms, former president Donald Trump is expected to announce his 2024 presidential campaign this week. This would not only obliterate the GOP’s chance to win the runoff election for Georgia’s U.S. Senate seat, but also threaten his party’s prospects two years from now.
But Republicans will likely learn in the near future that Trump’s latest political humiliation is the least of his worries. He remains in grave legal peril on multiple fronts, and no criminal investigation is a greater threat to him than the one being conducted by Fani Willis, the district attorney for Fulton County, Ga.
Willis is teeing up a strong criminal case against Trump for his attempt to pressure Georgia election officials to overturn the state’s 2020 results. She has been calling the former president’s cronies to testify before a grand jury and is successfully beating back specious challenges to subpoenas from key figures — including former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey O. Graham.
A voluminous new report from the Brookings Institution provides a legal road map for the potential prosecution of Trump. The report debunks defenses that Trump will likely deploy and underscores the real possibility that his closest associates might flip in the case, given how many might face criminal liability.
The report sums up the damning facts in the case:
[Trump] and those around him, including his chief of staff and others, made multiple attempts to intervene and overturn the state’s election results. His personal attorneys testified falsely in the state legislature. His campaign pursued a plan to organize false electors that included a bogus slate in Georgia. Trump attempted to replace his own attorney general to seek the unlawful intervention of the Georgia legislature. . . .
Most notably, on Saturday, January 2, 2021, Trump placed a call to Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Trump urged and ultimately threatened Raffensperger to reverse the election outcome — including a demand that Raffensperger “find 11,780 votes” that could be deemed fraudulent and tossed out. That number was exactly one more vote than the margin of Joe Biden’s 11,779-vote victory in the state. If Raffensperger’s office complied with his request, Trump would be named the winner of the state’s presidential election, and presumably could use that development to seek a broader unraveling of the certified election results in other states confirming his defeat.
Trump’s call to Raffensperger is by no means the only action he took demonstrating his intentions. Indeed, the evidence presented in the Brookings report should remove any reasonable doubt the former president was out to steal the election. This includes:
- Trump’s repeated attempts to discredit the results, even before the election began and despite multiple investigations that found no evidence of fraud.
- Calls that Trump made, not only to Georgia officials, but to election officials in multiple states to devise slates of phony electors.
- Trump’s desperate ploy to have the Justice Department send out letters to states falsely indicating there was evidence of fraud.
- Trump’s attempt to fire then-acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen when he refused to send out such letters.
- Trump’s enlistment of lawyers, including John Eastman and Cleta Mitchell, to work out a scheme to negate Georgia’s valid, certified electoral slates of electors.
- Trump’s decision to send his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to falsely testify at a Georgia hearing about already-refuted conspiracy theories. The Brookings report also notes that “Trump’s team continued to pressure Georgia legislators throughout the month of December, with Giuliani meeting again with the Georgia State Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Dec. 30, 2020.”
- Trump’s attempt to enlist Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel to help his efforts in Georgia.
- Trump’s refusal to heed pleas from Georgia officials that his bogus allegations were putting election workers and state officials at risk of violence.
Much of these details emerged during hearings conducted by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection. Altogether, the evidence against Trump that would be introduced to a trial jury would be staggering.
The Brookings report then applies several Georgia criminal laws to the facts:
These include four principal relevant criminal statutes: 1) solicitation to commit election fraud, Ga. Code Ann. § 21-2-604(a); 2) intentional interference with performance of election duties, Ga. Code Ann. § 21-2-597; 3) interference with primaries and elections, Ga. Code Ann. § 21-2-566; and 4) conspiracy to commit election fraud, Ga. Code Ann. § 21-2-603.
Reading through the report’s compilation of law and facts, it is clear not only that a district attorney could bring such a case against Trump, but also that it is virtually inconceivable that one would refuse to do so. As Norman Eisen, one of the report’s authors and a former co-counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during Trump’s first impeachment, tells me, “We are no longer a democracy if an ex-president can get away with conduct that would lead anyone else to be charged.” While Eisen notes that there might be some exonerating evidence that has yet to come to light, he adds “what [evidence] is known is so strong that charges against Trump are likely.”
Republicans still loyal to Trump who think the former president would be able to evade prosecution should reconsider. The Brookings report analyzes a list of defenses that Trump is likely to make, including “assertions of immunity by virtue of his status as a former president; claims that his conduct was protected by the First Amendment; accusations of selective or retaliatory prosecution; and an insistence that his conduct is shielded from liability because he truly believed his own claims of widespread election fraud.” None of these arguments, the report’s authors conclude, would have any merit.
The report is a sobering reminder of the extent to which a would-be authoritarian would go to retain power illegally. As Eisen tells me, “election denial is a danger to the republic, and unless the election denier-in-chief is charged for his past conduct that appears to have crossed the line to criminality, the threat will persist.”
And so it comes back to Republicans. After torpedoing arguably their best opportunity to win control of both the House and Senate, Trump is demanding that his party ignore his political failures as well as the exceedingly strong chance he will be indicted in the weeks ahead. Given that Republicans have never shown the nerve to abandon Trump, they might owe a debt of gratitude to Willis should she issue an indictment.
Leave it to a courageous woman to do what hordes of sniveling Republican politicians, donors and insiders cannot: hold Trump accountable.
NO ONE FORCED REPUBLICANS TO DO ANY OF THESE THINGS
By Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times
In “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” Karl Marx famously observed, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”
Our choices are shaped, and even bound, by the histories and institutions we inhabit. And yet they’re still our choices. We are moral agents, responsible for our decisions even if we can’t fully escape the matrix in which we make them.
And yet so much of the conversation about the modern Republican Party assumes the opposite: that Republican politicians are impossibly bound to the needs and desires of their coalition and unable to resist its demands. Many — too many — political observers speak as if Republican leaders and officials had no choice but to accept Donald Trump into the fold; no choice but to apologize for his every transgression; no choice but to humor his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election; and now, no choice but to embrace election-denying candidates around the country.
But that’s nonsense. For all the pressures of the base, for all the fear of Trump and his gift for ridicule, for all the demands of the donor class, it is also true that at every turn Republicans in Washington and elsewhere have made an active and affirmative choice to embrace the worst elements of their party — and jettison the norms and values that make democracy work — for the sake of their narrow political and ideological objectives.
Those objectives, for what it’s worth, are nothing new. To the extent that the Trump-era Republican Party has an agenda, it is what it has always been: to be a handmaiden to the total domination of capital, to facilitate the upward redistribution of wealth and to strengthen hierarchies of class and status. To those ends, Republicans in Washington have already announced plans to reduce social insurance, cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans and restrict abortion rights.
What’s striking, again, is the extent to which many political commentators refuse to accept the moral and political agency of Republican politicians and officials. If there is a threat to democracy, goes one argument, it’s because liberals and progressives have refused to compromise their priorities in its defense. And according to another, similar argument, which I wrote about last week, the Democratic Party’s rhetoric embracing democracy is, itself, undermining democracy.
As it stands, plenty of Republican politicians and officials are making live plans to undermine any election they might lose. According to a report in The Washington Post, “Republican officials and candidates in at least three battleground states are pushing to disqualify thousands of mail ballots after urging their own supporters to vote on Election Day.”
It’s not that those mail ballots are illegal or illegitimate; the problem is that many have presumably been cast by Democrats. If Republicans can invalidate Democratic mail ballots while counting on their supporters to vote in person on Election Day, then they can forge an easier path to victory in closely divided states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Republicans have attacked ballot access for Native Americans in Arizona — a Democratic-leaning group in a contested swing state — and embarked on a project of voter intimidation in Florida. In August, the state’s new election police force arrested 20 people accused of voter fraud. Fifteen were Black voters charged with casting ballots illegally. Several said they thought they qualified to cast a vote under a state constitutional amendment that restored the right to vote to many former felons. And in interviews with investigators, all said they had received a voter registration card from their county election supervisors.
In the absence of any evidence of intent, the state’s case against these supposedly lawbreaking voters will fall apart. But that doesn’t mean the arrests were a failure. Some Floridians, accustomed to helping older family members cast ballots by mail, have refrained from giving assistance for fear of running afoul of the state election police.
The larger point is that we should not treat the Republican effort to suppress and intimidate voters — or invalidate elections — as if it were a force of nature or the automatic result of some mechanical process. Republican politicians in Florida chose to respond to hard-fought elections by burdening their opponents. Republican leaders in Washington, likewise, chose to elevate their most irresponsible colleagues into positions of influence and authority. And Republican politicians nationwide chose to embrace the lies and the conspiracy theories that undergird the idea that the only legitimate elections are the ones Republicans win.
Led by Donald Trump and his many acolytes, the Republican Party is poised to plunge this country into political and constitutional crisis over its refusal to share power or acknowledge defeat. We can treat this as some kind of an inevitability, the only possible outcome given the pieces at play, or we can treat it as what it is: a deliberate choice.
By Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times
In “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” Karl Marx famously observed, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”
Our choices are shaped, and even bound, by the histories and institutions we inhabit. And yet they’re still our choices. We are moral agents, responsible for our decisions even if we can’t fully escape the matrix in which we make them.
And yet so much of the conversation about the modern Republican Party assumes the opposite: that Republican politicians are impossibly bound to the needs and desires of their coalition and unable to resist its demands. Many — too many — political observers speak as if Republican leaders and officials had no choice but to accept Donald Trump into the fold; no choice but to apologize for his every transgression; no choice but to humor his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election; and now, no choice but to embrace election-denying candidates around the country.
But that’s nonsense. For all the pressures of the base, for all the fear of Trump and his gift for ridicule, for all the demands of the donor class, it is also true that at every turn Republicans in Washington and elsewhere have made an active and affirmative choice to embrace the worst elements of their party — and jettison the norms and values that make democracy work — for the sake of their narrow political and ideological objectives.
Those objectives, for what it’s worth, are nothing new. To the extent that the Trump-era Republican Party has an agenda, it is what it has always been: to be a handmaiden to the total domination of capital, to facilitate the upward redistribution of wealth and to strengthen hierarchies of class and status. To those ends, Republicans in Washington have already announced plans to reduce social insurance, cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans and restrict abortion rights.
What’s striking, again, is the extent to which many political commentators refuse to accept the moral and political agency of Republican politicians and officials. If there is a threat to democracy, goes one argument, it’s because liberals and progressives have refused to compromise their priorities in its defense. And according to another, similar argument, which I wrote about last week, the Democratic Party’s rhetoric embracing democracy is, itself, undermining democracy.
As it stands, plenty of Republican politicians and officials are making live plans to undermine any election they might lose. According to a report in The Washington Post, “Republican officials and candidates in at least three battleground states are pushing to disqualify thousands of mail ballots after urging their own supporters to vote on Election Day.”
It’s not that those mail ballots are illegal or illegitimate; the problem is that many have presumably been cast by Democrats. If Republicans can invalidate Democratic mail ballots while counting on their supporters to vote in person on Election Day, then they can forge an easier path to victory in closely divided states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Republicans have attacked ballot access for Native Americans in Arizona — a Democratic-leaning group in a contested swing state — and embarked on a project of voter intimidation in Florida. In August, the state’s new election police force arrested 20 people accused of voter fraud. Fifteen were Black voters charged with casting ballots illegally. Several said they thought they qualified to cast a vote under a state constitutional amendment that restored the right to vote to many former felons. And in interviews with investigators, all said they had received a voter registration card from their county election supervisors.
In the absence of any evidence of intent, the state’s case against these supposedly lawbreaking voters will fall apart. But that doesn’t mean the arrests were a failure. Some Floridians, accustomed to helping older family members cast ballots by mail, have refrained from giving assistance for fear of running afoul of the state election police.
The larger point is that we should not treat the Republican effort to suppress and intimidate voters — or invalidate elections — as if it were a force of nature or the automatic result of some mechanical process. Republican politicians in Florida chose to respond to hard-fought elections by burdening their opponents. Republican leaders in Washington, likewise, chose to elevate their most irresponsible colleagues into positions of influence and authority. And Republican politicians nationwide chose to embrace the lies and the conspiracy theories that undergird the idea that the only legitimate elections are the ones Republicans win.
Led by Donald Trump and his many acolytes, the Republican Party is poised to plunge this country into political and constitutional crisis over its refusal to share power or acknowledge defeat. We can treat this as some kind of an inevitability, the only possible outcome given the pieces at play, or we can treat it as what it is: a deliberate choice.
AMERICA CAN HAVE DEMOCRACY OR POLITICAL VIOLENCE. NOT BOTH.
By The New York Times Editorial Board
Over the past five years, incidents of political violence in the United States by right-wing extremists have soared. Few experts who track this type of violence believe things will get better anytime soon without concerted action. Domestic extremism is actually likely to worsen. The attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of the speaker of the House of Representatives, was only the latest episode, and federal officials warn that the threat of violence could continue to escalate after the midterm elections.
The embrace of conspiratorial and violent ideology and rhetoric by many Republican politicians during and after the Trump presidency, anti-government anger related to the pandemic, disinformation, cultural polarization, the ubiquity of guns and radicalized internet culture have all led to the current moment, and none of those trends are in retreat. Donald Trump was the first American president to rouse an armed mob that stormed the Capitol and threatened lawmakers. Taken together, these factors form a social scaffolding that allows for the kind of endemic political violence that can undo a democracy. Ours would not be the first.
Yet the nation is not powerless to stop a slide toward deadly chaos. If institutions and individuals do more to make it unacceptable in American public life, organized violence in the service of political objectives can still be pushed to the fringes. When a faction of one of the country’s two main political parties embraces extremism, that makes thwarting it both more difficult and more necessary. A well-functioning democracy demands it.
The legal tools to do so are already available and in many cases are written into state constitutions, in laws prohibiting private paramilitary activity. “I fear that the country is entering a phase of history with more organized domestic civil violence than we’ve seen in 100 years,” said Philip Zelikow, the former executive director of the 9/11 commission, who pioneered legal strategies to go after violent extremists earlier in his career. “We have done it in the past and can do so again.”
As the range of violence in recent years shows, the scourge of extremism in the United States is evident across the political spectrum. But the threat to the current order comes disproportionately from the right.
Of the more than 440 extremism-related murders committed in the past decade, more than 75 percent were committed by right-wing extremists, white supremacists or anti-government extremists. The remaining quarter stemmed from a range of other motivations, according to a study by the Anti-Defamation League. There were 29 extremist-related homicides last year: 26 committed by right-wing extremists, two by Black nationalists and one by an Islamic extremist. The Department of Homeland Security has warned again and again that domestic extremism motivated by white supremacist and other right-wing ideologies is the country’s top terrorism threat.
Some of the most spectacular recent episodes of political terrorism are etched into the nation’s collective memory: mass shootings in El Paso and Buffalo, bomb and arson attacks against mosques and synagogues, a plot by a paramilitary group to kidnap Michigan’s governor, the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6.
In addition to these high-profile events, the threat of violence has begun to have a corrosive effect on many aspects of public life: the hounding of election workers until they are forced into hiding, harassment of school board officials, threats to judges, armed demonstrations at multiple statehouses, attacks on abortion clinics and anti-abortion pregnancy centers, bomb threats against hospitals that offer care to transgender children, assaults on flight attendants who try to enforce Covid rules and the armed intimidation of librarians over the books and ideas they choose to share.
Meanwhile, threats against members of Congress are more than 10 times as numerous as they were just five years ago. “I wouldn’t be surprised if a senator or House member were killed,” Senator Susan Collins told The Times this fall.
Many — far too many — Americans now consider political violence not only acceptable but perhaps necessary. In an online survey of more than 7,200 adults, nearly a third of people answered that political violence is usually or always justified. The study, conducted by researchers at the University of California, Davis, and released in October, came to the alarming conclusion that “MAGA Republicans” (as opposed to those who identified themselves as traditional Republicans) “are more likely to hold extreme and racist beliefs, to endorse political violence, to see such violence as likely to occur and to predict that they will be armed under circumstances in which they consider political violence to be justified.”
Any violence suppresses participation in democratic decision making, and it can negate the decisions that are made. “The damage that this violence itself and the conspiracies driving it are causing to our democracy are already substantial and are likely to produce significant democratic decline if not arrested soon,” Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told the Jan. 6 committee.
There are four interrelated trends that the country needs to address: the impunity of organized paramilitary groups, the presence of extremists in law enforcement and the military, the global spread of extremist ideas and the growing number of G.O.P. politicians who are using the threat of political violence not just to intimidate their opponents on the left but also to wrest control of the party from those Republicans who are committed to democratic norms.
By The New York Times Editorial Board
Over the past five years, incidents of political violence in the United States by right-wing extremists have soared. Few experts who track this type of violence believe things will get better anytime soon without concerted action. Domestic extremism is actually likely to worsen. The attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of the speaker of the House of Representatives, was only the latest episode, and federal officials warn that the threat of violence could continue to escalate after the midterm elections.
The embrace of conspiratorial and violent ideology and rhetoric by many Republican politicians during and after the Trump presidency, anti-government anger related to the pandemic, disinformation, cultural polarization, the ubiquity of guns and radicalized internet culture have all led to the current moment, and none of those trends are in retreat. Donald Trump was the first American president to rouse an armed mob that stormed the Capitol and threatened lawmakers. Taken together, these factors form a social scaffolding that allows for the kind of endemic political violence that can undo a democracy. Ours would not be the first.
Yet the nation is not powerless to stop a slide toward deadly chaos. If institutions and individuals do more to make it unacceptable in American public life, organized violence in the service of political objectives can still be pushed to the fringes. When a faction of one of the country’s two main political parties embraces extremism, that makes thwarting it both more difficult and more necessary. A well-functioning democracy demands it.
The legal tools to do so are already available and in many cases are written into state constitutions, in laws prohibiting private paramilitary activity. “I fear that the country is entering a phase of history with more organized domestic civil violence than we’ve seen in 100 years,” said Philip Zelikow, the former executive director of the 9/11 commission, who pioneered legal strategies to go after violent extremists earlier in his career. “We have done it in the past and can do so again.”
As the range of violence in recent years shows, the scourge of extremism in the United States is evident across the political spectrum. But the threat to the current order comes disproportionately from the right.
Of the more than 440 extremism-related murders committed in the past decade, more than 75 percent were committed by right-wing extremists, white supremacists or anti-government extremists. The remaining quarter stemmed from a range of other motivations, according to a study by the Anti-Defamation League. There were 29 extremist-related homicides last year: 26 committed by right-wing extremists, two by Black nationalists and one by an Islamic extremist. The Department of Homeland Security has warned again and again that domestic extremism motivated by white supremacist and other right-wing ideologies is the country’s top terrorism threat.
Some of the most spectacular recent episodes of political terrorism are etched into the nation’s collective memory: mass shootings in El Paso and Buffalo, bomb and arson attacks against mosques and synagogues, a plot by a paramilitary group to kidnap Michigan’s governor, the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6.
In addition to these high-profile events, the threat of violence has begun to have a corrosive effect on many aspects of public life: the hounding of election workers until they are forced into hiding, harassment of school board officials, threats to judges, armed demonstrations at multiple statehouses, attacks on abortion clinics and anti-abortion pregnancy centers, bomb threats against hospitals that offer care to transgender children, assaults on flight attendants who try to enforce Covid rules and the armed intimidation of librarians over the books and ideas they choose to share.
Meanwhile, threats against members of Congress are more than 10 times as numerous as they were just five years ago. “I wouldn’t be surprised if a senator or House member were killed,” Senator Susan Collins told The Times this fall.
Many — far too many — Americans now consider political violence not only acceptable but perhaps necessary. In an online survey of more than 7,200 adults, nearly a third of people answered that political violence is usually or always justified. The study, conducted by researchers at the University of California, Davis, and released in October, came to the alarming conclusion that “MAGA Republicans” (as opposed to those who identified themselves as traditional Republicans) “are more likely to hold extreme and racist beliefs, to endorse political violence, to see such violence as likely to occur and to predict that they will be armed under circumstances in which they consider political violence to be justified.”
Any violence suppresses participation in democratic decision making, and it can negate the decisions that are made. “The damage that this violence itself and the conspiracies driving it are causing to our democracy are already substantial and are likely to produce significant democratic decline if not arrested soon,” Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told the Jan. 6 committee.
There are four interrelated trends that the country needs to address: the impunity of organized paramilitary groups, the presence of extremists in law enforcement and the military, the global spread of extremist ideas and the growing number of G.O.P. politicians who are using the threat of political violence not just to intimidate their opponents on the left but also to wrest control of the party from those Republicans who are committed to democratic norms.
VOTERS CLEARLY CARE ABOUT THE ECONOMY, BUT WILL THE GOP’S PLANS MAKE THINGS BETTER?
If Republicans win control of the House, as polls indicate, they plan to gut Social Security and Medicare, while cutting taxes. That won't benefit voters or reduce inflation.
By The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
Polls indicate voters know that democracy is in peril, but they care more about the economy. But is electing Republican lawmakers the answer to either problem? If anything, a look at the GOP’s positions strongly suggests that their proposals will likely make things worse.
If Republicans win control of the House, as polls indicate, they plan to gut Social Security and Medicare, while cutting taxes. This is not a plan that will benefit voters or reduce inflation.
When Liz Truss, the brief British prime minister, announced a similar economic plan, England’s markets imploded. Truss was forced from office after 44 days, a tenure that the London tabloids said was shorter than the shelf life of a head of lettuce.
From Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush to Donald Trump, the GOP has long promoted similar trickle-down economic policies. Many middle- and working-class voters have been duped into supporting a failed policy that goes against their own economic interests.
With Election Day looming, voters beware: Republicans are not your economic friend. If Republicans win back control of Congress, they plan to make the 2017 tax cuts permanent, repeal the corporate tax increases President Joe Biden signed into law in August, and hollow out funding to the Internal Revenue Service.
Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, explained in March how cutting taxes will make inflation worse: “Putting more money in people’s pockets will increase demand for goods at a time of supply shortages. That will drive up prices and worsen the inflation that the governors claim to be so worried about. And it will increase pressure on the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates even more than it planned.”
Michael Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, was more direct: “It is unlikely that any of the policies proposed by Republicans would meaningfully reduce inflation in 2023, when rapidly rising prices will still be a major problem for the economy and for consumers.”
The centerpiece of the Republican plan is to cut Social Security and Medicare. Sen. Rick Scott (R., Fla.), chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, rolled out an 11-point plan to “rescue America” that calls for sunsetting all federal programs every five years, including Social Security and Medicare. In June, the Republican Study Committee released a plan that called for raising the eligibility age to collect full Social Security benefits from 67 to 70.
If Republicans return to power in Congress, they plan to use the looming debt-ceiling limit to shut down the government and force cuts to Social Security and Medicare. This is a reckless plan that could intentionally worsen the economy.
Republicans have spun a narrative that blames Biden for inflation and rising gas prices. (Never mind that oil companies are making record profits.)
Left unsaid is that under Trump, the national debt increased by $7.8 trillion. That was the third biggest increase in the national debt relative to the size of the economy of any president after George W. Bush and Abraham Lincoln. The Grand Old Party is not as fiscally savvy as its members would want you to believe.
To be sure, during Trump’s one term, the government rightly boosted spending to offset the economic collapse from the pandemic. But Trump’s massive 2017 tax cuts for wealthy individuals and corporations, combined with wasteful spending throughout, helped to balloon the deficit by 50%.
Under Biden, the deficit was cut in half in the 2022 fiscal year, thanks largely to reductions in COVID-relief spending. Meanwhile, Biden’s inflation reduction bill, signed into law in August, is expected to reduce drug prices for senior citizens, while also combating climate change. Biden’s infrastructure bill is designed to build the economy up from the middle, rather than trickle down from the rich.
While those economic benefits will not come overnight, gas prices are dropping and wages are increasing at the fastest rate in decades. In a column in the Wall Street Journal, economist Alan Blinder explained that Biden was not to blame for inflation.
Inflation came about after the pandemic collapsed the global economy. As the economy has bounced back, increased consumer demand, supply-chain issues, and worker shortages have combined to increase inflation, while the war in Ukraine added to the spike in oil prices.
It is easy to blame Biden for the economy, but voters should know that the Republican plan is far from the answer.
If Republicans win control of the House, as polls indicate, they plan to gut Social Security and Medicare, while cutting taxes. That won't benefit voters or reduce inflation.
By The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
Polls indicate voters know that democracy is in peril, but they care more about the economy. But is electing Republican lawmakers the answer to either problem? If anything, a look at the GOP’s positions strongly suggests that their proposals will likely make things worse.
If Republicans win control of the House, as polls indicate, they plan to gut Social Security and Medicare, while cutting taxes. This is not a plan that will benefit voters or reduce inflation.
When Liz Truss, the brief British prime minister, announced a similar economic plan, England’s markets imploded. Truss was forced from office after 44 days, a tenure that the London tabloids said was shorter than the shelf life of a head of lettuce.
From Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush to Donald Trump, the GOP has long promoted similar trickle-down economic policies. Many middle- and working-class voters have been duped into supporting a failed policy that goes against their own economic interests.
With Election Day looming, voters beware: Republicans are not your economic friend. If Republicans win back control of Congress, they plan to make the 2017 tax cuts permanent, repeal the corporate tax increases President Joe Biden signed into law in August, and hollow out funding to the Internal Revenue Service.
Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, explained in March how cutting taxes will make inflation worse: “Putting more money in people’s pockets will increase demand for goods at a time of supply shortages. That will drive up prices and worsen the inflation that the governors claim to be so worried about. And it will increase pressure on the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates even more than it planned.”
Michael Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, was more direct: “It is unlikely that any of the policies proposed by Republicans would meaningfully reduce inflation in 2023, when rapidly rising prices will still be a major problem for the economy and for consumers.”
The centerpiece of the Republican plan is to cut Social Security and Medicare. Sen. Rick Scott (R., Fla.), chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, rolled out an 11-point plan to “rescue America” that calls for sunsetting all federal programs every five years, including Social Security and Medicare. In June, the Republican Study Committee released a plan that called for raising the eligibility age to collect full Social Security benefits from 67 to 70.
If Republicans return to power in Congress, they plan to use the looming debt-ceiling limit to shut down the government and force cuts to Social Security and Medicare. This is a reckless plan that could intentionally worsen the economy.
Republicans have spun a narrative that blames Biden for inflation and rising gas prices. (Never mind that oil companies are making record profits.)
Left unsaid is that under Trump, the national debt increased by $7.8 trillion. That was the third biggest increase in the national debt relative to the size of the economy of any president after George W. Bush and Abraham Lincoln. The Grand Old Party is not as fiscally savvy as its members would want you to believe.
To be sure, during Trump’s one term, the government rightly boosted spending to offset the economic collapse from the pandemic. But Trump’s massive 2017 tax cuts for wealthy individuals and corporations, combined with wasteful spending throughout, helped to balloon the deficit by 50%.
Under Biden, the deficit was cut in half in the 2022 fiscal year, thanks largely to reductions in COVID-relief spending. Meanwhile, Biden’s inflation reduction bill, signed into law in August, is expected to reduce drug prices for senior citizens, while also combating climate change. Biden’s infrastructure bill is designed to build the economy up from the middle, rather than trickle down from the rich.
While those economic benefits will not come overnight, gas prices are dropping and wages are increasing at the fastest rate in decades. In a column in the Wall Street Journal, economist Alan Blinder explained that Biden was not to blame for inflation.
Inflation came about after the pandemic collapsed the global economy. As the economy has bounced back, increased consumer demand, supply-chain issues, and worker shortages have combined to increase inflation, while the war in Ukraine added to the spike in oil prices.
It is easy to blame Biden for the economy, but voters should know that the Republican plan is far from the answer.
3 WAYS ELECTION DENIERS ARE THREATENING U.S. DEMOCRACY, EXPLAINED
By Amber Phillips, The Washington Post
A movement to deny legitimate election results is thriving, and this worries experts who study democracy. What kind of pressure is that movement putting on our system, and what does it mean for your vote in this November’s midterm elections and potentially future ones?
Let’s attempt to break this down, in three ways.
Election deniers are running for office around the country
This November’s midterm elections are likely to bring a wave of election deniers into Congress and top state-level jobs overseeing elections in all corners of the country. That’s according to an analysis of GOP statewide and congressional candidates by The Post’s Amy Gardner, who found that more than half of the Republican candidates deny the 2020 election results.
If elected, these officials could make it harder to vote, allow endless audits of election results or even refuse to sign off on them. And most of those nominees are likely to win, writes Gardner.
The movement’s reach is even wider than candidates running for elected office. Republicans are spending millions to recruit partisan poll workers and watchers, who could disrupt the counting process or raise false claims about it. (Michigan Republican secretary of state nominee Kristina Karamo rose to prominence as a Detroit poll watcher who made false claims about election fraud.)
And the movement may be taking action to disrupt elections in other ways: Trump supporters have been calling their local election offices this fall requesting all kinds of public records, often using suspiciously similar wording, leading election officials to believe this is a coordinated effort to prevent them from getting ready to actually hold an election, report Gardner and Patrick Marley.
There is a brain drain among experienced election officials
To be an election official in America these days can mean receiving death threats for doing your job, as former Georgia election worker Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss testified to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol this summer.
“IT’S OPEN SEASON on honest election officials,” tweeted the head of Maricopa County, Ariz., a Republican, after the federal government charged a man with threatening an election official in the county. Another man was sentenced to prison for threatening Colorado’s secretary of state.
Tammy Patrick, a former election official in Maricopa County, said these threats aren’t slowing down.
“Election officials are under-resourced, underfunded, under appreciated — and now they are under attack,” she said. She said one Republican election official in a Trump-supporting county in Wisconsin told her, “I used to be the pillar of my community, and now I’m being treated like the pariah.” Patrick worries that many of these officials and their institutional knowledge will leave the field — when they’re needed more than ever.
We’ve seen how just one partisan local election official can leave elections systems vulnerable to bad actors. After the 2020 election, Trump allies and supporters allegedly attempted to access or copy data from voting machines in multiple states, according to a Washington Post investigation. Some experts worry that if that data fell into the wrong hands, hackers could use it to look for voting machines’ weaknesses.
The Supreme Court could give state politicians much more control over election results
Sometime after the midterms, the Supreme Court is expected to consider a once-marginal legal theory that state legislatures alone — and no other structure of state power — determine how elections are run.
This is called the “independent state legislature doctrine.” It’s a controversial, extremely literal reading of the Constitution, which says: “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.”
That’s traditionally been interpreted to mean that all of state government — so, state legislatures, but also governors and state constitutions and state courts — has a role in determining how to run federal elections.
But taken to its extreme, this conservative reading of the Constitution could allow state legislatures to overturn the popular vote in their state.
“It’s kind of unimaginable that a state legislature could act outside its own state constitution,” said Richard Briffault of Columbia Law School.
But experts say that if the Supreme Court agrees with this theory, it would give state legislatures much more power to change the way elections are run, and with very little oversight. And they’re especially worried because state legislatures have become less democratic themselves, as the parties draw district lines to keep themselves in power (a process known as gerrymandering).
State legislatures are already acting to make it harder to vote. According to the Brennan Center, last year, lawmakers introduced hundreds of bills to restrict voting access or empower partisan officials.
State legislatures were a key part of former president Donald Trump’s strategy to overturn the 2020 election results. He and his allies pressured Republican state lawmakers to override the popular vote in swing states he lost.
Not coincidentally, the doctrine gained a lot of popularity on the right around then. The power to choose electors is “yours and yours alone,” Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote in emails to Arizona elected officials.
Trump’s team was largely rebuffed. “I said, ‘Look, you are asking me to do something that is counter to my oath,’ ” testified Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers (R) to the Jan. 6 committee about the pressure he faced from Trump and his lawyers.
What does this mean for your vote?
For now, there are backstops in place — like other election officials, or the courts — to prevent a rogue official from simply refusing to certify legitimate results, or overturning how people voted.
“The few instances when we’ve seen people try to do something along these lines, it has resolved the right way because the law does try to prevent these things from happening,” Sean Morales-Doyle, acting director of the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights Program, told me earlier this year. (That situation played out this summer in rural New Mexico: When an entire county board refused to certify results, the secretary of state got a court order.)
But democracy experts say we should also be aware that there is a concerted effort to erode those backstops for future elections. If enough election deniers win their various races — including governor, secretary of state, attorney general and lawmakers at every level — those backstops may weaken.
Going forward, the technical and even tedious job of holding elections in America probably will require constant attention, Meredith McGehee, an ethics expert who led the bipartisan watchdog group Issue One said in September.
“The ability to actually run a competent election is something not to be overlooked and taken for granted,” she said.
By Amber Phillips, The Washington Post
A movement to deny legitimate election results is thriving, and this worries experts who study democracy. What kind of pressure is that movement putting on our system, and what does it mean for your vote in this November’s midterm elections and potentially future ones?
Let’s attempt to break this down, in three ways.
Election deniers are running for office around the country
This November’s midterm elections are likely to bring a wave of election deniers into Congress and top state-level jobs overseeing elections in all corners of the country. That’s according to an analysis of GOP statewide and congressional candidates by The Post’s Amy Gardner, who found that more than half of the Republican candidates deny the 2020 election results.
If elected, these officials could make it harder to vote, allow endless audits of election results or even refuse to sign off on them. And most of those nominees are likely to win, writes Gardner.
The movement’s reach is even wider than candidates running for elected office. Republicans are spending millions to recruit partisan poll workers and watchers, who could disrupt the counting process or raise false claims about it. (Michigan Republican secretary of state nominee Kristina Karamo rose to prominence as a Detroit poll watcher who made false claims about election fraud.)
And the movement may be taking action to disrupt elections in other ways: Trump supporters have been calling their local election offices this fall requesting all kinds of public records, often using suspiciously similar wording, leading election officials to believe this is a coordinated effort to prevent them from getting ready to actually hold an election, report Gardner and Patrick Marley.
There is a brain drain among experienced election officials
To be an election official in America these days can mean receiving death threats for doing your job, as former Georgia election worker Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss testified to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol this summer.
“IT’S OPEN SEASON on honest election officials,” tweeted the head of Maricopa County, Ariz., a Republican, after the federal government charged a man with threatening an election official in the county. Another man was sentenced to prison for threatening Colorado’s secretary of state.
Tammy Patrick, a former election official in Maricopa County, said these threats aren’t slowing down.
“Election officials are under-resourced, underfunded, under appreciated — and now they are under attack,” she said. She said one Republican election official in a Trump-supporting county in Wisconsin told her, “I used to be the pillar of my community, and now I’m being treated like the pariah.” Patrick worries that many of these officials and their institutional knowledge will leave the field — when they’re needed more than ever.
We’ve seen how just one partisan local election official can leave elections systems vulnerable to bad actors. After the 2020 election, Trump allies and supporters allegedly attempted to access or copy data from voting machines in multiple states, according to a Washington Post investigation. Some experts worry that if that data fell into the wrong hands, hackers could use it to look for voting machines’ weaknesses.
The Supreme Court could give state politicians much more control over election results
Sometime after the midterms, the Supreme Court is expected to consider a once-marginal legal theory that state legislatures alone — and no other structure of state power — determine how elections are run.
This is called the “independent state legislature doctrine.” It’s a controversial, extremely literal reading of the Constitution, which says: “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.”
That’s traditionally been interpreted to mean that all of state government — so, state legislatures, but also governors and state constitutions and state courts — has a role in determining how to run federal elections.
But taken to its extreme, this conservative reading of the Constitution could allow state legislatures to overturn the popular vote in their state.
“It’s kind of unimaginable that a state legislature could act outside its own state constitution,” said Richard Briffault of Columbia Law School.
But experts say that if the Supreme Court agrees with this theory, it would give state legislatures much more power to change the way elections are run, and with very little oversight. And they’re especially worried because state legislatures have become less democratic themselves, as the parties draw district lines to keep themselves in power (a process known as gerrymandering).
State legislatures are already acting to make it harder to vote. According to the Brennan Center, last year, lawmakers introduced hundreds of bills to restrict voting access or empower partisan officials.
State legislatures were a key part of former president Donald Trump’s strategy to overturn the 2020 election results. He and his allies pressured Republican state lawmakers to override the popular vote in swing states he lost.
Not coincidentally, the doctrine gained a lot of popularity on the right around then. The power to choose electors is “yours and yours alone,” Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote in emails to Arizona elected officials.
Trump’s team was largely rebuffed. “I said, ‘Look, you are asking me to do something that is counter to my oath,’ ” testified Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers (R) to the Jan. 6 committee about the pressure he faced from Trump and his lawyers.
What does this mean for your vote?
For now, there are backstops in place — like other election officials, or the courts — to prevent a rogue official from simply refusing to certify legitimate results, or overturning how people voted.
“The few instances when we’ve seen people try to do something along these lines, it has resolved the right way because the law does try to prevent these things from happening,” Sean Morales-Doyle, acting director of the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights Program, told me earlier this year. (That situation played out this summer in rural New Mexico: When an entire county board refused to certify results, the secretary of state got a court order.)
But democracy experts say we should also be aware that there is a concerted effort to erode those backstops for future elections. If enough election deniers win their various races — including governor, secretary of state, attorney general and lawmakers at every level — those backstops may weaken.
Going forward, the technical and even tedious job of holding elections in America probably will require constant attention, Meredith McGehee, an ethics expert who led the bipartisan watchdog group Issue One said in September.
“The ability to actually run a competent election is something not to be overlooked and taken for granted,” she said.
IF TODAY’S GOP BAFFLES YOU, CONSIDER WHAT MOTIVATES ITS BASE
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
How can so many people buy into false election fraud claims, climate change denialism or panic over White people being “replaced”? How can they vote for manifestly unfit Republicans such as Georgia U.S. Senate nominee Herschel Walker or Pennsylvania gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano?
For answers, turn to the Public Religion Research Institute’s American Values Survey, which provides insight into the beliefs of White evangelical Christians, who make up the core of the GOP. It reveals a lot about what they think and why they vote the way they do.
A striking 71 percent of these voters think the country has gone downhill since the 1950s (when women were excluded from most professions, Black Americans faced barriers to voting, 50 million Americans still used outhouses and only about 5 percent of Americans were college-educated). Because White Protestant evangelicals make up such a large share of the GOP, that means 66 percent of Republicans want to go back to the time of “Leave It to Beaver.”
Half of White evangelical Protestants also think God intended America to be the promised land. Nearly two-thirds say immigrants are a threat, and 61 percent say “society has become too soft and feminine.” And they are the only discrete religious group polled to support overturning Roe v. Wade.
On race, only 19 percent of the group agrees that “the legacy of slavery and discrimination have limited Black Americans’ upward mobility.” They are the least likely to accept that African Americans disproportionately receive the death penalty. And here’s the kicker: Unlike a majority of Americans, “six in ten white evangelical Protestants (61%) agree that discrimination against white Americans has become as big a problem as discrimination against racial minorities.”
Given these figures, it shouldn’t be surprising that while 58 percent of Americans think white supremacy is still a major problem, only 33 percent of White evangelical Protestants do, the lowest among religious groups. Similarly, 51 percent of the group believe that public teachers and librarians are “indoctrinating students with inappropriate curricula and books that wrongly portray America as a racist country,” compared with only 29 percent of Americans broadly.
And on immigration, only 30 percent of Americans buy into the “great replacement theory.” But 51 percent of White evangelical Protestants agree that “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background.”
As one might expect, this group is bolstering former president Donald Trump. “White evangelical Protestants are the only major religious group in which a majority of adherents say they view Trump favorably (63%), roughly similar to the share in 2021 (67%),” the survey finds. Likewise, 54 percent believe in the “big lie” of a stolen election, compared with 28 percent of all Americans.
In a nutshell, this group’s beliefs clash with the essence of the American experiment and conflict with objective facts, demography and economics. White evangelical Protestants’ outlook is warped by right-wing media and refracted through a prism of visceral anger and resentment.
It makes little sense to debate whether the MAGA movement radicalized White evangelical Protestants or the other way around. They are essentially one and the same.
Last year, Eastern Illinois University professor Ryan Burge wrote for the New York Times, “In essence, many Americans are coming to the understanding that to be very religiously engaged and very politically conservative means that they are evangelical, even if they don’t believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ.” In other words, Burge explained, more people are “conflating evangelicalism with Republicanism — and melding two forces to create a movement that is not entirely about politics or religion but power.” (This helps explain how evangelicals can embrace views that fly in the face of Christian theology; it’s not about the religion.)
The implications of the American Values Survey are profound. If millions of Americans think our country was best when White males were dominant and now think feminization plagues it, a great many would find comfort in the GOP’s toxic masculinity and in forced-birth laws that relegate women to the role of motherhood against their will. And if they dismiss the legacy of racism, many would favor policies that make it harder for minorities to vote and to access higher education (i.e., opposing affirmative action to rebalance college admissions in Whites’ favor).
These views also explain why so many Republicans seem perpetually angry and dissatisfied. What they want is unattainable. America is becoming less White, less male-dominated and less religious. Nothing politicians do or say will change this.
Moreover, White evangelicals are fundamentally out of step with the majority American opinion on everything from abortion to immigration to the legitimacy of the 2020 election. That, too, won’t change, no matter how angry they become.
Millions of White evangelical Protestants will therefore remain bonded with whatever cultlike figure can channel their anger. As long as he reaffirms and amplifies White evangelical Protestants’ fears, he can do no wrong. It also follows that a group that feels so besieged won’t much care about a candidate’s smarts, ethics or decency. Faced with a perceived existential threat, these Americans are inclined to support anyone who gives voice to their frustrations.
What endangers American democracy and democratic values goes far beyond one demagogue, one election or one set of policies. When so many Americans are driven by fear, resentment and antipathy toward inclusion, pluralistic democracy is at risk. Until we grapple with that reality, millions will remain vulnerable to cynical right-wing media and ruthlessly ambitious Republicans.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
How can so many people buy into false election fraud claims, climate change denialism or panic over White people being “replaced”? How can they vote for manifestly unfit Republicans such as Georgia U.S. Senate nominee Herschel Walker or Pennsylvania gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano?
For answers, turn to the Public Religion Research Institute’s American Values Survey, which provides insight into the beliefs of White evangelical Christians, who make up the core of the GOP. It reveals a lot about what they think and why they vote the way they do.
A striking 71 percent of these voters think the country has gone downhill since the 1950s (when women were excluded from most professions, Black Americans faced barriers to voting, 50 million Americans still used outhouses and only about 5 percent of Americans were college-educated). Because White Protestant evangelicals make up such a large share of the GOP, that means 66 percent of Republicans want to go back to the time of “Leave It to Beaver.”
Half of White evangelical Protestants also think God intended America to be the promised land. Nearly two-thirds say immigrants are a threat, and 61 percent say “society has become too soft and feminine.” And they are the only discrete religious group polled to support overturning Roe v. Wade.
On race, only 19 percent of the group agrees that “the legacy of slavery and discrimination have limited Black Americans’ upward mobility.” They are the least likely to accept that African Americans disproportionately receive the death penalty. And here’s the kicker: Unlike a majority of Americans, “six in ten white evangelical Protestants (61%) agree that discrimination against white Americans has become as big a problem as discrimination against racial minorities.”
Given these figures, it shouldn’t be surprising that while 58 percent of Americans think white supremacy is still a major problem, only 33 percent of White evangelical Protestants do, the lowest among religious groups. Similarly, 51 percent of the group believe that public teachers and librarians are “indoctrinating students with inappropriate curricula and books that wrongly portray America as a racist country,” compared with only 29 percent of Americans broadly.
And on immigration, only 30 percent of Americans buy into the “great replacement theory.” But 51 percent of White evangelical Protestants agree that “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background.”
As one might expect, this group is bolstering former president Donald Trump. “White evangelical Protestants are the only major religious group in which a majority of adherents say they view Trump favorably (63%), roughly similar to the share in 2021 (67%),” the survey finds. Likewise, 54 percent believe in the “big lie” of a stolen election, compared with 28 percent of all Americans.
In a nutshell, this group’s beliefs clash with the essence of the American experiment and conflict with objective facts, demography and economics. White evangelical Protestants’ outlook is warped by right-wing media and refracted through a prism of visceral anger and resentment.
It makes little sense to debate whether the MAGA movement radicalized White evangelical Protestants or the other way around. They are essentially one and the same.
Last year, Eastern Illinois University professor Ryan Burge wrote for the New York Times, “In essence, many Americans are coming to the understanding that to be very religiously engaged and very politically conservative means that they are evangelical, even if they don’t believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ.” In other words, Burge explained, more people are “conflating evangelicalism with Republicanism — and melding two forces to create a movement that is not entirely about politics or religion but power.” (This helps explain how evangelicals can embrace views that fly in the face of Christian theology; it’s not about the religion.)
The implications of the American Values Survey are profound. If millions of Americans think our country was best when White males were dominant and now think feminization plagues it, a great many would find comfort in the GOP’s toxic masculinity and in forced-birth laws that relegate women to the role of motherhood against their will. And if they dismiss the legacy of racism, many would favor policies that make it harder for minorities to vote and to access higher education (i.e., opposing affirmative action to rebalance college admissions in Whites’ favor).
These views also explain why so many Republicans seem perpetually angry and dissatisfied. What they want is unattainable. America is becoming less White, less male-dominated and less religious. Nothing politicians do or say will change this.
Moreover, White evangelicals are fundamentally out of step with the majority American opinion on everything from abortion to immigration to the legitimacy of the 2020 election. That, too, won’t change, no matter how angry they become.
Millions of White evangelical Protestants will therefore remain bonded with whatever cultlike figure can channel their anger. As long as he reaffirms and amplifies White evangelical Protestants’ fears, he can do no wrong. It also follows that a group that feels so besieged won’t much care about a candidate’s smarts, ethics or decency. Faced with a perceived existential threat, these Americans are inclined to support anyone who gives voice to their frustrations.
What endangers American democracy and democratic values goes far beyond one demagogue, one election or one set of policies. When so many Americans are driven by fear, resentment and antipathy toward inclusion, pluralistic democracy is at risk. Until we grapple with that reality, millions will remain vulnerable to cynical right-wing media and ruthlessly ambitious Republicans.
DON’T BLAME ‘BOTH SIDES.’ THE RIGHT IS DRIVING POLITICAL VIOLENCE.
By Max Boot, The Washington Post
It should not be controversial to say that America has a major problem with right-wing political violence. The evidence continues to accumulate — yet the GOP continues to deny responsibility for this horrifying trend.
On Friday, a man enflamed by right-wing conspiracy theories (including QAnon) entered the San Francisco home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and attacked her 82-year-old husband with a hammer, fracturing Paul Pelosi’s skull. “Where is Nancy?” he reportedly shouted, echoing the mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, at President Donald Trump’s instigation. This comes after years of Republican demonization of the House speaker, a figure of hatred for the right rivaled only by Hillary Clinton.
The same day as the Pelosi attack, a man pleaded guilty to making death threats against Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.). Two days earlier, three men who were motivated by right-wing, anti-lockdown hysteria after covid-19 hit were convicted of aiding a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D). In August, another man died after attacking an FBI office because he was so upset about the bureau’s search of Mar-a-Lago. “We must respond with force,” he wrote on Trump’s Truth Social website.
Then there are all the terrible hate crimes, in cities including Pittsburgh, El Paso and Buffalo, where gunmen were motivated by the kind of racist rhetoric — especially the “great replacement theory” — now openly espoused on Fox “News.”
Republican leaders exonerate themselves of any responsibility for political violence. “Violence is up across the board,” Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said on Sunday, arguing that it’s “unfair” to blame anti-Pelosi rhetoric for the assault on Pelosi’s husband.
Violence is unacceptable whether from the left or right, period. But we can’t allow GOP leaders to get away with this false moral equivalency. They are evading their responsibility for their extremist rhetoric that all too often motivates extremist actions.
There is little doubt about what is driving political violence: the ascendance of Trump. The former president and his followers use violent rhetoric of extremes: Trump calls President Biden an “enemy of the state,” attacks the FBI as “monsters,” refers to the “now Communist USA” and even wrote that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has a “DEATH WISH” for disagreeing with him. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) has expressed support for executing Nancy Pelosi and other leading Democrats. Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Tex.) has tweeted that “the America Last Marxists … are radically and systematically DESTROYING our country.”
That type of extremist rhetoric used to be confined to fringe organizations such as the John Birch Society. Now it’s the GOP mainstream, with predictable consequences. The U.S. Capitol Police report that threats against members of Congress have risen more than tenfold since Trump’s election in 2016, up to 9,625 last year.
The sickness on the right was on display after news broke about the attack on Paul Pelosi. While leading Republicans condemned the horrific assault, the MAGA base seethed with sick jokes making light of the violence and insane conspiracy theories. (Filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza suggested that the attack was “a romantic tryst that went awry.”)
There was, alas, no sign of the GOP taking responsibility for fomenting hatred. Kari Lake, the GOP nominee for governor of Arizona, blamed “leftist elected officials who have not enforced the laws.” Naturally, Republicans accuse Democrats of being “divisive” for citing Republican rhetoric as a contributing factor to political violence.
It’s true that, by calling out GOP extremism, Democrats do risk exacerbating the polarization of politics. But they can’t simply ignore this dangerous trend. And it’s not Democrats who are pushing our country to the brink: A New York Times study found that MAGA members of Congress who refused to accept the results of the 2020 election used polarizing language at nearly triple the rate of Democrats.
oSo please don’t accept the GOP framing of the assault on Paul Pelosi as evidence of a problem plaguing “both sides of the aisle.” Political violence in America is being driven primarily by the far right, not the far left, and the far right is much closer to the mainstream of the Republican Party than the far left is to the Democratic Party.
By Max Boot, The Washington Post
It should not be controversial to say that America has a major problem with right-wing political violence. The evidence continues to accumulate — yet the GOP continues to deny responsibility for this horrifying trend.
On Friday, a man enflamed by right-wing conspiracy theories (including QAnon) entered the San Francisco home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and attacked her 82-year-old husband with a hammer, fracturing Paul Pelosi’s skull. “Where is Nancy?” he reportedly shouted, echoing the mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, at President Donald Trump’s instigation. This comes after years of Republican demonization of the House speaker, a figure of hatred for the right rivaled only by Hillary Clinton.
The same day as the Pelosi attack, a man pleaded guilty to making death threats against Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.). Two days earlier, three men who were motivated by right-wing, anti-lockdown hysteria after covid-19 hit were convicted of aiding a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D). In August, another man died after attacking an FBI office because he was so upset about the bureau’s search of Mar-a-Lago. “We must respond with force,” he wrote on Trump’s Truth Social website.
Then there are all the terrible hate crimes, in cities including Pittsburgh, El Paso and Buffalo, where gunmen were motivated by the kind of racist rhetoric — especially the “great replacement theory” — now openly espoused on Fox “News.”
Republican leaders exonerate themselves of any responsibility for political violence. “Violence is up across the board,” Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said on Sunday, arguing that it’s “unfair” to blame anti-Pelosi rhetoric for the assault on Pelosi’s husband.
Violence is unacceptable whether from the left or right, period. But we can’t allow GOP leaders to get away with this false moral equivalency. They are evading their responsibility for their extremist rhetoric that all too often motivates extremist actions.
There is little doubt about what is driving political violence: the ascendance of Trump. The former president and his followers use violent rhetoric of extremes: Trump calls President Biden an “enemy of the state,” attacks the FBI as “monsters,” refers to the “now Communist USA” and even wrote that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has a “DEATH WISH” for disagreeing with him. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) has expressed support for executing Nancy Pelosi and other leading Democrats. Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Tex.) has tweeted that “the America Last Marxists … are radically and systematically DESTROYING our country.”
That type of extremist rhetoric used to be confined to fringe organizations such as the John Birch Society. Now it’s the GOP mainstream, with predictable consequences. The U.S. Capitol Police report that threats against members of Congress have risen more than tenfold since Trump’s election in 2016, up to 9,625 last year.
The sickness on the right was on display after news broke about the attack on Paul Pelosi. While leading Republicans condemned the horrific assault, the MAGA base seethed with sick jokes making light of the violence and insane conspiracy theories. (Filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza suggested that the attack was “a romantic tryst that went awry.”)
There was, alas, no sign of the GOP taking responsibility for fomenting hatred. Kari Lake, the GOP nominee for governor of Arizona, blamed “leftist elected officials who have not enforced the laws.” Naturally, Republicans accuse Democrats of being “divisive” for citing Republican rhetoric as a contributing factor to political violence.
It’s true that, by calling out GOP extremism, Democrats do risk exacerbating the polarization of politics. But they can’t simply ignore this dangerous trend. And it’s not Democrats who are pushing our country to the brink: A New York Times study found that MAGA members of Congress who refused to accept the results of the 2020 election used polarizing language at nearly triple the rate of Democrats.
oSo please don’t accept the GOP framing of the assault on Paul Pelosi as evidence of a problem plaguing “both sides of the aisle.” Political violence in America is being driven primarily by the far right, not the far left, and the far right is much closer to the mainstream of the Republican Party than the far left is to the Democratic Party.
RIGHT-WINGERS’ SHAMELESSNESS IS NOTHING TO ENVY
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
During the Trump administration, it was fashionable among progressive cynics to declare that “nothing matters”: No misdeed, lie or blunder on President Donald Trump’s part would ever entail any consequences. But in the wake of his 2020 loss and the multipronged criminal investigations into him, we can see that that adage isn’t accurate.
What is true, however, is that “nothing matters” to fellow Republicans; they’ve become fortified by utter shamelessness, a quality Democrats, thankfully, do not yet possess.
Take Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s repeated refusal to recuse himself from considering matters directly related to the 2020 coup attempt, which we know his wife, Ginni Thomas, participated in (e.g., by egging on the White House chief of staff and soliciting state officials to reverse the will of the voters). He did it again Monday, refusing to sit out Sen. Lindsey O. Graham’s (R-S.C.) appeal to be rescued from testifying to a grand jury about Trump’s efforts to “find” votes and reverse Georgia’s election results.
Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tweeted that Thomas violated part of the U.S. Code “requiring any ‘justice’ to recuse when his or her ‘impartiality might reasonably be questioned’ or his or her ‘spouse is known by the justice to have an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome.’ ”
Thomas’s utter contempt for the court’s already diminished reputation is bolstered by the knowledge that he has lifetime tenure and therefore faces no consequences for his injudicious conduct. Moreover, among those whose favorable opinion he covets — MAGA politicians, right-wing think tanks and publications with pretensions of intellectual seriousness — no one will object to actions that further their “cause” even at the expense of the court’s integrity. You’ll hear not a whisper of criticism, for example, from the thoroughly partisan Federalist Society, nor any GOP member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Refusals to act on principle, to call out one’s own side and to enforce a code of behavior for all public servants are now matters of tribal identity for Republicans. Defending Trump’s behavior — be it absconding with sensitive documents or instigating a would-be coup — is the only true requirement to succeed in today’s GOP. One has to be willing to subordinate conscience, truth and fidelity to the Constitution to earn the MAGA stamp of approval.
We’ve seen this play out with other right-wing figures. Look how the party rallies around its Senate candidate in Georgia, Herschel Walker, as unfit a nominee as either party has advanced in my lifetime. See the GOP’s deafening silence on Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s (R-Ala.) racist comments, or antisemitic gibes from Kayne West and Trump.
Aided by a right-wing media cocoon that insulates them from critical coverage and supported by an ends-justify-the-means MAGA movement, Republicans remain defiant. To quote Daniel Patrick Moynihan, they’ve been not just “defining deviancy down” but celebrating the decline.
There simply is no equivalent on the Democratic side. When a tape of shamefully racist comments among members of the Los Angeles City Council came to light, President Biden demanded that the miscreants resign. One member did. California Gov. Gavin Newsom now calls for two others to do the same.
When a group of 30 left-leaning House Democrats signed a letter urging “talks” with Russia to end the war — a position that aligned them with right-wing Russia apologists — condemnation from Democrats came swiftly. The group later withdrew the letter. Peer pressure and moral approbation serve their purpose, but only on one side of the political divide.
Democrats should not envy their opponents’ shamelessness. It’s not a superpower but, rather, a fatal flaw in character and a threat to decent, honorable democratic governance. There might be short-term gain to be had by enabling morally pernicious conduct. But the success of democracy and the favorable judgment of history depend on a strong conscience and an adherence to standards necessary for decent self-governance.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
During the Trump administration, it was fashionable among progressive cynics to declare that “nothing matters”: No misdeed, lie or blunder on President Donald Trump’s part would ever entail any consequences. But in the wake of his 2020 loss and the multipronged criminal investigations into him, we can see that that adage isn’t accurate.
What is true, however, is that “nothing matters” to fellow Republicans; they’ve become fortified by utter shamelessness, a quality Democrats, thankfully, do not yet possess.
Take Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s repeated refusal to recuse himself from considering matters directly related to the 2020 coup attempt, which we know his wife, Ginni Thomas, participated in (e.g., by egging on the White House chief of staff and soliciting state officials to reverse the will of the voters). He did it again Monday, refusing to sit out Sen. Lindsey O. Graham’s (R-S.C.) appeal to be rescued from testifying to a grand jury about Trump’s efforts to “find” votes and reverse Georgia’s election results.
Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tweeted that Thomas violated part of the U.S. Code “requiring any ‘justice’ to recuse when his or her ‘impartiality might reasonably be questioned’ or his or her ‘spouse is known by the justice to have an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome.’ ”
Thomas’s utter contempt for the court’s already diminished reputation is bolstered by the knowledge that he has lifetime tenure and therefore faces no consequences for his injudicious conduct. Moreover, among those whose favorable opinion he covets — MAGA politicians, right-wing think tanks and publications with pretensions of intellectual seriousness — no one will object to actions that further their “cause” even at the expense of the court’s integrity. You’ll hear not a whisper of criticism, for example, from the thoroughly partisan Federalist Society, nor any GOP member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Refusals to act on principle, to call out one’s own side and to enforce a code of behavior for all public servants are now matters of tribal identity for Republicans. Defending Trump’s behavior — be it absconding with sensitive documents or instigating a would-be coup — is the only true requirement to succeed in today’s GOP. One has to be willing to subordinate conscience, truth and fidelity to the Constitution to earn the MAGA stamp of approval.
We’ve seen this play out with other right-wing figures. Look how the party rallies around its Senate candidate in Georgia, Herschel Walker, as unfit a nominee as either party has advanced in my lifetime. See the GOP’s deafening silence on Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s (R-Ala.) racist comments, or antisemitic gibes from Kayne West and Trump.
Aided by a right-wing media cocoon that insulates them from critical coverage and supported by an ends-justify-the-means MAGA movement, Republicans remain defiant. To quote Daniel Patrick Moynihan, they’ve been not just “defining deviancy down” but celebrating the decline.
There simply is no equivalent on the Democratic side. When a tape of shamefully racist comments among members of the Los Angeles City Council came to light, President Biden demanded that the miscreants resign. One member did. California Gov. Gavin Newsom now calls for two others to do the same.
When a group of 30 left-leaning House Democrats signed a letter urging “talks” with Russia to end the war — a position that aligned them with right-wing Russia apologists — condemnation from Democrats came swiftly. The group later withdrew the letter. Peer pressure and moral approbation serve their purpose, but only on one side of the political divide.
Democrats should not envy their opponents’ shamelessness. It’s not a superpower but, rather, a fatal flaw in character and a threat to decent, honorable democratic governance. There might be short-term gain to be had by enabling morally pernicious conduct. But the success of democracy and the favorable judgment of history depend on a strong conscience and an adherence to standards necessary for decent self-governance.
REPUBLICANS’ INFLATION PLAN: TAX CUTS THAT’D MAKE LIZ TRUSS BLUSH
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Republicans routinely declare that inflation is their “best” issue in the midterms. But there is no reason to think inflation would shrink under a GOP majority in the House or Senate. Indeed, Republicans are projecting they would make inflation worse.
The Post reports, “Republicans plan to push to extend key parts of President Donald Trump’s tax cuts if they take control of Congress in this fall’s elections, aiming to force President Biden to codify trillions of dollars worth of lower taxes touted by his predecessor.”
Wait, what happened to their hand-wringing over inflation? Do they expect voters to believe that tax cuts primarily for the rich wouldn’t be inflationary?
In fact, when the Trump tax cuts were first passed, Republicans insisted they would pay for themselves by boosting economic growth. (That didn’t happen, but it did spur stock buybacks, contrary to Republican claims.) At a moment when Republicans are hollering about fiscal irresponsibility, it is bewildering that they are doubling down on the same tax cuts.
Jim Kessler, head of the moderate Democratic Third Way think tank, tells me, “Tax cuts like that in the U.S. would contradict everything the Fed is doing and put the U.S. economy in an inflation-driven tailspin.”
Jason Furman, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, compares the Republican proposals to British Prime Minister Liz Truss’s disastrous tax proposal that sank the British pound, and led to Truss’s resignation, arguing, “At worst they could also cause a U.K.-style market meltdown. Either way they are completely at odds with the argument that deficits have fueled inflation.”
This should end any talk that the election is a choice between addressing inflation or protecting democracy. In reality, it’s about whether Republicans will be granted power to make inflation worse and to threaten democracy.
In a larger sense, this is a reminder that Republicans advance policy arguments (i.e., too much fiscal stimulus caused inflation) not because they believe them, but because they will say whatever can help them attain power. Had Biden resisted spending during the pandemic, they would have attacked him for failing to tame inflation and unemployment. As Maya MacGuineas, president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, put it to me: “Increases in the deficit will push inflation up, not down. This will result both from unpaid-for spending and any tax cuts that aren’t matched with spending cuts as well.”
Republicans’ angst about deficits was always phony given their track record when they controlled the White House. As ProPublica reported in January 2021, “The national debt has risen by almost $7.8 trillion during Trump’s time in office.” Moreover, “The growth in the annual deficit under Trump ranks as the third-biggest increase, relative to the size of the economy, of any U.S. presidential administration. … And unlike George W. Bush and Abraham Lincoln, who oversaw the larger relative increases in deficits, Trump did not launch two foreign conflicts or have to pay for a civil war.”
In other words, deficits become a problem only when Democrats are in charge.
It gets worse. William Gale, co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, explains to me that the Republican push to extend Trump’s tax cuts could be seen as “cynical.” They were in control of Congress and the White House in 2017; they could have made them permanent. But, Gale notes, they “chose to make the individual provisions temporary, to keep the costs down.”
Moreover, he adds, “What is hypocritical is that they now want to repeal some of the revenue raisers they enacted in 2017 that have not taken effect yet,” such as the provision requiring businesses to amortize research and development expenses, rather than deduct them from taxable income. Republicans added the measure because they knew their tax cuts were a budget-buster.
As Austan Goolsbee, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, tells me, it’s as if Republicans are watching the financial chaos in Britain, and “all it did was convince them to find someone to hold their beer.”
You can make the case that the Biden administration spent too much too quickly. You can even make the argument that the administration isn’t doing enough to tighten the purse strings now (though such arguments ignore that this spending alleviated human suffering during the pandemic and funded productivity-enhancing infrastructure). But you cannot denounce measures that help working- and middle-class people (e.g., college debt relief) as inflationary and then turn around to propose another economic stimulus in the form of an enormous tax cut.
Well, you could, but that would make you a hypocrite and unfit for public office. A Republican leader, in other words.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Republicans routinely declare that inflation is their “best” issue in the midterms. But there is no reason to think inflation would shrink under a GOP majority in the House or Senate. Indeed, Republicans are projecting they would make inflation worse.
The Post reports, “Republicans plan to push to extend key parts of President Donald Trump’s tax cuts if they take control of Congress in this fall’s elections, aiming to force President Biden to codify trillions of dollars worth of lower taxes touted by his predecessor.”
Wait, what happened to their hand-wringing over inflation? Do they expect voters to believe that tax cuts primarily for the rich wouldn’t be inflationary?
In fact, when the Trump tax cuts were first passed, Republicans insisted they would pay for themselves by boosting economic growth. (That didn’t happen, but it did spur stock buybacks, contrary to Republican claims.) At a moment when Republicans are hollering about fiscal irresponsibility, it is bewildering that they are doubling down on the same tax cuts.
Jim Kessler, head of the moderate Democratic Third Way think tank, tells me, “Tax cuts like that in the U.S. would contradict everything the Fed is doing and put the U.S. economy in an inflation-driven tailspin.”
Jason Furman, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, compares the Republican proposals to British Prime Minister Liz Truss’s disastrous tax proposal that sank the British pound, and led to Truss’s resignation, arguing, “At worst they could also cause a U.K.-style market meltdown. Either way they are completely at odds with the argument that deficits have fueled inflation.”
This should end any talk that the election is a choice between addressing inflation or protecting democracy. In reality, it’s about whether Republicans will be granted power to make inflation worse and to threaten democracy.
In a larger sense, this is a reminder that Republicans advance policy arguments (i.e., too much fiscal stimulus caused inflation) not because they believe them, but because they will say whatever can help them attain power. Had Biden resisted spending during the pandemic, they would have attacked him for failing to tame inflation and unemployment. As Maya MacGuineas, president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, put it to me: “Increases in the deficit will push inflation up, not down. This will result both from unpaid-for spending and any tax cuts that aren’t matched with spending cuts as well.”
Republicans’ angst about deficits was always phony given their track record when they controlled the White House. As ProPublica reported in January 2021, “The national debt has risen by almost $7.8 trillion during Trump’s time in office.” Moreover, “The growth in the annual deficit under Trump ranks as the third-biggest increase, relative to the size of the economy, of any U.S. presidential administration. … And unlike George W. Bush and Abraham Lincoln, who oversaw the larger relative increases in deficits, Trump did not launch two foreign conflicts or have to pay for a civil war.”
In other words, deficits become a problem only when Democrats are in charge.
It gets worse. William Gale, co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, explains to me that the Republican push to extend Trump’s tax cuts could be seen as “cynical.” They were in control of Congress and the White House in 2017; they could have made them permanent. But, Gale notes, they “chose to make the individual provisions temporary, to keep the costs down.”
Moreover, he adds, “What is hypocritical is that they now want to repeal some of the revenue raisers they enacted in 2017 that have not taken effect yet,” such as the provision requiring businesses to amortize research and development expenses, rather than deduct them from taxable income. Republicans added the measure because they knew their tax cuts were a budget-buster.
As Austan Goolsbee, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, tells me, it’s as if Republicans are watching the financial chaos in Britain, and “all it did was convince them to find someone to hold their beer.”
You can make the case that the Biden administration spent too much too quickly. You can even make the argument that the administration isn’t doing enough to tighten the purse strings now (though such arguments ignore that this spending alleviated human suffering during the pandemic and funded productivity-enhancing infrastructure). But you cannot denounce measures that help working- and middle-class people (e.g., college debt relief) as inflationary and then turn around to propose another economic stimulus in the form of an enormous tax cut.
Well, you could, but that would make you a hypocrite and unfit for public office. A Republican leader, in other words.
REPUBLICANS’ SECRET ECONOMIC AGENDA? A GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS.
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
After refusing for months to divulge what they’d do if they regained control of Congress, Republicans have finally revealed some of their economic agenda.
Unfortunately, it might involve causing a global financial crisis, based on recent interviews with some GOP congressmen.
The GOP has not said how it would tackle inflation or other major economic challenges, including a recession. This is the party, after all, that had no platform in 2020; and when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was asked in January what Republicans would do if they regained the majority, he dodged: “That is a very good question,” he said, “and I’ll let you know when we take it back.”
Despite McConnell’s efforts, some details have been etched in by Republican lawmakers. To be clear, none of them have clarified their strategy for fighting inflation, unless you count shouting “SOCIALISM!” and “KEYSTONE!” over and over. But they have given a peek at other economic priorities.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) and other Republicans have recently backed proposals to make the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent, as well as to extend or expand several other corporate tax breaks.
Never mind that Americans think corporations already pay too little in taxes, according to many polls. Cutting taxes further is also likely to make inflation worse, for the same reason that Republicans argue that increased government spending can also make inflation worse: giving people more cash to spend when there’s limited stuff to buy drives prices up.
The scariest part of the recently disclosed GOP economic agenda, however, has largely gone under the radar. It’s the plan to hold the debt ceiling hostage next year, which could easily precipitate a global financial catastrophe.
Republicans have withheld their support from raising the debt limit before, usually framing their hostage-taking as a commitment to fiscal restraint. But the debt ceiling has nothing to do with new spending; rather, it’s a somewhat arbitrary statutory cap on how much the government can borrow to pay off bills that it has already incurred, through tax and spending decisions that Congress has already made. Refusing to raise the debt limit is like going to a restaurant, ordering the lobster and a $500 bottle of wine, and then declaring yourself financially responsible because you skipped out on the check.
Actually, it’s worse than that.
If lawmakers dine-and-dash on behalf of Uncle Sam, they tarnish the creditworthiness of the United States and can make it more expensive for the federal government to borrow in the future because investors don’t trust us. Worse, they might accidentally blow up every other financial market on Earth, too.
That’s because U.S. debt is now viewed as the safest of safe assets. Virtually all other assets around the world are benchmarked against U.S. Treasury securities. If we default on our debt obligations — or even come close to default — that raises the question of the riskiness of everything else investors buy and can send shockwaves of panic through every other market.
Boom, financial crisis.
In a Bloomberg Government article last week, the four Republican lawmakers interested in serving as House Budget Committee chairman in the next Congress all said they’d refuse to raise the debt ceiling next year unless Democrats agree to entitlement cuts and work requirements on safety-net programs — that is, measures Dems would find abhorrent. This would set the stage for another high-stakes showdown.
Recall that when Republicans held the debt limit hostage in 2011, the United States’ credit rating was downgraded for the first time in history because we came perilously close to default. Since then, the GOP has become more politically unhinged, which means brinkmanship might well go further, which makes a debt default — even by accident — more likely.
Yet, in threatening this scenario, Rep. Jason T. Smith (Mo.), ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, says: “The debt limit is clearly one of those tools that Republicans — that a Republican-controlled Congress — will use to make sure that we do everything we can to make this economy strong.”
Forcing a debt limit crisis, as the world teeters on the verge of recession, is the opposite of what you would pursue if you care about strengthening the economy. But no matter: Republicans don’t care that they will destroy the economy.
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
After refusing for months to divulge what they’d do if they regained control of Congress, Republicans have finally revealed some of their economic agenda.
Unfortunately, it might involve causing a global financial crisis, based on recent interviews with some GOP congressmen.
The GOP has not said how it would tackle inflation or other major economic challenges, including a recession. This is the party, after all, that had no platform in 2020; and when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was asked in January what Republicans would do if they regained the majority, he dodged: “That is a very good question,” he said, “and I’ll let you know when we take it back.”
Despite McConnell’s efforts, some details have been etched in by Republican lawmakers. To be clear, none of them have clarified their strategy for fighting inflation, unless you count shouting “SOCIALISM!” and “KEYSTONE!” over and over. But they have given a peek at other economic priorities.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) and other Republicans have recently backed proposals to make the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent, as well as to extend or expand several other corporate tax breaks.
Never mind that Americans think corporations already pay too little in taxes, according to many polls. Cutting taxes further is also likely to make inflation worse, for the same reason that Republicans argue that increased government spending can also make inflation worse: giving people more cash to spend when there’s limited stuff to buy drives prices up.
The scariest part of the recently disclosed GOP economic agenda, however, has largely gone under the radar. It’s the plan to hold the debt ceiling hostage next year, which could easily precipitate a global financial catastrophe.
Republicans have withheld their support from raising the debt limit before, usually framing their hostage-taking as a commitment to fiscal restraint. But the debt ceiling has nothing to do with new spending; rather, it’s a somewhat arbitrary statutory cap on how much the government can borrow to pay off bills that it has already incurred, through tax and spending decisions that Congress has already made. Refusing to raise the debt limit is like going to a restaurant, ordering the lobster and a $500 bottle of wine, and then declaring yourself financially responsible because you skipped out on the check.
Actually, it’s worse than that.
If lawmakers dine-and-dash on behalf of Uncle Sam, they tarnish the creditworthiness of the United States and can make it more expensive for the federal government to borrow in the future because investors don’t trust us. Worse, they might accidentally blow up every other financial market on Earth, too.
That’s because U.S. debt is now viewed as the safest of safe assets. Virtually all other assets around the world are benchmarked against U.S. Treasury securities. If we default on our debt obligations — or even come close to default — that raises the question of the riskiness of everything else investors buy and can send shockwaves of panic through every other market.
Boom, financial crisis.
In a Bloomberg Government article last week, the four Republican lawmakers interested in serving as House Budget Committee chairman in the next Congress all said they’d refuse to raise the debt ceiling next year unless Democrats agree to entitlement cuts and work requirements on safety-net programs — that is, measures Dems would find abhorrent. This would set the stage for another high-stakes showdown.
Recall that when Republicans held the debt limit hostage in 2011, the United States’ credit rating was downgraded for the first time in history because we came perilously close to default. Since then, the GOP has become more politically unhinged, which means brinkmanship might well go further, which makes a debt default — even by accident — more likely.
Yet, in threatening this scenario, Rep. Jason T. Smith (Mo.), ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, says: “The debt limit is clearly one of those tools that Republicans — that a Republican-controlled Congress — will use to make sure that we do everything we can to make this economy strong.”
Forcing a debt limit crisis, as the world teeters on the verge of recession, is the opposite of what you would pursue if you care about strengthening the economy. But no matter: Republicans don’t care that they will destroy the economy.
THE LATEST MAR-A-LAGO RULING UNDERSCORES THE FRIVOLOUSNESS OF TRUMP’S COMPLAINTS
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
The Supreme Court has dismissed Donald Trump in a single sentence. With no note of dissent, the justices Thursday rejected the former president’s request to intervene in litigation over documents seized from his Mar-a-Lago estate this summer. This outcome only underscores the outrageous frivolity of the contentions his team has lodged in courts of law and public opinion.
The Supreme Court shouldn’t even have entertained the petition to reconsider part of an appeals court order allowing the Justice Department to continue to review classified documents as a special master looks over other materials for claims of attorney-client or executive privilege. Yet the outcome of Justice Clarence Thomas’s referring the case his colleagues’ way is just another reason to scoff at claims from Mr. Trump that the legal system is treating him unfairly. He has had the opportunity to use, and attempt to abuse, the courts all the way up to the highest in the land — three of whose justices he appointed. And nonetheless, they’ve rejected his arguments.
These rejections are the only possible answer to the numerous implausible claims made by Mr. Trump, including that while in office he could declassify documents “even by thinking about it.” The Mar-a-Lago case is now ensnared in multiple courts thanks to multiple filings from Mr. Trump. Nowhere has he succeeded in establishing any real injury caused to him by the FBI being allowed to proceed with its investigation into the trove of more than 11,000 documents, including 103 with classification markings, that he took with him from the Oval Office. Meanwhile, federal prosecutors have ably described the injury that both an impeded investigation and the ability of an outside party to view highly sensitive materials would cause to the government. After all, these materials reportedly include information regarding nuclear capabilities of a foreign government and other secrets so closely held that the agents involved in the probe needed a special clearance to look at them.
This case, in short, is serious. An article from The Post only emphasizes this reality: A former White House valet told investigators that he moved boxes while the government was seeking the return of the classified materials, having previously denied doing anything of the sort. Security-camera footage corroborates the revised account. The new evidence adds substance to the suggestion of obstruction that the Justice Department also teased in its brief to the Supreme Court. Yet Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich persists in leveling increasingly absurd charges, claiming the administration has “fabricated a Document Hoax in a desperate attempt to retain political power.”
The idea that justice has somehow been perverted here is fiction. The significance of Mr. Trump’s conduct is as plain as the silliness of his complaints. The Supreme Court’s terse reply to his emergency application is only the latest confirmation.
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
The Supreme Court has dismissed Donald Trump in a single sentence. With no note of dissent, the justices Thursday rejected the former president’s request to intervene in litigation over documents seized from his Mar-a-Lago estate this summer. This outcome only underscores the outrageous frivolity of the contentions his team has lodged in courts of law and public opinion.
The Supreme Court shouldn’t even have entertained the petition to reconsider part of an appeals court order allowing the Justice Department to continue to review classified documents as a special master looks over other materials for claims of attorney-client or executive privilege. Yet the outcome of Justice Clarence Thomas’s referring the case his colleagues’ way is just another reason to scoff at claims from Mr. Trump that the legal system is treating him unfairly. He has had the opportunity to use, and attempt to abuse, the courts all the way up to the highest in the land — three of whose justices he appointed. And nonetheless, they’ve rejected his arguments.
These rejections are the only possible answer to the numerous implausible claims made by Mr. Trump, including that while in office he could declassify documents “even by thinking about it.” The Mar-a-Lago case is now ensnared in multiple courts thanks to multiple filings from Mr. Trump. Nowhere has he succeeded in establishing any real injury caused to him by the FBI being allowed to proceed with its investigation into the trove of more than 11,000 documents, including 103 with classification markings, that he took with him from the Oval Office. Meanwhile, federal prosecutors have ably described the injury that both an impeded investigation and the ability of an outside party to view highly sensitive materials would cause to the government. After all, these materials reportedly include information regarding nuclear capabilities of a foreign government and other secrets so closely held that the agents involved in the probe needed a special clearance to look at them.
This case, in short, is serious. An article from The Post only emphasizes this reality: A former White House valet told investigators that he moved boxes while the government was seeking the return of the classified materials, having previously denied doing anything of the sort. Security-camera footage corroborates the revised account. The new evidence adds substance to the suggestion of obstruction that the Justice Department also teased in its brief to the Supreme Court. Yet Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich persists in leveling increasingly absurd charges, claiming the administration has “fabricated a Document Hoax in a desperate attempt to retain political power.”
The idea that justice has somehow been perverted here is fiction. The significance of Mr. Trump’s conduct is as plain as the silliness of his complaints. The Supreme Court’s terse reply to his emergency application is only the latest confirmation.
DONALD TRUMP HAS TOLD AMERICANS EXACTLY WHO HE IS
By Jesse Wegman, The New York Times
The biggest news to come out of the ninth and (for now) final hearing of the Jan. 6 committee, on Thursday afternoon, was obvious: A subpoena requiring a former president to testify about his role in a deadly insurrection that he incited in order to prevent the transfer of power to his lawful successor is, to put it mildly, not something you see every day.
It was the right thing to do, although even in the drama of the moment (Mr. Schiff? Aye. Ms. Cheney? Aye.) it felt somewhat obligatory. After more than a year of dogged investigation involving hundreds of witnesses; thousands of texts, emails and other documents; countless sickening videos and photographs; and breathtaking testimony about the events leading up to that horrific day — all pointing directly at Donald Trump — how else could the committee have wrapped things up?
“We want to hear from him,” Representative Bennie Thompson, the committee chair, said in justifying the extraordinary motion, which he and the other members proceeded to authorize by a 9 to 0 vote.
Whether we actually hear from Mr. Trump is another matter. Immediately after the hearing, he mocked the committee on his social media site, asking why it had not called him to testify months ago. Anyone who hasn’t been in a coma for the past seven years could tell you this is classic Trumpian misdirection. The man doesn’t take any oath he isn’t prepared to violate, and he goes to lengths to avoid appearing anywhere that he can be criminally charged for lying.
On the other hand, Mr. Trump craves the spotlight. If the committee were to agree to his reported demand that his testimony be aired on live TV, he might actually go through with it. After all, it would be free prepublicity for his likely presidential run — even if he did nothing but invoke his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself, as he did more than 400 times during a deposition last summer, part of a New York State investigation into whether he fraudulently inflated his real estate assets. (The state’s attorney general, Letitia James, determined that he had, suing Mr. Trump, his family business and three of his adult children for lying to lenders and insurers to the tune of billions of dollars.)
However the subpoena negotiations play out, it’s important to remember one thing: We already have heard from him. Again and again and again and again, Mr. Trump has told the American people who he is, what he wants and exactly how he plans to get it — the law, the Constitution and the Republic be damned.
Sometimes he says it directly; sometimes it comes through the remarks of his closest allies or administration officials. Consider just a sampling of quotations that the Jan. 6 committee summarized in Thursday’s hearing:
‘We want all voting to stop.’
Mr. Trump said this on national television, in the early morning hours of Nov. 4, after initial vote counts that showed him in the lead began to move toward Joe Biden as more votes rolled in. The phenomenon was so predictable that it already had a name: the blue shift. In fact, Mr. Trump was warned repeatedly that this was very likely to happen, in part because of his own actions. Throughout the summer of 2020, he discouraged his supporters from voting by mail, meaning that mail-in ballots, which some states don’t start counting until polls close, would skew toward Democrats. Rather than accept what he must have known to be true, Mr. Trump effectively called for the disenfranchisement of tens of millions of Americans. But it was worse than that.
‘What Trump’s going to do is just declare victory, right? He’s going to declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s the winner. He’s just going to say he’s a winner.’
That was Steve Bannon, Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign manager and a former top White House adviser, speaking with a group of associates shortly before Election Day 2020. He was laying out in plain view the plan he knew was in the works. And it had been in the works for months. As the committee revealed on Thursday, Brad Parscale, who managed Mr. Trump’s 2020 bid, testified that the former president “planned as early as July that he would say he won the election even if he lost.”
‘There was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were.’
Bill Barr, Mr. Trump’s attorney general, said this in his testimony to the committee, describing his frustration with trying to bat away the unsubstantiated claims of voting fraud that Mr. Trump kept bringing to him — claims that were rejected by every federal and state court to consider them in the months after Election Day. When Mr. Barr resigned in December 2020, Mr. Trump attempted to replace him with Jeffrey Clark, an environmental lawyer in the Justice Department who had expressed a willingness to help Mr. Trump subvert the election. The plan failed only when top department officials threatened to resign if Mr. Clark got the job.
‘He knows it’s over. He knows he lost, but we’re going to keep trying.’
According to testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s last chief of staff, Mr. Meadows said this to her soon after Mr. Trump called Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, and tried in vain to shake him down for 11,780 votes, exactly one more than Mr. Biden’s margin of victory in the state. That was on Jan. 2, four days before Mr. Trump stood before tens of thousands of his supporters at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., and repeated many of the claims of voting fraud that he had been repeatedly told were false. He knew that many of those supporters were armed, because they had refused to pass through the magnetometers that had been set up for Mr. Trump’s safety. But he didn’t care. As he said, according to Ms. Hutchinson, “They’re not here to hurt me.”
As the committee revealed on Thursday, the Secret Service was aware of the threat of violence and specifically of an armed attack on the Capitol more than a week before Jan. 6. “Their plan is to literally kill people,” one tipster wrote. Mr. Trump was informed of the threats, too, before he whipped the mob into a frenzy and urged them to march on the Capitol.
These are only a few examples pulled from the immense body of evidence that the Jan. 6 committee has compiled for the American people and the world to see. Together they paint a clear and damning picture of the man who sat in the Oval Office for four years and will almost certainly try to again. Before that happens, Mr. Trump must be “required to answer for his actions,” as Mr. Thompson rightly said. It sounds so basic and yet, with Mr. Trump, it has remained so elusive.
That may be on the verge of changing. In addition to a criminal prosecution for the Jan. 6 insurrection, Mr. Trump could well be charged with federal offenses over the removal from the White House of hundreds of documents, some highly classified. He also faces a potential prosecution in Georgia for his efforts to subvert the election there.
These prosecutions would not by themselves solve all our problems. They would not neutralize the danger of the Republican Party, which is now infected from coast to coast with proudly ignorant conspiracymongers, wild-eyed election deniers and gun-toting maniacs. Led by Mr. Trump, the party has morphed into the greatest threat to the Republic since the Confederacy: a revanchist cult that refuses to accept electoral defeat. The Times reported on Thursday that a vast majority of the Republican candidates for top federal and state offices around the country either question or deny the 2020 presidential outcome, despite the lack of any supporting evidence.
Still, prosecutions would send a critical message to those who have put their careers and even lives on the line for American democracy or are considering doing so in the future: that their sacrifices are worth it. That when they come forward and speak the truth, the system responds with accountability. That when other people, especially the most powerful people, don’t play by the rules, they face consequences.
As Representative Liz Cheney, the committee’s vice chair, put it on Thursday, “Our institutions only hold when men and women of good faith make them hold, regardless of the political cost. We have no guarantee that these men and women will be in place next time.” She’s right, but we can make it more likely that they will be in place by holding Mr. Trump and his co-conspirators to account. If we don’t, the message we are sending is that in America, elections can be subverted and political violence is acceptable.
The Jan. 6 committee’s great legacy is helping to thwart that future by laying a path to true accountability. It is up to us — and to the Department of Justice — to walk it.
By Jesse Wegman, The New York Times
The biggest news to come out of the ninth and (for now) final hearing of the Jan. 6 committee, on Thursday afternoon, was obvious: A subpoena requiring a former president to testify about his role in a deadly insurrection that he incited in order to prevent the transfer of power to his lawful successor is, to put it mildly, not something you see every day.
It was the right thing to do, although even in the drama of the moment (Mr. Schiff? Aye. Ms. Cheney? Aye.) it felt somewhat obligatory. After more than a year of dogged investigation involving hundreds of witnesses; thousands of texts, emails and other documents; countless sickening videos and photographs; and breathtaking testimony about the events leading up to that horrific day — all pointing directly at Donald Trump — how else could the committee have wrapped things up?
“We want to hear from him,” Representative Bennie Thompson, the committee chair, said in justifying the extraordinary motion, which he and the other members proceeded to authorize by a 9 to 0 vote.
Whether we actually hear from Mr. Trump is another matter. Immediately after the hearing, he mocked the committee on his social media site, asking why it had not called him to testify months ago. Anyone who hasn’t been in a coma for the past seven years could tell you this is classic Trumpian misdirection. The man doesn’t take any oath he isn’t prepared to violate, and he goes to lengths to avoid appearing anywhere that he can be criminally charged for lying.
On the other hand, Mr. Trump craves the spotlight. If the committee were to agree to his reported demand that his testimony be aired on live TV, he might actually go through with it. After all, it would be free prepublicity for his likely presidential run — even if he did nothing but invoke his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself, as he did more than 400 times during a deposition last summer, part of a New York State investigation into whether he fraudulently inflated his real estate assets. (The state’s attorney general, Letitia James, determined that he had, suing Mr. Trump, his family business and three of his adult children for lying to lenders and insurers to the tune of billions of dollars.)
However the subpoena negotiations play out, it’s important to remember one thing: We already have heard from him. Again and again and again and again, Mr. Trump has told the American people who he is, what he wants and exactly how he plans to get it — the law, the Constitution and the Republic be damned.
Sometimes he says it directly; sometimes it comes through the remarks of his closest allies or administration officials. Consider just a sampling of quotations that the Jan. 6 committee summarized in Thursday’s hearing:
‘We want all voting to stop.’
Mr. Trump said this on national television, in the early morning hours of Nov. 4, after initial vote counts that showed him in the lead began to move toward Joe Biden as more votes rolled in. The phenomenon was so predictable that it already had a name: the blue shift. In fact, Mr. Trump was warned repeatedly that this was very likely to happen, in part because of his own actions. Throughout the summer of 2020, he discouraged his supporters from voting by mail, meaning that mail-in ballots, which some states don’t start counting until polls close, would skew toward Democrats. Rather than accept what he must have known to be true, Mr. Trump effectively called for the disenfranchisement of tens of millions of Americans. But it was worse than that.
‘What Trump’s going to do is just declare victory, right? He’s going to declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s the winner. He’s just going to say he’s a winner.’
That was Steve Bannon, Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign manager and a former top White House adviser, speaking with a group of associates shortly before Election Day 2020. He was laying out in plain view the plan he knew was in the works. And it had been in the works for months. As the committee revealed on Thursday, Brad Parscale, who managed Mr. Trump’s 2020 bid, testified that the former president “planned as early as July that he would say he won the election even if he lost.”
‘There was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were.’
Bill Barr, Mr. Trump’s attorney general, said this in his testimony to the committee, describing his frustration with trying to bat away the unsubstantiated claims of voting fraud that Mr. Trump kept bringing to him — claims that were rejected by every federal and state court to consider them in the months after Election Day. When Mr. Barr resigned in December 2020, Mr. Trump attempted to replace him with Jeffrey Clark, an environmental lawyer in the Justice Department who had expressed a willingness to help Mr. Trump subvert the election. The plan failed only when top department officials threatened to resign if Mr. Clark got the job.
‘He knows it’s over. He knows he lost, but we’re going to keep trying.’
According to testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s last chief of staff, Mr. Meadows said this to her soon after Mr. Trump called Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, and tried in vain to shake him down for 11,780 votes, exactly one more than Mr. Biden’s margin of victory in the state. That was on Jan. 2, four days before Mr. Trump stood before tens of thousands of his supporters at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., and repeated many of the claims of voting fraud that he had been repeatedly told were false. He knew that many of those supporters were armed, because they had refused to pass through the magnetometers that had been set up for Mr. Trump’s safety. But he didn’t care. As he said, according to Ms. Hutchinson, “They’re not here to hurt me.”
As the committee revealed on Thursday, the Secret Service was aware of the threat of violence and specifically of an armed attack on the Capitol more than a week before Jan. 6. “Their plan is to literally kill people,” one tipster wrote. Mr. Trump was informed of the threats, too, before he whipped the mob into a frenzy and urged them to march on the Capitol.
These are only a few examples pulled from the immense body of evidence that the Jan. 6 committee has compiled for the American people and the world to see. Together they paint a clear and damning picture of the man who sat in the Oval Office for four years and will almost certainly try to again. Before that happens, Mr. Trump must be “required to answer for his actions,” as Mr. Thompson rightly said. It sounds so basic and yet, with Mr. Trump, it has remained so elusive.
That may be on the verge of changing. In addition to a criminal prosecution for the Jan. 6 insurrection, Mr. Trump could well be charged with federal offenses over the removal from the White House of hundreds of documents, some highly classified. He also faces a potential prosecution in Georgia for his efforts to subvert the election there.
These prosecutions would not by themselves solve all our problems. They would not neutralize the danger of the Republican Party, which is now infected from coast to coast with proudly ignorant conspiracymongers, wild-eyed election deniers and gun-toting maniacs. Led by Mr. Trump, the party has morphed into the greatest threat to the Republic since the Confederacy: a revanchist cult that refuses to accept electoral defeat. The Times reported on Thursday that a vast majority of the Republican candidates for top federal and state offices around the country either question or deny the 2020 presidential outcome, despite the lack of any supporting evidence.
Still, prosecutions would send a critical message to those who have put their careers and even lives on the line for American democracy or are considering doing so in the future: that their sacrifices are worth it. That when they come forward and speak the truth, the system responds with accountability. That when other people, especially the most powerful people, don’t play by the rules, they face consequences.
As Representative Liz Cheney, the committee’s vice chair, put it on Thursday, “Our institutions only hold when men and women of good faith make them hold, regardless of the political cost. We have no guarantee that these men and women will be in place next time.” She’s right, but we can make it more likely that they will be in place by holding Mr. Trump and his co-conspirators to account. If we don’t, the message we are sending is that in America, elections can be subverted and political violence is acceptable.
The Jan. 6 committee’s great legacy is helping to thwart that future by laying a path to true accountability. It is up to us — and to the Department of Justice — to walk it.
THINK YOU ALREADY KNOW CRAZY? MEET THE HOUSE GOP CLASS OF ’22.
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
Can we have order in the House?
Not if this crowd takes over.
Much of the public focus in the midterm elections has been on the, er, exotic nature of the Republic nominees in Senate and gubernatorial races, and understandably so. There’s Mehmet Oz’s crudite, Doug Mastriano’s white supremacists, and Herschel Walker’s … well, pretty much everything he says and does. But GOP nominees for the House are no less erratic — just less well known.
There’s the woman from North Carolina who was accused of hitting one husband with an alarm clock, trying to hit another with a car (and also menacing him with a frying pan) and punching her daughter. She denies that, though she also invoked a conspiracy belief that alien lizards control the government.
There’s the man from Ohio who lied about his military record, lavishly promoted QAnon themes, acknowledged bypassing police barriers at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and with 120 gallons of paint turned his entire lawn into a Trump banner.
There’s the man from Michigan who claimed that Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman participated in a satanic ritual, who once disparaged women’s suffrage, and who, though Black, raised concern about Democrats “eroding the white population.”
Then there are: the Texas woman accused by her estranged husband of cruelty toward his teenage daughter; the Colorado woman who backed an effort to secede from her state; the Virginia woman who speculated that rape victims wouldn’t get pregnant; and the Wisconsin man who used campaign funds from his failed 2020 race to come to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, where he apparently breached Capitol barricades.
What they all have in common is that they’re in competitive races, which means they could well be part of a Republican House majority in January. And that’s on top of a larger group of GOP nominees in deep-red congressional districts who are a motley assortment of election deniers, climate-change deniers, QAnon enthusiasts and Jan. 6 participants who propose to abolish the FBI and ban abortion with no exceptions, among other things. Some won nominations despite efforts by party leadership to stop them and continue without financial support from the National Republican Congressional Committee.
Maybe this is why Kevin McCarthy, the man who as House speaker would have the task of leading this rogues’ gallery, calls his agenda a “Commitment to America.” Many members of his new majority might be good candidates for commitment.
J.R. Majewski, the Trump-backed lawn painter from Ohio, has a different agenda: He wants to “abolish all unconstitutional three letter agencies,” including the CIA. He has said he’s willing to fight a civil war, and he made a campaign video in which he carried a rifle and said he would “do whatever it takes” to “bring this country back to its former glory.”
In North Carolina, Sandy Smith is folding into her plans for the country the domestic-abuse allegations against her: “I never ran over anyone with a car and I never hit anyone in the head with a frying pan. … I am bringing a frying pan to DC, though,” she tweeted in May. (Disclosure: My wife, a pollster, is a consultant to Smith’s Democratic opponent.) Smith also wants “executions” of those who, she falsely claims, stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump.
Maybe this is what John Gibbs, the Michigan Republican who questioned women’s suffrage, had in mind when he wrote as a Stanford student that women don’t “posess [sic] the characteristics necessary to govern” because they rely on “emotional reasoning.”
McCarthy will surely have to put down many an uprising from what might be termed the Insurrection Caucus. Wisconsin nominee Derrick Van Orden, like Majewski and a few other GOP nominees, was outside the U.S. Capitol that day — and was photographed inside a restricted area, though he says he left when things turned violent. And Kelly Cooper, a nominee in Arizona, wants “the prisoners of January 6th … to be released on day one.”
George Santos, a nominee in New York, claimed he was the victim of election fraud in his failed 2020 bid. Sam Peters, a nominee in Nevada who has used the “#QArmy” hashtag and embraced being called the “male” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, characterized those facing charges for the insurrection as “civically engaged American citizens exercising their constitutional freedoms.” And Iowa nominee Zach Nunn, who found it suspicious that Capitol Police couldn’t “stop a bunch of middle-aged individuals from walking onto the floor,” argued that “not a single one” of the defendants was charged with and convicted of insurrection. (That’s because the charge is “seditious conspiracy.”) Madison Gesiotto Gilbert, a nominee from Ohio, was precocious in her false claims of election fraud: She claimed in 2018 that a voting machine had switched her vote in the Ohio Senate race from Republican to Democrat.
Overlapping with the Insurrection Caucus are those with qualifications that might, at best, be called unconventional. Monica De La Cruz, a Texas nominee and top GOP recruit, was accused in a court filing a year ago of “cruel and aggressive conduct” toward her then-husband’s 14-year-old daughter, including pinching the teen to stop her from crying; she denies the claim. In Colorado, nominee Barbara Kirkmeyer once led an attempt by 11 counties there to secede and become their own state. In North Carolina, nominee Bo Hines (who wants a 10-year moratorium on immigration) spoke of a “banana republic” as though the common term for flailing democracies was actually referring to the clothing store of the same name.
Of course, the People’s House has always attracted the eccentric, and even the shady, from both parties. But the would-be Republican Class of ’22 is extraordinary in the number of oddballs and extremists in its ranks. This is no accident: The trend in Republican primaries, accelerated by Trump, has favored those with the most eye-popping tapestry of conspiracy theories and unyielding positions. GOP primaries are dominated by a sliver of the electorate on the far right.
That’s why they produce figures such as Erik Aadland, a Colorado nominee who claims that the 2020 election was “absolutely rigged” and that the country is “on the brink of being taken over by a communist government” and who has followed various extremist groups, including the Proud Boys, on social media. In New Jersey, Frank Pallotta is again a Republican nominee, after declaring during his 2020 run for the same seat that he stands by the Oath Keepers, a group whose leaders are now on trial over Jan. 6.
Starting in January, a likely narrow Republican majority might have to find consensus among a freshman class that can’t agree on basic facts. Karoline Leavitt, a nominee in New Hampshire, claims that “the alleged ‘existential threat of climate change’ is a manufactured crisis by the Democrat Party.” In Virginia, nominee Yesli Vega argued that it was less likely for a rape victim to become pregnant because “it’s not something that’s happening organically.” Also in Virginia, nominee Hung Cao asserted that more “people get bludgeoned to death and stabbed to death than they get shot,” which is wrong by an order of magnitude.
But these nominees have offered unique policy ideas! Robert Burns of New Hampshire said in 2018 that he would allow abortion only to protect the “life of the mother” — but “we would need a panel in this sort of situation” to decide whether the ailing woman can get the lifesaving procedure.
A real-life death panel! Challenged recently on this position, Burns replied last month: “In response to the death panels, I believe women of color and low economic status deserve second and third opinions before being forced into abortions.” Put another way, a woman would need a second and third opinion before she’s allowed to save her own life.
The House Republican Class of ’22 will be many things, but “boring” is not one of them.
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
Can we have order in the House?
Not if this crowd takes over.
Much of the public focus in the midterm elections has been on the, er, exotic nature of the Republic nominees in Senate and gubernatorial races, and understandably so. There’s Mehmet Oz’s crudite, Doug Mastriano’s white supremacists, and Herschel Walker’s … well, pretty much everything he says and does. But GOP nominees for the House are no less erratic — just less well known.
There’s the woman from North Carolina who was accused of hitting one husband with an alarm clock, trying to hit another with a car (and also menacing him with a frying pan) and punching her daughter. She denies that, though she also invoked a conspiracy belief that alien lizards control the government.
There’s the man from Ohio who lied about his military record, lavishly promoted QAnon themes, acknowledged bypassing police barriers at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and with 120 gallons of paint turned his entire lawn into a Trump banner.
There’s the man from Michigan who claimed that Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman participated in a satanic ritual, who once disparaged women’s suffrage, and who, though Black, raised concern about Democrats “eroding the white population.”
Then there are: the Texas woman accused by her estranged husband of cruelty toward his teenage daughter; the Colorado woman who backed an effort to secede from her state; the Virginia woman who speculated that rape victims wouldn’t get pregnant; and the Wisconsin man who used campaign funds from his failed 2020 race to come to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, where he apparently breached Capitol barricades.
What they all have in common is that they’re in competitive races, which means they could well be part of a Republican House majority in January. And that’s on top of a larger group of GOP nominees in deep-red congressional districts who are a motley assortment of election deniers, climate-change deniers, QAnon enthusiasts and Jan. 6 participants who propose to abolish the FBI and ban abortion with no exceptions, among other things. Some won nominations despite efforts by party leadership to stop them and continue without financial support from the National Republican Congressional Committee.
Maybe this is why Kevin McCarthy, the man who as House speaker would have the task of leading this rogues’ gallery, calls his agenda a “Commitment to America.” Many members of his new majority might be good candidates for commitment.
J.R. Majewski, the Trump-backed lawn painter from Ohio, has a different agenda: He wants to “abolish all unconstitutional three letter agencies,” including the CIA. He has said he’s willing to fight a civil war, and he made a campaign video in which he carried a rifle and said he would “do whatever it takes” to “bring this country back to its former glory.”
In North Carolina, Sandy Smith is folding into her plans for the country the domestic-abuse allegations against her: “I never ran over anyone with a car and I never hit anyone in the head with a frying pan. … I am bringing a frying pan to DC, though,” she tweeted in May. (Disclosure: My wife, a pollster, is a consultant to Smith’s Democratic opponent.) Smith also wants “executions” of those who, she falsely claims, stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump.
Maybe this is what John Gibbs, the Michigan Republican who questioned women’s suffrage, had in mind when he wrote as a Stanford student that women don’t “posess [sic] the characteristics necessary to govern” because they rely on “emotional reasoning.”
McCarthy will surely have to put down many an uprising from what might be termed the Insurrection Caucus. Wisconsin nominee Derrick Van Orden, like Majewski and a few other GOP nominees, was outside the U.S. Capitol that day — and was photographed inside a restricted area, though he says he left when things turned violent. And Kelly Cooper, a nominee in Arizona, wants “the prisoners of January 6th … to be released on day one.”
George Santos, a nominee in New York, claimed he was the victim of election fraud in his failed 2020 bid. Sam Peters, a nominee in Nevada who has used the “#QArmy” hashtag and embraced being called the “male” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, characterized those facing charges for the insurrection as “civically engaged American citizens exercising their constitutional freedoms.” And Iowa nominee Zach Nunn, who found it suspicious that Capitol Police couldn’t “stop a bunch of middle-aged individuals from walking onto the floor,” argued that “not a single one” of the defendants was charged with and convicted of insurrection. (That’s because the charge is “seditious conspiracy.”) Madison Gesiotto Gilbert, a nominee from Ohio, was precocious in her false claims of election fraud: She claimed in 2018 that a voting machine had switched her vote in the Ohio Senate race from Republican to Democrat.
Overlapping with the Insurrection Caucus are those with qualifications that might, at best, be called unconventional. Monica De La Cruz, a Texas nominee and top GOP recruit, was accused in a court filing a year ago of “cruel and aggressive conduct” toward her then-husband’s 14-year-old daughter, including pinching the teen to stop her from crying; she denies the claim. In Colorado, nominee Barbara Kirkmeyer once led an attempt by 11 counties there to secede and become their own state. In North Carolina, nominee Bo Hines (who wants a 10-year moratorium on immigration) spoke of a “banana republic” as though the common term for flailing democracies was actually referring to the clothing store of the same name.
Of course, the People’s House has always attracted the eccentric, and even the shady, from both parties. But the would-be Republican Class of ’22 is extraordinary in the number of oddballs and extremists in its ranks. This is no accident: The trend in Republican primaries, accelerated by Trump, has favored those with the most eye-popping tapestry of conspiracy theories and unyielding positions. GOP primaries are dominated by a sliver of the electorate on the far right.
That’s why they produce figures such as Erik Aadland, a Colorado nominee who claims that the 2020 election was “absolutely rigged” and that the country is “on the brink of being taken over by a communist government” and who has followed various extremist groups, including the Proud Boys, on social media. In New Jersey, Frank Pallotta is again a Republican nominee, after declaring during his 2020 run for the same seat that he stands by the Oath Keepers, a group whose leaders are now on trial over Jan. 6.
Starting in January, a likely narrow Republican majority might have to find consensus among a freshman class that can’t agree on basic facts. Karoline Leavitt, a nominee in New Hampshire, claims that “the alleged ‘existential threat of climate change’ is a manufactured crisis by the Democrat Party.” In Virginia, nominee Yesli Vega argued that it was less likely for a rape victim to become pregnant because “it’s not something that’s happening organically.” Also in Virginia, nominee Hung Cao asserted that more “people get bludgeoned to death and stabbed to death than they get shot,” which is wrong by an order of magnitude.
But these nominees have offered unique policy ideas! Robert Burns of New Hampshire said in 2018 that he would allow abortion only to protect the “life of the mother” — but “we would need a panel in this sort of situation” to decide whether the ailing woman can get the lifesaving procedure.
A real-life death panel! Challenged recently on this position, Burns replied last month: “In response to the death panels, I believe women of color and low economic status deserve second and third opinions before being forced into abortions.” Put another way, a woman would need a second and third opinion before she’s allowed to save her own life.
The House Republican Class of ’22 will be many things, but “boring” is not one of them.
THE MAGA GOP HAS NEVER BEEN ABOUT ‘LIFE.’ ONLY POWER.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
The cat’s been out of the bag for some time regarding Republicans’ insincere support for “life.” If “life” were the issue when it comes to abortion, the party would not put reproductive health and lives at risk with forced-birth laws. For that matter, a pro-life politician would not oppose effective gun-safety laws; would not oppose mask edicts or discourage vaccinations for the coronavirus; and would not push to cut Medicaid and hobble the Affordable Care Act. However, never has it been more apparent how utterly unprincipled the party is when it comes to an issue it has used for decades to woo its base.
Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker, who supports forced birth even in cases of rape, incest and danger to the life of the mother, is credibly accused (with documentary proof) of urging a woman he impregnated to get an abortion and then paying for it, as the Daily Beast first reported. Although Walker has denied the allegation, Republicans have let on that they don’t care anyway. Dana Loesch, a former spokeswoman for the National Rifle Association, made that crystal clear:
Dana Loesch: “I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles. I want control of the Senate.” pic.twitter.com/gp3jbG5P1B — PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) October 4, 2022
She’s right, of course. All the GOP cares about is power. It certainly does not care about the character or quality of its candidates, about actual election results, about officials’ oaths or really any other policy matter. This was the party that had no platform in 2020, only unwavering loyalty to its leader.
Former Maine governor Paul LePage (R), who is running to win his old job back, seemed even more confused as to what his abortion position is meant to be. During a shambolic debate performance on Tuesday, the New York Times reported, LePage “repeatedly stumbled over a question about how he would handle the issue if voters returned him to office.” He didn’t understand the question, he said. Or it was a hypothetical. Or whatever. Easy to get lost when the issue is simply another weapon to wield in search of political office.
Such utterances can’t even be called hypocrisy; hypocrisy assumes one has beliefs. These candidates seem to believe in nothing but their own advancement — though they are quick to declare that whatever Democrats believe in poses an existential threat to America. We’re simply hearing them say out loud what we’ve long suspected they think privately: that voters are suckers, so they’ll tell them whatever they think the rubes will want to hear.
Whether it is Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) declaring that Jan. 6 was not an armed insurrection, or the scores of candidates parroting the “big lie,” or the forced-birth crowd dropping its states’ rights theory to push for a national ban, we see a party that is prepared to do and say anything to hold power, regardless of the harm to our democracy or national security.
A candidate such as J.D. Vance, the GOP nominee for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, can condemn defeated former president Donald Trump, then pivot to pledge undying loyalty — and count on getting rewarded with the nomination for debasing himself.
Republican leaders and enablers (including pundits who dream up ex post facto excuses for policy shifts and inanities) have repeatedly shown that the party doesn’t believe what its candidates say and doesn’t care what lies they tell supporters. We should stop attributing sincerity or good faith to the MAGA GOP. Again and again, its members show their “beliefs” are all a smokescreen to attain and hold power.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
The cat’s been out of the bag for some time regarding Republicans’ insincere support for “life.” If “life” were the issue when it comes to abortion, the party would not put reproductive health and lives at risk with forced-birth laws. For that matter, a pro-life politician would not oppose effective gun-safety laws; would not oppose mask edicts or discourage vaccinations for the coronavirus; and would not push to cut Medicaid and hobble the Affordable Care Act. However, never has it been more apparent how utterly unprincipled the party is when it comes to an issue it has used for decades to woo its base.
Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker, who supports forced birth even in cases of rape, incest and danger to the life of the mother, is credibly accused (with documentary proof) of urging a woman he impregnated to get an abortion and then paying for it, as the Daily Beast first reported. Although Walker has denied the allegation, Republicans have let on that they don’t care anyway. Dana Loesch, a former spokeswoman for the National Rifle Association, made that crystal clear:
Dana Loesch: “I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles. I want control of the Senate.” pic.twitter.com/gp3jbG5P1B — PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) October 4, 2022
She’s right, of course. All the GOP cares about is power. It certainly does not care about the character or quality of its candidates, about actual election results, about officials’ oaths or really any other policy matter. This was the party that had no platform in 2020, only unwavering loyalty to its leader.
Former Maine governor Paul LePage (R), who is running to win his old job back, seemed even more confused as to what his abortion position is meant to be. During a shambolic debate performance on Tuesday, the New York Times reported, LePage “repeatedly stumbled over a question about how he would handle the issue if voters returned him to office.” He didn’t understand the question, he said. Or it was a hypothetical. Or whatever. Easy to get lost when the issue is simply another weapon to wield in search of political office.
Such utterances can’t even be called hypocrisy; hypocrisy assumes one has beliefs. These candidates seem to believe in nothing but their own advancement — though they are quick to declare that whatever Democrats believe in poses an existential threat to America. We’re simply hearing them say out loud what we’ve long suspected they think privately: that voters are suckers, so they’ll tell them whatever they think the rubes will want to hear.
Whether it is Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) declaring that Jan. 6 was not an armed insurrection, or the scores of candidates parroting the “big lie,” or the forced-birth crowd dropping its states’ rights theory to push for a national ban, we see a party that is prepared to do and say anything to hold power, regardless of the harm to our democracy or national security.
A candidate such as J.D. Vance, the GOP nominee for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, can condemn defeated former president Donald Trump, then pivot to pledge undying loyalty — and count on getting rewarded with the nomination for debasing himself.
Republican leaders and enablers (including pundits who dream up ex post facto excuses for policy shifts and inanities) have repeatedly shown that the party doesn’t believe what its candidates say and doesn’t care what lies they tell supporters. We should stop attributing sincerity or good faith to the MAGA GOP. Again and again, its members show their “beliefs” are all a smokescreen to attain and hold power.
THE WAR ON ABORTION RIGHTS MESHES PERFECTLY WITH MAGA AUTHORITARIANISM
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, in the 100 days, as of Sunday, since the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, nearly 80 million people find themselves in 13 states that, in effect, ban abortion. There will be a record number of abortion-related measures on the midterm ballot. It would be a mistake to see the focus on abortion as distinct from the MAGA war on democracy.
Pundits and politicians tend to observe a bright distinction between the Donald Trump MAGA movement’s assault on democracy and the right-wing evisceration of women’s reproductive rights. After all, some pro-democracy voices on the right are antiabortion. But simply because not all forced-birth advocates are MAGA authoritarian supporters, that doesn’t mean a critical point should be overlooked: The attack on women’s self-determination and autonomy is as much a part of MAGA’s fascistic affinities as is the cult’s fondness for violence and white Christian nationalism.
One need only look at right-wing regimes present and past to see that they invariably include appeals to hyper-masculinity and demands for women to be limited to their roles as women and mothers. Modern authoritarian regimes — such as Viktor Orban’s Hungary or President Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil — and European fascists of the 1930s alike have sought to compel motherhood and limit women’s participation in society.
“Fascism is a rejection of the notion of equality, of an expansive definition of the people. And it comes at a time where people are pushing the parameters of an existing definition, one that basically included males, often male property owners only,” Anne Wingenter, professor of history and women’s studies at Loyola University Chicago, explained in a radio interview in April. “It was pushback against expanding that definition to excluded groups. What we seem to be experiencing today, to me, looks a lot like an attempt to define down that notion of the people again. And some people get to be fully autonomous, and some don’t.”
That was certainly the pattern in 1930s fascist Italy. Wingenter explained, “[Benito] Mussolini was known for his kind of pithy little quotes. And he is on record as saying, ‘War is to man, as maternity is to woman.’ ” She continued, “The ideal woman in fascist Italy was the wife and mother of many children.”
The xenophobic right-wing movement in the United States today is obsessed with “replacement theory,” regarding women in the dominant group as essential to the preservation of white supremacy. There was a “kind of demographic panic in the wake of the World War I in Italy,” Wingenter said. Now, in the United States, it is the MAGA hysteria over white replacement. In both, part of the “solution” is for White mothers to have lots of children and forgo not only abortion but birth control.
We therefore should recognize, as Wingenter puts it, that those who “tolerate the removal of a whole series of rights for people, in the sense of a full ban on abortion,” strike not only at the rights of women to participate fully in society but to destroy the democratic ideal of equal rights and equal opportunity.
Mainstream media coverage has no problem recognizing the link between the MAGA anti-democratic movement and racism/white nationalism. One need only look at the Confederate flags carried through the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, or listen to right-wing fearmongering about immigrants to understand racism is intrinsic to the MAGA movement. However, when it comes to women’s rights, we see little acknowledgment in mainstream reporting and commentary that misogyny and deprivation of women’s rights are central to a movement playing largely on White male hysteria.
In sum, MAGA support for government intrusion into Americans’ most intimate decisions reflects an authoritarian outlook. It is not a coincidence that this targeting of women is occurring in tandem with a developing voter registration gender gap favoring women. They understand all too well that the GOP’s quest for a national abortion ban is about their reproductive rights — and also about their inclusion in society and ultimately the preservation of democracy.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, in the 100 days, as of Sunday, since the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, nearly 80 million people find themselves in 13 states that, in effect, ban abortion. There will be a record number of abortion-related measures on the midterm ballot. It would be a mistake to see the focus on abortion as distinct from the MAGA war on democracy.
Pundits and politicians tend to observe a bright distinction between the Donald Trump MAGA movement’s assault on democracy and the right-wing evisceration of women’s reproductive rights. After all, some pro-democracy voices on the right are antiabortion. But simply because not all forced-birth advocates are MAGA authoritarian supporters, that doesn’t mean a critical point should be overlooked: The attack on women’s self-determination and autonomy is as much a part of MAGA’s fascistic affinities as is the cult’s fondness for violence and white Christian nationalism.
One need only look at right-wing regimes present and past to see that they invariably include appeals to hyper-masculinity and demands for women to be limited to their roles as women and mothers. Modern authoritarian regimes — such as Viktor Orban’s Hungary or President Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil — and European fascists of the 1930s alike have sought to compel motherhood and limit women’s participation in society.
“Fascism is a rejection of the notion of equality, of an expansive definition of the people. And it comes at a time where people are pushing the parameters of an existing definition, one that basically included males, often male property owners only,” Anne Wingenter, professor of history and women’s studies at Loyola University Chicago, explained in a radio interview in April. “It was pushback against expanding that definition to excluded groups. What we seem to be experiencing today, to me, looks a lot like an attempt to define down that notion of the people again. And some people get to be fully autonomous, and some don’t.”
That was certainly the pattern in 1930s fascist Italy. Wingenter explained, “[Benito] Mussolini was known for his kind of pithy little quotes. And he is on record as saying, ‘War is to man, as maternity is to woman.’ ” She continued, “The ideal woman in fascist Italy was the wife and mother of many children.”
The xenophobic right-wing movement in the United States today is obsessed with “replacement theory,” regarding women in the dominant group as essential to the preservation of white supremacy. There was a “kind of demographic panic in the wake of the World War I in Italy,” Wingenter said. Now, in the United States, it is the MAGA hysteria over white replacement. In both, part of the “solution” is for White mothers to have lots of children and forgo not only abortion but birth control.
We therefore should recognize, as Wingenter puts it, that those who “tolerate the removal of a whole series of rights for people, in the sense of a full ban on abortion,” strike not only at the rights of women to participate fully in society but to destroy the democratic ideal of equal rights and equal opportunity.
Mainstream media coverage has no problem recognizing the link between the MAGA anti-democratic movement and racism/white nationalism. One need only look at the Confederate flags carried through the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, or listen to right-wing fearmongering about immigrants to understand racism is intrinsic to the MAGA movement. However, when it comes to women’s rights, we see little acknowledgment in mainstream reporting and commentary that misogyny and deprivation of women’s rights are central to a movement playing largely on White male hysteria.
In sum, MAGA support for government intrusion into Americans’ most intimate decisions reflects an authoritarian outlook. It is not a coincidence that this targeting of women is occurring in tandem with a developing voter registration gender gap favoring women. They understand all too well that the GOP’s quest for a national abortion ban is about their reproductive rights — and also about their inclusion in society and ultimately the preservation of democracy.
THE SUPREME COURT’S MAJORITY RECONVENES ITS ASSAULT ON DEMOCRACY
By Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Washington Post
This week, a zealous band of Republican partisans gathered in Washington intent on advancing their campaign to undermine free and fair elections in this country. It isn’t the Proud Boys responding to President Donald Trump’s call to “stand back and stand by.” Nor is it the majority of House Republicans who sustain the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen. It is the six-person, right-wing majority of the Supreme Court using a self-selected docket of cases to advance minority rule.
The Voting Rights Act, one of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s greatest legacies, is a prime target. Five conservative justices joined in 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder to gut the act’s core enforcement mechanism: the requirement of prior federal approval for voting changes in states with a history of discrimination. Writing for the court, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. ignored the detailed record — and common sense — to make his own finding that racial discrimination was no longer a problem in the United States.
Not surprisingly, the decision opened the floodgates to the passage of voter-suppression laws across the South and in other states with Republican-majority legislatures.
Now, the act’s prohibition of voting practices that result in “denial or abridgement” of the right to vote on account of race is at risk. Merrill v. Milligan involves an Alabama redistricting plan that ensures that African Americans, who make up more than one-fourth of the state’s population, will constitute the majority in just one of its seven congressional districts. Having engaged in blatant racial gerrymandering, the state of Alabama now argues that race can’t be used as a factor to draw up a fairer map.
The most ominous case on the docket — Moore v. Harper — also involves gerrymandering.
The right-wing gang on the court ruled in 2019 that federal courts will not review cases of partisan gerrymandering — meaning, drawing congressional districts with the aim of helping one party win a disproportionate number of seats. The court’s opinion offered the reassurance that state courts would continue to curb extremes.
In North Carolina, the state Supreme Court did just that, striking down what it called an “egregious and intentional partisan gerrymander.” Now, North Carolina has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to ignore the state constitution and rule that the U.S. Constitution empowers the state legislature alone to determine how elections are run.
This wingnut argument — called the “independent state legislature theory” — ignores the entire history of elections in the United States. Yet, as The Post’s Ruth Marcus writes in her comprehensive review of the court’s threatening docket, three justices have already indicated they are sympathetic to it.
If the partisan GOP majority on the Supreme Court adopts this theory, it could have truly calamitous effects. Across the country, MAGA Republicans — inflamed by Trump’s “big lie” about the stolen 2020 election — are running candidates for governor and secretary of state and state legislatures. If the court rules in their favor and overrules state constitutions, then Republican majorities in state legislatures would be in position to follow Trump’s 2020 example: claim fraud without proof and replace the electors chosen by the popular vote with their own.
All of this builds on top of cases that have already neutered campaign finance laws and opened the sluice gates to unlimited — and often anonymous — campaign contributions. The Supreme Court ruled in 1976 in Buckley v. Valeo that money was speech and struck down limits on political spending by independent groups.
Then, in a 5-4 decision in Citizens United in 2010, the right-wing justices overturned any limits on campaign funding by corporations. Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy — a Reagan appointee — risibly declared that spending by corporations or others to oppose or support candidates would not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption. In 2014, in McCutcheon v. FEC, another 5-4 decision, the court outlawed any limits on how much money an individual could give to candidates or campaign committees in any election cycle.
No limits on corporations. No limits on individuals. Unlimited independent spending by PACs or other nonprofits. The result: Big money corrupts our elections.
As OpenSecrets reports, non-party outside groups — think PACs and pop-up nonprofit fronts — have spent nearly $4.5 billion influencing elections since Citizens United. In the previous two decades, they spent a combined $750 million. Not surprisingly, this has led to the obscene, spiraling cost of elections.
This year’s grotesqueries featured AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobby, spending millions — including two separate $1 million contributions from Republican donors — through front groups to try to defeat progressive women of color in Democratic Party primaries.
The Supreme Court is the country’s least democratic branch of government. Its appointed, unelected justices serve lifetime terms. They select the cases they hear. And now, after a 40-year campaign by conservatives, the court has a six-person, transparently partisan majority. This session, they will continue to forward the right’s agenda — undermining civil rights, elevating religious doctrine, rolling back the power to regulate.
At the center of that will be their assault on democracy. The House Jan. 6 committee has exposed Trump’s multilayered campaign to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Now, we need an independent inquiry to detail how right-wing justices have subverted our democracy, so we can determine what can be done to save it.
By Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Washington Post
This week, a zealous band of Republican partisans gathered in Washington intent on advancing their campaign to undermine free and fair elections in this country. It isn’t the Proud Boys responding to President Donald Trump’s call to “stand back and stand by.” Nor is it the majority of House Republicans who sustain the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen. It is the six-person, right-wing majority of the Supreme Court using a self-selected docket of cases to advance minority rule.
The Voting Rights Act, one of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s greatest legacies, is a prime target. Five conservative justices joined in 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder to gut the act’s core enforcement mechanism: the requirement of prior federal approval for voting changes in states with a history of discrimination. Writing for the court, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. ignored the detailed record — and common sense — to make his own finding that racial discrimination was no longer a problem in the United States.
Not surprisingly, the decision opened the floodgates to the passage of voter-suppression laws across the South and in other states with Republican-majority legislatures.
Now, the act’s prohibition of voting practices that result in “denial or abridgement” of the right to vote on account of race is at risk. Merrill v. Milligan involves an Alabama redistricting plan that ensures that African Americans, who make up more than one-fourth of the state’s population, will constitute the majority in just one of its seven congressional districts. Having engaged in blatant racial gerrymandering, the state of Alabama now argues that race can’t be used as a factor to draw up a fairer map.
The most ominous case on the docket — Moore v. Harper — also involves gerrymandering.
The right-wing gang on the court ruled in 2019 that federal courts will not review cases of partisan gerrymandering — meaning, drawing congressional districts with the aim of helping one party win a disproportionate number of seats. The court’s opinion offered the reassurance that state courts would continue to curb extremes.
In North Carolina, the state Supreme Court did just that, striking down what it called an “egregious and intentional partisan gerrymander.” Now, North Carolina has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to ignore the state constitution and rule that the U.S. Constitution empowers the state legislature alone to determine how elections are run.
This wingnut argument — called the “independent state legislature theory” — ignores the entire history of elections in the United States. Yet, as The Post’s Ruth Marcus writes in her comprehensive review of the court’s threatening docket, three justices have already indicated they are sympathetic to it.
If the partisan GOP majority on the Supreme Court adopts this theory, it could have truly calamitous effects. Across the country, MAGA Republicans — inflamed by Trump’s “big lie” about the stolen 2020 election — are running candidates for governor and secretary of state and state legislatures. If the court rules in their favor and overrules state constitutions, then Republican majorities in state legislatures would be in position to follow Trump’s 2020 example: claim fraud without proof and replace the electors chosen by the popular vote with their own.
All of this builds on top of cases that have already neutered campaign finance laws and opened the sluice gates to unlimited — and often anonymous — campaign contributions. The Supreme Court ruled in 1976 in Buckley v. Valeo that money was speech and struck down limits on political spending by independent groups.
Then, in a 5-4 decision in Citizens United in 2010, the right-wing justices overturned any limits on campaign funding by corporations. Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy — a Reagan appointee — risibly declared that spending by corporations or others to oppose or support candidates would not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption. In 2014, in McCutcheon v. FEC, another 5-4 decision, the court outlawed any limits on how much money an individual could give to candidates or campaign committees in any election cycle.
No limits on corporations. No limits on individuals. Unlimited independent spending by PACs or other nonprofits. The result: Big money corrupts our elections.
As OpenSecrets reports, non-party outside groups — think PACs and pop-up nonprofit fronts — have spent nearly $4.5 billion influencing elections since Citizens United. In the previous two decades, they spent a combined $750 million. Not surprisingly, this has led to the obscene, spiraling cost of elections.
This year’s grotesqueries featured AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobby, spending millions — including two separate $1 million contributions from Republican donors — through front groups to try to defeat progressive women of color in Democratic Party primaries.
The Supreme Court is the country’s least democratic branch of government. Its appointed, unelected justices serve lifetime terms. They select the cases they hear. And now, after a 40-year campaign by conservatives, the court has a six-person, transparently partisan majority. This session, they will continue to forward the right’s agenda — undermining civil rights, elevating religious doctrine, rolling back the power to regulate.
At the center of that will be their assault on democracy. The House Jan. 6 committee has exposed Trump’s multilayered campaign to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Now, we need an independent inquiry to detail how right-wing justices have subverted our democracy, so we can determine what can be done to save it.
THE SUPREME COURT ISN’T LISTENING, AND IT’S NO SECRET WHY
By The New York Times Editorial Board
The Supreme Court’s authority within the American political system is both immense and fragile. Somebody has to provide the last word in interpreting the Constitution, and — this is the key — to do so in a way that is seen as fair and legitimate by the people at large.
What happens when a majority of Americans don’t see it that way?
A common response to this question is to say the justices shouldn’t care. They aren’t there to satisfy the majority or to be swayed by the shifting winds of public opinion. That is partly true: The court’s most important obligations include safeguarding the constitutional rights of vulnerable minorities who can’t always count on protection from the political process and acting independently of political interests.
But in the bigger picture, the court nearly always hews close to where the majority of the American people are. If it does diverge, it should take care to do so in a way that doesn’t appear partisan. That is the basis of the trust given to the court by the public.
That trust, in turn, is crucial to the court’s ability to exercise the vast power Americans have granted it. The nine justices have no control over money, as Congress does, or force, as the executive branch does. All they have is their black robes and the public trust. A court that does not keep that trust cannot perform its critical role in American government.
And yet as the justices prepare to open a new term on Monday, fewer Americans have confidence in the court than ever before recorded. In a Gallup poll taken in June, before the court overturned Roe v. Wade with Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, only 25 percent of respondents said they had a high degree of confidence in the institution. That number is down from 50 percent in 2001 — just months after the court’s hugely controversial 5-to-4 ruling in Bush v. Gore, in which a majority consisting only of Republican appointees effectively decided the result of the 2000 election in favor of the Republicans. This widespread lack of confidence and trust in the nation’s highest court is a crisis, and rebuilding it is more important than the outcome of any single ruling.
Chief Justice John Roberts recently suggested that the court’s low public opinion is nothing more than sour grapes by those on the short end of recent rulings. “Simply because people disagree with an opinion is not a basis for criticizing the legitimacy of the court,” he said in remarks at a judicial conference earlier in September.
This is disingenuous. The court’s biggest decisions have always angered one group of people or another. Conservatives were upset, for instance, by the rulings in Brown v. Board of Education, which barred racial segregation in schools, and Obergefell v. Hodges, which established a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. Meanwhile, liberals were infuriated by Bush v. Gore and Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which opened the floodgates to dark money in politics. But overall public confidence in the court remained high until recently.
The actual cause of its historic unpopularity is no secret. Over the past several years, the court has been transformed into a judicial arm of the Republican Party. This project was taking shape more quietly for decades, but it shifted into high gear in 2016, when Justice Antonin Scalia died and Senate Republicans refused to let Barack Obama choose his successor, obliterating the practice of deferring to presidents to fill vacancies on the court. Within four years, the court had a 6-to-3 right-wing supermajority, supercharging the Republican appointees’ efforts to discard the traditions and processes that have allowed the court to appear fair and nonpartisan.
As a result, the court’s legitimacy has been squandered in the service of partisan victories. The Dobbs decision in June, which overturned Roe v. Wade, eliminated American women’s constitutional right to control their own bodies and was a priority of the Republican Party for decades, is only the most glaring example. In cases involving money in politics, partisan gerrymandering and multiple suits challenging the Voting Rights Act, the court has ruled in ways that make it easier for Republicans and harder for Democrats to win elections. In 2018, the court ruled that public sector labor unions violated the First Amendment rights of nonmembers by requiring them to pay fees to support the unions’ work bargaining on their behalf, after decades of rulings in which the court had found the opposite to be true. That ruling further weakened organized labor, another Republican goal.
For most of the court’s history, it was difficult to predict how a case would turn out based on the party of the president who nominated the justices. Even into the 21st century, as the country grew more polarized, the court’s rulings remained largely in line with the views of the average American voter. That is no longer the case. The court’s rulings are now in line with the views of the average Republican voter.
In the process, the court has unmoored itself from both the Constitution it is sworn to protect and the American people it is privileged to serve. This could not be happening at a worse moment. Election deniers in the Republican Party are undermining the integrity of the American electoral system. Right-wing political violence is a present and growing threat.
It is precisely during times like these that the American people need the Supreme Court to play the role Chief Justice Roberts memorably articulated at his own confirmation hearing — that of an umpire calling balls and strikes, ensuring a fair playing field for all. Instead, the court’s right-wingers are calling balls for one team and strikes for the other.
As Justice Elena Kagan said in a talk this month at Northwestern University School of Law, “When courts become extensions of the political process, when people see them as extensions of the political process, when people see them as trying just to impose personal preferences on a society irrespective of the law, that’s when there’s a problem — and that’s when there ought to be a problem.”
By The New York Times Editorial Board
The Supreme Court’s authority within the American political system is both immense and fragile. Somebody has to provide the last word in interpreting the Constitution, and — this is the key — to do so in a way that is seen as fair and legitimate by the people at large.
What happens when a majority of Americans don’t see it that way?
A common response to this question is to say the justices shouldn’t care. They aren’t there to satisfy the majority or to be swayed by the shifting winds of public opinion. That is partly true: The court’s most important obligations include safeguarding the constitutional rights of vulnerable minorities who can’t always count on protection from the political process and acting independently of political interests.
But in the bigger picture, the court nearly always hews close to where the majority of the American people are. If it does diverge, it should take care to do so in a way that doesn’t appear partisan. That is the basis of the trust given to the court by the public.
That trust, in turn, is crucial to the court’s ability to exercise the vast power Americans have granted it. The nine justices have no control over money, as Congress does, or force, as the executive branch does. All they have is their black robes and the public trust. A court that does not keep that trust cannot perform its critical role in American government.
And yet as the justices prepare to open a new term on Monday, fewer Americans have confidence in the court than ever before recorded. In a Gallup poll taken in June, before the court overturned Roe v. Wade with Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, only 25 percent of respondents said they had a high degree of confidence in the institution. That number is down from 50 percent in 2001 — just months after the court’s hugely controversial 5-to-4 ruling in Bush v. Gore, in which a majority consisting only of Republican appointees effectively decided the result of the 2000 election in favor of the Republicans. This widespread lack of confidence and trust in the nation’s highest court is a crisis, and rebuilding it is more important than the outcome of any single ruling.
Chief Justice John Roberts recently suggested that the court’s low public opinion is nothing more than sour grapes by those on the short end of recent rulings. “Simply because people disagree with an opinion is not a basis for criticizing the legitimacy of the court,” he said in remarks at a judicial conference earlier in September.
This is disingenuous. The court’s biggest decisions have always angered one group of people or another. Conservatives were upset, for instance, by the rulings in Brown v. Board of Education, which barred racial segregation in schools, and Obergefell v. Hodges, which established a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. Meanwhile, liberals were infuriated by Bush v. Gore and Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which opened the floodgates to dark money in politics. But overall public confidence in the court remained high until recently.
The actual cause of its historic unpopularity is no secret. Over the past several years, the court has been transformed into a judicial arm of the Republican Party. This project was taking shape more quietly for decades, but it shifted into high gear in 2016, when Justice Antonin Scalia died and Senate Republicans refused to let Barack Obama choose his successor, obliterating the practice of deferring to presidents to fill vacancies on the court. Within four years, the court had a 6-to-3 right-wing supermajority, supercharging the Republican appointees’ efforts to discard the traditions and processes that have allowed the court to appear fair and nonpartisan.
As a result, the court’s legitimacy has been squandered in the service of partisan victories. The Dobbs decision in June, which overturned Roe v. Wade, eliminated American women’s constitutional right to control their own bodies and was a priority of the Republican Party for decades, is only the most glaring example. In cases involving money in politics, partisan gerrymandering and multiple suits challenging the Voting Rights Act, the court has ruled in ways that make it easier for Republicans and harder for Democrats to win elections. In 2018, the court ruled that public sector labor unions violated the First Amendment rights of nonmembers by requiring them to pay fees to support the unions’ work bargaining on their behalf, after decades of rulings in which the court had found the opposite to be true. That ruling further weakened organized labor, another Republican goal.
For most of the court’s history, it was difficult to predict how a case would turn out based on the party of the president who nominated the justices. Even into the 21st century, as the country grew more polarized, the court’s rulings remained largely in line with the views of the average American voter. That is no longer the case. The court’s rulings are now in line with the views of the average Republican voter.
In the process, the court has unmoored itself from both the Constitution it is sworn to protect and the American people it is privileged to serve. This could not be happening at a worse moment. Election deniers in the Republican Party are undermining the integrity of the American electoral system. Right-wing political violence is a present and growing threat.
It is precisely during times like these that the American people need the Supreme Court to play the role Chief Justice Roberts memorably articulated at his own confirmation hearing — that of an umpire calling balls and strikes, ensuring a fair playing field for all. Instead, the court’s right-wingers are calling balls for one team and strikes for the other.
As Justice Elena Kagan said in a talk this month at Northwestern University School of Law, “When courts become extensions of the political process, when people see them as extensions of the political process, when people see them as trying just to impose personal preferences on a society irrespective of the law, that’s when there’s a problem — and that’s when there ought to be a problem.”
THIS THREAT TO DEMOCRACY IS HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT
By The New York Times Editorial Board
In the weeks after the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump and his allies were unable to get far in their attempts to prove widespread voter fraud. There were two reasons for that.
First, there wasn’t any, as numerous investigations by journalists, expert reports and court rulings showed. But second, Republican election officials in multiple states repeatedly said that their counts and recounts were accurate, and they defended the integrity of the election. For all the pressure that the Trump camp brought to bear, well-trained, civic-minded election workers carried out their duty to maintain the machinery of American voting.
Many top Republican Party officials and lawmakers have spent the last two years striking back, and drawn the most attention for their efforts to pass “voter integrity” laws that aim to make voting more onerous under the guise of preventing fraud. From January 2021 to May of this year, just under three dozen restrictive laws had been passed in nearly 20 states, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
These are pernicious laws, and they undermine Americans’ hard-won rights to vote. But just as important is the matter of who counts the votes, and who decides which votes count and which do not.
This is where Mr. Trump’s allies have focused much of their scheming since his re-election defeat. Their mission is to take over America’s election infrastructure, or at least key parts of it, from the ground up by filling key positions of influence with Trump sympathizers. Rather than threatening election officials, they will be the election officials — the poll workers and county commissioners and secretaries of state responsible for overseeing the casting, counting and certifying of votes.
These efforts require attention and mobilization from Americans across the political spectrum. America’s system of voting is complex and decentralized, with most of the oversight done at the state and local level by thousands of elected and appointed officials, along with poll workers. While it is outdated and inconvenient in many places, this system has worked relatively well for roughly 200 years.
But Mr. Trump’s attempts to subvert the election also revealed the system’s vulnerabilities, and his allies are now intently focused on exploiting those pressure points to bend the infrastructure of voting to their advantage. Their drive to take over election machinery county by county, state by state, is a reminder that democracy is fragile. The threats to it are not only violent ruptures like the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol but also quieter efforts to corrupt it.
A key element of this strategy is dismantling the bulwarks that stopped the assault on democracy in 2020. In Georgia, the top state election official, Brad Raffensperger, its secretary of state, refused Mr. Trump’s request to help steal the election by agreeing to “find” 11,780 additional votes. In Michigan, the Board of State Canvassers certified Joe Biden’s victory despite Mr. Trump’s aggressive meddling. A host of other state and local officials, many of them Republicans, pushed back on similarly antidemocratic machinations.
Mr. Trump and his allies have set about removing and replacing these public servants, through elections and appointments, with more like-minded officials. In some cases, the effort has failed. (In Georgia’s Republican primary this year, Mr. Trump backed a losing candidate in a vendetta against Mr. Raffensperger.) But in other states, Republicans have embraced election deniers as candidates, including for secretary of state.
Installing election deniers as top election officials is just one element of this plan. Much less visible, but just as important, is the so-called precinct strategy, in which Trump allies are recruiting supporters to flood the system by signing up to work in low-level election positions such as poll workers. A prominent promoter of the precinct strategy was Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser. Last year, Mr. Bannon rallied the listeners of his “War Room” podcast to sign up as precinct committee members. “We’re going to take this back village by village … precinct by precinct,” he proclaimed in May 2021.
The call was answered. An investigation by ProPublica in the summer of 2021 found a surge in Republicans signing up to be precinct officers or equivalent lowest-level officials in key counties. Of the 65 counties contacted, 41 reported a collective increase of at least 8,500 new sign-ups following Mr. Bannon’s call to arms. (ProPublica found no such spike on the Democratic side.)
The precinct strategy has been endorsed by Mr. Trump — who declared it a way to “take back our great country from the ground up” — and adopted by segments of the Republican Party.
Mr. Bannon is appealing to his supporters’ sense of civic duty by asking them to be more involved in their local election process. But unsettling details of what this effort entails emerged this summer after Politico acquired videos of Republican operatives discussing strategy with activists.
New election recruits would attend training workshops on how to challenge voters at polling places, explained Matthew Seifried, the Republican National Committee’s election integrity director for Michigan, in one of the recordings. These poll workers would have access to a hotline and a website staffed by “an army” of Republican-friendly lawyers prepared to help with challenges. “We’re going to have more lawyers than we’ve ever recruited, because let’s be honest, that’s where it’s going to be fought, right?” Mr. Seifried said at a meeting last October.
As testimony during the Jan. 6 committee hearings revealed, the legal challenges presented by Trump allies to the 2020 election quickly collapsed in part because they lacked even the most basic documentation. But carried out as designed, the precinct strategy means that even if, ultimately, there are no instances of fraud and most of the challenges to individual voters fall apart, they could still bog down the voting by causing delays and introducing unnecessary friction and confusion, giving cover to a state election official or state legislature to say that an election is tainted and therefore invalid.
After the May primary election in Pennsylvania, three Republican-controlled counties refused to count several hundred mail-in ballots on which voters had failed to write a date on the envelope. The administration of Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, filed suit, and last month, a judge ruled that the ballots had to be included in the results, finally clearing the way for the primaries to be certified. (State officials learned of a fourth county that had done something similar.)
Litigation is an important tool in tackling this threat. But it will not save the day. The problem is too big, says Marc Elias, a Democratic voting rights lawyer. “For every one place you try to solve this in court, there are five additional places where it is happening,” he said.
The real threat to America’s electoral system is not posed by ineligible voters trying to cast ballots. It is coming from inside the system.
All those who value democracy have a role to play in strengthening and supporting the electoral system that powers it, whatever their party. This involves, first, taking the threat posed by election deniers seriously and talking to friends and neighbors about it. It means paying attention to local elections — not just national ones — and supporting candidates who reject conspiracy theories and unfounded claims of fraud. It means getting involved in elections as canvassers or poll watchers or precinct officers. (Mr. Bannon has the right idea about civic participation; he just employs toxic lies as motivation.)
And it means voting, in every race on the ballot and in every election. To this end, employers have a role to play as well, by giving workers time off to vote and encouraging them to do so.
The task of safeguarding democracy does not end with one election. Mr. Trump and others looking to pervert the electoral process are full of intensity and are playing a long game. Only an equally strong and committed countervailing force will meet that challenge.
By The New York Times Editorial Board
In the weeks after the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump and his allies were unable to get far in their attempts to prove widespread voter fraud. There were two reasons for that.
First, there wasn’t any, as numerous investigations by journalists, expert reports and court rulings showed. But second, Republican election officials in multiple states repeatedly said that their counts and recounts were accurate, and they defended the integrity of the election. For all the pressure that the Trump camp brought to bear, well-trained, civic-minded election workers carried out their duty to maintain the machinery of American voting.
Many top Republican Party officials and lawmakers have spent the last two years striking back, and drawn the most attention for their efforts to pass “voter integrity” laws that aim to make voting more onerous under the guise of preventing fraud. From January 2021 to May of this year, just under three dozen restrictive laws had been passed in nearly 20 states, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
These are pernicious laws, and they undermine Americans’ hard-won rights to vote. But just as important is the matter of who counts the votes, and who decides which votes count and which do not.
This is where Mr. Trump’s allies have focused much of their scheming since his re-election defeat. Their mission is to take over America’s election infrastructure, or at least key parts of it, from the ground up by filling key positions of influence with Trump sympathizers. Rather than threatening election officials, they will be the election officials — the poll workers and county commissioners and secretaries of state responsible for overseeing the casting, counting and certifying of votes.
These efforts require attention and mobilization from Americans across the political spectrum. America’s system of voting is complex and decentralized, with most of the oversight done at the state and local level by thousands of elected and appointed officials, along with poll workers. While it is outdated and inconvenient in many places, this system has worked relatively well for roughly 200 years.
But Mr. Trump’s attempts to subvert the election also revealed the system’s vulnerabilities, and his allies are now intently focused on exploiting those pressure points to bend the infrastructure of voting to their advantage. Their drive to take over election machinery county by county, state by state, is a reminder that democracy is fragile. The threats to it are not only violent ruptures like the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol but also quieter efforts to corrupt it.
A key element of this strategy is dismantling the bulwarks that stopped the assault on democracy in 2020. In Georgia, the top state election official, Brad Raffensperger, its secretary of state, refused Mr. Trump’s request to help steal the election by agreeing to “find” 11,780 additional votes. In Michigan, the Board of State Canvassers certified Joe Biden’s victory despite Mr. Trump’s aggressive meddling. A host of other state and local officials, many of them Republicans, pushed back on similarly antidemocratic machinations.
Mr. Trump and his allies have set about removing and replacing these public servants, through elections and appointments, with more like-minded officials. In some cases, the effort has failed. (In Georgia’s Republican primary this year, Mr. Trump backed a losing candidate in a vendetta against Mr. Raffensperger.) But in other states, Republicans have embraced election deniers as candidates, including for secretary of state.
Installing election deniers as top election officials is just one element of this plan. Much less visible, but just as important, is the so-called precinct strategy, in which Trump allies are recruiting supporters to flood the system by signing up to work in low-level election positions such as poll workers. A prominent promoter of the precinct strategy was Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser. Last year, Mr. Bannon rallied the listeners of his “War Room” podcast to sign up as precinct committee members. “We’re going to take this back village by village … precinct by precinct,” he proclaimed in May 2021.
The call was answered. An investigation by ProPublica in the summer of 2021 found a surge in Republicans signing up to be precinct officers or equivalent lowest-level officials in key counties. Of the 65 counties contacted, 41 reported a collective increase of at least 8,500 new sign-ups following Mr. Bannon’s call to arms. (ProPublica found no such spike on the Democratic side.)
The precinct strategy has been endorsed by Mr. Trump — who declared it a way to “take back our great country from the ground up” — and adopted by segments of the Republican Party.
Mr. Bannon is appealing to his supporters’ sense of civic duty by asking them to be more involved in their local election process. But unsettling details of what this effort entails emerged this summer after Politico acquired videos of Republican operatives discussing strategy with activists.
New election recruits would attend training workshops on how to challenge voters at polling places, explained Matthew Seifried, the Republican National Committee’s election integrity director for Michigan, in one of the recordings. These poll workers would have access to a hotline and a website staffed by “an army” of Republican-friendly lawyers prepared to help with challenges. “We’re going to have more lawyers than we’ve ever recruited, because let’s be honest, that’s where it’s going to be fought, right?” Mr. Seifried said at a meeting last October.
As testimony during the Jan. 6 committee hearings revealed, the legal challenges presented by Trump allies to the 2020 election quickly collapsed in part because they lacked even the most basic documentation. But carried out as designed, the precinct strategy means that even if, ultimately, there are no instances of fraud and most of the challenges to individual voters fall apart, they could still bog down the voting by causing delays and introducing unnecessary friction and confusion, giving cover to a state election official or state legislature to say that an election is tainted and therefore invalid.
After the May primary election in Pennsylvania, three Republican-controlled counties refused to count several hundred mail-in ballots on which voters had failed to write a date on the envelope. The administration of Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, filed suit, and last month, a judge ruled that the ballots had to be included in the results, finally clearing the way for the primaries to be certified. (State officials learned of a fourth county that had done something similar.)
Litigation is an important tool in tackling this threat. But it will not save the day. The problem is too big, says Marc Elias, a Democratic voting rights lawyer. “For every one place you try to solve this in court, there are five additional places where it is happening,” he said.
The real threat to America’s electoral system is not posed by ineligible voters trying to cast ballots. It is coming from inside the system.
All those who value democracy have a role to play in strengthening and supporting the electoral system that powers it, whatever their party. This involves, first, taking the threat posed by election deniers seriously and talking to friends and neighbors about it. It means paying attention to local elections — not just national ones — and supporting candidates who reject conspiracy theories and unfounded claims of fraud. It means getting involved in elections as canvassers or poll watchers or precinct officers. (Mr. Bannon has the right idea about civic participation; he just employs toxic lies as motivation.)
And it means voting, in every race on the ballot and in every election. To this end, employers have a role to play as well, by giving workers time off to vote and encouraging them to do so.
The task of safeguarding democracy does not end with one election. Mr. Trump and others looking to pervert the electoral process are full of intensity and are playing a long game. Only an equally strong and committed countervailing force will meet that challenge.
TRUMP’S UNHINGED RAGE IN OHIO SHOWS THE DANGER OF A GOP CONGRESS
By Greg Sargent, The Washington Post
Donald Trump’s weekend rally in Ohio had no shortage of dark and disturbing moments: He mocked GOP Senate nominee J.D. Vance for “kissing my ass,” called for Singapore-style executions of drug dealers and enjoyed a moment of ritualistic crowd adulation set to what sounded like a QAnon song.
But Trump also delivered a deeply serious message with real-world implications. He fully expects a GOP Congress to use its power to place him outside the reach of any and all investigations and prosecutions, now and into the future.
At bottom, this was an effort to strike a new kind of bargain with Republicans: He delivers them his base, and they reward him by placing him beyond accountability and above the law.
At the rally, Trump uncorked a long, angry rant about the investigations he is facing. These probes are scrutinizing his hoarding of national security secrets, his scheming to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power after his 2020 loss, and his incitement of mob violence against the U.S. government.
“I’ve been harassed, investigated, defamed, slandered and persecuted like no other president,” Trump seethed, ripping into the “unhinged persecution” he supposedly faces. He also said:
What they’ve done, the radical Democrats and the deep state, is a form of political repression unlike anything our nation has ever seen. It’s a disgrace. And J.D., you gotta get it stopped.
J.D., you gotta get it stopped. Trump repeated other versions of this formulation throughout his speech.
These are not idle ravings. They are better understood as a directive, as a declaration of what Trump actually does expect a GOP-controlled Congress to do for him. And you will hear this more as Trump holds rallies for other House and Senate candidates.
In this regard, Republicans will have many options in Congress in 2023, even if they control only the House. Most obviously, a GOP House could use hearings, employed in bad faith under the guise of “oversight,” solely to harass those conducting investigations or potential prosecutions of Trump. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has telegraphed this.
But there’s more. A GOP-controlled House could revive a House rule enabling Republicans to target the salaries of individual federal officials — say, Attorney General Merrick Garland — or groups of federal employees, in an attempt to subvert those investigations and prosecutions.
Such tactics would be thwarted by a Democratic Senate or a presidential veto. But House Republicans could push for government shutdowns to leverage targeted defunding of investigations or prosecutions. They could threaten debt ceiling breaches (and economic disaster) toward that end.
In fact, Republicans are actively preparing for such scenarios. When they call for “defunding the FBI” in retaliation for the search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, they’re clumsily expressing a very real intention to use maximal congressional power against any investigative activity involving Trump. Some Republicans have gone so far as to float specific defunding tactics.
This alone is good reason for Democrats to act legislatively in the lame-duck session to disable the debt limit for good, as political scientist Jonathan Bernstein suggests they do.
So the stakes couldn’t be higher this fall. And on Saturday, Trump’s expectations of this implied pact with a GOP Congress were made explicit.
For instance, at one point, Trump noted that he’s outpolling other Republicans and sneered that without him on the ballot, “Republicans are not doing too well.” Translation: Nice midterm candidates you got there, Republicans. Be a shame if my base didn’t turn out for them.
Meanwhile, Trump cast the 74 million people who voted for him as victims of the investigations against him. The meaning is plain: If Republicans don’t maximize efforts to derail those investigations, he’ll cast them as sellouts, and his base will respond accordingly.
And Trump described investigations into his conduct by declaring that the United States has “weaponized its law enforcement against the opposing political party like never, ever before,” depicting this as a symptom of our “decline.” The implication: Efforts to hold him accountable are a sign we’re slipping into banana republic status.
You want real banana republic stuff? Try Trump’s rampant corruption, his enlisting of the MAGA movement and large swaths of the GOP behind the destruction of democracy, and his efforts to remain unaccountable to the law via tactics such as mob-speak threats of retaliatory street violence. As Shay Khatiri notes at the Bulwark, the bending of the law in the face of strongmen’s threats is an actual hallmark of banana republics.
Keeping the law at bay is exactly what Trump will demand of a GOP Congress. All throughout his presidency, Republicans understood that they were tolerating or running interference for his racism, authoritarianism and corruption in exchange for tax cuts for the rich and the nomination and appointment of right-wing judges. Now, Trump is proposing a new bargain: his base in exchange for absolute impunity.
By Greg Sargent, The Washington Post
Donald Trump’s weekend rally in Ohio had no shortage of dark and disturbing moments: He mocked GOP Senate nominee J.D. Vance for “kissing my ass,” called for Singapore-style executions of drug dealers and enjoyed a moment of ritualistic crowd adulation set to what sounded like a QAnon song.
But Trump also delivered a deeply serious message with real-world implications. He fully expects a GOP Congress to use its power to place him outside the reach of any and all investigations and prosecutions, now and into the future.
At bottom, this was an effort to strike a new kind of bargain with Republicans: He delivers them his base, and they reward him by placing him beyond accountability and above the law.
At the rally, Trump uncorked a long, angry rant about the investigations he is facing. These probes are scrutinizing his hoarding of national security secrets, his scheming to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power after his 2020 loss, and his incitement of mob violence against the U.S. government.
“I’ve been harassed, investigated, defamed, slandered and persecuted like no other president,” Trump seethed, ripping into the “unhinged persecution” he supposedly faces. He also said:
What they’ve done, the radical Democrats and the deep state, is a form of political repression unlike anything our nation has ever seen. It’s a disgrace. And J.D., you gotta get it stopped.
J.D., you gotta get it stopped. Trump repeated other versions of this formulation throughout his speech.
These are not idle ravings. They are better understood as a directive, as a declaration of what Trump actually does expect a GOP-controlled Congress to do for him. And you will hear this more as Trump holds rallies for other House and Senate candidates.
In this regard, Republicans will have many options in Congress in 2023, even if they control only the House. Most obviously, a GOP House could use hearings, employed in bad faith under the guise of “oversight,” solely to harass those conducting investigations or potential prosecutions of Trump. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has telegraphed this.
But there’s more. A GOP-controlled House could revive a House rule enabling Republicans to target the salaries of individual federal officials — say, Attorney General Merrick Garland — or groups of federal employees, in an attempt to subvert those investigations and prosecutions.
Such tactics would be thwarted by a Democratic Senate or a presidential veto. But House Republicans could push for government shutdowns to leverage targeted defunding of investigations or prosecutions. They could threaten debt ceiling breaches (and economic disaster) toward that end.
In fact, Republicans are actively preparing for such scenarios. When they call for “defunding the FBI” in retaliation for the search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, they’re clumsily expressing a very real intention to use maximal congressional power against any investigative activity involving Trump. Some Republicans have gone so far as to float specific defunding tactics.
This alone is good reason for Democrats to act legislatively in the lame-duck session to disable the debt limit for good, as political scientist Jonathan Bernstein suggests they do.
So the stakes couldn’t be higher this fall. And on Saturday, Trump’s expectations of this implied pact with a GOP Congress were made explicit.
For instance, at one point, Trump noted that he’s outpolling other Republicans and sneered that without him on the ballot, “Republicans are not doing too well.” Translation: Nice midterm candidates you got there, Republicans. Be a shame if my base didn’t turn out for them.
Meanwhile, Trump cast the 74 million people who voted for him as victims of the investigations against him. The meaning is plain: If Republicans don’t maximize efforts to derail those investigations, he’ll cast them as sellouts, and his base will respond accordingly.
And Trump described investigations into his conduct by declaring that the United States has “weaponized its law enforcement against the opposing political party like never, ever before,” depicting this as a symptom of our “decline.” The implication: Efforts to hold him accountable are a sign we’re slipping into banana republic status.
You want real banana republic stuff? Try Trump’s rampant corruption, his enlisting of the MAGA movement and large swaths of the GOP behind the destruction of democracy, and his efforts to remain unaccountable to the law via tactics such as mob-speak threats of retaliatory street violence. As Shay Khatiri notes at the Bulwark, the bending of the law in the face of strongmen’s threats is an actual hallmark of banana republics.
Keeping the law at bay is exactly what Trump will demand of a GOP Congress. All throughout his presidency, Republicans understood that they were tolerating or running interference for his racism, authoritarianism and corruption in exchange for tax cuts for the rich and the nomination and appointment of right-wing judges. Now, Trump is proposing a new bargain: his base in exchange for absolute impunity.
HOW LOW CAN THEY GO?
By Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump will be remembered for many things.
He injected obscenities into The New York Times’s White House coverage. He turned conspiracy theory into Republican orthodoxy. And he cut out the middleman on ugliness, happily doing the political wet work himself.
The Bush family had retainers, like Lee Atwater, who would hand off the dirty tricks and the scaremongering Willie Horton stuff to outside groups, and use direct mail and radio ads.
Trump dispensed with the idea that the candidate was above it all. He was excited to show he was beneath it all — the naked id of the Republican Party.
His soulless followers, like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, are happy to mud-wrestle and perform Grand Guignol as well.
In some ways, it’s easier to battle racism, sexism, xenophobia and fakery when the principals are gleefully spewing it. You can fight back on the record and in real time.
In other ways, however, having it all out in the open sends a foul stench through American politics, intensifying the brutish and bleak mood of the country.
Politicians who purport to be guardians of American “values” are rewarded for being inhumane. The nastier, the better. Republican pols have gone from kissing babies and rope-line handshakes to full-on viciousness.
I asked Trump during the 2016 campaign why he had gone so dark. “I guess because of the fact that I immediately went to No. 1,” he replied, “and I said, why don’t I just keep the same thing going?”
As it turned out, he was spinning up the mob, laying the groundwork for a violent attack on the Capitol. Trump riled up the mob again on Thursday in an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt. If he’s indicted on a charge of spiriting away classified documents to his Mar-a-Lago estate, the former president said, there will be “problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen before. I don’t think the people of the United States would stand for it.”
Trump created the cynical and boorish template for other presidential hopefuls on the right.
It can be amusing to mock elites. But there’s something exceedingly creepy — and blatantly opportunistic — about DeSantis chartering two planes to send some 50 migrants, mostly Venezuelan, from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard. The lawyers for some migrants said that they were deceived about their destination, and Martha’s Vineyard officials said they had no notice. Abbott sent two busloads of migrants to Vice President Kamala Harris’s home at the Naval Observatory.
It was reported that a woman who said her name was Perla offered the migrants in Texas three months of rent and work in Boston. But then they ended up, as one put it, “on this little island.”
This caper to expose the hypocrisy of Democratic elites ended up being compared to human trafficking. The Republicans are exploiting people’s misery for a political game. The migrants simply want to work, which a bunch of Americans don’t want to do anymore.
With their pre-midterm publicity stunts, as with their draconian push to outlaw abortion, the Republicans are increasingly letting politics take precedence over people.
The contentions of Republicans about geographical unfairness and Democratic inaction are undercut by their meanspirited behavior.
They are willing to make life worse for vulnerable, exhausted people who are already in a terrible position — and chortle while they’re being cruel.
As Blake Hounshell noted in The Times, DeSantis is courting Trump donors by adopting the racially charged playbook of Trump, who “made frequent and aggressive political use of Latino migrants during his run for the presidency in 2016 and long thereafter, casting many of them as ‘criminals’ and ‘rapists’ during his presidential announcement at Trump Tower.”
The callousness of DeSantis’s manipulations is clear.
Ugliness is what the G.O.P. is wearing this fall.
By Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump will be remembered for many things.
He injected obscenities into The New York Times’s White House coverage. He turned conspiracy theory into Republican orthodoxy. And he cut out the middleman on ugliness, happily doing the political wet work himself.
The Bush family had retainers, like Lee Atwater, who would hand off the dirty tricks and the scaremongering Willie Horton stuff to outside groups, and use direct mail and radio ads.
Trump dispensed with the idea that the candidate was above it all. He was excited to show he was beneath it all — the naked id of the Republican Party.
His soulless followers, like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, are happy to mud-wrestle and perform Grand Guignol as well.
In some ways, it’s easier to battle racism, sexism, xenophobia and fakery when the principals are gleefully spewing it. You can fight back on the record and in real time.
In other ways, however, having it all out in the open sends a foul stench through American politics, intensifying the brutish and bleak mood of the country.
Politicians who purport to be guardians of American “values” are rewarded for being inhumane. The nastier, the better. Republican pols have gone from kissing babies and rope-line handshakes to full-on viciousness.
I asked Trump during the 2016 campaign why he had gone so dark. “I guess because of the fact that I immediately went to No. 1,” he replied, “and I said, why don’t I just keep the same thing going?”
As it turned out, he was spinning up the mob, laying the groundwork for a violent attack on the Capitol. Trump riled up the mob again on Thursday in an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt. If he’s indicted on a charge of spiriting away classified documents to his Mar-a-Lago estate, the former president said, there will be “problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen before. I don’t think the people of the United States would stand for it.”
Trump created the cynical and boorish template for other presidential hopefuls on the right.
It can be amusing to mock elites. But there’s something exceedingly creepy — and blatantly opportunistic — about DeSantis chartering two planes to send some 50 migrants, mostly Venezuelan, from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard. The lawyers for some migrants said that they were deceived about their destination, and Martha’s Vineyard officials said they had no notice. Abbott sent two busloads of migrants to Vice President Kamala Harris’s home at the Naval Observatory.
It was reported that a woman who said her name was Perla offered the migrants in Texas three months of rent and work in Boston. But then they ended up, as one put it, “on this little island.”
This caper to expose the hypocrisy of Democratic elites ended up being compared to human trafficking. The Republicans are exploiting people’s misery for a political game. The migrants simply want to work, which a bunch of Americans don’t want to do anymore.
With their pre-midterm publicity stunts, as with their draconian push to outlaw abortion, the Republicans are increasingly letting politics take precedence over people.
The contentions of Republicans about geographical unfairness and Democratic inaction are undercut by their meanspirited behavior.
They are willing to make life worse for vulnerable, exhausted people who are already in a terrible position — and chortle while they’re being cruel.
As Blake Hounshell noted in The Times, DeSantis is courting Trump donors by adopting the racially charged playbook of Trump, who “made frequent and aggressive political use of Latino migrants during his run for the presidency in 2016 and long thereafter, casting many of them as ‘criminals’ and ‘rapists’ during his presidential announcement at Trump Tower.”
The callousness of DeSantis’s manipulations is clear.
Ugliness is what the G.O.P. is wearing this fall.
CENSORSHIP IS THE REFUGE OF THE WEAK
By The New York Times Editorial Board
Some threats to freedom of expression in America, like online harassment and disinformation, are amorphous or hard to pin down; others are alarmingly overt. Consider these recent examples of censorship in practice: A student newspaper and journalism program in Nebraska shut down for writing about L.G.B.T.Q. issues and pride month. Oklahoma’s top education official seeking to revoke the teaching certificate of an English teacher who shared a QR code that directed students to the Brooklyn Public Library’s online collection of banned books. Lawmakers in Missouri passing a law that makes school librarians vulnerable to prosecution for the content in their collections.
In Florida today it may be illegal for teachers to even talk about whom they love or marry thanks to the state’s so-called Don’t Say Gay law. Of course, it goes far beyond sex: The Sunshine State’s Republican commissioner of education rejected 28 math textbooks this year for including verboten content.
This year alone, 137 gag order bills, which would restrict the discussions of topics such as race, gender, sexuality and American history in kindergarten through 12th grade and higher education, have been introduced in 36 state legislatures, according to a report released last month by PEN America, a free speech organization. That’s a sharp increase from 2021, when 54 bills were introduced in 22 states. Only seven of those bills became law in 2022, but they are some of the strictest to date, and the sheer number of bills introduced reflects a growing enthusiasm on the right for censorship as a political weapon and instrument of social control.
These new measures are far more punitive than past efforts, with heavy fines or loss of state funding for institutions that dare to offer courses covering the forbidden content. Teachers can be fired and even face criminal charges. Lawsuits have already started to trickle through the courts asking for broad interpretations of the new statutes. For the first time, the PEN report noted, some bills have also targeted nonpublic schools and universities in addition to public schools.
It wasn’t all that long ago that Republican lawmakers around the country were introducing legislation they said would protect free speech on college campuses. Now, they’re using the coercive power of the state to restrict what people can talk about, learn about or discuss in public, and exposing them to lawsuits and other repercussions for doing so. That’s a clear threat to the ideals of a pluralistic political culture, in which challenging ideas are welcomed and discussed.
How and what to teach American students has been contested ground since the earliest days of public education, and the content of that instruction is something about which Americans can respectfully disagree. But the Supreme Court has limited the government’s power to censor school libraries, if not curriculums. “Local school boards may not remove books from school libraries simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books and seek by their removal to ‘prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion,’” Justice William Brennan wrote in a 1982 decision.
There may not even be wide disagreement over what American students are being taught. Despite the moral panic over teaching about gender and race, American parents overwhelmingly say they are satisfied with the instruction their children receive. A poll from National Public Radio and Ipsos earlier this year found that just 18 percent of parents said their child’s school “taught about gender and sexuality in a way that clashed with their family’s values,” while 19 percent said the same about race and racism. Only 14 percent felt that way about American history.
And yet, some Republican candidates are using the threat of censorship as a show of strength, evidence of their power to muzzle political opponents. Last year in Virginia, Glenn Youngkin won the governorship after a campaign in which he demagogued the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Beloved” by the Nobel Prize-winning Toni Morrison. Other candidates are looking to make issues around censorship a centerpiece of their pitch to voters in the midterm elections in races from Texas to New Jersey.
Some want to extend censorship far beyond the classroom. In Virginia, a Republican state representative tried to get a court to declare as obscene two young adult books that are frequently banned in schools, “Gender Queer,” by Maia Kobabe, and “A Court of Mist and Fury,” by Sarah Maas. The case was dismissed on Aug. 30, but if it had been successful, it could have made it illegal for bookstores to sell the books to children without parental consent.
Right-wing lawmakers are also looking to restrict what Americans can say about abortion. Model legislation from the National Right to Life Committee, which is circulating in state legislatures, aims to forbid Americans to give “instructions over the telephone, the internet or any other medium of communication regarding self-administered abortions or means to obtain an illegal abortion.” That prohibition would extend to hosting websites that contain such information.
Even when such bills fail, these efforts to censor create a climate of fear. Across the country, libraries in small towns are being threatened with closure and library staff members are being harassed and intimidated. The Times reports that librarians “have been labeled pedophiles on social media, called out by local politicians and reported to law enforcement officials. Some librarians have quit after being harassed online. Others have been fired for refusing to remove books from circulation.” The American Library Association has documented nearly 1,600 books in more than 700 libraries or library systems that have faced attempted censorship.
Only right-wing legislators are currently trying to write censorship into law. This is not only deeply undemocratic; it is an act of weakness masquerading as strength. A political project convinced of the superiority of its ideas doesn’t need the power of the state to shield itself from competition. Free expression isn’t just a feature of democracy; it is a necessary prerequisite.
By The New York Times Editorial Board
Some threats to freedom of expression in America, like online harassment and disinformation, are amorphous or hard to pin down; others are alarmingly overt. Consider these recent examples of censorship in practice: A student newspaper and journalism program in Nebraska shut down for writing about L.G.B.T.Q. issues and pride month. Oklahoma’s top education official seeking to revoke the teaching certificate of an English teacher who shared a QR code that directed students to the Brooklyn Public Library’s online collection of banned books. Lawmakers in Missouri passing a law that makes school librarians vulnerable to prosecution for the content in their collections.
In Florida today it may be illegal for teachers to even talk about whom they love or marry thanks to the state’s so-called Don’t Say Gay law. Of course, it goes far beyond sex: The Sunshine State’s Republican commissioner of education rejected 28 math textbooks this year for including verboten content.
This year alone, 137 gag order bills, which would restrict the discussions of topics such as race, gender, sexuality and American history in kindergarten through 12th grade and higher education, have been introduced in 36 state legislatures, according to a report released last month by PEN America, a free speech organization. That’s a sharp increase from 2021, when 54 bills were introduced in 22 states. Only seven of those bills became law in 2022, but they are some of the strictest to date, and the sheer number of bills introduced reflects a growing enthusiasm on the right for censorship as a political weapon and instrument of social control.
These new measures are far more punitive than past efforts, with heavy fines or loss of state funding for institutions that dare to offer courses covering the forbidden content. Teachers can be fired and even face criminal charges. Lawsuits have already started to trickle through the courts asking for broad interpretations of the new statutes. For the first time, the PEN report noted, some bills have also targeted nonpublic schools and universities in addition to public schools.
It wasn’t all that long ago that Republican lawmakers around the country were introducing legislation they said would protect free speech on college campuses. Now, they’re using the coercive power of the state to restrict what people can talk about, learn about or discuss in public, and exposing them to lawsuits and other repercussions for doing so. That’s a clear threat to the ideals of a pluralistic political culture, in which challenging ideas are welcomed and discussed.
How and what to teach American students has been contested ground since the earliest days of public education, and the content of that instruction is something about which Americans can respectfully disagree. But the Supreme Court has limited the government’s power to censor school libraries, if not curriculums. “Local school boards may not remove books from school libraries simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books and seek by their removal to ‘prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion,’” Justice William Brennan wrote in a 1982 decision.
There may not even be wide disagreement over what American students are being taught. Despite the moral panic over teaching about gender and race, American parents overwhelmingly say they are satisfied with the instruction their children receive. A poll from National Public Radio and Ipsos earlier this year found that just 18 percent of parents said their child’s school “taught about gender and sexuality in a way that clashed with their family’s values,” while 19 percent said the same about race and racism. Only 14 percent felt that way about American history.
And yet, some Republican candidates are using the threat of censorship as a show of strength, evidence of their power to muzzle political opponents. Last year in Virginia, Glenn Youngkin won the governorship after a campaign in which he demagogued the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Beloved” by the Nobel Prize-winning Toni Morrison. Other candidates are looking to make issues around censorship a centerpiece of their pitch to voters in the midterm elections in races from Texas to New Jersey.
Some want to extend censorship far beyond the classroom. In Virginia, a Republican state representative tried to get a court to declare as obscene two young adult books that are frequently banned in schools, “Gender Queer,” by Maia Kobabe, and “A Court of Mist and Fury,” by Sarah Maas. The case was dismissed on Aug. 30, but if it had been successful, it could have made it illegal for bookstores to sell the books to children without parental consent.
Right-wing lawmakers are also looking to restrict what Americans can say about abortion. Model legislation from the National Right to Life Committee, which is circulating in state legislatures, aims to forbid Americans to give “instructions over the telephone, the internet or any other medium of communication regarding self-administered abortions or means to obtain an illegal abortion.” That prohibition would extend to hosting websites that contain such information.
Even when such bills fail, these efforts to censor create a climate of fear. Across the country, libraries in small towns are being threatened with closure and library staff members are being harassed and intimidated. The Times reports that librarians “have been labeled pedophiles on social media, called out by local politicians and reported to law enforcement officials. Some librarians have quit after being harassed online. Others have been fired for refusing to remove books from circulation.” The American Library Association has documented nearly 1,600 books in more than 700 libraries or library systems that have faced attempted censorship.
Only right-wing legislators are currently trying to write censorship into law. This is not only deeply undemocratic; it is an act of weakness masquerading as strength. A political project convinced of the superiority of its ideas doesn’t need the power of the state to shield itself from competition. Free expression isn’t just a feature of democracy; it is a necessary prerequisite.
HOW REACTIONARY IS MAGA? TRY THE FIRST CENTURY B.C.
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears: They have come to resurrect Caesar.
MAGA Republican leaders take umbrage at being accused of “semi-fascism,” which is understandable: Twentieth-century dictators such as Mussolini and the German guy with the mustache gave fascism a bad name. But the MAGA crowd isn’t disavowing totalitarianism, per se. It’s just their taste in authoritarian figures skews toward the classics. They’re old-school — 1st century B.C. old. “Hail, Caesar” goes down so much easier than “Heil Hitler.”
J.D. Vance, the Republican Senate nominee in Ohio, is one resident of this newly platted Caesarian section, as a recent profile in the Cleveland Plain Dealer showed. It referred to a year-old interview Vance gave on a far-right podcast in which he spoke approvingly of Curtis Yarvin, a self-proclaimed monarchist who argues for an American Julius Caesar to take power.
“We are in a late republican period,” Vance said, referencing the era preceding Caesar’s dictatorship. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”
The podcast’s host, Jack Murphy, endorsed this sentiment, discussing possible “extra-constitutional” remedies to be taken “if we want to re-found the country.” (He told Vance he thought voting an “ineffectual” way to “rip out this leadership class.”)
Vance, who said he had been “radicalized” by the actions of “malevolent and evil” political opponents, described what “wild” actions he had in mind at another point in the podcast. He wants to “seize the institutions of the left” and purge political opponents with “de-Nazification, de-Ba’athification.”
Vance suggested that former president Donald Trump, once elected in 2024, should fire all civil servants and replace them with “our people,” defy court orders blocking such an illegal action, and then “do what Viktor Orban has done,” referring to the Hungarian dictator’s bans on certain topics from school curricula. Vance justified such “outside-the-box” authoritarian actions by reasoning that the United States is “far gone” and not “a real constitutional republic” anymore.
Hail, Caesar!
Vance is far from the only emperor-curious MAGA leader. Former Trump White House adviser Peter Navarro called Mike Pence a “traitor to the American Caesar of Trump” because the former vice president refused to help overturn the 2020 election. Another former Trump adviser, Michael Anton, hosted a Claremont Institute podcast with Yarvin about the desirability of an “American Caesar.”
Meanwhile, various tactics that would qualify as “extra-constitutional” have been proliferating on the MAGA right.
This week, Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee confirmed during the lame-duck Republican Congress after the 2020 election, turned the bedrock American principle of equal justice on its head. Cannon, granting Trump’s request for a “special master” to shield the government documents hoarded at his residence, said Trump’s need for protection from “stigma” was “in a league of its own” because of his “former position as president.” A judge granting extraordinary legal powers to the man who appointed her to spare him “reputational harm”? Hail, Caesar!
Last week, the House Jan. 6 committee wrote to Trump ally Newt Gingrich, outlining how the former House speaker encouraged Trump TV ads promoting false election-fraud claims, and how he suggested a “call-to-action” to intimidate election officials. “The goal is to arouse the country’s anger,” Gingrich wrote to Trump advisers, at a time when election officials desperately feared violence. Hail, Caesar!
Some MAGA Republicans have a novel solution to resolve pesky constitutional restraints: Rewrite the Constitution. As Carl Hulse reports in the New York Times, Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Tex.) introduced legislation seeking to compel Congress to call a constitutional convention — the first since the framers wrote it — to overhaul the United States’ founding document. The effort likely isn’t going anywhere, but it shows the contempt MAGA Republicans have for the constitutional order. Hail, Caesar!
Others in the MAGA movement simply reinterpret the Constitution to their own liking. County law-enforcement officials self-styling as “constitutional sheriffs” have assigned themselves power to decide what the law is, according to their own politics. One such sheriff in Michigan sought warrants in July to seize vote-counting machines to try to validate Trump’s false claims of voter fraud, Reuters reported last week. Armed lawmen going rogue to undermine elections? Hail, Caesar!
A few weeks from now, the Supreme Court will open its new term, in which it will decide whether to use a North Carolina case to allow state legislatures to redraw election maps — and potentially to overturn the outcome of elections and to disregard state constitutions — without any review by state courts. The high court blessing a radical legal theory that mocks the will of the voters? For MAGA Republicans, all roads lead to Roman imperialism.
Hail, Caesar!
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears: They have come to resurrect Caesar.
MAGA Republican leaders take umbrage at being accused of “semi-fascism,” which is understandable: Twentieth-century dictators such as Mussolini and the German guy with the mustache gave fascism a bad name. But the MAGA crowd isn’t disavowing totalitarianism, per se. It’s just their taste in authoritarian figures skews toward the classics. They’re old-school — 1st century B.C. old. “Hail, Caesar” goes down so much easier than “Heil Hitler.”
J.D. Vance, the Republican Senate nominee in Ohio, is one resident of this newly platted Caesarian section, as a recent profile in the Cleveland Plain Dealer showed. It referred to a year-old interview Vance gave on a far-right podcast in which he spoke approvingly of Curtis Yarvin, a self-proclaimed monarchist who argues for an American Julius Caesar to take power.
“We are in a late republican period,” Vance said, referencing the era preceding Caesar’s dictatorship. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”
The podcast’s host, Jack Murphy, endorsed this sentiment, discussing possible “extra-constitutional” remedies to be taken “if we want to re-found the country.” (He told Vance he thought voting an “ineffectual” way to “rip out this leadership class.”)
Vance, who said he had been “radicalized” by the actions of “malevolent and evil” political opponents, described what “wild” actions he had in mind at another point in the podcast. He wants to “seize the institutions of the left” and purge political opponents with “de-Nazification, de-Ba’athification.”
Vance suggested that former president Donald Trump, once elected in 2024, should fire all civil servants and replace them with “our people,” defy court orders blocking such an illegal action, and then “do what Viktor Orban has done,” referring to the Hungarian dictator’s bans on certain topics from school curricula. Vance justified such “outside-the-box” authoritarian actions by reasoning that the United States is “far gone” and not “a real constitutional republic” anymore.
Hail, Caesar!
Vance is far from the only emperor-curious MAGA leader. Former Trump White House adviser Peter Navarro called Mike Pence a “traitor to the American Caesar of Trump” because the former vice president refused to help overturn the 2020 election. Another former Trump adviser, Michael Anton, hosted a Claremont Institute podcast with Yarvin about the desirability of an “American Caesar.”
Meanwhile, various tactics that would qualify as “extra-constitutional” have been proliferating on the MAGA right.
This week, Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee confirmed during the lame-duck Republican Congress after the 2020 election, turned the bedrock American principle of equal justice on its head. Cannon, granting Trump’s request for a “special master” to shield the government documents hoarded at his residence, said Trump’s need for protection from “stigma” was “in a league of its own” because of his “former position as president.” A judge granting extraordinary legal powers to the man who appointed her to spare him “reputational harm”? Hail, Caesar!
Last week, the House Jan. 6 committee wrote to Trump ally Newt Gingrich, outlining how the former House speaker encouraged Trump TV ads promoting false election-fraud claims, and how he suggested a “call-to-action” to intimidate election officials. “The goal is to arouse the country’s anger,” Gingrich wrote to Trump advisers, at a time when election officials desperately feared violence. Hail, Caesar!
Some MAGA Republicans have a novel solution to resolve pesky constitutional restraints: Rewrite the Constitution. As Carl Hulse reports in the New York Times, Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Tex.) introduced legislation seeking to compel Congress to call a constitutional convention — the first since the framers wrote it — to overhaul the United States’ founding document. The effort likely isn’t going anywhere, but it shows the contempt MAGA Republicans have for the constitutional order. Hail, Caesar!
Others in the MAGA movement simply reinterpret the Constitution to their own liking. County law-enforcement officials self-styling as “constitutional sheriffs” have assigned themselves power to decide what the law is, according to their own politics. One such sheriff in Michigan sought warrants in July to seize vote-counting machines to try to validate Trump’s false claims of voter fraud, Reuters reported last week. Armed lawmen going rogue to undermine elections? Hail, Caesar!
A few weeks from now, the Supreme Court will open its new term, in which it will decide whether to use a North Carolina case to allow state legislatures to redraw election maps — and potentially to overturn the outcome of elections and to disregard state constitutions — without any review by state courts. The high court blessing a radical legal theory that mocks the will of the voters? For MAGA Republicans, all roads lead to Roman imperialism.
Hail, Caesar!
IN PRAISE OF IRON FISTS: TRUMP LEANS INTO HIS AUTHORITARIAN INSTINCTS
By Philip Bump, The Washington Post
It seems safe to assume that Republican gubernatorial candidate Geoff Diehl’s conference-call rally with Donald Trump did not go precisely as Diehl might have hoped.
The Massachusetts state representative is on the ballot Tuesday seeking his party’s nomination and landed his party’s most coveted primary endorsement: that of the former president. But Trump is Trump, and when conversation got underway, Trump offered a rather questionable reason for Republicans to give Diehl their votes.
As governor, Trump said, Diehl would “rule your state with an iron fist, and he’ll do what has to be done.”
In the abstract, this is not really what Americans tend to seek from their chief executives — particularly Republicans, who generally articulate a politics centered on freedom from any governmental heavy hand. But this particular approving invocation of an “iron fist” came only a day or two after Trump had offered similar praise for another politician at a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.
“He rules with an iron fist, 1.5 billion people,” Trump said of Chinese President Xi Jinping. “Yeah, I’d say he’s smart. Wouldn’t you say he’s smart?” This came as Trump contrasted President Biden with Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin, both of whom, Trump said, were “fierce” and “smart.”
This sentiment isn’t new coming from Trump. Since the earliest days of his presidency, Trump demonstrated an affinity for autocratic leaders like Xi, Putin, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Hungary’s Victor Orban — who Trump gleefully endorsed for reelection earlier this year. He found it obviously frustrating to have to navigate the intricacies of working with skeptical or demanding allies, greatly preferring the ostentation and stroking he received from nondemocratic leaders. And, of course, such leaders and their supporters often made clear their affinity for him.
Meanwhile in Russia: watch these highlights from today's state TV shows. The Kremlin's pet propagandists hate America, love Trump, find him "incredible," say they place all of their hope in him and Russia should continue to support "its candidate." pic.twitter.com/MSIN3ytb9v— Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) September 6, 2022
What’s different now is that the barriers between Trump and this instinct have eroded.
There are a few contributing factors. One is that Trump feels newly embattled, with the Justice Department investigation of his handling of classified documents that he removed from the White House leading to new disparagements of federal law enforcement.
“The FBI and the Justice Department have become vicious monsters,” Trump said in that same rally, “controlled by radical-left scoundrels, lawyers and the media, who tell them what to do — you people, right there” — he pointed at media in the room — “and when to do it. They’re trying to silence me and, more importantly, they are trying to silence you,” he told the cheering audience.
Not that Trump didn’t seek to deploy his own “vicious monsters.”
As a candidate in 2016 and as president, Trump advocated a Justice Department that was explicitly political. He called for probes of his opponents, something that gained at least a little traction. And when protests erupted in the summer of 2020, Trump advocated for the military to be deployed in response — a push that was blocked in part by opposition from within his administration. Because, of course, American presidents don’t have an iron fist to deploy unilaterally.
The most important shift, though, was that Trump’s last-ditch effort to seize power has met with no significant repercussions.
The most immediate legal threat Trump faces centers on violations of statutes dealing with document retention and not on his attempt to subvert Biden’s 2020 election. The House impeached Trump, something it had done before — and then Senate Republicans made sure he paid no cost. His endorsement is still his party’s most important political currency, as Diehl understands.
Hundreds of those who rioted on his behalf at the Capitol have been criminally charged or convicted but Trump — who called those rioters to Washington, misled them about the election results and called on them to fight — has faced no punishment, either literal or figurative. His tentative suggestion that the rioters might be pardoned has blossomed into a campaign pledge.
This, too, we’ve seen before, this pattern of Trump testing turbulent waters into which he dives once he realizes it’s safe. His initial rhetoric on immigration after his campaign launch in 2015 became a central part of his political identity when he realized that the complaints of business partners only increased the applause from Republican voters. His claims that polls were underestimating his support were bolstered by the 2016 results. His insistence that election fraud was rampant both that year and in 2020 never spurred any pushback from those he cared about: his base or conservative media. And the complaints of mainstream media were hardly a roadblock, since Trump has long been able to leverage those to his advantage.
Put simply, Trump has built a media and political ecosystem in which there will be no friction from his allies, no matter what he does. That allows him to embrace his instincts without fear of blowback — even when his instincts are to elevate and advocate authoritarian models of political power.
Most presidents come to the job with decades of experience in running for office (and often losing). They arrive understanding expectations about how power is shared and having experienced the ways in which politicians demonstrate fealty to our system.
But Trump arrived as an outsider, as he was quick to remind everyone. He came to the presidency not with decades of experience working within the system and understanding its checks on power. He came, instead, after decades spent as the CEO of a private company, an almost purely authoritarian exercise of power. Donald Trump’s expectations for what leaders should do was informed not by scholarly analysis of what past elected presidents had done but by the experience of being president of a business.
Donald Trump never held an election to confirm his leadership at the Trump Organization, and that worked out fine. Why shouldn’t he think Americans would want a leader with a similar iron fist as governor of Massachusetts? Or, beginning in January 2025, in the White House?
By Philip Bump, The Washington Post
It seems safe to assume that Republican gubernatorial candidate Geoff Diehl’s conference-call rally with Donald Trump did not go precisely as Diehl might have hoped.
The Massachusetts state representative is on the ballot Tuesday seeking his party’s nomination and landed his party’s most coveted primary endorsement: that of the former president. But Trump is Trump, and when conversation got underway, Trump offered a rather questionable reason for Republicans to give Diehl their votes.
As governor, Trump said, Diehl would “rule your state with an iron fist, and he’ll do what has to be done.”
In the abstract, this is not really what Americans tend to seek from their chief executives — particularly Republicans, who generally articulate a politics centered on freedom from any governmental heavy hand. But this particular approving invocation of an “iron fist” came only a day or two after Trump had offered similar praise for another politician at a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.
“He rules with an iron fist, 1.5 billion people,” Trump said of Chinese President Xi Jinping. “Yeah, I’d say he’s smart. Wouldn’t you say he’s smart?” This came as Trump contrasted President Biden with Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin, both of whom, Trump said, were “fierce” and “smart.”
This sentiment isn’t new coming from Trump. Since the earliest days of his presidency, Trump demonstrated an affinity for autocratic leaders like Xi, Putin, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Hungary’s Victor Orban — who Trump gleefully endorsed for reelection earlier this year. He found it obviously frustrating to have to navigate the intricacies of working with skeptical or demanding allies, greatly preferring the ostentation and stroking he received from nondemocratic leaders. And, of course, such leaders and their supporters often made clear their affinity for him.
Meanwhile in Russia: watch these highlights from today's state TV shows. The Kremlin's pet propagandists hate America, love Trump, find him "incredible," say they place all of their hope in him and Russia should continue to support "its candidate." pic.twitter.com/MSIN3ytb9v— Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) September 6, 2022
What’s different now is that the barriers between Trump and this instinct have eroded.
There are a few contributing factors. One is that Trump feels newly embattled, with the Justice Department investigation of his handling of classified documents that he removed from the White House leading to new disparagements of federal law enforcement.
“The FBI and the Justice Department have become vicious monsters,” Trump said in that same rally, “controlled by radical-left scoundrels, lawyers and the media, who tell them what to do — you people, right there” — he pointed at media in the room — “and when to do it. They’re trying to silence me and, more importantly, they are trying to silence you,” he told the cheering audience.
Not that Trump didn’t seek to deploy his own “vicious monsters.”
As a candidate in 2016 and as president, Trump advocated a Justice Department that was explicitly political. He called for probes of his opponents, something that gained at least a little traction. And when protests erupted in the summer of 2020, Trump advocated for the military to be deployed in response — a push that was blocked in part by opposition from within his administration. Because, of course, American presidents don’t have an iron fist to deploy unilaterally.
The most important shift, though, was that Trump’s last-ditch effort to seize power has met with no significant repercussions.
The most immediate legal threat Trump faces centers on violations of statutes dealing with document retention and not on his attempt to subvert Biden’s 2020 election. The House impeached Trump, something it had done before — and then Senate Republicans made sure he paid no cost. His endorsement is still his party’s most important political currency, as Diehl understands.
Hundreds of those who rioted on his behalf at the Capitol have been criminally charged or convicted but Trump — who called those rioters to Washington, misled them about the election results and called on them to fight — has faced no punishment, either literal or figurative. His tentative suggestion that the rioters might be pardoned has blossomed into a campaign pledge.
This, too, we’ve seen before, this pattern of Trump testing turbulent waters into which he dives once he realizes it’s safe. His initial rhetoric on immigration after his campaign launch in 2015 became a central part of his political identity when he realized that the complaints of business partners only increased the applause from Republican voters. His claims that polls were underestimating his support were bolstered by the 2016 results. His insistence that election fraud was rampant both that year and in 2020 never spurred any pushback from those he cared about: his base or conservative media. And the complaints of mainstream media were hardly a roadblock, since Trump has long been able to leverage those to his advantage.
Put simply, Trump has built a media and political ecosystem in which there will be no friction from his allies, no matter what he does. That allows him to embrace his instincts without fear of blowback — even when his instincts are to elevate and advocate authoritarian models of political power.
Most presidents come to the job with decades of experience in running for office (and often losing). They arrive understanding expectations about how power is shared and having experienced the ways in which politicians demonstrate fealty to our system.
But Trump arrived as an outsider, as he was quick to remind everyone. He came to the presidency not with decades of experience working within the system and understanding its checks on power. He came, instead, after decades spent as the CEO of a private company, an almost purely authoritarian exercise of power. Donald Trump’s expectations for what leaders should do was informed not by scholarly analysis of what past elected presidents had done but by the experience of being president of a business.
Donald Trump never held an election to confirm his leadership at the Trump Organization, and that worked out fine. Why shouldn’t he think Americans would want a leader with a similar iron fist as governor of Massachusetts? Or, beginning in January 2025, in the White House?
THE MORE WE LEARN, THE WORSE TRUMP LOOKS. THE LATEST IS NO EXCEPTION.
By Paul Waldman, The Washington Post
In a complicated case like that of Donald Trump’s pilfering of government documents, instead of learning everything all at once, we get information piecemeal. When the Justice Department makes a filing or the judge releases a document, the picture gets a little more focused. Every time, Trump’s defenders fervently hope this new development will demonstrate his innocence.
And every time, the opposite happens. The more we learn, the more guilty Trump looks.
In the latest news, a federal judge has released an inventory of the items the FBI found when it conducted a search of Mar-a-Lago last month. As we now know, despite his lawyers’ assurance that they had conducted a “diligent search” for all documents improperly in Trump’s possession, many were not located until the FBI arrived at Trump’s Florida resort bearing a search warrant.
This inventory shows that mixed in with news clippings and the occasional article of clothing were hundreds of government documents. Many had no classification markings, but many others did. Some of the latter were marked CONFIDENTIAL, others were marked SECRET, and some were labeled TOP SECRET. Here’s my count:
Those empty folders raise an obvious question. Unless you think Trump was just trying to save a few bucks by filching some unused office supplies (who among us … ), then what documents were in those folders? And what happened to them?
Some of these materials were recovered from a storage room at Mar-a-Lago, while others were found in Trump’s office. As one of Trump’s own hapless lawyers recently said, “He has guests frequently there.” And there’s every reason to believe that foreign intelligence agencies have targeted Mar-a-Lago for intelligence gathering.
Trump’s defenders have yet to offer a plausible explanation of what Trump intended to do with these classified documents, which makes his intentions look anything but sinister. They have preposterously claimed Trump had a “standing order” to declassify everything he took with him, a claim for which there is zero evidence. The classification status is irrelevant as a legal question, anyway; the ex-president is not allowed to simply abscond with government documents, classified or not.
But as law professor Steve Vladeckpoints out, if the “standing order” story were true it would be worse. It would mean Trump was declassifying all kinds of documents willy-nilly, not because publicizing the information they contained would pose no national security threat, but because he didn’t want to bother handling them properly.
You can come up with any number of explanations for what Trump was up to. The most benign excuse might be that he just thought it would be cool to hang on to secret materials, perhaps to show them off to visitors he wanted to impress. Trump has compromised national security for that very reason before.
And copious reporting has shown that those who dealt with Trump — both his own political appointees and career staff — spent significant time and effort essentially protecting the national security interests of the United States from its own president. The New York Times has reported that intelligence officials recount creating separate documents for his briefings, with the most sensitive sourcing information removed, because they knew Trump didn’t take seriously the need to protect it.
Hovering behind this controversy is the frightening possibility that Trump could become president again. Just this Thursday he promised “full pardons with an apology to many” for Jan. 6 rioters. If he’s eager to pardon perpetrators of a violent insurrection against the American government, what else might he have in store? How would he treat sensitive national security information in a second term? The very thought ought to make you shudder.
One thing is almost certain: There’s still more to learn about what Trump snatched from the White House on his way out. We will hopefully find out what it all was, why he took it, and what he might have done with it.
And none of it is going to make him look good.
By Paul Waldman, The Washington Post
In a complicated case like that of Donald Trump’s pilfering of government documents, instead of learning everything all at once, we get information piecemeal. When the Justice Department makes a filing or the judge releases a document, the picture gets a little more focused. Every time, Trump’s defenders fervently hope this new development will demonstrate his innocence.
And every time, the opposite happens. The more we learn, the more guilty Trump looks.
In the latest news, a federal judge has released an inventory of the items the FBI found when it conducted a search of Mar-a-Lago last month. As we now know, despite his lawyers’ assurance that they had conducted a “diligent search” for all documents improperly in Trump’s possession, many were not located until the FBI arrived at Trump’s Florida resort bearing a search warrant.
This inventory shows that mixed in with news clippings and the occasional article of clothing were hundreds of government documents. Many had no classification markings, but many others did. Some of the latter were marked CONFIDENTIAL, others were marked SECRET, and some were labeled TOP SECRET. Here’s my count:
- 31 documents with CONFIDENTIAL classification markings.
- 54 documents with SECRET classification markings.
- 18 documents with TOP SECRET classification markings.
- 48 empty folders with “CLASSIFIED” banners.
- 14 empty folders marked “Return to Staff Secretary/Military Aide.”
Those empty folders raise an obvious question. Unless you think Trump was just trying to save a few bucks by filching some unused office supplies (who among us … ), then what documents were in those folders? And what happened to them?
Some of these materials were recovered from a storage room at Mar-a-Lago, while others were found in Trump’s office. As one of Trump’s own hapless lawyers recently said, “He has guests frequently there.” And there’s every reason to believe that foreign intelligence agencies have targeted Mar-a-Lago for intelligence gathering.
Trump’s defenders have yet to offer a plausible explanation of what Trump intended to do with these classified documents, which makes his intentions look anything but sinister. They have preposterously claimed Trump had a “standing order” to declassify everything he took with him, a claim for which there is zero evidence. The classification status is irrelevant as a legal question, anyway; the ex-president is not allowed to simply abscond with government documents, classified or not.
But as law professor Steve Vladeckpoints out, if the “standing order” story were true it would be worse. It would mean Trump was declassifying all kinds of documents willy-nilly, not because publicizing the information they contained would pose no national security threat, but because he didn’t want to bother handling them properly.
You can come up with any number of explanations for what Trump was up to. The most benign excuse might be that he just thought it would be cool to hang on to secret materials, perhaps to show them off to visitors he wanted to impress. Trump has compromised national security for that very reason before.
And copious reporting has shown that those who dealt with Trump — both his own political appointees and career staff — spent significant time and effort essentially protecting the national security interests of the United States from its own president. The New York Times has reported that intelligence officials recount creating separate documents for his briefings, with the most sensitive sourcing information removed, because they knew Trump didn’t take seriously the need to protect it.
Hovering behind this controversy is the frightening possibility that Trump could become president again. Just this Thursday he promised “full pardons with an apology to many” for Jan. 6 rioters. If he’s eager to pardon perpetrators of a violent insurrection against the American government, what else might he have in store? How would he treat sensitive national security information in a second term? The very thought ought to make you shudder.
One thing is almost certain: There’s still more to learn about what Trump snatched from the White House on his way out. We will hopefully find out what it all was, why he took it, and what he might have done with it.
And none of it is going to make him look good.
SCHOOL IS FOR MAKING CITIZENS
By Heather C. McGhee and Victor Ray
Ms. McGhee is the author of “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together” and creator of the “Sum of Us” podcast. Dr. Ray is the author of “On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters & Why You Should Care.”
Why do we have public schools? To make young people into educated, productive adults, of course. But public schools are also for making Americans. Thus, public education requires lessons about history — the American spirit and its civics — and also contact with and context about other Americans: who we are and what has made us.
That broader purpose is currently under attack. According to PEN America, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting free expression, legislatures in 36 states have proposed 137 bills that would limit teaching about race, gender and American history. Nineteen censorship bills have become law in the past two years. In our increasingly diverse nation, insulating students from lessons about racism will create a generation ill equipped to participate in a multiracial democracy. When partisan politicians ban the teaching of our country’s full history, children are purposely made ignorant of how American society works. And the costs of this ignorance to American democracy will be borne by us all.
Fortunately, our shared American history offers models of the kind of education that can unite students and communities to produce a solidarity dividend — a positive public good that we can create only by working together across racial and socioeconomic lines. Black people in Jim Crow Mississippi lived under racial authoritarianism so strict and violent that it is hard to imagine today. But lies and omissions about history were essential to the program of Jim Crow subjugation. Lost Cause mythology, which downplayed slavery as a cause of the Civil War, replaced factual history. Students, regardless of race, were taught that Black people were inferior. And many white employers thought Black people should learn only enough for proficiency in menial Jim Crow jobs.
That’s why the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee sent volunteers to the Mississippi Delta during the 1964 Freedom Summer, to found schools in poor Black communities that offered a truthful education that was explicit about racial oppression and the denial of political rights.
This multiracial group of volunteers made plain the distance between American reality and its ideals. As a result, these Freedom Schools made citizens. According to William Sturkey, an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, once the S.N.C.C. volunteers left, Freedom School students changed their state by organizing voter registration drives and civil rights protests and by charting a more equitable future in terms of housing, jobs and health care. They earned advanced degrees and were elected to office.
The broader civil rights movement helped transform the nation — in ways that even benefited the white Southerners who were so deeply opposed. As Gavin Wright recounts in “Sharing the Prize,” civil rights gains helped create more robust economies and local democracies, benefiting all citizens. These gains were possible precisely because people learned how to confront the nation’s failures.
Every student deserves the kind of myth-shattering and empowering education that the Freedom Schools provided. Such education doesn’t shy away from America’s ugly truths and contradictions. Stories of racial progress should be coupled with data on abiding racial inequalities in employment, life expectancy and incarceration. Discussions of figures such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson should include the contradiction between their hypothetical opposition to slavery and the fact that they both enslaved people.
Honest education isn’t all bad news. In fact, the deeper you go into our history, the more you can find new heroes to celebrate. As Freedom School participants learned by looking at the people who taught them, there is a tradition of American heroism, by people of all races, that is as real as the tradition of oppression and injustice. We can’t understand one without the other. Teaching age-appropriate but full history today allows white students to ask themselves: Do I want to be like the hundreds of protesters in the black and white photograph, yelling at Ruby Bridges, a 6-year-old Black girl, as she tried to integrate a public school? Or do I want to be like the hundreds of white students who boarded buses for the South to register Black voters during Freedom Summer?
Contemporary attacks on teaching true history are authoritarian attempts to impose a sanitized curriculum. America’s book banners and anti-critical race theory zealots are following a path well worn by authoritarian regimes in Russia and Hungary, which have issued laws targeting the teaching of L.G.B.T.Q. issues. In the current U.S. debates, both the authoritarians and those people committed to multiracial democracy recognize that education is inherently political, because it enables students to understand, question and change their world. For the latter, this is the point; freedom comes from having the tools to comprehend a range of good and bad experiences and weigh the options for charting their future. Despite wails to the contrary from activist groups like Moms for Liberty, who claim accurate teaching of America’s history will harm white children, research shows that all students benefit from reading accurate but critical accounts. Lessons about racism make students more likely to engage and empathize across race. Such cross-racial solidarity is essential for members of our most diverse generation.
Perhaps that’s why many young people are rightfully suspicious of grown-ups who want to keep the truth from them. A white teenager in Nevada spoke out against censorship at her rural county school board meeting.
“Discussions of lessons based around our country and society’s true history are absolutely not making me, as a white person, feel attacked or guilty,” she said. “In fact, being able to talk about hard topics such as racial inequality and slavery allowed me to feel proud of how far our society has come and hopeful that we can continue to progress.”
This position recalls a letter home from a Freedom Summer volunteer explaining her students’ eagerness for knowledge. She wrote that her students “know that they have been cheated and they want anything and everything that we can give them.” Schools shouldn’t cheat kids by denying them the tools to navigate the world as it exists — and to create a better one for all of us.
The people who resist an honest teaching of history have an economic agenda, too. They attack our children’s freedom to learn in order to create “universal public school distrust,” as Christopher Rufo, one of the leading architects of the effort to censor the teaching of race in the classroom and an advocate of school vouchers, put it. When white parents — and the tax dollars that often move with them — abandon public schools out of fear of integrated curriculums, it drains the pool of public resources from our schools. It is no surprise that some recent campaigns to pack school boards, sue districts and spread book bans are reportedly funded by some of the same secret money groups that espouse low-tax, small-government economics, while financially backing the nomination of conservative judges.
If an educated citizenry makes democracy possible, attacking schools becomes a proxy war to limit democracy. This is a battle that our parents and grandparents fought and won. Now the struggle for an honest education — and the democracy it makes possible — must be ours as well.
By Heather C. McGhee and Victor Ray
Ms. McGhee is the author of “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together” and creator of the “Sum of Us” podcast. Dr. Ray is the author of “On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters & Why You Should Care.”
Why do we have public schools? To make young people into educated, productive adults, of course. But public schools are also for making Americans. Thus, public education requires lessons about history — the American spirit and its civics — and also contact with and context about other Americans: who we are and what has made us.
That broader purpose is currently under attack. According to PEN America, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting free expression, legislatures in 36 states have proposed 137 bills that would limit teaching about race, gender and American history. Nineteen censorship bills have become law in the past two years. In our increasingly diverse nation, insulating students from lessons about racism will create a generation ill equipped to participate in a multiracial democracy. When partisan politicians ban the teaching of our country’s full history, children are purposely made ignorant of how American society works. And the costs of this ignorance to American democracy will be borne by us all.
Fortunately, our shared American history offers models of the kind of education that can unite students and communities to produce a solidarity dividend — a positive public good that we can create only by working together across racial and socioeconomic lines. Black people in Jim Crow Mississippi lived under racial authoritarianism so strict and violent that it is hard to imagine today. But lies and omissions about history were essential to the program of Jim Crow subjugation. Lost Cause mythology, which downplayed slavery as a cause of the Civil War, replaced factual history. Students, regardless of race, were taught that Black people were inferior. And many white employers thought Black people should learn only enough for proficiency in menial Jim Crow jobs.
That’s why the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee sent volunteers to the Mississippi Delta during the 1964 Freedom Summer, to found schools in poor Black communities that offered a truthful education that was explicit about racial oppression and the denial of political rights.
This multiracial group of volunteers made plain the distance between American reality and its ideals. As a result, these Freedom Schools made citizens. According to William Sturkey, an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, once the S.N.C.C. volunteers left, Freedom School students changed their state by organizing voter registration drives and civil rights protests and by charting a more equitable future in terms of housing, jobs and health care. They earned advanced degrees and were elected to office.
The broader civil rights movement helped transform the nation — in ways that even benefited the white Southerners who were so deeply opposed. As Gavin Wright recounts in “Sharing the Prize,” civil rights gains helped create more robust economies and local democracies, benefiting all citizens. These gains were possible precisely because people learned how to confront the nation’s failures.
Every student deserves the kind of myth-shattering and empowering education that the Freedom Schools provided. Such education doesn’t shy away from America’s ugly truths and contradictions. Stories of racial progress should be coupled with data on abiding racial inequalities in employment, life expectancy and incarceration. Discussions of figures such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson should include the contradiction between their hypothetical opposition to slavery and the fact that they both enslaved people.
Honest education isn’t all bad news. In fact, the deeper you go into our history, the more you can find new heroes to celebrate. As Freedom School participants learned by looking at the people who taught them, there is a tradition of American heroism, by people of all races, that is as real as the tradition of oppression and injustice. We can’t understand one without the other. Teaching age-appropriate but full history today allows white students to ask themselves: Do I want to be like the hundreds of protesters in the black and white photograph, yelling at Ruby Bridges, a 6-year-old Black girl, as she tried to integrate a public school? Or do I want to be like the hundreds of white students who boarded buses for the South to register Black voters during Freedom Summer?
Contemporary attacks on teaching true history are authoritarian attempts to impose a sanitized curriculum. America’s book banners and anti-critical race theory zealots are following a path well worn by authoritarian regimes in Russia and Hungary, which have issued laws targeting the teaching of L.G.B.T.Q. issues. In the current U.S. debates, both the authoritarians and those people committed to multiracial democracy recognize that education is inherently political, because it enables students to understand, question and change their world. For the latter, this is the point; freedom comes from having the tools to comprehend a range of good and bad experiences and weigh the options for charting their future. Despite wails to the contrary from activist groups like Moms for Liberty, who claim accurate teaching of America’s history will harm white children, research shows that all students benefit from reading accurate but critical accounts. Lessons about racism make students more likely to engage and empathize across race. Such cross-racial solidarity is essential for members of our most diverse generation.
Perhaps that’s why many young people are rightfully suspicious of grown-ups who want to keep the truth from them. A white teenager in Nevada spoke out against censorship at her rural county school board meeting.
“Discussions of lessons based around our country and society’s true history are absolutely not making me, as a white person, feel attacked or guilty,” she said. “In fact, being able to talk about hard topics such as racial inequality and slavery allowed me to feel proud of how far our society has come and hopeful that we can continue to progress.”
This position recalls a letter home from a Freedom Summer volunteer explaining her students’ eagerness for knowledge. She wrote that her students “know that they have been cheated and they want anything and everything that we can give them.” Schools shouldn’t cheat kids by denying them the tools to navigate the world as it exists — and to create a better one for all of us.
The people who resist an honest teaching of history have an economic agenda, too. They attack our children’s freedom to learn in order to create “universal public school distrust,” as Christopher Rufo, one of the leading architects of the effort to censor the teaching of race in the classroom and an advocate of school vouchers, put it. When white parents — and the tax dollars that often move with them — abandon public schools out of fear of integrated curriculums, it drains the pool of public resources from our schools. It is no surprise that some recent campaigns to pack school boards, sue districts and spread book bans are reportedly funded by some of the same secret money groups that espouse low-tax, small-government economics, while financially backing the nomination of conservative judges.
If an educated citizenry makes democracy possible, attacking schools becomes a proxy war to limit democracy. This is a battle that our parents and grandparents fought and won. Now the struggle for an honest education — and the democracy it makes possible — must be ours as well.
TRUMP’S LOONY RANTS SHOULD REMIND THE GOP HIS NOMINATION WOULD BE DISASTROUS
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
One does not need a medical degree or a therapist’s license to conclude that defeated former president Donald Trump’s nutty rant insisting that he be made president immediately or the 2020 election be rerun is the sign of an unhinged personality. Under pressure from the increasingly potent espionage investigation, he might be losing his grip. For a change, you don’t hear Republicans rushing forth to support his latest insane demand.
Trump’s posting of QAnon messages and implicit threats (in increasingly unintelligible syntax) suggests that he is losing the ability or desire to control his impulsive outbursts. This is the guy whom millions of Republicans want to nominate for president.
Since the redacted affidavit was released last week, the only two defenses from Republicans are no defenses at all. The first, courtesy of Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), amounts to extortion: Prosecute Trump and there’ll be blood in the streets. The second is the laughable inquiry: Is that all? It’s not “all,” because the affidavit was heavily redacted. Moreover, the notion that we are talking “just” about documents ignores that most espionage cases are about documents (or equivalent material). That’s where the secrets are.
Trump defenders ignore at their own risk ample indications in the affidavit and news reports that documents were withheld even after a Trump lawyer represented that all confidential material had been returned, that the documents were in an unlocked storage area and that documents were moved. Any rational adult should be aware that evidence might show that Trump violated statutes the Justice Department cited in the affidavit (concerning obstruction and concealment/mutilation/removal). If so, aggravating crimes in addition to violation of the Espionage Act may be at issue.
Still, there is little to no sign that Republicans are ready to distance themselves from someone who risks an indictment in state and federal court and resorts regularly to incoherent rants that not even right-wing media dare repeat (lest they scare their viewers and listeners). Instead, they mutely march along, taking his advice on nominees and reiterating their support for another presidential run.
Their refusal to confront Trump’s current mental and legal status takes procrastination to a whole new level. Are they hoping that he’ll be indicted well in advance of 2024? Well, if past is prologue, then we shouldn’t discount the possibility that they would still nominate him. (Martyr! Deep state!). Hoping that another candidate comes along to point out that Trump is unelectable is peculiar given their own insistence, amplified by the right-wing media, that he’s the only one to lead the party.
If they are counting on the good sense of GOP primary voters to dump him, they might take a look at the MAGA loonies voters picked in primaries ahead of the midterms (e.g., Jan. 6 attendee and Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano; MAGA provocateur and election-denier Kari Lake in Arizona).
Just how they expect to rid themselves of someone like Trump is unclear. They have delegitimized law enforcement, the media and the few sane Republicans (e.g., Rep. Liz Cheney). So, figuring out who exactly is supposed to now convince the base that Trump is, after all this, too toxic and deranged to be the nominee may be a challenge.
This dilemma is entirely of the GOP’s own making. Years of sycophancy or silence, years of building a right-wing media cocoon and years of selective listening may prevent the party from engaging in rudimentary self-preservation. Maybe party leaders simply intend for him to run, lose, take the party down and set off a more violent version of Jan. 6 — because that’s the direction we’re heading in.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
One does not need a medical degree or a therapist’s license to conclude that defeated former president Donald Trump’s nutty rant insisting that he be made president immediately or the 2020 election be rerun is the sign of an unhinged personality. Under pressure from the increasingly potent espionage investigation, he might be losing his grip. For a change, you don’t hear Republicans rushing forth to support his latest insane demand.
Trump’s posting of QAnon messages and implicit threats (in increasingly unintelligible syntax) suggests that he is losing the ability or desire to control his impulsive outbursts. This is the guy whom millions of Republicans want to nominate for president.
Since the redacted affidavit was released last week, the only two defenses from Republicans are no defenses at all. The first, courtesy of Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), amounts to extortion: Prosecute Trump and there’ll be blood in the streets. The second is the laughable inquiry: Is that all? It’s not “all,” because the affidavit was heavily redacted. Moreover, the notion that we are talking “just” about documents ignores that most espionage cases are about documents (or equivalent material). That’s where the secrets are.
Trump defenders ignore at their own risk ample indications in the affidavit and news reports that documents were withheld even after a Trump lawyer represented that all confidential material had been returned, that the documents were in an unlocked storage area and that documents were moved. Any rational adult should be aware that evidence might show that Trump violated statutes the Justice Department cited in the affidavit (concerning obstruction and concealment/mutilation/removal). If so, aggravating crimes in addition to violation of the Espionage Act may be at issue.
Still, there is little to no sign that Republicans are ready to distance themselves from someone who risks an indictment in state and federal court and resorts regularly to incoherent rants that not even right-wing media dare repeat (lest they scare their viewers and listeners). Instead, they mutely march along, taking his advice on nominees and reiterating their support for another presidential run.
Their refusal to confront Trump’s current mental and legal status takes procrastination to a whole new level. Are they hoping that he’ll be indicted well in advance of 2024? Well, if past is prologue, then we shouldn’t discount the possibility that they would still nominate him. (Martyr! Deep state!). Hoping that another candidate comes along to point out that Trump is unelectable is peculiar given their own insistence, amplified by the right-wing media, that he’s the only one to lead the party.
If they are counting on the good sense of GOP primary voters to dump him, they might take a look at the MAGA loonies voters picked in primaries ahead of the midterms (e.g., Jan. 6 attendee and Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano; MAGA provocateur and election-denier Kari Lake in Arizona).
Just how they expect to rid themselves of someone like Trump is unclear. They have delegitimized law enforcement, the media and the few sane Republicans (e.g., Rep. Liz Cheney). So, figuring out who exactly is supposed to now convince the base that Trump is, after all this, too toxic and deranged to be the nominee may be a challenge.
This dilemma is entirely of the GOP’s own making. Years of sycophancy or silence, years of building a right-wing media cocoon and years of selective listening may prevent the party from engaging in rudimentary self-preservation. Maybe party leaders simply intend for him to run, lose, take the party down and set off a more violent version of Jan. 6 — because that’s the direction we’re heading in.
CONSERVATIVES THINK EDUCATION IS A THREAT. THEY’RE RIGHT.
By Paul Waldman, The Washington Post
The conservative campaign against education is many things. As a political matter, it’s about intensifying the culture war so moral panic drives Republican votes. As a policy matter, its long-term goals include dismantling public education. As a personal matter, it’s often motivated by fear that the American system of education is a threat to people’s children — that the wrong ideas, even ideas themselves, are impossibly dangerous.
On that last point, conservatives are absolutely right: Education is indeed a threat to many things they believe.
Consider some recent news from the front. In a Texas school district, police officers showed up to a high school library to “investigate” a graphic novel about a bullied gay teen. In Oklahoma, a teacher was investigated for responding to a draconian school censorship law by covering up her classroom library with a sign saying, “Books the state doesn’t want you to read”; she then resigned.
In another Texas district, a middle school deemed portions of a book by the man for whom the school was named — a grandson of former slaves who learned to read at age 98 — to be “inappropriate.” The reasons are unclear; perhaps his tribute to the importance of reading was too inflammatory.
It’s not just teachers. Librarians have come under attack, too. In a Michigan town, librarians were targeted with a torrent of abuse after residents learned that the library contained books on LGBTQ themes; the town then decided to defund its only library. Problem solved!
Meanwhile, Fox News has been on a tear, vilifying school teachers as lazy, stupid, anti-White Marxists trying to “groom” children for sexual abuse.
In some red states, teenagers have taken it upon themselves to organize sex-education classes. Conservatives who dominate in those places are terrified that if the teens learn how their bodies work and what sex is, they might develop ideas that undermine the “traditional” view of sex.
And once again, the conservatives are right. If you teach a girl that she has the right to make her own choices about sex, that having sex doesn’t turn her into chewed-up gum no one would want to touch, or that she ought to question why society labels men who have sex “players” but women who have sex “sluts,” she might begin to free herself from the shame and fear that perpetuates certain hierarchies of power. Who knows where that might take her?
Now, are school teachers more likely to be liberals, even in conservative areas? You bet they are. Think about the kind of person who goes into teaching. You have to be committed to the welfare of children, be skilled at providing care, and believe in the institution of schools (most of which are public). You have to care about equality, because it’s inherent in the practice. You have to love books and learning. And you have to be willing to work incredibly hard for low pay.
There are some conservatives who meet all those requirements, but most of the people who do — who are disproportionately women — are going to be liberals. That makes conservatives suspicious of the entire profession, regardless of what is actually being taught.
Then there are all the ways that, in Stephen Colbert’s immortal words, reality has a well-known liberal bias. If you’re going to teach science, you have to teach about evolution and climate change, even if some people would prefer to tell themselves both are sinister hoaxes.
And even if you train teachers to say the slaveholders who signed the Constitution actually hated slavery, or pass laws forbidding any mention of “gender fluidity,” what if your kids go on to college? Then they’ll be exposed to all manner of new ideas as they cultivate their capacity for critical thinking. They’ll probably meet people from different parts of the country and different backgrounds. They very well could decide that their parents are small-minded, and arrive at a set of beliefs that alienates them from the people who raised them.
These fears are intensified because we now live in an interconnected culture where shielding your children from ideas you don’t like has become almost impossible. If you’re 50 years old, you might have gone through school never meeting someone who was openly gay, or who wasn’t Christian, or who didn’t think the Civil War was about state’s rights. But if your kids have an internet connection, they have all kinds of exposure to different people and different ideas.
And the more conservative you are, the more likely it is that education will lead your kids toward experiences and beliefs that differ from yours — not because your kids are being victimized by propaganda, but just because of the nature of becoming educated.
If you’re an average consumer of Fox News and conservative media, you typically can’t do much about the things you’re told to be angry about every day; the rage is an end in itself. But in their war on education, conservatives have found a way to connect the national to the local, linking the things Tucker Carlson tells you are terribly threatening with what’s going on right down the street.
The threat is real. Conservatives can’t keep their kids from having their minds opened forever. And they know it.
By Paul Waldman, The Washington Post
The conservative campaign against education is many things. As a political matter, it’s about intensifying the culture war so moral panic drives Republican votes. As a policy matter, its long-term goals include dismantling public education. As a personal matter, it’s often motivated by fear that the American system of education is a threat to people’s children — that the wrong ideas, even ideas themselves, are impossibly dangerous.
On that last point, conservatives are absolutely right: Education is indeed a threat to many things they believe.
Consider some recent news from the front. In a Texas school district, police officers showed up to a high school library to “investigate” a graphic novel about a bullied gay teen. In Oklahoma, a teacher was investigated for responding to a draconian school censorship law by covering up her classroom library with a sign saying, “Books the state doesn’t want you to read”; she then resigned.
In another Texas district, a middle school deemed portions of a book by the man for whom the school was named — a grandson of former slaves who learned to read at age 98 — to be “inappropriate.” The reasons are unclear; perhaps his tribute to the importance of reading was too inflammatory.
It’s not just teachers. Librarians have come under attack, too. In a Michigan town, librarians were targeted with a torrent of abuse after residents learned that the library contained books on LGBTQ themes; the town then decided to defund its only library. Problem solved!
Meanwhile, Fox News has been on a tear, vilifying school teachers as lazy, stupid, anti-White Marxists trying to “groom” children for sexual abuse.
In some red states, teenagers have taken it upon themselves to organize sex-education classes. Conservatives who dominate in those places are terrified that if the teens learn how their bodies work and what sex is, they might develop ideas that undermine the “traditional” view of sex.
And once again, the conservatives are right. If you teach a girl that she has the right to make her own choices about sex, that having sex doesn’t turn her into chewed-up gum no one would want to touch, or that she ought to question why society labels men who have sex “players” but women who have sex “sluts,” she might begin to free herself from the shame and fear that perpetuates certain hierarchies of power. Who knows where that might take her?
Now, are school teachers more likely to be liberals, even in conservative areas? You bet they are. Think about the kind of person who goes into teaching. You have to be committed to the welfare of children, be skilled at providing care, and believe in the institution of schools (most of which are public). You have to care about equality, because it’s inherent in the practice. You have to love books and learning. And you have to be willing to work incredibly hard for low pay.
There are some conservatives who meet all those requirements, but most of the people who do — who are disproportionately women — are going to be liberals. That makes conservatives suspicious of the entire profession, regardless of what is actually being taught.
Then there are all the ways that, in Stephen Colbert’s immortal words, reality has a well-known liberal bias. If you’re going to teach science, you have to teach about evolution and climate change, even if some people would prefer to tell themselves both are sinister hoaxes.
And even if you train teachers to say the slaveholders who signed the Constitution actually hated slavery, or pass laws forbidding any mention of “gender fluidity,” what if your kids go on to college? Then they’ll be exposed to all manner of new ideas as they cultivate their capacity for critical thinking. They’ll probably meet people from different parts of the country and different backgrounds. They very well could decide that their parents are small-minded, and arrive at a set of beliefs that alienates them from the people who raised them.
These fears are intensified because we now live in an interconnected culture where shielding your children from ideas you don’t like has become almost impossible. If you’re 50 years old, you might have gone through school never meeting someone who was openly gay, or who wasn’t Christian, or who didn’t think the Civil War was about state’s rights. But if your kids have an internet connection, they have all kinds of exposure to different people and different ideas.
And the more conservative you are, the more likely it is that education will lead your kids toward experiences and beliefs that differ from yours — not because your kids are being victimized by propaganda, but just because of the nature of becoming educated.
If you’re an average consumer of Fox News and conservative media, you typically can’t do much about the things you’re told to be angry about every day; the rage is an end in itself. But in their war on education, conservatives have found a way to connect the national to the local, linking the things Tucker Carlson tells you are terribly threatening with what’s going on right down the street.
The threat is real. Conservatives can’t keep their kids from having their minds opened forever. And they know it.
HOW THE REDACTED FBI AFFIDAVIT REVEALS DEPTH OF TRUMP’S LEGAL PERIL
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
The redacted FBI affidavit released on Friday regarding the Aug. 8 search of the defeated former president’s Florida estate reveals many things about Donald Trump’s legal peril. It confirmed, for example, that the government is “conducting a criminal investigation concerning the improper removal and storage of classified information in unauthorized spaces, as well as the unlawful concealment or removal of government records.” To state it more plainly: The defeated former president is being investigated for potential violation of several statutes pertaining to his illegal retention and storage of official documents containing sensitive secrets.
Brookings Institution scholar Norman Ornstein points out that we quickly learned from the redacted affidavit that there was no lock on Trump’s storage area. Beyond that, Ornstein says, “There is no revelation here beyond what we knew — which is just devastating to Trump.” The former president had “documents, including the most sensitive national security secrets, handled in a slapdash fashion, kept in multiple unsecured locations, intermixed with photos and family stuff.” Ornstein observes the plethora of “lies about what had and had not been returned [and] laughable assertions about Trump’s ability to declassify unilaterally.” He concludes, “It reinforces how dangerous Trump is to the nation, and that is without any information yet about what malign reasons he had for grabbing these documents.”
Here are five takeaways from the redacted affidavit:
1 There were a LOT of documents
Of the 15 boxes Trump staffers returned to government possession in January, 14 contained super-secret information. “A preliminary triage of the documents with classification markings revealed the following approximate numbers: 184 unique documents bearing classification markings, including 67 documents marked as CONFIDENTIAL, 92 documents marked as SECRET, and 25 documents marked as TOP SECRET.” The preliminary review, conducted in May, found additional markings such as “HCS, FISA, ORCON, NOFORN, and SI.” These notations relate to national security secrets — one, HCS, indicates a category of highly classified government information; another refers to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court — including human and signals intelligence.
Trump had no right to retain these documents, the affidavit asserts, because “Classified information of any designation may be shared only with persons determined by an appropriate United States Government official to be eligible for access, and who possess a ‘need to know.’ ” These were government documents, not Trump’s personal papers.
In citing 18 USC 793(e), the government asserts that Trump had no right to refuse to return any document “relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.” He was no longer authorized to receive or retain such documents. Hence, his legal liability is acute.
2 The claim of declassification is evidence against Trump
It is telling that the government wants to highlight the argument from Trump’s team, raised in particular by Kash Patel, that Trump had a standing order to declassify the materials. (“FPOTUS COUNSEL 1 asked DOJ to consider a few ‘principles,’ which include FPOTUS COUNSEL 1′s claim that a President has absolute authority to declassify documents.” This is nonsense both factually and legally. It is also irrelevant to the retention of any government documents. There are no such principles that would help Trump here.
In a damning footnote, the government points out that “18 U.S.C. § 793(e) does not use the term ‘classified information,’ but rather criminalizes the unlawful retention of ‘information relating to the national defense.’ ” In other words, the notion that Trump could declassify documents at will is a fantasy. Classification is beside the point.
3 We don’t know how the government knew Trump still had more documents
This portion of the affidavit is redacted, a necessary (and expected) measure to protect the investigation and identity of witnesses. If the Trump brain trust thought they were going to get the name of a “mole,” they really are living in fantasy land.
4 Trump had no right to keep top-secret documents in an unsecured location
Quoting from a June 8 letter the Justice Department sent to Trump’s lawyer, the affidavit states, “As I previously indicated to you, Mar-a-Lago does not include a secure location authorized for the storage of classified information. As such, it appears that since the time classified documents [redacted] were removed from the secure facilities at the White House and moved to Mar-a-Lago on or around January 20, 2021, they have not been handled in an appropriate manner or stored in an appropriate location.” That’s damning evidence of Trump’s violations of statutes. (The affidavit notes: “Pursuant to Executive Order 13526, classified information contained on automated information systems, including networks and telecommunications systems, that collect, create, communicate, compute, disseminate, process, or store classified information must be maintained in a manner that: (1) prevents access by unauthorized persons; and (2) ensures the integrity of the information.”)
5 We don’t know what actions might have violated the obstruction statute (Section 1519) and the mutilation statute (Section 2071)
The latter subjects to criminal punishment “Whoever willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, or destroys, or attempts to do so, or, with intent to do so takes and carries away any record, proceeding, map, book, paper, document, or other thing ...”). We know from news reports that certain documents were torn. But we do not know whether Trump attempted to destroy or alter other documents. (His handwriting was found on some.) The New York Times previously reported that subpoenaed surveillance “footage showed that, after one instance in which Justice Department officials were in contact with Mr. Trump’s team, boxes were moved in and out of the room.”
In sum, Trump is in heap of trouble. “The chilling reality is setting in,” constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tells me. "In seeking this search warrant, the government had obviously exhausted every less intrusive way of protecting national defense information and other extremely sensitive top-secret material from those who illegally removed it to Mar-a-Lago, lied to government agencies about its being there, and kept it there for reasons that cannot have been entirely innocent and might have been unimaginably dangerous to our nation.”
Tribe adds: “Mr. Trump must regret having bragged that this search was baseless rather than coming up with some less easily refuted account of what he had been up to, because no rational person, after reading the affidavit even with its redactions, could doubt that there was more than just probable cause to believe that federal crimes of the most serious kind ... had been committed and, in some instances, were still being committed at the Mar-a-Lago premises.” In other words: The government caught Trump with top-secret documents and appears to have found that he hadn’t turned over all of them as his lawyer represented. Trump’s apologists might want to disentangle themselves from him before they thoroughly embarrass themselves.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
The redacted FBI affidavit released on Friday regarding the Aug. 8 search of the defeated former president’s Florida estate reveals many things about Donald Trump’s legal peril. It confirmed, for example, that the government is “conducting a criminal investigation concerning the improper removal and storage of classified information in unauthorized spaces, as well as the unlawful concealment or removal of government records.” To state it more plainly: The defeated former president is being investigated for potential violation of several statutes pertaining to his illegal retention and storage of official documents containing sensitive secrets.
Brookings Institution scholar Norman Ornstein points out that we quickly learned from the redacted affidavit that there was no lock on Trump’s storage area. Beyond that, Ornstein says, “There is no revelation here beyond what we knew — which is just devastating to Trump.” The former president had “documents, including the most sensitive national security secrets, handled in a slapdash fashion, kept in multiple unsecured locations, intermixed with photos and family stuff.” Ornstein observes the plethora of “lies about what had and had not been returned [and] laughable assertions about Trump’s ability to declassify unilaterally.” He concludes, “It reinforces how dangerous Trump is to the nation, and that is without any information yet about what malign reasons he had for grabbing these documents.”
Here are five takeaways from the redacted affidavit:
1 There were a LOT of documents
Of the 15 boxes Trump staffers returned to government possession in January, 14 contained super-secret information. “A preliminary triage of the documents with classification markings revealed the following approximate numbers: 184 unique documents bearing classification markings, including 67 documents marked as CONFIDENTIAL, 92 documents marked as SECRET, and 25 documents marked as TOP SECRET.” The preliminary review, conducted in May, found additional markings such as “HCS, FISA, ORCON, NOFORN, and SI.” These notations relate to national security secrets — one, HCS, indicates a category of highly classified government information; another refers to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court — including human and signals intelligence.
Trump had no right to retain these documents, the affidavit asserts, because “Classified information of any designation may be shared only with persons determined by an appropriate United States Government official to be eligible for access, and who possess a ‘need to know.’ ” These were government documents, not Trump’s personal papers.
In citing 18 USC 793(e), the government asserts that Trump had no right to refuse to return any document “relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.” He was no longer authorized to receive or retain such documents. Hence, his legal liability is acute.
2 The claim of declassification is evidence against Trump
It is telling that the government wants to highlight the argument from Trump’s team, raised in particular by Kash Patel, that Trump had a standing order to declassify the materials. (“FPOTUS COUNSEL 1 asked DOJ to consider a few ‘principles,’ which include FPOTUS COUNSEL 1′s claim that a President has absolute authority to declassify documents.” This is nonsense both factually and legally. It is also irrelevant to the retention of any government documents. There are no such principles that would help Trump here.
In a damning footnote, the government points out that “18 U.S.C. § 793(e) does not use the term ‘classified information,’ but rather criminalizes the unlawful retention of ‘information relating to the national defense.’ ” In other words, the notion that Trump could declassify documents at will is a fantasy. Classification is beside the point.
3 We don’t know how the government knew Trump still had more documents
This portion of the affidavit is redacted, a necessary (and expected) measure to protect the investigation and identity of witnesses. If the Trump brain trust thought they were going to get the name of a “mole,” they really are living in fantasy land.
4 Trump had no right to keep top-secret documents in an unsecured location
Quoting from a June 8 letter the Justice Department sent to Trump’s lawyer, the affidavit states, “As I previously indicated to you, Mar-a-Lago does not include a secure location authorized for the storage of classified information. As such, it appears that since the time classified documents [redacted] were removed from the secure facilities at the White House and moved to Mar-a-Lago on or around January 20, 2021, they have not been handled in an appropriate manner or stored in an appropriate location.” That’s damning evidence of Trump’s violations of statutes. (The affidavit notes: “Pursuant to Executive Order 13526, classified information contained on automated information systems, including networks and telecommunications systems, that collect, create, communicate, compute, disseminate, process, or store classified information must be maintained in a manner that: (1) prevents access by unauthorized persons; and (2) ensures the integrity of the information.”)
5 We don’t know what actions might have violated the obstruction statute (Section 1519) and the mutilation statute (Section 2071)
The latter subjects to criminal punishment “Whoever willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, or destroys, or attempts to do so, or, with intent to do so takes and carries away any record, proceeding, map, book, paper, document, or other thing ...”). We know from news reports that certain documents were torn. But we do not know whether Trump attempted to destroy or alter other documents. (His handwriting was found on some.) The New York Times previously reported that subpoenaed surveillance “footage showed that, after one instance in which Justice Department officials were in contact with Mr. Trump’s team, boxes were moved in and out of the room.”
In sum, Trump is in heap of trouble. “The chilling reality is setting in,” constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tells me. "In seeking this search warrant, the government had obviously exhausted every less intrusive way of protecting national defense information and other extremely sensitive top-secret material from those who illegally removed it to Mar-a-Lago, lied to government agencies about its being there, and kept it there for reasons that cannot have been entirely innocent and might have been unimaginably dangerous to our nation.”
Tribe adds: “Mr. Trump must regret having bragged that this search was baseless rather than coming up with some less easily refuted account of what he had been up to, because no rational person, after reading the affidavit even with its redactions, could doubt that there was more than just probable cause to believe that federal crimes of the most serious kind ... had been committed and, in some instances, were still being committed at the Mar-a-Lago premises.” In other words: The government caught Trump with top-secret documents and appears to have found that he hadn’t turned over all of them as his lawyer represented. Trump’s apologists might want to disentangle themselves from him before they thoroughly embarrass themselves.
THE TRUMP AFFIDAVIT SHOWS THE MAR-A-LAGO SEARCH WAS HARDLY CAPRICIOUS
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
The heavily redacted affidavit in which the FBI requested court permission to search Donald Trump’s home, released Friday, is more tantalizing than it is revealing. But what is visible, despite pages of blacked-out text, makes the Justice Department appear thoughtful and deliberate — and the former president quite the opposite.
On the orders of a federal magistrate judge, the DOJ unsealed the document claiming to establish probable cause for entering Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate to seize suspected sensitive materials improperly transported from the White House. The most important information — the specific pieces of evidence that persuaded the court to permit the FBI search — were obscured to protect the probe and the witnesses who have assisted it. But the text that remained visible still contained some useful information. This includes a closer look at the Trump camp’s back and forth with the National Archives and Records Administration and the FBI before the search, a granular list of the classification markings on the materials in question, and a mention of the possibility that “evidence of obstruction will be found.”
The National Archives initially asked for the documents allegedly in Mr. Trump’s possession, which needed to be archived per the Presidential Records Act, in May of last year — and continued asking for more than seven months, at which point the Trump team provided 15 boxes. Next, when the archives discovered classified markings on some documents, Mr. Trump resisted the FBI’s efforts to review the material, The Post has reported, and refused to hand over any additional classified information despite a grand jury subpoena.
Trump defenders have slammed the FBI’s search as aggressive and unwarranted. What has come out since, including on Friday, suggests the search was hardly capricious. Instead, all available evidence suggests it was a thoughtful choice made after other options had been exhausted. Along the way, the affidavit showed that the Justice Department considered the dubious defense from Mr. Trump’s allies that all the documents were declassified and that keeping them at Mar-a-Lago was therefore legal.
The catalogue of markings on the 184 classified documents agents reviewed before asking to search Mar-a-Lago also explains the DOJ’s determination to learn more. Acronyms such as SI, HCS, FISA and NOFORN might seem like collections of random letters to the layman, but they signify extraordinarily sensitive information: intelligence derived from clandestine human sources, for example, or from surveillance of foreign spies. That material in these categories was allegedly mixed in with other random papers as well as a mishmash of items reportedly including golf balls, a raincoat and a razor, is alarming — even absent intent to use them maliciously.
Read together, these facts should help assuage concerns that Attorney General Merrick Garland embarked on an ill-considered prosecutorial frolic when he sought to search Mar-a-Lago — though this reality is unlikely to stop the flow of reckless rhetoric from Trump acolytes. Meanwhile, those taking a more levelheaded approach should continue to do what they’ve done so far: wait. There was much we didn’t know before this affidavit was unsealed. There’s much we still don’t know now.
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
The heavily redacted affidavit in which the FBI requested court permission to search Donald Trump’s home, released Friday, is more tantalizing than it is revealing. But what is visible, despite pages of blacked-out text, makes the Justice Department appear thoughtful and deliberate — and the former president quite the opposite.
On the orders of a federal magistrate judge, the DOJ unsealed the document claiming to establish probable cause for entering Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate to seize suspected sensitive materials improperly transported from the White House. The most important information — the specific pieces of evidence that persuaded the court to permit the FBI search — were obscured to protect the probe and the witnesses who have assisted it. But the text that remained visible still contained some useful information. This includes a closer look at the Trump camp’s back and forth with the National Archives and Records Administration and the FBI before the search, a granular list of the classification markings on the materials in question, and a mention of the possibility that “evidence of obstruction will be found.”
The National Archives initially asked for the documents allegedly in Mr. Trump’s possession, which needed to be archived per the Presidential Records Act, in May of last year — and continued asking for more than seven months, at which point the Trump team provided 15 boxes. Next, when the archives discovered classified markings on some documents, Mr. Trump resisted the FBI’s efforts to review the material, The Post has reported, and refused to hand over any additional classified information despite a grand jury subpoena.
Trump defenders have slammed the FBI’s search as aggressive and unwarranted. What has come out since, including on Friday, suggests the search was hardly capricious. Instead, all available evidence suggests it was a thoughtful choice made after other options had been exhausted. Along the way, the affidavit showed that the Justice Department considered the dubious defense from Mr. Trump’s allies that all the documents were declassified and that keeping them at Mar-a-Lago was therefore legal.
The catalogue of markings on the 184 classified documents agents reviewed before asking to search Mar-a-Lago also explains the DOJ’s determination to learn more. Acronyms such as SI, HCS, FISA and NOFORN might seem like collections of random letters to the layman, but they signify extraordinarily sensitive information: intelligence derived from clandestine human sources, for example, or from surveillance of foreign spies. That material in these categories was allegedly mixed in with other random papers as well as a mishmash of items reportedly including golf balls, a raincoat and a razor, is alarming — even absent intent to use them maliciously.
Read together, these facts should help assuage concerns that Attorney General Merrick Garland embarked on an ill-considered prosecutorial frolic when he sought to search Mar-a-Lago — though this reality is unlikely to stop the flow of reckless rhetoric from Trump acolytes. Meanwhile, those taking a more levelheaded approach should continue to do what they’ve done so far: wait. There was much we didn’t know before this affidavit was unsealed. There’s much we still don’t know now.
MORE DAMNING EVIDENCE AGAINST TRUMP. AND MORE OF IT FROM REPUBLICANS.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) is trying to avoid testifying under oath before a Fulton County, Ga., grand jury examining Donald Trump’s attempt to undo the 2020 election. Graham almost certainly will be compelled to testify about some matters concerning the defeated former president’s obsession with throwing out Georgia votes. Now, the state’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, is seeking to avoid responding to his grand jury subpoena. He is likely to fail as well.
Kemp, who is running for reelection, does not want to underscore his opposition to Trump’s 2020 coup effort by testifying to the grand jury. Well, it would be politically awkward, but that’s no excuse to not comply with the legal obligations of any Georgia resident.
In response to Kemp’s motion to quash the subpoena, the Fulton County district attorney makes clear the wealth of information Kemp might provide. Dispensing with Kemp’s bogus claim of sovereign immunity (no one is suing Kemp) and his plea for gubernatorial executive privilege, the district attorney argues, “The factual content of his communications with former President Trump or persons connected to Trump can be revealed without disclosing any input he may have received from advisers concerning said conversation.”
There is plenty that Kemp can tell the grand jury, according to the filing:
Movant [Kemp] can testify inter alia about the existence of any evidence the Trump campaign or operatives provided to support their theory that Georgia’s election was “rigged”; Movant can testify about the identity of the people who attempted to communicate with him and whether they identified as representatives of Mr. ‘Trump; he can testify to the number of times he received or made calls related to the Trump campaign’s allegations and demands that he take action; he can testify about the specific contents of his phone conversations; he can testify about the contents of his telephone conversation with Mr. Trump; he can testify about whether Mr. Trump told Movant that he “got Movant elected”; he can testify about ‘whether Mr. Trump specifically sought a “special election” or some other form of relief; he can testify about conversations about “election integrity”; he can testify about whether threats were made by Mr. Trump or others; he can testify about his responses to Mr. Trump.
You can understand why Kemp would be squeamish about revealing all that. But he’s not the one who should be nervous. It’s Trump who has everything to lose.
To the extent that the Trump-Kemp conversations reveal the former president had no evidence of election fraud and tried to lean on Kemp to perform some extralegal contortions on Trump’s behalf, Kemp’s testimony will build on existing evidence (such as Trump’s January 2021 call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” just enough votes to flip the state’s vote outcome) and, together, might provide the basis for charges such as solicitation to commit election fraud, intentional interference with performance of election duties, conspiracy to commit election fraud and/or state racketeering.
Once more, Trump should worry about Republican witnesses that might incriminate him. And that holds true as well for the federal investigation into classified materials in Trump’s possession.
Recall that there is already voluminous evidence that Trump knew he possessed government documents that contained some of the nation’s most closely guarded secrets. For example, Trump personally went through documents, some of which were marked with the highest classification level, the New York Times reported. His attorneys had extended conversations with National Archives officials and then with the FBI. The government eventually sent a subpoena. It is virtually impossible to imagine how Trump could have been unaware he was in possession of highly confidential material that did not belong to him.
On top of all that, we learn that then-White House counsel Pat Cipollone acknowledged while Trump was still in office that the documents had to stay. The Post reports that in May 2021, “Archives officials were told by a Trump lawyer that the documents should be given back, according to an email from the top lawyer at the record-keeping agency.” In short, we now know that “Trump’s lawyers had concerns about Trump taking the documents and agreed that the boxes should be returned — at least according to the top Archives officials — while Trump kept the documents.” Trump, however, insisted the documents were his.
In short, the FBI, led by a Trump-appointed director, learned from Trump’s own White House counsel that he knew the documents were improperly retained. Again, even Trump’s White House counsel understood that Trump had no right to leave with sensitive documents.
In sum, wherever one looks — to the Georgia state prosecution, to the Jan. 6 hearings or to the Mar-a-Lago document debacle — Trump’s excuses are wearing thin. Evidence mounts of his willful disregard for the law. And Republicans continue to provide critical evidence that might well result in Trump’s indictment.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) is trying to avoid testifying under oath before a Fulton County, Ga., grand jury examining Donald Trump’s attempt to undo the 2020 election. Graham almost certainly will be compelled to testify about some matters concerning the defeated former president’s obsession with throwing out Georgia votes. Now, the state’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, is seeking to avoid responding to his grand jury subpoena. He is likely to fail as well.
Kemp, who is running for reelection, does not want to underscore his opposition to Trump’s 2020 coup effort by testifying to the grand jury. Well, it would be politically awkward, but that’s no excuse to not comply with the legal obligations of any Georgia resident.
In response to Kemp’s motion to quash the subpoena, the Fulton County district attorney makes clear the wealth of information Kemp might provide. Dispensing with Kemp’s bogus claim of sovereign immunity (no one is suing Kemp) and his plea for gubernatorial executive privilege, the district attorney argues, “The factual content of his communications with former President Trump or persons connected to Trump can be revealed without disclosing any input he may have received from advisers concerning said conversation.”
There is plenty that Kemp can tell the grand jury, according to the filing:
Movant [Kemp] can testify inter alia about the existence of any evidence the Trump campaign or operatives provided to support their theory that Georgia’s election was “rigged”; Movant can testify about the identity of the people who attempted to communicate with him and whether they identified as representatives of Mr. ‘Trump; he can testify to the number of times he received or made calls related to the Trump campaign’s allegations and demands that he take action; he can testify about the specific contents of his phone conversations; he can testify about the contents of his telephone conversation with Mr. Trump; he can testify about whether Mr. Trump told Movant that he “got Movant elected”; he can testify about ‘whether Mr. Trump specifically sought a “special election” or some other form of relief; he can testify about conversations about “election integrity”; he can testify about whether threats were made by Mr. Trump or others; he can testify about his responses to Mr. Trump.
You can understand why Kemp would be squeamish about revealing all that. But he’s not the one who should be nervous. It’s Trump who has everything to lose.
To the extent that the Trump-Kemp conversations reveal the former president had no evidence of election fraud and tried to lean on Kemp to perform some extralegal contortions on Trump’s behalf, Kemp’s testimony will build on existing evidence (such as Trump’s January 2021 call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” just enough votes to flip the state’s vote outcome) and, together, might provide the basis for charges such as solicitation to commit election fraud, intentional interference with performance of election duties, conspiracy to commit election fraud and/or state racketeering.
Once more, Trump should worry about Republican witnesses that might incriminate him. And that holds true as well for the federal investigation into classified materials in Trump’s possession.
Recall that there is already voluminous evidence that Trump knew he possessed government documents that contained some of the nation’s most closely guarded secrets. For example, Trump personally went through documents, some of which were marked with the highest classification level, the New York Times reported. His attorneys had extended conversations with National Archives officials and then with the FBI. The government eventually sent a subpoena. It is virtually impossible to imagine how Trump could have been unaware he was in possession of highly confidential material that did not belong to him.
On top of all that, we learn that then-White House counsel Pat Cipollone acknowledged while Trump was still in office that the documents had to stay. The Post reports that in May 2021, “Archives officials were told by a Trump lawyer that the documents should be given back, according to an email from the top lawyer at the record-keeping agency.” In short, we now know that “Trump’s lawyers had concerns about Trump taking the documents and agreed that the boxes should be returned — at least according to the top Archives officials — while Trump kept the documents.” Trump, however, insisted the documents were his.
In short, the FBI, led by a Trump-appointed director, learned from Trump’s own White House counsel that he knew the documents were improperly retained. Again, even Trump’s White House counsel understood that Trump had no right to leave with sensitive documents.
In sum, wherever one looks — to the Georgia state prosecution, to the Jan. 6 hearings or to the Mar-a-Lago document debacle — Trump’s excuses are wearing thin. Evidence mounts of his willful disregard for the law. And Republicans continue to provide critical evidence that might well result in Trump’s indictment.
THE GRIFTER IN CHIEF’S DANGEROUS GAMBIT
By Michelle Cottle, The New York Times
If there’s one thing a top-notch grifter knows how to do, it’s exploit a crisis.
So it is that Donald Trump has transformed the F.B.I.’s search of his Mar-a-Lago home from a potentially debilitating scandal into a political bonanza — one that threatens to further divide a twitchy, polarized nation.
His formula for this alchemy? The usual: playing on pre-existing grievances among his followers — in this case, the right’s bone-deep suspicion and resentment of federal authority. If you thought members of the MAGAverse were jacked up on Deep State conspiracy theories before, just wait until they spend several more weeks consuming the toxic spinsanity that Mr. Trump and his enablers have been pushing out like black tar heroin.
Once Mr. Trump donned his trusty cloak of victimhood, which by now must be threadbare from overuse, the Republican response to the search was predictable: His base roared in outrage, a display of blind fealty featuring threats of lethal violence against their savior’s perceived persecutors. Party leaders tripped over themselves to fuel the fury, lobbing attacks at the F.B.I. for which they should forever hide their faces. (Dear Kevin McCarthy: Any blood spilled over this is partly on your hands. An “intolerable state of weaponized politicization” of the Justice Department? Seriously?)
Mr. Trump is back to dominating the political stage, and a couple of recent polls show his support among Republicans having ticked up vis-à-vis the party overall, as well as compared with potential contenders for the 2024 presidential nomination. And just when Gov. Ron DeSantis was feeling sassy!
Even better, from the perspective of a veteran snake-oil salesman, the money has come pouring in. In the immediate aftermath of the so-called raid, fund-raising by Mr. Trump’s political action committee spiked, even topping $1 million on at least a couple of days, according to The Washington Post. Compare this with the more modest daily haul of around $200,000 to $300,000 in recent months.
This bump was no accident: Mr. Trump is a master at bilking his fans, and the F.B.I. had barely left Mar-a-Lago when his fund-raising machine kicked into overdrive. In the 10 days after the search, Trump World sent more than 120 fund-raising emails mentioning the episode, reports USA Today. Others featured more general references to persecution by the left. Several solicitations cited the “Official Trump Defense Fund” — which smells suspiciously like the “Official Election Defense Fund” for which Trump World once cadged donations but that, as best as anyone can tell, was never a real thing.
And so the grift grinds on.
As with so many Trump cons, this one goes beyond being shameless and self-serving. The former president and his allies are engaged in something deeply pernicious: an aggressive disinformation campaign that is ginning up anti-government anxiety and animus on the right by painting Mr. Trump as beset by evil, out-of-control feds.
Right on schedule, the F.B.I. is feeling the MAGA wrath. In the creepier corners of the internet, right-wing extremists are calling for violence against federal agents. A Republican candidate for the Florida legislature was booted from social media platforms after posting, “Under my plan, all Floridians will have permission to shoot FBI, IRS, ATF and all other feds ON SIGHT! Let freedom ring!” Among ostensibly more responsible Republicans, including a smattering of House members, there is chatter about defunding the bureau, drawing comparisons with the “defund the police” movement on the left.
On one level, the conservative assault on law enforcement feels discordant, ironic, even hypocritical. Especially when you consider that the F.B.I. has an achingly conservative culture and has long enjoyed a chummy relationship with the Republican Party. More specifically, it bears noting that the F.B.I.’s director, Christopher Wray, was picked by Mr. Trump.
But on another, this development makes perfect sense. The political right, which increasingly controls the party, has long had … issues … with federal authority, which periodically bubble up in nasty, dangerous ways.
Think back to the early 1990s, when the F.B.I.’s clashes with white separatists at Ruby Ridge in Idaho and later Branch Davidians near Waco, Texas — both of which ended in bloodshed — fueled conspiracy theories and anti-government sentiment on the right. These episodes played a role in radicalizing the domestic terrorists responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, but the damage lingered far longer. Ruby Ridge has been held responsible for birthing the American militia movement, and, as The Times noted more than two decades after the Texas siege, “for right-wing militias and so-called Patriot groups, Waco amounts to evidence of a tyrannical, illegitimate government unblinkingly prepared to kill its own people.”
Playing to this anti-government fever can prove politically irresistible. In 1995, Wayne LaPierre, then the executive vice president of the N.R.A., called federal agents “jackbooted government thugs” in a fund-raising letter. Back then, this rhetoric troubled some Republicans, including George H.W. Bush, who canceled his N.R.A. membership in disgust. But just a few years later, Representative Tom DeLay, then a member of the Republican leadership, dusted off the term, denouncing as “jackbooted thugs” some of the immigration agents involved in the case of Elián González, the Cuban boy found floating off Florida on Thanksgiving in 1999 and later returned to his father in Cuba.
Some of this cultural friction may be unavoidable. Federal agents, after all, are the ones tasked with enforcing all those Big Government edicts that many conservatives regard as an infringement upon their God-given individual liberties.
It was agents from the Bureau of Land Management who wound up in an armed standoff in 2014 with the supporters of Cliven Bundy, the Nevada rancher who refused to pay the required fees for grazing his cattle on federal lands. Mr. Bundy insisted that the federal government had no rights to the land — and, moreover, stated that he abided “by almost zero federal laws.” The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, meanwhile, became a popular conservative target years before Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene introduced legislation in 2021 to abolish it.
Going back still farther, federal troops played a prominent role in dismantling the segregated South. In his 1963 inaugural address, Gov. George Wallace of Alabama delivered his infamous pro-segregation rallying cry and whined that, after the Civil War, the South was “set upon by the vulturous carpetbagger and federal troops, all loyal Southerners were denied the vote at the point of bayonet, so that the infamous illegal 14th Amendment might be passed.” Even now, plenty of white Southerners — the aggrieved heart of today’s Republican Party — cling to their sense of being oppressed by highhanded federal meddlers.
Responsible political leaders work to lessen these kinds of tensions for the good of the nation. Mr. Trump cares nothing about that. He has spent years working to delegitimize the entire Department of Justice, claiming political persecution by the Deep State to advance his own ambitions.
The G.O.P. may fancy itself the party of law and order, but Mr. Trump has endeavored to redefine which laws matter and what kind of order is legitimate. Short answer: only ones that ensure he comes out on top. It is the ultimate grift, and one that grows ever more dangerous.
By Michelle Cottle, The New York Times
If there’s one thing a top-notch grifter knows how to do, it’s exploit a crisis.
So it is that Donald Trump has transformed the F.B.I.’s search of his Mar-a-Lago home from a potentially debilitating scandal into a political bonanza — one that threatens to further divide a twitchy, polarized nation.
His formula for this alchemy? The usual: playing on pre-existing grievances among his followers — in this case, the right’s bone-deep suspicion and resentment of federal authority. If you thought members of the MAGAverse were jacked up on Deep State conspiracy theories before, just wait until they spend several more weeks consuming the toxic spinsanity that Mr. Trump and his enablers have been pushing out like black tar heroin.
Once Mr. Trump donned his trusty cloak of victimhood, which by now must be threadbare from overuse, the Republican response to the search was predictable: His base roared in outrage, a display of blind fealty featuring threats of lethal violence against their savior’s perceived persecutors. Party leaders tripped over themselves to fuel the fury, lobbing attacks at the F.B.I. for which they should forever hide their faces. (Dear Kevin McCarthy: Any blood spilled over this is partly on your hands. An “intolerable state of weaponized politicization” of the Justice Department? Seriously?)
Mr. Trump is back to dominating the political stage, and a couple of recent polls show his support among Republicans having ticked up vis-à-vis the party overall, as well as compared with potential contenders for the 2024 presidential nomination. And just when Gov. Ron DeSantis was feeling sassy!
Even better, from the perspective of a veteran snake-oil salesman, the money has come pouring in. In the immediate aftermath of the so-called raid, fund-raising by Mr. Trump’s political action committee spiked, even topping $1 million on at least a couple of days, according to The Washington Post. Compare this with the more modest daily haul of around $200,000 to $300,000 in recent months.
This bump was no accident: Mr. Trump is a master at bilking his fans, and the F.B.I. had barely left Mar-a-Lago when his fund-raising machine kicked into overdrive. In the 10 days after the search, Trump World sent more than 120 fund-raising emails mentioning the episode, reports USA Today. Others featured more general references to persecution by the left. Several solicitations cited the “Official Trump Defense Fund” — which smells suspiciously like the “Official Election Defense Fund” for which Trump World once cadged donations but that, as best as anyone can tell, was never a real thing.
And so the grift grinds on.
As with so many Trump cons, this one goes beyond being shameless and self-serving. The former president and his allies are engaged in something deeply pernicious: an aggressive disinformation campaign that is ginning up anti-government anxiety and animus on the right by painting Mr. Trump as beset by evil, out-of-control feds.
Right on schedule, the F.B.I. is feeling the MAGA wrath. In the creepier corners of the internet, right-wing extremists are calling for violence against federal agents. A Republican candidate for the Florida legislature was booted from social media platforms after posting, “Under my plan, all Floridians will have permission to shoot FBI, IRS, ATF and all other feds ON SIGHT! Let freedom ring!” Among ostensibly more responsible Republicans, including a smattering of House members, there is chatter about defunding the bureau, drawing comparisons with the “defund the police” movement on the left.
On one level, the conservative assault on law enforcement feels discordant, ironic, even hypocritical. Especially when you consider that the F.B.I. has an achingly conservative culture and has long enjoyed a chummy relationship with the Republican Party. More specifically, it bears noting that the F.B.I.’s director, Christopher Wray, was picked by Mr. Trump.
But on another, this development makes perfect sense. The political right, which increasingly controls the party, has long had … issues … with federal authority, which periodically bubble up in nasty, dangerous ways.
Think back to the early 1990s, when the F.B.I.’s clashes with white separatists at Ruby Ridge in Idaho and later Branch Davidians near Waco, Texas — both of which ended in bloodshed — fueled conspiracy theories and anti-government sentiment on the right. These episodes played a role in radicalizing the domestic terrorists responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, but the damage lingered far longer. Ruby Ridge has been held responsible for birthing the American militia movement, and, as The Times noted more than two decades after the Texas siege, “for right-wing militias and so-called Patriot groups, Waco amounts to evidence of a tyrannical, illegitimate government unblinkingly prepared to kill its own people.”
Playing to this anti-government fever can prove politically irresistible. In 1995, Wayne LaPierre, then the executive vice president of the N.R.A., called federal agents “jackbooted government thugs” in a fund-raising letter. Back then, this rhetoric troubled some Republicans, including George H.W. Bush, who canceled his N.R.A. membership in disgust. But just a few years later, Representative Tom DeLay, then a member of the Republican leadership, dusted off the term, denouncing as “jackbooted thugs” some of the immigration agents involved in the case of Elián González, the Cuban boy found floating off Florida on Thanksgiving in 1999 and later returned to his father in Cuba.
Some of this cultural friction may be unavoidable. Federal agents, after all, are the ones tasked with enforcing all those Big Government edicts that many conservatives regard as an infringement upon their God-given individual liberties.
It was agents from the Bureau of Land Management who wound up in an armed standoff in 2014 with the supporters of Cliven Bundy, the Nevada rancher who refused to pay the required fees for grazing his cattle on federal lands. Mr. Bundy insisted that the federal government had no rights to the land — and, moreover, stated that he abided “by almost zero federal laws.” The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, meanwhile, became a popular conservative target years before Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene introduced legislation in 2021 to abolish it.
Going back still farther, federal troops played a prominent role in dismantling the segregated South. In his 1963 inaugural address, Gov. George Wallace of Alabama delivered his infamous pro-segregation rallying cry and whined that, after the Civil War, the South was “set upon by the vulturous carpetbagger and federal troops, all loyal Southerners were denied the vote at the point of bayonet, so that the infamous illegal 14th Amendment might be passed.” Even now, plenty of white Southerners — the aggrieved heart of today’s Republican Party — cling to their sense of being oppressed by highhanded federal meddlers.
Responsible political leaders work to lessen these kinds of tensions for the good of the nation. Mr. Trump cares nothing about that. He has spent years working to delegitimize the entire Department of Justice, claiming political persecution by the Deep State to advance his own ambitions.
The G.O.P. may fancy itself the party of law and order, but Mr. Trump has endeavored to redefine which laws matter and what kind of order is legitimate. Short answer: only ones that ensure he comes out on top. It is the ultimate grift, and one that grows ever more dangerous.
HOW TO COVER ELECTION DENIERS? TRY CALLING THEM ELECTION LIARS.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
A fleet of Republican candidates are running on a fundamental lie that strikes at the heart of our democracy — and on an implicit promise of future insurrection. The common term is “election deniers,” but that underplays the menace they pose.
For starters, we should keep in mind that they are not only lying about the 2020 election, repeating the thoroughly debunked falsehood that President Biden was not legitimately elected. In no other era would a national party have nominated such crackpots to any office, let alone governor or U.S. Senate.
But the worrisome trends don’t stop there. Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania, has been linked to a rabidly antisemitic social media site known to have provided an “online home for the man charged with killing 11 worshipers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue.” (While condemning antisemitism, he has refused to disavow the site, to which his campaign paid $5,000 for “consulting services.”) In April, he spoke at a conference organized by Alan and Francine Fosdick, who have promoted QAnon conspiracy theorists, that “included the screening of a video claiming that the country is experiencing a ‘great awakening’ that will expose ‘ritual child sacrifice’ and a ‘global satanic blood cult.’ ”
Kari Lake, Republican nominee for governor in Arizona, has endorsed a candidate for Oklahoma state Senate who “produced such a stream of internet bile he can only be seen as a committed anti-Semite, homophobe and racist — one of the most vile people in political life, unfit for government and unwelcome in polite society,” as one Arizona Republic column put it.
Republican Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan has called the GOP nominee to succeed him, Dan Cox, a “QAnon whack job,” “a nut” and “not, in my opinion, mentally stable.”
Republicans’ reprehensible and radical views (including climate denial, xenophobia and advocacy for forced birth, with no exceptions from abortion bans, even for a 14-year-old rape victim) should be enough to disqualify them from office. But beyond all that, these and other GOP Senate, House, gubernatorial, secretary of state and attorney general candidates are running on the lie that set off the violent insurrection at the Capitol.
The GOP nominee for secretary of state in Arizona, state Rep. Mark Finchem, for example, “introduced a resolution to decertify 2020 election results in the state,” NPR reported. “Finchem — a longtime member of the Oath Keepers, a far-right extremist group — was at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and in an interview with NPR earlier this year he declined to call what happened there a riot or an insurrection.” Several members of the Oath Keepers have pleaded guilty and/or been convicted of crimes for their Jan. 6 actions.
Jim Marchant, Republicans’ nominee for secretary of state in Nevada, says that he would not have certified President Biden’s Nevada win (a victory that had a margin of more than 33,500 votes). Michigan’s GOP nominee for secretary of state is arguably crazier. As the Atlantic reports:
Kristina Karamo, a community-college professor who’d previously accused Democrats of having a “satanic agenda,” went on Fox News again and again to describe how illegal ballots supposedly had been tallied for Joe Biden at the TCF Center in Detroit, where she worked as a poll watcher. She testified before the State Senate that sacks of votes inexplicably had been dropped off there in the middle of election night. She suggested that Dominion Voting software had flipped Trump votes to Biden votes statewide.
None of what Karamo described actually happened—as far as anyone has been able to confirm.
It is grossly insufficient to call these characters “election skeptics” or even “election deniers.” Their candidacies are based on the “big lie” (supported by fabulist tales and fraudulent claims). Their views are well beyond what was the mainstream in American politics before the MAGA movement came along.
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who describes “large portions" of the GOP as “very sick,” vowed on ABC’s “This Week” to campaign against election liars. “I’m going to work to support their opponents. I think it matters that much.” If lifelong conservative Republican Cheney is apparently willing to campaign for Democrats, this is no ordinary midterm election. The mainstream media should adjust accordingly.
The mainstream media cannot pretend that these Republicans are ordinary candidates in ordinary races. The language to describe them should be as blunt as Cheney’s — liar, insurrectionist, antidemocratic, radical, etc. They should be introduced and labeled that way when they appear on interview shows or in print and online pieces. And their lies should be debunked within headlines and lead paragraphs (“Election liar Lake says...,” etc.).
To do otherwise would hide the nature of the candidates, misrepresent the facts to voters and fail to fulfill the journalistic obligation to take the side of truth. An election teeming with militant liars should not be covered as an ordinary contest between two parties. This is no time for coverage based on false equivalence and whataboutism if we are to survive as a democracy with credible elections.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
A fleet of Republican candidates are running on a fundamental lie that strikes at the heart of our democracy — and on an implicit promise of future insurrection. The common term is “election deniers,” but that underplays the menace they pose.
For starters, we should keep in mind that they are not only lying about the 2020 election, repeating the thoroughly debunked falsehood that President Biden was not legitimately elected. In no other era would a national party have nominated such crackpots to any office, let alone governor or U.S. Senate.
But the worrisome trends don’t stop there. Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania, has been linked to a rabidly antisemitic social media site known to have provided an “online home for the man charged with killing 11 worshipers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue.” (While condemning antisemitism, he has refused to disavow the site, to which his campaign paid $5,000 for “consulting services.”) In April, he spoke at a conference organized by Alan and Francine Fosdick, who have promoted QAnon conspiracy theorists, that “included the screening of a video claiming that the country is experiencing a ‘great awakening’ that will expose ‘ritual child sacrifice’ and a ‘global satanic blood cult.’ ”
Kari Lake, Republican nominee for governor in Arizona, has endorsed a candidate for Oklahoma state Senate who “produced such a stream of internet bile he can only be seen as a committed anti-Semite, homophobe and racist — one of the most vile people in political life, unfit for government and unwelcome in polite society,” as one Arizona Republic column put it.
Republican Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan has called the GOP nominee to succeed him, Dan Cox, a “QAnon whack job,” “a nut” and “not, in my opinion, mentally stable.”
Republicans’ reprehensible and radical views (including climate denial, xenophobia and advocacy for forced birth, with no exceptions from abortion bans, even for a 14-year-old rape victim) should be enough to disqualify them from office. But beyond all that, these and other GOP Senate, House, gubernatorial, secretary of state and attorney general candidates are running on the lie that set off the violent insurrection at the Capitol.
The GOP nominee for secretary of state in Arizona, state Rep. Mark Finchem, for example, “introduced a resolution to decertify 2020 election results in the state,” NPR reported. “Finchem — a longtime member of the Oath Keepers, a far-right extremist group — was at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and in an interview with NPR earlier this year he declined to call what happened there a riot or an insurrection.” Several members of the Oath Keepers have pleaded guilty and/or been convicted of crimes for their Jan. 6 actions.
Jim Marchant, Republicans’ nominee for secretary of state in Nevada, says that he would not have certified President Biden’s Nevada win (a victory that had a margin of more than 33,500 votes). Michigan’s GOP nominee for secretary of state is arguably crazier. As the Atlantic reports:
Kristina Karamo, a community-college professor who’d previously accused Democrats of having a “satanic agenda,” went on Fox News again and again to describe how illegal ballots supposedly had been tallied for Joe Biden at the TCF Center in Detroit, where she worked as a poll watcher. She testified before the State Senate that sacks of votes inexplicably had been dropped off there in the middle of election night. She suggested that Dominion Voting software had flipped Trump votes to Biden votes statewide.
None of what Karamo described actually happened—as far as anyone has been able to confirm.
It is grossly insufficient to call these characters “election skeptics” or even “election deniers.” Their candidacies are based on the “big lie” (supported by fabulist tales and fraudulent claims). Their views are well beyond what was the mainstream in American politics before the MAGA movement came along.
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who describes “large portions" of the GOP as “very sick,” vowed on ABC’s “This Week” to campaign against election liars. “I’m going to work to support their opponents. I think it matters that much.” If lifelong conservative Republican Cheney is apparently willing to campaign for Democrats, this is no ordinary midterm election. The mainstream media should adjust accordingly.
The mainstream media cannot pretend that these Republicans are ordinary candidates in ordinary races. The language to describe them should be as blunt as Cheney’s — liar, insurrectionist, antidemocratic, radical, etc. They should be introduced and labeled that way when they appear on interview shows or in print and online pieces. And their lies should be debunked within headlines and lead paragraphs (“Election liar Lake says...,” etc.).
To do otherwise would hide the nature of the candidates, misrepresent the facts to voters and fail to fulfill the journalistic obligation to take the side of truth. An election teeming with militant liars should not be covered as an ordinary contest between two parties. This is no time for coverage based on false equivalence and whataboutism if we are to survive as a democracy with credible elections.
THEY ARE PATRIOTS, UNLIKE THE MAGA CULT.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
As MAGA thugs are wont to do, their reaction to the lawful search at former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, which we now know might have been related to nuclear secrets (which Trump has denied), amounted to an stream of insults and threats designed to whip up unhinged, violent characters.
While the exact motives of the person who attacked FBI offices in Cincinnati on Thursday remain unknown, reports indicate he was in D.C. in the days leading up the Jan. 6 insurrection and might have been at the U.S. Capitol that day. The GOP’s cycle of incitement and violence continues.
FBI Director Christopher A. Wray was properly outraged. “Unfounded attacks on the integrity of the FBI erode respect for the rule of law and are a grave disservice to the men and women who sacrifice so much to protect others,” he said in a written statement on Thursday. “Violence and threats against law enforcement, including the FBI, are dangerous and should be deeply concerning to all Americans. Every day I see the men and women of the FBI doing their jobs professionally and with rigor, objectivity, and a fierce commitment to our mission of protecting the American people and upholding the Constitution. I am proud to serve alongside them.”
Attorney General Merrick Garland, in an earlier appearance announcing that the Justice Department would seek to unseal the search warrant for Trump’s home, sounded a similar note: “Let me address recent unfounded attacks on the professionalism of the FBI and Justice Department agents and prosecutors,” he said. “I will not stand by silently when their integrity is unfairly attacked.”
Garland continued, “The men and women of the FBI and the Justice Department are dedicated, patriotic public servants. Every day, they protect the American people from violent crime, terrorism, and other threats to their safety, while safeguarding our civil rights. They do so at great personal sacrifice and risk to themselves.”
It is worth remembering that the warrant came about because the FBI reportedly had reason to believe that Trump had not returned all classified materials that he removed from the White House upon leaving office after the documents were subpoenaed. The agents apparently did everything they could to avoid calling attention to themselves at Mar-a-Lago or disturbing those present, dressing in plainclothes to let them blend in. Garland in his remarks explained that “the warrant and the FBI property receipt were provided on the day of the search to the former president’s counsel, who was on-site during the search.”
This was no “raid,” let alone an action that should in any sane universe ever be compared to Nazis. Trump and his cohorts bear moral responsibility for those who absorb their reckless rhetoric and consider them marching orders, as is the case with their “big lie” of a stolen election and the ensuing violence on Jan. 6, 2021.
Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.), a former Navy officer, put out an appropriately indignant tweet on Thursday: “Any attack on law enforcement is unacceptable, and recent attacks on the men and women serving in federal law enforcement are despicable. I strongly condemn the attempted breach of the FBI’s office in Cincinnati, and I am praying for the safety of our officers and agents.”
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the lonely voice of reason amid an ocean of insanity in her party, similarly tweeted, “I have been ashamed to hear members of my party attacking the integrity of the FBI agents involved with the recent Mar-a-Lago search. These are sickening comments that put the lives of patriotic public servants at risk.”
Other Republican lawmakers have either been silent or joined in the reprehensible conspiracy theory-mongering. Some of them even want to defund the FBI.
For protecting our national security and for carrying out their duties honorably, lawfully and without fanfare, we can say to the men and women of the FBI, well done.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
As MAGA thugs are wont to do, their reaction to the lawful search at former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, which we now know might have been related to nuclear secrets (which Trump has denied), amounted to an stream of insults and threats designed to whip up unhinged, violent characters.
While the exact motives of the person who attacked FBI offices in Cincinnati on Thursday remain unknown, reports indicate he was in D.C. in the days leading up the Jan. 6 insurrection and might have been at the U.S. Capitol that day. The GOP’s cycle of incitement and violence continues.
FBI Director Christopher A. Wray was properly outraged. “Unfounded attacks on the integrity of the FBI erode respect for the rule of law and are a grave disservice to the men and women who sacrifice so much to protect others,” he said in a written statement on Thursday. “Violence and threats against law enforcement, including the FBI, are dangerous and should be deeply concerning to all Americans. Every day I see the men and women of the FBI doing their jobs professionally and with rigor, objectivity, and a fierce commitment to our mission of protecting the American people and upholding the Constitution. I am proud to serve alongside them.”
Attorney General Merrick Garland, in an earlier appearance announcing that the Justice Department would seek to unseal the search warrant for Trump’s home, sounded a similar note: “Let me address recent unfounded attacks on the professionalism of the FBI and Justice Department agents and prosecutors,” he said. “I will not stand by silently when their integrity is unfairly attacked.”
Garland continued, “The men and women of the FBI and the Justice Department are dedicated, patriotic public servants. Every day, they protect the American people from violent crime, terrorism, and other threats to their safety, while safeguarding our civil rights. They do so at great personal sacrifice and risk to themselves.”
It is worth remembering that the warrant came about because the FBI reportedly had reason to believe that Trump had not returned all classified materials that he removed from the White House upon leaving office after the documents were subpoenaed. The agents apparently did everything they could to avoid calling attention to themselves at Mar-a-Lago or disturbing those present, dressing in plainclothes to let them blend in. Garland in his remarks explained that “the warrant and the FBI property receipt were provided on the day of the search to the former president’s counsel, who was on-site during the search.”
This was no “raid,” let alone an action that should in any sane universe ever be compared to Nazis. Trump and his cohorts bear moral responsibility for those who absorb their reckless rhetoric and consider them marching orders, as is the case with their “big lie” of a stolen election and the ensuing violence on Jan. 6, 2021.
Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.), a former Navy officer, put out an appropriately indignant tweet on Thursday: “Any attack on law enforcement is unacceptable, and recent attacks on the men and women serving in federal law enforcement are despicable. I strongly condemn the attempted breach of the FBI’s office in Cincinnati, and I am praying for the safety of our officers and agents.”
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the lonely voice of reason amid an ocean of insanity in her party, similarly tweeted, “I have been ashamed to hear members of my party attacking the integrity of the FBI agents involved with the recent Mar-a-Lago search. These are sickening comments that put the lives of patriotic public servants at risk.”
Other Republican lawmakers have either been silent or joined in the reprehensible conspiracy theory-mongering. Some of them even want to defund the FBI.
For protecting our national security and for carrying out their duties honorably, lawfully and without fanfare, we can say to the men and women of the FBI, well done.
FILES SEIZED FROM TRUMP ARE PART OF ESPIONAGE ACT INQUIRY
The materials included some marked as top secret and meant to be viewed only in secure government facilities, according to a copy of the warrant.
By Maggie Haberman, Glenn Thrush and Charlie Savage, The New York Times
Federal agents removed top secret documents when they searched former President Donald J. Trump’s Florida residence on Monday as part of an investigation into possible violations of the Espionage Act and other laws, according to a search warrant made public on Friday.
F.B.I. agents seized 11 sets of documents in all, including some marked as “classified/TS/SCI” — shorthand for “top secret/sensitive compartmented information,” according to an inventory of the materials seized in the search. Information categorized in that fashion is meant to be viewed only in a secure government facility.
It was the latest stunning revelation from the series of investigations swirling around his efforts to retain power after his election loss, his business practices and, in this case, his handling of government material that he took with him when he left the White House.
The results of the search showed that material designated as closely guarded national secrets was being held at an unsecured resort club, Mar-a-Lago, owned and occupied by a former president who has long shown a disdain for careful handling of classified information.
The documents released on Friday also made clear for the first time the gravity of the possible crimes under investigation in an inquiry that has generated denunciations of the Justice Department and the F.B.I. from prominent Republicans and fueled the anger of Mr. Trump, a likely 2024 presidential candidate.
A federal judge on Friday unsealed the search warrant for former President Donald J. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Fla., as well as a list of items removed from the property when federal agents executed the warrant this week.
In total, agents collected five sets of top secret documents, three sets of secret documents and three sets of confidential documents, the inventory showed. Also taken by the F.B.I. agents were files pertaining to the pardon of Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime associate of Mr. Trump, and material about President Emmanuel Macron of France — along with more than a dozen boxes labeled only by number.
The disclosure of the search warrant and the inventory made clear the stakes of the collision between a Justice Department saying it is intent on enforcing federal law at the highest levels and a former president whose norm-shattering behavior includes exhibiting a proprietary view of material that legally belongs to the government.
It is not clear why Mr. Trump apparently chose to hang onto materials that would ignite another legal firestorm around him. But last year, he told close associates that he regarded some presidential documents as his own personal property. When speaking about his friendly correspondence with the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, Mr. Trump said, “They’re mine,” according to a person familiar with the exchange.
Even though the F.B.I.’s inventory of materials seized from Mar-a-Lago indicated that numerous files had markings like “top secret,” Mr. Trump said on Friday that he had declassified all the material. Presidents wield sweeping power to declassify documents, although normally when that happens such markings are removed.
But even if Mr. Trump declassified the information before he left office, none of the three potential crimes cited by the department in seeking the warrant depend on whether a mishandled document has been deemed classified.
The warrant said the agents would be searching for material as they investigated potential violations of the Espionage Act, which outlaws the unauthorized retention of defense-related information that could harm the United States or aid a foreign adversary — a standard that was written by Congress before the creation of the modern classification system.
It also cited a federal law that makes it a crime to destroy or conceal a document to obstruct a government investigation, and another statute that bars the unlawful taking or destruction of government records or documents.
The existence of a search warrant does not mean the Justice Department has decided to pursue criminal charges against anyone. Mr. Trump has repeatedly said he did nothing wrong.
A federal court in Florida unsealed the search warrant and the inventory on Friday after a request from the Justice Department a day earlier to make them public. Sections of the warrant and the accompanying inventory were reported earlier in the The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times obtained them as well before they were unsealed.
The warrant appears to have given agents broad latitude in searching for materials deemed to be improperly stored at Mar-a-Lago, allowing access to “the 45 Office” and “all storage rooms and all other rooms or areas” on the premises that might be used to store documents.
The most informative and sensitive document — the Justice Department’s application for the warrant, which most likely included an affidavit detailing the evidence that persuaded a judge there was probable cause to believe that a search would find evidence of crimes — was not among the documents the department asked to unseal. It is unlikely to become public soon if ever.
The investigation into possible Espionage Act violations represents a previously unknown and potentially significant dimension to an inquiry initiated by the National Archives.
The act includes several provisions that could apply to Mr. Trump’s case, particularly if it is later found that he was grossly negligent in storing the materials, or knew that the information he possessed could harm U.S. interests and still declined to return it to investigators, said Mary McCord, a former top official in the Justice Department’s National Security Division.
“We are talking about highly classified documents with the potential to seriously harm U.S. national security, including by benefiting foreign agents,” said Ms. McCord, now the executive director of Georgetown Law’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection.
The unsealing of the search warrant helped to flesh out what is known about why Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, following the advice of the National Security Division, felt compelled to search the former president’s home.
The search was carried out as part of the government’s effort to account for documents that one person briefed on the matter said related to some of the most highly classified programs run by the United States.
The person told The Times that investigators had been concerned about material that included some from what the government calls “special access programs,” a designation that is typically reserved for extremely sensitive operations carried out by the United States abroad or for closely held technologies and capabilities.
The Washington Post reported that some of that material might have been related to classified documents “relating to nuclear weapons,” which could have been part of the special access programs designation.
In January, Mr. Trump turned over to the National Archives 15 boxes of material he had improperly taken with him when he left office. The archives subsequently identified classified material in the boxes and referred the matter to the Justice Department, which later convened a grand jury.
But as the results of Monday’s search appeared to show, other government material remained at Mar-a-Lago. Why Mr. Trump did not return it along with the 15 boxes he gave to the archives in January is not clear. But at some point, the Justice Department learned about it, and it issued a subpoena this spring demanding the return of some materials.
The existence of the subpoena suggests that the department tried methods short of a search warrant to account for the material before taking the politically explosive step of sending F.B.I. agents unannounced to Mar-a-Lago.
Jay Bratt, the department’s top counterintelligence official, traveled with a small group of other federal officials to Mar-a-Lago in early June.
There, they met with Mr. Trump’s lawyer Evan Corcoran and examined a basement storage area where the former president had stowed material that had come with him from the White House. Mr. Bratt subsequently emailed Mr. Corcoran and told him to further secure the documents in the storage area with a stronger padlock.
Then federal investigators subpoenaed surveillance footage from the club, which could have given officials a glimpse of who was coming in and out of the storage area, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.
During the same period, investigators were in contact with a number of Mr. Trump’s aides who had some knowledge of how he stored and moved documents around the White House and who still worked for him, three people familiar with the events said.
At least one witness provided the investigators with information that led them to want to further press Mr. Trump for material, according to a person familiar with the inquiry.
Federal officials came to believe this summer that Mr. Trump had not relinquished all the material that left the White House with him at the end of his term, according to three people familiar with the investigation.
Last Friday, the Justice Department applied for the search warrant. Early on Monday morning, F.B.I. agents arrived at Mar-a-Lago.
The materials included some marked as top secret and meant to be viewed only in secure government facilities, according to a copy of the warrant.
By Maggie Haberman, Glenn Thrush and Charlie Savage, The New York Times
Federal agents removed top secret documents when they searched former President Donald J. Trump’s Florida residence on Monday as part of an investigation into possible violations of the Espionage Act and other laws, according to a search warrant made public on Friday.
F.B.I. agents seized 11 sets of documents in all, including some marked as “classified/TS/SCI” — shorthand for “top secret/sensitive compartmented information,” according to an inventory of the materials seized in the search. Information categorized in that fashion is meant to be viewed only in a secure government facility.
It was the latest stunning revelation from the series of investigations swirling around his efforts to retain power after his election loss, his business practices and, in this case, his handling of government material that he took with him when he left the White House.
The results of the search showed that material designated as closely guarded national secrets was being held at an unsecured resort club, Mar-a-Lago, owned and occupied by a former president who has long shown a disdain for careful handling of classified information.
The documents released on Friday also made clear for the first time the gravity of the possible crimes under investigation in an inquiry that has generated denunciations of the Justice Department and the F.B.I. from prominent Republicans and fueled the anger of Mr. Trump, a likely 2024 presidential candidate.
A federal judge on Friday unsealed the search warrant for former President Donald J. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Fla., as well as a list of items removed from the property when federal agents executed the warrant this week.
In total, agents collected five sets of top secret documents, three sets of secret documents and three sets of confidential documents, the inventory showed. Also taken by the F.B.I. agents were files pertaining to the pardon of Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime associate of Mr. Trump, and material about President Emmanuel Macron of France — along with more than a dozen boxes labeled only by number.
The disclosure of the search warrant and the inventory made clear the stakes of the collision between a Justice Department saying it is intent on enforcing federal law at the highest levels and a former president whose norm-shattering behavior includes exhibiting a proprietary view of material that legally belongs to the government.
It is not clear why Mr. Trump apparently chose to hang onto materials that would ignite another legal firestorm around him. But last year, he told close associates that he regarded some presidential documents as his own personal property. When speaking about his friendly correspondence with the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, Mr. Trump said, “They’re mine,” according to a person familiar with the exchange.
Even though the F.B.I.’s inventory of materials seized from Mar-a-Lago indicated that numerous files had markings like “top secret,” Mr. Trump said on Friday that he had declassified all the material. Presidents wield sweeping power to declassify documents, although normally when that happens such markings are removed.
But even if Mr. Trump declassified the information before he left office, none of the three potential crimes cited by the department in seeking the warrant depend on whether a mishandled document has been deemed classified.
The warrant said the agents would be searching for material as they investigated potential violations of the Espionage Act, which outlaws the unauthorized retention of defense-related information that could harm the United States or aid a foreign adversary — a standard that was written by Congress before the creation of the modern classification system.
It also cited a federal law that makes it a crime to destroy or conceal a document to obstruct a government investigation, and another statute that bars the unlawful taking or destruction of government records or documents.
The existence of a search warrant does not mean the Justice Department has decided to pursue criminal charges against anyone. Mr. Trump has repeatedly said he did nothing wrong.
A federal court in Florida unsealed the search warrant and the inventory on Friday after a request from the Justice Department a day earlier to make them public. Sections of the warrant and the accompanying inventory were reported earlier in the The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times obtained them as well before they were unsealed.
The warrant appears to have given agents broad latitude in searching for materials deemed to be improperly stored at Mar-a-Lago, allowing access to “the 45 Office” and “all storage rooms and all other rooms or areas” on the premises that might be used to store documents.
The most informative and sensitive document — the Justice Department’s application for the warrant, which most likely included an affidavit detailing the evidence that persuaded a judge there was probable cause to believe that a search would find evidence of crimes — was not among the documents the department asked to unseal. It is unlikely to become public soon if ever.
The investigation into possible Espionage Act violations represents a previously unknown and potentially significant dimension to an inquiry initiated by the National Archives.
The act includes several provisions that could apply to Mr. Trump’s case, particularly if it is later found that he was grossly negligent in storing the materials, or knew that the information he possessed could harm U.S. interests and still declined to return it to investigators, said Mary McCord, a former top official in the Justice Department’s National Security Division.
“We are talking about highly classified documents with the potential to seriously harm U.S. national security, including by benefiting foreign agents,” said Ms. McCord, now the executive director of Georgetown Law’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection.
The unsealing of the search warrant helped to flesh out what is known about why Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, following the advice of the National Security Division, felt compelled to search the former president’s home.
The search was carried out as part of the government’s effort to account for documents that one person briefed on the matter said related to some of the most highly classified programs run by the United States.
The person told The Times that investigators had been concerned about material that included some from what the government calls “special access programs,” a designation that is typically reserved for extremely sensitive operations carried out by the United States abroad or for closely held technologies and capabilities.
The Washington Post reported that some of that material might have been related to classified documents “relating to nuclear weapons,” which could have been part of the special access programs designation.
In January, Mr. Trump turned over to the National Archives 15 boxes of material he had improperly taken with him when he left office. The archives subsequently identified classified material in the boxes and referred the matter to the Justice Department, which later convened a grand jury.
But as the results of Monday’s search appeared to show, other government material remained at Mar-a-Lago. Why Mr. Trump did not return it along with the 15 boxes he gave to the archives in January is not clear. But at some point, the Justice Department learned about it, and it issued a subpoena this spring demanding the return of some materials.
The existence of the subpoena suggests that the department tried methods short of a search warrant to account for the material before taking the politically explosive step of sending F.B.I. agents unannounced to Mar-a-Lago.
Jay Bratt, the department’s top counterintelligence official, traveled with a small group of other federal officials to Mar-a-Lago in early June.
There, they met with Mr. Trump’s lawyer Evan Corcoran and examined a basement storage area where the former president had stowed material that had come with him from the White House. Mr. Bratt subsequently emailed Mr. Corcoran and told him to further secure the documents in the storage area with a stronger padlock.
Then federal investigators subpoenaed surveillance footage from the club, which could have given officials a glimpse of who was coming in and out of the storage area, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.
During the same period, investigators were in contact with a number of Mr. Trump’s aides who had some knowledge of how he stored and moved documents around the White House and who still worked for him, three people familiar with the events said.
At least one witness provided the investigators with information that led them to want to further press Mr. Trump for material, according to a person familiar with the inquiry.
Federal officials came to believe this summer that Mr. Trump had not relinquished all the material that left the White House with him at the end of his term, according to three people familiar with the investigation.
Last Friday, the Justice Department applied for the search warrant. Early on Monday morning, F.B.I. agents arrived at Mar-a-Lago.
THE GOP SURRENDERS ANY CLAIM TO BEING THE ‘LAW AND ORDER’ PARTY
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
For decades, the GOP purported to be the party that was “tough on crime.” Unlike their Democratic counterparts, Republican politicians said, the GOP would protect the public from villainous lawbreakers, safeguard security, and give no quarter to miscreants and menaces. It was the party that demonstrably Funded the Police.
No longer.
Today, on matters of critical crimefighting, they’re on the side of the scofflaws. That’s true whether such scofflaws happen to be their political idols or more run-of-the-mill white-collar crooks.
See: those Republicans outraged that the nation’s top cops, the FBI, would execute a lawful warrant to search former president Donald Trump’s Florida home.
Which is a bit strange. For decades — since well before he ran for office — Trump has demonstrated flagrant disdain for the law, whether that law involved the tax code or the Federal Records Act or civil rights protections. It seems quite reasonable then that, occasionally, some contingent of law enforcement might look into whether any hinted-at lawbreaking was actually going on. As happened on Monday, after officials first demonstrated to a judge probable cause of a violation of federal law.
To some Republicans, though, a lawfully executed search of a Trump property apparently merits shaming and defunding the FBI. To them, it is evidence that the Biden administration has “fully weaponized DOJ & FBI to target their political enemies.”
Apparently, these Republicans have forgotten that FBI Director Christopher A. Wray was appointed to his job by Trump himself. Not a political enemy.
Many Republican lawmakers have also somehow forgotten that they opposed impeaching Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection because they said any Trump-related criminal allegation was a matter for the justice system to decide. The most appropriate way to maintain law and order, some argued, was to punt to the courts: “Let history, and if necessary the courts, judge the events of the past,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said in February 2021 when he voted to acquit.
Yet a year later, Rubio has decided that when a court deems a search warrant for Trump’s property appropriate, that means we’re becoming a “banana republic.”
You might be tempted to write all this off as cultish devotion to one above-the-law man, rather than a wholesale reconfiguring of party principles. You’d be wrong.
Many Republicans have fought to shield other deep-pocketed, white-collar criminals from the rule of law. They have done this by deliberately defunding the tax police.
For years, lawmakers have gutted the Internal Revenue Service. This resulted in abysmal customer service as well as embarrassingly archaic, disco-era IT systems.
It also happened to be a gift to anyone stiffing Uncle Sam.
Audit rates have plummeted, particularly for mega-corporations and the ultra-wealthy. IRS-referred federal prosecutions reached their lowest level on record in fiscal 2020 and are on track to be barely higher this year. This is not, presumably, because Americans have suddenly become more law-abiding. The tax police are just outgunned and outmanned.
Dodging your taxes is not a victimless crime, whatever Trump (“I have brilliantly used those laws”) and his ilk might suggest; the rest of us ultimately pay more to fill the shortfall.
Democratic lawmakers have proposed remedying the problem by appropriating $80 billion to the IRS, which would fund system upgrades, customer service improvements and additional enforcement capacity. Republican politicians have responded with full-blown fear-mongering, declaring that the IRS intends to hire an army of “87,000 agents” to harass “middle-class Americans.”
This fundamentally misrepresents the proposal in several ways.
First, that 87,000 tally — referring to a Treasury estimate for hiring through 2031 — doesn’t subtract out the number of current workers who are expected to retire in that time period, which is more than half of the existing IRS workforce.
Additionally, the 87,000 number refers to how many employees of all kinds the IRS expects to hire in the next decade. It includes people to answer the phones, IT professionals and various other non-enforcement-related jobs. The subset of hires to work on audits would focus on big corporations and the ultra-wealthy — which are where the IRS has most cut back its enforcement efforts over the past decade, and which tend to be higher-value targets besides.
None of this seems to matter to those Republicans connecting the search of Mar-a-Lago with efforts to beef up the IRS. “If the FBI can raid the home of a former US President,” tweeted Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), “imagine what 87,000 more IRS agents will do to you.”
Even if Banks muddled the details, he’s not entirely wrong: Model your behavior, tax-related or otherwise, on Trump, and it’s possible that some official, somewhere, might someday look into it. But not to worry: Your friends in the GOP will shield you from the consequences, at the expense of the rest of us.
RIP, “law and order” GOP.
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
For decades, the GOP purported to be the party that was “tough on crime.” Unlike their Democratic counterparts, Republican politicians said, the GOP would protect the public from villainous lawbreakers, safeguard security, and give no quarter to miscreants and menaces. It was the party that demonstrably Funded the Police.
No longer.
Today, on matters of critical crimefighting, they’re on the side of the scofflaws. That’s true whether such scofflaws happen to be their political idols or more run-of-the-mill white-collar crooks.
See: those Republicans outraged that the nation’s top cops, the FBI, would execute a lawful warrant to search former president Donald Trump’s Florida home.
Which is a bit strange. For decades — since well before he ran for office — Trump has demonstrated flagrant disdain for the law, whether that law involved the tax code or the Federal Records Act or civil rights protections. It seems quite reasonable then that, occasionally, some contingent of law enforcement might look into whether any hinted-at lawbreaking was actually going on. As happened on Monday, after officials first demonstrated to a judge probable cause of a violation of federal law.
To some Republicans, though, a lawfully executed search of a Trump property apparently merits shaming and defunding the FBI. To them, it is evidence that the Biden administration has “fully weaponized DOJ & FBI to target their political enemies.”
Apparently, these Republicans have forgotten that FBI Director Christopher A. Wray was appointed to his job by Trump himself. Not a political enemy.
Many Republican lawmakers have also somehow forgotten that they opposed impeaching Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection because they said any Trump-related criminal allegation was a matter for the justice system to decide. The most appropriate way to maintain law and order, some argued, was to punt to the courts: “Let history, and if necessary the courts, judge the events of the past,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said in February 2021 when he voted to acquit.
Yet a year later, Rubio has decided that when a court deems a search warrant for Trump’s property appropriate, that means we’re becoming a “banana republic.”
You might be tempted to write all this off as cultish devotion to one above-the-law man, rather than a wholesale reconfiguring of party principles. You’d be wrong.
Many Republicans have fought to shield other deep-pocketed, white-collar criminals from the rule of law. They have done this by deliberately defunding the tax police.
For years, lawmakers have gutted the Internal Revenue Service. This resulted in abysmal customer service as well as embarrassingly archaic, disco-era IT systems.
It also happened to be a gift to anyone stiffing Uncle Sam.
Audit rates have plummeted, particularly for mega-corporations and the ultra-wealthy. IRS-referred federal prosecutions reached their lowest level on record in fiscal 2020 and are on track to be barely higher this year. This is not, presumably, because Americans have suddenly become more law-abiding. The tax police are just outgunned and outmanned.
Dodging your taxes is not a victimless crime, whatever Trump (“I have brilliantly used those laws”) and his ilk might suggest; the rest of us ultimately pay more to fill the shortfall.
Democratic lawmakers have proposed remedying the problem by appropriating $80 billion to the IRS, which would fund system upgrades, customer service improvements and additional enforcement capacity. Republican politicians have responded with full-blown fear-mongering, declaring that the IRS intends to hire an army of “87,000 agents” to harass “middle-class Americans.”
This fundamentally misrepresents the proposal in several ways.
First, that 87,000 tally — referring to a Treasury estimate for hiring through 2031 — doesn’t subtract out the number of current workers who are expected to retire in that time period, which is more than half of the existing IRS workforce.
Additionally, the 87,000 number refers to how many employees of all kinds the IRS expects to hire in the next decade. It includes people to answer the phones, IT professionals and various other non-enforcement-related jobs. The subset of hires to work on audits would focus on big corporations and the ultra-wealthy — which are where the IRS has most cut back its enforcement efforts over the past decade, and which tend to be higher-value targets besides.
None of this seems to matter to those Republicans connecting the search of Mar-a-Lago with efforts to beef up the IRS. “If the FBI can raid the home of a former US President,” tweeted Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), “imagine what 87,000 more IRS agents will do to you.”
Even if Banks muddled the details, he’s not entirely wrong: Model your behavior, tax-related or otherwise, on Trump, and it’s possible that some official, somewhere, might someday look into it. But not to worry: Your friends in the GOP will shield you from the consequences, at the expense of the rest of us.
RIP, “law and order” GOP.
HOW MANY NUTTY STANCES CAN ONE PARTY TAKE?
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
President Biden, despite his party’s thin House majority and the 50-50 Senate, has arguably passed more important bills than any president since Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. And LBJ had a filibuster-proof Senate majority throughout his presidency (a high of 68 Democrats at one point) and huge House majorities (his low, after the 1966 election, was a 61-vote advantage).
With the passage Sunday of the historic Inflation Reduction Act, which would invest in green energy, contain prescription drug costs and make it much more difficult for big corporations to evade paying taxes, Democrats capped a run of victories. That includes the American Rescue Plan, the infrastructure plan, the gun-safety bill, the semiconductor manufacturing bill, expanded health care for veterans exposed to burn pits, reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, Senate approval for admitting Sweden and Finland to NATO, and confirmation of 76 federal judges (including the first Black female Supreme Court justice).
Throw on top of that the 9 million jobs gained since Biden took office; the widely successful rollout of coronavirus vaccination and treatments that are preventing serious illness for the vast majority of Americans; the record-low 8 percent uninsured rate; and the killing of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, and it’s clear this administration has a remarkable record.
Biden certainly has not gotten everything he wanted. Voting rights reform, subsidized child care, free community college and the rest of the expansive Build Back Better plan did not get through. The Senate has not been able to codify Roe v. Wade, protections for gay marriage or access to contraception. And while gas prices have dropped by roughly a dollar, they are still historically high, contributing to high inflation.
But think of it from the other perspective. What did the vast majority of Republicans vote against? It’s gobsmacking:
For any member not representing a deep-red district or state, many of those votes are not only problematic but indefensible.
What and whom are Republicans for? According to their votes: forced birth, protecting big corporations and tax cheats from paying taxes, the National Rifle Association and Second Amendment absolutists, oil companies and Big Pharma, to name a few things. The ties that bind them — aversion to lifesaving coronavirus vaccines, election denial, censorship, reverence for the Confederacy and persecution of LGBTQ Americans — used to be considered beyond the pale. Now, they are standard positions.
Understandably, voters are upset about inflation, although the GOP has yet to lay out a single coherent plan to address it. Meanwhile, agenda items that Republicans have put forth are grossly unpopular and bizarre (e.g., raising taxes on poor people, repealing the Affordable Care Act, making Social Security and Medicare discretionary).
Certainly, poor candidate selection represents a challenge to the GOP, but even the slickest candidate would have a hard time peddling this loony stuff. Whatever Democrats’ errors and inadequacies might be, as least they don’t believe in all this hooey.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
President Biden, despite his party’s thin House majority and the 50-50 Senate, has arguably passed more important bills than any president since Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. And LBJ had a filibuster-proof Senate majority throughout his presidency (a high of 68 Democrats at one point) and huge House majorities (his low, after the 1966 election, was a 61-vote advantage).
With the passage Sunday of the historic Inflation Reduction Act, which would invest in green energy, contain prescription drug costs and make it much more difficult for big corporations to evade paying taxes, Democrats capped a run of victories. That includes the American Rescue Plan, the infrastructure plan, the gun-safety bill, the semiconductor manufacturing bill, expanded health care for veterans exposed to burn pits, reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, Senate approval for admitting Sweden and Finland to NATO, and confirmation of 76 federal judges (including the first Black female Supreme Court justice).
Throw on top of that the 9 million jobs gained since Biden took office; the widely successful rollout of coronavirus vaccination and treatments that are preventing serious illness for the vast majority of Americans; the record-low 8 percent uninsured rate; and the killing of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, and it’s clear this administration has a remarkable record.
Biden certainly has not gotten everything he wanted. Voting rights reform, subsidized child care, free community college and the rest of the expansive Build Back Better plan did not get through. The Senate has not been able to codify Roe v. Wade, protections for gay marriage or access to contraception. And while gas prices have dropped by roughly a dollar, they are still historically high, contributing to high inflation.
But think of it from the other perspective. What did the vast majority of Republicans vote against? It’s gobsmacking:
- Republicans opposed the American Rescue Plan en masse, including measures to reduce child poverty by 40 percent, protections from eviction during the height of the pandemic, money to tackle the coronavirus, food assistance for those going hungry during the pandemic, and money to keep businesses from failing and first responders from being laid off at the state and federal levels.
- All but 19 Senate Republicans and 13 House Republicans voted against the infrastructure plan.
- More than 30 Republican senators voted against the modest gun safety bill. All but 14 House Republicans opposed it.
- 174 House Republicans voted against the Pact Act, the bill to provide health care to sick veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And after inexcusably delaying the bill in the Senate, more than 10 Republicans voted against it.
- Republicans almost unanimously opposed an independent Jan. 6 commission; a voting rights bill (including the reauthorization of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which used to draw virtual unanimous approval); and the impeachment or conviction of Donald Trump for orchestrating a failed coup.
- Republicans voted overwhelmingly against measures to stop gas price gouging and against capping insulin at $35 (193 Republicans in the House and 43 in the Senate).
- Senate Republicans unanimously opposed the Inflation Reduction Act, putting them on the side of dozens of major corporations that pay nothing in federal taxes and tax scofflaws who, because of lack of funding for the IRS, avoid paying their fair share.
- The vast majority of House Republicans voted against access to contraception. About 75 percent voted against gay marriage. And virtually all of them voted against codifying Roe, against privacy protection for women who use pregnancy-related apps and against protections for women to travel to another state for reproductive health care.
For any member not representing a deep-red district or state, many of those votes are not only problematic but indefensible.
What and whom are Republicans for? According to their votes: forced birth, protecting big corporations and tax cheats from paying taxes, the National Rifle Association and Second Amendment absolutists, oil companies and Big Pharma, to name a few things. The ties that bind them — aversion to lifesaving coronavirus vaccines, election denial, censorship, reverence for the Confederacy and persecution of LGBTQ Americans — used to be considered beyond the pale. Now, they are standard positions.
Understandably, voters are upset about inflation, although the GOP has yet to lay out a single coherent plan to address it. Meanwhile, agenda items that Republicans have put forth are grossly unpopular and bizarre (e.g., raising taxes on poor people, repealing the Affordable Care Act, making Social Security and Medicare discretionary).
Certainly, poor candidate selection represents a challenge to the GOP, but even the slickest candidate would have a hard time peddling this loony stuff. Whatever Democrats’ errors and inadequacies might be, as least they don’t believe in all this hooey.
THE GOP IS VIKTOR ORBAN’S PARTY NOW
By Max Boot, The Washington Post
All you need to know about the state of the Republican Party today is what happened at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas on Thursday. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has been destroying his country’s democracy, received a standing ovation less than two weeks after he gave a speech in Romania in which he endorsed the white supremacist “replacement theory” and denounced a “mixed-race world.”
One of Orban’s longtime advisers quit over what she described as a speech “worthy of Goebbels” before backtracking a bit. But Orban hasn’t recanted his repugnant views, and right-wingers in Dallas thrilled to his denunciations of immigration, abortion, LGBTQ rights and “the Woke Globalist Goliath.” He even excoriated Jewish financier George Soros, a Hungarian native, as someone who “hated Christianity.” The racist and anti-Semitic signaling was not subtle.
You can trace the current iteration of the Republican Party to the 1990s Gingrich revolution, as my brilliant Post colleague Dana Milbank does in a new book. Or you can go further back to the Goldwater revolution in the 1960s, as I did in my own book. But we must also acknowledge that something profound has changed in recent years.
Ten years ago this month, Republicans nominated a national ticket of Mitt Romney and Paul D. Ryan, a centrist former governor and a budget policy wonk. Now we have the coup-coup caucus cheering Viktor Orban. This is the Trump effect: The former president has made the marginal into the mainstream of the Republican Party, and vice versa.
Some observers were deceived by the success in Georgia of Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in handily defeating Trumpist challengers in May despite certifying President Biden’s victory. That was an aberration. In other races across the country, Republicans are nominating far-right fanatics who claim that the 2020 presidential election — and any election that they lose, for that matter — was “rigged.” By refusing to accept electoral defeat, they embrace authoritarianism.
In four key swing states — Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania — the GOP nominees to oversee state elections deny the legitimacy of Biden’s election. Two of those candidates, Arizona secretary of state nominee Mark Finchem and Pennsylvania governor nominee Doug Mastriano, were outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. If elected, they are no more likely to certify a Democratic victory in 2024 than they are to embrace critical race theory. Meanwhile, most House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for inciting an insurrection are being driven out of Congress. Michigan Rep. Peter Meijer was the latest to lose a primary last week to a proponent of the “big lie.”
Taking a cue from Trump, the winners of Republican primaries traffic in authoritarian imagery and rhetoric. Guns have become a de rigueur accessory in GOP campaign commercials. Arizona U.S. Senate nominee Blake Masters wants to lock up Anthony S. Fauci for trying to slow the spread of covid-19. And Arizona gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake wants to lock up her opponent for certifying Biden’s election victory.
Masters and Ohio U.S. Senate nominee J.D. Vance are both bankrolled by tech tycoon Peter Thiel, who has concluded that freedom and democracy aren’t “compatible.” Thiel’s “house political philosopher” is far-right blogger Curtis Yarvin, who is also close to Masters and Vance. Yarvin has mused that we may need an “American Caesar” to take control of the federal government. Trump is auditioning for the role; his henchmen are plotting to fire tens of thousands of civil servants and replace them with ultra-MAGA loyalists in 2025.
The libertarian-leaning Republican Party I grew up with in the 1980s is long gone and not coming back. Republicans still use the language of “freedom,” but their idea of freedom is warped: They want Americans to be free to carry weapons of war or spread deadly diseases but not to terminate a pregnancy or discuss gender or sexuality in school.
Republicans, once suspicious of government power, are now eager to use it to impose their agenda. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, next to Trump as the most likely 2024 GOP nominee, is establishing his culture-war credentials by, most recently, suspending an elected prosecutor who vowed not to “criminalize personal medical decisions,” such as abortion or “gender-affirming healthcare.” DeSantis even threatened to investigate parents who take their kids to drag shows.
These Republican extremists are often described as the “New Right,” but the term doesn’t fit. The New Right was the movement in the 1960s-1970s that produced Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. You can argue that the New Right helped lead to the present imbroglio, but it’s hard to imagine Goldwater or Reagan flashing Viktor Orban a thumbs-up, as Trump did.
Some other term is needed. “Christian nationalism” and “nationalist conservatism” have been bandied about, but the most apt phrase for this American authoritarianism is the New Fascism, and it is fast becoming the dominant trend on the right. If the GOP gains power in Washington, all of America will be in danger of being Orbanized.
By Max Boot, The Washington Post
All you need to know about the state of the Republican Party today is what happened at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas on Thursday. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has been destroying his country’s democracy, received a standing ovation less than two weeks after he gave a speech in Romania in which he endorsed the white supremacist “replacement theory” and denounced a “mixed-race world.”
One of Orban’s longtime advisers quit over what she described as a speech “worthy of Goebbels” before backtracking a bit. But Orban hasn’t recanted his repugnant views, and right-wingers in Dallas thrilled to his denunciations of immigration, abortion, LGBTQ rights and “the Woke Globalist Goliath.” He even excoriated Jewish financier George Soros, a Hungarian native, as someone who “hated Christianity.” The racist and anti-Semitic signaling was not subtle.
You can trace the current iteration of the Republican Party to the 1990s Gingrich revolution, as my brilliant Post colleague Dana Milbank does in a new book. Or you can go further back to the Goldwater revolution in the 1960s, as I did in my own book. But we must also acknowledge that something profound has changed in recent years.
Ten years ago this month, Republicans nominated a national ticket of Mitt Romney and Paul D. Ryan, a centrist former governor and a budget policy wonk. Now we have the coup-coup caucus cheering Viktor Orban. This is the Trump effect: The former president has made the marginal into the mainstream of the Republican Party, and vice versa.
Some observers were deceived by the success in Georgia of Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in handily defeating Trumpist challengers in May despite certifying President Biden’s victory. That was an aberration. In other races across the country, Republicans are nominating far-right fanatics who claim that the 2020 presidential election — and any election that they lose, for that matter — was “rigged.” By refusing to accept electoral defeat, they embrace authoritarianism.
In four key swing states — Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania — the GOP nominees to oversee state elections deny the legitimacy of Biden’s election. Two of those candidates, Arizona secretary of state nominee Mark Finchem and Pennsylvania governor nominee Doug Mastriano, were outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. If elected, they are no more likely to certify a Democratic victory in 2024 than they are to embrace critical race theory. Meanwhile, most House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for inciting an insurrection are being driven out of Congress. Michigan Rep. Peter Meijer was the latest to lose a primary last week to a proponent of the “big lie.”
Taking a cue from Trump, the winners of Republican primaries traffic in authoritarian imagery and rhetoric. Guns have become a de rigueur accessory in GOP campaign commercials. Arizona U.S. Senate nominee Blake Masters wants to lock up Anthony S. Fauci for trying to slow the spread of covid-19. And Arizona gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake wants to lock up her opponent for certifying Biden’s election victory.
Masters and Ohio U.S. Senate nominee J.D. Vance are both bankrolled by tech tycoon Peter Thiel, who has concluded that freedom and democracy aren’t “compatible.” Thiel’s “house political philosopher” is far-right blogger Curtis Yarvin, who is also close to Masters and Vance. Yarvin has mused that we may need an “American Caesar” to take control of the federal government. Trump is auditioning for the role; his henchmen are plotting to fire tens of thousands of civil servants and replace them with ultra-MAGA loyalists in 2025.
The libertarian-leaning Republican Party I grew up with in the 1980s is long gone and not coming back. Republicans still use the language of “freedom,” but their idea of freedom is warped: They want Americans to be free to carry weapons of war or spread deadly diseases but not to terminate a pregnancy or discuss gender or sexuality in school.
Republicans, once suspicious of government power, are now eager to use it to impose their agenda. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, next to Trump as the most likely 2024 GOP nominee, is establishing his culture-war credentials by, most recently, suspending an elected prosecutor who vowed not to “criminalize personal medical decisions,” such as abortion or “gender-affirming healthcare.” DeSantis even threatened to investigate parents who take their kids to drag shows.
These Republican extremists are often described as the “New Right,” but the term doesn’t fit. The New Right was the movement in the 1960s-1970s that produced Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. You can argue that the New Right helped lead to the present imbroglio, but it’s hard to imagine Goldwater or Reagan flashing Viktor Orban a thumbs-up, as Trump did.
Some other term is needed. “Christian nationalism” and “nationalist conservatism” have been bandied about, but the most apt phrase for this American authoritarianism is the New Fascism, and it is fast becoming the dominant trend on the right. If the GOP gains power in Washington, all of America will be in danger of being Orbanized.
TRUMP WANTED ‘TOTALLY LOYAL’ GENERALS LIKE HITLER’S, NEW BOOK SAYS
By Amy B Wang, The Washington Post
Former president Donald Trump once told a top adviser that he wanted “totally loyal” generals like the ones who had served Adolf Hitler — unaware that some of Hitler’s generals had tried to assassinate the Nazi leader several times, according to a new book about the Trump presidency.
Trump complained to John Kelly, then his chief of staff and a retired Marine Corps general, “why can’t you be like the German generals?” according to “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021” by journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser.
When Kelly asked which generals he meant, Trump replied: “The German generals in World War II.”
“You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off?” Kelly said, according to the book.
Trump didn’t believe him, the book says. “No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,” Trump insisted.
An excerpt of the book, published Monday in the New Yorker, paints a picture of a president at conflict with his own military leaders, who were torn between resigning in protest and staying on as members of the Trump administration to prevent greater catastrophe.
According to those interviewed for the book, Trump’s military leaders and advisers were regularly trying to pull back on Trump’s desire to inflate his image and power, and to reconcile that desire with the values of the United States.
In one conversation from the book, Trump reportedly told Kelly he didn’t want any injured veterans to be part of an Independence Day parade he was planning.
“Look, I don’t want any wounded guys in the parade,” Trump said. “This doesn’t look good for me.” He explained with distaste that at the Bastille Day parade there had been several formations of injured veterans, including wheelchair-bound soldiers who had lost limbs in battle.
Kelly could not believe what he was hearing. “Those are the heroes,” he told Trump. “In our society, there’s only one group of people who are more heroic than they are—and they are buried over in Arlington.” Kelly did not mention that his own son Robert, a lieutenant killed in action in Afghanistan, was among the dead interred there.
“I don’t want them,” Trump repeated. “It doesn’t look good for me.”
A spokesman for Trump had no immediate comment about the revelations in the book.
In another portion of the book, the authors describe how Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, drafted a resignation letter in the days after military police fired gas canisters and used grenades containing rubber pellets, clearing racial justice protesters from Lafayette Square ahead of Trump’s photo op in front of nearby St. John’s Church.
That event and other recent ones had prompted Milley to do “deep soul-searching,” Milley wrote in the letter, adding that he believed Trump was “doing great and irreparable harm” to the country. He wrote that he thought the president had made “a concerted effort over time to politicize the United States military” and that he no longer believed he could change that.
“You are using the military to create fear in the minds of the people — and we are trying to protect the American people,” Milley wrote. “I cannot stand idly by and participate in that attack, verbally or otherwise, on the American people.”
Trump, he added later, did not seem to believe or value the idea, embodied in the Constitution, that all men and women are created equal. Lastly, Milley said he “deeply” believed that Trump was ruining the international order and causing significant damage to the United States overseas and did not understand that millions of Americans had died in wars fighting fascism, Nazism and extremism.
“It’s now obvious to me that you don’t understand that world order. You don’t understand what [World War II] was all about,” Milley wrote. “In fact, you subscribe to many of the principles that we fought against. And I cannot be a party to that.”
Though the resignation letter was ultimately never sent, it showed the degree to which Milley believed Trump had already inflicted damage on the country. And though he was convinced by several not to quit, Milley would later fear two “nightmare scenarios” related to Trump’s attempts to hang onto power at home, according to the book.
“Milley feared that Trump’s ‘Hitler-like’ embrace of his own lies about the election would lead him to seek a ‘Reichstag moment,’ " Baker and Glasser wrote, referring to a 1933 fire in the German parliament that Hitler seized to take control of the country. “Milley now envisioned a declaration of martial law or a Presidential invocation of the Insurrection Act, with Trumpian Brown Shirts fomenting violence.”
Milley later feared that the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection — in which a pro-Trump mob overran the U.S. Capitol to try to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory — was in fact that “Reichstag moment.”
“They shook the very Republic to the core,” Milley later said about the Capitol attack, according to the book. “Can you imagine what a group of people who are much more capable could have done?”
By Amy B Wang, The Washington Post
Former president Donald Trump once told a top adviser that he wanted “totally loyal” generals like the ones who had served Adolf Hitler — unaware that some of Hitler’s generals had tried to assassinate the Nazi leader several times, according to a new book about the Trump presidency.
Trump complained to John Kelly, then his chief of staff and a retired Marine Corps general, “why can’t you be like the German generals?” according to “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021” by journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser.
When Kelly asked which generals he meant, Trump replied: “The German generals in World War II.”
“You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off?” Kelly said, according to the book.
Trump didn’t believe him, the book says. “No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,” Trump insisted.
An excerpt of the book, published Monday in the New Yorker, paints a picture of a president at conflict with his own military leaders, who were torn between resigning in protest and staying on as members of the Trump administration to prevent greater catastrophe.
According to those interviewed for the book, Trump’s military leaders and advisers were regularly trying to pull back on Trump’s desire to inflate his image and power, and to reconcile that desire with the values of the United States.
In one conversation from the book, Trump reportedly told Kelly he didn’t want any injured veterans to be part of an Independence Day parade he was planning.
“Look, I don’t want any wounded guys in the parade,” Trump said. “This doesn’t look good for me.” He explained with distaste that at the Bastille Day parade there had been several formations of injured veterans, including wheelchair-bound soldiers who had lost limbs in battle.
Kelly could not believe what he was hearing. “Those are the heroes,” he told Trump. “In our society, there’s only one group of people who are more heroic than they are—and they are buried over in Arlington.” Kelly did not mention that his own son Robert, a lieutenant killed in action in Afghanistan, was among the dead interred there.
“I don’t want them,” Trump repeated. “It doesn’t look good for me.”
A spokesman for Trump had no immediate comment about the revelations in the book.
In another portion of the book, the authors describe how Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, drafted a resignation letter in the days after military police fired gas canisters and used grenades containing rubber pellets, clearing racial justice protesters from Lafayette Square ahead of Trump’s photo op in front of nearby St. John’s Church.
That event and other recent ones had prompted Milley to do “deep soul-searching,” Milley wrote in the letter, adding that he believed Trump was “doing great and irreparable harm” to the country. He wrote that he thought the president had made “a concerted effort over time to politicize the United States military” and that he no longer believed he could change that.
“You are using the military to create fear in the minds of the people — and we are trying to protect the American people,” Milley wrote. “I cannot stand idly by and participate in that attack, verbally or otherwise, on the American people.”
Trump, he added later, did not seem to believe or value the idea, embodied in the Constitution, that all men and women are created equal. Lastly, Milley said he “deeply” believed that Trump was ruining the international order and causing significant damage to the United States overseas and did not understand that millions of Americans had died in wars fighting fascism, Nazism and extremism.
“It’s now obvious to me that you don’t understand that world order. You don’t understand what [World War II] was all about,” Milley wrote. “In fact, you subscribe to many of the principles that we fought against. And I cannot be a party to that.”
Though the resignation letter was ultimately never sent, it showed the degree to which Milley believed Trump had already inflicted damage on the country. And though he was convinced by several not to quit, Milley would later fear two “nightmare scenarios” related to Trump’s attempts to hang onto power at home, according to the book.
“Milley feared that Trump’s ‘Hitler-like’ embrace of his own lies about the election would lead him to seek a ‘Reichstag moment,’ " Baker and Glasser wrote, referring to a 1933 fire in the German parliament that Hitler seized to take control of the country. “Milley now envisioned a declaration of martial law or a Presidential invocation of the Insurrection Act, with Trumpian Brown Shirts fomenting violence.”
Milley later feared that the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection — in which a pro-Trump mob overran the U.S. Capitol to try to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory — was in fact that “Reichstag moment.”
“They shook the very Republic to the core,” Milley later said about the Capitol attack, according to the book. “Can you imagine what a group of people who are much more capable could have done?”
REPUBLICANS ARE COMING AFTER SOCIAL SECURITY. DEMOCRATS, TAKE NOTE.
By Helaine Olen, The Washington Post
Social Security is an enormously popular program. It’s also hugely effective. Minus their monthly check, a large number of seniors would live in financially straitened circumstances.
So, of course, the Republicans are once again taking aim at it and are, in the process, handing Democrats an issue almost as politically potent as abortion rights as they fight to hold on to their slim majorities in the November elections.
The most recent to join the fray is Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.). He announced earlier this week that he believes Social Security should be up for a congressional reauthorization vote every single year. “If you qualify for an entitlement, you get it no matter what the cost,” he huffed on a podcast.
The nerve of those entitled seniors. They paid faithfully into a program and expect a check. Imagine that!
This ups the ante from Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who opened the Social Security floodgates earlier this year when he proposed putting all government programs — including Social Security and Medicare — up for renewal every five years. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) immediately declared it dead on arrival, but that hasn’t stopped some Republicans such as Johnson from expressing their approval.
And then there is Arizona, where Blake Masters, Sen. Mark Kelly’s Republican challenger in November, has declared himself privatization-curious when it comes to Social Security.
“We need fresh and innovative thinking, maybe we should privatize Social Security,” he said in June. “Get the government out of it.” After enormous pushback, he backtracked, saying “I shouldn’t have said ‘privatize.’ I don’t think we should … mess with Social Security.”
Definitely spoken like a man you can rely on when it’s crunch time for Social Security.
The Social Security trust fund is set to run out of money by 2035. In a worst case scenario, when that happens, benefits would be cut — likely by 20 percent. But even that doesn’t need to happen. There is nothing stopping Congress from simply voting to allow Social Security benefits to be paid for out of general revenue.
The Republicans mouthing off claim to want to save Social Security from itself and that they aren’t attacking the program. Johnson says a yearly renewal would allow Washington pols to “fix problems or fix programs that are broken, that are going to be bankrupt.” As for Masters, he parrots the common but false belief that the program won’t be able to pay anyone benefits in the future.
Democrats, on the other hand, actually have systemic plans to address these woes. As I noted last week, there are two bills in Congress that would shore up the program while expanding benefits. One, sponsored by Rep. John B. Larson (D-Conn.), would extend solvency for several years. Another, championed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) would solidify it through the end of the century.
Both bills would raise taxes on higher earners. Perhaps not coincidentally, neither has a single Republican co-sponsor.
In fact, polls show voters want, per Sanders and Larson, a more generous and stable Social Security program, not a smaller, riskier and precarious one. This isn’t a surprise. As the pension system has increasingly given way to defined contribution schemes such as 401(k) plans, more and more Americans are at risk of running short of money in their golden years.
This is particularly true for Latinos, a group Republicans are making gains with, who possess a mere fraction of the wealth of White households, and are less likely to use individual retirement savings options.
So it was no surprise, when progressive polling group Data for Progress asked likely voters last month whether they supported Scott’s plan to end federal programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid if Congress didn’t vote to reauthorize them, the proposal received a resounding thumbs down, with three-fourths of those surveyed expressing their dismay.
When President George W. Bush and his fellow Republicans tried to push through Social Security privatization in 2005, it quite possibly contributed to the party losing control of the House in 2006.
Conversely, it’s quite possible that Donald Trump triumphed in 2016, in part, because as other Republican candidates seemingly competed to see who could toss grandma from the train hardest and fastest, he declared he would “save” Social Security. Yet, by 2020, he, too, was making noises about “entitlement” reform.
Since the program began, there have been Republicans who have attempted to cut back on or get the government out of Social Security. All of this trash talk is just the latest line of attack, taking advantage of a combination of deficit scare-mongering, fears for the program’s future, and a pervasive and widely shared sense that the U.S. government no longer works and can’t accomplish much for anyone — something I’ve dubbed the “can’t do” society — to make progress toward a long-sought goal.
It’s almost as though these Republicans can’t stop themselves from acting on the hope that when it comes to Social Security, the majority of voters won’t take them seriously, even as the GOP base laps their message up. But, in an age when increasing numbers of Americans are going to need a Social Security check to get by in retirement, that seems like a risky bet.
By Helaine Olen, The Washington Post
Social Security is an enormously popular program. It’s also hugely effective. Minus their monthly check, a large number of seniors would live in financially straitened circumstances.
So, of course, the Republicans are once again taking aim at it and are, in the process, handing Democrats an issue almost as politically potent as abortion rights as they fight to hold on to their slim majorities in the November elections.
The most recent to join the fray is Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.). He announced earlier this week that he believes Social Security should be up for a congressional reauthorization vote every single year. “If you qualify for an entitlement, you get it no matter what the cost,” he huffed on a podcast.
The nerve of those entitled seniors. They paid faithfully into a program and expect a check. Imagine that!
This ups the ante from Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who opened the Social Security floodgates earlier this year when he proposed putting all government programs — including Social Security and Medicare — up for renewal every five years. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) immediately declared it dead on arrival, but that hasn’t stopped some Republicans such as Johnson from expressing their approval.
And then there is Arizona, where Blake Masters, Sen. Mark Kelly’s Republican challenger in November, has declared himself privatization-curious when it comes to Social Security.
“We need fresh and innovative thinking, maybe we should privatize Social Security,” he said in June. “Get the government out of it.” After enormous pushback, he backtracked, saying “I shouldn’t have said ‘privatize.’ I don’t think we should … mess with Social Security.”
Definitely spoken like a man you can rely on when it’s crunch time for Social Security.
The Social Security trust fund is set to run out of money by 2035. In a worst case scenario, when that happens, benefits would be cut — likely by 20 percent. But even that doesn’t need to happen. There is nothing stopping Congress from simply voting to allow Social Security benefits to be paid for out of general revenue.
The Republicans mouthing off claim to want to save Social Security from itself and that they aren’t attacking the program. Johnson says a yearly renewal would allow Washington pols to “fix problems or fix programs that are broken, that are going to be bankrupt.” As for Masters, he parrots the common but false belief that the program won’t be able to pay anyone benefits in the future.
Democrats, on the other hand, actually have systemic plans to address these woes. As I noted last week, there are two bills in Congress that would shore up the program while expanding benefits. One, sponsored by Rep. John B. Larson (D-Conn.), would extend solvency for several years. Another, championed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) would solidify it through the end of the century.
Both bills would raise taxes on higher earners. Perhaps not coincidentally, neither has a single Republican co-sponsor.
In fact, polls show voters want, per Sanders and Larson, a more generous and stable Social Security program, not a smaller, riskier and precarious one. This isn’t a surprise. As the pension system has increasingly given way to defined contribution schemes such as 401(k) plans, more and more Americans are at risk of running short of money in their golden years.
This is particularly true for Latinos, a group Republicans are making gains with, who possess a mere fraction of the wealth of White households, and are less likely to use individual retirement savings options.
So it was no surprise, when progressive polling group Data for Progress asked likely voters last month whether they supported Scott’s plan to end federal programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid if Congress didn’t vote to reauthorize them, the proposal received a resounding thumbs down, with three-fourths of those surveyed expressing their dismay.
When President George W. Bush and his fellow Republicans tried to push through Social Security privatization in 2005, it quite possibly contributed to the party losing control of the House in 2006.
Conversely, it’s quite possible that Donald Trump triumphed in 2016, in part, because as other Republican candidates seemingly competed to see who could toss grandma from the train hardest and fastest, he declared he would “save” Social Security. Yet, by 2020, he, too, was making noises about “entitlement” reform.
Since the program began, there have been Republicans who have attempted to cut back on or get the government out of Social Security. All of this trash talk is just the latest line of attack, taking advantage of a combination of deficit scare-mongering, fears for the program’s future, and a pervasive and widely shared sense that the U.S. government no longer works and can’t accomplish much for anyone — something I’ve dubbed the “can’t do” society — to make progress toward a long-sought goal.
It’s almost as though these Republicans can’t stop themselves from acting on the hope that when it comes to Social Security, the majority of voters won’t take them seriously, even as the GOP base laps their message up. But, in an age when increasing numbers of Americans are going to need a Social Security check to get by in retirement, that seems like a risky bet.
JON STEWART SHOWS DEMOCRATS HOW TO RESPOND TO GOP CRUELTY
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Senate Republicans last week provided Americans with a vivid example of their party’s abject cruelty when they rejected the PACT Act, which would provide veterans with benefits to cover the health consequences they endured from exposure to burn pits while serving in Afghanistan and Iraq. They did so even though many of those same Republicans approved a nearly identical bill in June.
For a tutorial on how to respond to the lies and heartlessness Republicans have shown here, Democrats should turn to an unlikely source: comedian Jon Stewart.
The GOP’s reversal on the bill seems to be motivated by payback. Republicans voted against the PACT Act because they were angry over the agreement between Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) on the Inflation Reduction Act, the reconciliation package that includes tax hikes on the wealthy, subsidies for Affordable Care Act coverage and investment in green energy. The deal was announced just hours after the Senate passed its bipartisan bill to enhance national security and U.S. competitiveness against China by investing in semiconductor manufacturing.
In other words, Republicans threw a temper tantrum because they would no longer be able to hold the semiconductor bill hostage to block passage of the Democrats’ popular agenda. Think about that for a second. Republicans took their frustrations with Democrats out on sick veterans. That’ll show them!
In the days since the GOP stalled the bill, Stewart was unflinching. He went in front of cameras on Thursday to express what many Americans were feeling. Regarding Republicans’ about-face on the bill, Stewart said he was used to the “hypocrisy," “lies” and “cowardice” of politicians, but “I am not used to the cruelty.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) offered a patently false excuse that the bill would create “pork.” In fact, the funds are delineated for a specific purpose. As Stewart tweeted: “The PACT Act is a stand alone bill. The PACT Act has no spending unrelated to Veteran’s Health and Benefits. There is no ‘Pork.’ There is no budget maneuver that then allows Dems to backfill [with] whatever they want.”
Stewart, appearing on NBC News’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, kept up the barrage:
Republicans will likely come crawling back to approve the bill now that they have been exposed as deceitful, malicious and petulant. But Democrats should learn from Stewart and apply his techniques in other contexts.
In the abortion realm, Democrats should be clear. It is the height of dishonesty to say that abortion bans, which would endanger women’s health and lives, are “pro-life.” And it is simply untrue that these bills are about preventing abortions moments before delivery, as so many Republicans claim. The Supreme Court under Roe v. Wade allowed states to ban third-trimester abortions. All but a handful already did before the Dobbs decision. One percent of abortions occur after 21 weeks and far fewer in the third trimester. It is a lie to say abortion causes women emotional distress or physical injury or that abortion is dangerous.
And it is cruel and barbaric to demand that a teen rape victim endure pregnancy and labor or to demand a woman with chronic health conditions risk pregnancy. Only monsters would insist that doctors wait until women are so sick that they might die before they can receive appropriate medical treatment, which includes abortions.
Stewart is a gifted communicator. His basic approach — righteous anger, blunt language, mastery of the facts, determination to call out the GOP’s bad faith — is something all Democrats should follow, whether the topic is veterans’ health, abortion, the Jan. 6 insurrection, guns, climate change or just about anything else. Enough is enough.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Senate Republicans last week provided Americans with a vivid example of their party’s abject cruelty when they rejected the PACT Act, which would provide veterans with benefits to cover the health consequences they endured from exposure to burn pits while serving in Afghanistan and Iraq. They did so even though many of those same Republicans approved a nearly identical bill in June.
For a tutorial on how to respond to the lies and heartlessness Republicans have shown here, Democrats should turn to an unlikely source: comedian Jon Stewart.
The GOP’s reversal on the bill seems to be motivated by payback. Republicans voted against the PACT Act because they were angry over the agreement between Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) on the Inflation Reduction Act, the reconciliation package that includes tax hikes on the wealthy, subsidies for Affordable Care Act coverage and investment in green energy. The deal was announced just hours after the Senate passed its bipartisan bill to enhance national security and U.S. competitiveness against China by investing in semiconductor manufacturing.
In other words, Republicans threw a temper tantrum because they would no longer be able to hold the semiconductor bill hostage to block passage of the Democrats’ popular agenda. Think about that for a second. Republicans took their frustrations with Democrats out on sick veterans. That’ll show them!
In the days since the GOP stalled the bill, Stewart was unflinching. He went in front of cameras on Thursday to express what many Americans were feeling. Regarding Republicans’ about-face on the bill, Stewart said he was used to the “hypocrisy," “lies” and “cowardice” of politicians, but “I am not used to the cruelty.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) offered a patently false excuse that the bill would create “pork.” In fact, the funds are delineated for a specific purpose. As Stewart tweeted: “The PACT Act is a stand alone bill. The PACT Act has no spending unrelated to Veteran’s Health and Benefits. There is no ‘Pork.’ There is no budget maneuver that then allows Dems to backfill [with] whatever they want.”
Stewart, appearing on NBC News’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, kept up the barrage:
Republicans will likely come crawling back to approve the bill now that they have been exposed as deceitful, malicious and petulant. But Democrats should learn from Stewart and apply his techniques in other contexts.
In the abortion realm, Democrats should be clear. It is the height of dishonesty to say that abortion bans, which would endanger women’s health and lives, are “pro-life.” And it is simply untrue that these bills are about preventing abortions moments before delivery, as so many Republicans claim. The Supreme Court under Roe v. Wade allowed states to ban third-trimester abortions. All but a handful already did before the Dobbs decision. One percent of abortions occur after 21 weeks and far fewer in the third trimester. It is a lie to say abortion causes women emotional distress or physical injury or that abortion is dangerous.
And it is cruel and barbaric to demand that a teen rape victim endure pregnancy and labor or to demand a woman with chronic health conditions risk pregnancy. Only monsters would insist that doctors wait until women are so sick that they might die before they can receive appropriate medical treatment, which includes abortions.
Stewart is a gifted communicator. His basic approach — righteous anger, blunt language, mastery of the facts, determination to call out the GOP’s bad faith — is something all Democrats should follow, whether the topic is veterans’ health, abortion, the Jan. 6 insurrection, guns, climate change or just about anything else. Enough is enough.
HOW THE LEGAL HISTORY OF WITCHES IMPACTS ABORTION
Alito saw historical inquiry as “essential” to his analysis. He looked far back in legal history to support his decision.
by Robert I. Field, For The Philadelphia Inquirer
Robert I. Field is a professor of law at the Thomas R. Kline School of Law and a professor of health management and policy at the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University.
Should history guide our understanding of abortion rights today?
It did for Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the Supreme Court’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overruled Roe v. Wade and declared that the United States Constitution does not protect the right to abortion.
Since that decision was issued in late June, total bans have taken effect in eight states, bans after the sixth week of pregnancy have taken effect in another four, and more bans may follow. Abortion remains legal in Pennsylvania, but the legislature passed a bill in early July to ask voters to amend the state constitution to permit new restrictions.
Alito saw historical inquiry as “essential” to his analysis. He looked far back in legal history to support his decision, paying particular attention to cases and treatises in England from the late 1600s and early 1700s.
One of Alito’s go-to authorities from that era was Sir Matthew Hale, an English judge and legal commentator, who considered abortion after quickening, the time when the fetus’s movements can be felt, a “great crime.” Alito also referenced statements of Hale’s that, he felt, reflected similar attitudes toward pre-quickening abortions and abortions using a “potion” given to the mother, analogous to medication abortion today.
As it turns out, Alito made an interesting choice in relying on Hale. Abortion was far from the only legal issue concerning women that he considered as a judge and legal commentator. Among the others was one on which he had an especially strong opinion: witches.
What did a guiding light of reproductive jurisprudence from more than 300 years ago have to say on that topic? In 1662, he presided over a trial in which two women, Amy Duny and Rose Cullender, were charged with “bewitching” seven other people. Hale’s attitude toward that offense reflected the same no-nonsense posture as his attitude toward abortion. He upheld the jury’s convictions of both and sentenced them to death.
In his opinion in the case, Hale made it clear that he had no patience for the practice of witchcraft or doubt about its existence. As his position was described in a contemporary account, “[T]hat there were such creatures as witches he made no doubt at all, for first, the Scriptures had affirmed as much.” Moreover, “[T]he wisdom of all nations had provided laws against such persons, which is an argument of their confidence of such a crime.” The defendants never confessed, and they were hanged soon after the trial concluded.
Of course, this get-tough attitude toward witches was not limited to the common law as applied in England. It was also part of the law as applied in the colonies that were to become the United States. In Salem, Mass., 30 years later, more than 200 people were accused of witchcraft and 20 were killed.
Hale also had strong opinions on other issues affecting women. He saw no basis for prosecuting husbands for raping their wives, stating in one case, “For the husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife for by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband which she cannot retract.” That opinion had more staying power. It wasn’t finally repudiated in all states until 1993.
Some might think that the attitudes of someone like Hale are the product of a bygone era, much closer to Shakespeare’s time than to our own — hardly fundamental to an “essential” historical inquiry that guides jurisprudence today. We now know they would be wrong.
If attitudes from that era are to be a point of reference for the law on abortion, we should understand the full mindset they embodied. That historical inquiry could be quite revealing.
Alito saw historical inquiry as “essential” to his analysis. He looked far back in legal history to support his decision.
by Robert I. Field, For The Philadelphia Inquirer
Robert I. Field is a professor of law at the Thomas R. Kline School of Law and a professor of health management and policy at the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University.
Should history guide our understanding of abortion rights today?
It did for Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the Supreme Court’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overruled Roe v. Wade and declared that the United States Constitution does not protect the right to abortion.
Since that decision was issued in late June, total bans have taken effect in eight states, bans after the sixth week of pregnancy have taken effect in another four, and more bans may follow. Abortion remains legal in Pennsylvania, but the legislature passed a bill in early July to ask voters to amend the state constitution to permit new restrictions.
Alito saw historical inquiry as “essential” to his analysis. He looked far back in legal history to support his decision, paying particular attention to cases and treatises in England from the late 1600s and early 1700s.
One of Alito’s go-to authorities from that era was Sir Matthew Hale, an English judge and legal commentator, who considered abortion after quickening, the time when the fetus’s movements can be felt, a “great crime.” Alito also referenced statements of Hale’s that, he felt, reflected similar attitudes toward pre-quickening abortions and abortions using a “potion” given to the mother, analogous to medication abortion today.
As it turns out, Alito made an interesting choice in relying on Hale. Abortion was far from the only legal issue concerning women that he considered as a judge and legal commentator. Among the others was one on which he had an especially strong opinion: witches.
What did a guiding light of reproductive jurisprudence from more than 300 years ago have to say on that topic? In 1662, he presided over a trial in which two women, Amy Duny and Rose Cullender, were charged with “bewitching” seven other people. Hale’s attitude toward that offense reflected the same no-nonsense posture as his attitude toward abortion. He upheld the jury’s convictions of both and sentenced them to death.
In his opinion in the case, Hale made it clear that he had no patience for the practice of witchcraft or doubt about its existence. As his position was described in a contemporary account, “[T]hat there were such creatures as witches he made no doubt at all, for first, the Scriptures had affirmed as much.” Moreover, “[T]he wisdom of all nations had provided laws against such persons, which is an argument of their confidence of such a crime.” The defendants never confessed, and they were hanged soon after the trial concluded.
Of course, this get-tough attitude toward witches was not limited to the common law as applied in England. It was also part of the law as applied in the colonies that were to become the United States. In Salem, Mass., 30 years later, more than 200 people were accused of witchcraft and 20 were killed.
Hale also had strong opinions on other issues affecting women. He saw no basis for prosecuting husbands for raping their wives, stating in one case, “For the husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife for by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband which she cannot retract.” That opinion had more staying power. It wasn’t finally repudiated in all states until 1993.
Some might think that the attitudes of someone like Hale are the product of a bygone era, much closer to Shakespeare’s time than to our own — hardly fundamental to an “essential” historical inquiry that guides jurisprudence today. We now know they would be wrong.
If attitudes from that era are to be a point of reference for the law on abortion, we should understand the full mindset they embodied. That historical inquiry could be quite revealing.
WANT TO KNOW WHAT A ‘BANANA REPUBLIC’ LOOKS LIKE?
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Nervous pundits warn that for the good of the country, the Justice Department ought not to indict Donald Trump, since prosecuting a former president is the sort of thing “banana republics” do. That’s wrong on two grounds.
First, it is not up to Attorney General Merrick Garland to decide what’s in the country’s long-term democratic interests. The decision to “spare the country” of the turmoil surrounding a past president’s criminal trial rests with the chief executive, as was the case under President Gerald Ford.
The closest the Justice Department’s prosecutorial guidelines come to that concept is the requirement that a prosecution serve a “substantial federal interest.” But that factor, as properly understood, weighs in favor of prosecution. As the guidelines note:
In determining whether a substantial federal interest exists that requires prosecution, the attorney for the government should consider the nature and seriousness of the offense involved. A number of factors may be relevant to this consideration. One factor that is obviously of primary importance is the actual or potential impact of the offense on the community and on the victim(s). The nature and seriousness of the offense may also include a consideration of national security interests.
Well, there could hardly be a more substantial interest than punishing the leader of an attempt to overthrow a democratic election to deter future coups.
Fortunately, Garland made clear in a recent interview with NBC News’s Lester Holt that his department intends to “hold everyone, anyone who was criminally responsible for the events surrounding January 6, for any attempt to interfere with the lawful transfer of power from one administration to another, accountable.” The attorney general seemed to reject the idea of excluding a prosecution simply because Trump was president.
Second, prosecuting a former political leader is not what will turn the United States into a “banana republic.” Indeed, I have some unfortunate news for the nervous Nellies: Our country is already on its way to becoming a failed democracy. The question is now what we intend to do about it.
How do you know democracy is unraveling? It is when an incumbent does these sorts of things:
By now, Americans should realize that this was the stuff of tin-pot dictatorships, not mature constitutional democracies. They should understand that the Republican Party, filled with small individuals hiding behind phony claims of privilege to avoid testifying, has become the bullying apparatus that dictators have historically used to amplify their lies and cloak their actions in legitimacy.
If Americans don’t want our presidents to resemble the thugs of South American or Eastern Europe and don’t want violence to become a standard political weapon, they should demand that Garland keep his word.
This is not the call to “lock him up.” This is the call of a citizenry demanding that the Justice Department follow the legal process to hold responsible anyone involved in arguably the worst crime against democracy in our history. Only a “banana republic” would give the guy behind the coup attempt a get-out-of-jail card.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Nervous pundits warn that for the good of the country, the Justice Department ought not to indict Donald Trump, since prosecuting a former president is the sort of thing “banana republics” do. That’s wrong on two grounds.
First, it is not up to Attorney General Merrick Garland to decide what’s in the country’s long-term democratic interests. The decision to “spare the country” of the turmoil surrounding a past president’s criminal trial rests with the chief executive, as was the case under President Gerald Ford.
The closest the Justice Department’s prosecutorial guidelines come to that concept is the requirement that a prosecution serve a “substantial federal interest.” But that factor, as properly understood, weighs in favor of prosecution. As the guidelines note:
In determining whether a substantial federal interest exists that requires prosecution, the attorney for the government should consider the nature and seriousness of the offense involved. A number of factors may be relevant to this consideration. One factor that is obviously of primary importance is the actual or potential impact of the offense on the community and on the victim(s). The nature and seriousness of the offense may also include a consideration of national security interests.
Well, there could hardly be a more substantial interest than punishing the leader of an attempt to overthrow a democratic election to deter future coups.
Fortunately, Garland made clear in a recent interview with NBC News’s Lester Holt that his department intends to “hold everyone, anyone who was criminally responsible for the events surrounding January 6, for any attempt to interfere with the lawful transfer of power from one administration to another, accountable.” The attorney general seemed to reject the idea of excluding a prosecution simply because Trump was president.
Second, prosecuting a former political leader is not what will turn the United States into a “banana republic.” Indeed, I have some unfortunate news for the nervous Nellies: Our country is already on its way to becoming a failed democracy. The question is now what we intend to do about it.
How do you know democracy is unraveling? It is when an incumbent does these sorts of things:
- Refuses to acknowledge he lost an election.
- Uses captive media outlets to undermine the sanctity of elections and lie about election “fraud.”
- Ignores mounds of evidence showing the election was legitimate.
- Attempts to use the Justice Department to throw doubt on the legitimacy of an election.
- Pressures state officials to “find” just enough votes to change the result of a key state.
- Pressures state officials to retract voting certificates and create fraudulent documents to override the will of the people.
- Cooks up a scheme to retain power that his own counsel understands would be illegal.
- Pressures his vice president to disregard his oath and help facilitate the coup plot.
- Calls angry people to show up at the nation’s capital just when the legislature is counting electoral votes and promises the gathering will be “wild!”
- Invites an armed, unhinged mob to march on Congress and promises to join them in confronting the elected leaders carrying out their constitutional duties.
- Incites the crowd to hold his vice president responsible for not having the “courage” to overturn an election, even as the violent mob moves in on him.
- Refuses to use law enforcement or national security personnel to put down his supporters’ violent insurrection.
By now, Americans should realize that this was the stuff of tin-pot dictatorships, not mature constitutional democracies. They should understand that the Republican Party, filled with small individuals hiding behind phony claims of privilege to avoid testifying, has become the bullying apparatus that dictators have historically used to amplify their lies and cloak their actions in legitimacy.
If Americans don’t want our presidents to resemble the thugs of South American or Eastern Europe and don’t want violence to become a standard political weapon, they should demand that Garland keep his word.
This is not the call to “lock him up.” This is the call of a citizenry demanding that the Justice Department follow the legal process to hold responsible anyone involved in arguably the worst crime against democracy in our history. Only a “banana republic” would give the guy behind the coup attempt a get-out-of-jail card.
THE ANTI-ABORTION MOVEMENT IS IN DENIAL
By Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times
It is always painful to grapple with realities that contravene your most deeply held beliefs.
A major theme of recent feminist writing has been the chasm between the rhetoric of sexual liberation and many women’s depressing experience of casual sex. I’ve met many idealistic Jews, raised to always give Israel the benefit of the doubt, who’ve been floored when they saw the occupation of Palestine up close. Plenty of people convinced themselves that because the impetus behind pandemic school closures was noble, the results wouldn’t be devastating.
Perhaps some in the anti-abortion movement are wrestling with a similarly discomfiting gap between intentions and effects right now. That, at least, is the most sympathetic reading of the angry denial of prominent abortion opponents when confronted with a predictable consequence of abortion bans: delayed care for traumatic pregnancy complications.
Since Roe v. Wade was overturned last month, there’s been a steady barrage of horror stories, including several of women refused abortions for life-threatening pregnancy emergencies. Rakhi Dimino, a doctor in Texas, where most abortions have been illegal since last year, told PBS that more patients are coming to her with sepsis or hemorrhaging “than I’ve ever seen before.”
Some foes of abortion appear unbothered by such suffering; Idaho’s Republican Party recently rejected language from its party platform that would allow for abortions when a pregnant woman’s life is at stake. Others, however, seem to be struggling to reconcile their conviction that abortion bans are good for women with these evidently not-good outcomes. The result is frantic and sometimes paranoid deflection.
Recently NPR reported on the ordeal of Elizabeth Weller, a Houston woman whose water broke at 18 weeks. With little amniotic fluid left, her fetus had almost no chance of survival. Continuing the pregnancy put Weller at risk of infection and hemorrhage. She decided to terminate, but when her doctor arrived at the hospital to perform the procedure, she wasn’t allowed to because of Texas’s abortion ban. The fetus still had a heartbeat, and Weller didn’t yet show signs of severe medical distress. She waited for days, getting sicker, until a hospital ethics board ruled that she could be induced.
Weller’s story is at once shocking and, to anyone who has followed the issue closely, predictable. Even before the Supreme Court allowed states to ban abortion, there were instances of egregious miscarriage mismanagement at Catholic hospitals, which operate under guidelines prohibiting abortion.
A 2008 article in The American Journal of Public Health detailed cases in which “Catholic-owned hospital ethics committees denied approval of uterine evacuation while fetal heart tones were still present, forcing physicians to delay care or transport miscarrying patients to non-Catholic-owned facilities.” According to a report by a Michigan health official obtained by The Guardian, one Catholic hospital subjected five women to dangerous delays in the treatment of miscarriages over just 17 months. In 2013 one of the women, Tamesha Means, sued the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, though her case was dismissed.
In fact, one reason Catholic hospital policies around abortion and miscarriage haven’t been even more devastating is that, with Roe standing, other hospitals served as a release valve. In a 2016 A.C.L.U. report, for example, several doctors described caring for patients transferred from Catholic hospitals that wouldn’t treat their pregnancy-related emergencies. One doctor, David Eisenberg, recalled a patient who was transferred to his hospital from a Catholic institution 10 days after her water broke. Her sepsis was so severe it left her with a cognitive injury. “To this day, I have never seen someone so sick — because we would never wait that long before evacuating the uterus,” he said.
I believe abortion laws put people’s health at grave risk, but that’s far from the only reason I oppose them. But dismissing an argument because of the motive of the person making it is a classic logical fallacy, the sort of thing you resort to when you’d rather not deal with the argument itself.
Members of the anti-abortion movement claim that abortion is never medically necessary. If they can’t bear to look clearly at the world they’ve made, maybe it’s because then they’d have to admit that what they’ve been saying has never been true.
By Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times
It is always painful to grapple with realities that contravene your most deeply held beliefs.
A major theme of recent feminist writing has been the chasm between the rhetoric of sexual liberation and many women’s depressing experience of casual sex. I’ve met many idealistic Jews, raised to always give Israel the benefit of the doubt, who’ve been floored when they saw the occupation of Palestine up close. Plenty of people convinced themselves that because the impetus behind pandemic school closures was noble, the results wouldn’t be devastating.
Perhaps some in the anti-abortion movement are wrestling with a similarly discomfiting gap between intentions and effects right now. That, at least, is the most sympathetic reading of the angry denial of prominent abortion opponents when confronted with a predictable consequence of abortion bans: delayed care for traumatic pregnancy complications.
Since Roe v. Wade was overturned last month, there’s been a steady barrage of horror stories, including several of women refused abortions for life-threatening pregnancy emergencies. Rakhi Dimino, a doctor in Texas, where most abortions have been illegal since last year, told PBS that more patients are coming to her with sepsis or hemorrhaging “than I’ve ever seen before.”
Some foes of abortion appear unbothered by such suffering; Idaho’s Republican Party recently rejected language from its party platform that would allow for abortions when a pregnant woman’s life is at stake. Others, however, seem to be struggling to reconcile their conviction that abortion bans are good for women with these evidently not-good outcomes. The result is frantic and sometimes paranoid deflection.
Recently NPR reported on the ordeal of Elizabeth Weller, a Houston woman whose water broke at 18 weeks. With little amniotic fluid left, her fetus had almost no chance of survival. Continuing the pregnancy put Weller at risk of infection and hemorrhage. She decided to terminate, but when her doctor arrived at the hospital to perform the procedure, she wasn’t allowed to because of Texas’s abortion ban. The fetus still had a heartbeat, and Weller didn’t yet show signs of severe medical distress. She waited for days, getting sicker, until a hospital ethics board ruled that she could be induced.
Weller’s story is at once shocking and, to anyone who has followed the issue closely, predictable. Even before the Supreme Court allowed states to ban abortion, there were instances of egregious miscarriage mismanagement at Catholic hospitals, which operate under guidelines prohibiting abortion.
A 2008 article in The American Journal of Public Health detailed cases in which “Catholic-owned hospital ethics committees denied approval of uterine evacuation while fetal heart tones were still present, forcing physicians to delay care or transport miscarrying patients to non-Catholic-owned facilities.” According to a report by a Michigan health official obtained by The Guardian, one Catholic hospital subjected five women to dangerous delays in the treatment of miscarriages over just 17 months. In 2013 one of the women, Tamesha Means, sued the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, though her case was dismissed.
In fact, one reason Catholic hospital policies around abortion and miscarriage haven’t been even more devastating is that, with Roe standing, other hospitals served as a release valve. In a 2016 A.C.L.U. report, for example, several doctors described caring for patients transferred from Catholic hospitals that wouldn’t treat their pregnancy-related emergencies. One doctor, David Eisenberg, recalled a patient who was transferred to his hospital from a Catholic institution 10 days after her water broke. Her sepsis was so severe it left her with a cognitive injury. “To this day, I have never seen someone so sick — because we would never wait that long before evacuating the uterus,” he said.
I believe abortion laws put people’s health at grave risk, but that’s far from the only reason I oppose them. But dismissing an argument because of the motive of the person making it is a classic logical fallacy, the sort of thing you resort to when you’d rather not deal with the argument itself.
Members of the anti-abortion movement claim that abortion is never medically necessary. If they can’t bear to look clearly at the world they’ve made, maybe it’s because then they’d have to admit that what they’ve been saying has never been true.
IT’S NO WONDER RIGHT-WING JUSTICES DIDN’T WEIGH DOBBS’S AWFUL IMPACT ON WOMEN
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
With so many disturbing aspects of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade — the shoddy history, the contempt for stare decisis, etc. — it is easy to forget that one of the most heinous came from Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.
During oral arguments, Julie Rikelman, counsel for Jackson’s Women Health, had the temerity to spell out the ramifications that bans would have on the health and future of women denied an abortion. Roberts cut her off and plunged ahead in his search for justification for a 15-week limit on the procedure.
In short, women were irrelevant to him; damage done to their right to life and liberty was brushed off. After all, if you insist on using 1868 (when the 14th Amendment was adopted — and women couldn’t vote) to determine our deeply held values, of course you’ll decide women’s lives are secondary.
The Dobbs defenders dismiss victims of the case’s outcome as statistically insignificant. They insist that incidents of raped children are “hoaxes.” They play down the real-world results of Dobbs despite real-world examples and uncontroverted data documenting harm to women denied abortions.
The definitive examination of abortion denial, Diana Greene Foster’s 2020 “The Turnaway Study,” looked at the lives of about 1,100 women over five years. Foster and a slew of researchers compared women denied abortion services because they were past the gestational limit with women at the same stage of pregnancy who got an abortion.
Especially with state legislators now deciding how much latitude to give women in controlling their own lives, you would think some of them might be interested in the results of the study, including the myths it obliterates and the suffering and maternal deaths it documents:
The best available evidence tells us that forcing women to give birth against their will isn’t just monstrous on its face but will have horrific practical consequences. More women (especially poor women and women of color) will die, have serious health problems, wind up in poverty and on public assistance, have longer exposure to abusive partners, and see their education and life goals short-circuited. The bans will inflict hardship on existing children, too, who could become orphaned, lose sufficient care or fall into poverty. No wonder forced-birth hard-liners don’t want to listen to the facts — and the chief justice of the United States wants to gloss right over them.
The most definitive data unmistakably refute the claim that abortion bans are “good” for women. Few things could be more barbaric than robbing women of control over a critical life decision and forcing them to endure the bleak outcomes we know will follow.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
With so many disturbing aspects of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade — the shoddy history, the contempt for stare decisis, etc. — it is easy to forget that one of the most heinous came from Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.
During oral arguments, Julie Rikelman, counsel for Jackson’s Women Health, had the temerity to spell out the ramifications that bans would have on the health and future of women denied an abortion. Roberts cut her off and plunged ahead in his search for justification for a 15-week limit on the procedure.
In short, women were irrelevant to him; damage done to their right to life and liberty was brushed off. After all, if you insist on using 1868 (when the 14th Amendment was adopted — and women couldn’t vote) to determine our deeply held values, of course you’ll decide women’s lives are secondary.
The Dobbs defenders dismiss victims of the case’s outcome as statistically insignificant. They insist that incidents of raped children are “hoaxes.” They play down the real-world results of Dobbs despite real-world examples and uncontroverted data documenting harm to women denied abortions.
The definitive examination of abortion denial, Diana Greene Foster’s 2020 “The Turnaway Study,” looked at the lives of about 1,100 women over five years. Foster and a slew of researchers compared women denied abortion services because they were past the gestational limit with women at the same stage of pregnancy who got an abortion.
Especially with state legislators now deciding how much latitude to give women in controlling their own lives, you would think some of them might be interested in the results of the study, including the myths it obliterates and the suffering and maternal deaths it documents:
- Less than 10 percent of women consider adoption, blowing a hole in antiabortion advocates’ notion of that option as an obvious, simple solution.
- Time limits on abortion are not effective in preventing already rare “late term” abortions; the primary cause for delaying until the second trimester is late discovery of pregnancy (usually in young women with no pregnancy symptoms and irregular periods). How can women seek an early abortion if they don’t know they’re pregnant? Difficulty finding a provider also pushes abortions later — and bans and restrictions often add to delays by forcing women to plan travel out of state.
- Forced-birth activists’ insistence that abortions are dangerous and/or harmful to women is utterly false. Much greater harm to women’s physical health, family situation, economic condition and life trajectory comes from being denied an abortion. Also, some 95 percent of women who had abortions are glad they did.
- Waiting periods mostly create only later-term abortions. The study documents that the vast majority of women have already considered their decision.
- Since poverty or lack of resources for existing children motivate a large share of abortions, the best “prevention” would be robust economic, social and educational assistance for pregnant women. Unfortunately, the forced-birth crowd largely isn’t interested.
- Roughly 60 percent of women who get abortions have one or more children already, and many women plan to have children later, once they are ready. Abortion bans mean more unwanted pregnancies and fewer later, wanted pregnancies when the woman is confident she can parent.
- Women rarely regret their abortions. After their abortion, 90 percent of women in the study felt “relief.” In the short run, women denied abortions experienced the greater emotional stress, and women who had abortions had long-term mental health outcomes no different than those of women who were denied. Physical health among those denied abortions was far worse; two in the study died.
The best available evidence tells us that forcing women to give birth against their will isn’t just monstrous on its face but will have horrific practical consequences. More women (especially poor women and women of color) will die, have serious health problems, wind up in poverty and on public assistance, have longer exposure to abusive partners, and see their education and life goals short-circuited. The bans will inflict hardship on existing children, too, who could become orphaned, lose sufficient care or fall into poverty. No wonder forced-birth hard-liners don’t want to listen to the facts — and the chief justice of the United States wants to gloss right over them.
The most definitive data unmistakably refute the claim that abortion bans are “good” for women. Few things could be more barbaric than robbing women of control over a critical life decision and forcing them to endure the bleak outcomes we know will follow.
THE FOUR STAGES OF REPUBLICAN MISINFORMATION
By Wajahat Ali
If a 10-year-old girl cannot escape the cruel machinery of the right-wing disinformation network, then there’s little hope for the rest of us trying to protect our freedom, dignity, and fragile democracy.
Conservatives’ attempts to minimize, and then weaponize, the horrific story of a 10-year-old rape victim highlights their tried-and-tested four-part strategy to manufacture lies and outrage to fuel their march toward fascism.
Ohio was one of 13 states with automatic “trigger bans” that went into effect immediately after the Supreme Court overturned Roe in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. As a result, Ohio now has zero exceptions for rape and incest. A 10-year-old rape victim who missed the state’s new six-week deadline by three days was forced to travel to Indiana for her abortion. Earlier this month, the girl’s alleged rapist, Gershon Fuentes, was arrested and charged with felony first-degree rape.
One would assume this sordid story would force most Republicans to pause in horror and reflect on the brutal consequences unleashed by the Court taking away the constitutionally protected right to abortion.
How would they feel if this was their daughter or loved one? Would they want to force an innocent girl to endure unnecessary trauma by carrying her abuser’s child? Could they at least create exceptions for rape and incest, which are supported by 69 percent of Americans, including 56 percent of Republicans?
At the very least, this story should open them up to empathize with this young girl’s dilemma, right?
Wrong.
The entire right-wing ecosystem unleashed its full arsenal to discredit the 10-year-old girl as a liar, intimidate her physician, demonize liberals, and continue its march backward, undeterred, in its quest to make Handmaid’s Tale cosplay a reality—in an America that subordinates and punishes women for having the audacity to control their own bodies.
To achieve its goal, the right uses a now familiar four-part strategy.
First, Republicans use any means necessary to achieve power and promote their unpopular, extremist, counter-majoritarian agenda.
Second, they create and promote disinformation and lies to frighten their base and Jedi mind-trick them into believing they are being oppressed by the actual victims.
Third, they create a specific villain, target them, and then attack them through scapegoating, smearing, and intimidation.
Fourth, they never apologize or back down once their lie is exposed, but instead, they double down, and in times of doubt, always pivot towards racism and fear-mongering.
WHAT DOES THE FOUR-POINT PLAN LOOK LIKE IN PRACTICE?
To illustrate the strategy, look no further than the GOP’s rationalization of the Jan. 6 insurrection and embrace of the Big Lie—which gave them the successful blueprint to promote their hateful anti-abortion policies.
First, Donald Trump deliberately promoted lies and conspiracy theories about election fraud conducted by Democrats. Instead of accepting his defeat, he unleashed a premeditated, coordinated strategy to engage in a failed coup, which eventually resulted in thousands of his supporters overtaking the U.S. Capitol in an effort to overturn a free and fair election.
To get to the point where a 10-year-old rape victim has to cross state lines for an abortion, look to the GOP’s four-decade effort to kill Roe v. Wade. Republicans finally got their wish by packing the Supreme Court with right-wing extremists in black robes handpicked by the Federalist Society. Sen. Mitch McConnell stole Merrick Garland’s seat by refusing to hold a confirmation hearing, citing the need to wait until after the 2016 election. Then, he went against his own bullshit precedent and bum-rushed Justice Amy Coney Barrett on to the Court after millions of votes had already been cast in the 2020 election. That’s how they got a right-wing majority to dutifully overturn Roe, which led to Republican-controlled states imposing draconian laws that are punishing women and their health-care providers.
Second, the right-wing media ecosystem continues to amplify the Big Lie and fuel conspiracy theories, which has since resulted in a majority of GOP voters falsely believing Biden was not fairly elected. More than 100 Republicans who have won their recent primaries support the Big Lie, which has transformed into a MAGA litmus test for aspiring GOP candidates.
Similarly, both Fox News and the Wall Street Journal used their platforms to help discredit the story of the 10-year-old rape victim. Fox host Jesse Watters referred to it as a “hoax” that, according to him, follows a “pretty dangerous pattern of politically timed disinformation” by Democrats. On his top-rated cable news show, Tucker Carlson said “politicians are lying about this [story].” MAGA politicians like Rep. Jim Jordan tweeted that the story was a lie and Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost called it a fabrication. Fox labeled it the “Biden abortion story.”
However, the story, which has nothing to do with Biden, is true. The young girl was actually raped and forced to travel to another state for her abortion. Instead of owning up to their mistake and apologizing, right-wingers instead implemented the third part of the strategy by targeting a manufactured villain.
In the MAGA world, villains like Kyle Rittenhouse and Michael Flynn are rebranded and exalted, while actual heroes are ignored, ridiculed, or dismissed. This includes Capitol Hill police officers, election workers Lady Ruby and her daughter, and fellow Republicans who didn’t go along with the Big Lie—such as Rusty Bowers, Speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, who received death threats and is now censured by fellow Republican colleagues for putting country above party.
If this is how MAGA treats its own, then what hope do a 10-year-old girl and her physician have at redemption? On Watters’ show, Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita put a target on the girl’s physician by announcing he would be open to prosecuting her for failing to report the abortion. In reality, Dr. Caitlin Bernard had already reported the case, but truth doesn’t matter when you’re simply trying to rile up your base to score political points and ratings. (Earlier this week, Dr. Bernard announced she was thinking about suing Rokita for defamation.)
Sadly, this isn’t Dr. Bernard’s first rodeo with right-wing extremists. She is listed as a “local abortion threat” and her name and workplace, along with those of five other physicians, are published on the Right to Life Michiana’s website. In 2006, Justice Barrett, then a law professor, signed a two-page ad published by the extremist anti-abortion group that referred to Roe as “barbaric” and “defend[ed] the right to life from fertilization to natural death.” Last year, Dr. Bernard testified that she was forced to stop providing first-trimester abortions at a South Bend, Indiana, clinic after she was warned about kidnapping threats against her daughter.
Finally, the modern right-wing movement can never apologize, own up to its mistakes, or back down. Humility, grace, and decency are perceived by the base as signs of weakness. Instead, they ratchet up the lie, amp up the terror, and add more villains.
For example, despite numerous election audits supporting Biden’s victory, and even loyal Trumpers—such as former Attorney General Bill Barr—affirming the 2020 election results, the GOP has instead chosen to feed its base the Big Lie.
Even after the 10-year-old rape victim’s story was confirmed, Republicans who called her a liar refused to offer an apology or correction. When pressed, Rep. Jordan said he “never doubted the child” and instead blamed the media. Fox News hosts didn’t correct the story for their audience, but instead decided to engage in their usual xenophobia by attacking the alleged rapist’s immigration status.
After previously saying the story wasn’t true, Carlson, playing to racist type, pivoted and said “the obvious headline here was not about abortion. It was about the crime committed against the child—‘Who raped a 10-year-old.’” His answer: “an illegal alien.”
Unfortunately, this 10-year-old rape victim is one of the many girls who will suffer from the GOP’s anti-abortion policies. But unlike her, most of their stories will be forgotten statistics that never receive a headline or a column.
Perhaps that is a blessing. These victims won’t be subjected to the lies manufactured by a right-wing ecosystem willing to demonize girls and health care providers simply to advance their perverse and regressive cultural agenda.
If Republicans have no mercy for 10-year-old rape victims, then the rest of us should expect nothing but cruelty and contempt in their violent and barbaric efforts to achieve minority rule.
By Wajahat Ali
If a 10-year-old girl cannot escape the cruel machinery of the right-wing disinformation network, then there’s little hope for the rest of us trying to protect our freedom, dignity, and fragile democracy.
Conservatives’ attempts to minimize, and then weaponize, the horrific story of a 10-year-old rape victim highlights their tried-and-tested four-part strategy to manufacture lies and outrage to fuel their march toward fascism.
Ohio was one of 13 states with automatic “trigger bans” that went into effect immediately after the Supreme Court overturned Roe in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. As a result, Ohio now has zero exceptions for rape and incest. A 10-year-old rape victim who missed the state’s new six-week deadline by three days was forced to travel to Indiana for her abortion. Earlier this month, the girl’s alleged rapist, Gershon Fuentes, was arrested and charged with felony first-degree rape.
One would assume this sordid story would force most Republicans to pause in horror and reflect on the brutal consequences unleashed by the Court taking away the constitutionally protected right to abortion.
How would they feel if this was their daughter or loved one? Would they want to force an innocent girl to endure unnecessary trauma by carrying her abuser’s child? Could they at least create exceptions for rape and incest, which are supported by 69 percent of Americans, including 56 percent of Republicans?
At the very least, this story should open them up to empathize with this young girl’s dilemma, right?
Wrong.
The entire right-wing ecosystem unleashed its full arsenal to discredit the 10-year-old girl as a liar, intimidate her physician, demonize liberals, and continue its march backward, undeterred, in its quest to make Handmaid’s Tale cosplay a reality—in an America that subordinates and punishes women for having the audacity to control their own bodies.
To achieve its goal, the right uses a now familiar four-part strategy.
First, Republicans use any means necessary to achieve power and promote their unpopular, extremist, counter-majoritarian agenda.
Second, they create and promote disinformation and lies to frighten their base and Jedi mind-trick them into believing they are being oppressed by the actual victims.
Third, they create a specific villain, target them, and then attack them through scapegoating, smearing, and intimidation.
Fourth, they never apologize or back down once their lie is exposed, but instead, they double down, and in times of doubt, always pivot towards racism and fear-mongering.
WHAT DOES THE FOUR-POINT PLAN LOOK LIKE IN PRACTICE?
To illustrate the strategy, look no further than the GOP’s rationalization of the Jan. 6 insurrection and embrace of the Big Lie—which gave them the successful blueprint to promote their hateful anti-abortion policies.
First, Donald Trump deliberately promoted lies and conspiracy theories about election fraud conducted by Democrats. Instead of accepting his defeat, he unleashed a premeditated, coordinated strategy to engage in a failed coup, which eventually resulted in thousands of his supporters overtaking the U.S. Capitol in an effort to overturn a free and fair election.
To get to the point where a 10-year-old rape victim has to cross state lines for an abortion, look to the GOP’s four-decade effort to kill Roe v. Wade. Republicans finally got their wish by packing the Supreme Court with right-wing extremists in black robes handpicked by the Federalist Society. Sen. Mitch McConnell stole Merrick Garland’s seat by refusing to hold a confirmation hearing, citing the need to wait until after the 2016 election. Then, he went against his own bullshit precedent and bum-rushed Justice Amy Coney Barrett on to the Court after millions of votes had already been cast in the 2020 election. That’s how they got a right-wing majority to dutifully overturn Roe, which led to Republican-controlled states imposing draconian laws that are punishing women and their health-care providers.
Second, the right-wing media ecosystem continues to amplify the Big Lie and fuel conspiracy theories, which has since resulted in a majority of GOP voters falsely believing Biden was not fairly elected. More than 100 Republicans who have won their recent primaries support the Big Lie, which has transformed into a MAGA litmus test for aspiring GOP candidates.
Similarly, both Fox News and the Wall Street Journal used their platforms to help discredit the story of the 10-year-old rape victim. Fox host Jesse Watters referred to it as a “hoax” that, according to him, follows a “pretty dangerous pattern of politically timed disinformation” by Democrats. On his top-rated cable news show, Tucker Carlson said “politicians are lying about this [story].” MAGA politicians like Rep. Jim Jordan tweeted that the story was a lie and Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost called it a fabrication. Fox labeled it the “Biden abortion story.”
However, the story, which has nothing to do with Biden, is true. The young girl was actually raped and forced to travel to another state for her abortion. Instead of owning up to their mistake and apologizing, right-wingers instead implemented the third part of the strategy by targeting a manufactured villain.
In the MAGA world, villains like Kyle Rittenhouse and Michael Flynn are rebranded and exalted, while actual heroes are ignored, ridiculed, or dismissed. This includes Capitol Hill police officers, election workers Lady Ruby and her daughter, and fellow Republicans who didn’t go along with the Big Lie—such as Rusty Bowers, Speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, who received death threats and is now censured by fellow Republican colleagues for putting country above party.
If this is how MAGA treats its own, then what hope do a 10-year-old girl and her physician have at redemption? On Watters’ show, Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita put a target on the girl’s physician by announcing he would be open to prosecuting her for failing to report the abortion. In reality, Dr. Caitlin Bernard had already reported the case, but truth doesn’t matter when you’re simply trying to rile up your base to score political points and ratings. (Earlier this week, Dr. Bernard announced she was thinking about suing Rokita for defamation.)
Sadly, this isn’t Dr. Bernard’s first rodeo with right-wing extremists. She is listed as a “local abortion threat” and her name and workplace, along with those of five other physicians, are published on the Right to Life Michiana’s website. In 2006, Justice Barrett, then a law professor, signed a two-page ad published by the extremist anti-abortion group that referred to Roe as “barbaric” and “defend[ed] the right to life from fertilization to natural death.” Last year, Dr. Bernard testified that she was forced to stop providing first-trimester abortions at a South Bend, Indiana, clinic after she was warned about kidnapping threats against her daughter.
Finally, the modern right-wing movement can never apologize, own up to its mistakes, or back down. Humility, grace, and decency are perceived by the base as signs of weakness. Instead, they ratchet up the lie, amp up the terror, and add more villains.
For example, despite numerous election audits supporting Biden’s victory, and even loyal Trumpers—such as former Attorney General Bill Barr—affirming the 2020 election results, the GOP has instead chosen to feed its base the Big Lie.
Even after the 10-year-old rape victim’s story was confirmed, Republicans who called her a liar refused to offer an apology or correction. When pressed, Rep. Jordan said he “never doubted the child” and instead blamed the media. Fox News hosts didn’t correct the story for their audience, but instead decided to engage in their usual xenophobia by attacking the alleged rapist’s immigration status.
After previously saying the story wasn’t true, Carlson, playing to racist type, pivoted and said “the obvious headline here was not about abortion. It was about the crime committed against the child—‘Who raped a 10-year-old.’” His answer: “an illegal alien.”
Unfortunately, this 10-year-old rape victim is one of the many girls who will suffer from the GOP’s anti-abortion policies. But unlike her, most of their stories will be forgotten statistics that never receive a headline or a column.
Perhaps that is a blessing. These victims won’t be subjected to the lies manufactured by a right-wing ecosystem willing to demonize girls and health care providers simply to advance their perverse and regressive cultural agenda.
If Republicans have no mercy for 10-year-old rape victims, then the rest of us should expect nothing but cruelty and contempt in their violent and barbaric efforts to achieve minority rule.
5 THINGS WE LEARNED IN THE JAN. 6 COMMITTEE’S STUNNING HEARING
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
The House select committee, in the last of this series of hearings on the attack of the U.S. Capitol, delivered a stunning account on Thursday of the 187 minutes that passed between Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” speech on Jan. 6, 2021, and the release of his video telling his supporters to go home.
Multiple people, including the former president’s own family, pleaded with Trump to issue a statement condemning the violence. But as Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), chair of the committee, said in opening remarks, Trump “could not be moved.”
Here are the key revelations about Trump’s last-ditch attempt to stop the electoral vote count:
1-Trump chose to do nothing.
The list of people who Trump did not call as the violence unfolded is telling. It includes the attorney general, the secretary of defense or any leader in the military. Even though he knew within 15 minutes of finishing his speech that a violent mob was attacking the Capitol, he never intervened. The absence of entries in the White House calls logs and the presidential diary — as well as the erasure of texts between Secret Service agents — during those crucial hours suggests a coverup.
Before Thursday’s hearing, there was only speculation that Trump was working through his associates Michael Flynn and Roger Stone to activate the violent mob. However, the committee on Thursday revealed that Trump called his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, at 1:39 p.m., and again just after 2 p.m. Cassidy Hutchinson, who served as a top aide to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, previously testified that she had heard mention of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers during planning for Jan. 6 when “when Mr. Giuliani would be around.”
By 1:49 p.m. the mob was massing at the Capitol and Fox News was covering the chaos. Trump tweeted out video of his inflammatory speech. Former White House counsel Pat Cipollone testified that he and others “forcefully” tried to convince Trump to call off the mob. Cipollone said he and others specifically discussed the chants by rioters to “hang Mike Pence,” which Cipollone described as “outrageous.”
This is the sort of evidence the Justice Department will need to demonstrate Trump’s intent in possible charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding. It suggests Trump wanted this outcome.
2-Trump put Pence in further peril.
One unnamed witness described radio communication with the Secret Service detail for Vice President Mike Pence while the Capitol was under siege. The witness revealed that the officers were “starting to fear for their own lives” and that their radio messages were “disturbing. There were calls to say goodbye to family members.” The mob clearly was targeting Pence. It was at that moment Trump chose to pour gasoline on the fire with his 2:24 p.m. tweet claiming that Pence “didn’t have the courage” to halt the vote count. The juxtaposition of the testimony with Trump’s tweet was appalling.
Former national security official Matt Pottinger testified that he was so disturbed by the tweet that he decided then to resign. As he explained, it was “the opposite of what we really needed at that moment, which was a de-escalation. Former deputy White House press secretary Sarah Matthews also testified that Trump’s tweet was “giving the green light” to the rioters. She added, “I’ve seen the impact his words have on his supporters.” Because she viewed the message as “indefensible,” she quit that night.
What was Trump doing while Pence was in peril? Calling senators to try to delay the vote. Bone-chilling. Galling. However one describes it, it’s clear Trump wanted the violence to continue.
3-Trump only grudgingly called on his supporters to go home.
Trump refused to call off the mob when it mattered. Frantic texts from Fox News personalities, advisers and Republicans all pleaded for him to make a statement. Cipollone testified that “everyone” on staff wanted Trump to call off the mob. At 2:38 p.m., after pleadings from Ivanka Trump, Trump sent a tweet urging rioters to “stay peaceful,” without any instruction to leave the Capitol. (At that moment, House members were putting on gas masks as tear gas filled the rotunda.)
Trump finally sent out his video telling the mob to leave the Capitol after 4 p.m., when the violence was already starting to wind down. Even then, he went off script to claim the election was stolen and to praise the violent insurrectionists. Pence ordered the Capitol be cleared, and leaders of both parties insisted on completing the count.
Before the day ended, Trump tweeted that the rioters were “patriots.” The next day, while preparing video remarks, Trump still refused to admit the election was over.
4-Republicans can’t live down their conduct.
Watching the committee’s video compilation of Republicans initially condemning Trump’s behavior — only to later acquit him during his second impeachment and downplay or rationalize the attack — serves as a reminder of the GOP’s moral collapse.
The committee included testimony that Trump sneered at Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) when the House minority leader pleaded with Trump during the attack for help, reportedly telling McCarthy that the rioters must have cared more about the election than he did. We also saw clips of both McCarthy and Senate Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) declaring that Trump was responsible for the attack shortly after the insurrection. Of course, McCarthy has since reverted to his sniveling obsequiousness.
The committee also took a swing at Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley. It first showed the photo of the Republican fist-pumping the crowd outside the Capitol, and included devastating testimony from a Capitol Police officer frustrated by his attempt to rile up the crowd. The committee then showed video of Hawley fleeing from the mob just hours later.
5-There is more to learn — and more to come.
Thompson said at the beginning of the hearing that “the dam has begun to break.” More witnesses are emerging and new evidence is pouring in, he said, adding that the committee will reassemble in September for more hearings.
Among the issues left to examine is the full-blown scandal concerning the Secret Service’s deletion of texts from Jan. 5 and 6. (To no one’s surprise, the Secret Service agents that promised to refute testimony from Hutchinson have not shown up. They have retained their own lawyers.)
In any case, the series of Trump advisers and allies expressing disgust at his actions should convince all but the most delusional cultists that Trump should never be trusted with power again. As Pottinger said, Trump gave America’s enemies ammunition to claim our nation was in “decline” and that democracy doesn’t work.
In an eloquent summation, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) reminded the country that “we cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.” Her message was clear: Trump’s return to power would be unimaginable.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
The House select committee, in the last of this series of hearings on the attack of the U.S. Capitol, delivered a stunning account on Thursday of the 187 minutes that passed between Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” speech on Jan. 6, 2021, and the release of his video telling his supporters to go home.
Multiple people, including the former president’s own family, pleaded with Trump to issue a statement condemning the violence. But as Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), chair of the committee, said in opening remarks, Trump “could not be moved.”
Here are the key revelations about Trump’s last-ditch attempt to stop the electoral vote count:
1-Trump chose to do nothing.
The list of people who Trump did not call as the violence unfolded is telling. It includes the attorney general, the secretary of defense or any leader in the military. Even though he knew within 15 minutes of finishing his speech that a violent mob was attacking the Capitol, he never intervened. The absence of entries in the White House calls logs and the presidential diary — as well as the erasure of texts between Secret Service agents — during those crucial hours suggests a coverup.
Before Thursday’s hearing, there was only speculation that Trump was working through his associates Michael Flynn and Roger Stone to activate the violent mob. However, the committee on Thursday revealed that Trump called his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, at 1:39 p.m., and again just after 2 p.m. Cassidy Hutchinson, who served as a top aide to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, previously testified that she had heard mention of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers during planning for Jan. 6 when “when Mr. Giuliani would be around.”
By 1:49 p.m. the mob was massing at the Capitol and Fox News was covering the chaos. Trump tweeted out video of his inflammatory speech. Former White House counsel Pat Cipollone testified that he and others “forcefully” tried to convince Trump to call off the mob. Cipollone said he and others specifically discussed the chants by rioters to “hang Mike Pence,” which Cipollone described as “outrageous.”
This is the sort of evidence the Justice Department will need to demonstrate Trump’s intent in possible charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding. It suggests Trump wanted this outcome.
2-Trump put Pence in further peril.
One unnamed witness described radio communication with the Secret Service detail for Vice President Mike Pence while the Capitol was under siege. The witness revealed that the officers were “starting to fear for their own lives” and that their radio messages were “disturbing. There were calls to say goodbye to family members.” The mob clearly was targeting Pence. It was at that moment Trump chose to pour gasoline on the fire with his 2:24 p.m. tweet claiming that Pence “didn’t have the courage” to halt the vote count. The juxtaposition of the testimony with Trump’s tweet was appalling.
Former national security official Matt Pottinger testified that he was so disturbed by the tweet that he decided then to resign. As he explained, it was “the opposite of what we really needed at that moment, which was a de-escalation. Former deputy White House press secretary Sarah Matthews also testified that Trump’s tweet was “giving the green light” to the rioters. She added, “I’ve seen the impact his words have on his supporters.” Because she viewed the message as “indefensible,” she quit that night.
What was Trump doing while Pence was in peril? Calling senators to try to delay the vote. Bone-chilling. Galling. However one describes it, it’s clear Trump wanted the violence to continue.
3-Trump only grudgingly called on his supporters to go home.
Trump refused to call off the mob when it mattered. Frantic texts from Fox News personalities, advisers and Republicans all pleaded for him to make a statement. Cipollone testified that “everyone” on staff wanted Trump to call off the mob. At 2:38 p.m., after pleadings from Ivanka Trump, Trump sent a tweet urging rioters to “stay peaceful,” without any instruction to leave the Capitol. (At that moment, House members were putting on gas masks as tear gas filled the rotunda.)
Trump finally sent out his video telling the mob to leave the Capitol after 4 p.m., when the violence was already starting to wind down. Even then, he went off script to claim the election was stolen and to praise the violent insurrectionists. Pence ordered the Capitol be cleared, and leaders of both parties insisted on completing the count.
Before the day ended, Trump tweeted that the rioters were “patriots.” The next day, while preparing video remarks, Trump still refused to admit the election was over.
4-Republicans can’t live down their conduct.
Watching the committee’s video compilation of Republicans initially condemning Trump’s behavior — only to later acquit him during his second impeachment and downplay or rationalize the attack — serves as a reminder of the GOP’s moral collapse.
The committee included testimony that Trump sneered at Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) when the House minority leader pleaded with Trump during the attack for help, reportedly telling McCarthy that the rioters must have cared more about the election than he did. We also saw clips of both McCarthy and Senate Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) declaring that Trump was responsible for the attack shortly after the insurrection. Of course, McCarthy has since reverted to his sniveling obsequiousness.
The committee also took a swing at Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley. It first showed the photo of the Republican fist-pumping the crowd outside the Capitol, and included devastating testimony from a Capitol Police officer frustrated by his attempt to rile up the crowd. The committee then showed video of Hawley fleeing from the mob just hours later.
5-There is more to learn — and more to come.
Thompson said at the beginning of the hearing that “the dam has begun to break.” More witnesses are emerging and new evidence is pouring in, he said, adding that the committee will reassemble in September for more hearings.
Among the issues left to examine is the full-blown scandal concerning the Secret Service’s deletion of texts from Jan. 5 and 6. (To no one’s surprise, the Secret Service agents that promised to refute testimony from Hutchinson have not shown up. They have retained their own lawyers.)
In any case, the series of Trump advisers and allies expressing disgust at his actions should convince all but the most delusional cultists that Trump should never be trusted with power again. As Pottinger said, Trump gave America’s enemies ammunition to claim our nation was in “decline” and that democracy doesn’t work.
In an eloquent summation, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) reminded the country that “we cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.” Her message was clear: Trump’s return to power would be unimaginable.
JAN. 6 PANEL PRESENTS EVIDENCE OF TRUMP’S REFUSAL TO STOP THE RIOT
The House panel painted a detailed picture of how, as officials rushed to respond to an attack on the United States government, the commander in chief chose for hours to do nothing.
By Luke Broadwater and Maggie Haberman, The New York Times
As a mob of his supporters assaulted the Capitol, former President Donald J. Trump sat in his dining room off the Oval Office, watching the violence on television and choosing to do nothing for hours to stop it, an array of former administration officials testified to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack in accounts laid out on Thursday.
In a final public hearing of the summer and one of the most dramatic of the inquiry, the panel provided a panoramic account of how, even as the lives of law enforcement officers, members of Congress and his own vice president were under threat, Mr. Trump could not be moved to act until after it was clear that the riot had failed to disrupt Congress’s session to confirm his election defeat.
Even then, the committee showed in never-before-seen footage from the White House, Mr. Trump privately refused to concede — “I don’t want to say the election’s over!” he angrily told aides as he recorded a video message that had been scripted for him the day after the attack — or to condemn the assault on the Capitol as a crime.
Calling on a cast of witnesses assembled to make it hard for viewers to dismiss as tools of a partisan witch hunt — top Trump aides, veterans and military leaders, loyal Republicans and even members of Mr. Trump’s own family — the committee established that the president willfully rejected their efforts to persuade him to mobilize a response to the deadliest attack on the Capitol in two centuries.
“You’re the commander in chief. You’ve got an assault going on on the Capitol of the United States of America, and there’s nothing?” Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s highest-ranking military officer, told the panel. “No call? Nothing? Zero?”
It was a closing argument of sorts in the case the panel has built against Mr. Trump, one whose central assertion is that the former president was derelict in his duty for failing to do all that he could — or anything at all, for 187 minutes — to call off the assault carried out in his name.
Thursday’s session, led by two military veterans with testimony from another, was also an appeal to patriotism as the panel asserted that Mr. Trump’s inaction during the riot was a final, glaring violation of his oath of office, coming at the end of a multipronged and unsuccessful effort to overturn his 2020 election loss.
In perhaps one of the most jarring revelations, the committee presented evidence that a call from a Pentagon official to coordinate a response to the assault on the Capitol as it was underway initially went unanswered because, according to a White House lawyer, “the president didn’t want anything done.”
And the panel played Secret Service radio transmissions and testimony that showed in chilling detail how close Vice President Mike Pence came to danger during the riot, including an account of members of his Secret Service detail being so rattled by what was unfolding that they were contacting family members to say goodbye.
Both pieces of testimony were provided by a former White House official whom the committee did not identify by name — and whose voice was altered to protect his identity — who was described as having had “national security responsibilities.”
The witness described an exchange between Eric Herschmann, a lawyer working in the White House, and the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, about the call from the Pentagon.
“Mr. Herschmann turned to Mr. Cipollone and said, ‘The president didn’t want anything done,’” the witness testified. “Mr. Cipollone had to take the call himself.”
The committee also played dramatic radio recordings over the span of 10 minutes, from 2:14 to 2:24 p.m., from the moments in which the Secret Service sought a route to safety to evacuate the vice president from the Capitol, where he was being held in his office near the Senate chamber as the mob closed in.
“Harden that door up,” one agent said. “If we’re moving, we need to move now,” another said. And at another point: “If we lose any more time, we may lose the ability to leave.”
And in a frightening moment over the radio traffic, an agent warned: “There is smoke. Unknown what kind of smoke it is.”
Mr. Cipollone described to the committee how he and most of the rest of the White House staff believed Mr. Trump needed to do more to quell the violence, but demurred when asked about the president’s view on whether the riot should end, citing executive privilege.
“I believed more needed to be done,” Mr. Cipollone testified.
White House officials recounted how the president declined to take the few steps down the hallway to the White House briefing room to call off the mob, instead tweeting an attack on Mr. Pence as he was fleeing for his life.
“I think that in that moment, for him to tweet out the message about Mike Pence, it was him pouring gasoline on the fire and making it much worse,” said Sarah Matthews, a former White House press aide who resigned on Jan. 6 and was one of two witnesses who testified in person on Thursday.
The other was Matthew Pottinger, a Marine Corps veteran who was the deputy national security adviser and the highest-ranking White House official to resign on Jan. 6.
“That was the moment that I decided that I was going to resign, that that would be my last day at the White House,” Mr. Pottinger said, referring to Mr. Trump’s Twitter condemnation of the vice president. “I simply didn’t want to be associated with the events that were unfolding on the Capitol.”
Ms. Matthews also told the committee that Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, confided to her that Mr. Trump had not wanted to mention the word “peace” in any tweets, and only grudgingly relented to his daughter Ivanka Trump’s suggestion that he ask people to “stay peaceful.”
Ms. McEnany “looked directly at me and in a hushed tone shared with me that the president did not want to include any sort of mention of peace in that tweet,” Ms. Matthews testified.
While Mr. Pence was making phone calls trying to deploy the National Guard to the Capitol after evacuating to protect himself and his family, Mr. Trump did not make a single call to a government official to try to stop the violence, witnesses said. The call Mr. Trump did make was to Rudolph W. Giuliani, his personal lawyer who was helping his efforts to overturn the election results, including calling Republican senators on Jan. 6 to get them to disrupt Congress’s electoral count.
A day after the attack, two of Mr. Trump’s communications aides lamented Mr. Trump’s response to the violence and the toll on law enforcement, after 150 officers were injured and one, Brian D. Sicknick of the Capitol Police, had died.
“If he acknowledged the dead cop, he’d be implicitly faulting the mob. And he won’t do that, because they’re his people,” said one, Tim Murtaugh, a former Trump campaign communications director. “And he would also be close to acknowledging that what he lit at the rally got out of control. No way he acknowledges something that could ultimately be called his fault. No way.”
The hearing hardly marked the end of the committee’s work. The panel now plans to enter a second investigative stage, prepare a preliminary report and hold additional hearings in September.
“The investigation is still ongoing, if not maybe accelerating,” said Representative Elaine Luria, Democrat of Virginia and a member of the committee. “We’re gaining so much new information.”
Lawmakers said they would use August, when Congress takes a lengthy recess, to prepare a preliminary report of their findings, tentatively scheduled to be released in September. But a final report — complete with exhibits and transcripts — could wait until December, just before the committee is set to dissolve at the start of a new Congress on Jan. 3, 2023.
For Thursday’s session, the panel turned to two military veterans — Ms. Luria, a Navy veteran, and Representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois and a lieutenant colonel in the Air National Guard — to lead the questioning.
“President Trump did not fail to act during the 187 minutes between leaving the Ellipse and telling the mob to go home,” Mr. Kinzinger said. “He chose not to act.”
At each of its hearings throughout June and July, the panel has presented evidence that lawmakers believe could be used to bolster a criminal case against Mr. Trump. The committee laid out evidence of a conspiracy to defraud the American people and Mr. Trump’s own donors; plans to submit false slates of electors that could lead to charges of filing false documents to the government; and evidence of a plot to disrupt the electoral count on Capitol Hill that suggest he could be prosecuted for obstructing an official proceeding of Congress.
The assertion that Mr. Trump was derelict in duty might not be the basis for a criminal charge, Ms. Luria said, but it raised ethical, moral and legal questions. At least one judge has cited Mr. Trump’s inaction as grounds for civil lawsuits against Mr. Trump moving forward.
The committee has spent almost two months laying out its narrative of a president who, having failed in a series of efforts to overturn his defeat, directed a mob of his supporters to march to the Capitol after delivering a speech excoriating Mr. Pence for not interfering in Congress’s official count of electoral ballots to confirm Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s election as president.
On Thursday, it revealed testimony that underscored how even Republican members of Congress were beseeching Mr. Trump to call off the mob, turning to his children when the president refused to do so.
Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s adviser and son-in-law, testified that Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, had called him in the middle of the violence asking for help.
“I heard my phone ringing, turned the shower off, saw it was Leader McCarthy, who I had a good relationship with,” Mr. Kushner testified. “He told me it was getting really ugly over at the Capitol and said, ‘Please, you know, anything you could do to help, I would appreciate it.’ ”
“I don’t recall a specific ask, just anything you could do,” Mr. Kushner added. “Again, I got the sense that they were scared.”
Mr. McCarthy was just one of many Republicans who called on Mr. Trump to end the violence that day, some of them sending texts to Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff.
Most of those same Republicans would return to the House chamber after police cleared the mob from the Capitol and, even after the violence, vote to side with Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn his defeat, backing his lies about a stolen election.
The House panel painted a detailed picture of how, as officials rushed to respond to an attack on the United States government, the commander in chief chose for hours to do nothing.
By Luke Broadwater and Maggie Haberman, The New York Times
As a mob of his supporters assaulted the Capitol, former President Donald J. Trump sat in his dining room off the Oval Office, watching the violence on television and choosing to do nothing for hours to stop it, an array of former administration officials testified to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack in accounts laid out on Thursday.
In a final public hearing of the summer and one of the most dramatic of the inquiry, the panel provided a panoramic account of how, even as the lives of law enforcement officers, members of Congress and his own vice president were under threat, Mr. Trump could not be moved to act until after it was clear that the riot had failed to disrupt Congress’s session to confirm his election defeat.
Even then, the committee showed in never-before-seen footage from the White House, Mr. Trump privately refused to concede — “I don’t want to say the election’s over!” he angrily told aides as he recorded a video message that had been scripted for him the day after the attack — or to condemn the assault on the Capitol as a crime.
Calling on a cast of witnesses assembled to make it hard for viewers to dismiss as tools of a partisan witch hunt — top Trump aides, veterans and military leaders, loyal Republicans and even members of Mr. Trump’s own family — the committee established that the president willfully rejected their efforts to persuade him to mobilize a response to the deadliest attack on the Capitol in two centuries.
“You’re the commander in chief. You’ve got an assault going on on the Capitol of the United States of America, and there’s nothing?” Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s highest-ranking military officer, told the panel. “No call? Nothing? Zero?”
It was a closing argument of sorts in the case the panel has built against Mr. Trump, one whose central assertion is that the former president was derelict in his duty for failing to do all that he could — or anything at all, for 187 minutes — to call off the assault carried out in his name.
Thursday’s session, led by two military veterans with testimony from another, was also an appeal to patriotism as the panel asserted that Mr. Trump’s inaction during the riot was a final, glaring violation of his oath of office, coming at the end of a multipronged and unsuccessful effort to overturn his 2020 election loss.
In perhaps one of the most jarring revelations, the committee presented evidence that a call from a Pentagon official to coordinate a response to the assault on the Capitol as it was underway initially went unanswered because, according to a White House lawyer, “the president didn’t want anything done.”
And the panel played Secret Service radio transmissions and testimony that showed in chilling detail how close Vice President Mike Pence came to danger during the riot, including an account of members of his Secret Service detail being so rattled by what was unfolding that they were contacting family members to say goodbye.
Both pieces of testimony were provided by a former White House official whom the committee did not identify by name — and whose voice was altered to protect his identity — who was described as having had “national security responsibilities.”
The witness described an exchange between Eric Herschmann, a lawyer working in the White House, and the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, about the call from the Pentagon.
“Mr. Herschmann turned to Mr. Cipollone and said, ‘The president didn’t want anything done,’” the witness testified. “Mr. Cipollone had to take the call himself.”
The committee also played dramatic radio recordings over the span of 10 minutes, from 2:14 to 2:24 p.m., from the moments in which the Secret Service sought a route to safety to evacuate the vice president from the Capitol, where he was being held in his office near the Senate chamber as the mob closed in.
“Harden that door up,” one agent said. “If we’re moving, we need to move now,” another said. And at another point: “If we lose any more time, we may lose the ability to leave.”
And in a frightening moment over the radio traffic, an agent warned: “There is smoke. Unknown what kind of smoke it is.”
Mr. Cipollone described to the committee how he and most of the rest of the White House staff believed Mr. Trump needed to do more to quell the violence, but demurred when asked about the president’s view on whether the riot should end, citing executive privilege.
“I believed more needed to be done,” Mr. Cipollone testified.
White House officials recounted how the president declined to take the few steps down the hallway to the White House briefing room to call off the mob, instead tweeting an attack on Mr. Pence as he was fleeing for his life.
“I think that in that moment, for him to tweet out the message about Mike Pence, it was him pouring gasoline on the fire and making it much worse,” said Sarah Matthews, a former White House press aide who resigned on Jan. 6 and was one of two witnesses who testified in person on Thursday.
The other was Matthew Pottinger, a Marine Corps veteran who was the deputy national security adviser and the highest-ranking White House official to resign on Jan. 6.
“That was the moment that I decided that I was going to resign, that that would be my last day at the White House,” Mr. Pottinger said, referring to Mr. Trump’s Twitter condemnation of the vice president. “I simply didn’t want to be associated with the events that were unfolding on the Capitol.”
Ms. Matthews also told the committee that Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, confided to her that Mr. Trump had not wanted to mention the word “peace” in any tweets, and only grudgingly relented to his daughter Ivanka Trump’s suggestion that he ask people to “stay peaceful.”
Ms. McEnany “looked directly at me and in a hushed tone shared with me that the president did not want to include any sort of mention of peace in that tweet,” Ms. Matthews testified.
While Mr. Pence was making phone calls trying to deploy the National Guard to the Capitol after evacuating to protect himself and his family, Mr. Trump did not make a single call to a government official to try to stop the violence, witnesses said. The call Mr. Trump did make was to Rudolph W. Giuliani, his personal lawyer who was helping his efforts to overturn the election results, including calling Republican senators on Jan. 6 to get them to disrupt Congress’s electoral count.
A day after the attack, two of Mr. Trump’s communications aides lamented Mr. Trump’s response to the violence and the toll on law enforcement, after 150 officers were injured and one, Brian D. Sicknick of the Capitol Police, had died.
“If he acknowledged the dead cop, he’d be implicitly faulting the mob. And he won’t do that, because they’re his people,” said one, Tim Murtaugh, a former Trump campaign communications director. “And he would also be close to acknowledging that what he lit at the rally got out of control. No way he acknowledges something that could ultimately be called his fault. No way.”
The hearing hardly marked the end of the committee’s work. The panel now plans to enter a second investigative stage, prepare a preliminary report and hold additional hearings in September.
“The investigation is still ongoing, if not maybe accelerating,” said Representative Elaine Luria, Democrat of Virginia and a member of the committee. “We’re gaining so much new information.”
Lawmakers said they would use August, when Congress takes a lengthy recess, to prepare a preliminary report of their findings, tentatively scheduled to be released in September. But a final report — complete with exhibits and transcripts — could wait until December, just before the committee is set to dissolve at the start of a new Congress on Jan. 3, 2023.
For Thursday’s session, the panel turned to two military veterans — Ms. Luria, a Navy veteran, and Representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois and a lieutenant colonel in the Air National Guard — to lead the questioning.
“President Trump did not fail to act during the 187 minutes between leaving the Ellipse and telling the mob to go home,” Mr. Kinzinger said. “He chose not to act.”
At each of its hearings throughout June and July, the panel has presented evidence that lawmakers believe could be used to bolster a criminal case against Mr. Trump. The committee laid out evidence of a conspiracy to defraud the American people and Mr. Trump’s own donors; plans to submit false slates of electors that could lead to charges of filing false documents to the government; and evidence of a plot to disrupt the electoral count on Capitol Hill that suggest he could be prosecuted for obstructing an official proceeding of Congress.
The assertion that Mr. Trump was derelict in duty might not be the basis for a criminal charge, Ms. Luria said, but it raised ethical, moral and legal questions. At least one judge has cited Mr. Trump’s inaction as grounds for civil lawsuits against Mr. Trump moving forward.
The committee has spent almost two months laying out its narrative of a president who, having failed in a series of efforts to overturn his defeat, directed a mob of his supporters to march to the Capitol after delivering a speech excoriating Mr. Pence for not interfering in Congress’s official count of electoral ballots to confirm Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s election as president.
On Thursday, it revealed testimony that underscored how even Republican members of Congress were beseeching Mr. Trump to call off the mob, turning to his children when the president refused to do so.
Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s adviser and son-in-law, testified that Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, had called him in the middle of the violence asking for help.
“I heard my phone ringing, turned the shower off, saw it was Leader McCarthy, who I had a good relationship with,” Mr. Kushner testified. “He told me it was getting really ugly over at the Capitol and said, ‘Please, you know, anything you could do to help, I would appreciate it.’ ”
“I don’t recall a specific ask, just anything you could do,” Mr. Kushner added. “Again, I got the sense that they were scared.”
Mr. McCarthy was just one of many Republicans who called on Mr. Trump to end the violence that day, some of them sending texts to Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff.
Most of those same Republicans would return to the House chamber after police cleared the mob from the Capitol and, even after the violence, vote to side with Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn his defeat, backing his lies about a stolen election.
THIS IS WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE WHEN WOMEN BECOME SECOND-CLASS CITIZENS
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
The horror stories from state abortion bans are piling up: Women facing dangerous delays in care for miscarriages. Doctors violating their training and waiting until their patient is at death’s door before performing an abortion. Pharmacists struggling to understand whether filling prescriptions for drugs that are used both for abortions and for post-miscarriage treatment opens them up to criminal charges.
Episodes in which women are needlessly denied treatment will become commonplace. The Advocate reports this disturbing account from Louisiana:
A woman who was 16 weeks pregnant had her water break, and her doctor wanted to perform a dilation and evacuation, a type of abortion procedure, to take out the fetus, which was not viable. But the doctor consulted with an attorney, who advised against it. … [T]he woman preferred the abortion, but instead “was forced to go through a painful, hours-long labor to deliver a nonviable fetus, despite her wishes and best medical advice.”
Hospitals and their lawyers are being forced to interpret statutory terms that don’t correspond to medical practice and language. These laws often demand a degree of certainty doctors can’t provide. Katie McHugh, an obstetrician-gynecologist in Indiana, tells me doctors must now tell patients that a given procedure is “what she would medically recommend,” but then inform the patient she can’t receive that treatment in her state. In other words, doctors in some states are becoming travel agents for abortion services.
In many states, the substantial risk to mental health (e.g., depression, suicidal ideation) might not “count” as a valid exception to abortion bans. And are the risks associated with traveling long distances for women determined to seek an abortion factored into the calculation? Definitive answers are nonexistent.
Most egregiously, McHugh adds, these laws do not envision chronic conditions. A pregnant woman at risk of liver failure, for example, may face debilitating conditions or even death down the road if she gives birth. But if state law requires imminent risk of death to perform the procedure, she may have to carry the pregnancy to term against her wishes and doctor’s advice. This is barbaric.
Katie Watson, a lawyer and ethicist at Northwestern University, tells me that without an abortion ban, a doctor telling a patient to wait for treatment until she becomes really sick would qualify as malpractice. She also warns that state laws may be “criminalizing” miscarriages since medications used to clear the uterus after a miscarriage, such as mifepristone and misoprostol, are also used for an abortion. Miscarrying women — and their doctors — could face intense scrutiny.
One thing is certain, Watson says: “More babies will be born, and more women will die.” That’s just reality in a country with high maternal death rates. And that will fall disproportionately on Black women, who are more than twice as likely to die from pregnancy than White women.
Meanwhile, pregnant minors face larger risks to physical health (e.g., an increased need for a Caesarean section) and moral trauma above and beyond what an adult victim would face. This is especially true for rape victims.
In short, the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has thrown out the basic premise of medicine: to minimize health risks. The ruling generated chaos among doctors, lawyers and patients, who must now wrestle with incoherent restrictions or bans.
As Leah Litman, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Tuesday, the court’s disastrous jurisprudence creates “a kind of uncertainty that makes it difficult to advise people on what their rights are and to advise institutions on what they can do to secure those rights when courts take them away.”
She continued:
The resulting uncertainty is already having devastating consequences, as we hear from those who are unable to travel for care, the struggles of those trying to manage their care at home, and the nightmares faced by those who do travel for care, including the 10-year-old rape victim who was forced to obtain an abortion from an out-of-state provider. That is the world we are now living in. …
People are rightfully unsure about what their rights are on any given day; politicians and advocates are claiming broader and broader authority over individuals, and broadcasting plans to restrict other rights related to autonomy, personhood, family, and home that so many people rely on.
Decades of litigation have only just begun. Dobbs abolished federal constitutional protection for abortion, but state laws and constitutions may offer relief. The Post reports that multiple states will have measures on their ballots in November that could extend or protect abortion rights. This includes Michigan, where more than enough signatures were submitted to add a constitutional amendment on the ballot that would protect abortion rights.
Meanwhile, litigation in state courts in Florida, Idaho, Kentucky, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas, Utah and West Virginia will test various legal theories to overturn abortion bans, including:
Doctors, courts, patients and prosecutors are in uncharted waters. Indeed, mass confusion might be a feature, not a bug, for forced-birth advocates since uncertainty chills abortion care.
It’s no wonder the Supreme Court doesn’t leave any other fundamental rights to be decided at the state level. Imagine if, for example, protections from unreasonable search and seizure were in the hands of state lawmakers. Now, women must fend for themselves without constitutional armor to shield their cherished rights. That’s the essence of what it means to be a second-class citizen.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
The horror stories from state abortion bans are piling up: Women facing dangerous delays in care for miscarriages. Doctors violating their training and waiting until their patient is at death’s door before performing an abortion. Pharmacists struggling to understand whether filling prescriptions for drugs that are used both for abortions and for post-miscarriage treatment opens them up to criminal charges.
Episodes in which women are needlessly denied treatment will become commonplace. The Advocate reports this disturbing account from Louisiana:
A woman who was 16 weeks pregnant had her water break, and her doctor wanted to perform a dilation and evacuation, a type of abortion procedure, to take out the fetus, which was not viable. But the doctor consulted with an attorney, who advised against it. … [T]he woman preferred the abortion, but instead “was forced to go through a painful, hours-long labor to deliver a nonviable fetus, despite her wishes and best medical advice.”
Hospitals and their lawyers are being forced to interpret statutory terms that don’t correspond to medical practice and language. These laws often demand a degree of certainty doctors can’t provide. Katie McHugh, an obstetrician-gynecologist in Indiana, tells me doctors must now tell patients that a given procedure is “what she would medically recommend,” but then inform the patient she can’t receive that treatment in her state. In other words, doctors in some states are becoming travel agents for abortion services.
In many states, the substantial risk to mental health (e.g., depression, suicidal ideation) might not “count” as a valid exception to abortion bans. And are the risks associated with traveling long distances for women determined to seek an abortion factored into the calculation? Definitive answers are nonexistent.
Most egregiously, McHugh adds, these laws do not envision chronic conditions. A pregnant woman at risk of liver failure, for example, may face debilitating conditions or even death down the road if she gives birth. But if state law requires imminent risk of death to perform the procedure, she may have to carry the pregnancy to term against her wishes and doctor’s advice. This is barbaric.
Katie Watson, a lawyer and ethicist at Northwestern University, tells me that without an abortion ban, a doctor telling a patient to wait for treatment until she becomes really sick would qualify as malpractice. She also warns that state laws may be “criminalizing” miscarriages since medications used to clear the uterus after a miscarriage, such as mifepristone and misoprostol, are also used for an abortion. Miscarrying women — and their doctors — could face intense scrutiny.
One thing is certain, Watson says: “More babies will be born, and more women will die.” That’s just reality in a country with high maternal death rates. And that will fall disproportionately on Black women, who are more than twice as likely to die from pregnancy than White women.
Meanwhile, pregnant minors face larger risks to physical health (e.g., an increased need for a Caesarean section) and moral trauma above and beyond what an adult victim would face. This is especially true for rape victims.
In short, the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has thrown out the basic premise of medicine: to minimize health risks. The ruling generated chaos among doctors, lawyers and patients, who must now wrestle with incoherent restrictions or bans.
As Leah Litman, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Tuesday, the court’s disastrous jurisprudence creates “a kind of uncertainty that makes it difficult to advise people on what their rights are and to advise institutions on what they can do to secure those rights when courts take them away.”
She continued:
The resulting uncertainty is already having devastating consequences, as we hear from those who are unable to travel for care, the struggles of those trying to manage their care at home, and the nightmares faced by those who do travel for care, including the 10-year-old rape victim who was forced to obtain an abortion from an out-of-state provider. That is the world we are now living in. …
People are rightfully unsure about what their rights are on any given day; politicians and advocates are claiming broader and broader authority over individuals, and broadcasting plans to restrict other rights related to autonomy, personhood, family, and home that so many people rely on.
Decades of litigation have only just begun. Dobbs abolished federal constitutional protection for abortion, but state laws and constitutions may offer relief. The Post reports that multiple states will have measures on their ballots in November that could extend or protect abortion rights. This includes Michigan, where more than enough signatures were submitted to add a constitutional amendment on the ballot that would protect abortion rights.
Meanwhile, litigation in state courts in Florida, Idaho, Kentucky, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas, Utah and West Virginia will test various legal theories to overturn abortion bans, including:
- Claiming that the laws are unconstitutionally vague, as is the basis for suits in Arizona, Louisiana and Oklahoma, where doctors or patients are unable to determine what’s legal and what’s not.
- Arguing that abortion bans would infringe upon a doctor’s religious beliefs if their religious views prioritize preventing harm to people’s health.
- Claiming that bans would deprive Black women’s equal protection, since forced-birth policies will burden them.
- Making the case that bans amount to a denial of all women’s equal protection, since they are uniquely being denied proper reproductive care, unlike any other patient category.
- Focusing on the arbitrary loss of life or liberty, in violation of due process.
Doctors, courts, patients and prosecutors are in uncharted waters. Indeed, mass confusion might be a feature, not a bug, for forced-birth advocates since uncertainty chills abortion care.
It’s no wonder the Supreme Court doesn’t leave any other fundamental rights to be decided at the state level. Imagine if, for example, protections from unreasonable search and seizure were in the hands of state lawmakers. Now, women must fend for themselves without constitutional armor to shield their cherished rights. That’s the essence of what it means to be a second-class citizen.
WE ARE RETIRED GENERALS AND ADMIRALS. TRUMP’S ACTIONS ON JAN. 6 WERE A DERELICTION OF DUTY.
By Steve Abbot, Peter Chiarelli, John Jumper, James Loy, John Nathman, William Owens and Johnnie Wilson
Admirals Abbot, Loy, Nathman and Owens and Generals Chiarelli, Jumper and Wilson are retired four-star generals and admirals in the U.S. armed forces.
The inquiry by the House’s Jan. 6 committee has produced many startling findings, but none to us more alarming than the fact that while rioters tried to thwart the peaceful transfer of power and ransacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the president and commander in chief, Donald Trump, abdicated his duty to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.
In the weeks leading up to that terrible day, allies of Mr. Trump also urged him to hold on to power by unlawfully ordering the military to seize voting machines and supervise a do-over of the election. Such an illegal order would have imperiled a foundational precept of American democracy: civilian control of the military.
Americans may take it for granted, but the strength of our democracy rests upon the stability of this arrangement, which requires both civilian and military leaders to have confidence that they have the same goal of supporting and defending the Constitution.
We hope that the country will never face such a crisis again. But to safeguard our constitutional order, military leaders must be ready for similar situations in which the chain of command appears unclear or the legality of orders uncertain.
The relationship between America’s civilian leadership and its military is structured by an established chain of command: from unit leaders through various commanders and generals and up to the secretary of defense and the president. Civilian authorities have the constitutional and legal right and responsibility to decide whether to use military force. As military officers, we had the duty to provide candid, expert advice on how to use such force and then to obey all lawful orders, whether we agreed or not.
The events of Jan. 6 offer a demonstration on how military and civilian leaders execute this relationship and what happens when it comes under threat. When a mob attacked the Capitol, the commander in chief failed to act to restore order and even encouraged the rioters. As Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified to Congress, Vice President Mike Pence attempted to fill the void by calling on the National Guard to intervene.
Given the urgent need to secure the Capitol, Mr. Pence’s request was reasonable. Yet the vice president has no role in the chain of command unless specifically acting under the president’s authority because of illness or incapacitation, and therefore cannot lawfully issue orders to the military. Members of Congress, who also pleaded for military assistance as the mob laid siege to the Capitol, are in the same category. In the end, the National Guard deployed not in response to those pleas but under lawful orders issued by the acting secretary of defense, Christopher Miller.
Should civilians atop the chain of command again abandon their duties or attempt to abuse their authority, military ranks can and must respond in accordance with their oaths — without a lawful order from appropriate command authority, they cannot unilaterally undertake a mission. Concurrent with a duty to obey all lawful orders is a duty to question and disobey unlawful orders — those a person “of ordinary sense and understanding,” as a Court of Military Review ruling put it, would know to be wrong.
Operations on U.S. soil must also specifically comply with the Standing Rules for the Use of Force, which limit use of force but explicitly authorize it to protect people from imminent threat of death or serious harm, to defend “assets vital to national security” and “to prevent the sabotage of a national critical infrastructure.”
These are essential checks on civilian officials who would make unlawful use of U.S. military personnel. Governors, who possess broad command authority over our 54 National Guard organizations, for example, may face political pressure to deploy these forces to illegally interfere with elections or other democratic processes.
To recognize these threats to our democracy, military leaders must continue to develop robust training, guidance and resources for service members in accordance with these safeguards, ensuring the integrity of the chain of command and effective operation of civil-military relations.
But while such preparedness is necessary, it is not sufficient.
We each took an oath as former leaders of the armed forces to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” We fulfilled that oath through service to civilian leadership elected by and accountable to the American people. This essential arrangement, however, is not self-executing; it relies on civilian leaders equally committed to protecting and defending the Constitution — including, most important, the commander in chief.
The principle of civilian control of the military predates the founding of the Republic. In 1775, George Washington was commissioned as the military commander of the Continental Army under the civilian command authority of the Second Continental Congress. The next year, among the grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence against King George III was his making “the military independent of and superior to the civil power.”
The president’s dereliction of duty on Jan. 6 tested the integrity of this historic principle as never before, endangering American lives and our democracy.
The lesson of that day is clear. Our democracy is not a given. To preserve it, Americans must demand nothing less from their leaders than an unassailable commitment to country over party — and to their oaths above all.
By Steve Abbot, Peter Chiarelli, John Jumper, James Loy, John Nathman, William Owens and Johnnie Wilson
Admirals Abbot, Loy, Nathman and Owens and Generals Chiarelli, Jumper and Wilson are retired four-star generals and admirals in the U.S. armed forces.
The inquiry by the House’s Jan. 6 committee has produced many startling findings, but none to us more alarming than the fact that while rioters tried to thwart the peaceful transfer of power and ransacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the president and commander in chief, Donald Trump, abdicated his duty to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.
In the weeks leading up to that terrible day, allies of Mr. Trump also urged him to hold on to power by unlawfully ordering the military to seize voting machines and supervise a do-over of the election. Such an illegal order would have imperiled a foundational precept of American democracy: civilian control of the military.
Americans may take it for granted, but the strength of our democracy rests upon the stability of this arrangement, which requires both civilian and military leaders to have confidence that they have the same goal of supporting and defending the Constitution.
We hope that the country will never face such a crisis again. But to safeguard our constitutional order, military leaders must be ready for similar situations in which the chain of command appears unclear or the legality of orders uncertain.
The relationship between America’s civilian leadership and its military is structured by an established chain of command: from unit leaders through various commanders and generals and up to the secretary of defense and the president. Civilian authorities have the constitutional and legal right and responsibility to decide whether to use military force. As military officers, we had the duty to provide candid, expert advice on how to use such force and then to obey all lawful orders, whether we agreed or not.
The events of Jan. 6 offer a demonstration on how military and civilian leaders execute this relationship and what happens when it comes under threat. When a mob attacked the Capitol, the commander in chief failed to act to restore order and even encouraged the rioters. As Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified to Congress, Vice President Mike Pence attempted to fill the void by calling on the National Guard to intervene.
Given the urgent need to secure the Capitol, Mr. Pence’s request was reasonable. Yet the vice president has no role in the chain of command unless specifically acting under the president’s authority because of illness or incapacitation, and therefore cannot lawfully issue orders to the military. Members of Congress, who also pleaded for military assistance as the mob laid siege to the Capitol, are in the same category. In the end, the National Guard deployed not in response to those pleas but under lawful orders issued by the acting secretary of defense, Christopher Miller.
Should civilians atop the chain of command again abandon their duties or attempt to abuse their authority, military ranks can and must respond in accordance with their oaths — without a lawful order from appropriate command authority, they cannot unilaterally undertake a mission. Concurrent with a duty to obey all lawful orders is a duty to question and disobey unlawful orders — those a person “of ordinary sense and understanding,” as a Court of Military Review ruling put it, would know to be wrong.
Operations on U.S. soil must also specifically comply with the Standing Rules for the Use of Force, which limit use of force but explicitly authorize it to protect people from imminent threat of death or serious harm, to defend “assets vital to national security” and “to prevent the sabotage of a national critical infrastructure.”
These are essential checks on civilian officials who would make unlawful use of U.S. military personnel. Governors, who possess broad command authority over our 54 National Guard organizations, for example, may face political pressure to deploy these forces to illegally interfere with elections or other democratic processes.
To recognize these threats to our democracy, military leaders must continue to develop robust training, guidance and resources for service members in accordance with these safeguards, ensuring the integrity of the chain of command and effective operation of civil-military relations.
But while such preparedness is necessary, it is not sufficient.
We each took an oath as former leaders of the armed forces to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” We fulfilled that oath through service to civilian leadership elected by and accountable to the American people. This essential arrangement, however, is not self-executing; it relies on civilian leaders equally committed to protecting and defending the Constitution — including, most important, the commander in chief.
The principle of civilian control of the military predates the founding of the Republic. In 1775, George Washington was commissioned as the military commander of the Continental Army under the civilian command authority of the Second Continental Congress. The next year, among the grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence against King George III was his making “the military independent of and superior to the civil power.”
The president’s dereliction of duty on Jan. 6 tested the integrity of this historic principle as never before, endangering American lives and our democracy.
The lesson of that day is clear. Our democracy is not a given. To preserve it, Americans must demand nothing less from their leaders than an unassailable commitment to country over party — and to their oaths above all.
THE ANTI-ABORTION MOVEMENT’S CONTEMPT FOR WOMEN IS WORSE THAN I IMAGINED
By Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times
It’s getting hard to keep track of all the stories of women being denied care for miscarriages and otherwise having their lives endangered because of state abortion bans.
The Washington Post reported on a woman who had to travel to Michigan after a doctor in her home state refused to end an ectopic pregnancy because of the presence of fetal cardiac activity. (Ectopic pregnancies, in which an embryo implants outside the uterus, never lead to a live birth and are the leading cause of first-trimester maternal death.)
In an interview with The Associated Press, a doctor described a patient who was miscarrying in Texas and had developed a uterine infection. She couldn’t get the necessary treatment — an immediate abortion — as long as the fetus displayed signs of life. “The patient developed complications, required surgery, lost multiple liters of blood and had to be put on a breathing machine,” The A.P. reported, all because, as the doctor said, “we were essentially 24 hours behind.”
A doctor in Wisconsin, Carley Zeal, told The New York Times about caring for a woman having a miscarriage who had been denied treatment at a hospital. By the time she found Dr. Zeal, The Times reported, “the woman had been bleeding intermittently for days,” which the doctor said put her at “increased risk of hemorrhage or infection.”
Some in the anti-abortion movement insist that the doctors refusing to treat these women are mistaken about what the laws in their states say. “To the extent that doctors or attorneys are confused about whether necessary women’s health care is forbidden under pro-life laws, the fault lies in large part with pro-abortion activists, who have been intentionally muddying the waters,” tweeted Alexandra DeSanctis Marr, a writer for National Review and the co-author of “Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing.”
If that was the case, one might think abortion opponents would be eager to see their laws clarified. After all, the suffering caused by mismanaged miscarriages doesn’t serve the cause of fetal life. Ultimately, it will likely be detrimental to the anti-abortion movement. In Ireland, it was the death of Savita Halappanavar, who developed septicemia after being refused a termination while she was miscarrying, that spurred the successful campaign for legalized abortion there. Preventing such deaths should be as urgent a priority for those opposed to legal abortion as for those who champion it.
But it isn’t. Last week, the Biden administration released guidance that under federal law, hospitals must provide abortions when they’re necessary to stabilize patients suffering medical emergencies, or transfer them to a hospital that will. Texas is suing to prevent that policy from going into effect, saying it would “transform every emergency room in the country into a walk-in abortion clinic.”
Idaho’s Republican Party recently changed its platform to call for the criminalization of all abortions without exception. According to a blog post by Idaho Reports, a public policy television program, some delegates shared concerns about ectopic pregnancies and proposed an exemption in the platform when a woman’s life is in “lethal danger.” The exemption proposal was voted down, 412-164.
In The Times, the president of Texas Right to Life, John Seago, acknowledged that abortion bans could delay intervention during miscarriages. Doctors, he said, cannot decide that “I want to cause the death of the child today because I believe that they’re going to pass away eventually.”
I thought I was sufficiently cynical about the anti-abortion movement, but I admit to being taken aback by this blithe, public disregard for the lives of women, including women suffering the loss of wanted pregnancies.
I suspect that part of what’s happening is the right following its own rhetoric to its logical conclusion. It’s common for abortion opponents to claim that abortion is never medically necessary. Among conservative elites, this argument relies on semantic trickery, defining the termination of pregnancy to save a woman’s life as something other than abortion. Hence when the president of Americans United for Life testified before Congress, she argued, about the high-profile case of the 10-year-old rape victim, “If a 10-year-old became pregnant as a result of rape and it was threatening her life, then that’s not an abortion.”
This stance allows some abortion opponents to avoid reckoning with the consequences of the laws they support. Others, however, see those consequences fully and are fine with them. Scott Herndon, an Idaho Republican who recently unseated an incumbent state senator, was the politician who proposed the abortion criminalization language in his party’s platform. A website he runs, Abolish Abortion Idaho, says, of legislation he pushes, “Doctors may not intentionally kill the child in their medical attempts to treat the mother.”
On the day Roe v. Wade was overturned, Herndon posted a Facebook video arguing for murder prosecutions for abortion patients as well as abortion providers. “This body inside the mother’s body is not her body, and we need to get over the lie that mothers are not accountable,” he said. Men like him are making laws now. Don’t expect mercy.
By Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times
It’s getting hard to keep track of all the stories of women being denied care for miscarriages and otherwise having their lives endangered because of state abortion bans.
The Washington Post reported on a woman who had to travel to Michigan after a doctor in her home state refused to end an ectopic pregnancy because of the presence of fetal cardiac activity. (Ectopic pregnancies, in which an embryo implants outside the uterus, never lead to a live birth and are the leading cause of first-trimester maternal death.)
In an interview with The Associated Press, a doctor described a patient who was miscarrying in Texas and had developed a uterine infection. She couldn’t get the necessary treatment — an immediate abortion — as long as the fetus displayed signs of life. “The patient developed complications, required surgery, lost multiple liters of blood and had to be put on a breathing machine,” The A.P. reported, all because, as the doctor said, “we were essentially 24 hours behind.”
A doctor in Wisconsin, Carley Zeal, told The New York Times about caring for a woman having a miscarriage who had been denied treatment at a hospital. By the time she found Dr. Zeal, The Times reported, “the woman had been bleeding intermittently for days,” which the doctor said put her at “increased risk of hemorrhage or infection.”
Some in the anti-abortion movement insist that the doctors refusing to treat these women are mistaken about what the laws in their states say. “To the extent that doctors or attorneys are confused about whether necessary women’s health care is forbidden under pro-life laws, the fault lies in large part with pro-abortion activists, who have been intentionally muddying the waters,” tweeted Alexandra DeSanctis Marr, a writer for National Review and the co-author of “Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing.”
If that was the case, one might think abortion opponents would be eager to see their laws clarified. After all, the suffering caused by mismanaged miscarriages doesn’t serve the cause of fetal life. Ultimately, it will likely be detrimental to the anti-abortion movement. In Ireland, it was the death of Savita Halappanavar, who developed septicemia after being refused a termination while she was miscarrying, that spurred the successful campaign for legalized abortion there. Preventing such deaths should be as urgent a priority for those opposed to legal abortion as for those who champion it.
But it isn’t. Last week, the Biden administration released guidance that under federal law, hospitals must provide abortions when they’re necessary to stabilize patients suffering medical emergencies, or transfer them to a hospital that will. Texas is suing to prevent that policy from going into effect, saying it would “transform every emergency room in the country into a walk-in abortion clinic.”
Idaho’s Republican Party recently changed its platform to call for the criminalization of all abortions without exception. According to a blog post by Idaho Reports, a public policy television program, some delegates shared concerns about ectopic pregnancies and proposed an exemption in the platform when a woman’s life is in “lethal danger.” The exemption proposal was voted down, 412-164.
In The Times, the president of Texas Right to Life, John Seago, acknowledged that abortion bans could delay intervention during miscarriages. Doctors, he said, cannot decide that “I want to cause the death of the child today because I believe that they’re going to pass away eventually.”
I thought I was sufficiently cynical about the anti-abortion movement, but I admit to being taken aback by this blithe, public disregard for the lives of women, including women suffering the loss of wanted pregnancies.
I suspect that part of what’s happening is the right following its own rhetoric to its logical conclusion. It’s common for abortion opponents to claim that abortion is never medically necessary. Among conservative elites, this argument relies on semantic trickery, defining the termination of pregnancy to save a woman’s life as something other than abortion. Hence when the president of Americans United for Life testified before Congress, she argued, about the high-profile case of the 10-year-old rape victim, “If a 10-year-old became pregnant as a result of rape and it was threatening her life, then that’s not an abortion.”
This stance allows some abortion opponents to avoid reckoning with the consequences of the laws they support. Others, however, see those consequences fully and are fine with them. Scott Herndon, an Idaho Republican who recently unseated an incumbent state senator, was the politician who proposed the abortion criminalization language in his party’s platform. A website he runs, Abolish Abortion Idaho, says, of legislation he pushes, “Doctors may not intentionally kill the child in their medical attempts to treat the mother.”
On the day Roe v. Wade was overturned, Herndon posted a Facebook video arguing for murder prosecutions for abortion patients as well as abortion providers. “This body inside the mother’s body is not her body, and we need to get over the lie that mothers are not accountable,” he said. Men like him are making laws now. Don’t expect mercy.
REPUBLICANS’ HASTY ATTACKS ON WOMEN SHOW THEY WERE NEVER PRO-LIFE
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Just when it seemed that forced-birth advocates could not be any more cruel or disdainful of women’s lives, Texas’s Ken Paxton stepped up to confirm this crowd is anything but pro-life. The Post reports that the Republican state attorney general “sued the Biden administration over federal rules that require abortions be provided in medical emergencies to save the life of the mother, even in states with near-total bans.”
Texas Republicans are apparently outraged by the administration’s recent reminder that under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, emergency rooms must screen, stabilize and treat patients at risk of death before transferring them to another facility. In the case of pregnancy complications (e.g., preeclampsia, premature rupture of the membranes), an emergency abortion may be recommended to prevent serious permanent injury or death. How could any public official who claims to be “pro-life” seek to impede such a lifesaving intervention?
As White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Thursday, “This is yet another example of an extreme and radical Republican elected official. It is unthinkable that this public official would sue to block women from receiving life-saving care in emergency rooms, a right protected under U.S. law.”
Perhaps “unthinkable” is the wrong word. Defenders of women’s fundamental right to access abortion have long argued that the forced-birth crowd is not “pro-life.” History and the experiences of other countries show that when abortion is restricted, maternal mortality increases. A truly “pro-life” politician would support birth control, prenatal care, Medicaid extension, child-care subsidies and other government initiatives. By and large, the right-wing abortion cops aren’t in favor of any of that.
Instead, forced birth has always been about controlling women and compelling them to prioritize motherhood above all other roles, regardless of any serious health conditions. No other patient in distress — and certainly no man — would ever expect lifesaving measures to hinge on doctors and hospital lawyers’ agreement on interpretation of a state law seeking to outlaw a necessary medical procedure.
Rochelle Garza, Paxton’s Democratic opponent in Texas’s attorney general race, spoke for many outraged women when she tweeted, “What he’s advocating for is femicide — the intentional killing of women by withholding life-saving care. This lawsuit does not reflect Texans’ values and we will not sit idly by while Paxton turns our state into a morgue.”
Meanwhile, the ongoing ordeal of the 10-year-old rape victim from Ohio forced to travel to Indiana to get an abortion became even more excruciating, thanks to Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita. The Republican went on Fox News on Wednesday to say his office is investigating Caitlin Bernard, the Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist who provided the abortion. “We’re gathering the evidence as we speak, and we’re going to fight this to the end, including looking at her licensure,” Rokita said. He also repeated baseless claims that Bernard had “a history of failing to report” child abuse cases.
As it turns out, Bernard filed the appropriate report in a timely manner. Her attorney said in a statement, “She has not violated any law, including patient privacy laws, and she has not been disciplined by her employer. We are considering legal action against those who have smeared my client, including Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, and know that the facts will all come out in due time.” It sounds like she has a powerful case.
Rokita’s incendiary remarks, not unlike defeated former president Donald Trump’s smear of Georgia election workers, could reasonably have been expected to unleash the right-wing mob on the doctor, either virtually or in person. The reckless attack surely added to the victim’s stress. Public targeting of a rape victim and her doctor likely will deter other victims from coming forward.
The episode is yet another example reflecting the forced-birth movement’s utter disregard for the well-being of women and girls. Rokita, like Paxton, treats them as pawns in a power grab to keep his supporters infuriated and himself in office.
It cannot be said strongly enough: In denying women have any interest in protecting their bodily integrity and intimate decision-making, the right-wing Supreme Court set up millions of women, their families, and their doctors for abuse, disrespect and physical and mental harm.
Indiana’s legislature has been called back into special session on July 25 to consider further restrictions on abortion care. Have Republicans not inflicted enough humiliation, and not endangered enough women, girls and doctors? Oh no, I fear they are only getting started.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Just when it seemed that forced-birth advocates could not be any more cruel or disdainful of women’s lives, Texas’s Ken Paxton stepped up to confirm this crowd is anything but pro-life. The Post reports that the Republican state attorney general “sued the Biden administration over federal rules that require abortions be provided in medical emergencies to save the life of the mother, even in states with near-total bans.”
Texas Republicans are apparently outraged by the administration’s recent reminder that under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, emergency rooms must screen, stabilize and treat patients at risk of death before transferring them to another facility. In the case of pregnancy complications (e.g., preeclampsia, premature rupture of the membranes), an emergency abortion may be recommended to prevent serious permanent injury or death. How could any public official who claims to be “pro-life” seek to impede such a lifesaving intervention?
As White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Thursday, “This is yet another example of an extreme and radical Republican elected official. It is unthinkable that this public official would sue to block women from receiving life-saving care in emergency rooms, a right protected under U.S. law.”
Perhaps “unthinkable” is the wrong word. Defenders of women’s fundamental right to access abortion have long argued that the forced-birth crowd is not “pro-life.” History and the experiences of other countries show that when abortion is restricted, maternal mortality increases. A truly “pro-life” politician would support birth control, prenatal care, Medicaid extension, child-care subsidies and other government initiatives. By and large, the right-wing abortion cops aren’t in favor of any of that.
Instead, forced birth has always been about controlling women and compelling them to prioritize motherhood above all other roles, regardless of any serious health conditions. No other patient in distress — and certainly no man — would ever expect lifesaving measures to hinge on doctors and hospital lawyers’ agreement on interpretation of a state law seeking to outlaw a necessary medical procedure.
Rochelle Garza, Paxton’s Democratic opponent in Texas’s attorney general race, spoke for many outraged women when she tweeted, “What he’s advocating for is femicide — the intentional killing of women by withholding life-saving care. This lawsuit does not reflect Texans’ values and we will not sit idly by while Paxton turns our state into a morgue.”
Meanwhile, the ongoing ordeal of the 10-year-old rape victim from Ohio forced to travel to Indiana to get an abortion became even more excruciating, thanks to Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita. The Republican went on Fox News on Wednesday to say his office is investigating Caitlin Bernard, the Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist who provided the abortion. “We’re gathering the evidence as we speak, and we’re going to fight this to the end, including looking at her licensure,” Rokita said. He also repeated baseless claims that Bernard had “a history of failing to report” child abuse cases.
As it turns out, Bernard filed the appropriate report in a timely manner. Her attorney said in a statement, “She has not violated any law, including patient privacy laws, and she has not been disciplined by her employer. We are considering legal action against those who have smeared my client, including Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, and know that the facts will all come out in due time.” It sounds like she has a powerful case.
Rokita’s incendiary remarks, not unlike defeated former president Donald Trump’s smear of Georgia election workers, could reasonably have been expected to unleash the right-wing mob on the doctor, either virtually or in person. The reckless attack surely added to the victim’s stress. Public targeting of a rape victim and her doctor likely will deter other victims from coming forward.
The episode is yet another example reflecting the forced-birth movement’s utter disregard for the well-being of women and girls. Rokita, like Paxton, treats them as pawns in a power grab to keep his supporters infuriated and himself in office.
It cannot be said strongly enough: In denying women have any interest in protecting their bodily integrity and intimate decision-making, the right-wing Supreme Court set up millions of women, their families, and their doctors for abuse, disrespect and physical and mental harm.
Indiana’s legislature has been called back into special session on July 25 to consider further restrictions on abortion care. Have Republicans not inflicted enough humiliation, and not endangered enough women, girls and doctors? Oh no, I fear they are only getting started.
‘PRO-LIFE’? WOMEN’S SUFFERING IS FORCED-BIRTH ZEALOTS’ DOING.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Just as advocates of abortion access warned, the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade is resulting in increased pain, anguish and risk of death for pregnant women. It’s forcing health-care providers into a Catch-22 where they increasingly must navigate between their professional obligation to provide appropriate medical care and their fear of criminal prosecution and loss of their medical licenses.
The Post reports that “the standard of care for incomplete miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies and other common complications is being scrutinized, delayed — even denied — jeopardizing maternal health, according to the accounts of doctors in multiple states where new laws have gone into effect.”
Forced-birth zealots have set up a system in which doctors in states with draconian and/or hopelessly vague abortion bans are compelled to defer medically recommended abortion until the woman is at imminent risk of death. In those states, too, pharmacists resist filling a prescription for medication to resolve miscarriages — because exactly the same drug is used for abortion.
The new legal thicket can delay access to medical abortions (generally available up to 10 or 11 weeks) and thereby require women to undergo more expensive and risky surgery. Confusion about the legal status of treating ectopic pregnancies — virtually none of which would result in a live birth — can put women’s health in grave danger. (The Post reports: “Delaying treatment for an ectopic pregnancy is so dangerous it would amount to malpractice, said Pamela Parker, an OB/GYN in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley.”)
Lauren Thaxton, an obstetrician-gynecologist at the University of Texas at Austin, tells me that because medical risks associated with pregnancy (e.g., hypertension, diabetes, cardiac conditions) might develop later in pregnancy, possibly manifesting suddenly, these new, stringent requirements prevent doctors and patients from responsible planning that would weigh the risk of death and risk to the woman’s long-term health.
Doctors may be at the mercy of hospital lawyers, who themselves may not be able to predict how imprecise state laws, written in nonmedical terms, might be applied. While doctors are used to assessing what they might reasonably expect, state laws might demand a level of certainty to perform an abortion that simply does not apply in medical settings.
If, for example, a woman suffers a ruptured membrane (water breaking) before 22 to 24 weeks, the chance of the fetus’s survival is negligible while the woman faces risk of infection or hemorrhaging, Thaxton explains. A responsible OB/GYN almost certainly would not delay or deny an abortion; under Texas’s rigid six-week abortion ban, that might be precisely what the doctor is compelled to do.
The impact of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision on girls should make all but the most heartless forced-birth advocates shudder. “New bans in nearly a dozen states do not make exceptions for rape or incest, leaving young adolescents — already among the most restricted in their abortion options — with less access to the procedure,” the New York Times reports. “Even in states with exemptions for rape and incest, requirements involving police reports and parental consent can be prohibitive for children and teenagers.”
The disastrous episode involving a 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio could be repeated countless times as abortion bans with no exception for rape or incest multiply.
Even before Dobbs’s full impact is known, Americans are already expressing deep opposition to a new legal landscape that puts consideration of women’s well-being, even their lives, at the bottom of the list. In the latest Fox News poll, 60 percent oppose the court’s overturning of Roe, and the new regimen in many states is hugely unpopular. Only 9 percent would ban abortion if the woman’s life is at risk and only 11 percent if her health is endangered or if the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest.
Pro-women’s-life-and-health advocates have an opportunity to focus voters’ attention on state ballot measures regarding abortion rights (in Kansas next month, in Michigan in November), and on the abortion stances of candidates in state and local elections.
On Thursday, Senate Republicans blocked an effort to take up a bill that would guarantee women’s right to travel to another state to obtain an abortion. Now we are beginning to see just how tyrannical and radical is the mind-set of forced-birth crusaders.
Congress would be well advised to hold hearings not only in Washington but also in states where bans are going into effect to educate state lawmakers, governors and voters about the the post-Roe world the Supreme Court’s conservative justices have imposed on Americans.
It behooves the media, the medical profession and anyone defending the dignity, health and life of women to demand that Republicans face up to the consequences of their handiwork — and to demand accountability for the damage they are causing.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Just as advocates of abortion access warned, the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade is resulting in increased pain, anguish and risk of death for pregnant women. It’s forcing health-care providers into a Catch-22 where they increasingly must navigate between their professional obligation to provide appropriate medical care and their fear of criminal prosecution and loss of their medical licenses.
The Post reports that “the standard of care for incomplete miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies and other common complications is being scrutinized, delayed — even denied — jeopardizing maternal health, according to the accounts of doctors in multiple states where new laws have gone into effect.”
Forced-birth zealots have set up a system in which doctors in states with draconian and/or hopelessly vague abortion bans are compelled to defer medically recommended abortion until the woman is at imminent risk of death. In those states, too, pharmacists resist filling a prescription for medication to resolve miscarriages — because exactly the same drug is used for abortion.
The new legal thicket can delay access to medical abortions (generally available up to 10 or 11 weeks) and thereby require women to undergo more expensive and risky surgery. Confusion about the legal status of treating ectopic pregnancies — virtually none of which would result in a live birth — can put women’s health in grave danger. (The Post reports: “Delaying treatment for an ectopic pregnancy is so dangerous it would amount to malpractice, said Pamela Parker, an OB/GYN in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley.”)
Lauren Thaxton, an obstetrician-gynecologist at the University of Texas at Austin, tells me that because medical risks associated with pregnancy (e.g., hypertension, diabetes, cardiac conditions) might develop later in pregnancy, possibly manifesting suddenly, these new, stringent requirements prevent doctors and patients from responsible planning that would weigh the risk of death and risk to the woman’s long-term health.
Doctors may be at the mercy of hospital lawyers, who themselves may not be able to predict how imprecise state laws, written in nonmedical terms, might be applied. While doctors are used to assessing what they might reasonably expect, state laws might demand a level of certainty to perform an abortion that simply does not apply in medical settings.
If, for example, a woman suffers a ruptured membrane (water breaking) before 22 to 24 weeks, the chance of the fetus’s survival is negligible while the woman faces risk of infection or hemorrhaging, Thaxton explains. A responsible OB/GYN almost certainly would not delay or deny an abortion; under Texas’s rigid six-week abortion ban, that might be precisely what the doctor is compelled to do.
The impact of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision on girls should make all but the most heartless forced-birth advocates shudder. “New bans in nearly a dozen states do not make exceptions for rape or incest, leaving young adolescents — already among the most restricted in their abortion options — with less access to the procedure,” the New York Times reports. “Even in states with exemptions for rape and incest, requirements involving police reports and parental consent can be prohibitive for children and teenagers.”
The disastrous episode involving a 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio could be repeated countless times as abortion bans with no exception for rape or incest multiply.
Even before Dobbs’s full impact is known, Americans are already expressing deep opposition to a new legal landscape that puts consideration of women’s well-being, even their lives, at the bottom of the list. In the latest Fox News poll, 60 percent oppose the court’s overturning of Roe, and the new regimen in many states is hugely unpopular. Only 9 percent would ban abortion if the woman’s life is at risk and only 11 percent if her health is endangered or if the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest.
Pro-women’s-life-and-health advocates have an opportunity to focus voters’ attention on state ballot measures regarding abortion rights (in Kansas next month, in Michigan in November), and on the abortion stances of candidates in state and local elections.
On Thursday, Senate Republicans blocked an effort to take up a bill that would guarantee women’s right to travel to another state to obtain an abortion. Now we are beginning to see just how tyrannical and radical is the mind-set of forced-birth crusaders.
Congress would be well advised to hold hearings not only in Washington but also in states where bans are going into effect to educate state lawmakers, governors and voters about the the post-Roe world the Supreme Court’s conservative justices have imposed on Americans.
It behooves the media, the medical profession and anyone defending the dignity, health and life of women to demand that Republicans face up to the consequences of their handiwork — and to demand accountability for the damage they are causing.
MARY TRUMP ON DONALD WAITING IN THE MAR-A-LAGO CAFETERIA LINE
By John Casey
I’ve talked to Mary Trump a couple of times, and as a psychologist, she gave me insight into the depravity of her uncle.
There were other credible sources who helped me along the way, with the goal of always trying to shine a light on the tyranny, bigotry, and insanity of Donald Trump.
The testimony during the January 6 committee public hearings of former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson and other White House staffers about Trump’s petulant (thank you, Liz Cheney!) behavior was earth-shattering.
Or was it? Hutchinson and others finally ripped — not pulled — the curtain apart and exposed the hideous and heinous animal that Trump is behind closed doors and otherwise. America, many said, finally saw who the real Donald Trump was. But I don’t think that’s true.
Trump pushed the prime minister of Montenegro out of his way at a NATO summit (he tried to push NATO out of the way too). So it should not be inconceivable that he would push his Secret Service detail around.
Eyebrows were raised about the December 18 six-hour White House meeting with the bottom-feeders who snuck in, namely Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Mike Flynn, and the former CEO of Overstock, Patrick Byrne. But Trump’s campaign met with Russian spies in June of 2016 in Trump Tower in the failed attempt to get dirt on Hillary Clinton. Which one is worse?
Trump made his Secret Service detail take him for a joyride in front of the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center while he had severe COVID, risking the health of his detail while they drove him around so he could wave at the MAGA rodents in front of the hospital. That Trump tried to grab the wheel of the presidential vehicle from his Secret Service detail seems to pale in comparison.
Trump threw paper towel rolls at a crowd of homeless, starved, displaced, and desperate Puerto Ricans after the territory was devastated by a hurricane. Trump threw a plated hamburger against the wall in the presidential dining room after Attorney General Bill Barr said there was no election fraud. Which throw was more heartless?
Trump ordered an attack with tear gas, flash bangs, and other ammunition on peaceful protesters in front of the White House after George Floyd’s murder. Why are we suddenly caught off guard that Trump wanted metal detectors’ “mags” taken down so his armed cabal could enter the National Mall?
That Trump did and said nothing to calm the unrest after Charlottesville except to say that there were good people on both sides; thus, we are to be alarmed that he did nothing to stop the racist and neofascist insurrectionists on January 6 except to tell them they are “loved”?
You get the picture, or you’ve seen this picture before. You get the idea, or you had this idea before, and you know the story, or you knew Trump’s story long before Hutchinson and others came along. This is a mob movie that we’ve seen countless times that makes “Scarface” look like a teen coming of age story.
Someone else who was not surprised in the least was Mary L. Trump, the former president’s niece. She is the best-selling author of “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man,” a definitive examination of her uncle’s psyche, and the host of The Mary L. Trump Show.
I had to reach out to her again, to see what she thought of all the news about Donald that has busted forth from these riveting hearings. When I spoke to her two years ago this month, she was prophetic. She summed up in one sentence what her uncle was all about: “He will never get better and may get worse.”
I asked her, first, do you ever get tired of saying “I told you so”? “I don’t put it in those terms,” she said during a phone catch-up this week. “At this point, anyone who is surprised by what they’re hearing about Donald isn’t paying attention. There’s nothing to be surprised about. From throwing food to getting rid of the ‘mags’ so that armed militias could attend his rally, he’s capable of anything. He did get worse, like I said, much worse.”
Mary Trump explained that he hurts people and pushes them around and scares them because he knows they can’t retaliate.
Does she think her uncle has been glued to the hearings? “Donald’s problem is that he needs attention. He craves it. The hearings are all about him and that makes him happy. It’s virtually impossible for him to stay away. Now, when Liz Cheney said he was a 76-year-old man and not a petulant child, that probably bothered him, only because she is a strong woman who would dare defy him.”
Recently, Trump said that she thinks her uncle might be the one who is scared now. What did she mean by that? “Clearly he’s trying to use his power to manipulate people to not testify or not testify truthfully, so the witness tampering is a desperate ploy,” she pointed out. “Also, he’s contemplating declaring his candidacy earlier, since he thinks doing so will somehow protect him.”
Trump added that Donald “has never faced the consequences of his actions, and he knows that, and he’s in no mood to find out what it means to be accountable.”
One of his actions that’s generated a lot of media attention is his plate throwing. Mary Trump and I had a good laugh about that, but I wondered if she had ever seen him throw a plate or throw a tantrum while she was growing up. “He never had to,” she was quick to say. “He was always the center of attention in the family. No one ever questioned him. We were all spectators and cheerleaders to Donald, so there was nothing for him to be upset about. My grandfather constructed a world where Donald could do no wrong. He was always made to feel like the most important person on the planet.”
I asked if she would ever see him succumbing to being led away in handcuffs. Or would he barricade himself at Mar-a-Lago or, worse, off himself to avoid the embarrassment? “No, he would do neither,” Trump explained. “I don’t know how that would work, whether his attorneys would negotiate something beforehand, or if the FBI would raid his home at dawn. Either way, he would make himself the victim and that the real crime was being committed unfairly against him.”
I threw out a hypothetical about it going all going south for Donald. If he ever ended up in prison. “Let’s hope so!” Mary interrupted with a laugh. If he ended up behind bars, what would he miss the most, his funky hair or fake tan? “There’s no way he would ever allow himself to think that would happen to him. He’s been manipulated to believe his own greatness. That he is the handsomest, smartest, and most brilliant person in the world.”
“Now, having said all that, if he did end up behind bars, he would adapt in some way,” she continued. “He left the grandeur of the White House, and now he’s just another guy at the cafeteria at Mar-a-Lago who crashes weddings there so people applaud him. He will adapt to being in reduced circumstances.”
Will her uncle run again? “He didn’t like the job, and the main reason he’d run is he thinks he can avoid being charged with any crime. But he loved the job because he took advantage of the emoluments clause and made money during his term. The best thing about the presidency to him is that it’s a good grift gig that made him a lot of money.”
By John Casey
I’ve talked to Mary Trump a couple of times, and as a psychologist, she gave me insight into the depravity of her uncle.
There were other credible sources who helped me along the way, with the goal of always trying to shine a light on the tyranny, bigotry, and insanity of Donald Trump.
The testimony during the January 6 committee public hearings of former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson and other White House staffers about Trump’s petulant (thank you, Liz Cheney!) behavior was earth-shattering.
Or was it? Hutchinson and others finally ripped — not pulled — the curtain apart and exposed the hideous and heinous animal that Trump is behind closed doors and otherwise. America, many said, finally saw who the real Donald Trump was. But I don’t think that’s true.
Trump pushed the prime minister of Montenegro out of his way at a NATO summit (he tried to push NATO out of the way too). So it should not be inconceivable that he would push his Secret Service detail around.
Eyebrows were raised about the December 18 six-hour White House meeting with the bottom-feeders who snuck in, namely Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Mike Flynn, and the former CEO of Overstock, Patrick Byrne. But Trump’s campaign met with Russian spies in June of 2016 in Trump Tower in the failed attempt to get dirt on Hillary Clinton. Which one is worse?
Trump made his Secret Service detail take him for a joyride in front of the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center while he had severe COVID, risking the health of his detail while they drove him around so he could wave at the MAGA rodents in front of the hospital. That Trump tried to grab the wheel of the presidential vehicle from his Secret Service detail seems to pale in comparison.
Trump threw paper towel rolls at a crowd of homeless, starved, displaced, and desperate Puerto Ricans after the territory was devastated by a hurricane. Trump threw a plated hamburger against the wall in the presidential dining room after Attorney General Bill Barr said there was no election fraud. Which throw was more heartless?
Trump ordered an attack with tear gas, flash bangs, and other ammunition on peaceful protesters in front of the White House after George Floyd’s murder. Why are we suddenly caught off guard that Trump wanted metal detectors’ “mags” taken down so his armed cabal could enter the National Mall?
That Trump did and said nothing to calm the unrest after Charlottesville except to say that there were good people on both sides; thus, we are to be alarmed that he did nothing to stop the racist and neofascist insurrectionists on January 6 except to tell them they are “loved”?
You get the picture, or you’ve seen this picture before. You get the idea, or you had this idea before, and you know the story, or you knew Trump’s story long before Hutchinson and others came along. This is a mob movie that we’ve seen countless times that makes “Scarface” look like a teen coming of age story.
Someone else who was not surprised in the least was Mary L. Trump, the former president’s niece. She is the best-selling author of “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man,” a definitive examination of her uncle’s psyche, and the host of The Mary L. Trump Show.
I had to reach out to her again, to see what she thought of all the news about Donald that has busted forth from these riveting hearings. When I spoke to her two years ago this month, she was prophetic. She summed up in one sentence what her uncle was all about: “He will never get better and may get worse.”
I asked her, first, do you ever get tired of saying “I told you so”? “I don’t put it in those terms,” she said during a phone catch-up this week. “At this point, anyone who is surprised by what they’re hearing about Donald isn’t paying attention. There’s nothing to be surprised about. From throwing food to getting rid of the ‘mags’ so that armed militias could attend his rally, he’s capable of anything. He did get worse, like I said, much worse.”
Mary Trump explained that he hurts people and pushes them around and scares them because he knows they can’t retaliate.
Does she think her uncle has been glued to the hearings? “Donald’s problem is that he needs attention. He craves it. The hearings are all about him and that makes him happy. It’s virtually impossible for him to stay away. Now, when Liz Cheney said he was a 76-year-old man and not a petulant child, that probably bothered him, only because she is a strong woman who would dare defy him.”
Recently, Trump said that she thinks her uncle might be the one who is scared now. What did she mean by that? “Clearly he’s trying to use his power to manipulate people to not testify or not testify truthfully, so the witness tampering is a desperate ploy,” she pointed out. “Also, he’s contemplating declaring his candidacy earlier, since he thinks doing so will somehow protect him.”
Trump added that Donald “has never faced the consequences of his actions, and he knows that, and he’s in no mood to find out what it means to be accountable.”
One of his actions that’s generated a lot of media attention is his plate throwing. Mary Trump and I had a good laugh about that, but I wondered if she had ever seen him throw a plate or throw a tantrum while she was growing up. “He never had to,” she was quick to say. “He was always the center of attention in the family. No one ever questioned him. We were all spectators and cheerleaders to Donald, so there was nothing for him to be upset about. My grandfather constructed a world where Donald could do no wrong. He was always made to feel like the most important person on the planet.”
I asked if she would ever see him succumbing to being led away in handcuffs. Or would he barricade himself at Mar-a-Lago or, worse, off himself to avoid the embarrassment? “No, he would do neither,” Trump explained. “I don’t know how that would work, whether his attorneys would negotiate something beforehand, or if the FBI would raid his home at dawn. Either way, he would make himself the victim and that the real crime was being committed unfairly against him.”
I threw out a hypothetical about it going all going south for Donald. If he ever ended up in prison. “Let’s hope so!” Mary interrupted with a laugh. If he ended up behind bars, what would he miss the most, his funky hair or fake tan? “There’s no way he would ever allow himself to think that would happen to him. He’s been manipulated to believe his own greatness. That he is the handsomest, smartest, and most brilliant person in the world.”
“Now, having said all that, if he did end up behind bars, he would adapt in some way,” she continued. “He left the grandeur of the White House, and now he’s just another guy at the cafeteria at Mar-a-Lago who crashes weddings there so people applaud him. He will adapt to being in reduced circumstances.”
Will her uncle run again? “He didn’t like the job, and the main reason he’d run is he thinks he can avoid being charged with any crime. But he loved the job because he took advantage of the emoluments clause and made money during his term. The best thing about the presidency to him is that it’s a good grift gig that made him a lot of money.”
A 10-YEAR-OLD RAPE VICTIM’S PLIGHT SHOWS WHY POLITICIANS SHOULD STAY OUT OF ABORTION
By Jennifer Rubin, The New York Times
President Biden last week channeled the horror that many felt regarding the news of a 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio who was forced to go out of state to obtain an abortion. "Imagine being that little girl,” he said, decrying the suggestion from antiabortion zealots that she should be forced to give birth to her rapist’s child. “I can’t think of anything as much more extreme.”
Well, now, we have something even more extreme: Right-wing Ohio politicians accusing the child of making a false allegation to get an abortion. Think about that. They thought a 10-year-old was simply promiscuous and looking for an excuse to end her pregnancy? The mind reels.
The Columbus Dispatch reports, “Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost appeared on Fox News this week, casting doubt on the veracity of Dr. Caitlin Bernard’s account that a 10-year-old Ohio rape victim needed to travel to Indiana for an abortion.” Yost repeated the accusation during an interview with USA Today: “Every day that goes by, the more likely that this is a fabrication. I know the cops and prosecutors in this state. . . . And shame on the Indianapolis paper that ran this thing on a single source who has an obvious axe to grind.”
The shame was his. After the alleged rapist was arrested on Tuesday, I reached out to Yost’s office to see if he would apologize for his comments. He did not respond.
Yost wasn’t alone in casting aspersions on the victim’s account. The Dispatch reported:
Rep. Jim Jordan ... also cast doubt on the veracity of the story this week and shared an article about Yost’s comments that no evidence had been found.
“Another lie,” he tweeted. “Anyone surprised?”
After news of the arrest broke, Jordan tweeted that the man charged “should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
No response from his office either.
As a preliminary matter, it is grossly inappropriate — and arguably a violation of prosecutors’ code of ethics — to publicly (and with zero basis) demean a victim’s account. The American Bar Association rules state: “The prosecutor should not make, cause to be made, or authorize or condone the making of, a public statement that the prosecutor knows or reasonably should know will have a substantial likelihood of materially prejudicing a criminal proceeding or heightening public condemnation of the accused.”
In the case of sexual violence, Yost’s conduct is especially egregious given the aversion that many victims already feel about going to law enforcement. And in the case of a child, it is nothing short of barbaric. Yost’s remarks could encourage abusers to tell their victims, “No one’s going to believe you.”
Former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade tells me: “This is the new world we live in. To get an abortion under a rape exception to the law, a victim must prove there was a rape, and must do so more quickly than a pregnancy will permit.” She continues, “Instead of diligently investigating the rape, a Republican official is incentivized to signal to his supporters that he cares more about preventing the abortion than prosecuting the rapist. Rape victims will be twice victimized.”
The rape victim in Ohio was put in this position because the state’s GOP legislature passed a six-week abortion ban with no exception for rape or incest, and Republican Gov. Mike DeWine signed it. While DeWine did not insult the victim upon learning of the case, his statement gave no indication that he understood the law he signed was responsible for the victim’s extended trauma. “This is a horrible, horrible tragedy for a 10-year-old to be assaulted, for a 10-year-old to be raped,” DeWine said on July 6. “As a father and as a grandfather, it’s just gut-wrenching to even think about it.”
Not gut-wrenching enough, however, to spare her the delay and ordeal of out-of-state travel to terminate the pregnancy.
The entire episode should underscore the forced-birth cohort’s monstrous dehumanization of women. They do not trust women, their families, doctors or clergy to make decisions that involve serious risks of mental and emotional harm. These politicians would deny women and girls the autonomy to make life decisions that will have life-changing consequences for them and their families. Even worse, too many politicians fail to demonstrate any respect for victims who report sexual assault.
If there were ever an advertisement against allowing politicians to override intimate health decisions of women and girls, this is it. Do Ohioans really want to sign over control of their lives to the likes of Yost, DeWine and Jordan? The voters can answer that question in November.
By Jennifer Rubin, The New York Times
President Biden last week channeled the horror that many felt regarding the news of a 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio who was forced to go out of state to obtain an abortion. "Imagine being that little girl,” he said, decrying the suggestion from antiabortion zealots that she should be forced to give birth to her rapist’s child. “I can’t think of anything as much more extreme.”
Well, now, we have something even more extreme: Right-wing Ohio politicians accusing the child of making a false allegation to get an abortion. Think about that. They thought a 10-year-old was simply promiscuous and looking for an excuse to end her pregnancy? The mind reels.
The Columbus Dispatch reports, “Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost appeared on Fox News this week, casting doubt on the veracity of Dr. Caitlin Bernard’s account that a 10-year-old Ohio rape victim needed to travel to Indiana for an abortion.” Yost repeated the accusation during an interview with USA Today: “Every day that goes by, the more likely that this is a fabrication. I know the cops and prosecutors in this state. . . . And shame on the Indianapolis paper that ran this thing on a single source who has an obvious axe to grind.”
The shame was his. After the alleged rapist was arrested on Tuesday, I reached out to Yost’s office to see if he would apologize for his comments. He did not respond.
Yost wasn’t alone in casting aspersions on the victim’s account. The Dispatch reported:
Rep. Jim Jordan ... also cast doubt on the veracity of the story this week and shared an article about Yost’s comments that no evidence had been found.
“Another lie,” he tweeted. “Anyone surprised?”
After news of the arrest broke, Jordan tweeted that the man charged “should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
No response from his office either.
As a preliminary matter, it is grossly inappropriate — and arguably a violation of prosecutors’ code of ethics — to publicly (and with zero basis) demean a victim’s account. The American Bar Association rules state: “The prosecutor should not make, cause to be made, or authorize or condone the making of, a public statement that the prosecutor knows or reasonably should know will have a substantial likelihood of materially prejudicing a criminal proceeding or heightening public condemnation of the accused.”
In the case of sexual violence, Yost’s conduct is especially egregious given the aversion that many victims already feel about going to law enforcement. And in the case of a child, it is nothing short of barbaric. Yost’s remarks could encourage abusers to tell their victims, “No one’s going to believe you.”
Former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade tells me: “This is the new world we live in. To get an abortion under a rape exception to the law, a victim must prove there was a rape, and must do so more quickly than a pregnancy will permit.” She continues, “Instead of diligently investigating the rape, a Republican official is incentivized to signal to his supporters that he cares more about preventing the abortion than prosecuting the rapist. Rape victims will be twice victimized.”
The rape victim in Ohio was put in this position because the state’s GOP legislature passed a six-week abortion ban with no exception for rape or incest, and Republican Gov. Mike DeWine signed it. While DeWine did not insult the victim upon learning of the case, his statement gave no indication that he understood the law he signed was responsible for the victim’s extended trauma. “This is a horrible, horrible tragedy for a 10-year-old to be assaulted, for a 10-year-old to be raped,” DeWine said on July 6. “As a father and as a grandfather, it’s just gut-wrenching to even think about it.”
Not gut-wrenching enough, however, to spare her the delay and ordeal of out-of-state travel to terminate the pregnancy.
The entire episode should underscore the forced-birth cohort’s monstrous dehumanization of women. They do not trust women, their families, doctors or clergy to make decisions that involve serious risks of mental and emotional harm. These politicians would deny women and girls the autonomy to make life decisions that will have life-changing consequences for them and their families. Even worse, too many politicians fail to demonstrate any respect for victims who report sexual assault.
If there were ever an advertisement against allowing politicians to override intimate health decisions of women and girls, this is it. Do Ohioans really want to sign over control of their lives to the likes of Yost, DeWine and Jordan? The voters can answer that question in November.
5 THINGS WE LEARNED FROM THE JAN. 6 COMMITTEE’S LATEST HEARING
By Jennifer Rubin – The Washington Post
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), in her opening remarks during the Jan. 6 House select committee’s hearing on Tuesday, rebutted the new, favored defense from Donald Trump’s camp that he was bamboozled by advisers and couldn’t tell right from wrong. The former president “is not an impressionable child,” she said. “Just like everyone else in this country, he is responsible for his own actions and his own choices.”
It was an apt remark considering the evidence presented in the committee’s latest hearing. The session detailed the interaction between Trump and his most crazed advisers, and how Trump’s public statements stirred up violent, right-wing groups to storm the Capitol on his behalf to stop the electoral vote count.
Here are five key takeaways from the hearing:
1 - Trump knew he lost the election but refused to concede
Committee member Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.) walked through documents and testimony showing that not even Trump’s craziest enablers had evidence of fraud. Trump was told this repeatedly.
It was powerful to see Eugene Scalia, a favorite on the right who served as Trump’s labor secretary, as well as former White House counsel Pat Cipollone, former attorney general William P. Barr and even Trump’s daughter Ivanka testify in video depositions that they told the president that the jig was up after the electoral college met on Dec. 14, 2020. It was time to concede, they said. Barr testified that then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows eventually came to the same conclusion. Trump was not persuaded.
Instead, Trump plunged forward, culminating in a Dec. 18 meeting in which a team of outside advisers paid Trump a visit and clashed with his White House staff. Raskin explained, “The meeting has been called unhinged, not normal and the craziest meeting of the Trump presidency.”
Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, as well as Trump associate Michael Flynn, arrived bearing a draft executive order to “seize” ballot boxes and appoint Powell as a special prosecutor with the power to make election-related charges against people. Cipollone testified that he vehemently opposed the scheme, deeming it a “terrible idea” and “not how we do things in the United States.”
The heated meeting reportedly lasted more than six hours as Cipollone challenged the bizarre conspiracy theories that “Team Rudy” was passing along to Trump, involving foreign countries’ tampering with the results.
2 - Far-right militia groups responded to Trump’s call for action and coordinated in broad daylight
After it became clear that the plan to seize the ballot boxes wouldn’t pan out, at 1:42 a.m. on Dec. 19, Trump sent out a tweet targeting the joint session of Congress at which the electoral votes would be certified. He called on his supporters to come to D.C. on Jan. 6 and insisted it would be “wild.”
Far-right online personalities such as Ali Alexander beckoned their followers to promote the event. An anonymous Twitter employee, who had tracked extremist Trump supporters after he told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” during a presidential debate, testified to the committee, “I was concerned the former president, for the first time, was speaking directly to extremist organizations and giving them directives.”
As a result of Trump’s invitation, far-right groups online turned ugly, violent and apocalyptic. The founder of one pro-Trump site referred to Jan. 6 as “D-day.” Trump continued to whip up his supporters on Twitter in the days before Jan. 6. Donell Harvin, a former top intelligence official for the District of Columbia, testified that previously unaligned groups were coordinating and planning a violent event.
3 - Trump and his cronies revved up the violent mob he had summoned to D.C.
The committee showed chilling video excerpts of speeches from Flynn, Trump confidant Roger Stone and far-right media personality Alex Jones on the night before Jan. 6. The committee also showed that both Flynn and Stone had connections to violent militia groups.
On the same day, Trump continued to issue tweets urging the mob not to let the country fall to the left. The Twitter employee testified that there were efforts to de-platform Trump from the site, anticipating the violence from the “locked and loaded” crowd. They failed.
Even one of Trump’s allies feared what would happen. Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) said on Jan. 5: “We also have Trump supporters who actually believe that we are going to overturn the election. And when that doesn’t happen — most likely will not happen — they are going to go nuts.”
Despite warnings of violence, Trump insisted on adding incendiary lines to his rally speech on Jan. 6 calling on Vice President Mike Pence to reject electoral votes. The White House counsel’s office edited the line out, but Trump demanded that it put back in after Pence told him on the morning of Jan. 6 that he wouldn’t do his bidding. Trump ad-libbed even more lines that incited the mob.
4 - The mob members believed Trump wanted them to fight to reverse the election
Stephen M. Ayres, one of the insurrectionists who swarmed the Capitol on Jan. 6, appeared before the committee on Tuesday alongside former Oath Keeper spokesman Jason Van Tatenhove. Ayres was the first participant in the insurrection that Americans could hear from firsthand.
Ayers described himself as a normal American before being caught up in the Trump cult. In describing the social media chorus that brought him to the Capitol on Jan. 6, he said, “I felt like I needed to get down here.” He also testified that it “definitely” would have made a difference to him had he known that Trump lied about the election being “stolen.” At the conclusion of his testimony, he called on others to “take off the blinders before it’s too late."
Van Tatenhove’s statements provided a window into the mentality of far-right militias. “We have to stop with the dishonesty,” he said, adding, "This could have been a spark that started a new civil war.” He practically pleaded with the country to pull back from the abyss. “We’ve been exceedingly lucky,” he said.
Their appearances before the committee were a sad, almost pathetic illustration of the people Trump preyed upon.
5 - Trump tried to contact a witness
At the end of the hearing, Cheney revealed that Trump tried personally to contact a witness who has not been publicly named. The witness told their lawyer, who then alerted the committee. The committee has referred the matter to the Justice Department.
“Let me say one more time," Cheney said, "we will take any effort to influence witness testimony very seriously.” This is yet another vivid reminder that Trump remains a threat to the rule of law.
By Jennifer Rubin – The Washington Post
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), in her opening remarks during the Jan. 6 House select committee’s hearing on Tuesday, rebutted the new, favored defense from Donald Trump’s camp that he was bamboozled by advisers and couldn’t tell right from wrong. The former president “is not an impressionable child,” she said. “Just like everyone else in this country, he is responsible for his own actions and his own choices.”
It was an apt remark considering the evidence presented in the committee’s latest hearing. The session detailed the interaction between Trump and his most crazed advisers, and how Trump’s public statements stirred up violent, right-wing groups to storm the Capitol on his behalf to stop the electoral vote count.
Here are five key takeaways from the hearing:
1 - Trump knew he lost the election but refused to concede
Committee member Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.) walked through documents and testimony showing that not even Trump’s craziest enablers had evidence of fraud. Trump was told this repeatedly.
It was powerful to see Eugene Scalia, a favorite on the right who served as Trump’s labor secretary, as well as former White House counsel Pat Cipollone, former attorney general William P. Barr and even Trump’s daughter Ivanka testify in video depositions that they told the president that the jig was up after the electoral college met on Dec. 14, 2020. It was time to concede, they said. Barr testified that then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows eventually came to the same conclusion. Trump was not persuaded.
Instead, Trump plunged forward, culminating in a Dec. 18 meeting in which a team of outside advisers paid Trump a visit and clashed with his White House staff. Raskin explained, “The meeting has been called unhinged, not normal and the craziest meeting of the Trump presidency.”
Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, as well as Trump associate Michael Flynn, arrived bearing a draft executive order to “seize” ballot boxes and appoint Powell as a special prosecutor with the power to make election-related charges against people. Cipollone testified that he vehemently opposed the scheme, deeming it a “terrible idea” and “not how we do things in the United States.”
The heated meeting reportedly lasted more than six hours as Cipollone challenged the bizarre conspiracy theories that “Team Rudy” was passing along to Trump, involving foreign countries’ tampering with the results.
2 - Far-right militia groups responded to Trump’s call for action and coordinated in broad daylight
After it became clear that the plan to seize the ballot boxes wouldn’t pan out, at 1:42 a.m. on Dec. 19, Trump sent out a tweet targeting the joint session of Congress at which the electoral votes would be certified. He called on his supporters to come to D.C. on Jan. 6 and insisted it would be “wild.”
Far-right online personalities such as Ali Alexander beckoned their followers to promote the event. An anonymous Twitter employee, who had tracked extremist Trump supporters after he told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” during a presidential debate, testified to the committee, “I was concerned the former president, for the first time, was speaking directly to extremist organizations and giving them directives.”
As a result of Trump’s invitation, far-right groups online turned ugly, violent and apocalyptic. The founder of one pro-Trump site referred to Jan. 6 as “D-day.” Trump continued to whip up his supporters on Twitter in the days before Jan. 6. Donell Harvin, a former top intelligence official for the District of Columbia, testified that previously unaligned groups were coordinating and planning a violent event.
3 - Trump and his cronies revved up the violent mob he had summoned to D.C.
The committee showed chilling video excerpts of speeches from Flynn, Trump confidant Roger Stone and far-right media personality Alex Jones on the night before Jan. 6. The committee also showed that both Flynn and Stone had connections to violent militia groups.
On the same day, Trump continued to issue tweets urging the mob not to let the country fall to the left. The Twitter employee testified that there were efforts to de-platform Trump from the site, anticipating the violence from the “locked and loaded” crowd. They failed.
Even one of Trump’s allies feared what would happen. Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) said on Jan. 5: “We also have Trump supporters who actually believe that we are going to overturn the election. And when that doesn’t happen — most likely will not happen — they are going to go nuts.”
Despite warnings of violence, Trump insisted on adding incendiary lines to his rally speech on Jan. 6 calling on Vice President Mike Pence to reject electoral votes. The White House counsel’s office edited the line out, but Trump demanded that it put back in after Pence told him on the morning of Jan. 6 that he wouldn’t do his bidding. Trump ad-libbed even more lines that incited the mob.
4 - The mob members believed Trump wanted them to fight to reverse the election
Stephen M. Ayres, one of the insurrectionists who swarmed the Capitol on Jan. 6, appeared before the committee on Tuesday alongside former Oath Keeper spokesman Jason Van Tatenhove. Ayres was the first participant in the insurrection that Americans could hear from firsthand.
Ayers described himself as a normal American before being caught up in the Trump cult. In describing the social media chorus that brought him to the Capitol on Jan. 6, he said, “I felt like I needed to get down here.” He also testified that it “definitely” would have made a difference to him had he known that Trump lied about the election being “stolen.” At the conclusion of his testimony, he called on others to “take off the blinders before it’s too late."
Van Tatenhove’s statements provided a window into the mentality of far-right militias. “We have to stop with the dishonesty,” he said, adding, "This could have been a spark that started a new civil war.” He practically pleaded with the country to pull back from the abyss. “We’ve been exceedingly lucky,” he said.
Their appearances before the committee were a sad, almost pathetic illustration of the people Trump preyed upon.
5 - Trump tried to contact a witness
At the end of the hearing, Cheney revealed that Trump tried personally to contact a witness who has not been publicly named. The witness told their lawyer, who then alerted the committee. The committee has referred the matter to the Justice Department.
“Let me say one more time," Cheney said, "we will take any effort to influence witness testimony very seriously.” This is yet another vivid reminder that Trump remains a threat to the rule of law.
REPUBLICANS HAVE A CHOICE: THEY CAN DUMP THE KOOKS.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
The mainstream media insist on treating the Republican Party as a normal party, routinely declining to press them on their party’s embrace of violence, lies and conspiracy theories. President Biden only gingerly dubs GOP proposals “ultra MAGA,” as if the problem were merely some absurdist policy ideas (e.g., taxing poor people). Neither Biden nor the media get to the nub of the problem.
Let’s be blunt: A great many Republican candidates are bonkers. Or they are pretending to be.
This includes an assortment of primary challengers to Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.). Her main opponent, Harriet Hageman, cited in their recent debate the debunked film “2000 Mules” to question drop boxes and insisted the Jan. 6 insurrectionists were punished for “exercising their First Amendment rights.” The other Republican contenders echoed her lies.
The Wyoming candidates are not alone. GOP candidates for Arizona governor must have taken one look at their Wyoming colleagues and concluded, “You want crazy? We’ll give you crazy.” They, too, spewed irrational theories at their recent debate, with Republican favorite Kari Lake also repeating the lie about “mules” trafficking ballots. Those outside the cult of former president Donald Trump may find it unimaginable that Arizonans would entrust these people with a public office, let alone the governorship.
Meanwhile, in an appearance on CNN on Sunday, Republican South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem refused to say that Trump, who sent an armed mob up to the Capitol, had any responsibility for the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Fellow Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) looked on aghast. “I’m blown away,” he said. “It’s like ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers.’ This is not the Kristi Noem I served with.”
And the insane lies coming from Republicans are not only about Trump. The active purveyors of the “big lie,” the vaccine deniers, the replacement theory provocateurs and the crowd that spun conspiracy theories about Ukraine when Trump was caught extorting its president are all either delusional or willing to pretend so. They are either hopelessly gullible or infinitely cynical.
Consider the six congressional Republicans who reportedly sought pardons after the Jan. 6 insurrection. Or Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who carried Russian disinformation and was caught up in the coup attempt. Or Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who retracted his observation that Jan. 6 was a “terrorist attack” to avoid the ire of the MAGA base. Or the Republican National Committee, which declared violence on Jan. 6 to be “legitimate political discourse.” Such figures are unfit for office since they cannot grasp reality and defend the Constitution from foreign and domestic enemies.
How do we handle people so lacking in honesty or shame? Cheney promised during her debate, “I won’t say something that I know is wrong simply to earn the votes of people.” Perhaps she should have spelled it out: The other people on this stage are lying, or they cannot tell the difference between truth and lies.
The corollary to the nuttery is that spineless GOP leaders, such as House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) and Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.), who once condemned the Jan. 6 attack and now evade questions about it, certainly know their defense of Trump rests on a foundation of lies. But with no capacity or desire to control the kooks, they are riding the wave of insanity to power. They are enablers and hence unfit themselves.
The result of this mass dishonesty has been the thorough radicalization of the GOP. As Cheney said in an interview with ABC News’s Jonathan Karl on Sunday: “Millions of people, millions of Republicans have been betrayed by Donald Trump. And that is a really painful thing for people to recognize and to admit, but it’s absolutely the case. And they’ve been betrayed by him, by the ‘big lie,’ and by — by what he continues to do and say to tear apart our country and tear apart our party. And I think we have to reject that.”
No doubt some GOP voters don’t believe the lies either, but they like tax cuts or forced-birth laws or just hate Democrats so much they would entrust nuclear codes to an unstable person such as Trump. The true believers may be beyond reach, but the voters who went along with Trump and the MAGA GOP for these reasons might reconsider the choices before them.
Democracy defenders pray that the spectacle of unhinged Republicans competing for office might shake some ordinary Republicans out of their stupor. They are not obligated to defend these candidates’ lunacy or to excuse the Jan. 6 insurrection. They can pursue policy outcomes they like without toting the MAGA baggage. Republican voters who know the MAGA pols imperil our democracy might even vote for moderate Democrats (oh, yes!), especially for offices responsible for election administration.
Still-reachable Republican voters — and the disengaged independents — might listen to the warnings from non-MAGA Republicans and Democrats. These voters need not renounce their past support for Trump; they just need to close the door on the era of crackpottery.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
The mainstream media insist on treating the Republican Party as a normal party, routinely declining to press them on their party’s embrace of violence, lies and conspiracy theories. President Biden only gingerly dubs GOP proposals “ultra MAGA,” as if the problem were merely some absurdist policy ideas (e.g., taxing poor people). Neither Biden nor the media get to the nub of the problem.
Let’s be blunt: A great many Republican candidates are bonkers. Or they are pretending to be.
This includes an assortment of primary challengers to Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.). Her main opponent, Harriet Hageman, cited in their recent debate the debunked film “2000 Mules” to question drop boxes and insisted the Jan. 6 insurrectionists were punished for “exercising their First Amendment rights.” The other Republican contenders echoed her lies.
The Wyoming candidates are not alone. GOP candidates for Arizona governor must have taken one look at their Wyoming colleagues and concluded, “You want crazy? We’ll give you crazy.” They, too, spewed irrational theories at their recent debate, with Republican favorite Kari Lake also repeating the lie about “mules” trafficking ballots. Those outside the cult of former president Donald Trump may find it unimaginable that Arizonans would entrust these people with a public office, let alone the governorship.
Meanwhile, in an appearance on CNN on Sunday, Republican South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem refused to say that Trump, who sent an armed mob up to the Capitol, had any responsibility for the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Fellow Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) looked on aghast. “I’m blown away,” he said. “It’s like ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers.’ This is not the Kristi Noem I served with.”
And the insane lies coming from Republicans are not only about Trump. The active purveyors of the “big lie,” the vaccine deniers, the replacement theory provocateurs and the crowd that spun conspiracy theories about Ukraine when Trump was caught extorting its president are all either delusional or willing to pretend so. They are either hopelessly gullible or infinitely cynical.
Consider the six congressional Republicans who reportedly sought pardons after the Jan. 6 insurrection. Or Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who carried Russian disinformation and was caught up in the coup attempt. Or Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who retracted his observation that Jan. 6 was a “terrorist attack” to avoid the ire of the MAGA base. Or the Republican National Committee, which declared violence on Jan. 6 to be “legitimate political discourse.” Such figures are unfit for office since they cannot grasp reality and defend the Constitution from foreign and domestic enemies.
How do we handle people so lacking in honesty or shame? Cheney promised during her debate, “I won’t say something that I know is wrong simply to earn the votes of people.” Perhaps she should have spelled it out: The other people on this stage are lying, or they cannot tell the difference between truth and lies.
The corollary to the nuttery is that spineless GOP leaders, such as House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) and Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.), who once condemned the Jan. 6 attack and now evade questions about it, certainly know their defense of Trump rests on a foundation of lies. But with no capacity or desire to control the kooks, they are riding the wave of insanity to power. They are enablers and hence unfit themselves.
The result of this mass dishonesty has been the thorough radicalization of the GOP. As Cheney said in an interview with ABC News’s Jonathan Karl on Sunday: “Millions of people, millions of Republicans have been betrayed by Donald Trump. And that is a really painful thing for people to recognize and to admit, but it’s absolutely the case. And they’ve been betrayed by him, by the ‘big lie,’ and by — by what he continues to do and say to tear apart our country and tear apart our party. And I think we have to reject that.”
No doubt some GOP voters don’t believe the lies either, but they like tax cuts or forced-birth laws or just hate Democrats so much they would entrust nuclear codes to an unstable person such as Trump. The true believers may be beyond reach, but the voters who went along with Trump and the MAGA GOP for these reasons might reconsider the choices before them.
Democracy defenders pray that the spectacle of unhinged Republicans competing for office might shake some ordinary Republicans out of their stupor. They are not obligated to defend these candidates’ lunacy or to excuse the Jan. 6 insurrection. They can pursue policy outcomes they like without toting the MAGA baggage. Republican voters who know the MAGA pols imperil our democracy might even vote for moderate Democrats (oh, yes!), especially for offices responsible for election administration.
Still-reachable Republican voters — and the disengaged independents — might listen to the warnings from non-MAGA Republicans and Democrats. These voters need not renounce their past support for Trump; they just need to close the door on the era of crackpottery.
IT’S THE CRUELTY THAT WILL UNDO THE FORCED BIRTH CRUSADE
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
When abortion rights advocates accused antiabortion proponents of being disturbingly indifferent to women and even aspiring to cruelly force women to give birth, they were labeled hysterics or exaggerators. But now, just as they were proved correct about the right’s ambition to reverse Roe v. Wade, these advocates can say they had the forced-birth crowd pegged all along. The proof is already here.
Two Republican governors, Kristi L. Noem of South Dakota and Tate Reeves of Mississippi, were asked on Sunday news talk shows about the case of a 10-year-old girl impregnated by her rapist. Are they really insisting that, regardless of the physical harm that giving birth could cause someone so young, the child be further tormented and forced to have the baby? Yes.
Reeves said these are such a “small, minor” number of cases. He wouldn’t say there should be an exception. Noem defended forced birth, insisting, “I don’t believe a tragic situation should be perpetuated by another tragedy.” The tragedy of forcing a 10-year-old to undergo a pregnancy and the pain of childbirth does not register with Noem.
These are not anomalies. Mississippi House Speaker Philip Gunn (R) said, soon after the decision overturning Roe was announced, that, in his view, a 12-year-old impregnated by incest should be forced to complete her pregnancy. Herschel Walker, a Republican nominee for Senate in Georgia, would agree apparently since he wants no exceptions. Not even to save the woman’s life. Ohio state Rep. Jean Schmidt has called forcing a 13-year-old rape victim to give birth an “opportunity.”
Indeed, the number of states contemplating abortion bans with no exception for rape or incest might shock you. Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards — a Democrat — just signed an abortion law with no exception for rape or incest. In Arkansas, Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) seemed open to making an exception, but its absence won’t slow down implementation of the abortion ban in his state.
The New York Times reports, “There are no allowances for victims of rape or incest in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, Ohio, South Dakota, Tennessee or Texas.” In Idaho, a woman would have to file a police report to obtain an abortion, something virtually impossible for incest victims and others who live in fear of their attackers.
The monstrous cruelty of such bills shows how little many conservatives care about the well-being of women and girls who have already experienced the unbelievable trauma of sexual violence.
But it gets worse. Many states no longer consider exceptions for the health of the woman or create dangerous uncertainty. In the real medical world, where doctors and patients make decisions based on probabilities, the result of such abortion laws can be deadly for women. If abortion is legal only with the “imminent” risk of death, women can be left in peril, facing what can become fatal complications later in pregnancy — when the chances of survival have declined.
In Tennessee, for example, doctors are supposed to prove the woman couldn’t have lived without an abortion. (They must prove “the abortion was necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or to prevent serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman.”)
NBC News reports:Arizona’s 15-week abortion ban provides exceptions for emergencies when continuing the pregnancy will “create serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function” for the mother. Oklahoma’s recent ban, the most restrictive in the country, is focused on life-threatening situations.
Mental health is almost never seen as enough of a reason to justify an abortion under the laws, said Carol Sanger, professor of law at Columbia University and the author of “About Abortion: Terminating Pregnancy in 21st-Century America.”
Republican candidates for governor in Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and joined with antiabortion groups to seek bans “that would not allow the procedure even if the mother’s health were endangered,” The Post reports.
Forced-birth advocates can hardly be called “pro-life” when they are willing to gamble with the lives and health of women. To say women will die because of abortion laws or will suffer untold harm, both mental and physical, is not hyperbole. It’s reality for women who are now deprived of the right to make their own decision about their health and even their lives.
When you treat women like less than competent adults, and insist that others, who may have little or no competency, weigh the risks to her health and life, you wind up not with a culture of life but a culture of devaluing women’s lives.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
When abortion rights advocates accused antiabortion proponents of being disturbingly indifferent to women and even aspiring to cruelly force women to give birth, they were labeled hysterics or exaggerators. But now, just as they were proved correct about the right’s ambition to reverse Roe v. Wade, these advocates can say they had the forced-birth crowd pegged all along. The proof is already here.
Two Republican governors, Kristi L. Noem of South Dakota and Tate Reeves of Mississippi, were asked on Sunday news talk shows about the case of a 10-year-old girl impregnated by her rapist. Are they really insisting that, regardless of the physical harm that giving birth could cause someone so young, the child be further tormented and forced to have the baby? Yes.
Reeves said these are such a “small, minor” number of cases. He wouldn’t say there should be an exception. Noem defended forced birth, insisting, “I don’t believe a tragic situation should be perpetuated by another tragedy.” The tragedy of forcing a 10-year-old to undergo a pregnancy and the pain of childbirth does not register with Noem.
These are not anomalies. Mississippi House Speaker Philip Gunn (R) said, soon after the decision overturning Roe was announced, that, in his view, a 12-year-old impregnated by incest should be forced to complete her pregnancy. Herschel Walker, a Republican nominee for Senate in Georgia, would agree apparently since he wants no exceptions. Not even to save the woman’s life. Ohio state Rep. Jean Schmidt has called forcing a 13-year-old rape victim to give birth an “opportunity.”
Indeed, the number of states contemplating abortion bans with no exception for rape or incest might shock you. Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards — a Democrat — just signed an abortion law with no exception for rape or incest. In Arkansas, Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) seemed open to making an exception, but its absence won’t slow down implementation of the abortion ban in his state.
The New York Times reports, “There are no allowances for victims of rape or incest in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, Ohio, South Dakota, Tennessee or Texas.” In Idaho, a woman would have to file a police report to obtain an abortion, something virtually impossible for incest victims and others who live in fear of their attackers.
The monstrous cruelty of such bills shows how little many conservatives care about the well-being of women and girls who have already experienced the unbelievable trauma of sexual violence.
But it gets worse. Many states no longer consider exceptions for the health of the woman or create dangerous uncertainty. In the real medical world, where doctors and patients make decisions based on probabilities, the result of such abortion laws can be deadly for women. If abortion is legal only with the “imminent” risk of death, women can be left in peril, facing what can become fatal complications later in pregnancy — when the chances of survival have declined.
In Tennessee, for example, doctors are supposed to prove the woman couldn’t have lived without an abortion. (They must prove “the abortion was necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or to prevent serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman.”)
NBC News reports:Arizona’s 15-week abortion ban provides exceptions for emergencies when continuing the pregnancy will “create serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function” for the mother. Oklahoma’s recent ban, the most restrictive in the country, is focused on life-threatening situations.
Mental health is almost never seen as enough of a reason to justify an abortion under the laws, said Carol Sanger, professor of law at Columbia University and the author of “About Abortion: Terminating Pregnancy in 21st-Century America.”
Republican candidates for governor in Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and joined with antiabortion groups to seek bans “that would not allow the procedure even if the mother’s health were endangered,” The Post reports.
Forced-birth advocates can hardly be called “pro-life” when they are willing to gamble with the lives and health of women. To say women will die because of abortion laws or will suffer untold harm, both mental and physical, is not hyperbole. It’s reality for women who are now deprived of the right to make their own decision about their health and even their lives.
When you treat women like less than competent adults, and insist that others, who may have little or no competency, weigh the risks to her health and life, you wind up not with a culture of life but a culture of devaluing women’s lives.
ANOTHER STEP TOWARD CLIMATE APOCALYPSE
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
We’re having a heat wave, a tropical heat wave. Also a temperate heat wave and an Arctic heat wave, with temperatures reaching the high 80s in northern Norway. The megadrought in the Western United States has reduced Lake Mead to a small fraction of its former size, and it now threatens to become a “dead pool” that can no longer supply water to major cities. Climate change is already doing immense damage, and it’s probably only a matter of time before we experience huge catastrophes that take thousands of lives.
And the Republican majority on the Supreme Court just voted to limit the Biden administration’s ability to do anything about it.
For party fealty is, of course, what this is all about. Anyone who believes that the recent series of blockbuster court rulings reflects any consistent legal theory is being willfully naïve: Clearly, the way this court interprets the law is almost entirely determined by what serves Republican interests. If states want to ban abortion, well, that’s their prerogative. If New York has a law restricting the concealed carrying of firearms, well, that’s unconstitutional.
And partisanship is the central problem of climate policy. Yes, Joe Manchin stands in the way of advancing the Biden climate agenda. But if there were even a handful of Republican senators willing to support climate action, Manchin wouldn’t matter, and neither would the Supreme Court: Simple legislation could establish regulations limiting greenhouse gas emissions and provide subsidies and maybe even impose taxes to encourage the transition to a green economy. So ultimately our paralysis in the face of what looks more and more like a looming apocalypse comes down to the G.O.P.’s adamant opposition to any kind of action.
The question is, how did letting the planet burn become a key G.O.P. tenet?
It wasn’t always thus. The Environmental Protection Agency, whose scope for action the court just moved to limit, was created by none other than Richard Nixon. As late as 2008 John McCain, the Republican nominee for president, ran on a promise to impose a cap-and-trade system to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
Republican positioning on the environment is also completely unlike that of mainstream conservative parties in other Western nations. One study — from a few years back, but I don’t think the fundamentals have changed — found that most conservative parties do support climate action and that the Republican Party “is an anomaly in denying anthropogenic climate change.” And yes, the G.O.P. is still into climate denial; it may sometimes admit that climate change is real while insisting that nothing can be done about it, but it reverts to denial every time there’s a cold snap.
So what explains the Republican climate difference? One natural answer is “follow the money”: In the 2020 election cycle the oil and gas industry gave 84 percent of its political contributions to Republicans; for coal mining, the number was 96 percent.
But I suspect that money is only part of the story; in fact, to some extent the causation may run the other way, with the fossil fuel sector backing Republicans because they’re anti-environment rather than the other way around.
My skepticism about a simple follow-the-money story comes from a couple of observations. One is that Republicans have staked out anti-science positions on other issues, like Covid vaccination, where the monetary considerations are far less obvious: As far as I know, the coronavirus isn’t a major source of campaign contributions.
Also, while the Republican position on climate is an outlier compared with “normal” conservative parties, it’s actually typical for right-wing populist parties. (Side note: I hate the use of the word “populist” here, because Republicans have shown no inclination toward policies that would actually help workers. But I guess we’re stuck with it.)
In other words, the politics of climate policy look a lot like the politics of authoritarian government and minority rights: The Republican Party looks more like Hungary’s Fidesz or Poland’s Law and Justice than like the center-right parties other countries call conservative.
Why, exactly, are authoritarian right-wing parties anti-environment? That’s a discussion for another day. What’s important right now is that the United States is the only major nation in which an authoritarian right-wing party — which lost the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections yet controls the Supreme Court — has the ability to block actions that might prevent climate catastrophe.
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
We’re having a heat wave, a tropical heat wave. Also a temperate heat wave and an Arctic heat wave, with temperatures reaching the high 80s in northern Norway. The megadrought in the Western United States has reduced Lake Mead to a small fraction of its former size, and it now threatens to become a “dead pool” that can no longer supply water to major cities. Climate change is already doing immense damage, and it’s probably only a matter of time before we experience huge catastrophes that take thousands of lives.
And the Republican majority on the Supreme Court just voted to limit the Biden administration’s ability to do anything about it.
For party fealty is, of course, what this is all about. Anyone who believes that the recent series of blockbuster court rulings reflects any consistent legal theory is being willfully naïve: Clearly, the way this court interprets the law is almost entirely determined by what serves Republican interests. If states want to ban abortion, well, that’s their prerogative. If New York has a law restricting the concealed carrying of firearms, well, that’s unconstitutional.
And partisanship is the central problem of climate policy. Yes, Joe Manchin stands in the way of advancing the Biden climate agenda. But if there were even a handful of Republican senators willing to support climate action, Manchin wouldn’t matter, and neither would the Supreme Court: Simple legislation could establish regulations limiting greenhouse gas emissions and provide subsidies and maybe even impose taxes to encourage the transition to a green economy. So ultimately our paralysis in the face of what looks more and more like a looming apocalypse comes down to the G.O.P.’s adamant opposition to any kind of action.
The question is, how did letting the planet burn become a key G.O.P. tenet?
It wasn’t always thus. The Environmental Protection Agency, whose scope for action the court just moved to limit, was created by none other than Richard Nixon. As late as 2008 John McCain, the Republican nominee for president, ran on a promise to impose a cap-and-trade system to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
Republican positioning on the environment is also completely unlike that of mainstream conservative parties in other Western nations. One study — from a few years back, but I don’t think the fundamentals have changed — found that most conservative parties do support climate action and that the Republican Party “is an anomaly in denying anthropogenic climate change.” And yes, the G.O.P. is still into climate denial; it may sometimes admit that climate change is real while insisting that nothing can be done about it, but it reverts to denial every time there’s a cold snap.
So what explains the Republican climate difference? One natural answer is “follow the money”: In the 2020 election cycle the oil and gas industry gave 84 percent of its political contributions to Republicans; for coal mining, the number was 96 percent.
But I suspect that money is only part of the story; in fact, to some extent the causation may run the other way, with the fossil fuel sector backing Republicans because they’re anti-environment rather than the other way around.
My skepticism about a simple follow-the-money story comes from a couple of observations. One is that Republicans have staked out anti-science positions on other issues, like Covid vaccination, where the monetary considerations are far less obvious: As far as I know, the coronavirus isn’t a major source of campaign contributions.
Also, while the Republican position on climate is an outlier compared with “normal” conservative parties, it’s actually typical for right-wing populist parties. (Side note: I hate the use of the word “populist” here, because Republicans have shown no inclination toward policies that would actually help workers. But I guess we’re stuck with it.)
In other words, the politics of climate policy look a lot like the politics of authoritarian government and minority rights: The Republican Party looks more like Hungary’s Fidesz or Poland’s Law and Justice than like the center-right parties other countries call conservative.
Why, exactly, are authoritarian right-wing parties anti-environment? That’s a discussion for another day. What’s important right now is that the United States is the only major nation in which an authoritarian right-wing party — which lost the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections yet controls the Supreme Court — has the ability to block actions that might prevent climate catastrophe.
THE SUPREME COURT SABOTAGES EFFORTS TO PROTECT PUBLIC HEALTH AND SAFETY
By The New York Times Editorial Board
On Thursday, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, with its 6-3 ruling in the case of West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, curtailed the power of the agency to protect the environment, and specifically to require the reductions in emissions that are urgently necessary to limit global warming.
The court’s ruling constrains any effort to tighten restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. It also threatens the Biden administration’s ability to impose new limits on tailpipe emissions from cars and trucks and on methane emissions from oil and gas facilities. As the three members of the court’s liberal minority wrote in a stinging dissent, the majority’s decision strips the E.P.A. of the power “to respond to the most pressing environmental challenge of our time.”
The Biden administration, already struggling to persuade Congress to invest in renewable energy and compelled by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to push for increased production of fossil fuels, once again finds its ambitious goals for confronting climate change slipping beyond reach. The court’s adversarial posture means that the administration must double down on its efforts to win congressional support for its spending plans. President Biden and Democratic leaders should also press to pass legislation clarifying the E.P.A.’s authority to regulate emissions.
Thursday’s ruling also has consequences far beyond environmental regulation. It threatens the ability of federal agencies to issue rules of any kind, including the regulations that ensure the safety of food, medicines and other consumer products, that protect workers from injuries and that prevent financial panics.
In 1984, an earlier generation of conservative Supreme Court justices formalized a doctrine of deference to the judgment of regulatory agencies, modestly concluding that judges were neither experts nor elected officials, and therefore ought to leave such decisions in other hands. In Thursday’s decision, the court asserted that the policy of deference applies only to supposedly unimportant regulations. When it comes to “major questions” of regulatory policy, the court said, it would not hesitate to second-guess regulators — and to strike rules that it decided did not have a clear congressional warrant.
The decision amounts to a warning shot across the bow of the administrative state. The court’s current conservative majority, engaged in a counterrevolution against the norms of American society, is seeking to curtail the efforts of federal regulators to protect the public’s health and safety. The court already invoked a similar logic during the Covid pandemic to strike down workplace Covid testing requirements and a federal moratorium on evictions. And by refraining from defining a threshold for what constitutes a “major question,” the court is leaving a sword hanging over every new rule.
The West Virginia case has its origins in 2015, when the E.P.A. imposed new limits on carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants. The agency determined that it was impossible for those plants to reduce emissions to what it regarded as a safe level while producing the same amount of electricity. Burning coal is simply too dirty. Accordingly, it directed companies to cut emissions by reducing output or by shifting to other forms of power generation.
The rule never took effect. The court stayed its implementation in 2016, and the Trump administration withdrew it in 2019. But the litigants, including the states of West Virginia and North Dakota and a pair of coal companies, pressed ahead with a lawsuit to make sure the rule stayed dead.
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, agreed with their claim that the E.P.A. did not have the authority to require companies to shift resources to other kinds of power generation. Mr. Roberts wrote that the court’s longstanding policy in such cases of deference to the agency’s own assessment of its authority did not apply because the stakes were too high. It is a theory long championed by Justice Neil Gorsuch, who explained in a concurring opinion that “administrative agencies must be able to point to ‘clear congressional authorization’ when they claim the power to make decisions of vast ‘economic and political significance.’”
The E.P.A. clearly has the legal authority to set an acceptable standard for emissions, in this case of carbon dioxide, and then to impose restrictions on emitters, in this case coal-fired power plants. The court did not contest these facts. Instead, it ruled that the Clean Air Act does not provide the E.P.A. with sufficient authority to achieve those emissions standards.
Chief Justice Roberts described this conclusion as a defense of congressional authority — an assertion of the primacy of elected officials. But constraining the power of regulatory agencies should not be understood as a shift in the locus of decision-making; rather, it effectively prevents good decisions from being made.
Congress has decided, and with good reason, that regulatory agencies staffed by experts are the best available mechanism for a representative democracy to make decisions in areas of technical complexity. The E.P.A. is the entity that Congress relies upon to figure out how clean the air should be, and how to get there. Asserting that it lacks the power to perform its basic responsibilities is simply sabotage.
It is a telling fact that power producers, in response to market forces, have achieved the shift to cleaner energy that the E.P.A. sought to require in 2015, validating the agency’s assessment of what it could reasonably mandate.
Chief Justice Roberts’s predecessors recognized their own limitations. In the 1984 ruling that formalized the court’s policy of regulatory deference, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that “judges are not experts in the field and are not part of either political branch of the government.” Both points are important. The court lacks technical expertise and an electoral mandate. Thursday’s decision asserting a more muscular role is thus a blow to both the public interest and democracy.
By The New York Times Editorial Board
On Thursday, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, with its 6-3 ruling in the case of West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, curtailed the power of the agency to protect the environment, and specifically to require the reductions in emissions that are urgently necessary to limit global warming.
The court’s ruling constrains any effort to tighten restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. It also threatens the Biden administration’s ability to impose new limits on tailpipe emissions from cars and trucks and on methane emissions from oil and gas facilities. As the three members of the court’s liberal minority wrote in a stinging dissent, the majority’s decision strips the E.P.A. of the power “to respond to the most pressing environmental challenge of our time.”
The Biden administration, already struggling to persuade Congress to invest in renewable energy and compelled by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to push for increased production of fossil fuels, once again finds its ambitious goals for confronting climate change slipping beyond reach. The court’s adversarial posture means that the administration must double down on its efforts to win congressional support for its spending plans. President Biden and Democratic leaders should also press to pass legislation clarifying the E.P.A.’s authority to regulate emissions.
Thursday’s ruling also has consequences far beyond environmental regulation. It threatens the ability of federal agencies to issue rules of any kind, including the regulations that ensure the safety of food, medicines and other consumer products, that protect workers from injuries and that prevent financial panics.
In 1984, an earlier generation of conservative Supreme Court justices formalized a doctrine of deference to the judgment of regulatory agencies, modestly concluding that judges were neither experts nor elected officials, and therefore ought to leave such decisions in other hands. In Thursday’s decision, the court asserted that the policy of deference applies only to supposedly unimportant regulations. When it comes to “major questions” of regulatory policy, the court said, it would not hesitate to second-guess regulators — and to strike rules that it decided did not have a clear congressional warrant.
The decision amounts to a warning shot across the bow of the administrative state. The court’s current conservative majority, engaged in a counterrevolution against the norms of American society, is seeking to curtail the efforts of federal regulators to protect the public’s health and safety. The court already invoked a similar logic during the Covid pandemic to strike down workplace Covid testing requirements and a federal moratorium on evictions. And by refraining from defining a threshold for what constitutes a “major question,” the court is leaving a sword hanging over every new rule.
The West Virginia case has its origins in 2015, when the E.P.A. imposed new limits on carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants. The agency determined that it was impossible for those plants to reduce emissions to what it regarded as a safe level while producing the same amount of electricity. Burning coal is simply too dirty. Accordingly, it directed companies to cut emissions by reducing output or by shifting to other forms of power generation.
The rule never took effect. The court stayed its implementation in 2016, and the Trump administration withdrew it in 2019. But the litigants, including the states of West Virginia and North Dakota and a pair of coal companies, pressed ahead with a lawsuit to make sure the rule stayed dead.
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, agreed with their claim that the E.P.A. did not have the authority to require companies to shift resources to other kinds of power generation. Mr. Roberts wrote that the court’s longstanding policy in such cases of deference to the agency’s own assessment of its authority did not apply because the stakes were too high. It is a theory long championed by Justice Neil Gorsuch, who explained in a concurring opinion that “administrative agencies must be able to point to ‘clear congressional authorization’ when they claim the power to make decisions of vast ‘economic and political significance.’”
The E.P.A. clearly has the legal authority to set an acceptable standard for emissions, in this case of carbon dioxide, and then to impose restrictions on emitters, in this case coal-fired power plants. The court did not contest these facts. Instead, it ruled that the Clean Air Act does not provide the E.P.A. with sufficient authority to achieve those emissions standards.
Chief Justice Roberts described this conclusion as a defense of congressional authority — an assertion of the primacy of elected officials. But constraining the power of regulatory agencies should not be understood as a shift in the locus of decision-making; rather, it effectively prevents good decisions from being made.
Congress has decided, and with good reason, that regulatory agencies staffed by experts are the best available mechanism for a representative democracy to make decisions in areas of technical complexity. The E.P.A. is the entity that Congress relies upon to figure out how clean the air should be, and how to get there. Asserting that it lacks the power to perform its basic responsibilities is simply sabotage.
It is a telling fact that power producers, in response to market forces, have achieved the shift to cleaner energy that the E.P.A. sought to require in 2015, validating the agency’s assessment of what it could reasonably mandate.
Chief Justice Roberts’s predecessors recognized their own limitations. In the 1984 ruling that formalized the court’s policy of regulatory deference, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that “judges are not experts in the field and are not part of either political branch of the government.” Both points are important. The court lacks technical expertise and an electoral mandate. Thursday’s decision asserting a more muscular role is thus a blow to both the public interest and democracy.
CRAZIES, COWARDS AND THE TRUMP COUP
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
Like many people, I expected the worst from the Jan. 6 committee: long, droning speeches, grandstanding by posturing politicians, lots of he-said-she-said.
What we’ve gotten instead has been riveting and terrifying. The usual suspects are, of course, nit-picking at the details — although never over the crucial points, like Donald Trump’s desire to participate in an armed assault on the Capitol, and never, tellingly, under oath — and some in the news media are, shamefully, playing along. But realistically there is no longer any doubt that Trump tried to overturn the results of a lawful election, and when all else had failed, encouraged and tried to abet a violent attack on Congress.
I’ll leave it to the legal experts to figure out whether the evidence should lead to formal criminal proceedings, and in particular whether Trump himself should be charged with seditious conspiracy. But no reasonable person can deny that what happened after the 2020 election was an attempted coup, a betrayal of everything America stands for.
I still see some people comparing this scandal to Watergate. That’s like comparing assault and battery to a traffic violation. Trump’s actions were by far the worst thing any American president has ever done.
But here’s the thing: Dozens of people in or close to the Trump administration must have known what was going on; many of them surely have firsthand knowledge of at least some aspects of the coup attempt. Yet only a handful have come forward with what they know.
And what about Republicans in Congress? Almost surely many if not most of them realize the enormity of what happened — after all, the assault on the Capitol placed their own lives in danger. Yet 175 House Republicans voted against creating a national commission on the Jan. 6 insurrection, with only 35 in favor.
How can we explain this abdication of duty? Even now, full-on MAGA cultists are probably a minority among G.O.P. politicians. For every Lauren Boebert or Marjorie Taylor Greene, there are most likely several Kevin McCarthys — careerists, not crazies, apparatchiks rather than fanatics. Yet the noncrazy wing of the G.O.P., with only a handful of exceptions, has nonetheless done everything it can to prevent any reckoning over the attempted coup.
Which has me thinking about the nature of courage, and the way courage — or cowardice — is mediated by institutions.
Human beings can be incredibly brave. As we see in the news from Ukraine every day, many soldiers are willing to hold their ground under deadly artillery barrages. Firefighters rush into burning buildings. Indeed, the Capitol Police were heroic in their defense of Congress on Jan. 6.
Such displays of physical courage aren’t commonplace — most of us will never know how we’d perform in such circumstances. Yet if physical courage is rare, moral courage — the willingness to stand up for what you believe to be right, even in the face of social pressure to conform — is even rarer. And moral courage is what Trump’s associates and Republican members of Congress so conspicuously lack.
Is this a partisan thing? We can’t really know how members of the other party would respond if a Democratic president tried a similar coup — but that’s partly because such an attempt is more or less inconceivable. For as political scientists have long noted, the two parties are very different, not just in their policies, but in their institutional structures as well.
The Democratic Party, while it may be more unified than in the past, remains a loose coalition of interest groups. Some of these interest groups are praiseworthy, some not so much, but in any case the looseness gives Democrats room to criticize their leaders and, if they choose, take a stand on principle.
The Republican Party is a far more monolithic entity, in which politicians compete over who adheres most faithfully to the party’s line. That line used to be defined by economic ideology, but these days it is more about positioning in the culture wars — and personal loyalty to Trump. It takes great moral courage for Republicans to defy the party’s diktats, and those who do are promptly excommunicated.
There’s an exception that proves the rule: the surprising pro-democracy stand of the neocons, the people who gave us the Iraq war. That was a terrible sin, never to be forgotten. But during the Trump years, as most of the G.O.P. bent its knee to a man whose awfulness it fully understood, just about all the prominent neocons — from William Kristol and Max Boot to, yes, Liz Cheney — sided firmly with the rule of law.
Where’s this coming from? I don’t think it’s a slur on these people’s courage to note that the neocons were always a distinct group, never fully assimilated by the Republican monolith, with careers that rested in part on reputations outside the party. This arguably leaves them freer than garden-variety Republicans to act in accord with their consciences.
Unfortunately, that still leaves the rest. If the Democrats are a coalition of interest groups, Republicans are now a coalition of crazies and cowards. And it’s hard to say which Republicans present the greater danger.
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
Like many people, I expected the worst from the Jan. 6 committee: long, droning speeches, grandstanding by posturing politicians, lots of he-said-she-said.
What we’ve gotten instead has been riveting and terrifying. The usual suspects are, of course, nit-picking at the details — although never over the crucial points, like Donald Trump’s desire to participate in an armed assault on the Capitol, and never, tellingly, under oath — and some in the news media are, shamefully, playing along. But realistically there is no longer any doubt that Trump tried to overturn the results of a lawful election, and when all else had failed, encouraged and tried to abet a violent attack on Congress.
I’ll leave it to the legal experts to figure out whether the evidence should lead to formal criminal proceedings, and in particular whether Trump himself should be charged with seditious conspiracy. But no reasonable person can deny that what happened after the 2020 election was an attempted coup, a betrayal of everything America stands for.
I still see some people comparing this scandal to Watergate. That’s like comparing assault and battery to a traffic violation. Trump’s actions were by far the worst thing any American president has ever done.
But here’s the thing: Dozens of people in or close to the Trump administration must have known what was going on; many of them surely have firsthand knowledge of at least some aspects of the coup attempt. Yet only a handful have come forward with what they know.
And what about Republicans in Congress? Almost surely many if not most of them realize the enormity of what happened — after all, the assault on the Capitol placed their own lives in danger. Yet 175 House Republicans voted against creating a national commission on the Jan. 6 insurrection, with only 35 in favor.
How can we explain this abdication of duty? Even now, full-on MAGA cultists are probably a minority among G.O.P. politicians. For every Lauren Boebert or Marjorie Taylor Greene, there are most likely several Kevin McCarthys — careerists, not crazies, apparatchiks rather than fanatics. Yet the noncrazy wing of the G.O.P., with only a handful of exceptions, has nonetheless done everything it can to prevent any reckoning over the attempted coup.
Which has me thinking about the nature of courage, and the way courage — or cowardice — is mediated by institutions.
Human beings can be incredibly brave. As we see in the news from Ukraine every day, many soldiers are willing to hold their ground under deadly artillery barrages. Firefighters rush into burning buildings. Indeed, the Capitol Police were heroic in their defense of Congress on Jan. 6.
Such displays of physical courage aren’t commonplace — most of us will never know how we’d perform in such circumstances. Yet if physical courage is rare, moral courage — the willingness to stand up for what you believe to be right, even in the face of social pressure to conform — is even rarer. And moral courage is what Trump’s associates and Republican members of Congress so conspicuously lack.
Is this a partisan thing? We can’t really know how members of the other party would respond if a Democratic president tried a similar coup — but that’s partly because such an attempt is more or less inconceivable. For as political scientists have long noted, the two parties are very different, not just in their policies, but in their institutional structures as well.
The Democratic Party, while it may be more unified than in the past, remains a loose coalition of interest groups. Some of these interest groups are praiseworthy, some not so much, but in any case the looseness gives Democrats room to criticize their leaders and, if they choose, take a stand on principle.
The Republican Party is a far more monolithic entity, in which politicians compete over who adheres most faithfully to the party’s line. That line used to be defined by economic ideology, but these days it is more about positioning in the culture wars — and personal loyalty to Trump. It takes great moral courage for Republicans to defy the party’s diktats, and those who do are promptly excommunicated.
There’s an exception that proves the rule: the surprising pro-democracy stand of the neocons, the people who gave us the Iraq war. That was a terrible sin, never to be forgotten. But during the Trump years, as most of the G.O.P. bent its knee to a man whose awfulness it fully understood, just about all the prominent neocons — from William Kristol and Max Boot to, yes, Liz Cheney — sided firmly with the rule of law.
Where’s this coming from? I don’t think it’s a slur on these people’s courage to note that the neocons were always a distinct group, never fully assimilated by the Republican monolith, with careers that rested in part on reputations outside the party. This arguably leaves them freer than garden-variety Republicans to act in accord with their consciences.
Unfortunately, that still leaves the rest. If the Democrats are a coalition of interest groups, Republicans are now a coalition of crazies and cowards. And it’s hard to say which Republicans present the greater danger.
CASSIDY HUTCHINSON COULD READ THE KETCHUP ON THE WALL
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
Before Tuesday, few outside of Trump World had ever heard of Cassidy Hutchinson. But few who witnessed the young woman’s extraordinary two hours before the House select committee on Jan. 6 will ever forget her.
The former aide to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, just three years out of college, strode into the Cannon Caucus room with a four-person entourage, facing down 25 photographers. She was understandably nervous — TV cameras from all directions beamed her every move to millions — but she had a preternatural poise.
She sat ramrod straight in the witness chair, forearms on the table. And she spoke softly but with a command, backed up by notes and texts, that left no doubt that her testimony about what she had witnessed in the Trump White House was the horrible truth.
Hutchinson, 25, recounted what she was told President Donald Trump had done when the head of his Secret Service detail, Bobby Engel, refused to drive him to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021: “The president reached up towards the front of the vehicle to grab at the steering wheel. Mr. Engel grabbed his arm, said, ‘Sir, you need to take your hand off the steering wheel. We’re going back to the West Wing.’ … Mr. Trump then used his free hand to lunge towards Bobby Engel” in the direction of his throat.
I heard gasps and saw stunned glances among the 70 or so reporters in the room.
She told of walking into the Oval Office dining room after Trump heard that Attorney General Bill Barr said he hadn’t seen substantial fraud in the 2020 election: “I first noticed there was ketchup, dripping down the wall, and there’s a shattered porcelain plate on the floor. The valet had articulated that the president was extremely angry at the attorney general’s [Associated Press] interview and had thrown his lunch against the wall.”
In the hearing room, jaws dropped.
“There were several times,” she testified, “that I was aware of him either throwing dishes or flipping the tablecloth to let all the contents of the table go onto the floor.”
We all knew Trump fomented violence on Jan. 6, but here was evidence he was violent himself (allegations Trump denied Tuesday on his social media platform). Hutchinson filled in the details in vivid answers to questions posed by Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the panel’s vice chair, seated 30 feet away on the dais.
People on the Mall with AR-15s, Glock pistols and other weapons on Jan. 6 were avoiding Trump’s rally on the Ellipse because their weapons would have been confiscated by the Secret Service at the magnetometers, or mags, where entrants were scanned. But Trump wanted them in his rally, she testified, and said “something to the effect of, ‘You know, I don’t f-ing care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me. Take the f-ing mags away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here.”
Hutchinson had everything to lose by defying Team Trump’s pressure for her to remain silent. (After her testimony, the committee also revealed incidents of apparent witness tampering it had discovered.) Her courage should shame her big-name former colleagues who are refusing to cooperate. She had worked in the White House little more than a year, and before that she had been a White House and Capitol Hill intern, but her testimony displayed a sense of patriotism that eludes so many older Trump loyalists.
“As a staffer that works to always represent the administration to the best of my ability and to showcase the good things that he had done for the country, I remember feeling frustrated, disappointed, and really it felt personal,” she said of her reaction to Jan. 6. “As an American, I was disgusted. It was unpatriotic. It was un-American. We were watching the Capitol building get defaced over a lie.”
Contrast that with the cowardice of retired Gen. Michael Flynn, one of the insurrection schemers, whose testimony the committee aired, to chuckles:
“Do you believe the violence on January 6 was justified morally?”
“Take the Fifth.”
“Do you believe the violence on January 6th was justified legally?”
“Fifth.”
“Do you believe in the peaceful transition of power?
“The Fifth.”
And contrast the character evident in Hutchinson’s testimony with the perfidy of her former boss, who phoned in to an insurrection-eve meeting with its architects. Meadows told Hutchinson that “things might get real, real bad on Jan. 6,” she said, but when they did, he sat on his office couch, scrolling on his phone.
Then-White House counsel Pat Cipollone had warned Meadows that “we’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable” and that “people are going to die and the blood’s going to be on your f-ing hands,” Hutchinson testified. But Meadows, still on his couch, said Trump “doesn’t want to do anything” to stop the violence.
If Meadows, more than twice Hutchinson’s age, had even half of her courage, the country would be in a much better place.
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
Before Tuesday, few outside of Trump World had ever heard of Cassidy Hutchinson. But few who witnessed the young woman’s extraordinary two hours before the House select committee on Jan. 6 will ever forget her.
The former aide to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, just three years out of college, strode into the Cannon Caucus room with a four-person entourage, facing down 25 photographers. She was understandably nervous — TV cameras from all directions beamed her every move to millions — but she had a preternatural poise.
She sat ramrod straight in the witness chair, forearms on the table. And she spoke softly but with a command, backed up by notes and texts, that left no doubt that her testimony about what she had witnessed in the Trump White House was the horrible truth.
Hutchinson, 25, recounted what she was told President Donald Trump had done when the head of his Secret Service detail, Bobby Engel, refused to drive him to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021: “The president reached up towards the front of the vehicle to grab at the steering wheel. Mr. Engel grabbed his arm, said, ‘Sir, you need to take your hand off the steering wheel. We’re going back to the West Wing.’ … Mr. Trump then used his free hand to lunge towards Bobby Engel” in the direction of his throat.
I heard gasps and saw stunned glances among the 70 or so reporters in the room.
She told of walking into the Oval Office dining room after Trump heard that Attorney General Bill Barr said he hadn’t seen substantial fraud in the 2020 election: “I first noticed there was ketchup, dripping down the wall, and there’s a shattered porcelain plate on the floor. The valet had articulated that the president was extremely angry at the attorney general’s [Associated Press] interview and had thrown his lunch against the wall.”
In the hearing room, jaws dropped.
“There were several times,” she testified, “that I was aware of him either throwing dishes or flipping the tablecloth to let all the contents of the table go onto the floor.”
We all knew Trump fomented violence on Jan. 6, but here was evidence he was violent himself (allegations Trump denied Tuesday on his social media platform). Hutchinson filled in the details in vivid answers to questions posed by Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the panel’s vice chair, seated 30 feet away on the dais.
People on the Mall with AR-15s, Glock pistols and other weapons on Jan. 6 were avoiding Trump’s rally on the Ellipse because their weapons would have been confiscated by the Secret Service at the magnetometers, or mags, where entrants were scanned. But Trump wanted them in his rally, she testified, and said “something to the effect of, ‘You know, I don’t f-ing care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me. Take the f-ing mags away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here.”
Hutchinson had everything to lose by defying Team Trump’s pressure for her to remain silent. (After her testimony, the committee also revealed incidents of apparent witness tampering it had discovered.) Her courage should shame her big-name former colleagues who are refusing to cooperate. She had worked in the White House little more than a year, and before that she had been a White House and Capitol Hill intern, but her testimony displayed a sense of patriotism that eludes so many older Trump loyalists.
“As a staffer that works to always represent the administration to the best of my ability and to showcase the good things that he had done for the country, I remember feeling frustrated, disappointed, and really it felt personal,” she said of her reaction to Jan. 6. “As an American, I was disgusted. It was unpatriotic. It was un-American. We were watching the Capitol building get defaced over a lie.”
Contrast that with the cowardice of retired Gen. Michael Flynn, one of the insurrection schemers, whose testimony the committee aired, to chuckles:
“Do you believe the violence on January 6 was justified morally?”
“Take the Fifth.”
“Do you believe the violence on January 6th was justified legally?”
“Fifth.”
“Do you believe in the peaceful transition of power?
“The Fifth.”
And contrast the character evident in Hutchinson’s testimony with the perfidy of her former boss, who phoned in to an insurrection-eve meeting with its architects. Meadows told Hutchinson that “things might get real, real bad on Jan. 6,” she said, but when they did, he sat on his office couch, scrolling on his phone.
Then-White House counsel Pat Cipollone had warned Meadows that “we’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable” and that “people are going to die and the blood’s going to be on your f-ing hands,” Hutchinson testified. But Meadows, still on his couch, said Trump “doesn’t want to do anything” to stop the violence.
If Meadows, more than twice Hutchinson’s age, had even half of her courage, the country would be in a much better place.
THE SUPREME COURT DECLARES WAR ON MODERN AMERICA
By Jennifer Rubin
It gives me no joy to say that my prediction in April that the Supreme Court was set to launch a war on modern America — on its social and legal progress over decades — was accurate. In a tone more reminiscent of a MAGA rally than a high court, the majority Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization opinion overturning the right to abortion drips with disdain for women’s concerns about personal autonomy and for the principle of stare decisis.
As bad as this particular opinion is, the broader picture is about much more than abortion.
The right-wing court wants to lock 21st-century America into the Founders’ world or, at the latest, the late 19th century, conveniently skipping past the parts of history that disfavor its cramped view of individual rights. Women, minorities, gay people and others once had little political, economic or social power. And so they will again, if the court gets its way.
Look carefully at the court’s language hopscotching through history. “Until the latter part of the 20th century, such a right [to abortion] was entirely unknown in American law,” the opinion proclaims. The past 50 years when Roe v. Wade followed a line of previous cases concerning personal autonomy (“privacy”) don’t count, it seems.
The court also leaps past the part of American history when abortion was generally legal up to “quickening.” (Oops, the majority gave it away: “We begin with the common law, under which abortion was a crime at least after ‘quickening’ — i.e., the first felt movement of the fetus in the womb, which usually occurs between the 16th and 18th week of pregnancy.” After quickening, even in the majority’s telling.)
Why bother with all this selective, fatuous historical argument? This is where it gets scary and goes well beyond abortion. The court insists that our rights under the 14th Amendment were fixed in 1868. We therefore get a perverse result, as the dissent explains:
Women were denied lots of rights in 1868. Only in the 20th century did some states affirm their right to hold property or take out credit or hold certain professions. Gay people and minor children had no rights to speak of, nor did the physically or mentally disabled. This court declares we are stuck with the precise state of the law pre-civil rights, pre-women’s rights, pre-modern. And herein rest the absurdity and danger of a Supreme Court unmoored from precedent and unconcerned with the impact of its decisions on today’s America.
Still, perhaps my prediction was off by 100 years. It’s not the 1960s to which the right-wing court wants to take us but the 1860s. That radical, extreme view virtually guarantees outcomes in conflict with diverse, modern America. The notion that liberty and equality are ever expanding is kaput. The moral universe is bending backward.
How radical is this? Well, Justice Clarence Thomas provided the answer by arguing in his concurring opinion that the court should reconsider rights going well beyond abortion. President Biden was right to focus on the import of this: “[Thomas] explicitly called to reconsider the right of marriage equality, the right of couples to make their choices on contraception. This is an extreme and dangerous path the court is now taking us on.”
So it’s not right to say “Roe is on the ballot” in November. The 21st century is on the ballot. At risk is the America in which the definition of equality has expanded, in which the state is prohibited from micromanaging our lives, in which one’s right to make personal decisions is not governed by Zip code.
And it’s not just the court that is taking us back to the 19th century. Republicans at all levels of government cheered the decision. Former vice president Mike Pence asserted that a nationwide abortion ban should follow. This is a party of radicalism, of contempt for the modern America in which White males do not get to make all the rules. It’s a view of democracy akin to right-wing authoritarian regimes where elections (sort of) are held but individual liberty and human rights have no guarantee, given few constraints on government power.
Many thought Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) was grossly exaggerating when he declared in 1987: “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, Blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors on midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the government, and the door of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens.” It turns out he was simply premature — and failed to foresee a five-person majority of Robert Borks.
And it’s going to get worse if the Supreme Court decides in West Virginia v. the Environmental Protection Agency that the administrative state (the EPA, but why stop there?) cannot regulate carbon emissions without detailed directions from Congress. And wait until the court considers a North Carolina case that state legislatures can pull off their own coups by reversing the popular vote of the people for president if it does not suit the lawmakers. (Donald Trump’s allies would have been constitutionally empowered to override the vote absent any evidence of fraud.)
Are we doomed to board the Republicans’ time machine back to the 19th century? Certainly not.
First, Congress can act to secure all the rights that Thomas identified for the chopping block. Let Republicans filibuster protection for abortion, for contraception and for interracial and same-sex marriage. And if they do, then voters can send Democrats with sufficient fortitude to modify the filibuster to protect their fundamental rights.
Second, since the Supreme Court is sending the most personal, intimate decisions to state legislatures and governors as well as local district attorneys and judges, those desiring a constitutional regime for the 21st century must fill every one of those offices with people who respect fundamental rights. The 21st century vs. the 19th century becomes the issue in every election.
But inflation! But gas prices! We will have the same rate of inflation (thanks to the Federal Reserve) with Republican majorities as with Democratic ones. The former has no secret plan to reduce prices. What we won’t have with Republicans in power is a country rooted in the 21st century.
For that, you need to vote out the people who apparently thought America was at its best in 1868.
By Jennifer Rubin
It gives me no joy to say that my prediction in April that the Supreme Court was set to launch a war on modern America — on its social and legal progress over decades — was accurate. In a tone more reminiscent of a MAGA rally than a high court, the majority Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization opinion overturning the right to abortion drips with disdain for women’s concerns about personal autonomy and for the principle of stare decisis.
As bad as this particular opinion is, the broader picture is about much more than abortion.
The right-wing court wants to lock 21st-century America into the Founders’ world or, at the latest, the late 19th century, conveniently skipping past the parts of history that disfavor its cramped view of individual rights. Women, minorities, gay people and others once had little political, economic or social power. And so they will again, if the court gets its way.
Look carefully at the court’s language hopscotching through history. “Until the latter part of the 20th century, such a right [to abortion] was entirely unknown in American law,” the opinion proclaims. The past 50 years when Roe v. Wade followed a line of previous cases concerning personal autonomy (“privacy”) don’t count, it seems.
The court also leaps past the part of American history when abortion was generally legal up to “quickening.” (Oops, the majority gave it away: “We begin with the common law, under which abortion was a crime at least after ‘quickening’ — i.e., the first felt movement of the fetus in the womb, which usually occurs between the 16th and 18th week of pregnancy.” After quickening, even in the majority’s telling.)
Why bother with all this selective, fatuous historical argument? This is where it gets scary and goes well beyond abortion. The court insists that our rights under the 14th Amendment were fixed in 1868. We therefore get a perverse result, as the dissent explains:
- Because laws in 1868 deprived women of any control over their bodies, the majority approves States doing so today.
- Because those laws prevented women from charting the course of their own lives, the majority says States can do the same again.
- Because in 1868, the government could tell a pregnant woman — even in the first days of her pregnancy — that she could do nothing but bear a child, it can once more impose that command.
Women were denied lots of rights in 1868. Only in the 20th century did some states affirm their right to hold property or take out credit or hold certain professions. Gay people and minor children had no rights to speak of, nor did the physically or mentally disabled. This court declares we are stuck with the precise state of the law pre-civil rights, pre-women’s rights, pre-modern. And herein rest the absurdity and danger of a Supreme Court unmoored from precedent and unconcerned with the impact of its decisions on today’s America.
Still, perhaps my prediction was off by 100 years. It’s not the 1960s to which the right-wing court wants to take us but the 1860s. That radical, extreme view virtually guarantees outcomes in conflict with diverse, modern America. The notion that liberty and equality are ever expanding is kaput. The moral universe is bending backward.
How radical is this? Well, Justice Clarence Thomas provided the answer by arguing in his concurring opinion that the court should reconsider rights going well beyond abortion. President Biden was right to focus on the import of this: “[Thomas] explicitly called to reconsider the right of marriage equality, the right of couples to make their choices on contraception. This is an extreme and dangerous path the court is now taking us on.”
So it’s not right to say “Roe is on the ballot” in November. The 21st century is on the ballot. At risk is the America in which the definition of equality has expanded, in which the state is prohibited from micromanaging our lives, in which one’s right to make personal decisions is not governed by Zip code.
And it’s not just the court that is taking us back to the 19th century. Republicans at all levels of government cheered the decision. Former vice president Mike Pence asserted that a nationwide abortion ban should follow. This is a party of radicalism, of contempt for the modern America in which White males do not get to make all the rules. It’s a view of democracy akin to right-wing authoritarian regimes where elections (sort of) are held but individual liberty and human rights have no guarantee, given few constraints on government power.
Many thought Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) was grossly exaggerating when he declared in 1987: “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, Blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors on midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the government, and the door of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens.” It turns out he was simply premature — and failed to foresee a five-person majority of Robert Borks.
And it’s going to get worse if the Supreme Court decides in West Virginia v. the Environmental Protection Agency that the administrative state (the EPA, but why stop there?) cannot regulate carbon emissions without detailed directions from Congress. And wait until the court considers a North Carolina case that state legislatures can pull off their own coups by reversing the popular vote of the people for president if it does not suit the lawmakers. (Donald Trump’s allies would have been constitutionally empowered to override the vote absent any evidence of fraud.)
Are we doomed to board the Republicans’ time machine back to the 19th century? Certainly not.
First, Congress can act to secure all the rights that Thomas identified for the chopping block. Let Republicans filibuster protection for abortion, for contraception and for interracial and same-sex marriage. And if they do, then voters can send Democrats with sufficient fortitude to modify the filibuster to protect their fundamental rights.
Second, since the Supreme Court is sending the most personal, intimate decisions to state legislatures and governors as well as local district attorneys and judges, those desiring a constitutional regime for the 21st century must fill every one of those offices with people who respect fundamental rights. The 21st century vs. the 19th century becomes the issue in every election.
But inflation! But gas prices! We will have the same rate of inflation (thanks to the Federal Reserve) with Republican majorities as with Democratic ones. The former has no secret plan to reduce prices. What we won’t have with Republicans in power is a country rooted in the 21st century.
For that, you need to vote out the people who apparently thought America was at its best in 1868.
THE SUPREME COURT RULINGS REPRESENT THE TYRANNY OF THE MINORITY
By Max Boot, The Washington Post
Everyone knows that the Founders were afraid of the tyranny of the majority. That’s why they built so many checks and balances into the Constitution. What’s less well known is that they were also afraid of the tyranny of the minority. That’s why they scrapped the Articles of Confederation, which required agreement from 9 of 13 states to pass any laws, and enacted a Constitution with much stronger executive authority.
In Federalist No. 22, Alexander Hamilton warned that giving small states like Rhode Island or Delaware “equal weight in the scale of power” with large states like “Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York” violated the precepts of “justice” and “common-sense.” “The larger States would after a while revolt from the idea of receiving the law from the smaller,” he predicted, arguing that such a system contradicts “the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail.”
Hamilton’s nightmare has become the reality of 21st-century America. We are living under minoritarian tyranny, with smaller states imposing their views on the larger through their disproportionate sway in the Senate and the electoral college — and therefore on the Supreme Court. To take but one example: Twenty-one states with fewer total people than California have 42 Senate seats. This undemocratic, unjust system has produced the new Supreme Court rulings on gun control and abortion.
These are issues on which public opinion is lopsidedly in favor on what, for want of a better word, we might call the “liberal” side. Following the Uvalde, Tex., shooting, a recent poll showed that 65 percent of Americans want stricter gun controls; only 28 percent are opposed. Public opinion is just as clear on abortion: Fifty-four percent of Americans want to preserve Roe v. Wade and only 28 percent want to overturn it. Fifty-eight percent want abortion to be legal in most or all cases.
Yet the Supreme Court’s hard-right majority just overruled a New York law that made it difficult to get a permit to carry a gun, while upholding a Mississippi law that banned all abortions after 15 weeks. This represents a dramatic expansion of gun rights and an equally dramatic curtailment of abortion rights.
Now, the Supreme Court has no obligation to follow the popular will. It is charged with safeguarding the Constitution. But it is hard for any disinterested observer to have any faith in what the right-wing justices are doing. They are not acting very conservatively in overturning an abortion ruling (Roe v. Wade) that is 49 years old and a New York state gun-control statute that is 109 years old. In both cases, the justices rely on dubious readings of legal history that have been challenged by many scholars to overturn what had been settled law.
Conservatives can plausibly argue that liberal justices invented a constitutional right to abortion, but how is that different from what conservative justices have done in inventing an individual right to carry guns that is also nowhere to be found in the Constitution? The Supreme Court did not recognize an individual right to bear arms until 2008 — 217 years after the Second Amendment was enacted expressly to protect “well-regulated” state militia. The Second Amendment hasn’t changed over the centuries, but the composition of the court has.
The majority conveniently favors state’s rights on abortion but not on guns. It is obvious that the conservative justices (who are presumably antiabortion rights and pro-gun rights) are simply enacting their personal preferences, just as liberal justices (who are presumably pro-choice and pro-gun control) do.
So, if the Supreme Court is going to be a forum for legislating, shouldn’t it respect the views of two-thirds of the country? But our perverse political system has allowed a militant, right-wing minority to hijack the law. As an Economist correspondent points out, “5 of the 6 conservative Supreme Court justices were appointed by a Republican Senate majority that won fewer votes than the Democrats” and “3 of the 6 were nominated by a president who also won a minority of the popular vote.”
The situation is actually even more inequitable: In all likelihood, Roe would not have been overturned if then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had not broken with precedent by refusing to grant President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, a vote in 2016. McConnell brazenly held the seat open for President Donald Trump to fill. Now Trump’s appointee, Neil M. Gorsuch, is part of the five-justice majority that has overturned Roe. (Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined with the other five justices to uphold the Mississippi abortion law but not to overrule Roe.)
Public faith in the Supreme Court is down to a historic low of 25 percent, and there’s a good reason why it keeps eroding. We are experiencing what the Founders feared: a crisis of governmental legitimacy brought about by minoritarian tyranny. And it could soon get a whole lot worse. In his concurring opinion in the abortion case, Justice Clarence Thomas called on the court to overturn popular precedents upholding a right to contraception, same-sex relationships and marriage equality. So much for Hamilton’s hope that “the sense of the majority should prevail.”
By Max Boot, The Washington Post
Everyone knows that the Founders were afraid of the tyranny of the majority. That’s why they built so many checks and balances into the Constitution. What’s less well known is that they were also afraid of the tyranny of the minority. That’s why they scrapped the Articles of Confederation, which required agreement from 9 of 13 states to pass any laws, and enacted a Constitution with much stronger executive authority.
In Federalist No. 22, Alexander Hamilton warned that giving small states like Rhode Island or Delaware “equal weight in the scale of power” with large states like “Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York” violated the precepts of “justice” and “common-sense.” “The larger States would after a while revolt from the idea of receiving the law from the smaller,” he predicted, arguing that such a system contradicts “the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail.”
Hamilton’s nightmare has become the reality of 21st-century America. We are living under minoritarian tyranny, with smaller states imposing their views on the larger through their disproportionate sway in the Senate and the electoral college — and therefore on the Supreme Court. To take but one example: Twenty-one states with fewer total people than California have 42 Senate seats. This undemocratic, unjust system has produced the new Supreme Court rulings on gun control and abortion.
These are issues on which public opinion is lopsidedly in favor on what, for want of a better word, we might call the “liberal” side. Following the Uvalde, Tex., shooting, a recent poll showed that 65 percent of Americans want stricter gun controls; only 28 percent are opposed. Public opinion is just as clear on abortion: Fifty-four percent of Americans want to preserve Roe v. Wade and only 28 percent want to overturn it. Fifty-eight percent want abortion to be legal in most or all cases.
Yet the Supreme Court’s hard-right majority just overruled a New York law that made it difficult to get a permit to carry a gun, while upholding a Mississippi law that banned all abortions after 15 weeks. This represents a dramatic expansion of gun rights and an equally dramatic curtailment of abortion rights.
Now, the Supreme Court has no obligation to follow the popular will. It is charged with safeguarding the Constitution. But it is hard for any disinterested observer to have any faith in what the right-wing justices are doing. They are not acting very conservatively in overturning an abortion ruling (Roe v. Wade) that is 49 years old and a New York state gun-control statute that is 109 years old. In both cases, the justices rely on dubious readings of legal history that have been challenged by many scholars to overturn what had been settled law.
Conservatives can plausibly argue that liberal justices invented a constitutional right to abortion, but how is that different from what conservative justices have done in inventing an individual right to carry guns that is also nowhere to be found in the Constitution? The Supreme Court did not recognize an individual right to bear arms until 2008 — 217 years after the Second Amendment was enacted expressly to protect “well-regulated” state militia. The Second Amendment hasn’t changed over the centuries, but the composition of the court has.
The majority conveniently favors state’s rights on abortion but not on guns. It is obvious that the conservative justices (who are presumably antiabortion rights and pro-gun rights) are simply enacting their personal preferences, just as liberal justices (who are presumably pro-choice and pro-gun control) do.
So, if the Supreme Court is going to be a forum for legislating, shouldn’t it respect the views of two-thirds of the country? But our perverse political system has allowed a militant, right-wing minority to hijack the law. As an Economist correspondent points out, “5 of the 6 conservative Supreme Court justices were appointed by a Republican Senate majority that won fewer votes than the Democrats” and “3 of the 6 were nominated by a president who also won a minority of the popular vote.”
The situation is actually even more inequitable: In all likelihood, Roe would not have been overturned if then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had not broken with precedent by refusing to grant President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, a vote in 2016. McConnell brazenly held the seat open for President Donald Trump to fill. Now Trump’s appointee, Neil M. Gorsuch, is part of the five-justice majority that has overturned Roe. (Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined with the other five justices to uphold the Mississippi abortion law but not to overrule Roe.)
Public faith in the Supreme Court is down to a historic low of 25 percent, and there’s a good reason why it keeps eroding. We are experiencing what the Founders feared: a crisis of governmental legitimacy brought about by minoritarian tyranny. And it could soon get a whole lot worse. In his concurring opinion in the abortion case, Justice Clarence Thomas called on the court to overturn popular precedents upholding a right to contraception, same-sex relationships and marriage equality. So much for Hamilton’s hope that “the sense of the majority should prevail.”
THE SUPREME COURT EVISCERATES ABORTION RIGHTS AND ITS OWN LEGITIMACY
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
While we knew from the leak of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s majority opinion that Roe v. Wade and nearly 50 years of constitutional precedent were hanging by a thread, and yet when the opinion came down Friday morning — a virtual copy of the leaked draft — many Americans no doubt felt a wave of disbelief, anger, dread and fear.
The court’s decision is so emphatic, and so contemptuous of the principle of stare decisis, that one wonders whether the unvarnished radicalism of the decision will finally rouse millions of Americans to the threat posed by a court untethered to law, precedent or reason.
As the dissent (by Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor) made clear, the majority opinion is as radical as any in its history: “It says that from the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of. A State can force her to bring a pregnancy to term, even at the steepest personal and familial costs. An abortion restriction, the majority holds, is permissible whenever rational, the lowest level of scrutiny known to the law. And because, as the Court has often stated, protecting fetal life is rational, States will feel free to enact all manner of restrictions.”
The result could well be enactment of criminal penalties for every abortion, in any circumstance. “Enforcement of all these draconian restrictions will also be left largely to the States’ devices. A State can of course impose criminal penalties on abortion providers, including lengthy prison sentences,” the three dissenters wrote. “But some States will not stop there. Perhaps, in the wake of today’s decision, a state law will criminalize the woman’s conduct too, incarcerating or fining her for daring to seek or obtain an abortion.” The dissent added, “And as Texas has recently shown, a State can turn neighbor against neighbor, enlisting fellow citizens in the effort to root out anyone who tries to get an abortion, or to assist another in doing so.”
The dissent also underscores the enormous damage to women’s self-determination, autonomy and equal status as persons. And it rightly attacks the garbled history in the majority opinion, noting that the Constitution was ratified before women had the vote. In essence, the court elevates male dominance to a constitutional imperative in the 21st century.
Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s feckless concurrence claiming the court is simply being neutral on the issue of abortion is preposterous, as the dissent makes clear: “His idea is that neutrality lies in giving the abortion issue to the States, where some can go one way and some another. But would he say that the Court is being ‘scrupulously neutral’ if it allowed New York and California to ban all the guns they want?”
The hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty of the court’s right-wing justices lead to the conclusion that they have simply appointed themselves super-legislators free to impose a view of the United States as a White, Christian and male-dominated society despite the values, beliefs and choices of a majority of 330 million modern Americans.
To understand how radical the court’s decision is, one need only consider Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurrence, where he says the quiet part out loud: He’d sweep away 14th Amendment substantive due process — birth control, gay marriage, all of it. And that is where we are heading, for in a sense Thomas is right. There is no bright line between destroying the expansive view of liberty in the 14th Amendment, when abortion is at issue, and destroying it for all other intimate decisions. The right-wing majority’s willingness to countenance an all-powerful state that interferes with every aspect of our lives is breathtaking.
The dissent says it plainly: The majority “makes radical change too easy and too fast, based on nothing more than the new views of new judges. The majority has overruled Roe and Casey for one and only one reason: because it has always despised them, and now it has the votes to discard them. The majority thereby substitutes a rule by judges for the rule of law.”
And now what? States will race to criminalize abortion. Women’s lives and personhood will be put at risk. But that is not the end. Ultimately, the people — even in the court’s telling — still have control. They can vote out those who would drastically criminalize women unwilling to be forced to give birth. They can elect senators to do away with the filibuster in order to protect reproductive rights and reformulate the court, including the removal of lifetime tenure. The response frankly must be as bold and decisive as the court’s affront.
The court’s decision may result in women’s deaths. But it has certainly killed off what is left of the court’s credibility. And for that, there is no solution in sight.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
While we knew from the leak of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s majority opinion that Roe v. Wade and nearly 50 years of constitutional precedent were hanging by a thread, and yet when the opinion came down Friday morning — a virtual copy of the leaked draft — many Americans no doubt felt a wave of disbelief, anger, dread and fear.
The court’s decision is so emphatic, and so contemptuous of the principle of stare decisis, that one wonders whether the unvarnished radicalism of the decision will finally rouse millions of Americans to the threat posed by a court untethered to law, precedent or reason.
As the dissent (by Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor) made clear, the majority opinion is as radical as any in its history: “It says that from the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of. A State can force her to bring a pregnancy to term, even at the steepest personal and familial costs. An abortion restriction, the majority holds, is permissible whenever rational, the lowest level of scrutiny known to the law. And because, as the Court has often stated, protecting fetal life is rational, States will feel free to enact all manner of restrictions.”
The result could well be enactment of criminal penalties for every abortion, in any circumstance. “Enforcement of all these draconian restrictions will also be left largely to the States’ devices. A State can of course impose criminal penalties on abortion providers, including lengthy prison sentences,” the three dissenters wrote. “But some States will not stop there. Perhaps, in the wake of today’s decision, a state law will criminalize the woman’s conduct too, incarcerating or fining her for daring to seek or obtain an abortion.” The dissent added, “And as Texas has recently shown, a State can turn neighbor against neighbor, enlisting fellow citizens in the effort to root out anyone who tries to get an abortion, or to assist another in doing so.”
The dissent also underscores the enormous damage to women’s self-determination, autonomy and equal status as persons. And it rightly attacks the garbled history in the majority opinion, noting that the Constitution was ratified before women had the vote. In essence, the court elevates male dominance to a constitutional imperative in the 21st century.
Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s feckless concurrence claiming the court is simply being neutral on the issue of abortion is preposterous, as the dissent makes clear: “His idea is that neutrality lies in giving the abortion issue to the States, where some can go one way and some another. But would he say that the Court is being ‘scrupulously neutral’ if it allowed New York and California to ban all the guns they want?”
The hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty of the court’s right-wing justices lead to the conclusion that they have simply appointed themselves super-legislators free to impose a view of the United States as a White, Christian and male-dominated society despite the values, beliefs and choices of a majority of 330 million modern Americans.
To understand how radical the court’s decision is, one need only consider Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurrence, where he says the quiet part out loud: He’d sweep away 14th Amendment substantive due process — birth control, gay marriage, all of it. And that is where we are heading, for in a sense Thomas is right. There is no bright line between destroying the expansive view of liberty in the 14th Amendment, when abortion is at issue, and destroying it for all other intimate decisions. The right-wing majority’s willingness to countenance an all-powerful state that interferes with every aspect of our lives is breathtaking.
The dissent says it plainly: The majority “makes radical change too easy and too fast, based on nothing more than the new views of new judges. The majority has overruled Roe and Casey for one and only one reason: because it has always despised them, and now it has the votes to discard them. The majority thereby substitutes a rule by judges for the rule of law.”
And now what? States will race to criminalize abortion. Women’s lives and personhood will be put at risk. But that is not the end. Ultimately, the people — even in the court’s telling — still have control. They can vote out those who would drastically criminalize women unwilling to be forced to give birth. They can elect senators to do away with the filibuster in order to protect reproductive rights and reformulate the court, including the removal of lifetime tenure. The response frankly must be as bold and decisive as the court’s affront.
The court’s decision may result in women’s deaths. But it has certainly killed off what is left of the court’s credibility. And for that, there is no solution in sight.
THE RULING OVERTURNING ROE IS AN INSULT TO WOMEN AND THE JUDICIAL SYSTEM
By The New York Times Editorial Board
Even if we knew it was coming, the shock reverberates.
For the first time in history, the Supreme Court has eliminated an established constitutional right involving the most fundamental of human concerns: the dignity and autonomy to decide what happens to your body. As of June 24, 2022, about 64 million American women of childbearing age have less power to decide what happens in their own bodies than they did the day before, less power than their mothers and even some of their grandmothers did. That is the first and most important consequence of the Supreme Court’s decision on Friday morning to overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
The right-wing majority in Friday’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — which involved a Mississippi law that banned most abortions after 15 weeks, well before the line of viability established in Roe and Casey — stated, “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”
The implications of this reversal will be devastating, throwing America into a new era of struggle over abortion laws — an era that will be marked by chaos, confusion and human suffering. About half the states in the United States are expected to enact laws that restrict or make abortion illegal in all or most cases. Many women may be forced by law to carry pregnancies to term, even, in some cases, those caused by rape or incest. Some will likely die, especially those with pregnancy complications that must be treated with abortion or those who resort to unsafe means of abortion because they can’t afford to travel to states where the procedure remains legal. Even those who are able to travel to other states could face the risk of criminal prosecution. Some could go to prison, as could the doctors who care for them. Miscarriages could be investigated as murders, which has already happened in several states, and may become only more common. Without full control over their bodies, women will lose their ability to function as equal members of American society.
The insult of Friday’s ruling is not only in its blithe dismissal of women’s dignity and equality. It lies, as well, in the overt rejection of a well-established legal standard that had managed for decades to balance and reflect Americans’ views on a fraught topic. A majority of the American public believes that women, not state or federal lawmakers, should have the legal right to decide whether to end a pregnancy in all or most cases. At the same time, Americans are weary of the decades-long fight over abortion, a fight that may feel far removed from their complex and deeply personal views about this issue.
The court’s ruling in Dobbs invites years of even more fractious and protracted legal conflict. By giving state legislatures the power to impose virtually whatever abortion restrictions they please, some will now enact outright bans on abortion. Dozens of cases challenging those laws could soon start making their way through the courts and, almost certainly, to the Supreme Court.
The justices in the majority claim to be playing an impartial role in this decision. “Because the Constitution is neutral on the issue of abortion, this court also must be scrupulously neutral,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a concurring opinion. And yet, as the three dissenting justices pointed out, “when it comes to rights, the court does not act ‘neutrally’ when it leaves everything up to the states. Rather, the court acts neutrally when it protects the right against all comers.”
Friday’s ruling was written by Justice Samuel Alito. It was joined by all the other Republican-appointed justices, although Chief Justice John Roberts tried to have it both ways, joining with the majority to uphold the Mississippi law in Dobbs even as he wrote separately to say he would not have overturned Roe and Casey altogether out of a respect for precedent.
The dissent, signed jointly by the three justices appointed by Democrats, took apart the majority’s attempts to justify its rejection of established precedent and even questioned the Republican-appointed justices’ claims to neutrality. The right to abortion, the dissenters noted, was established by one ruling a half century ago, reaffirmed by another 30 years ago, and “no recent developments, in either law or fact, have eroded or cast doubt on those precedents. Nothing, in short, has changed.”
Nothing, that is, other than the makeup of the court. This is the sole reason for Friday’s ruling. As the dissenters rightly put it, “Today, the proclivities of individuals rule.”
The presence of these individuals on the court is the culmination of a decades-long effort by anti-abortion and other right-wing forces to remake the court into a regressive bulwark. This has never been a secret; and with the help of the Senate under Mitch McConnell, former president Donald Trump and allies in the conservative legal movement, they have succeeded.
The central logic of the Dobbs ruling is superficially straightforward, and the opinion is substantially the same as the draft Justice Alito distributed to the other justices in February, which was leaked to the press last month. Roe and Casey must be overruled, the ruling says, because “the Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision,” including the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of due process. While that provision has been held to guarantee certain rights that are not mentioned explicitly in the Constitution, any such right must be “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition.”
By the majority’s reasoning, the right to terminate a pregnancy is not “deeply rooted” in the history and tradition of the United States — a country whose Constitution was written by a small band of wealthy white men, many of whom owned slaves and most, if not all, of whom considered women to be second-class citizens without any say in politics.
The three dissenters in the Dobbs case — Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — called out the majority’s dishonesty, noting that its exceedingly narrow definition of “deeply rooted” rights poses a threat to far more than reproductive freedom. The majority’s denial of this is impossible to believe, the dissenters wrote, saying: “Either the majority does not really believe in its own reasoning. Or if it does, all rights that have no history stretching back to the mid-19th century are insecure.”
In other words, the court is not going to stop at abortion. If you think that’s hyperbole, consider Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in Dobbs, in which he called for the court to reconsider other constitutional rights that Americans have enjoyed, in some cases, for decades — including the right to use birth control, the right to marry the person of their choosing and the right of consenting adults to do as they please in the privacy of their bedrooms without being arrested and charged with crimes. These rights share a similar constitutional grounding to the now-former right to abortion, and Justice Thomas rejects that grounding, calling on the court to “eliminate it … at the earliest opportunity.”
This position may not command a majority of justices today, but six years ago, few people thought Roe v. Wade would be overturned. Brett Kavanaugh, during his confirmation hearing in 2018, said Roe v. Wade “is important precedent of the Supreme Court that has been reaffirmed many times.” He added: “Casey specifically reconsidered it, applied the stare decisis factors, and decided to reaffirm it. That makes Casey a precedent on precedent.”
Yet he voted to overturn two rulings that have led to more equality, more dignity and more freedom for millions of Americans. To dismantle these and other advances, the majority on this Supreme Court has demonstrated its disregard for precedent, public opinion and the court’s own legitimacy in the eyes of the American people. We will be paying the price for decades to come.
By The New York Times Editorial Board
Even if we knew it was coming, the shock reverberates.
For the first time in history, the Supreme Court has eliminated an established constitutional right involving the most fundamental of human concerns: the dignity and autonomy to decide what happens to your body. As of June 24, 2022, about 64 million American women of childbearing age have less power to decide what happens in their own bodies than they did the day before, less power than their mothers and even some of their grandmothers did. That is the first and most important consequence of the Supreme Court’s decision on Friday morning to overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
The right-wing majority in Friday’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — which involved a Mississippi law that banned most abortions after 15 weeks, well before the line of viability established in Roe and Casey — stated, “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”
The implications of this reversal will be devastating, throwing America into a new era of struggle over abortion laws — an era that will be marked by chaos, confusion and human suffering. About half the states in the United States are expected to enact laws that restrict or make abortion illegal in all or most cases. Many women may be forced by law to carry pregnancies to term, even, in some cases, those caused by rape or incest. Some will likely die, especially those with pregnancy complications that must be treated with abortion or those who resort to unsafe means of abortion because they can’t afford to travel to states where the procedure remains legal. Even those who are able to travel to other states could face the risk of criminal prosecution. Some could go to prison, as could the doctors who care for them. Miscarriages could be investigated as murders, which has already happened in several states, and may become only more common. Without full control over their bodies, women will lose their ability to function as equal members of American society.
The insult of Friday’s ruling is not only in its blithe dismissal of women’s dignity and equality. It lies, as well, in the overt rejection of a well-established legal standard that had managed for decades to balance and reflect Americans’ views on a fraught topic. A majority of the American public believes that women, not state or federal lawmakers, should have the legal right to decide whether to end a pregnancy in all or most cases. At the same time, Americans are weary of the decades-long fight over abortion, a fight that may feel far removed from their complex and deeply personal views about this issue.
The court’s ruling in Dobbs invites years of even more fractious and protracted legal conflict. By giving state legislatures the power to impose virtually whatever abortion restrictions they please, some will now enact outright bans on abortion. Dozens of cases challenging those laws could soon start making their way through the courts and, almost certainly, to the Supreme Court.
The justices in the majority claim to be playing an impartial role in this decision. “Because the Constitution is neutral on the issue of abortion, this court also must be scrupulously neutral,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a concurring opinion. And yet, as the three dissenting justices pointed out, “when it comes to rights, the court does not act ‘neutrally’ when it leaves everything up to the states. Rather, the court acts neutrally when it protects the right against all comers.”
Friday’s ruling was written by Justice Samuel Alito. It was joined by all the other Republican-appointed justices, although Chief Justice John Roberts tried to have it both ways, joining with the majority to uphold the Mississippi law in Dobbs even as he wrote separately to say he would not have overturned Roe and Casey altogether out of a respect for precedent.
The dissent, signed jointly by the three justices appointed by Democrats, took apart the majority’s attempts to justify its rejection of established precedent and even questioned the Republican-appointed justices’ claims to neutrality. The right to abortion, the dissenters noted, was established by one ruling a half century ago, reaffirmed by another 30 years ago, and “no recent developments, in either law or fact, have eroded or cast doubt on those precedents. Nothing, in short, has changed.”
Nothing, that is, other than the makeup of the court. This is the sole reason for Friday’s ruling. As the dissenters rightly put it, “Today, the proclivities of individuals rule.”
The presence of these individuals on the court is the culmination of a decades-long effort by anti-abortion and other right-wing forces to remake the court into a regressive bulwark. This has never been a secret; and with the help of the Senate under Mitch McConnell, former president Donald Trump and allies in the conservative legal movement, they have succeeded.
The central logic of the Dobbs ruling is superficially straightforward, and the opinion is substantially the same as the draft Justice Alito distributed to the other justices in February, which was leaked to the press last month. Roe and Casey must be overruled, the ruling says, because “the Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision,” including the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of due process. While that provision has been held to guarantee certain rights that are not mentioned explicitly in the Constitution, any such right must be “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition.”
By the majority’s reasoning, the right to terminate a pregnancy is not “deeply rooted” in the history and tradition of the United States — a country whose Constitution was written by a small band of wealthy white men, many of whom owned slaves and most, if not all, of whom considered women to be second-class citizens without any say in politics.
The three dissenters in the Dobbs case — Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — called out the majority’s dishonesty, noting that its exceedingly narrow definition of “deeply rooted” rights poses a threat to far more than reproductive freedom. The majority’s denial of this is impossible to believe, the dissenters wrote, saying: “Either the majority does not really believe in its own reasoning. Or if it does, all rights that have no history stretching back to the mid-19th century are insecure.”
In other words, the court is not going to stop at abortion. If you think that’s hyperbole, consider Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in Dobbs, in which he called for the court to reconsider other constitutional rights that Americans have enjoyed, in some cases, for decades — including the right to use birth control, the right to marry the person of their choosing and the right of consenting adults to do as they please in the privacy of their bedrooms without being arrested and charged with crimes. These rights share a similar constitutional grounding to the now-former right to abortion, and Justice Thomas rejects that grounding, calling on the court to “eliminate it … at the earliest opportunity.”
This position may not command a majority of justices today, but six years ago, few people thought Roe v. Wade would be overturned. Brett Kavanaugh, during his confirmation hearing in 2018, said Roe v. Wade “is important precedent of the Supreme Court that has been reaffirmed many times.” He added: “Casey specifically reconsidered it, applied the stare decisis factors, and decided to reaffirm it. That makes Casey a precedent on precedent.”
Yet he voted to overturn two rulings that have led to more equality, more dignity and more freedom for millions of Americans. To dismantle these and other advances, the majority on this Supreme Court has demonstrated its disregard for precedent, public opinion and the court’s own legitimacy in the eyes of the American people. We will be paying the price for decades to come.
5 BIG TRUTHS ABOUT THE SUPREME COURT’S GUTTING OF ROE
By Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman, The Washington Post
Like it or not, here’s the reality: The Supreme Court has become the site of a new political Forever War.
That court has now done what liberals insisted it would and what conservatives alternately prayed for and denied was their intention all along: Overruled Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Now abortion can be outlawed, first in Republican-run states and perhaps eventually in the nation as a whole.
The best summary of what just happened comes from the dissent by the liberal justices: “The majority has overruled Roe and Casey for one and only one reason: because it has always despised them, and now it has the votes to discard them.”
Here are five takeaways from this political and legal earthquake.
1-The court’s decision is both straightforward and incredibly sweeping.
The decision written by Justice Samuel Alito flatly declares that “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start.” It rules that because a right to abortion is neither explicitly laid out in the Constitution nor “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions,” it deserves no protection as a fundamental right.
Therefore, states will be free to enact whatever restrictions on that right they choose. The decision also drips with contempt both for the court’s prior abortion jurisprudence and for abortion rights itself.
“The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions,” Alito writes, which means it therefore does not exist. The ruling dismisses the effect on women’s liberty by saying: “Women are not without electoral or political power,” and therefore they might try to protect their rights with their votes.
Crucially, Alito also sent a clear message to states that they may restrict abortion in absolutely any way they like. He specifies that going forward, abortion restrictions will be judged on rational-basis review, the lowest standard courts apply to judging new laws. If the state can show that it has any rational basis at all for a new restriction, the court will uphold it.
The court could have opted for a less radical decision. It could have upheld the 15-week Mississippi abortion ban at issue in this case while further eroding abortion rights by ending the fetal viability standard, without overturning the fundamental right itself. Instead it opted for a much more sweeping decision.
2-The court is only getting started.
In his concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas gives away the game, saying explicitly that the court should go on to overturn the cases that established the right to use contraception, overturned sodomy bans and established the right to same-sex marriage.
“After overruling these demonstrably erroneous decisions,” Thomas goes on, the court should expand its view outward to keep overruling more and more decisions.
Thomas bases that agenda on a rejection of “substantive due process.” He rejects the idea that the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of liberty incorporates a number of rights, such as the right to privacy, even if they are not explicitly mentioned in the text.
Yet as Justice Stephen G. Breyer’s dissent notes, the men who wrote the Constitution and the 14th Amendment granted almost no rights at all to women. Breyer unloads on the majority as follows:
When the majority says that we must read our foundational charter as viewed at the time of ratification (except that we may also check it against the Dark Ages), it consigns women to second-class citizenship.
Those men also didn’t believe that Black and White people have the right to marry one another; only later did the court rule that they do. Presumably this court would not extend the logic of this decision to taking away that right as well.
But as the court’s conservatives have already shown, the historical and textual approach they are now using is infinitely flexible, allowing them to arrive at any decision they want.
In the future that’s likely to mean a further erosion of the separation of church and state, fewer rights for workers, increasingly restricted voting rights, a further entrenchment of minority rule, and ever greater limits on government’s ability to solve problems.
That likely includes dramatically hobbling the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to combat climate change at a time when the future human habitability of our only planetary home in the known universe is in grave doubt.
3-Democrats need a fundamental rethink to meet this moment.
With the court escalating the radical legal revolution it is imposing on the country, Democrats need to shift their approach at the most fundamental level.
This entails both accepting and embracing this crowning fact: The court is going to be a zone of full-blown partisan combat for many years to come. Republicans have known this for decades. Democrats have to meet them on the battlefield that Republicans created.
“The court was always politicized,” Yale law professor Samuel Moyn tells us. “The question is, who’s going to get the upper hand in controlling it?”
Communicating this fact with the public — that the court cannot be a purely neutral legal zone and will inevitably be politicized going forward — is job one. This entails explaining clearly that when Republicans swiped Merrick Garland’s seat based on an invented principle about appointments in election years, then ditched that principle to appoint another justice, they fundamentally tainted the court in a way that demands hardball Democratic tactics in response.
It also means leveling with voters by telling them that the court is an instrument of minority rule — with five judges appointed by Republican presidents who ascended to office without winning the popular vote — and that the court is inevitably shaped by electoral politics.
This doesn’t mean all judicial rulings are purely politically motivated. It means the party in power picks judges in keeping with its political and policy agenda. Democrats must put all this squarely before the public.
“In a way there’s an opportunity in this decision to reorient,” Moyn told us, by hammering home to the public that our judicial order is shaped by “who’s elected and who gets power.”
And it means Democrats must stand for serious structural reform of the court, as a corrective to the irredeemable Republican tainting of it. This might entail term limits for justices, or expanding the court, or constraining its power with legislative reforms like limiting its jurisdiction, requiring supermajorities to overturn legislation and enabling legislative overrides of rulings.
But whatever the specifics, the core principle has to be that the court simply cannot continue to exist in its current form if we are to call ourselves a liberal democracy. The basic posture, Moyn says, should be shaped around the idea that we face “an epic confrontation, like in the 1930s.”
4-Democrats must make very clear promises about what’s next.
In keeping with the above shift, Democrats have to be ultra-clear about this fall’s elections. They need to tell voters: If you let us keep the House and deliver us two more Senate seats, we will end the filibuster, pass a bill nationally codifying abortion rights, and undertake far-reaching Supreme Court reform.
Of course, the court could strike down such a national abortion bill. But as Moyn notes, Democrats can tell voters that they would reform the court to prevent this, vowing: “We will declare war on the Supreme Court to keep that law viable.”
5-Democrats must make this stick — hard — politically.
Republicans are already celebrating the decision by calling for a national legislative ban on abortion. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) alluded to this on Friday by flatly declaring that Republicans are “plotting a national abortion ban.”
Every Republican candidate for the House and Senate should be pressed relentlessly on whether they would vote for such a national ban in Congress. Given broad public support for abortion rights, that won’t be an easy position to hold in swing states and swing districts.
And if the media doesn’t compel Republican candidates to answer this question, Democrats must do it instead. Whether Democrats like it or not, this is becoming a Forever War, and they must meet the moment.
By Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman, The Washington Post
Like it or not, here’s the reality: The Supreme Court has become the site of a new political Forever War.
That court has now done what liberals insisted it would and what conservatives alternately prayed for and denied was their intention all along: Overruled Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Now abortion can be outlawed, first in Republican-run states and perhaps eventually in the nation as a whole.
The best summary of what just happened comes from the dissent by the liberal justices: “The majority has overruled Roe and Casey for one and only one reason: because it has always despised them, and now it has the votes to discard them.”
Here are five takeaways from this political and legal earthquake.
1-The court’s decision is both straightforward and incredibly sweeping.
The decision written by Justice Samuel Alito flatly declares that “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start.” It rules that because a right to abortion is neither explicitly laid out in the Constitution nor “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions,” it deserves no protection as a fundamental right.
Therefore, states will be free to enact whatever restrictions on that right they choose. The decision also drips with contempt both for the court’s prior abortion jurisprudence and for abortion rights itself.
“The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions,” Alito writes, which means it therefore does not exist. The ruling dismisses the effect on women’s liberty by saying: “Women are not without electoral or political power,” and therefore they might try to protect their rights with their votes.
Crucially, Alito also sent a clear message to states that they may restrict abortion in absolutely any way they like. He specifies that going forward, abortion restrictions will be judged on rational-basis review, the lowest standard courts apply to judging new laws. If the state can show that it has any rational basis at all for a new restriction, the court will uphold it.
The court could have opted for a less radical decision. It could have upheld the 15-week Mississippi abortion ban at issue in this case while further eroding abortion rights by ending the fetal viability standard, without overturning the fundamental right itself. Instead it opted for a much more sweeping decision.
2-The court is only getting started.
In his concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas gives away the game, saying explicitly that the court should go on to overturn the cases that established the right to use contraception, overturned sodomy bans and established the right to same-sex marriage.
“After overruling these demonstrably erroneous decisions,” Thomas goes on, the court should expand its view outward to keep overruling more and more decisions.
Thomas bases that agenda on a rejection of “substantive due process.” He rejects the idea that the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of liberty incorporates a number of rights, such as the right to privacy, even if they are not explicitly mentioned in the text.
Yet as Justice Stephen G. Breyer’s dissent notes, the men who wrote the Constitution and the 14th Amendment granted almost no rights at all to women. Breyer unloads on the majority as follows:
When the majority says that we must read our foundational charter as viewed at the time of ratification (except that we may also check it against the Dark Ages), it consigns women to second-class citizenship.
Those men also didn’t believe that Black and White people have the right to marry one another; only later did the court rule that they do. Presumably this court would not extend the logic of this decision to taking away that right as well.
But as the court’s conservatives have already shown, the historical and textual approach they are now using is infinitely flexible, allowing them to arrive at any decision they want.
In the future that’s likely to mean a further erosion of the separation of church and state, fewer rights for workers, increasingly restricted voting rights, a further entrenchment of minority rule, and ever greater limits on government’s ability to solve problems.
That likely includes dramatically hobbling the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to combat climate change at a time when the future human habitability of our only planetary home in the known universe is in grave doubt.
3-Democrats need a fundamental rethink to meet this moment.
With the court escalating the radical legal revolution it is imposing on the country, Democrats need to shift their approach at the most fundamental level.
This entails both accepting and embracing this crowning fact: The court is going to be a zone of full-blown partisan combat for many years to come. Republicans have known this for decades. Democrats have to meet them on the battlefield that Republicans created.
“The court was always politicized,” Yale law professor Samuel Moyn tells us. “The question is, who’s going to get the upper hand in controlling it?”
Communicating this fact with the public — that the court cannot be a purely neutral legal zone and will inevitably be politicized going forward — is job one. This entails explaining clearly that when Republicans swiped Merrick Garland’s seat based on an invented principle about appointments in election years, then ditched that principle to appoint another justice, they fundamentally tainted the court in a way that demands hardball Democratic tactics in response.
It also means leveling with voters by telling them that the court is an instrument of minority rule — with five judges appointed by Republican presidents who ascended to office without winning the popular vote — and that the court is inevitably shaped by electoral politics.
This doesn’t mean all judicial rulings are purely politically motivated. It means the party in power picks judges in keeping with its political and policy agenda. Democrats must put all this squarely before the public.
“In a way there’s an opportunity in this decision to reorient,” Moyn told us, by hammering home to the public that our judicial order is shaped by “who’s elected and who gets power.”
And it means Democrats must stand for serious structural reform of the court, as a corrective to the irredeemable Republican tainting of it. This might entail term limits for justices, or expanding the court, or constraining its power with legislative reforms like limiting its jurisdiction, requiring supermajorities to overturn legislation and enabling legislative overrides of rulings.
But whatever the specifics, the core principle has to be that the court simply cannot continue to exist in its current form if we are to call ourselves a liberal democracy. The basic posture, Moyn says, should be shaped around the idea that we face “an epic confrontation, like in the 1930s.”
4-Democrats must make very clear promises about what’s next.
In keeping with the above shift, Democrats have to be ultra-clear about this fall’s elections. They need to tell voters: If you let us keep the House and deliver us two more Senate seats, we will end the filibuster, pass a bill nationally codifying abortion rights, and undertake far-reaching Supreme Court reform.
Of course, the court could strike down such a national abortion bill. But as Moyn notes, Democrats can tell voters that they would reform the court to prevent this, vowing: “We will declare war on the Supreme Court to keep that law viable.”
5-Democrats must make this stick — hard — politically.
Republicans are already celebrating the decision by calling for a national legislative ban on abortion. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) alluded to this on Friday by flatly declaring that Republicans are “plotting a national abortion ban.”
Every Republican candidate for the House and Senate should be pressed relentlessly on whether they would vote for such a national ban in Congress. Given broad public support for abortion rights, that won’t be an easy position to hold in swing states and swing districts.
And if the media doesn’t compel Republican candidates to answer this question, Democrats must do it instead. Whether Democrats like it or not, this is becoming a Forever War, and they must meet the moment.
REQUIEM FOR THE SUPREME COURT
By Linda Greenhouse, winner of a 1998 Pulitzer Prize, reported on the Supreme Court for The Times from 1978 to 2008 and was a contributing Opinion writer from 2009 to 2021.
They did it because they could.
It was as simple as that.
With the stroke of a pen, Justice Samuel Alito and four other justices, all chosen by Republican presidents running on successive party platforms committed to overturning Roe v. Wade, erased the constitutional right to reproductive autonomy that the Supreme Court recognized more than 49 years ago. As the dissenting opinion — written by Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — observed, never before had the court rescinded an individual right and left it up to the states whether to respect what had once been anchored in the Constitution.
The practical consequences of the decision, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, are enormous and severe. Abortion, now one of the most common medical procedures, will be banned or sharply limited in about half the country. Excluding miscarriages, nearly one in five pregnancies ends in abortion in the United States, and one American woman in four will terminate a pregnancy during her lifetime. Two generations of women in this country have come of age secure in the knowledge that an unintended pregnancy need not knock their lives off course. “After today,” as the dissent pointed out, “young women will come of age with fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers had.”
What the court delivered on Friday is a requiem for the right to abortion. As Chief Justice John Roberts, who declined to join Justice Alito’s opinion, may well suspect, it is also a requiem for the Supreme Court.
Consider the implication of Justice Alito’s declaration that Roe v. Wade was “egregiously wrong” from the start. Five of the seven justices in the Roe majority — all except William O. Douglas and Thurgood Marshall — were appointed by Republican presidents. The votes necessary to preserve the right to abortion 19 years later in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Roe follow-up decision that the court also overturned on Friday, came from five Republican-appointed justices.
In asserting that these justices led the court into grave error from which it must now be rescued, Justice Alito and his majority are necessarily saying that these predecessors, joining the court over a period of four decades, didn’t know enough, or care enough, to use the right methodology and reach the right decision. The arrogance and unapologetic nature of the opinion are breathtaking. (Of the justices who decided Casey in 1992, the only member of the court still serving is Justice Clarence Thomas, a dissenter then, who wrote in a concurring opinion on Friday that now that the court has overturned the right to abortion, it should also reconsider its precedents on contraception, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and same-sex marriage.)
The dissenting justices wrote on Friday, “The majority’s refusal even to consider the life-altering consequences of reversing Roe and Casey is a stunning indictment of its decision.” They observed, “The majority has overruled Roe and Casey for one and only one reason: because it has always despised them, and now it has the votes to discard them. The majority thereby substitutes a rule by judges for the rule of law.”
Those sentences are as terrifying as they are obviously correct. Where do they leave the court, now having voluntarily shed the protection offered by its usual stance that it is simply the passive recipient of the disputes that the public brings to its door?
For several years, members of the new majority have been openly inviting opportunities to revisit Roe and Casey, just as the same justices, principally Justices Thomas and Alito, spent years inviting the gun lobby to bring cases affording an opportunity to expand on the Second Amendment analysis of the 2008 Heller decision; that campaign culminated on Thursday with the decision in the New York State gun-licensing case. That case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, of course, did not overturn an old right but expanded on a new one.
The court engaged in no such outreach at the time of Roe. To the contrary, the case reached the Supreme Court under a jurisdictional statute, since repealed, that required it to rule on the merits whenever a federal court had invoked federal constitutional grounds to invalidate a state law. A special three-judge Federal District Court, convened under that statute, had declared unconstitutional the Texas law that made abortion a crime except to save a pregnant woman’s life.
For the court to decide to take on Roe v. Wade, in other words, was the opposite of judicial activism. Friday’s ruling, meanwhile, was judicial activism’s epitome: A federal appeals court had blocked a Mississippi law on the ground that the law’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy was obviously inconsistent with Roe and Casey. (Those decisions protected the right to abortion up until fetal viability, or about 24 weeks.) The state originally asked the justices to decide whether a ban on abortion before viability was always unconstitutional. Over Chief Justice Roberts’s objection, the majority opinion went further, eliminating the right to abortion in its entirety.
In a concurrence, the chief justice underscored just how aggressive the majority opinion was, writing: “Surely we should adhere closely to principles of judicial restraint here, where the broader path the court chooses entails repudiating a constitutional right we have not only previously recognized, but also expressly reaffirmed applying the doctrine of stare decisis.” He added that “its dramatic and consequential ruling is unnecessary to decide the case before us.”
But Justice Alito declined that call for restraint. The chief justice’s “quest for a middle way would only put off the day when we would be forced to confront the question we now decide,” Justice Alito wrote. “The turmoil wrought by Roe and Casey would be prolonged. It is far better — for this court and the country — to face up to the real issue without further delay.”
There will be turmoil now, for sure, as the country’s highways fill with women desperate to regain control over their lives and running out of time, perhaps followed by vigilantes across state lines. But the only turmoil that was caused by Roe and Casey was due to the refusal of activists, politicians and Republican-appointed judges to accept the validity of the precedents. Justice Alito’s reference to “turmoil” reminded me of nothing so much as Donald Trump’s invocation of “carnage” in his inaugural address. There was no carnage then, but there was carnage to come.
Forty-nine years is a long time, but professional lives, including mine, are long as well. I was a freshly minted journalist at The Times in 1969 when I received an assignment to write about the growing controversy over abortion. I immersed myself in the issue, interviewing and learning from lawyers on both sides of the debate. On Jan. 25, 1970, The New York Times Magazine published my article under the headline “Constitutional Question: Is There a Right to Abortion?” It was, I believe, the first article in a general-interest publication to survey the nascent constitutional arguments, and it has been quite widely reprinted. When I finished reading Friday’s decision in preparation for writing this essay, I realized that I will have chronicled this profound issue across its entire arc, a perspective I never could have anticipated.
Except, of course, that the story isn’t over. Although Justice Brett Kavanaugh proclaimed with evident relief in his concurring opinion that the court was now bowing out of the picture and “will no longer decide how to evaluate the interests of the pregnant woman and the interests in protecting fetal life throughout pregnancy,” that is not likely to be the case. Those pesky women will keep coming up with problems: What about pregnancy-related medical issues short of imminent death? Rape? Incest? Fetuses doomed to die in the womb or shortly after birth? Will young teens be forced to bear children? Will women who receive a prenatal diagnosis of a serious fetal anomaly be forced to bring a child into the world whom they can’t care for adequately and in whom the state has little postnatal interest? What happens when states start prosecuting not only doctors but women?
Justice Alito has an answer to these questions: “rational basis.” A law regulating abortion, he writes, “must be sustained if there is a rational basis on which the legislature could have thought that it would serve legitimate state interests.” And what might be such an interest? The list of “legitimate interests” is frightening:
Respect for and preservation of prenatal life at all stages of development … the protection of maternal health and safety; the elimination of particularly gruesome or barbaric medical procedures; the preservation of the integrity of the medical profession; the mitigation of fetal pain; and the prevention of discrimination on the basis of race, sex or disability.
With the exception of the first and second interests — the Casey decision itself recognized the state’s interest in unborn life throughout pregnancy — these are anti-abortion dog whistles. The “particularly gruesome” procedures include a common method of second-trimester abortion that some states have tried to outlaw. The “integrity” of the medical profession is a slam on doctors whom Friday’s majority refers to as “abortionists.” The “fetal pain” issue is a canard, as fetuses lack the neural development to experience pain until late in pregnancy. And the discrimination issue refers, at least in part, to current state laws that would criminalize the abortion of fetuses with a Down syndrome diagnosis; currently, most such pregnancies are terminated.
And the dissenting opinion asks, “What about the morning-after pill? IUDs? In vitro fertilization?” Or medical management of miscarriage, often by the same methods used for abortion?
No, justices, your work isn’t done. What you have finished off is the legitimacy of the court on which you are privileged to spend the rest of your lives.
By Linda Greenhouse, winner of a 1998 Pulitzer Prize, reported on the Supreme Court for The Times from 1978 to 2008 and was a contributing Opinion writer from 2009 to 2021.
They did it because they could.
It was as simple as that.
With the stroke of a pen, Justice Samuel Alito and four other justices, all chosen by Republican presidents running on successive party platforms committed to overturning Roe v. Wade, erased the constitutional right to reproductive autonomy that the Supreme Court recognized more than 49 years ago. As the dissenting opinion — written by Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — observed, never before had the court rescinded an individual right and left it up to the states whether to respect what had once been anchored in the Constitution.
The practical consequences of the decision, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, are enormous and severe. Abortion, now one of the most common medical procedures, will be banned or sharply limited in about half the country. Excluding miscarriages, nearly one in five pregnancies ends in abortion in the United States, and one American woman in four will terminate a pregnancy during her lifetime. Two generations of women in this country have come of age secure in the knowledge that an unintended pregnancy need not knock their lives off course. “After today,” as the dissent pointed out, “young women will come of age with fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers had.”
What the court delivered on Friday is a requiem for the right to abortion. As Chief Justice John Roberts, who declined to join Justice Alito’s opinion, may well suspect, it is also a requiem for the Supreme Court.
Consider the implication of Justice Alito’s declaration that Roe v. Wade was “egregiously wrong” from the start. Five of the seven justices in the Roe majority — all except William O. Douglas and Thurgood Marshall — were appointed by Republican presidents. The votes necessary to preserve the right to abortion 19 years later in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Roe follow-up decision that the court also overturned on Friday, came from five Republican-appointed justices.
In asserting that these justices led the court into grave error from which it must now be rescued, Justice Alito and his majority are necessarily saying that these predecessors, joining the court over a period of four decades, didn’t know enough, or care enough, to use the right methodology and reach the right decision. The arrogance and unapologetic nature of the opinion are breathtaking. (Of the justices who decided Casey in 1992, the only member of the court still serving is Justice Clarence Thomas, a dissenter then, who wrote in a concurring opinion on Friday that now that the court has overturned the right to abortion, it should also reconsider its precedents on contraception, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and same-sex marriage.)
The dissenting justices wrote on Friday, “The majority’s refusal even to consider the life-altering consequences of reversing Roe and Casey is a stunning indictment of its decision.” They observed, “The majority has overruled Roe and Casey for one and only one reason: because it has always despised them, and now it has the votes to discard them. The majority thereby substitutes a rule by judges for the rule of law.”
Those sentences are as terrifying as they are obviously correct. Where do they leave the court, now having voluntarily shed the protection offered by its usual stance that it is simply the passive recipient of the disputes that the public brings to its door?
For several years, members of the new majority have been openly inviting opportunities to revisit Roe and Casey, just as the same justices, principally Justices Thomas and Alito, spent years inviting the gun lobby to bring cases affording an opportunity to expand on the Second Amendment analysis of the 2008 Heller decision; that campaign culminated on Thursday with the decision in the New York State gun-licensing case. That case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, of course, did not overturn an old right but expanded on a new one.
The court engaged in no such outreach at the time of Roe. To the contrary, the case reached the Supreme Court under a jurisdictional statute, since repealed, that required it to rule on the merits whenever a federal court had invoked federal constitutional grounds to invalidate a state law. A special three-judge Federal District Court, convened under that statute, had declared unconstitutional the Texas law that made abortion a crime except to save a pregnant woman’s life.
For the court to decide to take on Roe v. Wade, in other words, was the opposite of judicial activism. Friday’s ruling, meanwhile, was judicial activism’s epitome: A federal appeals court had blocked a Mississippi law on the ground that the law’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy was obviously inconsistent with Roe and Casey. (Those decisions protected the right to abortion up until fetal viability, or about 24 weeks.) The state originally asked the justices to decide whether a ban on abortion before viability was always unconstitutional. Over Chief Justice Roberts’s objection, the majority opinion went further, eliminating the right to abortion in its entirety.
In a concurrence, the chief justice underscored just how aggressive the majority opinion was, writing: “Surely we should adhere closely to principles of judicial restraint here, where the broader path the court chooses entails repudiating a constitutional right we have not only previously recognized, but also expressly reaffirmed applying the doctrine of stare decisis.” He added that “its dramatic and consequential ruling is unnecessary to decide the case before us.”
But Justice Alito declined that call for restraint. The chief justice’s “quest for a middle way would only put off the day when we would be forced to confront the question we now decide,” Justice Alito wrote. “The turmoil wrought by Roe and Casey would be prolonged. It is far better — for this court and the country — to face up to the real issue without further delay.”
There will be turmoil now, for sure, as the country’s highways fill with women desperate to regain control over their lives and running out of time, perhaps followed by vigilantes across state lines. But the only turmoil that was caused by Roe and Casey was due to the refusal of activists, politicians and Republican-appointed judges to accept the validity of the precedents. Justice Alito’s reference to “turmoil” reminded me of nothing so much as Donald Trump’s invocation of “carnage” in his inaugural address. There was no carnage then, but there was carnage to come.
Forty-nine years is a long time, but professional lives, including mine, are long as well. I was a freshly minted journalist at The Times in 1969 when I received an assignment to write about the growing controversy over abortion. I immersed myself in the issue, interviewing and learning from lawyers on both sides of the debate. On Jan. 25, 1970, The New York Times Magazine published my article under the headline “Constitutional Question: Is There a Right to Abortion?” It was, I believe, the first article in a general-interest publication to survey the nascent constitutional arguments, and it has been quite widely reprinted. When I finished reading Friday’s decision in preparation for writing this essay, I realized that I will have chronicled this profound issue across its entire arc, a perspective I never could have anticipated.
Except, of course, that the story isn’t over. Although Justice Brett Kavanaugh proclaimed with evident relief in his concurring opinion that the court was now bowing out of the picture and “will no longer decide how to evaluate the interests of the pregnant woman and the interests in protecting fetal life throughout pregnancy,” that is not likely to be the case. Those pesky women will keep coming up with problems: What about pregnancy-related medical issues short of imminent death? Rape? Incest? Fetuses doomed to die in the womb or shortly after birth? Will young teens be forced to bear children? Will women who receive a prenatal diagnosis of a serious fetal anomaly be forced to bring a child into the world whom they can’t care for adequately and in whom the state has little postnatal interest? What happens when states start prosecuting not only doctors but women?
Justice Alito has an answer to these questions: “rational basis.” A law regulating abortion, he writes, “must be sustained if there is a rational basis on which the legislature could have thought that it would serve legitimate state interests.” And what might be such an interest? The list of “legitimate interests” is frightening:
Respect for and preservation of prenatal life at all stages of development … the protection of maternal health and safety; the elimination of particularly gruesome or barbaric medical procedures; the preservation of the integrity of the medical profession; the mitigation of fetal pain; and the prevention of discrimination on the basis of race, sex or disability.
With the exception of the first and second interests — the Casey decision itself recognized the state’s interest in unborn life throughout pregnancy — these are anti-abortion dog whistles. The “particularly gruesome” procedures include a common method of second-trimester abortion that some states have tried to outlaw. The “integrity” of the medical profession is a slam on doctors whom Friday’s majority refers to as “abortionists.” The “fetal pain” issue is a canard, as fetuses lack the neural development to experience pain until late in pregnancy. And the discrimination issue refers, at least in part, to current state laws that would criminalize the abortion of fetuses with a Down syndrome diagnosis; currently, most such pregnancies are terminated.
And the dissenting opinion asks, “What about the morning-after pill? IUDs? In vitro fertilization?” Or medical management of miscarriage, often by the same methods used for abortion?
No, justices, your work isn’t done. What you have finished off is the legitimacy of the court on which you are privileged to spend the rest of your lives.
THOSE IGNORING THE JAN. 6 REVELATIONS ARE GUARANTEEING MORE VIOLENCE
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
Rep. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.), one of two Republicans on the House Jan. 6 committee, recently made public a letter mailed to his home threatening to kill him, his wife and his 5-month-old child.
“There’s violence in the future, I’m going to tell you,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.” “And until we get a grip on telling people the truth, we can’t expect any differently.”
The ongoing threat of violence was at the core of Tuesday’s hearing of the select committee, which explored the campaign by President Donald Trump and his lawyers to pressure state legislators and election officials to overturn the election results — and the harassment, intimidation and threats they set off.
Shaye Moss, a Georgia election worker who with her mother was falsely accused by Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani of wrongdoing, testified about how Trump supporters busted into her grandmother’s home to perform a “citizens arrest,” and about how their constant threats and vile, racist attacks have caused her to become a recluse and gain 60 pounds. Her mother had to abandon her home for two months at the FBI’s urging.
Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, a Republican, testified about the man with a pistol who threatened his neighbor and the people who came to his house with “panel trucks with videos of me, proclaiming me to be a pedophile and a pervert and a corrupt politician,” upsetting his wife and terminally ill daughter.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, also a Republican, testified about the doxing of his email and cellphone, the “sexualized attacks” on his wife of 40 years and the break-in of the home of his late son’s widow.
Warned the vice chair of the panel, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.): “We cannot let America become a nation of conspiracy theories and thug violence.”
The democracy America has cultivated for 230 years is slipping away, leaving us in danger of becoming a system in which political differences and elections are not resolved by the rule of law but “decided in the streets,” as Greg Jacob, former vice president Mike Pence’s chief counsel, put it in his testimony about the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
We didn’t arrive at this precarious moment solely because of Trump. Trump couldn’t have happened if Fox News and Republican elites hadn’t normalized his threats to democratic traditions. Now they continue to do so with their breezy dismissal of the breathtaking revelations of the Jan. 6 hearings.
The conservative elites surely know we are moving toward instability and violence. Yet rather than grapple with the threat, they excuse Trump’s lawlessness once more by resorting to tribalism: There’s nothing new here. The needle isn’t moving.
This has been the Fox News refrain from the start of its brownout coverage of the Jan. 6 hearings. “This isn’t going to move … the needle one bit,” Fox News contributor Joe Concha said on air before the hearings began. “Democrats are toast in the midterms.”
Raymond Arroyo told Fox News’s Laura Ingraham: “I don’t think this moves the needle for the American voter.”
“Did this move the needle at all?” Fox News host Shannon Bream asked.
“I kind of doubt it,” responded Fox News’s Martha MacCallum.
“When it comes to moving the needle,” conservative Katie Pavlich told Fox News, those revisiting Jan. 6 “are not winning.”
The pendulum of history is swinging toward the autocratic, at home and abroad, and Republican elites are nattering about “the needle” of short-term partisan gain.
It’s reductive, and reckless. Top former Trump advisers detailed how the former president knew he had lost the election but perpetrated an illegal coup attempt. As legendary conservative jurist J. Michael Luttig testified: “Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy.”
Now, Trump is claiming the Jan. 6 probe is “fake and phony” and the testimony from his former advisers “doctored.” And Trump allies and supporters are helping him get away with it — again.
In doing so, they are effectively guaranteeing more violence. And no side is immune from the growing threat, as the arrest of a man planning to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh reveals.
During Tuesday’s hearing, the committee also heard from Gabriel Sterling, the Georgia election official who, incensed by threats against elections workers, lashed out at Trump and other politicians in a December 2020 video: “Someone’s going to get shot. Someone’s going to get killed. … All of you who have not said a damn word are complicit in this.”
And all who are silent now are complicit in assuring that the horrors of Jan. 6 will recur.
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
Rep. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.), one of two Republicans on the House Jan. 6 committee, recently made public a letter mailed to his home threatening to kill him, his wife and his 5-month-old child.
“There’s violence in the future, I’m going to tell you,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.” “And until we get a grip on telling people the truth, we can’t expect any differently.”
The ongoing threat of violence was at the core of Tuesday’s hearing of the select committee, which explored the campaign by President Donald Trump and his lawyers to pressure state legislators and election officials to overturn the election results — and the harassment, intimidation and threats they set off.
Shaye Moss, a Georgia election worker who with her mother was falsely accused by Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani of wrongdoing, testified about how Trump supporters busted into her grandmother’s home to perform a “citizens arrest,” and about how their constant threats and vile, racist attacks have caused her to become a recluse and gain 60 pounds. Her mother had to abandon her home for two months at the FBI’s urging.
Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, a Republican, testified about the man with a pistol who threatened his neighbor and the people who came to his house with “panel trucks with videos of me, proclaiming me to be a pedophile and a pervert and a corrupt politician,” upsetting his wife and terminally ill daughter.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, also a Republican, testified about the doxing of his email and cellphone, the “sexualized attacks” on his wife of 40 years and the break-in of the home of his late son’s widow.
Warned the vice chair of the panel, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.): “We cannot let America become a nation of conspiracy theories and thug violence.”
The democracy America has cultivated for 230 years is slipping away, leaving us in danger of becoming a system in which political differences and elections are not resolved by the rule of law but “decided in the streets,” as Greg Jacob, former vice president Mike Pence’s chief counsel, put it in his testimony about the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
We didn’t arrive at this precarious moment solely because of Trump. Trump couldn’t have happened if Fox News and Republican elites hadn’t normalized his threats to democratic traditions. Now they continue to do so with their breezy dismissal of the breathtaking revelations of the Jan. 6 hearings.
The conservative elites surely know we are moving toward instability and violence. Yet rather than grapple with the threat, they excuse Trump’s lawlessness once more by resorting to tribalism: There’s nothing new here. The needle isn’t moving.
This has been the Fox News refrain from the start of its brownout coverage of the Jan. 6 hearings. “This isn’t going to move … the needle one bit,” Fox News contributor Joe Concha said on air before the hearings began. “Democrats are toast in the midterms.”
Raymond Arroyo told Fox News’s Laura Ingraham: “I don’t think this moves the needle for the American voter.”
“Did this move the needle at all?” Fox News host Shannon Bream asked.
“I kind of doubt it,” responded Fox News’s Martha MacCallum.
“When it comes to moving the needle,” conservative Katie Pavlich told Fox News, those revisiting Jan. 6 “are not winning.”
The pendulum of history is swinging toward the autocratic, at home and abroad, and Republican elites are nattering about “the needle” of short-term partisan gain.
It’s reductive, and reckless. Top former Trump advisers detailed how the former president knew he had lost the election but perpetrated an illegal coup attempt. As legendary conservative jurist J. Michael Luttig testified: “Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy.”
Now, Trump is claiming the Jan. 6 probe is “fake and phony” and the testimony from his former advisers “doctored.” And Trump allies and supporters are helping him get away with it — again.
In doing so, they are effectively guaranteeing more violence. And no side is immune from the growing threat, as the arrest of a man planning to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh reveals.
During Tuesday’s hearing, the committee also heard from Gabriel Sterling, the Georgia election official who, incensed by threats against elections workers, lashed out at Trump and other politicians in a December 2020 video: “Someone’s going to get shot. Someone’s going to get killed. … All of you who have not said a damn word are complicit in this.”
And all who are silent now are complicit in assuring that the horrors of Jan. 6 will recur.
ANOTHER REASON FOR THE JAN. 6 HEARINGS: THE GOP IS STILL ATTACKING DEMOCRACY
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Retired federal judge J. Michael Luttig warned at the House Jan. 6 committee’s hearing last Thursday that Donald Trump and his supporters remain a “clear and present danger” to our democracy. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the vice chair of the committee, has similarly warned about the “ongoing threat” the defeated former president poses.
This is not hyperbole. In fact, three vivid examples in recent days show that the radicalized GOP no longer subscribes to the basic principles of democracy.
The first came from Trump at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s gathering last week. Apparently oblivious to the potential crimes to which he was confessing, Trump declared, “Mike Pence had a chance to be great. He had a chance to be frankly historic. But just like [former attorney general ] Bill Barr and the rest of these weak people, Mike — and I say it sadly because I like him — but Mike did not have the courage to act.” In other words, Trump has no qualms about attempting to pressure his vice president or the Justice Department to undo an election.
Does anyone believe he and his supporters wouldn’t pull out all the stops once more to persuade the House of Representatives not to certify the 2024 election if the Democratic nominee won? Trump has shown absolutely no hesitation that he is willing to deploy similar tactics in future elections. In fact, he still wrongly insists there is historical precedent for his coup attempt (even though John Eastman, his chief insurrection plotter, reportedly confessed in Trump’s presence that none exists).
Trump has also vowed political retribution against those who seek to hold him accountable, calling for an investigation into the Jan. 6 committee. “The first people to receive subpoenas should be crazy Nancy Pelosi and warmonger Liz Cheney, who by the way is, they say, down by 35 points in the great state on Wyoming.”
Another kind of the ongoing threat to democracy comes from New Mexico, where the state Supreme Court was compelled to order county commissioners in rural Otero County to certify their June 7 primary election. Commissioner Couy Griffin, a Republican who was sentenced last week for trespassing at the Capitol on Jan. 6, refused to certify the results not because of evidence of fraud but because of “gut feeling and intuition.” This is the Trump standard: It doesn’t matter if there is zero evidence of fraud. Sheer delusion is sufficient to violate election laws.
It’s the same mind-set that begot endless phony “audits” of the 2020 election results. Unless those who convinced their followers (or even themselves) that the election was stolen are held accountable, partisans taking elections into their own hands to deny the will of the people will become standard operating procedure.
Finally, there is the proliferation of threats of violence from Republicans. This stems from Trump egging on violence at his rallies in 2016, and it has continued ever since, despite warnings from some Republican officials such as Georgia election official Gabriel Sterling that someone could be injured or killed as a result of such rhetoric. Those warnings were prescient, as video of the mob hunting down Vice President Pence showed.
Casual use of violent rhetoric is now embedded in MAGA political culture. The latest comes from disgraced former Missouri governor Eric Greitens, who is running for his state’s Senate seat. He released an ad on Monday in which he carries a shotgun and declares “We’re going RINO hunting.” He and men in tactical gear then break into a house as though they are seeking to kill “Republicans in name only.” Twitter slapped a warning on the ad for “abusive behavior,” but left it up. Facebook took it down. The GOP is likely to nominate Greitens.
It’s a fundamental precept of criminal law that if illegal conduct goes unpunished, others will try to do it again. The threat to democracy remains, not just from Trump but also from a whole raft of election deniers who are running for office or wield power over local elections. If Trump and his ilk are not punished, the threat will only worsen.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Retired federal judge J. Michael Luttig warned at the House Jan. 6 committee’s hearing last Thursday that Donald Trump and his supporters remain a “clear and present danger” to our democracy. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the vice chair of the committee, has similarly warned about the “ongoing threat” the defeated former president poses.
This is not hyperbole. In fact, three vivid examples in recent days show that the radicalized GOP no longer subscribes to the basic principles of democracy.
The first came from Trump at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s gathering last week. Apparently oblivious to the potential crimes to which he was confessing, Trump declared, “Mike Pence had a chance to be great. He had a chance to be frankly historic. But just like [former attorney general ] Bill Barr and the rest of these weak people, Mike — and I say it sadly because I like him — but Mike did not have the courage to act.” In other words, Trump has no qualms about attempting to pressure his vice president or the Justice Department to undo an election.
Does anyone believe he and his supporters wouldn’t pull out all the stops once more to persuade the House of Representatives not to certify the 2024 election if the Democratic nominee won? Trump has shown absolutely no hesitation that he is willing to deploy similar tactics in future elections. In fact, he still wrongly insists there is historical precedent for his coup attempt (even though John Eastman, his chief insurrection plotter, reportedly confessed in Trump’s presence that none exists).
Trump has also vowed political retribution against those who seek to hold him accountable, calling for an investigation into the Jan. 6 committee. “The first people to receive subpoenas should be crazy Nancy Pelosi and warmonger Liz Cheney, who by the way is, they say, down by 35 points in the great state on Wyoming.”
Another kind of the ongoing threat to democracy comes from New Mexico, where the state Supreme Court was compelled to order county commissioners in rural Otero County to certify their June 7 primary election. Commissioner Couy Griffin, a Republican who was sentenced last week for trespassing at the Capitol on Jan. 6, refused to certify the results not because of evidence of fraud but because of “gut feeling and intuition.” This is the Trump standard: It doesn’t matter if there is zero evidence of fraud. Sheer delusion is sufficient to violate election laws.
It’s the same mind-set that begot endless phony “audits” of the 2020 election results. Unless those who convinced their followers (or even themselves) that the election was stolen are held accountable, partisans taking elections into their own hands to deny the will of the people will become standard operating procedure.
Finally, there is the proliferation of threats of violence from Republicans. This stems from Trump egging on violence at his rallies in 2016, and it has continued ever since, despite warnings from some Republican officials such as Georgia election official Gabriel Sterling that someone could be injured or killed as a result of such rhetoric. Those warnings were prescient, as video of the mob hunting down Vice President Pence showed.
Casual use of violent rhetoric is now embedded in MAGA political culture. The latest comes from disgraced former Missouri governor Eric Greitens, who is running for his state’s Senate seat. He released an ad on Monday in which he carries a shotgun and declares “We’re going RINO hunting.” He and men in tactical gear then break into a house as though they are seeking to kill “Republicans in name only.” Twitter slapped a warning on the ad for “abusive behavior,” but left it up. Facebook took it down. The GOP is likely to nominate Greitens.
It’s a fundamental precept of criminal law that if illegal conduct goes unpunished, others will try to do it again. The threat to democracy remains, not just from Trump but also from a whole raft of election deniers who are running for office or wield power over local elections. If Trump and his ilk are not punished, the threat will only worsen.
STUNNING TRUMP REVELATIONS RAISE FEARS OF A DARK, VIOLENT FUTURE
By Greg Sargent, The Washington Post
As extraordinary revelations pour forth about Donald Trump’s plot to destroy our political order after the 2020 election, an unsettling question arises: What does it mean that for most elected Republicans, none of what we’re learning is remotely disqualifying, either in a party leader or a 2024 presidential nominee?
At the close of Thursday’s Jan. 6 select committee hearing, J. Michael Luttig, a former federal judge widely respected by conservatives, issued a long-term warning. Trump and his allies pose a “clear and present danger to American democracy,” Luttig said, and pledge to “succeed in 2024 where they failed in 2020.”
“The former president and his allies,” Luttig continued, “are executing that blueprint for 2024 in open and plain view of the American public.”
This might seem like a narrow procedural prediction: If 2024 is super-close, they’ll attempt the same manipulation of our creaky electoral college machinery as last time. They might succeed. They’re putting those pieces in place right now.
That’s all true. But Luttig’s testimony, along with the shocking new revelations, point to something more fundamental at stake. These hearings are about what kind of long-term democratic future lies ahead: They represent an effort to minimize the possibility that we’re sliding headlong into a protracted era of chronic instability and rising political violence.
If you doubt this, please note: The foreboding expressed by Luttig and others is shared by experts who study democratic breakdown. When Luttig says we’re at a “perilous crossroads,” and says only Republicans can “bring an end” to the threat, he’s not alone.
Two of those experts, Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, professors of government and politics, recently argued that we’re heading into a “coming age of instability.” This is not a claim of pending “civil war.” It’s more subtle: a future of smoldering conflict akin to “the Troubles” in Ireland.
“Such a scenario would be marked by frequent constitutional crises, including contested or stolen elections,” they wrote, predicting our elections might devolve into periodic referendums on whether the United States will be “democratic or authoritarian.”
This portends “heightened political violence,” they suggested, including assassinations, bombings and violent confrontations in the streets, “often tolerated and even incited by politicians.”
How GOP leaders respond to the moment will help determine whether that happens, the scholars noted. It bodes badly that GOP leaders rejected a bipartisan Jan. 6 accounting and have “refused to unambiguously reject violence.”
Whether those scholars are right remains to be seen. But the most recent developments are not encouraging.
We’re now learning that Trump and his co-conspirators corruptly pressured many government actors to steal an election he knew he lost. That he knew the scheme was illegal. That he weaponized a mob to chase his vice president through the Capitol, resulting in horrifying political violence, destruction and death.
It’s easy to get seduced by the vivid, damning nature of these revelations. Now that they’re exploding in our faces, surely some sort of accountability awaits the coup plotters. Surely Republican elites will quietly reckon with the truth about Jan. 6 and renounce Trump as fundamentally unacceptable in a party leader, even if they don’t say so loudly.
Look at those headlines. Big changes must be coming, right?
Maybe. But in the background, scores and scores of GOP candidates across the country remain fully committed to the notion that the underlying mission of the coup plotters and Jan. 6 rioters was just. The revelations haven’t slowed their campaigns in the slightest.
The Jan. 6 committee will release a damning report this fall, and maybe we’ll see prosecutions. But here’s another possibility: No one is prosecuted, Republicans take Congress, Jan. 6 headlines fade, and after the noise dies down, many pro-coup Republicans are in positions of control over election machinery — and Trump or a designated successor is a favorite for the 2024 GOP nomination.
How many GOP leaders are calling on those candidates to renounce this permanent posture holding that future election losses will be subject to nullification? How many GOP leaders are condemning what we’re learning about Trump’s coup attempt?
It is precisely this fact, that few GOP leaders see a need to reorient the party away from these tendencies, that alarms experts in democratic breakdown. So I contacted Levitsky, one of the above article’s co-authors, to ask whether a forceful stand by GOP leaders against what we’re now learning might help alter the trajectory he fears.
“It would make all the difference in the world,” Levitsky told me. As he defined the problem, the GOP is highly competitive in national elections while simultaneously being “captured by authoritarian forces.”
If GOP leaders treated the Jan. 6 committee’s findings as revelatory and significant, Levitsky continued, it might steer us toward greater stability. This would prompt “institutional reform,” he said, and send a message to all levels of the party that “this is beyond the pale. We don’t do this in America.”
The alternative: GOP leaders don’t treat this as beyond the pale at all, but instead as containing the makings of a tolerable or even desirable future. This would impose a “great cost,” Levitsky said, because “many Americans will be left with a message of ambiguity.”
I contacted Luttig to ask: How important is it for GOP elites to renounce the pro-coup candidates in their midst, and flatly declare the new Trump revelations disqualifying in a party leader and 2024 nominee?
If they don’t, Luttig told me, he agrees America may be headed for a period of “protracted democratic instability.”
Alternative futures are possible. Democrats might rebound and win decisively in 2024. Or maybe Trump will retire to Mar-a-Lago, Republicans will cleanly win in 2024, and President Ron DeSantis will turn out to be more authoritarian bark than bite.
But one thing seems unavoidable: If GOP leaders were to treat these revelations with the urgency and seriousness they deserve, it would probably render the darker alternative a lot less likely.
By Greg Sargent, The Washington Post
As extraordinary revelations pour forth about Donald Trump’s plot to destroy our political order after the 2020 election, an unsettling question arises: What does it mean that for most elected Republicans, none of what we’re learning is remotely disqualifying, either in a party leader or a 2024 presidential nominee?
At the close of Thursday’s Jan. 6 select committee hearing, J. Michael Luttig, a former federal judge widely respected by conservatives, issued a long-term warning. Trump and his allies pose a “clear and present danger to American democracy,” Luttig said, and pledge to “succeed in 2024 where they failed in 2020.”
“The former president and his allies,” Luttig continued, “are executing that blueprint for 2024 in open and plain view of the American public.”
This might seem like a narrow procedural prediction: If 2024 is super-close, they’ll attempt the same manipulation of our creaky electoral college machinery as last time. They might succeed. They’re putting those pieces in place right now.
That’s all true. But Luttig’s testimony, along with the shocking new revelations, point to something more fundamental at stake. These hearings are about what kind of long-term democratic future lies ahead: They represent an effort to minimize the possibility that we’re sliding headlong into a protracted era of chronic instability and rising political violence.
If you doubt this, please note: The foreboding expressed by Luttig and others is shared by experts who study democratic breakdown. When Luttig says we’re at a “perilous crossroads,” and says only Republicans can “bring an end” to the threat, he’s not alone.
Two of those experts, Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, professors of government and politics, recently argued that we’re heading into a “coming age of instability.” This is not a claim of pending “civil war.” It’s more subtle: a future of smoldering conflict akin to “the Troubles” in Ireland.
“Such a scenario would be marked by frequent constitutional crises, including contested or stolen elections,” they wrote, predicting our elections might devolve into periodic referendums on whether the United States will be “democratic or authoritarian.”
This portends “heightened political violence,” they suggested, including assassinations, bombings and violent confrontations in the streets, “often tolerated and even incited by politicians.”
How GOP leaders respond to the moment will help determine whether that happens, the scholars noted. It bodes badly that GOP leaders rejected a bipartisan Jan. 6 accounting and have “refused to unambiguously reject violence.”
Whether those scholars are right remains to be seen. But the most recent developments are not encouraging.
We’re now learning that Trump and his co-conspirators corruptly pressured many government actors to steal an election he knew he lost. That he knew the scheme was illegal. That he weaponized a mob to chase his vice president through the Capitol, resulting in horrifying political violence, destruction and death.
It’s easy to get seduced by the vivid, damning nature of these revelations. Now that they’re exploding in our faces, surely some sort of accountability awaits the coup plotters. Surely Republican elites will quietly reckon with the truth about Jan. 6 and renounce Trump as fundamentally unacceptable in a party leader, even if they don’t say so loudly.
Look at those headlines. Big changes must be coming, right?
Maybe. But in the background, scores and scores of GOP candidates across the country remain fully committed to the notion that the underlying mission of the coup plotters and Jan. 6 rioters was just. The revelations haven’t slowed their campaigns in the slightest.
The Jan. 6 committee will release a damning report this fall, and maybe we’ll see prosecutions. But here’s another possibility: No one is prosecuted, Republicans take Congress, Jan. 6 headlines fade, and after the noise dies down, many pro-coup Republicans are in positions of control over election machinery — and Trump or a designated successor is a favorite for the 2024 GOP nomination.
How many GOP leaders are calling on those candidates to renounce this permanent posture holding that future election losses will be subject to nullification? How many GOP leaders are condemning what we’re learning about Trump’s coup attempt?
It is precisely this fact, that few GOP leaders see a need to reorient the party away from these tendencies, that alarms experts in democratic breakdown. So I contacted Levitsky, one of the above article’s co-authors, to ask whether a forceful stand by GOP leaders against what we’re now learning might help alter the trajectory he fears.
“It would make all the difference in the world,” Levitsky told me. As he defined the problem, the GOP is highly competitive in national elections while simultaneously being “captured by authoritarian forces.”
If GOP leaders treated the Jan. 6 committee’s findings as revelatory and significant, Levitsky continued, it might steer us toward greater stability. This would prompt “institutional reform,” he said, and send a message to all levels of the party that “this is beyond the pale. We don’t do this in America.”
The alternative: GOP leaders don’t treat this as beyond the pale at all, but instead as containing the makings of a tolerable or even desirable future. This would impose a “great cost,” Levitsky said, because “many Americans will be left with a message of ambiguity.”
I contacted Luttig to ask: How important is it for GOP elites to renounce the pro-coup candidates in their midst, and flatly declare the new Trump revelations disqualifying in a party leader and 2024 nominee?
If they don’t, Luttig told me, he agrees America may be headed for a period of “protracted democratic instability.”
Alternative futures are possible. Democrats might rebound and win decisively in 2024. Or maybe Trump will retire to Mar-a-Lago, Republicans will cleanly win in 2024, and President Ron DeSantis will turn out to be more authoritarian bark than bite.
But one thing seems unavoidable: If GOP leaders were to treat these revelations with the urgency and seriousness they deserve, it would probably render the darker alternative a lot less likely.
DONALD TRUMP, AMERICAN MONSTER
By Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
WASHINGTON — Monsters are not what they used to be.
I’m reading “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley for school and the monster is magnificent. He starts out with an elegance of mind and sweetness of temperament, reading Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther” and gathering firewood for a poor family. But his creator, Victor Frankenstein, abandons him and refuses him a mate to calm his loneliness. The creature finds no one who does not recoil in fear and disgust from his stitched-together appearance, his yellow skin and eyes, and black lips. Embittered, he seeks revenge on his creator and the world.
“Every where I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded,” he laments. “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.”
Before he disappears into the Arctic at the end of the book, he muses that once he had “high thoughts of honour,” until his “frightful catalogue” of malignant deeds piled up.
Shelley’s monster, unlike ours, has self-awareness, and a reason to wreak havoc. He knows how to feel guilty and when to leave the stage. Our monster’s malignity stems from pure narcissistic psychopathy — and he refuses to leave the stage or cease his vile mendacity.
It never for a moment crossed Donald Trump’s mind that an American president committing sedition would be a debilitating, corrosive thing for the country. It was just another way for the Emperor of Chaos to burnish his title.
We listened Thursday night to the frightful catalogue of Trump’s deeds. They are so beyond the pale, so hard to fathom, that in some ways, it’s all still sinking in.
The House Jan. 6 committee’s prime-time hearing was not about Trump as a bloviating buffoon who stumbled into the presidency. It was about Trump as a callous monster, and many will come away convinced that he should be criminally charged and put in jail. Lock him up!
The hearing drove home the fact that Trump was deadly serious about overthrowing the government. If his onetime lap dog Mike Pence was strung up on the gallows outside the Capitol for refusing to help Trump hold onto his office illegitimately, Trump said, so be it. “Maybe our supporters have the right idea,” he remarked that day, chillingly, noting that his vice president “deserves it.”
Liz Cheney cleverly used the words of former Trump aides to show that, despite his malevolent bleating, Trump knew there was no fraud on a level that would have changed the election results.
“I made it clear I did not agree with the idea of saying the election was stolen and putting out this stuff, which I told the president was bullshit,” William Barr, Trump’s attorney general, said.
Breaking from her father, Ivanka Trump — in a taped deposition — said she embraced Barr’s version of reality: “I respect Attorney General Barr. So I accepted what he was saying.”
(Her husband, Jared Kushner, won the prize for gall in his deposition: He was too busy arranging pardons for sleazeballs to pay attention to whether Trump aides were threatening to quit over the sleazeball in the Oval Office.
Trump’s data experts told him bluntly that he had lost. “So there’s no there there,” Mark Meadows commented.
Trump just couldn’t stand being labeled a loser — his father’s bête noire. He maniacally subverted the election out of pure selfishness and wickedness, knowing it is easy to manipulate people on social media with the Big Lie.
It was fine with him if his followers broke the law and attacked the police and went to jail, while he praised their “love” from afar. It’s amazing that no lawmakers were killed.
Everywhere you look, there’s something that makes your blood run cold. The monster in “Frankenstein” is not the only one who has forsaken “thoughts of honour.”
Russia, also in the grip of a monster, is invading and destroying a neighboring democracy for no reason, except Vladimir Putin’s delusions of grandeur.
In Uvalde, the unfathomable story unspools about how the police delayed rescuing schoolchildren for an hour because a commander was worried about the officers’ safety.
Greedy golf icons joined a tour underwritten by the Saudis, even though the Saudi crown prince ordered a journalist dismembered. (Kushner is under investigation about whether he traded on his government position to secure a $2 billion investment from the Saudis for his new private equity firm.)
As Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the committee, noted, when the Capitol was attacked in 1814, it was by the British. This time it was by an enemy within, egged on by the man at the heart of the democracy he swore to protect.
“They did so at the encouragement of the president of the United States,” Thompson said of the mob, “trying to stop the transfer of power, a precedent that had stood for 220 years.”
It’s mind-boggling that so many people still embrace Trump when it’s so plain that he cares only about himself. He was quick to throw Ivanka off the sled on Friday, indicating her opinion did not count since she “was not involved in looking at, or studying, Election results. She had long since checked out.”
Let some conservatives dismiss the hearings as “A Snooze Fest.” Let Fox News churlishly refuse to run them.
The hearing was mesmerizing, describing a horror story with predatory Proud Boys and a monster at its center that even Mary Shelley could have appreciated. The ratings were boffo, with nearly 20 million viewers.
Caroline Edwards, the tough Capitol Police officer who suffered a concussion, was sprayed in her eyes and got back up to return to the fight, described a hellscape.
“I was slipping in people’s blood,” she recalled. “You know, I — I was catching people as they fell. I — you know, I was — it was carnage.”
In his dystopian Inaugural speech, Trump promised to end “American carnage.” Instead, he delivered it. Now he needs to be held accountable for his attempted coup — and not just in the court of public opinion.
By Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
WASHINGTON — Monsters are not what they used to be.
I’m reading “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley for school and the monster is magnificent. He starts out with an elegance of mind and sweetness of temperament, reading Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther” and gathering firewood for a poor family. But his creator, Victor Frankenstein, abandons him and refuses him a mate to calm his loneliness. The creature finds no one who does not recoil in fear and disgust from his stitched-together appearance, his yellow skin and eyes, and black lips. Embittered, he seeks revenge on his creator and the world.
“Every where I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded,” he laments. “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.”
Before he disappears into the Arctic at the end of the book, he muses that once he had “high thoughts of honour,” until his “frightful catalogue” of malignant deeds piled up.
Shelley’s monster, unlike ours, has self-awareness, and a reason to wreak havoc. He knows how to feel guilty and when to leave the stage. Our monster’s malignity stems from pure narcissistic psychopathy — and he refuses to leave the stage or cease his vile mendacity.
It never for a moment crossed Donald Trump’s mind that an American president committing sedition would be a debilitating, corrosive thing for the country. It was just another way for the Emperor of Chaos to burnish his title.
We listened Thursday night to the frightful catalogue of Trump’s deeds. They are so beyond the pale, so hard to fathom, that in some ways, it’s all still sinking in.
The House Jan. 6 committee’s prime-time hearing was not about Trump as a bloviating buffoon who stumbled into the presidency. It was about Trump as a callous monster, and many will come away convinced that he should be criminally charged and put in jail. Lock him up!
The hearing drove home the fact that Trump was deadly serious about overthrowing the government. If his onetime lap dog Mike Pence was strung up on the gallows outside the Capitol for refusing to help Trump hold onto his office illegitimately, Trump said, so be it. “Maybe our supporters have the right idea,” he remarked that day, chillingly, noting that his vice president “deserves it.”
Liz Cheney cleverly used the words of former Trump aides to show that, despite his malevolent bleating, Trump knew there was no fraud on a level that would have changed the election results.
“I made it clear I did not agree with the idea of saying the election was stolen and putting out this stuff, which I told the president was bullshit,” William Barr, Trump’s attorney general, said.
Breaking from her father, Ivanka Trump — in a taped deposition — said she embraced Barr’s version of reality: “I respect Attorney General Barr. So I accepted what he was saying.”
(Her husband, Jared Kushner, won the prize for gall in his deposition: He was too busy arranging pardons for sleazeballs to pay attention to whether Trump aides were threatening to quit over the sleazeball in the Oval Office.
Trump’s data experts told him bluntly that he had lost. “So there’s no there there,” Mark Meadows commented.
Trump just couldn’t stand being labeled a loser — his father’s bête noire. He maniacally subverted the election out of pure selfishness and wickedness, knowing it is easy to manipulate people on social media with the Big Lie.
It was fine with him if his followers broke the law and attacked the police and went to jail, while he praised their “love” from afar. It’s amazing that no lawmakers were killed.
Everywhere you look, there’s something that makes your blood run cold. The monster in “Frankenstein” is not the only one who has forsaken “thoughts of honour.”
Russia, also in the grip of a monster, is invading and destroying a neighboring democracy for no reason, except Vladimir Putin’s delusions of grandeur.
In Uvalde, the unfathomable story unspools about how the police delayed rescuing schoolchildren for an hour because a commander was worried about the officers’ safety.
Greedy golf icons joined a tour underwritten by the Saudis, even though the Saudi crown prince ordered a journalist dismembered. (Kushner is under investigation about whether he traded on his government position to secure a $2 billion investment from the Saudis for his new private equity firm.)
As Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the committee, noted, when the Capitol was attacked in 1814, it was by the British. This time it was by an enemy within, egged on by the man at the heart of the democracy he swore to protect.
“They did so at the encouragement of the president of the United States,” Thompson said of the mob, “trying to stop the transfer of power, a precedent that had stood for 220 years.”
It’s mind-boggling that so many people still embrace Trump when it’s so plain that he cares only about himself. He was quick to throw Ivanka off the sled on Friday, indicating her opinion did not count since she “was not involved in looking at, or studying, Election results. She had long since checked out.”
Let some conservatives dismiss the hearings as “A Snooze Fest.” Let Fox News churlishly refuse to run them.
The hearing was mesmerizing, describing a horror story with predatory Proud Boys and a monster at its center that even Mary Shelley could have appreciated. The ratings were boffo, with nearly 20 million viewers.
Caroline Edwards, the tough Capitol Police officer who suffered a concussion, was sprayed in her eyes and got back up to return to the fight, described a hellscape.
“I was slipping in people’s blood,” she recalled. “You know, I — I was catching people as they fell. I — you know, I was — it was carnage.”
In his dystopian Inaugural speech, Trump promised to end “American carnage.” Instead, he delivered it. Now he needs to be held accountable for his attempted coup — and not just in the court of public opinion.
CHENEY LEAVES TRUMP AND HIS GOP APOLOGISTS REELING
By E.J. Dionne Jr., The Washington Post
Constitutional democracies are rarely destroyed by a single blow. Their citizens often sleepwalk into catastrophe, discovering too late that a degree of timely vigilance could have preserved their system of self-rule.
This is why the work of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection is so important. Its public hearing Thursday was a red alert.
Using less than two hours of prime-time television, the committee issued an urgent plea: Americans must understand the violence they saw on that winter day in 2021 as nothing less than what Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), the committee chair, called “an attempted coup.”
Attempted coups have authors, and with a steely, matter-of-fact eloquence worthy of history’s most able prosecutors, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the vice chair, indicted Donald Trump in every sense but the formal one.
After watching Cheney pile fact upon fact and make connection after connection, the actual prosecutors in the Justice Department (and local prosecutors in Georgia) will have little choice but to issue the actual legal indictments that the treasonous conspiracy of Jan. 6 requires.
The nation must be clear on this: Failing to achieve accountability for the Jan. 6 insurrection, in the courts and at the ballot boxes, will amount to issuing a license for the enemies of democracy to do this all over again.
Cheney’s standing as a loyal conservative Republican certainly added to her credibility and guarantees her a place on history’s honor roll. But even more critical to her success Thursday night was her understanding of the obstacles before her. She needed to overcome the temptation of the complacent to write off the desecration of our seat of government as the work of mad extremists disconnected from the broader political system.
No. Foes of democracy regularly use mobs for their purposes, and these criminals were acting in concert with the president of the United States. Cheney proved — yes, beyond a shadow of a doubt — that the assault on the counting of the electoral vote was planned, and that thuggish, far-right Proud Boys and Oath Keepers and the rest were part of something bigger. One man set this attempted putsch in motion.
“President Trump,” Cheney declared, “summoned the mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack.”
Speaking to the part of her audience made up of Justice Department lawyers, Cheney used the evidence the committee gathered to underscore that Trump knew his election-rigging claim was a gigantic inflammatory lie. It was devastating to see former attorney general William Barr on video calling Trump’s assertions “bulls---,” and to learn that the former president’s own data mavens told him they were false. Trump’s daughter Ivanka was on video saying she believed Barr, not her father.
Key to prosecuting Trump will be proving his corrupt intent. The liar will claim innocence by insisting he truly “believed” that the election was stolen. The more evidence there is that he knew perfectly well that he was peddling, well, “bulls---,” the harder it will be for him to evade the consequences of his actions. Even the most practiced con artists get caught out eventually.
Last, Cheney showed that the mayhem was part of a much broader effort to subvert a free election. She contrasted Trump’s unquenchable will to power with the loyalty of fellow Republicans — at the federal, state and local levels — to the Constitution and the democratic process. Again and again, Trump attacked then-Vice President Mike Pence’s refusal to throw out legitimately chosen electors, even at moments when Pence’s life was in danger.
Cheney did not just let this hang there. “Aware of the rioters’ chants to ‘hang Mike Pence,’” she said, “the president responded with this sentiment: ‘Maybe our supporters have the right idea,’ and Mike Pence ‘deserves’ it.”
If holding Trump accountable is “partisan,” that makes standing up for one of the most conservative Republican vice presidents in history “partisan,” too. And if the story being told is “partisan,” why are so many of the credible witnesses Republicans?
This goes to one other aspect of authoritarian practice that the committee is confronting: Abusers of power cultivate cynicism. Trump’s defenders do not want Americans to grapple with the facts. They want people to believe that there are no truths at all, just selfish interests. Let it go, they say, it’s old news.
In describing the “war scene,” “carnage” and “chaos” of Jan. 6, Caroline Edwards, a U.S. Capitol Police officer badly injured by the Trumpist mob, provided the antidote to this poisonous indifference.
To ignore the war on our Constitution that Trump unleashed is to break faith with Edwards and all the other guardians of our republican traditions. At the very least, Thursday’s hearing showed that defenders of democracy have a fighting chance to awaken a brooding and preoccupied nation.
By E.J. Dionne Jr., The Washington Post
Constitutional democracies are rarely destroyed by a single blow. Their citizens often sleepwalk into catastrophe, discovering too late that a degree of timely vigilance could have preserved their system of self-rule.
This is why the work of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection is so important. Its public hearing Thursday was a red alert.
Using less than two hours of prime-time television, the committee issued an urgent plea: Americans must understand the violence they saw on that winter day in 2021 as nothing less than what Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), the committee chair, called “an attempted coup.”
Attempted coups have authors, and with a steely, matter-of-fact eloquence worthy of history’s most able prosecutors, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the vice chair, indicted Donald Trump in every sense but the formal one.
After watching Cheney pile fact upon fact and make connection after connection, the actual prosecutors in the Justice Department (and local prosecutors in Georgia) will have little choice but to issue the actual legal indictments that the treasonous conspiracy of Jan. 6 requires.
The nation must be clear on this: Failing to achieve accountability for the Jan. 6 insurrection, in the courts and at the ballot boxes, will amount to issuing a license for the enemies of democracy to do this all over again.
Cheney’s standing as a loyal conservative Republican certainly added to her credibility and guarantees her a place on history’s honor roll. But even more critical to her success Thursday night was her understanding of the obstacles before her. She needed to overcome the temptation of the complacent to write off the desecration of our seat of government as the work of mad extremists disconnected from the broader political system.
No. Foes of democracy regularly use mobs for their purposes, and these criminals were acting in concert with the president of the United States. Cheney proved — yes, beyond a shadow of a doubt — that the assault on the counting of the electoral vote was planned, and that thuggish, far-right Proud Boys and Oath Keepers and the rest were part of something bigger. One man set this attempted putsch in motion.
“President Trump,” Cheney declared, “summoned the mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack.”
Speaking to the part of her audience made up of Justice Department lawyers, Cheney used the evidence the committee gathered to underscore that Trump knew his election-rigging claim was a gigantic inflammatory lie. It was devastating to see former attorney general William Barr on video calling Trump’s assertions “bulls---,” and to learn that the former president’s own data mavens told him they were false. Trump’s daughter Ivanka was on video saying she believed Barr, not her father.
Key to prosecuting Trump will be proving his corrupt intent. The liar will claim innocence by insisting he truly “believed” that the election was stolen. The more evidence there is that he knew perfectly well that he was peddling, well, “bulls---,” the harder it will be for him to evade the consequences of his actions. Even the most practiced con artists get caught out eventually.
Last, Cheney showed that the mayhem was part of a much broader effort to subvert a free election. She contrasted Trump’s unquenchable will to power with the loyalty of fellow Republicans — at the federal, state and local levels — to the Constitution and the democratic process. Again and again, Trump attacked then-Vice President Mike Pence’s refusal to throw out legitimately chosen electors, even at moments when Pence’s life was in danger.
Cheney did not just let this hang there. “Aware of the rioters’ chants to ‘hang Mike Pence,’” she said, “the president responded with this sentiment: ‘Maybe our supporters have the right idea,’ and Mike Pence ‘deserves’ it.”
If holding Trump accountable is “partisan,” that makes standing up for one of the most conservative Republican vice presidents in history “partisan,” too. And if the story being told is “partisan,” why are so many of the credible witnesses Republicans?
This goes to one other aspect of authoritarian practice that the committee is confronting: Abusers of power cultivate cynicism. Trump’s defenders do not want Americans to grapple with the facts. They want people to believe that there are no truths at all, just selfish interests. Let it go, they say, it’s old news.
In describing the “war scene,” “carnage” and “chaos” of Jan. 6, Caroline Edwards, a U.S. Capitol Police officer badly injured by the Trumpist mob, provided the antidote to this poisonous indifference.
To ignore the war on our Constitution that Trump unleashed is to break faith with Edwards and all the other guardians of our republican traditions. At the very least, Thursday’s hearing showed that defenders of democracy have a fighting chance to awaken a brooding and preoccupied nation.
WHAT WE LEARNED FROM THE JAN. 6 COMMITTEE’S POWERFUL CASE AGAINST TRUMP
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
In arguably the most important congressional hearing since Watergate, the House Jan. 6 select committee conducted its first prime-time proceedings on Thursday into defeated former president Donald Trump’s attempt to overthrow the 2020 election results. It was gripping, shocking and, at times, frightening.
Here are a few of the key takeaways of the committee’s gob-smacking account of the worst betrayal ever by an American president:
1 - The seriousness of the insurrection
Committee Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) in his opening remarks took time to make a compelling contrast of Trump to Abraham Lincoln, who in the middle of the Civil War was willing to turn over the reins of power if he lost reelection. As Thompson explained, the oath that officeholders must take — to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” — was a response to the Civil War.
Meanwhile, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) quoted from the opinion of a federal judge warning that if the coup plotters were not investigated and held responsible, an attack on U.S. democracy would happen again. The message was profound and clear: We came frightfully close to losing our democracy — and will again unless we hold Trump accountable.
2 - The whole plot
The challenge for the committee is to tell a coherent story of the entire plot and to dispel the myth that the coup attempt was only about the Capitol assault. The committee has so far succeeded. Its initial telling of the far-flung plot — peppered with new, damning tidbits of Trump’s willful pursuit of power — was breathtaking.
Committee members certainly provided a taste of the magnitude of the plot. Jan. 6 was the “culmination of a coup attempt,” said Thompson. Cheney promised to outline Trump’s seven-part plan to overthrow the election. Her calm, methodical presentation previewed the evidence of Trump’s efforts to pressure state officials, concoct phony electors and induce the Justice Department to assist in overturning the election.
Small anecdotes added to the persuasiveness of the account. Cheney described a late-night meeting of former national security adviser Michael Flynn and Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell to cook up crazy schemes to “rerun the election.” That was the predicate for Trump’s infamous tweet summoning supporters to come to D.C. on Jan. 6. (“Be there, will be wild,” he said.) The clear implication was that Trump was calling the mob to help facilitate the loony plans.
Finally, the committee offered a sense of how Trump’s public words spurred the mob. His “stand back and stand by” comment to the Proud Boys goosed membership in the far-right organization.
3 - The evidence of Trump’s ‘corrupt’ intent
If Trump is ever to be held criminally accountable for the coup attempt, prosecutors will have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he knew what he was doing was wrong and unjustified. Here, the committee demonstrated there may be ample evidence of that.
Trump was repeatedly told his claims of voter fraud were bogus. New video of former attorney general William P. Barr’s testimony to the committee showed that he told Trump his fraud claims were “bulls--t” and “complete nonsense.” In addition, a sample of testimony from other Trump officials showed claims of fraud were repeatedly debunked and ridiculed. Justice Department officials and the White House counsel threatened to quit if Trump persisted in deploying the lie to retain power. Officials told Trump it was illegal to pressure former vice president Mike Pence to throw the election to him.
In the words of former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows regarding voter fraud, “There is no there, there.” Trump persisted anyway. The array of witnesses who will attest to Trump’s willful disregard of all his aides’ admonition is powerful evidence, previously unknown, that he knew he had no legitimate claim to the presidency.
Other anecdotes solidified the image of a president fixated on remaining in power. Trump reportedly declared of calls to hang Pence: “Maybe our supporters have the right idea. Mike Pence deserves it.” Cheney’s retelling was bone-chilling — an indication of a dangerous character bent on overthrowing an election.
And in failing to lift a finger to stop the mob (he “placed no call to any element of the United States government to instruct the Capitol be defended,” Cheney said), Trump’s corrupt intent was laid bare. The conclusion is obvious: He wanted the violence to play out because he thought it might stop the transfer of power. By contrast, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark A. Milley testified that Pence urged him to get the National Guard down to the Capitol.
4 - The shocking violence on Jan. 6
To this day, Republicans have downplayed or dismissed the extent of the violence on Jan. 6. The committee showed beyond a reasonable doubt that this was not “legitimate political discourse,” as the Republican National Committee described it.
Seeing new video, and hearing audio of desperate police describing the attack, was nothing short of terrifying. The cruelty and lawlessness of the mob are indisputable. Trump’s words insisting that “love was in the air” was a powerful reminder of his capacity to lie.
Testimony from Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards, who was abused and injured on that day, made clear that no reasonable person could doubt the crowd’s viciousness and anger. Filmmaker Nick Quested testified that the mob appeared well organized. This was no spontaneous uprising.
5 - The cooperation of so many Republicans
Americans must understand that evidence against Trump comes from people who worked for him right up to the bitter end. These lifelong Republicans’ accounts are required to tell the story, and their presence at the hearings via video should dispel the notion that this was all cooked up by Democrats. If the MAGA crowd has a beef with the facts, they will need to take it up with Republican witnesses including Barr, former White House adviser Ivanka Trump, Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller and others.
It was remarkably powerful to hear people who spun and even lied on behalf of Trump soberly tell the truth. Their testimony attesting to the bogus fraud claims, and to the consensus within the White House that Trump’s actions were illegal, was the most effective rebuke imaginable to the “big lie.”
6 - Government at its best
Americans have become so accustomed to combative hearings hijacked by MAGA zealots that the committee’s coherent and dignified proceeding serves as a reminder that responsible, sane governance is possible. And Cheney cemented her role as an honorable patriot, a living rebuke to her spineless and deceitful fellow Republicans. She and the entire committee’s diligence help restore our faith in democracy.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
In arguably the most important congressional hearing since Watergate, the House Jan. 6 select committee conducted its first prime-time proceedings on Thursday into defeated former president Donald Trump’s attempt to overthrow the 2020 election results. It was gripping, shocking and, at times, frightening.
Here are a few of the key takeaways of the committee’s gob-smacking account of the worst betrayal ever by an American president:
1 - The seriousness of the insurrection
Committee Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) in his opening remarks took time to make a compelling contrast of Trump to Abraham Lincoln, who in the middle of the Civil War was willing to turn over the reins of power if he lost reelection. As Thompson explained, the oath that officeholders must take — to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” — was a response to the Civil War.
Meanwhile, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) quoted from the opinion of a federal judge warning that if the coup plotters were not investigated and held responsible, an attack on U.S. democracy would happen again. The message was profound and clear: We came frightfully close to losing our democracy — and will again unless we hold Trump accountable.
2 - The whole plot
The challenge for the committee is to tell a coherent story of the entire plot and to dispel the myth that the coup attempt was only about the Capitol assault. The committee has so far succeeded. Its initial telling of the far-flung plot — peppered with new, damning tidbits of Trump’s willful pursuit of power — was breathtaking.
Committee members certainly provided a taste of the magnitude of the plot. Jan. 6 was the “culmination of a coup attempt,” said Thompson. Cheney promised to outline Trump’s seven-part plan to overthrow the election. Her calm, methodical presentation previewed the evidence of Trump’s efforts to pressure state officials, concoct phony electors and induce the Justice Department to assist in overturning the election.
Small anecdotes added to the persuasiveness of the account. Cheney described a late-night meeting of former national security adviser Michael Flynn and Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell to cook up crazy schemes to “rerun the election.” That was the predicate for Trump’s infamous tweet summoning supporters to come to D.C. on Jan. 6. (“Be there, will be wild,” he said.) The clear implication was that Trump was calling the mob to help facilitate the loony plans.
Finally, the committee offered a sense of how Trump’s public words spurred the mob. His “stand back and stand by” comment to the Proud Boys goosed membership in the far-right organization.
3 - The evidence of Trump’s ‘corrupt’ intent
If Trump is ever to be held criminally accountable for the coup attempt, prosecutors will have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he knew what he was doing was wrong and unjustified. Here, the committee demonstrated there may be ample evidence of that.
Trump was repeatedly told his claims of voter fraud were bogus. New video of former attorney general William P. Barr’s testimony to the committee showed that he told Trump his fraud claims were “bulls--t” and “complete nonsense.” In addition, a sample of testimony from other Trump officials showed claims of fraud were repeatedly debunked and ridiculed. Justice Department officials and the White House counsel threatened to quit if Trump persisted in deploying the lie to retain power. Officials told Trump it was illegal to pressure former vice president Mike Pence to throw the election to him.
In the words of former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows regarding voter fraud, “There is no there, there.” Trump persisted anyway. The array of witnesses who will attest to Trump’s willful disregard of all his aides’ admonition is powerful evidence, previously unknown, that he knew he had no legitimate claim to the presidency.
Other anecdotes solidified the image of a president fixated on remaining in power. Trump reportedly declared of calls to hang Pence: “Maybe our supporters have the right idea. Mike Pence deserves it.” Cheney’s retelling was bone-chilling — an indication of a dangerous character bent on overthrowing an election.
And in failing to lift a finger to stop the mob (he “placed no call to any element of the United States government to instruct the Capitol be defended,” Cheney said), Trump’s corrupt intent was laid bare. The conclusion is obvious: He wanted the violence to play out because he thought it might stop the transfer of power. By contrast, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark A. Milley testified that Pence urged him to get the National Guard down to the Capitol.
4 - The shocking violence on Jan. 6
To this day, Republicans have downplayed or dismissed the extent of the violence on Jan. 6. The committee showed beyond a reasonable doubt that this was not “legitimate political discourse,” as the Republican National Committee described it.
Seeing new video, and hearing audio of desperate police describing the attack, was nothing short of terrifying. The cruelty and lawlessness of the mob are indisputable. Trump’s words insisting that “love was in the air” was a powerful reminder of his capacity to lie.
Testimony from Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards, who was abused and injured on that day, made clear that no reasonable person could doubt the crowd’s viciousness and anger. Filmmaker Nick Quested testified that the mob appeared well organized. This was no spontaneous uprising.
5 - The cooperation of so many Republicans
Americans must understand that evidence against Trump comes from people who worked for him right up to the bitter end. These lifelong Republicans’ accounts are required to tell the story, and their presence at the hearings via video should dispel the notion that this was all cooked up by Democrats. If the MAGA crowd has a beef with the facts, they will need to take it up with Republican witnesses including Barr, former White House adviser Ivanka Trump, Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller and others.
It was remarkably powerful to hear people who spun and even lied on behalf of Trump soberly tell the truth. Their testimony attesting to the bogus fraud claims, and to the consensus within the White House that Trump’s actions were illegal, was the most effective rebuke imaginable to the “big lie.”
6 - Government at its best
Americans have become so accustomed to combative hearings hijacked by MAGA zealots that the committee’s coherent and dignified proceeding serves as a reminder that responsible, sane governance is possible. And Cheney cemented her role as an honorable patriot, a living rebuke to her spineless and deceitful fellow Republicans. She and the entire committee’s diligence help restore our faith in democracy.
MOST AMERICANS DON’T ACCEPT THE MASS SLAUGHTER OF CHILDREN. WHY DOES THE GOP?
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Republicans often throw out platitudes on their refusal to tackle the gun epidemic: We all care about kids, they say. Sometimes their tone becomes defensive: Don’t question our sincerity!
The polls show a different story. While 60 percent of Americans favor tougher gun laws, only 29 percent of Republicans do, according to the latest CBS News-YouGov poll. A significant majority (62 percent) favor banning semiautomatic weapons such as AR-15s, but only 31 percent of Republicans say the same. Support for red-flag laws among Republicans is 20 points lower than among the general public.
It gets wackier from there. Only 3 percent of Republicans say America would be safer if guns were banned; only 13 percent say it would be safer with fewer guns. A plurality of Republicans are convinced the number of guns has no effect on gun violence.
The kicker is that while only 28 percent of the general population thinks we have to accept mass gun murder as part of living in a free society, 44 percent of Republicans do. It’s an open question as to whether Republicans truly believe that claim or simply deny that there are solutions to maintain their belief in unlimited access to guns. But their willingness to accept tens of thousands of deaths each year from gun-related injuries, including small children, should stun and depress the rational Americans who do not think mass murders of schoolchildren are just a part of life.
The callousness about loss of human life naturally comes up in the abortion debate. Many Republicans, who believe a fetus should be protected from the moment of conception, insist that antiabortion laws would stop abortions. History shows this is utterly false. Rich women would continue to procure abortions; poor women would go to shady operators or try to give an abortion to themselves. The result would be an increased risk of poorer women dying, especially in states where the maternal death rate is high. To follow the cockeyed logic of the pro-gun, pro-forced-birth crowd, these deaths would simply be the “cost” of living in a free society. Not so free for the women involved.
Republicans have demonstrated this same reckless indifference to human life during the covid pandemic. Millions refused to vaccinate or wear masks. The governors and other elected leaders who spread disinformation and encouraged life-threatening behavior were uniformly Republican. Vaccination rates were lower in red states; the death rates there were subsequently higher.
These Republicans, in other words, refused to give up their “freedom” to be carriers of a disease. That freedom from vaccines and masks might have contributed to more deaths (even their own), but — heck — that’s the cost of doing business in a free society.
The GOP has no business affixing the pro-life tag to its party when time and again Republicans insist their right to be free of inconveniences and regulation takes precedence over human life. Democrats should reclaim the pro-life label. They are the party that is willing to “suffer” the mild inconvenience of masks and vaccination and “sacrifice” weapons of war to protect others. They are therefore far more deserving of the “pro-life” mantle.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Republicans often throw out platitudes on their refusal to tackle the gun epidemic: We all care about kids, they say. Sometimes their tone becomes defensive: Don’t question our sincerity!
The polls show a different story. While 60 percent of Americans favor tougher gun laws, only 29 percent of Republicans do, according to the latest CBS News-YouGov poll. A significant majority (62 percent) favor banning semiautomatic weapons such as AR-15s, but only 31 percent of Republicans say the same. Support for red-flag laws among Republicans is 20 points lower than among the general public.
It gets wackier from there. Only 3 percent of Republicans say America would be safer if guns were banned; only 13 percent say it would be safer with fewer guns. A plurality of Republicans are convinced the number of guns has no effect on gun violence.
The kicker is that while only 28 percent of the general population thinks we have to accept mass gun murder as part of living in a free society, 44 percent of Republicans do. It’s an open question as to whether Republicans truly believe that claim or simply deny that there are solutions to maintain their belief in unlimited access to guns. But their willingness to accept tens of thousands of deaths each year from gun-related injuries, including small children, should stun and depress the rational Americans who do not think mass murders of schoolchildren are just a part of life.
The callousness about loss of human life naturally comes up in the abortion debate. Many Republicans, who believe a fetus should be protected from the moment of conception, insist that antiabortion laws would stop abortions. History shows this is utterly false. Rich women would continue to procure abortions; poor women would go to shady operators or try to give an abortion to themselves. The result would be an increased risk of poorer women dying, especially in states where the maternal death rate is high. To follow the cockeyed logic of the pro-gun, pro-forced-birth crowd, these deaths would simply be the “cost” of living in a free society. Not so free for the women involved.
Republicans have demonstrated this same reckless indifference to human life during the covid pandemic. Millions refused to vaccinate or wear masks. The governors and other elected leaders who spread disinformation and encouraged life-threatening behavior were uniformly Republican. Vaccination rates were lower in red states; the death rates there were subsequently higher.
These Republicans, in other words, refused to give up their “freedom” to be carriers of a disease. That freedom from vaccines and masks might have contributed to more deaths (even their own), but — heck — that’s the cost of doing business in a free society.
The GOP has no business affixing the pro-life tag to its party when time and again Republicans insist their right to be free of inconveniences and regulation takes precedence over human life. Democrats should reclaim the pro-life label. They are the party that is willing to “suffer” the mild inconvenience of masks and vaccination and “sacrifice” weapons of war to protect others. They are therefore far more deserving of the “pro-life” mantle.
WOODWARD AND BERNSTEIN THOUGHT NIXON DEFINED CORRUPTION. THEN CAME TRUMP.
Perspective by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, The Washington Post
President George Washington, in his celebrated 1796 Farewell Address, cautioned that American democracy was fragile. “Cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government,” he warned.
Two of his successors — Richard Nixon and Donald Trump — demonstrate the shocking genius of our first president’s foresight.
As reporters, we had studied Nixon and written about him for nearly half a century, during which we believed with great conviction that never again would America have a president who would trample the national interest and undermine democracy through the audacious pursuit of personal and political self-interest.
And then along came Trump.
The heart of Nixon’s criminality was his successful subversion of the electoral process — the most fundamental element of American democracy. He accomplished it through a massive campaign of political espionage, sabotage and disinformation that enabled him to literally determine who his opponent would be in the presidential election of 1972.
With a covert budget of just $250,000, a team of undercover Nixon operatives derailed the presidential campaign of Sen. Edmund Muskie of Maine, the Democrats’ most electable candidate.
Nixon then ran against Sen. George McGovern, a South Dakota Democrat widely viewed as the much weaker candidate, and won in a historic landslide with 61 percent of the vote and carrying 49 states.
Over the next two years, Nixon’s illegal conduct was gradually exposed by the news media, the Senate Watergate Committee, special prosecutors, a House impeachment investigation and finally by the Supreme Court. In a unanimous decision, the court ordered Nixon to turn over his secret tape recordings, which doomed his presidency.
These instruments of American democracy finally stopped Nixon dead in his tracks, forcing the only resignation of a president in American history.
Donald Trump not only sought to destroy the electoral system through false claims of voter fraud and unprecedented public intimidation of state election officials, but he also then attempted to prevent the peaceful transfer of power to his duly elected successor, for the first time in American history.
Trump’s diabolical instincts exploited a weakness in the law. In a highly unusual and specific manner, the Electoral Count Act of 1887 says that at 1 p.m. on Jan. 6 following a presidential election, the House and Senate will meet in a joint session. The president of the Senate, in this case Vice President Mike Pence, will preside. The electoral votes from the 50 states and the District of Columbia will then be opened and counted.
This singular moment in American democracy is the only official declaration and certification of who won the presidential election.
In a deception that exceeded even Nixon’s imagination, Trump and a group of lawyers, loyalists and White House aides devised a strategy to bombard the country with false assertions that the 2020 election was rigged and that Trump had really won. They zeroed in on the Jan. 6 session as the opportunity to overturn the election’s result. Leading up to that crucial date, Trump’s lawyers circulated memos with manufactured claims of voter fraud that had counted the dead, underage citizens, prisoners and out-of-state residents.
We watched in utter dismay as Trump persistently claimed that he was really the winner. “We won,” he said in a speech on Jan. 6 at the Ellipse. “We won in a landslide. This was a landslide.” He publicly and relentlessly pressured Pence to make him the victor on Jan. 6.
On that day, driven by Trump’s rhetoric and his obvious approval, a mob descended on the Capitol and, in a stunning act of collective violence, broke through doors and windows and ransacked the House chamber, where the electoral votes were to be counted. The mob then went in search of Pence — all to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. Trump did nothing to restrain them.
By legal definition this is clearly sedition — conduct, speech or organizing that incites people to rebel against the governing authority of the state. Thus, Trump became the first seditious president in our history.
Perspective by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, The Washington Post
President George Washington, in his celebrated 1796 Farewell Address, cautioned that American democracy was fragile. “Cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government,” he warned.
Two of his successors — Richard Nixon and Donald Trump — demonstrate the shocking genius of our first president’s foresight.
As reporters, we had studied Nixon and written about him for nearly half a century, during which we believed with great conviction that never again would America have a president who would trample the national interest and undermine democracy through the audacious pursuit of personal and political self-interest.
And then along came Trump.
The heart of Nixon’s criminality was his successful subversion of the electoral process — the most fundamental element of American democracy. He accomplished it through a massive campaign of political espionage, sabotage and disinformation that enabled him to literally determine who his opponent would be in the presidential election of 1972.
With a covert budget of just $250,000, a team of undercover Nixon operatives derailed the presidential campaign of Sen. Edmund Muskie of Maine, the Democrats’ most electable candidate.
Nixon then ran against Sen. George McGovern, a South Dakota Democrat widely viewed as the much weaker candidate, and won in a historic landslide with 61 percent of the vote and carrying 49 states.
Over the next two years, Nixon’s illegal conduct was gradually exposed by the news media, the Senate Watergate Committee, special prosecutors, a House impeachment investigation and finally by the Supreme Court. In a unanimous decision, the court ordered Nixon to turn over his secret tape recordings, which doomed his presidency.
These instruments of American democracy finally stopped Nixon dead in his tracks, forcing the only resignation of a president in American history.
Donald Trump not only sought to destroy the electoral system through false claims of voter fraud and unprecedented public intimidation of state election officials, but he also then attempted to prevent the peaceful transfer of power to his duly elected successor, for the first time in American history.
Trump’s diabolical instincts exploited a weakness in the law. In a highly unusual and specific manner, the Electoral Count Act of 1887 says that at 1 p.m. on Jan. 6 following a presidential election, the House and Senate will meet in a joint session. The president of the Senate, in this case Vice President Mike Pence, will preside. The electoral votes from the 50 states and the District of Columbia will then be opened and counted.
This singular moment in American democracy is the only official declaration and certification of who won the presidential election.
In a deception that exceeded even Nixon’s imagination, Trump and a group of lawyers, loyalists and White House aides devised a strategy to bombard the country with false assertions that the 2020 election was rigged and that Trump had really won. They zeroed in on the Jan. 6 session as the opportunity to overturn the election’s result. Leading up to that crucial date, Trump’s lawyers circulated memos with manufactured claims of voter fraud that had counted the dead, underage citizens, prisoners and out-of-state residents.
We watched in utter dismay as Trump persistently claimed that he was really the winner. “We won,” he said in a speech on Jan. 6 at the Ellipse. “We won in a landslide. This was a landslide.” He publicly and relentlessly pressured Pence to make him the victor on Jan. 6.
On that day, driven by Trump’s rhetoric and his obvious approval, a mob descended on the Capitol and, in a stunning act of collective violence, broke through doors and windows and ransacked the House chamber, where the electoral votes were to be counted. The mob then went in search of Pence — all to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. Trump did nothing to restrain them.
By legal definition this is clearly sedition — conduct, speech or organizing that incites people to rebel against the governing authority of the state. Thus, Trump became the first seditious president in our history.
HOUSE REPUBLICANS' CLIMATE STRATEGY DRAWS DEMOCRATS' JEERS
By Maxine Joselow, with research by Vanessa Montalbano , The Washington Post
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) plans to unveil a strategy today outlining how Republicans would address climate change, energy and environmental issues if the party gains control of the House in the midterm elections, according to three individuals familiar with the matter, Maxine and our colleague Jeff Stein scooped on Wednesday evening.
The strategy calls for streamlining the permitting process for large infrastructure projects, increasing domestic fossil fuel production and boosting exports of U.S. liquefied natural gas, which proponents say is cleaner than gas produced in other countries, according to the individuals, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe details that are not yet public.
However, the GOP plan drew immediate criticism from congressional Democrats, who noted that leading scientists have said the world must rapidly phase out fossil fuels to stave off catastrophic consequences of the climate crisis.
To meet the more ambitious goal of the 2015 Paris agreement, the world must eliminate coal use within 30 years, according to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Gas dependence should be reduced by 45 percent, while oil use must fall 60 percent by the middle of the century, the IPCC said in a recent report that concluded humanity is running out of time to meet global climate goals.
“I welcome the efforts of anyone, regardless of party, who is willing to seriously tackle climate change — but on its face this does not look like a serious proposal,” said Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.). “Most people understand that a serious climate solution requires a shift toward cleaner sources of energy, but the Republicans apparently want to take us in the opposite direction, with more dependence on dangerous, dirty energy sources.”
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who has been participating in bipartisan energy talks led by Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), echoed that sentiment.
“Any climate plan must be judged on whether it reduces emissions and invests in renewables to diversify energy sources and bring a long-term reduction and stability in prices for all Americans,” Khanna said. “Based on what's been reported, this plan is just a Big Oil wish list.”
Rep. Melanie Ann Stansbury (D-N.M.) cautioned against undermining the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires federal agencies to assess the environmental consequences of major actions, in order to accelerate the permitting process. “This plan is out of touch with reality and is an end-run around environmental protections that have been in place for decades,” she said.
McCarthy, who would probably become speaker if the GOP picks up enough seats in the midterms, last year tapped Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.) to lead a task force on climate, energy and conservation. The strategy is the result of months of deliberations within that task force, which includes 17 GOP members.
Spokespeople for McCarthy and Graves declined to comment on the record ahead of today's official rollout.
The House GOP plan comes as Republicans seek to make gains with educated suburban voters in November’s elections. Some of these voters may want to see Republicans take a more proactive stance on climate change and energy policy, rather than letting Democrats dominate the debate, said George David Banks, a Republican climate policy expert who served as a White House climate adviser under President Donald Trump.
“It’s the competitive seats that make a difference,” he said. “And most of those run through the suburbs. So there’s certainly a recognition that you’ve got to win a critical mass of those to control the House.”
By Maxine Joselow, with research by Vanessa Montalbano , The Washington Post
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) plans to unveil a strategy today outlining how Republicans would address climate change, energy and environmental issues if the party gains control of the House in the midterm elections, according to three individuals familiar with the matter, Maxine and our colleague Jeff Stein scooped on Wednesday evening.
The strategy calls for streamlining the permitting process for large infrastructure projects, increasing domestic fossil fuel production and boosting exports of U.S. liquefied natural gas, which proponents say is cleaner than gas produced in other countries, according to the individuals, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe details that are not yet public.
However, the GOP plan drew immediate criticism from congressional Democrats, who noted that leading scientists have said the world must rapidly phase out fossil fuels to stave off catastrophic consequences of the climate crisis.
To meet the more ambitious goal of the 2015 Paris agreement, the world must eliminate coal use within 30 years, according to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Gas dependence should be reduced by 45 percent, while oil use must fall 60 percent by the middle of the century, the IPCC said in a recent report that concluded humanity is running out of time to meet global climate goals.
“I welcome the efforts of anyone, regardless of party, who is willing to seriously tackle climate change — but on its face this does not look like a serious proposal,” said Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.). “Most people understand that a serious climate solution requires a shift toward cleaner sources of energy, but the Republicans apparently want to take us in the opposite direction, with more dependence on dangerous, dirty energy sources.”
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who has been participating in bipartisan energy talks led by Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), echoed that sentiment.
“Any climate plan must be judged on whether it reduces emissions and invests in renewables to diversify energy sources and bring a long-term reduction and stability in prices for all Americans,” Khanna said. “Based on what's been reported, this plan is just a Big Oil wish list.”
Rep. Melanie Ann Stansbury (D-N.M.) cautioned against undermining the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires federal agencies to assess the environmental consequences of major actions, in order to accelerate the permitting process. “This plan is out of touch with reality and is an end-run around environmental protections that have been in place for decades,” she said.
McCarthy, who would probably become speaker if the GOP picks up enough seats in the midterms, last year tapped Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.) to lead a task force on climate, energy and conservation. The strategy is the result of months of deliberations within that task force, which includes 17 GOP members.
Spokespeople for McCarthy and Graves declined to comment on the record ahead of today's official rollout.
The House GOP plan comes as Republicans seek to make gains with educated suburban voters in November’s elections. Some of these voters may want to see Republicans take a more proactive stance on climate change and energy policy, rather than letting Democrats dominate the debate, said George David Banks, a Republican climate policy expert who served as a White House climate adviser under President Donald Trump.
“It’s the competitive seats that make a difference,” he said. “And most of those run through the suburbs. So there’s certainly a recognition that you’ve got to win a critical mass of those to control the House.”
DONALD TRUMP HAS NOTHING LEFT BUT SPITE
By Paul Waldman, The Washington Post
It seems more likely than ever that Donald Trump will run for president again in 2024, and if you want to know what his campaign will be about, look no further than his journey to Wyoming this past weekend to try to destroy Rep. Liz Cheney, one of the few Republicans in Congress who turned against him.
Trump’s political project can now be described in a single word: spite.
His personal animosities and resentments always played a key role in his political decisions, but what’s different today is how little anything else seems to animate him. It’s why he went to Wyoming to campaign for Harriet Hageman — and why Hageman herself was an afterthought. All that matters is that she’s primarying Cheney, whose criticism of Trump has been unrelenting.
I suppose you could argue there’s a rational strategy behind Trump’s actions: Like the mob boss he has so often resembled, he must make an example out of a disloyal underling, so nobody else gets any ideas. The trouble is that one candidate after another has endured Trump’s fury and won anyway. The far-right clowns he endorsed in governor’s races in Idaho and Nebraska both lost. In Georgia, he targeted the incumbent Republican governor and secretary of state because they declined to steal the 2020 election for him; both won their primaries easily.
That doesn’t mean any Republican could successfully challenge Trump for the 2024 presidential nomination; his grip on the party remains too strong. But what kind of case can a politician so consumed with spite make to the general electorate?
When we look back on the bizarre spectacle of the 2016 election, we sometimes forget that amidst all the vitriol, Trump had an argument that was compelling to many Americans embittered about what had happened to them and their communities. The story of the past few decades, Trump said, is that the game was rigged. Manufacturing declined, jobs went away, and now you struggle to make ends meet with little hope for the future.
There was a lot Trump left out of that story. He didn’t mention how much worse his own party made those same people’s lives by waging war on labor unions, keeping wages low, and hampering access to health care and good schools. The message also was wrapped up in xenophobia and misogyny. But at least part of Trump’s diagnosis — that both parties had failed to bring millions of Americans along through tough economic transitions — was basically true, and resonated powerfully.
And in true Trumpian style, he promised the people left behind that he would wipe their problems away and deliver them to a nirvana of wealth and spiritual triumph.
Four years later, the promise had worn thin. While the economy continued on the robust path it had set out on during the Obama years, Trump didn’t bring back all the manufacturing and coal jobs he had promised. The people who nodded their heads when he told them the deck was stacked against them were no better off than they had been before, even before Trump mishandled the coronavirus pandemic.
But there’s still power in one of the central rationales Trump offered to his supporters: There are people you hate — immigrants, racial minorities, uppity women, gays, liberals of all kinds — and I hate them, too. I will be your weapon against them. His core supporters still thrill to that message. Some will even stand in line to hear him rant and rave about how the 2020 election was stolen from him.
Others notice, though, that despite Trump’s four years in power, the United States is still full of immigrants and growing more diverse every day. Social change on issues of sexuality and child-rearing has not been reversed. And it turned out you can put an Internet troll in the White House to spend every day owning the libs, but it won’t turn your struggling town into a paradise.
Trump no longer has a story to tell about America that ends with a better future. That’s not to say it’s impossible he wins in 2024. As we’ve seen again and again, elections are often determined by unforeseeable circumstances; a well-timed recession or crisis can change everything.
If and when Trump runs again, his bid will have all the anger and hate of his past two campaigns, but none of the optimism he had in 2016. He has been distilled to his bitter, resentful core. The result could be a race even uglier than what he subjected us to before.
By Paul Waldman, The Washington Post
It seems more likely than ever that Donald Trump will run for president again in 2024, and if you want to know what his campaign will be about, look no further than his journey to Wyoming this past weekend to try to destroy Rep. Liz Cheney, one of the few Republicans in Congress who turned against him.
Trump’s political project can now be described in a single word: spite.
His personal animosities and resentments always played a key role in his political decisions, but what’s different today is how little anything else seems to animate him. It’s why he went to Wyoming to campaign for Harriet Hageman — and why Hageman herself was an afterthought. All that matters is that she’s primarying Cheney, whose criticism of Trump has been unrelenting.
I suppose you could argue there’s a rational strategy behind Trump’s actions: Like the mob boss he has so often resembled, he must make an example out of a disloyal underling, so nobody else gets any ideas. The trouble is that one candidate after another has endured Trump’s fury and won anyway. The far-right clowns he endorsed in governor’s races in Idaho and Nebraska both lost. In Georgia, he targeted the incumbent Republican governor and secretary of state because they declined to steal the 2020 election for him; both won their primaries easily.
That doesn’t mean any Republican could successfully challenge Trump for the 2024 presidential nomination; his grip on the party remains too strong. But what kind of case can a politician so consumed with spite make to the general electorate?
When we look back on the bizarre spectacle of the 2016 election, we sometimes forget that amidst all the vitriol, Trump had an argument that was compelling to many Americans embittered about what had happened to them and their communities. The story of the past few decades, Trump said, is that the game was rigged. Manufacturing declined, jobs went away, and now you struggle to make ends meet with little hope for the future.
There was a lot Trump left out of that story. He didn’t mention how much worse his own party made those same people’s lives by waging war on labor unions, keeping wages low, and hampering access to health care and good schools. The message also was wrapped up in xenophobia and misogyny. But at least part of Trump’s diagnosis — that both parties had failed to bring millions of Americans along through tough economic transitions — was basically true, and resonated powerfully.
And in true Trumpian style, he promised the people left behind that he would wipe their problems away and deliver them to a nirvana of wealth and spiritual triumph.
Four years later, the promise had worn thin. While the economy continued on the robust path it had set out on during the Obama years, Trump didn’t bring back all the manufacturing and coal jobs he had promised. The people who nodded their heads when he told them the deck was stacked against them were no better off than they had been before, even before Trump mishandled the coronavirus pandemic.
But there’s still power in one of the central rationales Trump offered to his supporters: There are people you hate — immigrants, racial minorities, uppity women, gays, liberals of all kinds — and I hate them, too. I will be your weapon against them. His core supporters still thrill to that message. Some will even stand in line to hear him rant and rave about how the 2020 election was stolen from him.
Others notice, though, that despite Trump’s four years in power, the United States is still full of immigrants and growing more diverse every day. Social change on issues of sexuality and child-rearing has not been reversed. And it turned out you can put an Internet troll in the White House to spend every day owning the libs, but it won’t turn your struggling town into a paradise.
Trump no longer has a story to tell about America that ends with a better future. That’s not to say it’s impossible he wins in 2024. As we’ve seen again and again, elections are often determined by unforeseeable circumstances; a well-timed recession or crisis can change everything.
If and when Trump runs again, his bid will have all the anger and hate of his past two campaigns, but none of the optimism he had in 2016. He has been distilled to his bitter, resentful core. The result could be a race even uglier than what he subjected us to before.
AMERICA’S HUMAN SACRIFICES
By Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
WASHINGTON — Once, when I thought of child sacrifice, I thought of ancient shibboleths.
In Aeschylus, Agamemnon lures his daughter, Iphigenia, to a spot she thinks is for her wedding, as the chorus urges: “Hoist her over the altar like a yearling, give it all your strength … gag her hard.” Agamemnon agonized but felt he had to sacrifice his daughter to appease a goddess and be granted favorable winds to sail against Troy. Small sacrifice to get your fleet moving.
In Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus kills his daughter, Lavinia, at the dinner table, after she has been raped and maimed by attackers. “Die, die, Lavinia!” he cries. “And thy shame with thee.” Small sacrifice to save your honor.
Now, however, I think of child sacrifice as a modern phenomenon, a barbaric one that defines this country. We are sacrificing children, not only the ones who die, but also those who watch and those who fear the future.
Children having their tomorrows taken away. Small sacrifice if we can keep our guns. Why not let every deranged loner buy an assault weapon?
America is not a mythical kingdom ruled by fickle gods or black magic. Our fate is not in the stars. It is in ourselves. It is within our power to stop schools from becoming killing fields.
We have simply decided not to do it.
The shooter in Uvalde slipped into a fourth-grade classroom at Robb Elementary School, ominously announced, “Look what we have here” and fired more than 100 rounds.
The local police did nothing to stop the human sacrifice. Nineteen officers loitered in the hall for as long as 78 minutes as children died. How can you justify keeping assault weapons on the open market when police officers don’t engage with them, even with kids’ lives on the line?
As the officers waited, not bothering to break down a barricaded door, the 19 lambs went to slaughter, trapped in a blood-soaked classroom with an 18-year-old madman. In a haunting tableau, one little girl smeared herself with her dead friend’s blood to appear dead. Meanwhile, desperate parents tried to climb over a chain-link fence to save their children. The police, doing nothing more useful, kept busy by handcuffing at least one parent trying to get into the school.
A slain teacher’s husband died of a heart attack after he took flowers to her memorial at the school. They had four kids. Who will take care of them?
Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas coldly said of the massacre, the sixth mass shooting in his seven years in office, “could have been worse.” Donald Trump, who once told me if he were elected president, he would get in his limo and drive down to the National Rifle Association and bargain with it until he could get agreement to some common-sense solutions, spoke to the N.R.A. convention in Houston Friday evening and spouted gun lobby talking points — small price for the tens of millions it spent to get him elected. What a sociopathic jellyfish. It was sacrilege for him to make it seem as though the N.R.A. cared by reading the names of the dead children and teachers, with a bell gonging after each name.
What is wrong with this country? Republicans think they’re showing their toughness by preventing curbs on guns. But it’s a huge American weakness.
When a gunman killed 35 people in Tasmania in 1996, the Australian government passed such common-sense gun laws six months later that there has been only one mass shooting since. More than a million firearms were destroyed.
When an anti-Islamic extremist in Christchurch killed 51 people in two mosques in 2019, the New Zealand government banned most semiautomatic weapons 26 days later. There have been no mass shootings since.
As the inspiring New Zealand prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, said at the time, she could not have faced the surviving victims and told them “our system and our laws allow these guns to be available and that is OK.”
The political debates here are empty and soulless, with Democrats dodging the issue and Republicans hardening even on mild proposals like universal background checks, which has overwhelming public approval.
“Most Republicans in the Senate represent deeply conservative states where gun ownership is treated as a sacred privilege enshrined in the Constitution, a privilege not to be infringed upon no matter how much blood is spilled in classrooms and school hallways around the country,” Carl Hulse wrote in The Times.
Republicans throw up a fog of nonsensical suggestions. Before speaking to the N.R.A. Friday, Ted Cruz said schools should have only one entry point, with an armed guard. Guns don’t kill people. Doors do. During his speech at the N.R.A., Trump suggested turning schools into virtual jails and letting teachers pack pistols in class.
“Meaningful policy discussions over guns or voting or public health have left the room,” said my colleague Elizabeth Williamson, author of the new book “Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth.” “Spewing conspiracy theories and bench-clearing nonsense around mass shootings, elections and coronavirus is becoming a tribal signifier for some on the right.”
The Republicans are doing everything they can to stop women from having control over their own bodies and doing nothing to stop the carnage against kids; they may as well change the party symbol from an elephant to an AR-15.
America is stuck in a loop on guns — and it’s a fatal one. This country always cherished its frontier image, Gary Cooper in “High Noon,” shooting it out with the bad guys. But now when the bad guys start shooting, lawmakers just shrug.
We’ve become a country of cowards, so terrified of the unholy power of gun worship that no sacrifice of young blood is too great to appease it.
By Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
WASHINGTON — Once, when I thought of child sacrifice, I thought of ancient shibboleths.
In Aeschylus, Agamemnon lures his daughter, Iphigenia, to a spot she thinks is for her wedding, as the chorus urges: “Hoist her over the altar like a yearling, give it all your strength … gag her hard.” Agamemnon agonized but felt he had to sacrifice his daughter to appease a goddess and be granted favorable winds to sail against Troy. Small sacrifice to get your fleet moving.
In Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus kills his daughter, Lavinia, at the dinner table, after she has been raped and maimed by attackers. “Die, die, Lavinia!” he cries. “And thy shame with thee.” Small sacrifice to save your honor.
Now, however, I think of child sacrifice as a modern phenomenon, a barbaric one that defines this country. We are sacrificing children, not only the ones who die, but also those who watch and those who fear the future.
Children having their tomorrows taken away. Small sacrifice if we can keep our guns. Why not let every deranged loner buy an assault weapon?
America is not a mythical kingdom ruled by fickle gods or black magic. Our fate is not in the stars. It is in ourselves. It is within our power to stop schools from becoming killing fields.
We have simply decided not to do it.
The shooter in Uvalde slipped into a fourth-grade classroom at Robb Elementary School, ominously announced, “Look what we have here” and fired more than 100 rounds.
The local police did nothing to stop the human sacrifice. Nineteen officers loitered in the hall for as long as 78 minutes as children died. How can you justify keeping assault weapons on the open market when police officers don’t engage with them, even with kids’ lives on the line?
As the officers waited, not bothering to break down a barricaded door, the 19 lambs went to slaughter, trapped in a blood-soaked classroom with an 18-year-old madman. In a haunting tableau, one little girl smeared herself with her dead friend’s blood to appear dead. Meanwhile, desperate parents tried to climb over a chain-link fence to save their children. The police, doing nothing more useful, kept busy by handcuffing at least one parent trying to get into the school.
A slain teacher’s husband died of a heart attack after he took flowers to her memorial at the school. They had four kids. Who will take care of them?
Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas coldly said of the massacre, the sixth mass shooting in his seven years in office, “could have been worse.” Donald Trump, who once told me if he were elected president, he would get in his limo and drive down to the National Rifle Association and bargain with it until he could get agreement to some common-sense solutions, spoke to the N.R.A. convention in Houston Friday evening and spouted gun lobby talking points — small price for the tens of millions it spent to get him elected. What a sociopathic jellyfish. It was sacrilege for him to make it seem as though the N.R.A. cared by reading the names of the dead children and teachers, with a bell gonging after each name.
What is wrong with this country? Republicans think they’re showing their toughness by preventing curbs on guns. But it’s a huge American weakness.
When a gunman killed 35 people in Tasmania in 1996, the Australian government passed such common-sense gun laws six months later that there has been only one mass shooting since. More than a million firearms were destroyed.
When an anti-Islamic extremist in Christchurch killed 51 people in two mosques in 2019, the New Zealand government banned most semiautomatic weapons 26 days later. There have been no mass shootings since.
As the inspiring New Zealand prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, said at the time, she could not have faced the surviving victims and told them “our system and our laws allow these guns to be available and that is OK.”
The political debates here are empty and soulless, with Democrats dodging the issue and Republicans hardening even on mild proposals like universal background checks, which has overwhelming public approval.
“Most Republicans in the Senate represent deeply conservative states where gun ownership is treated as a sacred privilege enshrined in the Constitution, a privilege not to be infringed upon no matter how much blood is spilled in classrooms and school hallways around the country,” Carl Hulse wrote in The Times.
Republicans throw up a fog of nonsensical suggestions. Before speaking to the N.R.A. Friday, Ted Cruz said schools should have only one entry point, with an armed guard. Guns don’t kill people. Doors do. During his speech at the N.R.A., Trump suggested turning schools into virtual jails and letting teachers pack pistols in class.
“Meaningful policy discussions over guns or voting or public health have left the room,” said my colleague Elizabeth Williamson, author of the new book “Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth.” “Spewing conspiracy theories and bench-clearing nonsense around mass shootings, elections and coronavirus is becoming a tribal signifier for some on the right.”
The Republicans are doing everything they can to stop women from having control over their own bodies and doing nothing to stop the carnage against kids; they may as well change the party symbol from an elephant to an AR-15.
America is stuck in a loop on guns — and it’s a fatal one. This country always cherished its frontier image, Gary Cooper in “High Noon,” shooting it out with the bad guys. But now when the bad guys start shooting, lawmakers just shrug.
We’ve become a country of cowards, so terrified of the unholy power of gun worship that no sacrifice of young blood is too great to appease it.
HE AMERICAN KILLING FIELDS
By Charles M. Blow, The New York Times
The Republican Party has turned America into a killing field.
Republicans have allowed guns to proliferate while weakening barriers to ownership, lowering the age at which one can purchase a weapon and eliminating laws governing how, when and where guns can be carried.
They have done this in part with help from conservatives on the Supreme Court who have upheld a corrupt and bastardized interpretation of the Second Amendment.
But Republicans have also done so by promoting fear and paranoia. They tell people that criminals are coming to menace you, immigrants are coming to menace you, a race war (or racial replacement) is coming to menace you and the government itself may one day come to menace you.
The only defense you have against the menace is to be armed.
If you buy into this line of thinking, owning a gun is not only logical but prudent. It’s like living in a flood plain and buying flood insurance. Of course you should do it.
The propaganda has been incredibly, insidiously persuasive. As Vox pointed out last year, “Americans make up less than 5 percent of the world’s population, yet they own roughly 45 percent of all the world’s privately held firearms,” according to 2018 data.
But once you accept the dogma that a personal arsenal is your last line of defense against an advancing threat, no amount of tragedy can persuade you to relinquish that idea, not even the slaughter of children and their teachers in their classrooms.
Even if you think that shootings like the one in Texas are horrendous, you see yourself and your interests as detached from them. You didn’t do the killing. Your guns are kept safe and secure, possibly even under lock and key. You are a responsible gun owner. The person who did the killing is a lunatic.
Republicans carry this logic in Congress. They offer thoughts and prayers but resist reforms. They offer the same asinine advice: To counter bad guys with guns, we need more good guys with guns. They seem to envision an old-school western in which gunmen square off and the ranger always kills the desperado.
They want to arm teachers, even though most don’t want to be armed. Personally, I can’t imagine any of my elementary-school teachers with a gun in the classroom trying to fend off a gunman. That’s not what they signed up for.
And so Republicans keep the country trapped in a state of intransigence, ricocheting from one tragedy to another. This is not normal, nor is it necessary and inevitable.
No other country has the level of American carnage, but no other country has American Republicans.
The mass shootings are only the tip of the iceberg.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 45,000 people died from gun-related episodes in 2020, the most recorded in this country and a 15 percent increase from the year before. Slightly more than half, 54 percent, were the result of suicide, and 43 percent were the result of homicide.
And still, we do nothing to restrict gun access, or more precisely, Republicans agree to no new restrictions. This is not a both-sides-equally issue. The lion’s share of the resistance to passing federal gun safety laws falls squarely on Republican shoulders. We have to call a fig a fig and a trough a trough.
Beginning to pass gun safety wouldn’t immediately end all gun violence in this country, but it could begin to lower the body count, to lessen the amount of blood flowing in the streets.
Republicans have no intention of helping in that regard. Too often, they seem to see the carnage as collateral — as if they could use the constancy and repetition of these killings to scuttle efforts to stop future killings. Some Republicans may even count on Americans getting used to inaction, getting inured to the killing of children, getting numb to the relentless taking of life and no taking of action.
So we go through the cycle yet again — the wailing of loved ones, the sadness of a country. We call the victims’ names and learn a little about their lives before they were cut down. Maybe this one liked ice cream or that one liked to dress up like a princess. We ask: If not now, when? If not for this, then for what? We listen to Democrats condemn and Republicans deflect.
And before we can fully mourn one massacre, another one happens. It was just over a week ago that a white supremacist terrorist gunned down 13 people in a Buffalo grocery store. In fact, according to the Gun Violence Archive, there were 611 mass shootings in the United States in 2020. That’s not only more than one a day; it’s approaching two a day. (The archive defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more people were shot or killed, not including the shooter.)
There is no great mystery about why we are where we are in this country when it comes to gun violence. We shouldn’t — and must not — pretend that this issue is complicated. It’s not.
We are not addressing our insane gun culture and the havoc it is wreaking because the Republican Party refuses to cooperate. There is death all around us, but for too many Republicans, it is a sad inconvenience rather than impetus for action.
By Charles M. Blow, The New York Times
The Republican Party has turned America into a killing field.
Republicans have allowed guns to proliferate while weakening barriers to ownership, lowering the age at which one can purchase a weapon and eliminating laws governing how, when and where guns can be carried.
They have done this in part with help from conservatives on the Supreme Court who have upheld a corrupt and bastardized interpretation of the Second Amendment.
But Republicans have also done so by promoting fear and paranoia. They tell people that criminals are coming to menace you, immigrants are coming to menace you, a race war (or racial replacement) is coming to menace you and the government itself may one day come to menace you.
The only defense you have against the menace is to be armed.
If you buy into this line of thinking, owning a gun is not only logical but prudent. It’s like living in a flood plain and buying flood insurance. Of course you should do it.
The propaganda has been incredibly, insidiously persuasive. As Vox pointed out last year, “Americans make up less than 5 percent of the world’s population, yet they own roughly 45 percent of all the world’s privately held firearms,” according to 2018 data.
But once you accept the dogma that a personal arsenal is your last line of defense against an advancing threat, no amount of tragedy can persuade you to relinquish that idea, not even the slaughter of children and their teachers in their classrooms.
Even if you think that shootings like the one in Texas are horrendous, you see yourself and your interests as detached from them. You didn’t do the killing. Your guns are kept safe and secure, possibly even under lock and key. You are a responsible gun owner. The person who did the killing is a lunatic.
Republicans carry this logic in Congress. They offer thoughts and prayers but resist reforms. They offer the same asinine advice: To counter bad guys with guns, we need more good guys with guns. They seem to envision an old-school western in which gunmen square off and the ranger always kills the desperado.
They want to arm teachers, even though most don’t want to be armed. Personally, I can’t imagine any of my elementary-school teachers with a gun in the classroom trying to fend off a gunman. That’s not what they signed up for.
And so Republicans keep the country trapped in a state of intransigence, ricocheting from one tragedy to another. This is not normal, nor is it necessary and inevitable.
No other country has the level of American carnage, but no other country has American Republicans.
The mass shootings are only the tip of the iceberg.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 45,000 people died from gun-related episodes in 2020, the most recorded in this country and a 15 percent increase from the year before. Slightly more than half, 54 percent, were the result of suicide, and 43 percent were the result of homicide.
And still, we do nothing to restrict gun access, or more precisely, Republicans agree to no new restrictions. This is not a both-sides-equally issue. The lion’s share of the resistance to passing federal gun safety laws falls squarely on Republican shoulders. We have to call a fig a fig and a trough a trough.
Beginning to pass gun safety wouldn’t immediately end all gun violence in this country, but it could begin to lower the body count, to lessen the amount of blood flowing in the streets.
Republicans have no intention of helping in that regard. Too often, they seem to see the carnage as collateral — as if they could use the constancy and repetition of these killings to scuttle efforts to stop future killings. Some Republicans may even count on Americans getting used to inaction, getting inured to the killing of children, getting numb to the relentless taking of life and no taking of action.
So we go through the cycle yet again — the wailing of loved ones, the sadness of a country. We call the victims’ names and learn a little about their lives before they were cut down. Maybe this one liked ice cream or that one liked to dress up like a princess. We ask: If not now, when? If not for this, then for what? We listen to Democrats condemn and Republicans deflect.
And before we can fully mourn one massacre, another one happens. It was just over a week ago that a white supremacist terrorist gunned down 13 people in a Buffalo grocery store. In fact, according to the Gun Violence Archive, there were 611 mass shootings in the United States in 2020. That’s not only more than one a day; it’s approaching two a day. (The archive defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more people were shot or killed, not including the shooter.)
There is no great mystery about why we are where we are in this country when it comes to gun violence. We shouldn’t — and must not — pretend that this issue is complicated. It’s not.
We are not addressing our insane gun culture and the havoc it is wreaking because the Republican Party refuses to cooperate. There is death all around us, but for too many Republicans, it is a sad inconvenience rather than impetus for action.
LEAKED EMAILS FROM TRUMP’S LAWYER SHOW BLUEPRINT FOR A 2024 COUP
By Greg Sargent, The Washington Post
The House committee examining the insurrection attempt has obtained new emails from the lawyer who helped concoct Donald Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 election. They reveal a whole new level of scheming behind that effort, which was even more nefarious than previously thought.
But the emails also raise forward-looking questions: What do these new revelations tell us about how the subsequent efforts to steal a presidential election might unfold? And could conditions be different next time in a way that might facilitate such a scheme?
The answers to these questions are unsettling. But they also point toward a way we can protect ourselves from the worst. Will Congress act?
The emails from lawyer John Eastman show him urging GOP state legislators in Pennsylvania to cast doubt on 2020 vote totals, to create cover to certify a slate of presidential electors for Trump. Politico reported on the emails, which the Jan. 6 select committee obtained from the University of Colorado, where Eastman worked at the time.
The key revelation: Eastman’s scheme had an additional layer to it. We already knew his plan centered on urging Trump’s vice president to abuse his role in the congressional count of electors to subvert the election’s conclusion.
Now, in these new emails, Eastman is seen devising a pretext for state legislatures to invalidate Joe Biden’s electors and certify sham Trump electors. He advises a Pennsylvania legislator to use a complex formula — based on treating mailed-in ballots as illegitimate — to extrapolate that enough Biden votes are invalid to show Trump won the popular vote.
Eastman writes:
Then, having done that math, you’d be left with a significant Trump lead that would bolster the argument for the Legislature adopting a slate of Trump electors — perfectly within your authority to do anyway, but now bolstered by the untainted popular vote. That would help provide some cover.
Eastman advises the legislator to argue that Biden electors certified by the governor are thus “null and void.”
This is extraordinary stuff. Eastman advised that a state legislature should concoct a fig leaf justification for declaring the correct Biden electors certified by the governor invalid and certifying Trump electors instead.
First note that Trump himself also did something like this. When Trump pressured the Georgia secretary of state to “find” votes to make him the winner, this was designed to create a similar pretext for replacing Biden electors with Trump ones.
“Eastman wasn’t doing anything that Trump wasn’t doing himself,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the Jan. 6 committee, told me. “They were both trying to get officials in the electoral process to substitute a counterfeit for the actual vote totals.”
“Eastman was seeking to implant a new mathematical calculation contrived to produce a Trump win in Pennsylvania,” Raskin said.
These Eastman emails show that manipulating vote totals to create “cover” for state legislatures to appoint sham Trump electors was more central to the scheme than we knew.
Whether this creates more exposure for Eastman and others remains to be seen. But this also has other important implications: It reveals with more clarity an avenue by which nefarious actors might seek to subvert a future election.
Note that Eastman says, almost as an aside, that state legislators have the “authority” to appoint new electors even if the popular vote totals don’t justify it.
“Eastman’s view is that the legislature has absolute power in terms of picking presidential electors,” elections expert Richard L. Hasen told me, even if that means “ignoring the will of the voters” or “the legislature’s prior rules on how to pick those electors.”
In the future, Hasen notes, bad actors might see this as “a path to steal an election.”
There’s more: Right now many Republicans in thrall to Trump’s 2020 lies are running for positions of control over election machinery at the state level, including secretary of state positions.
Crucially, such people would be in a position to create exactly the pretext that Eastman envisioned. How? By using official stature to cast doubt on popular vote outcomes, manufacturing “cover” for a state legislature and/or governor to certify fake electors for a losing candidate. A GOP-controlled House could then count those electors and flip a state or even an election.
Eastman has laid out the blueprint. “This shows the country one more strategic booby trap that was improvised by Trump’s team that can sit there for use by bad-faith actors in future elections,” Raskin told me.
Such a scenario might appear unlikely right now. Nonetheless, all this underscores the dire need to reform the Electoral Count Act of 1887 to minimize the risks of such a thing being attempted.
Done properly, reform could help thwart a rerun of exactly the scheme Eastman developed. It could create a requirement that if a state-level attempt is made to certify sham electors, Congress must count only the slate that the courts deem the legitimate one.
“Congress absolutely must reform the ECA to clarify that no state officials — not governors, not state secretaries of state, and not state legislators — can manipulate which electoral votes it will count,” legal scholar Matthew Seligman, an expert on the ECA, told me.
“The only way to do that is to require that Congress follow courts' decisions about which electors are valid,” Seligman said.
If Congress doesn’t act, that would mean relying on the virtue of individual actors in the right places to thwart such a scheme. But given all we’ve seen since Jan. 6, institutional reforms seem like a far safer bet, wouldn’t you say?
By Greg Sargent, The Washington Post
The House committee examining the insurrection attempt has obtained new emails from the lawyer who helped concoct Donald Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 election. They reveal a whole new level of scheming behind that effort, which was even more nefarious than previously thought.
But the emails also raise forward-looking questions: What do these new revelations tell us about how the subsequent efforts to steal a presidential election might unfold? And could conditions be different next time in a way that might facilitate such a scheme?
The answers to these questions are unsettling. But they also point toward a way we can protect ourselves from the worst. Will Congress act?
The emails from lawyer John Eastman show him urging GOP state legislators in Pennsylvania to cast doubt on 2020 vote totals, to create cover to certify a slate of presidential electors for Trump. Politico reported on the emails, which the Jan. 6 select committee obtained from the University of Colorado, where Eastman worked at the time.
The key revelation: Eastman’s scheme had an additional layer to it. We already knew his plan centered on urging Trump’s vice president to abuse his role in the congressional count of electors to subvert the election’s conclusion.
Now, in these new emails, Eastman is seen devising a pretext for state legislatures to invalidate Joe Biden’s electors and certify sham Trump electors. He advises a Pennsylvania legislator to use a complex formula — based on treating mailed-in ballots as illegitimate — to extrapolate that enough Biden votes are invalid to show Trump won the popular vote.
Eastman writes:
Then, having done that math, you’d be left with a significant Trump lead that would bolster the argument for the Legislature adopting a slate of Trump electors — perfectly within your authority to do anyway, but now bolstered by the untainted popular vote. That would help provide some cover.
Eastman advises the legislator to argue that Biden electors certified by the governor are thus “null and void.”
This is extraordinary stuff. Eastman advised that a state legislature should concoct a fig leaf justification for declaring the correct Biden electors certified by the governor invalid and certifying Trump electors instead.
First note that Trump himself also did something like this. When Trump pressured the Georgia secretary of state to “find” votes to make him the winner, this was designed to create a similar pretext for replacing Biden electors with Trump ones.
“Eastman wasn’t doing anything that Trump wasn’t doing himself,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the Jan. 6 committee, told me. “They were both trying to get officials in the electoral process to substitute a counterfeit for the actual vote totals.”
“Eastman was seeking to implant a new mathematical calculation contrived to produce a Trump win in Pennsylvania,” Raskin said.
These Eastman emails show that manipulating vote totals to create “cover” for state legislatures to appoint sham Trump electors was more central to the scheme than we knew.
Whether this creates more exposure for Eastman and others remains to be seen. But this also has other important implications: It reveals with more clarity an avenue by which nefarious actors might seek to subvert a future election.
Note that Eastman says, almost as an aside, that state legislators have the “authority” to appoint new electors even if the popular vote totals don’t justify it.
“Eastman’s view is that the legislature has absolute power in terms of picking presidential electors,” elections expert Richard L. Hasen told me, even if that means “ignoring the will of the voters” or “the legislature’s prior rules on how to pick those electors.”
In the future, Hasen notes, bad actors might see this as “a path to steal an election.”
There’s more: Right now many Republicans in thrall to Trump’s 2020 lies are running for positions of control over election machinery at the state level, including secretary of state positions.
Crucially, such people would be in a position to create exactly the pretext that Eastman envisioned. How? By using official stature to cast doubt on popular vote outcomes, manufacturing “cover” for a state legislature and/or governor to certify fake electors for a losing candidate. A GOP-controlled House could then count those electors and flip a state or even an election.
Eastman has laid out the blueprint. “This shows the country one more strategic booby trap that was improvised by Trump’s team that can sit there for use by bad-faith actors in future elections,” Raskin told me.
Such a scenario might appear unlikely right now. Nonetheless, all this underscores the dire need to reform the Electoral Count Act of 1887 to minimize the risks of such a thing being attempted.
Done properly, reform could help thwart a rerun of exactly the scheme Eastman developed. It could create a requirement that if a state-level attempt is made to certify sham electors, Congress must count only the slate that the courts deem the legitimate one.
“Congress absolutely must reform the ECA to clarify that no state officials — not governors, not state secretaries of state, and not state legislators — can manipulate which electoral votes it will count,” legal scholar Matthew Seligman, an expert on the ECA, told me.
“The only way to do that is to require that Congress follow courts' decisions about which electors are valid,” Seligman said.
If Congress doesn’t act, that would mean relying on the virtue of individual actors in the right places to thwart such a scheme. But given all we’ve seen since Jan. 6, institutional reforms seem like a far safer bet, wouldn’t you say?
JUSTICE ALITO’S ROSY VIEW OF PREGNANCY IN AMERICA IS FANTASY
Leaky legal protections and economic penalties riddle the health-care and workplace landscapes
Perspective by Ria Tabacco Mar, director of the ACLU's Women's Rights Project.
Among the many shocking elements of the leaked draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, this one jumped out at me: the rosy picture of pregnancy painted by Justice Samuel Alito, who has never been pregnant. Alito lists a string of what he calls “modern developments” that lessen the financial toll exacted by pregnancy. “Federal and state laws ban discrimination on the basis of pregnancy,” he writes. “Leave for pregnancy and childbirth are now guaranteed by law in many cases,” and “costs of medical care associated with pregnancy are covered by insurance or government assistance.” The implication is that Roe has outlived any role it once played in improving women’s economic security.
But anyone who has been pregnant — or cares to understand — knows that the reality in the United States is not rosy at all. At best, pregnant Americans must navigate a patchwork of leaky protections, a labyrinth of financial costs and penalties, and a health-care landscape that threatens the lives of the most vulnerable.
Let’s start with Alito’s claim that pregnant workers have nothing to fear because federal and state laws ban pregnancy discrimination. His claim that workplace protections insulate pregnant employees from harm is particularly rich given the origins of the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act, a rebuke to a 1976 Supreme Court decision, General Electric Co. v. Gilbert, which wrongly concluded that workers could be penalized for being pregnant.
Fortunately, Congress stepped in to right that wrong, but there remains a persistent gap between the letter of the law and the lived experience of pregnant workers. That’s certainly been our experience at the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, where we routinely represent women fired or forced into unpaid leave for being pregnant. These women aren’t anomalies. In the nearly half-century since 1978, pregnant workers have been continually denied reasonable accommodations they need to keep working safely or are outright fired for being pregnant, leading to more than 50,000 charges of pregnancy discrimination in the last decade alone. Because most incidents of discrimination aren’t reported, that number represents a fraction of the problem. These trends persist even though women now make up a majority of the workforce, and 85 percent of female workers will become pregnant at some point, with most continuing to work through their pregnancies — and beyond.
That brings us to Alito’s next assertion. He writes that “leave for pregnancy and childbirth are now guaranteed by law in many cases.” The Family and Medical Leave Act guarantees 12 weeks of leave, but that leave is unpaid. Going three months without pay is a luxury few new parents can afford. And even that minimal guarantee covers only those who work for large employers and have at least a full year on the job, meaning roughly half the workforce is left out. Paid leave is hard to come by; just 1 in 4 workers has access to paid family leave in the United States.
Sotomayor saw she couldn’t sway her colleagues. So she talked to us instead.
Alito’s draft opinion also peddles the notion that “the costs of medical care associated with pregnancy are covered by insurance or government assistance.” Most of the states likely to ban abortion, should Roe be overturned, are the same states that have refused to expand Medicaid coverage. And even those families lucky enough to have employer-based health coverage can end up facing thousands in medical bills for childbirth: For a birth free of complications, a worker with employer-based insurance can expect to pay $4,500 on average in out-of-pocket costs.
That’s assuming, of course, that they make it out of pregnancy alive. The United States has the dubious distinction of having the worst maternal mortality rate among wealthy countries. And appalling racial disparities in resources and health care make pregnancy more life-threatening for some than for others. In Mississippi — the state whose abortion ban is currently before the Supreme Court in a case that the Alito draft addresses — the maternal mortality rate for Black women is nearly three times higher than that for White women. And in Washington, where the Supreme Court sits, Black people make up just 45 percent of the population but 90 percent of pregnancy-related deaths.
Despite the fact that he has two children of his own, Alito displays astonishing ignorance about what many pregnant people and their families face in the wealthiest nation in the world, a nation that spends just $500 per child on early-childhood care — less than 2 percent of what Norway does. The consequences of that ignorance will be the difference between life and death, or profound suffering and unnecessary hardship, for so many.
I, for one, would love to live in the country that the draft opinion describes, where pregnancy is physically and economically safe, valued and supported. Unfortunately, we live in this one — where even a wanted pregnancy and birth can be among the most economically disruptive experiences most people can expect to face. In this America, reproductive autonomy remains a pillar of women’s equality and livelihoods. Until Alito has lived in our house, he has no business knocking down its walls.
Leaky legal protections and economic penalties riddle the health-care and workplace landscapes
Perspective by Ria Tabacco Mar, director of the ACLU's Women's Rights Project.
Among the many shocking elements of the leaked draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, this one jumped out at me: the rosy picture of pregnancy painted by Justice Samuel Alito, who has never been pregnant. Alito lists a string of what he calls “modern developments” that lessen the financial toll exacted by pregnancy. “Federal and state laws ban discrimination on the basis of pregnancy,” he writes. “Leave for pregnancy and childbirth are now guaranteed by law in many cases,” and “costs of medical care associated with pregnancy are covered by insurance or government assistance.” The implication is that Roe has outlived any role it once played in improving women’s economic security.
But anyone who has been pregnant — or cares to understand — knows that the reality in the United States is not rosy at all. At best, pregnant Americans must navigate a patchwork of leaky protections, a labyrinth of financial costs and penalties, and a health-care landscape that threatens the lives of the most vulnerable.
Let’s start with Alito’s claim that pregnant workers have nothing to fear because federal and state laws ban pregnancy discrimination. His claim that workplace protections insulate pregnant employees from harm is particularly rich given the origins of the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act, a rebuke to a 1976 Supreme Court decision, General Electric Co. v. Gilbert, which wrongly concluded that workers could be penalized for being pregnant.
Fortunately, Congress stepped in to right that wrong, but there remains a persistent gap between the letter of the law and the lived experience of pregnant workers. That’s certainly been our experience at the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, where we routinely represent women fired or forced into unpaid leave for being pregnant. These women aren’t anomalies. In the nearly half-century since 1978, pregnant workers have been continually denied reasonable accommodations they need to keep working safely or are outright fired for being pregnant, leading to more than 50,000 charges of pregnancy discrimination in the last decade alone. Because most incidents of discrimination aren’t reported, that number represents a fraction of the problem. These trends persist even though women now make up a majority of the workforce, and 85 percent of female workers will become pregnant at some point, with most continuing to work through their pregnancies — and beyond.
That brings us to Alito’s next assertion. He writes that “leave for pregnancy and childbirth are now guaranteed by law in many cases.” The Family and Medical Leave Act guarantees 12 weeks of leave, but that leave is unpaid. Going three months without pay is a luxury few new parents can afford. And even that minimal guarantee covers only those who work for large employers and have at least a full year on the job, meaning roughly half the workforce is left out. Paid leave is hard to come by; just 1 in 4 workers has access to paid family leave in the United States.
Sotomayor saw she couldn’t sway her colleagues. So she talked to us instead.
Alito’s draft opinion also peddles the notion that “the costs of medical care associated with pregnancy are covered by insurance or government assistance.” Most of the states likely to ban abortion, should Roe be overturned, are the same states that have refused to expand Medicaid coverage. And even those families lucky enough to have employer-based health coverage can end up facing thousands in medical bills for childbirth: For a birth free of complications, a worker with employer-based insurance can expect to pay $4,500 on average in out-of-pocket costs.
That’s assuming, of course, that they make it out of pregnancy alive. The United States has the dubious distinction of having the worst maternal mortality rate among wealthy countries. And appalling racial disparities in resources and health care make pregnancy more life-threatening for some than for others. In Mississippi — the state whose abortion ban is currently before the Supreme Court in a case that the Alito draft addresses — the maternal mortality rate for Black women is nearly three times higher than that for White women. And in Washington, where the Supreme Court sits, Black people make up just 45 percent of the population but 90 percent of pregnancy-related deaths.
Despite the fact that he has two children of his own, Alito displays astonishing ignorance about what many pregnant people and their families face in the wealthiest nation in the world, a nation that spends just $500 per child on early-childhood care — less than 2 percent of what Norway does. The consequences of that ignorance will be the difference between life and death, or profound suffering and unnecessary hardship, for so many.
I, for one, would love to live in the country that the draft opinion describes, where pregnancy is physically and economically safe, valued and supported. Unfortunately, we live in this one — where even a wanted pregnancy and birth can be among the most economically disruptive experiences most people can expect to face. In this America, reproductive autonomy remains a pillar of women’s equality and livelihoods. Until Alito has lived in our house, he has no business knocking down its walls.
THE GOP ROARS ABOUT ABORTION. THEN THEY ABANDON THE CHILDREN.
By Michele L. Norris, The Washington Post
What about the children?
For decades, the abortion debate has been about politics and precedent, about religion and reproductive rights, about riling up voters and rewriting laws. Rarely is it about what happens to children once they roam this earth if their mothers are forced to go through with an unplanned pregnancy. Where is the commitment by antiabortion warriors to take up the fight for the babies who will be born under duress?
Short answer? It hardly exists. This is the false piety hidden in the Republican Party’s zeal to roll back a woman’s right to choose. The sanctity of human life is all-important right up to the point when that flesh-and-bone child enters a world where programs designed to support women, the poor or households teetering toward economic ruin are being scaled back by a party that claims to be about family values. Family, for the radicalized GOP, is too often an inelastic framework built around powerful men, subordinate women, and children who will learn how to hurl themselves forward in life, even if there’s no money, few educational opportunities, no job prospects in their future, no proverbial boots with magical straps to lift their fortunes toward the sun.
The pro-life warriors — including legislators who have been rolling back abortion rights at the state level — are silent when it comes to fighting for even the simple principle of enhanced child support enforcement so the men who father these children can provide for the life they create. Let’s not forget that women who seek abortions are disproportionately poor or economically insecure. A 2014 study found that 3 in 4 women who terminate their pregnancies are low-income and almost 50 percent of those women live below the poverty level. Fifty-five percent are unmarried or do not live with the father.
Diana Greene Foster, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences, knows what a world without abortion looks like. She spent 10 years tracking thousands of women and reports that women who were denied abortions because of rules around gestation limits were more likely to be single, without steady work, without a partner and without family support five years later. Those women also reported feeling trapped and less emotionally bonded to their new babies compared with women who had abortions and then had subsequent children later in life.
“It is by no means a given that a woman who did not want to have a baby cannot forge a loving and healthy relationship with that child, even if it doesn’t happen right away,” Greene Foster writes in her book “The Turnaway Study.” “But the finding does underscore the adverse circumstances for the child when a woman continues a pregnancy against her will.”
A further irony is that many of the states that have enacted the most restrictive bans on abortion also spend the least money to provide health and economic benefits for expecting mothers and children once they’re born.
The numbers don’t lie when you look at state rankings on maternal morbidity, infant mortality, premature birth, child poverty, birth weight, access to health care, day care, food stamps and housing. Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s draft opinion is about a case that comes from Mississippi — a state that ranks dead last in preterm births, neonatal mortality and overall child well-being.
Some religious institutions do focus on the outcome of unplanned pregnancies. The Gabriel Project, sponsored by Catholic Charities, is a crisis pregnancy center that aims to offer compassionate and confidential ministry to those pregnant and in distress. Clearly, its aim is to reduce the number of abortions, but at least a program such as this centers women and the children they might bear. That rarely happens in political or legal debates about abortion.
The women who contemplate ending their pregnancies never really take center stage in this drama. Their dilemma is framed as simply a choice. Their anguish is subject to moral policing. Their reasons (poverty, abusive partner, age, insufficient life skills) are brushed away by majority White and male lawmakers who have
no problem policing women’s bodies but have been howling for months about something as simple as mask mandates. Even women who become pregnant under the most horrible of circumstances — rape or incest — are criminalized under a growing number of state laws if the mother decides not to carry the fetus to term, regardless of the physical or emotional trauma.
The prospect of a United States where abortion is unattainable is no longer an abstraction. Those who have long fought to outlaw the procedure often argue that the child whose life is ended by abortion might be the very person who could discover the cure for cancer — as if the government needs to control women’s bodies to protect the future of the human race.
That argument is wickedly hollow when it comes from lawmakers who are unwilling to invest in helping expectant mothers or providing a stronger safety net for the children they will be forced to bear.
By Michele L. Norris, The Washington Post
What about the children?
For decades, the abortion debate has been about politics and precedent, about religion and reproductive rights, about riling up voters and rewriting laws. Rarely is it about what happens to children once they roam this earth if their mothers are forced to go through with an unplanned pregnancy. Where is the commitment by antiabortion warriors to take up the fight for the babies who will be born under duress?
Short answer? It hardly exists. This is the false piety hidden in the Republican Party’s zeal to roll back a woman’s right to choose. The sanctity of human life is all-important right up to the point when that flesh-and-bone child enters a world where programs designed to support women, the poor or households teetering toward economic ruin are being scaled back by a party that claims to be about family values. Family, for the radicalized GOP, is too often an inelastic framework built around powerful men, subordinate women, and children who will learn how to hurl themselves forward in life, even if there’s no money, few educational opportunities, no job prospects in their future, no proverbial boots with magical straps to lift their fortunes toward the sun.
The pro-life warriors — including legislators who have been rolling back abortion rights at the state level — are silent when it comes to fighting for even the simple principle of enhanced child support enforcement so the men who father these children can provide for the life they create. Let’s not forget that women who seek abortions are disproportionately poor or economically insecure. A 2014 study found that 3 in 4 women who terminate their pregnancies are low-income and almost 50 percent of those women live below the poverty level. Fifty-five percent are unmarried or do not live with the father.
Diana Greene Foster, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences, knows what a world without abortion looks like. She spent 10 years tracking thousands of women and reports that women who were denied abortions because of rules around gestation limits were more likely to be single, without steady work, without a partner and without family support five years later. Those women also reported feeling trapped and less emotionally bonded to their new babies compared with women who had abortions and then had subsequent children later in life.
“It is by no means a given that a woman who did not want to have a baby cannot forge a loving and healthy relationship with that child, even if it doesn’t happen right away,” Greene Foster writes in her book “The Turnaway Study.” “But the finding does underscore the adverse circumstances for the child when a woman continues a pregnancy against her will.”
A further irony is that many of the states that have enacted the most restrictive bans on abortion also spend the least money to provide health and economic benefits for expecting mothers and children once they’re born.
The numbers don’t lie when you look at state rankings on maternal morbidity, infant mortality, premature birth, child poverty, birth weight, access to health care, day care, food stamps and housing. Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s draft opinion is about a case that comes from Mississippi — a state that ranks dead last in preterm births, neonatal mortality and overall child well-being.
Some religious institutions do focus on the outcome of unplanned pregnancies. The Gabriel Project, sponsored by Catholic Charities, is a crisis pregnancy center that aims to offer compassionate and confidential ministry to those pregnant and in distress. Clearly, its aim is to reduce the number of abortions, but at least a program such as this centers women and the children they might bear. That rarely happens in political or legal debates about abortion.
The women who contemplate ending their pregnancies never really take center stage in this drama. Their dilemma is framed as simply a choice. Their anguish is subject to moral policing. Their reasons (poverty, abusive partner, age, insufficient life skills) are brushed away by majority White and male lawmakers who have
no problem policing women’s bodies but have been howling for months about something as simple as mask mandates. Even women who become pregnant under the most horrible of circumstances — rape or incest — are criminalized under a growing number of state laws if the mother decides not to carry the fetus to term, regardless of the physical or emotional trauma.
The prospect of a United States where abortion is unattainable is no longer an abstraction. Those who have long fought to outlaw the procedure often argue that the child whose life is ended by abortion might be the very person who could discover the cure for cancer — as if the government needs to control women’s bodies to protect the future of the human race.
That argument is wickedly hollow when it comes from lawmakers who are unwilling to invest in helping expectant mothers or providing a stronger safety net for the children they will be forced to bear.
THE GOP IS NO LONGER A PARTY. IT’S A MOVEMENT TO IMPOSE WHITE CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
People might be confused about how a Republican Party that once worried about government overreach now seeks to control medical care for transgender children and retaliate against a corporation for objecting to a bill targeting LGBTQ students. And why is it that the most ambitious Republicans are spending more time battling nonexistent critical race theory in schools than on health care or inflation?
To explain this, one must acknowledge that the GOP is not a political party anymore. It is a movement dedicated to imposing White Christian nationalism.
The media blandly describes the GOP’s obsessions as “culture wars,” but that suggests there is another side seeking to impose its views on others. In reality, only one side is repudiating pluralistic democracy — White, Christian and mainly rural Americans who are becoming a minority group and want to maintain their political power.
The result is an alarming pattern: Any moment of social progress is soon followed by reactionary panic and claims of victimhood. It’s no mere coincidence that Donald Trump, the leader of the birther movement, succeeded the first African American president. Nor should the anti-critical-race-theory movement surprise anyone given the mass protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Understanding his phenomenon is crucial to preserving pluralistic democracy.
Sherrilyn Ifill, former head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, recently recalled the period of protest after Floyd’s murder in an engrossing podcast with former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. The movement, Ifill explained, was the first time many Americans collectively empathized with those who had experienced systemic injustice. But “those who are arrayed in opposition to justice and equality have not lost sight of it,” she said. “What they saw [in the protests] is part of what undergirds the current movement that you’re seeing around the country right now.”
Thus, Ifill argued, the MAGA crowd is frantically maneuvering to halt education “about the truth of the history of racism and white supremacy, of the struggle for justice in this country.” The goal is to stymie the development of children’s empathy and awareness of racial injustice.
In a real sense, the MAGA response is an effort to conserve power and to counteract the sense of a shared fate with Americans who historically have been marginalized. The right now defines itself not with policies but with its angry tone, its malicious labeling and insults (e.g., “groomer,” “woke”), and its targeting of LGBTQ youths and dehumanization of immigrants. Right-wingers’ attempt to cast their opponents as sick, dangerous and — above all — not “real Americans” is as critical to securing power as voter suppression.
The indignation of MAGA personalities when presented with the reality of systematic racism is telling and very much in line with White evangelical Christian views. As Robert P. Jones, the head of the Public Religion Research Institute who has written extensively on the evangelical movement, explained in an interview with Governing:
What we saw in the 20th century was that edifice of white supremacy that got built with the support of white Christian leaders and pastors and churches. Once it was built, the best way to protect it was to make it invisible, to create a kind of theology that was so inward focused that Christianity was only about personal piety. It was disconnected from social justice, politics, the world. It led white Christians to be fairly narcissistic and indifferent to injustice all around them. Martin Luther King Jr. had that line in Letter from Birmingham Jail where he’s in dismay not about racist Christians, but about so-called moderates in Birmingham, the “more cautious than courageous” white Christians who “remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows.”
Indeed, rarely has King’s admonition been more appropriate: “I have watched white churches stand on the sidelines and merely mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard so many ministers say, ‘Those are social issues which the gospel has nothing to do with.’ ”
Today, those who argue that America is a White, Christian nation simultaneously insist they are devoid of bigotry. The MAGA crowd is offended by any attempt to identify the ongoing reality of systemic racism (evident, for example, in the criminal justice system, maternal health care, housing discrimination and gerrymandering to reduce minority voting power). The notion that institutions they refuse to reform perpetuate racism is a sort of moral challenge to their claim to be “colorblind.” Perhaps it is simply self-interested blindness.
No one should be surprised that the “big lie” has become gospel in White evangelical churches. The New York Times reports: “In the 17 months since the presidential election, pastors at these churches have preached about fraudulent votes and vague claims of election meddling. … For these church leaders, Mr. Trump’s narrative of the 2020 election has become a prominent strain in an apocalyptic vision of the left running amok.”
If anti-critical-race-theory crusades are the response to racial empathy, then laws designed to make voting harder or to subvert elections are the answer to the GOP’s defeat in 2020, which the right still refuses to concede. The election has been transformed into a plot against right-wingers that must be rectified by further marginalizing those outside their movement.
Our political problems are significant, but they are minor compared with the moral confusion that is afflicting the millions of White Christian Americans who consider themselves victims. Left unaddressed, this will smother calls for empathy, tolerance and justice.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
People might be confused about how a Republican Party that once worried about government overreach now seeks to control medical care for transgender children and retaliate against a corporation for objecting to a bill targeting LGBTQ students. And why is it that the most ambitious Republicans are spending more time battling nonexistent critical race theory in schools than on health care or inflation?
To explain this, one must acknowledge that the GOP is not a political party anymore. It is a movement dedicated to imposing White Christian nationalism.
The media blandly describes the GOP’s obsessions as “culture wars,” but that suggests there is another side seeking to impose its views on others. In reality, only one side is repudiating pluralistic democracy — White, Christian and mainly rural Americans who are becoming a minority group and want to maintain their political power.
The result is an alarming pattern: Any moment of social progress is soon followed by reactionary panic and claims of victimhood. It’s no mere coincidence that Donald Trump, the leader of the birther movement, succeeded the first African American president. Nor should the anti-critical-race-theory movement surprise anyone given the mass protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Understanding his phenomenon is crucial to preserving pluralistic democracy.
Sherrilyn Ifill, former head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, recently recalled the period of protest after Floyd’s murder in an engrossing podcast with former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. The movement, Ifill explained, was the first time many Americans collectively empathized with those who had experienced systemic injustice. But “those who are arrayed in opposition to justice and equality have not lost sight of it,” she said. “What they saw [in the protests] is part of what undergirds the current movement that you’re seeing around the country right now.”
Thus, Ifill argued, the MAGA crowd is frantically maneuvering to halt education “about the truth of the history of racism and white supremacy, of the struggle for justice in this country.” The goal is to stymie the development of children’s empathy and awareness of racial injustice.
In a real sense, the MAGA response is an effort to conserve power and to counteract the sense of a shared fate with Americans who historically have been marginalized. The right now defines itself not with policies but with its angry tone, its malicious labeling and insults (e.g., “groomer,” “woke”), and its targeting of LGBTQ youths and dehumanization of immigrants. Right-wingers’ attempt to cast their opponents as sick, dangerous and — above all — not “real Americans” is as critical to securing power as voter suppression.
The indignation of MAGA personalities when presented with the reality of systematic racism is telling and very much in line with White evangelical Christian views. As Robert P. Jones, the head of the Public Religion Research Institute who has written extensively on the evangelical movement, explained in an interview with Governing:
What we saw in the 20th century was that edifice of white supremacy that got built with the support of white Christian leaders and pastors and churches. Once it was built, the best way to protect it was to make it invisible, to create a kind of theology that was so inward focused that Christianity was only about personal piety. It was disconnected from social justice, politics, the world. It led white Christians to be fairly narcissistic and indifferent to injustice all around them. Martin Luther King Jr. had that line in Letter from Birmingham Jail where he’s in dismay not about racist Christians, but about so-called moderates in Birmingham, the “more cautious than courageous” white Christians who “remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows.”
Indeed, rarely has King’s admonition been more appropriate: “I have watched white churches stand on the sidelines and merely mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard so many ministers say, ‘Those are social issues which the gospel has nothing to do with.’ ”
Today, those who argue that America is a White, Christian nation simultaneously insist they are devoid of bigotry. The MAGA crowd is offended by any attempt to identify the ongoing reality of systemic racism (evident, for example, in the criminal justice system, maternal health care, housing discrimination and gerrymandering to reduce minority voting power). The notion that institutions they refuse to reform perpetuate racism is a sort of moral challenge to their claim to be “colorblind.” Perhaps it is simply self-interested blindness.
No one should be surprised that the “big lie” has become gospel in White evangelical churches. The New York Times reports: “In the 17 months since the presidential election, pastors at these churches have preached about fraudulent votes and vague claims of election meddling. … For these church leaders, Mr. Trump’s narrative of the 2020 election has become a prominent strain in an apocalyptic vision of the left running amok.”
If anti-critical-race-theory crusades are the response to racial empathy, then laws designed to make voting harder or to subvert elections are the answer to the GOP’s defeat in 2020, which the right still refuses to concede. The election has been transformed into a plot against right-wingers that must be rectified by further marginalizing those outside their movement.
Our political problems are significant, but they are minor compared with the moral confusion that is afflicting the millions of White Christian Americans who consider themselves victims. Left unaddressed, this will smother calls for empathy, tolerance and justice.
GOP ‘BUILT ON FRAUD, FEAR AND FASCISM’? IF THE JACKBOOT FITS...
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
There were even more vermin than usual in Washington this week. A rabid fox at the Capitol bit at least nine people, including Rep. Ami Bera (D-Calif.). And Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison attacked Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) with an insult most entomological.
After Cotton implied that Supreme Court Justice-designate Ketanji Brown Jackson is a Nazi sympathizer, Harrison referred to Cotton as a “little maggot-infested man” on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
Fake news! Cotton may go low, but, at 6-foot-5, he is not little. Also, maggots typically feed on dead things, and Cotton, though stiff, is not currently deceased. The man likes to carry on, but he is not carrion.
Harrison went on to censure the Republican Party as a whole: “It is a party built on fraud, fear and fascism.” Interestingly, a statement from the Republican National Committee taking offense at the “maggot-infested” charge did not dispute the “fraud, fear and fascism” formulation. As your self-appointed fact-checker, I have therefore examined the merits of the accusation.
FRAUD
Sixteen months after President Donald Trump’s claims of election fraud failed in some 60 court cases, we have finally found evidence of potential voter fraud. Trump’s White House staff chief, Mark Meadows, reportedly registered to vote in 2020 using the address of a mobile home he never lived in. And former Trump State Department official Matt Mowers, a current congressional candidate, voted twice during the 2016 primaries, in New Hampshire and New Jersey.
The “big lie” about a rigged election, accepted by two-thirds of Republican voters, has spawned new frauds about the dangers of coronavirus vaccines (leading to sharply higher death rates in heavily Republican counties) and the promise, touted by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) of the deworming drug ivermectin to treat covid-19; an exhaustive new study finds the drug useless.
Then there are the little everyday frauds. Just days after Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) told the world that his colleagues engage in coke-fueled orgies, Rep. Lisa McClain (R-Mich.) declared at a Trump rally that it was Trump who “caught Osama bin Laden,” record-low unemployment is at a “40-year high” and there weren’t “any wars” during Trump’s presidency. Never mind Syria and Afghanistan.
FEAR
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) said people like Ketanji Brown Jackson become public defenders because “their heart is with the murderers.” Cotton said Justice Robert H. Jackson “left the Supreme Court to go to Nuremberg and prosecute the case against the Nazis. This Judge Jackson might have gone there to defend them.”
Republican senators used the Jackson confirmation to stir fear of minorities and vulnerable groups with manufactured crises about transgender athletes (of the 200,000 participants in women’s collegiate sports, perhaps 50 are transgender) and “critical race theory” (which isn’t taught in public schools).
Ohio Republican Senate candidate J.D. Vance released an ad saying “Biden’s open border is killing Ohioans, with more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”
Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.), in his latest dalliance with white nationalists, was listed as a “featured guest” at an event on April 20 (Adolf Hitler’s birthday) of a white-nationalist-tied group. His office denies he’ll participate, but Gosar shared details of the event on Instagram, the Arizona Mirror reports.
At a Trump-hosted screening at Mar-a-Lago this week of “Rigged: The Zuckerberg Funded Plot to Defeat Donald Trump,” a poster showed Mark Zuckerberg “devilishly grabbing cash,” The Post’s Josh Dawsey reported. The film repeatedly describes the Jewish billionaire’s money as “Zuckerbucks” — even though the Anti-Defamation League objected to the term as an antisemitic trope about wealthy Jewish control.
FASCISM
Sixty-three House Republicans — 30 percent of the caucus — voted against a resolution this week affirming unequivocal support for NATO as authoritarian Russia attacks democratic Ukraine.
A Republican National Committee resolution, never rescinded, refers to the Capitol insurrection not as an authoritarian attempt to overthrow democracy and keep the defeated Trump in power but as “legitimate political discourse.” And Trump expresses regret he didn’t march to the Capitol with the insurrectionists.
Republican-run states are racing to follow Florida’s “don’t say gay” legislation that bans teaching about sexual orientation or gender identity, which follows similar efforts to ban certain teaching about race and history, and widespread efforts to ban books about race, sexuality, gender and police brutality.
The Florida legislature approved an “election crimes” police force for Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), with the potential to intimidate voters, while various GOP-led states move forward with new provisions providing residents with incentives to inform on each other.
The newly-revealed text messages of Justice Clarence Thomas’s activist wife, Ginni, show her sharing with the Trump White House her “hope” that the “Biden crime family” as well as elected officials, bureaucrats and journalists would be taken to “barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.”
**
Is the GOP “a party built on fraud, fear and fascism”? Certainly, not all Republicans think this way. But too many others are subverting democracy, cavorting with white nationalists, spreading racist fears and fantasizing about extrajudicial punishment for political opponents and the media. For them, the jackboot fits.
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
There were even more vermin than usual in Washington this week. A rabid fox at the Capitol bit at least nine people, including Rep. Ami Bera (D-Calif.). And Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison attacked Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) with an insult most entomological.
After Cotton implied that Supreme Court Justice-designate Ketanji Brown Jackson is a Nazi sympathizer, Harrison referred to Cotton as a “little maggot-infested man” on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
Fake news! Cotton may go low, but, at 6-foot-5, he is not little. Also, maggots typically feed on dead things, and Cotton, though stiff, is not currently deceased. The man likes to carry on, but he is not carrion.
Harrison went on to censure the Republican Party as a whole: “It is a party built on fraud, fear and fascism.” Interestingly, a statement from the Republican National Committee taking offense at the “maggot-infested” charge did not dispute the “fraud, fear and fascism” formulation. As your self-appointed fact-checker, I have therefore examined the merits of the accusation.
FRAUD
Sixteen months after President Donald Trump’s claims of election fraud failed in some 60 court cases, we have finally found evidence of potential voter fraud. Trump’s White House staff chief, Mark Meadows, reportedly registered to vote in 2020 using the address of a mobile home he never lived in. And former Trump State Department official Matt Mowers, a current congressional candidate, voted twice during the 2016 primaries, in New Hampshire and New Jersey.
The “big lie” about a rigged election, accepted by two-thirds of Republican voters, has spawned new frauds about the dangers of coronavirus vaccines (leading to sharply higher death rates in heavily Republican counties) and the promise, touted by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) of the deworming drug ivermectin to treat covid-19; an exhaustive new study finds the drug useless.
Then there are the little everyday frauds. Just days after Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) told the world that his colleagues engage in coke-fueled orgies, Rep. Lisa McClain (R-Mich.) declared at a Trump rally that it was Trump who “caught Osama bin Laden,” record-low unemployment is at a “40-year high” and there weren’t “any wars” during Trump’s presidency. Never mind Syria and Afghanistan.
FEAR
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) said people like Ketanji Brown Jackson become public defenders because “their heart is with the murderers.” Cotton said Justice Robert H. Jackson “left the Supreme Court to go to Nuremberg and prosecute the case against the Nazis. This Judge Jackson might have gone there to defend them.”
Republican senators used the Jackson confirmation to stir fear of minorities and vulnerable groups with manufactured crises about transgender athletes (of the 200,000 participants in women’s collegiate sports, perhaps 50 are transgender) and “critical race theory” (which isn’t taught in public schools).
Ohio Republican Senate candidate J.D. Vance released an ad saying “Biden’s open border is killing Ohioans, with more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”
Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.), in his latest dalliance with white nationalists, was listed as a “featured guest” at an event on April 20 (Adolf Hitler’s birthday) of a white-nationalist-tied group. His office denies he’ll participate, but Gosar shared details of the event on Instagram, the Arizona Mirror reports.
At a Trump-hosted screening at Mar-a-Lago this week of “Rigged: The Zuckerberg Funded Plot to Defeat Donald Trump,” a poster showed Mark Zuckerberg “devilishly grabbing cash,” The Post’s Josh Dawsey reported. The film repeatedly describes the Jewish billionaire’s money as “Zuckerbucks” — even though the Anti-Defamation League objected to the term as an antisemitic trope about wealthy Jewish control.
FASCISM
Sixty-three House Republicans — 30 percent of the caucus — voted against a resolution this week affirming unequivocal support for NATO as authoritarian Russia attacks democratic Ukraine.
A Republican National Committee resolution, never rescinded, refers to the Capitol insurrection not as an authoritarian attempt to overthrow democracy and keep the defeated Trump in power but as “legitimate political discourse.” And Trump expresses regret he didn’t march to the Capitol with the insurrectionists.
Republican-run states are racing to follow Florida’s “don’t say gay” legislation that bans teaching about sexual orientation or gender identity, which follows similar efforts to ban certain teaching about race and history, and widespread efforts to ban books about race, sexuality, gender and police brutality.
The Florida legislature approved an “election crimes” police force for Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), with the potential to intimidate voters, while various GOP-led states move forward with new provisions providing residents with incentives to inform on each other.
The newly-revealed text messages of Justice Clarence Thomas’s activist wife, Ginni, show her sharing with the Trump White House her “hope” that the “Biden crime family” as well as elected officials, bureaucrats and journalists would be taken to “barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.”
**
Is the GOP “a party built on fraud, fear and fascism”? Certainly, not all Republicans think this way. But too many others are subverting democracy, cavorting with white nationalists, spreading racist fears and fantasizing about extrajudicial punishment for political opponents and the media. For them, the jackboot fits.
WHY HAVEN’T REPUBLICANS HAD TO ANSWER FOR TRUMP’S SUPPORT FOR PUTIN?
By Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent, The Washington Post
Reports of horrific atrocities in Ukraine are putting some who are sympathetic to the Kremlin’s take on the Russian invasion in an awkward position, since most people aren’t comfortable defending war crimes.
But there are some people who ought to feel more uncomfortable than they apparently do.
We’re talking about the Republicans who spent years justifying and supporting Donald Trump’s substantive and emotional support for Vladimir Putin, and his attempts to use Ukraine and its president Volodymyr Zelensky for his own debased purposes.
We’re not referring to the Fox News commentators and performative populist nationalists who openly played footsie with Putin before the invasion, though those worthies have plainly lost their ideological footing and don’t know what to say, now that Putin’s horrors have mounted.
Instead, we’re talking about all the Republicans who do denounce Putin’s invasion and support a forceful response, but almost never admit to — let alone renounce — Trump’s years of efforts as president to align our interests with those of Putin and against Ukraine, the West and liberal democracy.
Democrats could make a forceful case against those Republicans right now. One Democrat trying to do this is Rep. Abigail Spanberger, who faces a tough reelection fight in her Virginia swing district.
“We saw a president align himself completely with Putin,” Spanberger told us. “We continue to see this former president call Putin a ‘genius,’ say affirming things — certainly not denounce him in the strongest words possible.”
“People need to take a side on the past actions that occurred under the prior administration as it related to Putin,” said Spanberger, who has a national security background as a former CIA official.
“Every Republican” should be pressed on these matters, argued Spanberger, such as whether they will now acknowledge how derelict it was that Trump withheld military aid from Ukraine to pressure Zelensky to carry out his corrupt political bidding.
Just try to imagine what Republicans would be saying right now, with much of the world united in support of Ukraine and against Putin’s brutality, if a Democratic president did everything Trump did.
If a Democrat had frozen aid to Ukraine when it was under Russian attack. If a Democrat had fawned over Putin’s supposed strength and intelligence for years, even defending his suppression of dissent. If a Democrat had stood next to Putin in Helsinki and accepted Putin’s word for it that he did not seek to subvert a U.S. presidential election.
Yet today, the Republicans who stood by Trump through all his Russia-Ukraine scandals — and who still consider him the leader of their party — seem to have little fear that their own recent history will be used against them.
Amid Trump’s current praise of Putin, his refusal to address the invasion with moral clarity, and even his call for Putin to find dirt on President Biden’s son Hunter, Republicans still seem to have felt little serious political heat.
Yes, some Republicans have faced media pressure to narrowly condemn such moments. But they don’t seem to feel any obligation to fundamentally renounce Trump’s broader posture. Couldn’t Democrats press this point a bit harder?
Some Democratic House candidates are trying to do this. Jay Chen, a Navy Reserve intelligence officer who is running in California, recently declared: “Republicans have a ton of baggage when it comes to their worship of Vladimir Putin.”
Spanberger, for her part, argued that Republicans should feel pressure to “very clearly stand up for the cause of democracy,” and “very clearly denounce authoritarians such as Putin, and anyone that gives them comfort and cover,” Trump very much included.
This isn’t just about re-litigating the past. It also has a forward-looking dimension. The 2024 presidential nomination might be Trump’s for the asking, and according to former Trump adviser John Bolton, in a second term Trump might seek to withdraw from NATO.
Democrats might point out what it would mean to have Trump become president again, only this time in the aftermath of Putin’s effort to violently annex Ukraine while committing war crimes in the process.
“We’re talking about a man who has praised an authoritarian killer for invading a sovereign nation,” Spanberger told us. If Ukraine does successfully resist the invasion and is “in a fledgling state of rebuilding” which will require the “support of NATO allies,” Spanberger asked, “what happens when we have a president who turns back toward Putin?”
Shouldn’t Republicans who still treat Trump as the leader of their party be pressed to account for this?
By Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent, The Washington Post
Reports of horrific atrocities in Ukraine are putting some who are sympathetic to the Kremlin’s take on the Russian invasion in an awkward position, since most people aren’t comfortable defending war crimes.
But there are some people who ought to feel more uncomfortable than they apparently do.
We’re talking about the Republicans who spent years justifying and supporting Donald Trump’s substantive and emotional support for Vladimir Putin, and his attempts to use Ukraine and its president Volodymyr Zelensky for his own debased purposes.
We’re not referring to the Fox News commentators and performative populist nationalists who openly played footsie with Putin before the invasion, though those worthies have plainly lost their ideological footing and don’t know what to say, now that Putin’s horrors have mounted.
Instead, we’re talking about all the Republicans who do denounce Putin’s invasion and support a forceful response, but almost never admit to — let alone renounce — Trump’s years of efforts as president to align our interests with those of Putin and against Ukraine, the West and liberal democracy.
Democrats could make a forceful case against those Republicans right now. One Democrat trying to do this is Rep. Abigail Spanberger, who faces a tough reelection fight in her Virginia swing district.
“We saw a president align himself completely with Putin,” Spanberger told us. “We continue to see this former president call Putin a ‘genius,’ say affirming things — certainly not denounce him in the strongest words possible.”
“People need to take a side on the past actions that occurred under the prior administration as it related to Putin,” said Spanberger, who has a national security background as a former CIA official.
“Every Republican” should be pressed on these matters, argued Spanberger, such as whether they will now acknowledge how derelict it was that Trump withheld military aid from Ukraine to pressure Zelensky to carry out his corrupt political bidding.
Just try to imagine what Republicans would be saying right now, with much of the world united in support of Ukraine and against Putin’s brutality, if a Democratic president did everything Trump did.
If a Democrat had frozen aid to Ukraine when it was under Russian attack. If a Democrat had fawned over Putin’s supposed strength and intelligence for years, even defending his suppression of dissent. If a Democrat had stood next to Putin in Helsinki and accepted Putin’s word for it that he did not seek to subvert a U.S. presidential election.
Yet today, the Republicans who stood by Trump through all his Russia-Ukraine scandals — and who still consider him the leader of their party — seem to have little fear that their own recent history will be used against them.
Amid Trump’s current praise of Putin, his refusal to address the invasion with moral clarity, and even his call for Putin to find dirt on President Biden’s son Hunter, Republicans still seem to have felt little serious political heat.
Yes, some Republicans have faced media pressure to narrowly condemn such moments. But they don’t seem to feel any obligation to fundamentally renounce Trump’s broader posture. Couldn’t Democrats press this point a bit harder?
Some Democratic House candidates are trying to do this. Jay Chen, a Navy Reserve intelligence officer who is running in California, recently declared: “Republicans have a ton of baggage when it comes to their worship of Vladimir Putin.”
Spanberger, for her part, argued that Republicans should feel pressure to “very clearly stand up for the cause of democracy,” and “very clearly denounce authoritarians such as Putin, and anyone that gives them comfort and cover,” Trump very much included.
This isn’t just about re-litigating the past. It also has a forward-looking dimension. The 2024 presidential nomination might be Trump’s for the asking, and according to former Trump adviser John Bolton, in a second term Trump might seek to withdraw from NATO.
Democrats might point out what it would mean to have Trump become president again, only this time in the aftermath of Putin’s effort to violently annex Ukraine while committing war crimes in the process.
“We’re talking about a man who has praised an authoritarian killer for invading a sovereign nation,” Spanberger told us. If Ukraine does successfully resist the invasion and is “in a fledgling state of rebuilding” which will require the “support of NATO allies,” Spanberger asked, “what happens when we have a president who turns back toward Putin?”
Shouldn’t Republicans who still treat Trump as the leader of their party be pressed to account for this?
TRUMP’S VIOLENT POLITICAL RHETORIC IS METASTASIZING IN THE REPUBLICAN PARTY
By The Washington Post Editorial Board
Violent and threatening political rhetoric, normalized and encouraged by former president Donald Trump, is metastasizing in the Republican Party. As nearly a third of GOP voters tell pollsters that violence might be required to “save our country,” some officeholders and candidates who espouse menacing views are rewarded with fundraising and social media success. Too often, mainstream party leaders — the very voices who should be drawing the line at hate speech — are silent.
Silence is complicity. By not speaking out even in response to overt calls for lethal vengeance and death threats against political foes, Republican officials send a clear message that violence itself is a plausible alternative to debate, and even a palatable one.
Those political foes are mainly, but not only, Democrats. Revolutionaries — and that is how some of the most extreme GOP figures see themselves — are apt to turn on their brethren. After 13 Republican members of the House broke ranks to join Democrats in voting for President Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure bill last fall, they were subjected to vicious attacks from party voters, as well as some right-wing lawmakers.
Far from being condemned for violent threats and hate speech, candidates and incumbents are increasingly being rewarded. One is Jarome Bell, who is vying for the GOP nomination in Virginia’s highly competitive 2nd Congressional District. He went a major step beyond the lie that Joe Biden stole the 2020 presidential election, calling for putting to death anyone convicted of voter fraud in a tweet in September: “Audit all 50 states. Arrest all involved. Try all involved. Convict all involved. Execute all involved.” Now Mr. Bell, who faces stiff competition in the party primary in June, has been endorsed by Republican Rep. Bob Good of Virginia.
Mr. Bell has also been endorsed by a Republican state senator in Arizona, Wendy Rogers, a rising star in GOP politics nationally despite — or possibly in part because of — her incendiary, antisemitic rhetoric. At a white nationalist convention in Florida last month, she said, “We need to build more gallows” to dispatch “traitors.”
Ms. Rogers, who has outstripped almost every other candidate for state office in Arizona in fundraising and social media followers, was censured by the Republican-led state Senate for promoting violence — although only after the resolution was watered down to remove a reference to her rhetoric “inciting general racial and religious discrimination.”
That was encouraging. At the same time, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey dragged his feet before finally applauding Ms. Rogers’s censure, and the state GOP chairwoman, Kelli Ward, has been mum.
Those are not isolated examples. Mr. Trump was reported to have been “delighted” by actual violence — his rioting supporters breaching the Capitol on Jan. 6 last year. And when Rep. Paul A. Gosar (Ariz.) tweeted an anime video doctored to portray him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), just two fellow Republicans voted for a resolution to censure him in the House of Representatives.
History provides abundant evidence that rhetorical violence begets actual violence. By countenancing vile, dehumanizing, bloody-minded rhetoric, Republicans are paving a dangerous road to the future.
By The Washington Post Editorial Board
Violent and threatening political rhetoric, normalized and encouraged by former president Donald Trump, is metastasizing in the Republican Party. As nearly a third of GOP voters tell pollsters that violence might be required to “save our country,” some officeholders and candidates who espouse menacing views are rewarded with fundraising and social media success. Too often, mainstream party leaders — the very voices who should be drawing the line at hate speech — are silent.
Silence is complicity. By not speaking out even in response to overt calls for lethal vengeance and death threats against political foes, Republican officials send a clear message that violence itself is a plausible alternative to debate, and even a palatable one.
Those political foes are mainly, but not only, Democrats. Revolutionaries — and that is how some of the most extreme GOP figures see themselves — are apt to turn on their brethren. After 13 Republican members of the House broke ranks to join Democrats in voting for President Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure bill last fall, they were subjected to vicious attacks from party voters, as well as some right-wing lawmakers.
Far from being condemned for violent threats and hate speech, candidates and incumbents are increasingly being rewarded. One is Jarome Bell, who is vying for the GOP nomination in Virginia’s highly competitive 2nd Congressional District. He went a major step beyond the lie that Joe Biden stole the 2020 presidential election, calling for putting to death anyone convicted of voter fraud in a tweet in September: “Audit all 50 states. Arrest all involved. Try all involved. Convict all involved. Execute all involved.” Now Mr. Bell, who faces stiff competition in the party primary in June, has been endorsed by Republican Rep. Bob Good of Virginia.
Mr. Bell has also been endorsed by a Republican state senator in Arizona, Wendy Rogers, a rising star in GOP politics nationally despite — or possibly in part because of — her incendiary, antisemitic rhetoric. At a white nationalist convention in Florida last month, she said, “We need to build more gallows” to dispatch “traitors.”
Ms. Rogers, who has outstripped almost every other candidate for state office in Arizona in fundraising and social media followers, was censured by the Republican-led state Senate for promoting violence — although only after the resolution was watered down to remove a reference to her rhetoric “inciting general racial and religious discrimination.”
That was encouraging. At the same time, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey dragged his feet before finally applauding Ms. Rogers’s censure, and the state GOP chairwoman, Kelli Ward, has been mum.
Those are not isolated examples. Mr. Trump was reported to have been “delighted” by actual violence — his rioting supporters breaching the Capitol on Jan. 6 last year. And when Rep. Paul A. Gosar (Ariz.) tweeted an anime video doctored to portray him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), just two fellow Republicans voted for a resolution to censure him in the House of Representatives.
History provides abundant evidence that rhetorical violence begets actual violence. By countenancing vile, dehumanizing, bloody-minded rhetoric, Republicans are paving a dangerous road to the future.
WHY THE GOP AGENDA WILL GROW EVEN MORE EXTREME IN THE COMING YEARS
By Paul Waldman, The Washington Post
Some Republicans in the Senate have been arguing lately about how explicit they should be about the agenda they’ll pursue should they win control of Congress. While some suggest promoting “Contract With America”-style bullet points, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) says this is unnecessary and risky, potentially opening the party up to attacks.
But the GOP has an agenda, one that’s quite clear if you’re paying close enough attention — which most Americans aren’t. It matters greatly, not only for what they would do between 2022 and 2024, but more importantly, what will happen should they take both chambers of Congress and the presidency afterward.
Consider, for instance, McConnell’s latest obsession: too many kids who have enough to eat during the school day.
As part of pandemic relief passed by Congress in 2020, the Agriculture Department funded universal free lunch in schools. Rather than having a complex system in which some kids paid for lunch, some got reduced price meals, and some ate for free, schools could just feed everyone. It made for less bureaucracy and better-fed kids, at a time when the country was economically stressed.
The waivers that made this possible were later extended, but they’re set to expire at the end of June — and now McConnell and other Republicans are resisting extending them further. “McConnell is not budging,” said one person close to the negotiations.
While you can argue that the Trump era saw a partial retreat in the GOP from Paul Ryan-style attacks on the safety net, the impulse to literally take food from the mouths of children is still there — and will surface whenever Republicans have the chance.
Why go there? Their most common argument they make is that it’s just too expensive, and they’re seeking budget cuts. I’d remind you that Congress recently passed a $768 billion bill to fund the military for a single year, which Republicans enthusiastically supported. So they have zero credibility to complain about high spending; they support spending on some things and not others.
If Republicans do win control of one or both houses in the midterms, we’re likely to see a lot of this type of effort to chip away at social spending wherever possible. Sometimes, it will be for political reasons, but often, such as in this case, it will be a reflection of their sincere beliefs about what government should and shouldn’t do.
We’re also likely to see a repeat of a pattern that was evident when the Republicans took over first the House and then the Senate when Barack Obama was president. To satisfy the voters who elected them, they have to hold show votes on issues that matter to their base, even though those bills will be filibustered or vetoed. But in the process, they frustrate those same voters, who want results.
So, if and when they finally take the presidency as well — as in 2016 — they will really have to deliver. We saw that with the Affordable Care Act: After holding more than 60 failed votes to repeal the law while Obama was in office, they had to follow through once they had all the power. Fortunately for the country, their last attempt in 2017 was a disaster, and collapsed when Sen. John McCain refused to vote for repeal.
How much the appetite remains in the party for that particular act of destruction is unclear, but Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) recently said during a radio show that he still hopes to repeal the ACA. Whatever they do, they’ll have to show the base that they’re sticking it to the libs and moving ahead with a conservative agenda.
There’s another key part of this dynamic that wasn’t present before: State-level Republicans have gotten so extreme and aggressive that they may have created a new set of expectations that congressional Republicans will have to satisfy.
When your state representatives are essentially outlawing abortion, banning books and passing “Don’t Say Gay” bills, you may not be satisfied unless your member of Congress is willing to go just as far. Which will put pressure on congressional Republicans — but unlike those at the state level, they won’t be able to put their agenda into law.
That is, unless and until they take over in 2024, at which point they’ll have to follow through on all the radical policy changes they said they wanted but were stymied by President Biden from enacting.
Which means that should we find ourselves there three years from now, the Republican agenda will be a secret to no one — and its audacity will make your head spin.
By Paul Waldman, The Washington Post
Some Republicans in the Senate have been arguing lately about how explicit they should be about the agenda they’ll pursue should they win control of Congress. While some suggest promoting “Contract With America”-style bullet points, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) says this is unnecessary and risky, potentially opening the party up to attacks.
But the GOP has an agenda, one that’s quite clear if you’re paying close enough attention — which most Americans aren’t. It matters greatly, not only for what they would do between 2022 and 2024, but more importantly, what will happen should they take both chambers of Congress and the presidency afterward.
Consider, for instance, McConnell’s latest obsession: too many kids who have enough to eat during the school day.
As part of pandemic relief passed by Congress in 2020, the Agriculture Department funded universal free lunch in schools. Rather than having a complex system in which some kids paid for lunch, some got reduced price meals, and some ate for free, schools could just feed everyone. It made for less bureaucracy and better-fed kids, at a time when the country was economically stressed.
The waivers that made this possible were later extended, but they’re set to expire at the end of June — and now McConnell and other Republicans are resisting extending them further. “McConnell is not budging,” said one person close to the negotiations.
While you can argue that the Trump era saw a partial retreat in the GOP from Paul Ryan-style attacks on the safety net, the impulse to literally take food from the mouths of children is still there — and will surface whenever Republicans have the chance.
Why go there? Their most common argument they make is that it’s just too expensive, and they’re seeking budget cuts. I’d remind you that Congress recently passed a $768 billion bill to fund the military for a single year, which Republicans enthusiastically supported. So they have zero credibility to complain about high spending; they support spending on some things and not others.
If Republicans do win control of one or both houses in the midterms, we’re likely to see a lot of this type of effort to chip away at social spending wherever possible. Sometimes, it will be for political reasons, but often, such as in this case, it will be a reflection of their sincere beliefs about what government should and shouldn’t do.
We’re also likely to see a repeat of a pattern that was evident when the Republicans took over first the House and then the Senate when Barack Obama was president. To satisfy the voters who elected them, they have to hold show votes on issues that matter to their base, even though those bills will be filibustered or vetoed. But in the process, they frustrate those same voters, who want results.
So, if and when they finally take the presidency as well — as in 2016 — they will really have to deliver. We saw that with the Affordable Care Act: After holding more than 60 failed votes to repeal the law while Obama was in office, they had to follow through once they had all the power. Fortunately for the country, their last attempt in 2017 was a disaster, and collapsed when Sen. John McCain refused to vote for repeal.
How much the appetite remains in the party for that particular act of destruction is unclear, but Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) recently said during a radio show that he still hopes to repeal the ACA. Whatever they do, they’ll have to show the base that they’re sticking it to the libs and moving ahead with a conservative agenda.
There’s another key part of this dynamic that wasn’t present before: State-level Republicans have gotten so extreme and aggressive that they may have created a new set of expectations that congressional Republicans will have to satisfy.
When your state representatives are essentially outlawing abortion, banning books and passing “Don’t Say Gay” bills, you may not be satisfied unless your member of Congress is willing to go just as far. Which will put pressure on congressional Republicans — but unlike those at the state level, they won’t be able to put their agenda into law.
That is, unless and until they take over in 2024, at which point they’ll have to follow through on all the radical policy changes they said they wanted but were stymied by President Biden from enacting.
Which means that should we find ourselves there three years from now, the Republican agenda will be a secret to no one — and its audacity will make your head spin.
REPUBLICANS ARE SO EAGER TO SEE BIDEN FAIL THAT THEY’D LET PUTIN SUCCEED
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
After her fellow Republicans booted her from party leadership last year, Rep. Liz Cheney posed a question: “Do we hate our political adversaries more than we love our country?”
Now, with Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Republicans are answering that question — in the affirmative.
The dictator is betting that division within the United States will sap American resolve and thereby sow disunity between the United States and European democracies — allowing him to crush Ukraine’s democracy and potentially others. And Republicans are giving him what he wants. They are so determined to see President Biden fail that they would let President Putin succeed.
Tuesday night’s State of the Union address, coming six days after Russia started the biggest war in Europe since 1944, offered a timely opportunity to showcase national unity for Putin, and the world. During a similar address to Congress after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush enveloped Democratic congressional leaders in bear hugs. But this time, a number of Republicans boycotted Biden’s address, ostensibly because they objected to getting tested for the coronavirus.
Those in the chamber rose to applaud the Ukrainian ambassador, and many wore Ukraine’s yellow and blue. But as Biden extolled national unity — “He thought he could divide us at home, in this chamber, in this nation. … But Putin was wrong." — Republican lawmakers sniped at him on Twitter.
How deep was the contempt? As Biden mentioned the cancers that kill many U.S. veterans, including his own son Beau, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) heckled the president.
The relentless assault no doubt undermines Biden — but it also weakens America. Biden’s response — the U.S. response — can be only as strong as Republicans allow. By sabotaging the commander in chief, Republican leaders have made it more difficult to rally the nation to accept wartime sacrifices (accepting higher energy prices or, potentially, lost American lives).
A poll released Monday by Yahoo News-YouGov shows how corrosive the Republican assaults on Biden have been. Though Americans overwhelmingly call the Ukraine invasion unjustified, Trump voters actually had a more favorable opinion of Putin than of Biden. Ninety-five percent of Trump voters expressed an unfavorable view of Biden (including 87 percent holding a very unfavorable view), compared with 78 percent of Trump voters expressing an unfavorable view of Putin (60 percent very unfavorable). Only 3 percent of Trump voters said Biden is “doing a better job leading his country” than Putin, while 47 percent said the dictator, who has brought isolation and economic crisis to Russia, is doing a better job than Biden.
This shouldn’t be surprising. Trump, while opposing the Ukraine invasion, has called “peacekeeper” Putin’s actions “very savvy,” “genius” and “smart,” while “our leaders are dumb.”
That’s a bit rich, after Trump threatened to blow up NATO, unsuccessfully tried to persuade other world leaders to readmit Russia to the Group of Seven and infamously tried to condition military aid to Ukraine on the country’s willingness to provide Trump with political dirt on Democrats. Republican lawmakers defended Trump by parroting Russian propaganda falsely blaming Ukraine for 2016 U.S. election sabotage, which Russia actually did.
But this isn’t the time to point fingers at political opponents. It’s time to confront the real enemy. Do Republican leaders know the difference?
In the official GOP response to the State of the Union, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds picked up the blame-Biden theme, accusing him of “focusing on political correctness rather than military readiness” before the Ukraine invasion. “Weakness on the world stage has a cost," she charged.
It does. And Republicans, by undermining Biden in a time of war, risk making America pay.
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
After her fellow Republicans booted her from party leadership last year, Rep. Liz Cheney posed a question: “Do we hate our political adversaries more than we love our country?”
Now, with Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Republicans are answering that question — in the affirmative.
The dictator is betting that division within the United States will sap American resolve and thereby sow disunity between the United States and European democracies — allowing him to crush Ukraine’s democracy and potentially others. And Republicans are giving him what he wants. They are so determined to see President Biden fail that they would let President Putin succeed.
Tuesday night’s State of the Union address, coming six days after Russia started the biggest war in Europe since 1944, offered a timely opportunity to showcase national unity for Putin, and the world. During a similar address to Congress after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush enveloped Democratic congressional leaders in bear hugs. But this time, a number of Republicans boycotted Biden’s address, ostensibly because they objected to getting tested for the coronavirus.
Those in the chamber rose to applaud the Ukrainian ambassador, and many wore Ukraine’s yellow and blue. But as Biden extolled national unity — “He thought he could divide us at home, in this chamber, in this nation. … But Putin was wrong." — Republican lawmakers sniped at him on Twitter.
How deep was the contempt? As Biden mentioned the cancers that kill many U.S. veterans, including his own son Beau, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) heckled the president.
The relentless assault no doubt undermines Biden — but it also weakens America. Biden’s response — the U.S. response — can be only as strong as Republicans allow. By sabotaging the commander in chief, Republican leaders have made it more difficult to rally the nation to accept wartime sacrifices (accepting higher energy prices or, potentially, lost American lives).
A poll released Monday by Yahoo News-YouGov shows how corrosive the Republican assaults on Biden have been. Though Americans overwhelmingly call the Ukraine invasion unjustified, Trump voters actually had a more favorable opinion of Putin than of Biden. Ninety-five percent of Trump voters expressed an unfavorable view of Biden (including 87 percent holding a very unfavorable view), compared with 78 percent of Trump voters expressing an unfavorable view of Putin (60 percent very unfavorable). Only 3 percent of Trump voters said Biden is “doing a better job leading his country” than Putin, while 47 percent said the dictator, who has brought isolation and economic crisis to Russia, is doing a better job than Biden.
This shouldn’t be surprising. Trump, while opposing the Ukraine invasion, has called “peacekeeper” Putin’s actions “very savvy,” “genius” and “smart,” while “our leaders are dumb.”
That’s a bit rich, after Trump threatened to blow up NATO, unsuccessfully tried to persuade other world leaders to readmit Russia to the Group of Seven and infamously tried to condition military aid to Ukraine on the country’s willingness to provide Trump with political dirt on Democrats. Republican lawmakers defended Trump by parroting Russian propaganda falsely blaming Ukraine for 2016 U.S. election sabotage, which Russia actually did.
But this isn’t the time to point fingers at political opponents. It’s time to confront the real enemy. Do Republican leaders know the difference?
In the official GOP response to the State of the Union, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds picked up the blame-Biden theme, accusing him of “focusing on political correctness rather than military readiness” before the Ukraine invasion. “Weakness on the world stage has a cost," she charged.
It does. And Republicans, by undermining Biden in a time of war, risk making America pay.
THE QUESTION FOR THE GOP: TRUMP OR AMERICAN DEMOCRACY?
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Republicans have resorted to a variety of excuses and lies to avoid breaking with the defeated former president: He didn’t mean to incite the violent insurgents on Jan. 6, 2021. He eventually asked for them to go home. It wasn’t that violent.
Like the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen, none of these hold up to the least bit of scrutiny. (The defeated president refused to say anything to the insurgents for 187 minutes, then expressed love for them. The violent images refute the lie that it was a nonviolent protest.) Moreover, the former president insists on hugging the violent insurgents — and insists the Republican Party hug him.
At yet another unhinged rally appearance on Saturday, he declared, “If I run and I win, we will treat those people from January 6 fairly. We will treat them fairly, and if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly.” Even more incoherently, he insisted, “What that ‘unselect’ committee is doing and what the people are doing that are running those prisons, it’s a disgrace.”
This reaffirms a disturbing and incontrovertible fact that Republicans refuse to address: They stand by and may well nominate someone who sided and still sides with violent seditionists bent on overthrowing the duly elected government of the United States.
In vernacular, former president Donald Trump is a traitor, someone who betrayed our Constitution. And still the GOP cannot bring itself to part with him. Even so-called moderate Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) cannot rule out supporting him in 2024. (Recall she was convinced he had learned his lesson in deciding to vote to acquit him in the first impeachment trial.)
All of this underscores the moral and intellectual depravity that has gripped the Republican Party. When a Republican governor such as Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas has the temerity to suggest, “I do not believe Trump is the one to lead our party and our country again, as president,” this is taken as a sign of moral courage. And when Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire tells CNN’s Dana Bash that “Oh my goodness, no” we shouldn’t pardon the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, we are reminded that the vast majority of elected Republicans still play down the uprising, objected to a bipartisan commission to investigate and would not dream of suggesting Trump be prosecuted.
Figures such as the sniveling Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) beg forgiveness when the right-wing media objects to his correct characterization of Jan. 6 as a “violent terrorist attack,” but that’s hardly less objectionable than vows from average Republicans who say they will support the instigator of the attack should he again run for president.
It seems elementary, but each and every Republican on the ballot needs to decide if they stand with Trump and the violent insurgents or with the United States and its Constitution. The two are mutually exclusive.
Whether it is Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who falsely claims the insurgents were not violent — or Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), who got her position in Republican House leadership by virtue of her willingness to repeat the “big lie” — Republicans up and down the ballot continue to side with Trump.
And the media continues to treat this as politics as normal, to interrogate President Biden as to why he has not cultivated more Republican support for his agenda (maybe because the Republicans have lost their grip on reality and now operate in bad faith?) and to allow Republicans in one interview after another to escape the fundamental question: Do you side with the insurrectionists and their leader or with our democracy?
Democrats would be well advised to start making Republican disloyalty to the Constitution an issue, taking a page from the playbook of groups such as the Republican Accountability Project — made up of conservatives pushing back against the “big lie” narrative and attempting to call Trump supporters to account. The group has begun to run ads such as this one in Arizona, against the MAGA candidate for governor Kari Lake:
Meet @KariLake:
- Leading AZ Republican candidate for governor
- Enemy of democracy
Watch the ad during the Suns/Nets game on Tuesday, February 1. pic.twitter.com/5ilJ0S1Bfv— The Republican Accountability Project (@AccountableGOP) January 27, 2022
It need not be the only issue Democrats raise in this year’s elections, but it certainly should be front and center. After Trump put out a statement insisting that Mike Pence, then the vice president, “could have overturned the election” (thereby conceding that he indeed had lost the election), Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) tweeted: “This is an admission, and a massively un-American statement. It is time for every Republican leader to pick a side… Trump or the Constitution, there is no middle on defending our nation anymore.” It’s hard to quibble with that.
We have one party that not merely refuses to break with the former defeated president but also refuses to break with the notion that the violent insurgents seeking to overthrow the election were the true patriots. If that’s not disqualification for holding office, I’m not sure what is.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Republicans have resorted to a variety of excuses and lies to avoid breaking with the defeated former president: He didn’t mean to incite the violent insurgents on Jan. 6, 2021. He eventually asked for them to go home. It wasn’t that violent.
Like the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen, none of these hold up to the least bit of scrutiny. (The defeated president refused to say anything to the insurgents for 187 minutes, then expressed love for them. The violent images refute the lie that it was a nonviolent protest.) Moreover, the former president insists on hugging the violent insurgents — and insists the Republican Party hug him.
At yet another unhinged rally appearance on Saturday, he declared, “If I run and I win, we will treat those people from January 6 fairly. We will treat them fairly, and if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly.” Even more incoherently, he insisted, “What that ‘unselect’ committee is doing and what the people are doing that are running those prisons, it’s a disgrace.”
This reaffirms a disturbing and incontrovertible fact that Republicans refuse to address: They stand by and may well nominate someone who sided and still sides with violent seditionists bent on overthrowing the duly elected government of the United States.
In vernacular, former president Donald Trump is a traitor, someone who betrayed our Constitution. And still the GOP cannot bring itself to part with him. Even so-called moderate Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) cannot rule out supporting him in 2024. (Recall she was convinced he had learned his lesson in deciding to vote to acquit him in the first impeachment trial.)
All of this underscores the moral and intellectual depravity that has gripped the Republican Party. When a Republican governor such as Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas has the temerity to suggest, “I do not believe Trump is the one to lead our party and our country again, as president,” this is taken as a sign of moral courage. And when Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire tells CNN’s Dana Bash that “Oh my goodness, no” we shouldn’t pardon the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, we are reminded that the vast majority of elected Republicans still play down the uprising, objected to a bipartisan commission to investigate and would not dream of suggesting Trump be prosecuted.
Figures such as the sniveling Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) beg forgiveness when the right-wing media objects to his correct characterization of Jan. 6 as a “violent terrorist attack,” but that’s hardly less objectionable than vows from average Republicans who say they will support the instigator of the attack should he again run for president.
It seems elementary, but each and every Republican on the ballot needs to decide if they stand with Trump and the violent insurgents or with the United States and its Constitution. The two are mutually exclusive.
Whether it is Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who falsely claims the insurgents were not violent — or Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), who got her position in Republican House leadership by virtue of her willingness to repeat the “big lie” — Republicans up and down the ballot continue to side with Trump.
And the media continues to treat this as politics as normal, to interrogate President Biden as to why he has not cultivated more Republican support for his agenda (maybe because the Republicans have lost their grip on reality and now operate in bad faith?) and to allow Republicans in one interview after another to escape the fundamental question: Do you side with the insurrectionists and their leader or with our democracy?
Democrats would be well advised to start making Republican disloyalty to the Constitution an issue, taking a page from the playbook of groups such as the Republican Accountability Project — made up of conservatives pushing back against the “big lie” narrative and attempting to call Trump supporters to account. The group has begun to run ads such as this one in Arizona, against the MAGA candidate for governor Kari Lake:
Meet @KariLake:
- Leading AZ Republican candidate for governor
- Enemy of democracy
Watch the ad during the Suns/Nets game on Tuesday, February 1. pic.twitter.com/5ilJ0S1Bfv— The Republican Accountability Project (@AccountableGOP) January 27, 2022
It need not be the only issue Democrats raise in this year’s elections, but it certainly should be front and center. After Trump put out a statement insisting that Mike Pence, then the vice president, “could have overturned the election” (thereby conceding that he indeed had lost the election), Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) tweeted: “This is an admission, and a massively un-American statement. It is time for every Republican leader to pick a side… Trump or the Constitution, there is no middle on defending our nation anymore.” It’s hard to quibble with that.
We have one party that not merely refuses to break with the former defeated president but also refuses to break with the notion that the violent insurgents seeking to overthrow the election were the true patriots. If that’s not disqualification for holding office, I’m not sure what is.
ATTACK OF THE RIGHT-WING THOUGHT POLICE
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
Americans like to think of their nation as a beacon of freedom. And despite all the ways in which we have failed to live up to our self-image, above all the vast injustices that sprang from the original sin of slavery, freedom — not just free elections, but also freedom of speech and thought — has long been a key element of the American idea.
Now, however, freedom is under attack, on more fronts than many people realize. Everyone knows about the Big Lie, the refusal by a large majority of Republicans to accept the legitimacy of a lost election. But there are many other areas in which freedom is not just under assault but in retreat.
Let’s talk, in particular, about the attack on education, especially but not only in Florida, which has become one of America’s leading laboratories of democratic erosion.
Republicans have made considerable political hay by denouncing the teaching of critical race theory; this strategy has succeeded even though most voters have no idea what that theory is and it isn’t actually being taught in public schools. But the facts in this case don’t matter, because denunciations of C.R.T. are basically a cover for a much bigger agenda: an attempt to stop schools from teaching anything that makes right-wingers uncomfortable.
I use that last word advisedly: There’s a bill advancing in the Florida Senate declaring that an individual “should not be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.” That is, the criterion for what can be taught isn’t “Is it true? Is it supported by the scholarly consensus?” but rather “Does it make certain constituencies uncomfortable?”
Anyone tempted to place an innocuous interpretation on this provision — maybe it’s just about not assigning collective guilt? — should read the text of the bill. Among other things, it cites as its two prime examples of things that must not happen in schools “denial or minimization of the Holocaust, and the teaching of critical race theory” — because suggesting that “racism is embedded in American society” (the bill’s definition of the theory) is just the same as denying that Hitler killed six million Jews.
What’s really striking, however, is the idea that schools should be prohibited from teaching anything that causes “discomfort” among students and their parents. If you imagine that the effects of applying this principle would be limited to teaching about race relations, you’re being utterly naïve.
For one thing, racism is far from being the only disturbing topic in American history. I’m sure that some students will find that the story of how we came to invade Iraq — or for that matter how we got involved in Vietnam — makes them uncomfortable. Ban those topics from the curriculum!
Then there’s the teaching of science. Most high schools do teach the theory of evolution, but leading Republican politicians are either evasive or actively deny the scientific consensus, presumably reflecting the G.O.P. base’s discomfort with the concept. Once the Florida standard takes hold, how long will teaching of evolution survive?
Geology, by the way, has the same problem. I’ve been on nature tours where the guides refuse to talk about the origins of rock formations, saying that they’ve had problems with some religious guests.
Oh, and given the growing importance of anti-vaccination posturing as a badge of conservative allegiance, how long before basic epidemiology — maybe even the germ theory of disease — gets the critical race theory treatment?
And then there’s economics, which these days is widely taught at the high school level. (Full disclosure: Many high schools use an adapted version of the principles text I co-author.) Given the long history of politically driven attempts to prevent the teaching of Keynesian economics, what do you think the Florida standard would do to teaching in my home field?
The point is that the smear campaign against critical race theory is almost certainly the start of an attempt to subject education in general to rule by the right-wing thought police, which will have dire effects far beyond the specific topic of racism.
And who will enforce the rules? State-sponsored vigilantes! Last month Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, proposed a “Stop Woke Act” that would empower parents to sue school districts they claim teach critical race theory — and collect lawyer fees, a setup modeled on the bounties under Texas’ new anti-abortion law. Even the prospect of such lawsuits would have a chilling effect on teaching.
Did I mention that DeSantis also wants to create a special police force to investigate election fraud? Like the attacks on critical race theory, this is obviously an attempt to use a made-up issue — voter fraud is largely nonexistent — as an excuse for intimidation.
OK, I’m sure that some people will say that I’m making too much of these issues. But ask yourself: Has there been any point over, say, the past five years when warnings about right-wing extremism have proved overblown and those dismissing those warnings as “alarmist” have been right?
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
Americans like to think of their nation as a beacon of freedom. And despite all the ways in which we have failed to live up to our self-image, above all the vast injustices that sprang from the original sin of slavery, freedom — not just free elections, but also freedom of speech and thought — has long been a key element of the American idea.
Now, however, freedom is under attack, on more fronts than many people realize. Everyone knows about the Big Lie, the refusal by a large majority of Republicans to accept the legitimacy of a lost election. But there are many other areas in which freedom is not just under assault but in retreat.
Let’s talk, in particular, about the attack on education, especially but not only in Florida, which has become one of America’s leading laboratories of democratic erosion.
Republicans have made considerable political hay by denouncing the teaching of critical race theory; this strategy has succeeded even though most voters have no idea what that theory is and it isn’t actually being taught in public schools. But the facts in this case don’t matter, because denunciations of C.R.T. are basically a cover for a much bigger agenda: an attempt to stop schools from teaching anything that makes right-wingers uncomfortable.
I use that last word advisedly: There’s a bill advancing in the Florida Senate declaring that an individual “should not be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.” That is, the criterion for what can be taught isn’t “Is it true? Is it supported by the scholarly consensus?” but rather “Does it make certain constituencies uncomfortable?”
Anyone tempted to place an innocuous interpretation on this provision — maybe it’s just about not assigning collective guilt? — should read the text of the bill. Among other things, it cites as its two prime examples of things that must not happen in schools “denial or minimization of the Holocaust, and the teaching of critical race theory” — because suggesting that “racism is embedded in American society” (the bill’s definition of the theory) is just the same as denying that Hitler killed six million Jews.
What’s really striking, however, is the idea that schools should be prohibited from teaching anything that causes “discomfort” among students and their parents. If you imagine that the effects of applying this principle would be limited to teaching about race relations, you’re being utterly naïve.
For one thing, racism is far from being the only disturbing topic in American history. I’m sure that some students will find that the story of how we came to invade Iraq — or for that matter how we got involved in Vietnam — makes them uncomfortable. Ban those topics from the curriculum!
Then there’s the teaching of science. Most high schools do teach the theory of evolution, but leading Republican politicians are either evasive or actively deny the scientific consensus, presumably reflecting the G.O.P. base’s discomfort with the concept. Once the Florida standard takes hold, how long will teaching of evolution survive?
Geology, by the way, has the same problem. I’ve been on nature tours where the guides refuse to talk about the origins of rock formations, saying that they’ve had problems with some religious guests.
Oh, and given the growing importance of anti-vaccination posturing as a badge of conservative allegiance, how long before basic epidemiology — maybe even the germ theory of disease — gets the critical race theory treatment?
And then there’s economics, which these days is widely taught at the high school level. (Full disclosure: Many high schools use an adapted version of the principles text I co-author.) Given the long history of politically driven attempts to prevent the teaching of Keynesian economics, what do you think the Florida standard would do to teaching in my home field?
The point is that the smear campaign against critical race theory is almost certainly the start of an attempt to subject education in general to rule by the right-wing thought police, which will have dire effects far beyond the specific topic of racism.
And who will enforce the rules? State-sponsored vigilantes! Last month Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, proposed a “Stop Woke Act” that would empower parents to sue school districts they claim teach critical race theory — and collect lawyer fees, a setup modeled on the bounties under Texas’ new anti-abortion law. Even the prospect of such lawsuits would have a chilling effect on teaching.
Did I mention that DeSantis also wants to create a special police force to investigate election fraud? Like the attacks on critical race theory, this is obviously an attempt to use a made-up issue — voter fraud is largely nonexistent — as an excuse for intimidation.
OK, I’m sure that some people will say that I’m making too much of these issues. But ask yourself: Has there been any point over, say, the past five years when warnings about right-wing extremism have proved overblown and those dismissing those warnings as “alarmist” have been right?
JUST WHAT IS THE ANTIABORTION CROWD’S PLAN FOR SUPPORTING PREGNANT PEOPLE?
The March For Life activists should be ready to help shoulder the burdens they’ve created
By Monica Hesse, The Washington Post
A note to all the participants of Friday’s antiabortion March for Life rally, taking place in Washington:
I hope you’re preparing to make condoms rain from the sky. Buckets of them. Craploads, hurled from the cargo holds of the biggest planes you can find. Also, birth control pills. I hope every time a teenager opens their locker at school she finds 60 packs of Yaz.
You have been holding these marches since 1974, the year after Roe v. Wade, and guess what? You might have finally done it. You stacked the courts. Your lobbying efforts and voting patterns jammed three conservative justices on the Supreme Court’s bench during President Donald Trump’s term — never mind the hypocrisy of stonewalling Merrick Garland and then replacing Ruth Bader Ginsburg (this isn’t the March for Constitutional Etiquette, after all). That same court is now preparing to issue rulings that might overturn the precedent that guaranteed women control over their reproductive futures. So, congrats?
I hope you’re ready for your odious brave new world. I presume each and every one of you is planning to adopt several kids. Those chia seed-size embryos that you insist on calling pre-born children eventually will be born to parents who never wanted to be parents, and someone will need to step up to the plate. Since “adoption” has been your solution, you’re up, slugger. Surely you can spare the extra $233,000 that the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2015 estimated it takes to raise a child from birth to age 18. (If the cost sounds steep, one of your crisis pregnancy centers might be willing to toss in a box of Huggies.)
I hope that the 364 days you’re not attending this march, you’re marching for universal health care. Also, subsidized day care and universal preschool; I hope every Chick-fil-A sandwich will now come with a side of full-time nanny.
Also, if your feet aren’t too tired, maybe you could mix in some marches for mandated parental leave for both mothers and fathers, and for free therapy for all of the people whose bodies and souls have been traumatized via forced pregnancy and forced birth.
At the very least, I hope we can count on you to vote for candidates who care about these issues with the same righteousness you brought to supporting pro-life politicians.
Truly, we can’t wait to see all the work you personally have been doing to reduce unwanted pregnancies, besides lurking outside of Planned Parenthood and shouting at people who are trying to get Pap smears. (Have you been doing that work?)
Intimate-partner violence can escalate during pregnancy — homicide is a leading cause of pregnancy-associated death — but you’ve probably already got a plan for making sure the boyfriends or husbands of these people don’t assault them upon learning they’re expecting.
Also, I hope you’re prepared to have the talk with your 15-year-old daughter — the talk that I wish on no family, regardless of politics. The one where she tells you her boyfriend said he would wear a condom but didn’t. The one that happens 13 or 15 weeks into her pregnancy because she was afraid to tell you earlier, because she knew you believed abstinence was the only acceptable form of birth control. The one where she’s sobbing and terrified and you begin to fully realize that accidental pregnancies don’t happen to bad people, they happen to all kinds of people, and maybe not every accident needs to be punished with lifelong consequences.
The one where you explain that there is no option but to live with those consequences. The one where you explain that you made sure of it.
Your theme this year is “Equality begins in the womb,” which is really smart. I’m excited for you to reveal the sweeping legislation you have up your sleeve pursuant to this extraordinary dedication to equality. The immediate passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, perhaps? Racial and economic justice initiatives to specifically help Black women and poor women? I hope I’m not getting my hopes up. Otherwise, I would think the theme would read: “Equality begins in the womb, and also ends there.”
March for Life founder Nellie Gray vowed to hold a demonstration every year until Roe v. Wade was overturned, according to your organization’s website. Depending on the outcome of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization later this year, it might be your last march for this particular cause.
But once you have this thing you always wanted — state-sanctioned control over women’s bodies — your work is not finished. You are responsible for the pregnant people whose futures you have changed, and for their future children, and both are going to need a lot more than your prayers.
The March For Life activists should be ready to help shoulder the burdens they’ve created
By Monica Hesse, The Washington Post
A note to all the participants of Friday’s antiabortion March for Life rally, taking place in Washington:
I hope you’re preparing to make condoms rain from the sky. Buckets of them. Craploads, hurled from the cargo holds of the biggest planes you can find. Also, birth control pills. I hope every time a teenager opens their locker at school she finds 60 packs of Yaz.
You have been holding these marches since 1974, the year after Roe v. Wade, and guess what? You might have finally done it. You stacked the courts. Your lobbying efforts and voting patterns jammed three conservative justices on the Supreme Court’s bench during President Donald Trump’s term — never mind the hypocrisy of stonewalling Merrick Garland and then replacing Ruth Bader Ginsburg (this isn’t the March for Constitutional Etiquette, after all). That same court is now preparing to issue rulings that might overturn the precedent that guaranteed women control over their reproductive futures. So, congrats?
I hope you’re ready for your odious brave new world. I presume each and every one of you is planning to adopt several kids. Those chia seed-size embryos that you insist on calling pre-born children eventually will be born to parents who never wanted to be parents, and someone will need to step up to the plate. Since “adoption” has been your solution, you’re up, slugger. Surely you can spare the extra $233,000 that the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2015 estimated it takes to raise a child from birth to age 18. (If the cost sounds steep, one of your crisis pregnancy centers might be willing to toss in a box of Huggies.)
I hope that the 364 days you’re not attending this march, you’re marching for universal health care. Also, subsidized day care and universal preschool; I hope every Chick-fil-A sandwich will now come with a side of full-time nanny.
Also, if your feet aren’t too tired, maybe you could mix in some marches for mandated parental leave for both mothers and fathers, and for free therapy for all of the people whose bodies and souls have been traumatized via forced pregnancy and forced birth.
At the very least, I hope we can count on you to vote for candidates who care about these issues with the same righteousness you brought to supporting pro-life politicians.
Truly, we can’t wait to see all the work you personally have been doing to reduce unwanted pregnancies, besides lurking outside of Planned Parenthood and shouting at people who are trying to get Pap smears. (Have you been doing that work?)
Intimate-partner violence can escalate during pregnancy — homicide is a leading cause of pregnancy-associated death — but you’ve probably already got a plan for making sure the boyfriends or husbands of these people don’t assault them upon learning they’re expecting.
Also, I hope you’re prepared to have the talk with your 15-year-old daughter — the talk that I wish on no family, regardless of politics. The one where she tells you her boyfriend said he would wear a condom but didn’t. The one that happens 13 or 15 weeks into her pregnancy because she was afraid to tell you earlier, because she knew you believed abstinence was the only acceptable form of birth control. The one where she’s sobbing and terrified and you begin to fully realize that accidental pregnancies don’t happen to bad people, they happen to all kinds of people, and maybe not every accident needs to be punished with lifelong consequences.
The one where you explain that there is no option but to live with those consequences. The one where you explain that you made sure of it.
Your theme this year is “Equality begins in the womb,” which is really smart. I’m excited for you to reveal the sweeping legislation you have up your sleeve pursuant to this extraordinary dedication to equality. The immediate passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, perhaps? Racial and economic justice initiatives to specifically help Black women and poor women? I hope I’m not getting my hopes up. Otherwise, I would think the theme would read: “Equality begins in the womb, and also ends there.”
March for Life founder Nellie Gray vowed to hold a demonstration every year until Roe v. Wade was overturned, according to your organization’s website. Depending on the outcome of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization later this year, it might be your last march for this particular cause.
But once you have this thing you always wanted — state-sanctioned control over women’s bodies — your work is not finished. You are responsible for the pregnant people whose futures you have changed, and for their future children, and both are going to need a lot more than your prayers.
OF COURSE DONALD TRUMP BEARS PRIMARY BLAME FOR JAN. 6
Why do so many try to argue that he doesn’t?
By Philip Bump, The Washington Post
There is no shortage of hard-to-believe elements about the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 of last year, but one of the things that may be hardest to believe is that many Americans claim to think former president Donald Trump bears no blame for what occurred.
For most observers, it seems safe to say, this is a surreal assertion. That there had never before been a mob of outraged individuals who swarmed into the Capitol on any January 6, the day on which electoral votes had been counted for decades, was not a coincidence. Never before had the losing candidate in a presidential election repeatedly claimed that he had won, much less a losing candidate with an Internet-powered megaphone and a political base centered so squarely on his personal piques and interests.
Trump spent months before the 2020 election sowing the seeds for his subsequent dishonesty. Since before the 2016 election, he had claimed that voter fraud is rampant in the United States, which it isn’t. As the coronavirus pandemic upended election officials’ plans, Trump transitioned his rhetoric from false claims about in-person voting to false claims about mail-in ballots. Going into Nov. 3, 2020, experts fully expected the pattern that followed: Democrats, more wary of the virus, disproportionately cast votes by mail that in many places would be counted more slowly — meaning a predictable shift toward the Democratic candidate, Joe Biden. But for weeks before and then on the night of the election itself, Trump tried to derail this counting, insisting that only the votes already counted, ones that favored him, were enough to constitute victory.
When his loss was confirmed on the morning of Nov. 7, the real fight began. Trump had already been elevating any and all conspiracy theories about fraud that popped up in his various phone conversations and in his Twitter feed, but now he turned that effort more energetically toward getting political allies to intercede against Biden’s win.
He had help. Recognizing that Trump’s obsessions quickly created small opportunities for profit, his allies constructed a system to amplify the idea that the election had been stolen. It is important to reiterate that all of these assertions about rampant fraud either still lack any credible evidence or have been explicitly debunked. After 15 months of review, there has been no concrete demonstration that the vote was systematically subverted in one single county, much less a state or a collection of states. But it remained profitable in attention and money for Trump and his allies to say it had been.
By mid-December 2020, Trump’s attention turned to Jan. 6. That may be because the Lincoln Project, an effort led by former Republicans that centered on needling the president, had identified the day as the one on which Vice President Mike Pence would be forced to certify Trump’s loss. But Trump began explicitly encouraging people to come to Washington on that day and object to the election he said was stolen. (At a rally in Georgia two days before the riot, the WiFi password for press was “SeeYouJan6!”) So they came by the thousands. The White House was involved in planning a series of events that day, most obviously the rally at the Ellipse — during which Trump encouraged attendees to march to the Capitol as he again made false claims about the election being stolen.
Again, it’s weird to even have to restate all of this. Obviously the crowd that day was furious about an election they thought had been stolen, and obviously Trump had encouraged them to be there. It’s useful to remember that scale was important; had 30 Proud Boys shown up to try to storm the Capitol, it wouldn’t have worked. When hundreds of people decided to, it did. And those people were there and mad because of Trump. He opened the spigot fully on Nov. 3, 2020, and the Capitol was flooded two months later.
And yet. In a poll conducted by The Washington Post with the University of Maryland, nearly a quarter of Americans say Trump bears no responsibility for what happened at the Capitol a year ago. The majority of that group are Republicans, nearly half of whom claim to think Trump bears no blame. No blame. Not just “Trump was not the only factor,” but “Trump was not a factor.”
How? How can Americans believe that Trump is not culpable for what occurred, given how obvious that culpability is? I would argue there are three reasons.
Misinformation. As should be obvious, false claims about both the election and the riot have been central to the effort to distance Trump from that violence. That takes many forms, from sloppy efforts to rationalize his claims about fraud to dishonest presentations about what occurred that day.
Central to that latter effort has been Fox News’s Tucker Carlson. He has repeatedly elevated unproved or disproved claims about the instigation of the riot, including in a three-part series centered on alleging that government actors made it happen. Yahoo News’s Jon Ward looked closely at the series, finding — unsurprisingly — that Carlson does not make his purported case. This is not a new development for one of Carlson’s claims.
One form of misinformation that has been rampant since Jan. 6 is misinformation by omission, a simple failure by right-wing outlets to cover what happened in any great detail. Fox News, for example, covered sparingly the impeachment that followed the riot. In that recent Post-UMD poll, about a sixth of Republicans said that they didn’t think any police had been injured by those engaged in the riot, a deviation from reality that can perhaps be explained in part by the lack of attention paid to that detail in conservative media. Many on the right have isolated images, like shots of rioters walking through the Capitol that day, as evidence that the riot was mostly peaceful — a belief held by more than a third of Republicans.
Meanwhile, on the morning of the anniversary of the Capitol riot: pic.twitter.com/Ac9b9jQvKO — Josh Wingrove (@josh_wingrove) January 6, 2022
Rationalization. It has also been the case since shortly after the riot that some Trump supporters have sought to rationalize what occurred by comparing it to violence and vandalism that emerged after some protests during the summer of 2020.
This is not a great comparison for several reasons, including that the scale of that violence was often wildly overstated in the conservative media (again, see Fox) and that the Capitol riot was predicated on a demonstrably false claim about the election. Regardless, it’s a weird defense of the rioters to insist that they somehow saw such actions as justifiable, given what they believed had occurred the previous summer, as though robbing banks is justified by a series of burglaries.
It has long been a feature of Trump support that his claims and behavior need to be slotted into some category of acceptability. By January 2021, this process had been streamlined through repeated use. So it’s not that the actions were necessarily rationalized in this way by those engaged in the riot as it unfolded (though some did) as much as that this rationalization was applied after the fact to diversify culpability.
This is understandable. Millions of Americans invested in the idea of Trump as the salvation of American democracy. That’s hard to reconcile with his obvious effort to undermine the election results and his response to the riot itself as it unfolded, which could at its most generous be described as apathy.
Delusion. Less understandable is simple delusion. This overlaps with misinformation, certainly, but involves simple rejection of the obvious facts at hand. Such as that the riot was caused by antifa, a claim that emerged hours after the riot, was debunked and then re-rationalized. Deluded assessments of what occurred on that day are myriad and, in all cases, driven not by observed fact but desired outcome.
It's been a year. I knew some people would spin what happened, and I knew some others would twist into a pretzel to excuse it. Never in my wildest imagination did I think so many people would simply deny what they saw with their own eyes. — Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) January 6, 2022
None of us is perfectly clear-eyed about anything. But on some things, objective reality is not particularly obscured.
Jan. 6 happened because Donald Trump put into place the disinformation that it required and the call to action that energized it. Others bear blame, too, including law enforcement that was unprepared to prevent the attack despite myriad warnings, and Trump’s allies, who took his claims and turned them into a marketplace of dishonesty. But it all follows from Trump.
If Trump had held a news conference on Nov. 7, 2020, and announced that he recognized Biden’s win, there is no riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6. It is fundamentally Donald Trump’s fault, and there is no rational way to dispute that point.
Why do so many try to argue that he doesn’t?
By Philip Bump, The Washington Post
There is no shortage of hard-to-believe elements about the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 of last year, but one of the things that may be hardest to believe is that many Americans claim to think former president Donald Trump bears no blame for what occurred.
For most observers, it seems safe to say, this is a surreal assertion. That there had never before been a mob of outraged individuals who swarmed into the Capitol on any January 6, the day on which electoral votes had been counted for decades, was not a coincidence. Never before had the losing candidate in a presidential election repeatedly claimed that he had won, much less a losing candidate with an Internet-powered megaphone and a political base centered so squarely on his personal piques and interests.
Trump spent months before the 2020 election sowing the seeds for his subsequent dishonesty. Since before the 2016 election, he had claimed that voter fraud is rampant in the United States, which it isn’t. As the coronavirus pandemic upended election officials’ plans, Trump transitioned his rhetoric from false claims about in-person voting to false claims about mail-in ballots. Going into Nov. 3, 2020, experts fully expected the pattern that followed: Democrats, more wary of the virus, disproportionately cast votes by mail that in many places would be counted more slowly — meaning a predictable shift toward the Democratic candidate, Joe Biden. But for weeks before and then on the night of the election itself, Trump tried to derail this counting, insisting that only the votes already counted, ones that favored him, were enough to constitute victory.
When his loss was confirmed on the morning of Nov. 7, the real fight began. Trump had already been elevating any and all conspiracy theories about fraud that popped up in his various phone conversations and in his Twitter feed, but now he turned that effort more energetically toward getting political allies to intercede against Biden’s win.
He had help. Recognizing that Trump’s obsessions quickly created small opportunities for profit, his allies constructed a system to amplify the idea that the election had been stolen. It is important to reiterate that all of these assertions about rampant fraud either still lack any credible evidence or have been explicitly debunked. After 15 months of review, there has been no concrete demonstration that the vote was systematically subverted in one single county, much less a state or a collection of states. But it remained profitable in attention and money for Trump and his allies to say it had been.
By mid-December 2020, Trump’s attention turned to Jan. 6. That may be because the Lincoln Project, an effort led by former Republicans that centered on needling the president, had identified the day as the one on which Vice President Mike Pence would be forced to certify Trump’s loss. But Trump began explicitly encouraging people to come to Washington on that day and object to the election he said was stolen. (At a rally in Georgia two days before the riot, the WiFi password for press was “SeeYouJan6!”) So they came by the thousands. The White House was involved in planning a series of events that day, most obviously the rally at the Ellipse — during which Trump encouraged attendees to march to the Capitol as he again made false claims about the election being stolen.
Again, it’s weird to even have to restate all of this. Obviously the crowd that day was furious about an election they thought had been stolen, and obviously Trump had encouraged them to be there. It’s useful to remember that scale was important; had 30 Proud Boys shown up to try to storm the Capitol, it wouldn’t have worked. When hundreds of people decided to, it did. And those people were there and mad because of Trump. He opened the spigot fully on Nov. 3, 2020, and the Capitol was flooded two months later.
And yet. In a poll conducted by The Washington Post with the University of Maryland, nearly a quarter of Americans say Trump bears no responsibility for what happened at the Capitol a year ago. The majority of that group are Republicans, nearly half of whom claim to think Trump bears no blame. No blame. Not just “Trump was not the only factor,” but “Trump was not a factor.”
How? How can Americans believe that Trump is not culpable for what occurred, given how obvious that culpability is? I would argue there are three reasons.
Misinformation. As should be obvious, false claims about both the election and the riot have been central to the effort to distance Trump from that violence. That takes many forms, from sloppy efforts to rationalize his claims about fraud to dishonest presentations about what occurred that day.
Central to that latter effort has been Fox News’s Tucker Carlson. He has repeatedly elevated unproved or disproved claims about the instigation of the riot, including in a three-part series centered on alleging that government actors made it happen. Yahoo News’s Jon Ward looked closely at the series, finding — unsurprisingly — that Carlson does not make his purported case. This is not a new development for one of Carlson’s claims.
One form of misinformation that has been rampant since Jan. 6 is misinformation by omission, a simple failure by right-wing outlets to cover what happened in any great detail. Fox News, for example, covered sparingly the impeachment that followed the riot. In that recent Post-UMD poll, about a sixth of Republicans said that they didn’t think any police had been injured by those engaged in the riot, a deviation from reality that can perhaps be explained in part by the lack of attention paid to that detail in conservative media. Many on the right have isolated images, like shots of rioters walking through the Capitol that day, as evidence that the riot was mostly peaceful — a belief held by more than a third of Republicans.
Meanwhile, on the morning of the anniversary of the Capitol riot: pic.twitter.com/Ac9b9jQvKO — Josh Wingrove (@josh_wingrove) January 6, 2022
Rationalization. It has also been the case since shortly after the riot that some Trump supporters have sought to rationalize what occurred by comparing it to violence and vandalism that emerged after some protests during the summer of 2020.
This is not a great comparison for several reasons, including that the scale of that violence was often wildly overstated in the conservative media (again, see Fox) and that the Capitol riot was predicated on a demonstrably false claim about the election. Regardless, it’s a weird defense of the rioters to insist that they somehow saw such actions as justifiable, given what they believed had occurred the previous summer, as though robbing banks is justified by a series of burglaries.
It has long been a feature of Trump support that his claims and behavior need to be slotted into some category of acceptability. By January 2021, this process had been streamlined through repeated use. So it’s not that the actions were necessarily rationalized in this way by those engaged in the riot as it unfolded (though some did) as much as that this rationalization was applied after the fact to diversify culpability.
This is understandable. Millions of Americans invested in the idea of Trump as the salvation of American democracy. That’s hard to reconcile with his obvious effort to undermine the election results and his response to the riot itself as it unfolded, which could at its most generous be described as apathy.
Delusion. Less understandable is simple delusion. This overlaps with misinformation, certainly, but involves simple rejection of the obvious facts at hand. Such as that the riot was caused by antifa, a claim that emerged hours after the riot, was debunked and then re-rationalized. Deluded assessments of what occurred on that day are myriad and, in all cases, driven not by observed fact but desired outcome.
It's been a year. I knew some people would spin what happened, and I knew some others would twist into a pretzel to excuse it. Never in my wildest imagination did I think so many people would simply deny what they saw with their own eyes. — Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) January 6, 2022
None of us is perfectly clear-eyed about anything. But on some things, objective reality is not particularly obscured.
Jan. 6 happened because Donald Trump put into place the disinformation that it required and the call to action that energized it. Others bear blame, too, including law enforcement that was unprepared to prevent the attack despite myriad warnings, and Trump’s allies, who took his claims and turned them into a marketplace of dishonesty. But it all follows from Trump.
If Trump had held a news conference on Nov. 7, 2020, and announced that he recognized Biden’s win, there is no riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6. It is fundamentally Donald Trump’s fault, and there is no rational way to dispute that point.
TOO MANY REPUBLICANS CONDONE VIOLENCE, AND EVEN MORE EXONERATE TRUMP
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
As we approach the first anniversary of the violent insurrection triggered by President Donald Trump, the failed coup appears to have solidified a block of voters who repudiate facts and democracy.
The latest Post-University of Maryland poll contains troubling news. “The percentage of Americans who say violent action against the government is justified at times stands at 34 percent, which is considerably higher than in past polls by The Post or other major news organizations dating back more than two decades.” And even more ready to resort to violence are independents, reminding us that “independent” does not mean moderate. (“The new survey finds 40 percent of Republicans, 41 percent of independents and 23 percent of Democrats saying violence is sometimes justified,” The Post reported.)
An overwhelming majority (72%) of Americans believe the people involved in the attack on the Capitol were “threatening democracy,” while 1 in 4 Americans believes that the individuals involved were “protecting democracy.” Broken down by party identification, Democrats are nearly unanimous (96%) in believing that those involved in the attacks were threatening democracy. Republicans are more split, with 45% saying it was a threat and 52% saying those involved in the riot were “protecting democracy.”
One can take solace, I suppose, that 62 percent of Americans reject violence, and 72 percent recognized Jan. 6 was a threat to democracy. However, when an exceedingly high proportion of one of the two major political parties does not accept the sanctity of elections and the peaceful transfer of power, it is no exaggeration to say democracy itself is on the ballot this year. Returning to power a party openly hostile to democracy is setting ourselves up for political self destruction.
When it comes to blame for the siege at the Capitol, 72 percent of Republicans in The Post/UMD poll and 78 percent in the ABC/Ipsos refuse to hold Trump responsible or say they hold him only somewhat responsible. It’s telling that so many Republicans say in theory that violence may be needed, but when it comes to implicating their leader in the insurrection, they’d rather deny reality. Perhaps associating their party’s leader with a violent coup isn’t such an inviting prospect after all.
While there is a greater share of Republicans willing to inhabit a parallel universe in which Trump is innocent than there is of those who in theory support violence, they are more isolated than one might image. An overwhelming share of Democrats (92 percent) and a healthy majority of Independents (57 percent) understand he at the very least bears a good amount of responsibility for the attack.
For the habitually optimistic, there is a smidgen of positive news. In The Post/UMD poll, “About 7 in 10 Americans say Biden’s election as president was legitimate, but that leaves almost 3 in 10 who say it was not, including 58 percent of Republicans and 27 percent of independents.” The share of Republicans who say he was not elected legitimately has thankfully dropped from 70 to 58 percent since last January. Well, a drop in 12 points is not nothing. (The ABC/Ipsos poll shows less movement among Republicans; in that survey, 71 percent “sided with Trump’s false claims that he was the rightful winner.”)
The numbers should remind us that the threat to democracy may be greater than ever. As we enter one of the most perilous years for the American experiment since 1861, we would do well to keep several points in mind:
First, it matters not at all whether voters find democracy a compelling issue for the 2022 campaign; as a matter of intellectual honesty and public education Democrats must stay on the issue and hold Trump and his cronies responsible for his actions. They must continue to defend voting rights and nonpartisan election administration; to do otherwise is to cede the field to democracy’s foes. Moreover, given the strong support for democracy and for nonviolence, this is a popular issue, if not a motivating one.
That brings us to the next takeaway: President Biden needs a knockout Jan. 6 speech denouncing the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen and condemning the GOP’s growing acceptance of violence. He might even point out to reality-based voters how ludicrous and irresponsible the GOP is in making the “big lie” an article of faith for their party.
In thinking about the speech, Biden might recall Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural address as California’s governor on Jan. 5, 1967:
We are participating in the orderly transfer of administrative authority by direction of the people. And this is the simple magic which makes a commonplace routine a near miracle to many of the world’s inhabitants: The continuing fact that the people, by democratic process, can delegate this power, yet retain custody of it.
Perhaps you and I have lived with this miracle too long to be properly appreciative. Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not our by inheritance, it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again.
Biden should forcefully make the case that the essence of democracy is precisely the “orderly transfer of administrative authority by direction of the people.” Any individual or party who claims no election can be legitimate if his side loses violates that fundamental precept. Such voices take themselves outside a democratic compact that boils down to: “The people decide.”
There should be perfect clarity: If you are not prepared to accept defeat in an election, you do not believe in democracy. You do not believe in America. Biden needs to challenge Republicans to reaffirm the basic building blocks of democracy: Easy access to voting, nonpolitical election administration and government by the people (without subterfuge, chicanery and legal hocus-pocus).
Finally, Attorney General Merrick Garland should pay close attention. The danger in not holding Trump and associates responsible for any violation of federal laws would vastly outweigh the risk of political backlash among his followers. It is the MAGA cult’s very determination to exonerate Trump and simultaneously excuse violence that should, when the facts are all in, compel prosecution of those who use extralegal means to retain power.
These sobering poll results underscore how important it will be for the House select committee probing Jan. 6 to tee up complete cases for possible prosecution. Refusing to prosecute clear violations of law would be a moral and constitutional failure as glaring as the Republicans’ refusal to accept their 2020 defeat. Moreover, it would be an invitation to the insurrectionists to try it again.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
As we approach the first anniversary of the violent insurrection triggered by President Donald Trump, the failed coup appears to have solidified a block of voters who repudiate facts and democracy.
The latest Post-University of Maryland poll contains troubling news. “The percentage of Americans who say violent action against the government is justified at times stands at 34 percent, which is considerably higher than in past polls by The Post or other major news organizations dating back more than two decades.” And even more ready to resort to violence are independents, reminding us that “independent” does not mean moderate. (“The new survey finds 40 percent of Republicans, 41 percent of independents and 23 percent of Democrats saying violence is sometimes justified,” The Post reported.)
An overwhelming majority (72%) of Americans believe the people involved in the attack on the Capitol were “threatening democracy,” while 1 in 4 Americans believes that the individuals involved were “protecting democracy.” Broken down by party identification, Democrats are nearly unanimous (96%) in believing that those involved in the attacks were threatening democracy. Republicans are more split, with 45% saying it was a threat and 52% saying those involved in the riot were “protecting democracy.”
One can take solace, I suppose, that 62 percent of Americans reject violence, and 72 percent recognized Jan. 6 was a threat to democracy. However, when an exceedingly high proportion of one of the two major political parties does not accept the sanctity of elections and the peaceful transfer of power, it is no exaggeration to say democracy itself is on the ballot this year. Returning to power a party openly hostile to democracy is setting ourselves up for political self destruction.
When it comes to blame for the siege at the Capitol, 72 percent of Republicans in The Post/UMD poll and 78 percent in the ABC/Ipsos refuse to hold Trump responsible or say they hold him only somewhat responsible. It’s telling that so many Republicans say in theory that violence may be needed, but when it comes to implicating their leader in the insurrection, they’d rather deny reality. Perhaps associating their party’s leader with a violent coup isn’t such an inviting prospect after all.
While there is a greater share of Republicans willing to inhabit a parallel universe in which Trump is innocent than there is of those who in theory support violence, they are more isolated than one might image. An overwhelming share of Democrats (92 percent) and a healthy majority of Independents (57 percent) understand he at the very least bears a good amount of responsibility for the attack.
For the habitually optimistic, there is a smidgen of positive news. In The Post/UMD poll, “About 7 in 10 Americans say Biden’s election as president was legitimate, but that leaves almost 3 in 10 who say it was not, including 58 percent of Republicans and 27 percent of independents.” The share of Republicans who say he was not elected legitimately has thankfully dropped from 70 to 58 percent since last January. Well, a drop in 12 points is not nothing. (The ABC/Ipsos poll shows less movement among Republicans; in that survey, 71 percent “sided with Trump’s false claims that he was the rightful winner.”)
The numbers should remind us that the threat to democracy may be greater than ever. As we enter one of the most perilous years for the American experiment since 1861, we would do well to keep several points in mind:
First, it matters not at all whether voters find democracy a compelling issue for the 2022 campaign; as a matter of intellectual honesty and public education Democrats must stay on the issue and hold Trump and his cronies responsible for his actions. They must continue to defend voting rights and nonpartisan election administration; to do otherwise is to cede the field to democracy’s foes. Moreover, given the strong support for democracy and for nonviolence, this is a popular issue, if not a motivating one.
That brings us to the next takeaway: President Biden needs a knockout Jan. 6 speech denouncing the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen and condemning the GOP’s growing acceptance of violence. He might even point out to reality-based voters how ludicrous and irresponsible the GOP is in making the “big lie” an article of faith for their party.
In thinking about the speech, Biden might recall Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural address as California’s governor on Jan. 5, 1967:
We are participating in the orderly transfer of administrative authority by direction of the people. And this is the simple magic which makes a commonplace routine a near miracle to many of the world’s inhabitants: The continuing fact that the people, by democratic process, can delegate this power, yet retain custody of it.
Perhaps you and I have lived with this miracle too long to be properly appreciative. Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not our by inheritance, it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again.
Biden should forcefully make the case that the essence of democracy is precisely the “orderly transfer of administrative authority by direction of the people.” Any individual or party who claims no election can be legitimate if his side loses violates that fundamental precept. Such voices take themselves outside a democratic compact that boils down to: “The people decide.”
There should be perfect clarity: If you are not prepared to accept defeat in an election, you do not believe in democracy. You do not believe in America. Biden needs to challenge Republicans to reaffirm the basic building blocks of democracy: Easy access to voting, nonpolitical election administration and government by the people (without subterfuge, chicanery and legal hocus-pocus).
Finally, Attorney General Merrick Garland should pay close attention. The danger in not holding Trump and associates responsible for any violation of federal laws would vastly outweigh the risk of political backlash among his followers. It is the MAGA cult’s very determination to exonerate Trump and simultaneously excuse violence that should, when the facts are all in, compel prosecution of those who use extralegal means to retain power.
These sobering poll results underscore how important it will be for the House select committee probing Jan. 6 to tee up complete cases for possible prosecution. Refusing to prosecute clear violations of law would be a moral and constitutional failure as glaring as the Republicans’ refusal to accept their 2020 defeat. Moreover, it would be an invitation to the insurrectionists to try it again.
AFTER 4 KILLINGS, ‘OFFICER OF THE YEAR’ IS STILL ON THE JOB
A Pennsylvania state trooper was returned to duty following three investigations by his own agency. A fourth inquiry is underway.
By Kim Barker, Steve Eder and David D. Kirkpatrick, The New York Times
LEBANON, Pa. — In November 2008, Pennsylvania Trooper Jay Splain was honored at a county law enforcement banquet as a hero, the police officer of the year. The reason: He had shot and killed a suicidal man who allegedly pointed an Uzi submachine gun at him.
That was the first killing. Trooper Splain went on to fatally shoot three more people in separate incidents, an extraordinary tally for an officer responsible for patrolling largely rural areas with low rates of violent crime. All four who died were troubled, struggling with drugs, mental illness or both. In two cases, including that of the man with the Uzi, family members had called the police for help because their relatives had threatened to kill themselves.
The most recent death was last month, when Trooper Splain shot an unarmed man in his Volkswagen Beetle. After learning that the officer had previously killed three other people over nearly 15 years, the man’s sister, Autumn Krouse, asked, “Why would that person still be employed?”
Trooper Splain is an outlier. Most officers never fire their weapons. Until now, his full record of killings has not been disclosed; the Pennsylvania State Police even successfully fought a lawsuit seeking to identify him and provide other details in one shooting. In the agency’s more than a century of policing, no officer has ever been prosecuted for fatally shooting someone, according to a spokesman. That history aligns with a longstanding pattern across the country of little accountability for police officers’ use of deadly force.
Prosecutors and a grand jury concluded that Trooper Splain’s first three lethal shootings were justified, and an inquiry into the most recent one is ongoing. Rather than have independent outsiders look into the killings, the police agency has conducted its own investigations — which were led by officers from his unit — raising questions about the rigor of the inquiries.
“When a police officer has shot at and potentially killed a civilian, the public will never trust the police agency to investigate itself and be unbiased,” said Tom Hogan, the former district attorney of Chester County, Pa. A Republican, he helped write recommendations by the state prosecutors’ association for independent investigations — a reform that many departments resist, but one sought by the national prosecutors’ association and major policing groups.
In its review of Trooper Splain’s killings, The New York Times found inconsistencies between the evidence of what occurred and what the state police said had happened. The officer appeared to have departed from police protocols in several of the fatal confrontations, according to interviews and an examination of investigative and court records.
In three of the encounters, the people killed were in vehicles. The trooper shot two unarmed drivers because they were allegedly using their vehicles as weapons, a frequent rationale, The Times found in an earlier investigation that uncovered hundreds of seemingly avoidable killings by the police — often with impunity. Many large police departments ban shooting at moving vehicles because it is very often dangerous, ineffective and unnecessary.
Trooper Splain, who is on desk duty until the pending inquiry is completed, did not return calls or reply to a letter seeking comment. The other troopers who were involved in the shootings or who led the investigations declined to comment or did not respond to messages. David Kennedy, the president of the state troopers’ union, responded on Trooper Splain’s behalf to written questions, saying he had acted with courage and “was forced to make split-second decisions no one hopes they ever have to make.”
Cpl. Brent Miller, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania State Police, said, “We are confident we have the resources to investigate such incidents thoroughly and objectively.” He referred questions on the killings to district attorneys. Asked whether Trooper Splain had ever faced disciplinary action, Cpl. Miller said that any such records were confidential.
All troopers involved in shootings must attend specialized training to assess their physical and mental fitness before returning to active duty, he said, adding that in some cases, troopers may also be required to undergo use-of-force training at the police academy.
Darrel W. Stephens, a former longtime police chief who now helps run a policing research institute at Florida State University, called the four shootings a “red flag.”
“Four is incredibly unusual,” he said. “That is out there on the edge.” Even if the shootings can be legally justified, he said, the pattern needs to be “examined very closely” to determine why the same officer repeatedly resorted to deadly force. “Because they can, it doesn’t mean they should,” he said.
It’s not clear how common it is for police officers to fatally shoot multiple people during their careers. No database keeps track. In 2012, an officer in Scottsdale, Ariz., retired after his sixth fatal shooting. In 2015, a sheriff’s deputy in Broward County, Fla., was involved in his fourth fatal shooting. Both officers belonged to SWAT teams, called into dangerous situations where gunfire is most common.
Trooper Splain, 41, is a patrol officer who works in largely rural swaths of Pennsylvania, where the state police rarely kill anyone. During his time on the force, he has been responsible for four of the nine fatal shootings by troopers in the three counties where they occurred, according to a Times analysis of cases identified by the research group Fatal Encounters. The killings by Trooper Splain were reported by local news outlets, although he was mentioned by name only in one case.
From a young age, Jay Splain seemed inspired by the military. The son of a radiologist and a nurse, he grew up in Allentown, Pa., and attended the elite Hill prep school outside Philadelphia. He belonged to the school’s gun club. His senior yearbook page pictured him holding a rifle, cited the motto of the U.S. Marine Corps and quoted Stonewall Jackson, the Confederate general, twice.
He went on to the Virginia Military Institute, where Jackson had once been an artillery instructor. Jay Splain enrolled in a military officer training program, joined the school’s competitive rifle team and the Semper Fi Society, and referred to his “warrior image” in his college yearbook bio.
But in 2004 Mr. Splain became a state trooper, with duties like making D.U.I. arrests, tracking down thieves and, on one occasion, catching a suspect in “a paintball incident,” state police newsletters show. His former college roommate, Army Lt. Col. Nicholas Shallcross, said that his ambitions had shifted during college from the military to law enforcement.
Trooper Splain, the lieutenant colonel said, saw himself as “a protector.”
A Call For Help
In July 2007, Joseph Rotkewicz, 37, who had bipolar disorder, took two of his brother’s guns into a room of his family’s home and repeatedly threatened to kill himself, pointing a gun at his head. His father had recently died, and his girlfriend had had an affair with his best friend.
For an hour, his sister, Linda Hunsicker, and a friend, Hans Frendt, tried to talk him down, Ms. Hunsicker recalled in an interview. Then Mr. Rotkewicz fired at least two shots at the ceiling. Ms. Hunsicker said her brother never threatened her or Mr. Frendt.
“He just kept begging me not to call the cops,” she recalled in an interview. “I wish I would have listened.”
Emergency operators told her to go outside; the two men stayed indoors. Mr. Rotkewicz used electrical tape to strap the Uzi to his neck and chest, so the barrel pointed up at his chin, Mr. Frendt later said.
At about 5 p.m., at least a dozen state troopers showed up, Ms. Hunsicker recalled; a specially trained SWAT-style negotiating team typically responds to such situations. Police tried once to call the house, but Ms. Hunsicker had brought the cordless phone out with her.
With a person threatening to harm only himself, “the overarching principle is, slow things down and don’t force a confrontation,” said Ashley Heiberger, a consultant to police departments and a former captain in Bethlehem, Pa.
Entering a house to challenge someone threatening suicide “is not consistent with generally accepted law enforcement practices,” he added, “and good officers and good agencies have been emphasizing these concepts and principles for decades.”
Current Pennsylvania State Police regulations call for troopers dealing with someone who is mentally ill to “take steps to calm/de-escalate the situation, when feasible,” and to “assume a quiet, nonthreatening manner.”
Ms. Hunsicker said no one had used a bullhorn or tried other ways to resolve her brother’s crisis peacefully. Instead, Trooper Splain and another trooper eventually entered the house. Mr. Frendt, still inside, later told the deputy coroner that the troopers ordered him to leave, the coroner’s report said.
On his way out, he heard one of them demand that Mr. Rotkewicz drop his weapon, followed by two gunshots, the report said.
Trooper Splain shot Mr. Rotkewicz twice in the chest, records show. Pennsylvania State Police later said that Mr. Rotkewicz had pointed the Uzi at Trooper Splain.
For this, his unit named him trooper of the year. In a letter later nominating Trooper Splain for the Lehigh County officer of the year, his commanding officer wrote that Mr. Rotkewicz had a “history of mental disease” and was “threatening his life and the lives of others.”
Trooper Splain had seen Mr. Rotkewicz holding the Uzi beneath his chin, the letter said, but it did not mention any electrical tape. The letter then said Mr. Rotkewicz “ignored repeated orders from Trooper Splain to stop and drop the firearm” and “lowered the gun forward” toward the trooper.
In a court filing years later, a lawyer for the state police acknowledged that Mr. Rotkewicz had affixed the Uzi “to his chest and neck by means of the black colored electrical tape.” Although it’s possible Mr. Rotkewicz broke the tape, the forensic pathologist who performed the autopsy wrote, “The tape has been wrapped several times about the neck and is kinked in several areas.”
The Pennsylvania State Police typically assign a lead investigator from the same troop’s major case team to lead the criminal inquiry. At the time, Trooper Splain worked out of the headquarters of Troop M — the same barracks as the lead investigator.
Joseph Kuhns, a criminologist at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte who did a study for the Major Cities Chiefs Association on investigations of police shootings, called it “highly unusual” to assign officers from the same unit to examine a shooting.
For almost 10 years, the state police resisted Ms. Hunsicker’s efforts to obtain the police investigative report so she could find out what happened to her brother. In a court filing, her lawyer said the police’s refusal to provide the report was an effort to “cover up wrongful conduct.” She didn’t know the name of the officer who killed her brother until a Times reporter told her.
James B. Martin, a Republican who is the longtime district attorney of Lehigh County, said in an interview that, after meeting with the lead investigator, he had ruled the shooting justified — a decision he called a “no-brainer.” He said he did not recall any claims that the gun had been taped to Mr. Rotkewicz.
Mr. Martin saw nothing wrong with allowing the police to investigate themselves.
“The Pennsylvania State Police is a troop of 4,500 very well-qualified police officers who do an excellent job, and their integrity, as far as I’m concerned, is beyond reproach,” he said.
A Different Choice
On a Saturday in May 2017, Anthony Ardo threatened to kill himself by blowing his head off with an explosive. Addicted to drugs for years, the 47-year-old was reeling after a breakup and being evicted by his mother, Jean Monaghan. After she called 911 seeking help for him, Trooper Splain and a junior trooper, Eddie Pagan, came to her family farm and persuaded her to lure him back.
Mr. Ardo pulled up but then appeared to reverse his Buick Reatta, according to the officers’ accounts. Rather than let him go, the troopers ran out the back door and got in their two patrol cars, hidden from view. They trapped the Buick between their cruisers, hopped out and drew their firearms, the troopers told police investigators.
Within seconds, the troopers began shooting, according to Ms. Monaghan. Lawyers for Ms. Monaghan said they believe that Trooper Splain, who fired nine times, killed Mr. Ardo with the last three bullets. The troopers later said they feared for their lives, according to court filings, as Mr. Ardo, sitting in the driver’s seat, appeared to be lighting something around his neck. That turned out to be a common aerial firework.
In an interview, the dead man’s mother wondered why the officers hadn’t tried to de-escalate the situation by stepping away. “They rushed him and didn’t even give him a chance,” said Ms. Monaghan, who said she watched the confrontation from her window and later filed a wrongful-death lawsuit. She added, “They were in no way in harm’s way if they would have just backed up and left him alone.”
The review by The Times of hundreds of killings of unarmed motorists by police found that mental health crises were a recurring theme. In at least 10 cases, callers asked the police to check on the welfare of people threatening suicide or struggling from mental illness. Instead, the responding officers shot the drivers and later claimed they feared that they or someone else would be run over.
Cpl. Miller said troopers use “their discretion to assess the current situation and resources available to them for every incident.” He said the agency couldn’t comment on pending litigation.
Within an hour of Mr. Ardo’s shooting, a state police lieutenant called John Morganelli, the district attorney in Northampton County and a Democrat, to ask how the prosecutor wanted to handle the investigation, according to a grand-jury report later made public. Mr. Morganelli decided his office would take the lead and assigned a county detective.
But the lieutenant soon told Mr. Morganelli that his higher-up bosses “would not yield the criminal investigation,” the report said.
Apparently because of that dispute, no one interviewed either trooper for about a month. During that time, the two men talked to each other and watched dash-camera videos of the shooting, they acknowledged later. Law enforcement experts warn that allowing officers to share information before interviews can lead them to align their stories.
Trooper Splain disclosed his earlier fatal shooting to Trooper Pagan, both men said in depositions. “Most of the conversations revolved around him giving me advice as to how to handle the stress,” Trooper Pagan said.
State police assigned an investigator from Troop M’s major case team to lead the inquiry. Superior officers later told the grand jury that they rely on investigating troopers to report any potential conflicts of interest.
Trooper Michael Everk, the lead investigator, declined to comment for this article. He had worked with Trooper Splain on a marijuana bust, state police newsletters show. While interviewing the troopers, Trooper Everk referred to Trooper Pagan as “Eddie” several times instead of speaking more formally, as he did in other interviews.
Mr. Morganelli brought the case to a grand jury, which concluded that the shooting was justified. But the jurors also issued a second, public report accusing state police leaders of a “somewhat arrogant view of superiority” over other law enforcement agencies. The panel also found investigators gave troopers “special treatment” that is “not generally afforded to others who are the subject of a criminal investigation.”
The next year, Trooper Splain was moved to Troop L in Lebanon County.
‘The Gravest of Situations’
Pier Hess Graf, the Lebanon County district attorney, hosts an annual fund-raiser, “Back the Blue,” for a Pennsylvania nonprofit that helps the families of slain officers. Her husband is a state police corporal.
Advocates of reform say such apparent conflicts of interest highlight the need for independent, arms-length criminal investigations into killings by the police. Some police departments now call in district attorneys from neighboring counties, others have independent units to investigate fatalities. In recent years, states including California, New Jersey, and New York shifted many of these investigations to the state attorney general’s office.
But last year, Ms. Graf oversaw an investigation into another fatal shooting involving Trooper Splain. At the time, her husband was based in the same barracks.
Early on March 16, 2020, Charity Thome, 42, who had mental illness and drug addiction, fled officers after she was caught trying to break into her former home, records show.
Officer Ryan Haase of the North Lebanon Police Department started pursuing her Honda Accord; he soon told dispatchers he was ending the chase because, with few cars on the road at that hour, the woman was not endangering the public.
But then Trooper Splain and a rookie, Trooper Matthew Haber, joined him. Ms. Thome led the police on a “lengthy high-speed chase,” Ms. Graf, the district attorney, said later, with “no regard for traffic lights, signs, police sirens, other vehicles on the roadway or the safety of the general public.”
Many police departments ban high-speed pursuits of nonviolent offenders, especially if officers know who they are and can find them later. Instead, records show, Trooper Splain performed a risky maneuver to force Ms. Thome to stop.
The Accord spun out into a field. Ms. Thome then drove into Officer Haase’s S.U.V. The two troopers jumped out of their vehicle, guns drawn. “Stop, stop, get out of the car, show me your hands,” Trooper Splain recalled shouting, according to a police interview quoted in a lawsuit filed by Ms. Thome’s family.
He fired first, followed by the rookie. Ms. Thome, hit seven times, died almost instantly, according to the lawsuit.
In an April 2020 press release describing the killing, Ms. Graf, the prosecutor, said Ms. Thome “accelerated forward and drove into” the officer’s vehicle. The release also described Troopers Splain and Haber as saying they feared multiple outcomes, including Ms. Thome reversing and running over officers or continuing “to ram” the S.U.V.
But Officer Haase estimated her speed to be five miles an hour, adding that he was more worried about damage to his vehicle than about his safety, according to his interviews with police included in the lawsuit. Neither vehicle’s airbags deployed, the lawsuit said; a photograph showed that the S.U.V. sustained minimal damage.
No police commands could be heard in a dash-camera video. Trooper Splain told police 30 seconds had elapsed between his leaving the car and shooting. The video, included in the lawsuit, shows it took only a few seconds.
“Their job was to talk her out of the vehicle and into safety,” said Thomas Kline, a lawyer for Ms. Thome’s family. “And instead, they did just the opposite, which was to fire multiple rounds of bullets into her pinned-down vehicle, leaving her defenseless and tragically dead.”
Agency policy says Pennsylvania state troopers should not shoot at moving vehicles unless the driver “poses an imminent danger of death or serious bodily injury,” or if shooting is the last resort to prevent a suspect in a violent felony from escaping.
In the release, Ms. Graf said she had assigned her detective bureau to oversee the investigation, which involved several agencies. It drew on the state police inquiry, which was led by an investigator based out of the same troop as Trooper Splain, The Times found.
Ms. Graf had determined that the shooting was justified after about a month — a relatively fast conclusion compared to similar inquiries reviewed by reporters. In response to questions from The Times, Ms. Graf didn’t address any potential conflict of interest and said she stood by her decisions.
“Law enforcement involved in this case committed the most serious human act — they took a life,” Ms. Graf said in the press release announcing her ruling. She added, “They did so knowing the use of deadly force is necessary in only the gravest of situations.”
The 4th Killing
Andy Dzwonchyk, a 40-year-old metal worker who had once been named “loudest laugh” and voted president of his high school class, was unraveling by November.
Amy Hastings, his girlfriend of 20 years, had left, weary of his drug use. She obtained a protection order after he badgered her to come back and talked of killing himself in front of their two sons if she did not return. “Andy never threatened me or the kids,” Ms. Hastings said in an interview.
At about 10:40 p.m. on Nov. 7, Ms. Hastings called 911 because Mr. Dzwonchyk kept texting, in violation of the order. Two troopers showed up, including Jay Splain.
While Ms. Hastings talked to them, Mr. Dzwonchyk, who was caring for their sons, texted again, saying he needed a thermometer for one boy, who was sick, Ms. Hastings recalled. She went inside because it was cold. Then Mr. Dzwonchyk, who lived down the road from where she was staying, drove up.
The troopers tried to arrest Mr. Dzwonchyk in his car, but a struggle ensued, according to a police spokesman at a press conference the next morning. Trooper David Beohm said one officer had gotten caught inside the vehicle, which advanced and reversed, dragging him, although he was not injured.
“It wasn’t like a real fast back-and-forth,” Trooper Beohm said.
Mr. Dzwonchyk’s 1999 Beetle was a stick-shift, making it difficult to go forward and backward quickly. Attempts to subdue Mr. Dzwonchyk with a Taser didn’t work, according to the spokesman. Only then, he said, did the other officer fire his weapon.
That was Trooper Splain.
A Pennsylvania state trooper was returned to duty following three investigations by his own agency. A fourth inquiry is underway.
By Kim Barker, Steve Eder and David D. Kirkpatrick, The New York Times
LEBANON, Pa. — In November 2008, Pennsylvania Trooper Jay Splain was honored at a county law enforcement banquet as a hero, the police officer of the year. The reason: He had shot and killed a suicidal man who allegedly pointed an Uzi submachine gun at him.
That was the first killing. Trooper Splain went on to fatally shoot three more people in separate incidents, an extraordinary tally for an officer responsible for patrolling largely rural areas with low rates of violent crime. All four who died were troubled, struggling with drugs, mental illness or both. In two cases, including that of the man with the Uzi, family members had called the police for help because their relatives had threatened to kill themselves.
The most recent death was last month, when Trooper Splain shot an unarmed man in his Volkswagen Beetle. After learning that the officer had previously killed three other people over nearly 15 years, the man’s sister, Autumn Krouse, asked, “Why would that person still be employed?”
Trooper Splain is an outlier. Most officers never fire their weapons. Until now, his full record of killings has not been disclosed; the Pennsylvania State Police even successfully fought a lawsuit seeking to identify him and provide other details in one shooting. In the agency’s more than a century of policing, no officer has ever been prosecuted for fatally shooting someone, according to a spokesman. That history aligns with a longstanding pattern across the country of little accountability for police officers’ use of deadly force.
Prosecutors and a grand jury concluded that Trooper Splain’s first three lethal shootings were justified, and an inquiry into the most recent one is ongoing. Rather than have independent outsiders look into the killings, the police agency has conducted its own investigations — which were led by officers from his unit — raising questions about the rigor of the inquiries.
“When a police officer has shot at and potentially killed a civilian, the public will never trust the police agency to investigate itself and be unbiased,” said Tom Hogan, the former district attorney of Chester County, Pa. A Republican, he helped write recommendations by the state prosecutors’ association for independent investigations — a reform that many departments resist, but one sought by the national prosecutors’ association and major policing groups.
In its review of Trooper Splain’s killings, The New York Times found inconsistencies between the evidence of what occurred and what the state police said had happened. The officer appeared to have departed from police protocols in several of the fatal confrontations, according to interviews and an examination of investigative and court records.
In three of the encounters, the people killed were in vehicles. The trooper shot two unarmed drivers because they were allegedly using their vehicles as weapons, a frequent rationale, The Times found in an earlier investigation that uncovered hundreds of seemingly avoidable killings by the police — often with impunity. Many large police departments ban shooting at moving vehicles because it is very often dangerous, ineffective and unnecessary.
Trooper Splain, who is on desk duty until the pending inquiry is completed, did not return calls or reply to a letter seeking comment. The other troopers who were involved in the shootings or who led the investigations declined to comment or did not respond to messages. David Kennedy, the president of the state troopers’ union, responded on Trooper Splain’s behalf to written questions, saying he had acted with courage and “was forced to make split-second decisions no one hopes they ever have to make.”
Cpl. Brent Miller, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania State Police, said, “We are confident we have the resources to investigate such incidents thoroughly and objectively.” He referred questions on the killings to district attorneys. Asked whether Trooper Splain had ever faced disciplinary action, Cpl. Miller said that any such records were confidential.
All troopers involved in shootings must attend specialized training to assess their physical and mental fitness before returning to active duty, he said, adding that in some cases, troopers may also be required to undergo use-of-force training at the police academy.
Darrel W. Stephens, a former longtime police chief who now helps run a policing research institute at Florida State University, called the four shootings a “red flag.”
“Four is incredibly unusual,” he said. “That is out there on the edge.” Even if the shootings can be legally justified, he said, the pattern needs to be “examined very closely” to determine why the same officer repeatedly resorted to deadly force. “Because they can, it doesn’t mean they should,” he said.
It’s not clear how common it is for police officers to fatally shoot multiple people during their careers. No database keeps track. In 2012, an officer in Scottsdale, Ariz., retired after his sixth fatal shooting. In 2015, a sheriff’s deputy in Broward County, Fla., was involved in his fourth fatal shooting. Both officers belonged to SWAT teams, called into dangerous situations where gunfire is most common.
Trooper Splain, 41, is a patrol officer who works in largely rural swaths of Pennsylvania, where the state police rarely kill anyone. During his time on the force, he has been responsible for four of the nine fatal shootings by troopers in the three counties where they occurred, according to a Times analysis of cases identified by the research group Fatal Encounters. The killings by Trooper Splain were reported by local news outlets, although he was mentioned by name only in one case.
From a young age, Jay Splain seemed inspired by the military. The son of a radiologist and a nurse, he grew up in Allentown, Pa., and attended the elite Hill prep school outside Philadelphia. He belonged to the school’s gun club. His senior yearbook page pictured him holding a rifle, cited the motto of the U.S. Marine Corps and quoted Stonewall Jackson, the Confederate general, twice.
He went on to the Virginia Military Institute, where Jackson had once been an artillery instructor. Jay Splain enrolled in a military officer training program, joined the school’s competitive rifle team and the Semper Fi Society, and referred to his “warrior image” in his college yearbook bio.
But in 2004 Mr. Splain became a state trooper, with duties like making D.U.I. arrests, tracking down thieves and, on one occasion, catching a suspect in “a paintball incident,” state police newsletters show. His former college roommate, Army Lt. Col. Nicholas Shallcross, said that his ambitions had shifted during college from the military to law enforcement.
Trooper Splain, the lieutenant colonel said, saw himself as “a protector.”
A Call For Help
In July 2007, Joseph Rotkewicz, 37, who had bipolar disorder, took two of his brother’s guns into a room of his family’s home and repeatedly threatened to kill himself, pointing a gun at his head. His father had recently died, and his girlfriend had had an affair with his best friend.
For an hour, his sister, Linda Hunsicker, and a friend, Hans Frendt, tried to talk him down, Ms. Hunsicker recalled in an interview. Then Mr. Rotkewicz fired at least two shots at the ceiling. Ms. Hunsicker said her brother never threatened her or Mr. Frendt.
“He just kept begging me not to call the cops,” she recalled in an interview. “I wish I would have listened.”
Emergency operators told her to go outside; the two men stayed indoors. Mr. Rotkewicz used electrical tape to strap the Uzi to his neck and chest, so the barrel pointed up at his chin, Mr. Frendt later said.
At about 5 p.m., at least a dozen state troopers showed up, Ms. Hunsicker recalled; a specially trained SWAT-style negotiating team typically responds to such situations. Police tried once to call the house, but Ms. Hunsicker had brought the cordless phone out with her.
With a person threatening to harm only himself, “the overarching principle is, slow things down and don’t force a confrontation,” said Ashley Heiberger, a consultant to police departments and a former captain in Bethlehem, Pa.
Entering a house to challenge someone threatening suicide “is not consistent with generally accepted law enforcement practices,” he added, “and good officers and good agencies have been emphasizing these concepts and principles for decades.”
Current Pennsylvania State Police regulations call for troopers dealing with someone who is mentally ill to “take steps to calm/de-escalate the situation, when feasible,” and to “assume a quiet, nonthreatening manner.”
Ms. Hunsicker said no one had used a bullhorn or tried other ways to resolve her brother’s crisis peacefully. Instead, Trooper Splain and another trooper eventually entered the house. Mr. Frendt, still inside, later told the deputy coroner that the troopers ordered him to leave, the coroner’s report said.
On his way out, he heard one of them demand that Mr. Rotkewicz drop his weapon, followed by two gunshots, the report said.
Trooper Splain shot Mr. Rotkewicz twice in the chest, records show. Pennsylvania State Police later said that Mr. Rotkewicz had pointed the Uzi at Trooper Splain.
For this, his unit named him trooper of the year. In a letter later nominating Trooper Splain for the Lehigh County officer of the year, his commanding officer wrote that Mr. Rotkewicz had a “history of mental disease” and was “threatening his life and the lives of others.”
Trooper Splain had seen Mr. Rotkewicz holding the Uzi beneath his chin, the letter said, but it did not mention any electrical tape. The letter then said Mr. Rotkewicz “ignored repeated orders from Trooper Splain to stop and drop the firearm” and “lowered the gun forward” toward the trooper.
In a court filing years later, a lawyer for the state police acknowledged that Mr. Rotkewicz had affixed the Uzi “to his chest and neck by means of the black colored electrical tape.” Although it’s possible Mr. Rotkewicz broke the tape, the forensic pathologist who performed the autopsy wrote, “The tape has been wrapped several times about the neck and is kinked in several areas.”
The Pennsylvania State Police typically assign a lead investigator from the same troop’s major case team to lead the criminal inquiry. At the time, Trooper Splain worked out of the headquarters of Troop M — the same barracks as the lead investigator.
Joseph Kuhns, a criminologist at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte who did a study for the Major Cities Chiefs Association on investigations of police shootings, called it “highly unusual” to assign officers from the same unit to examine a shooting.
For almost 10 years, the state police resisted Ms. Hunsicker’s efforts to obtain the police investigative report so she could find out what happened to her brother. In a court filing, her lawyer said the police’s refusal to provide the report was an effort to “cover up wrongful conduct.” She didn’t know the name of the officer who killed her brother until a Times reporter told her.
James B. Martin, a Republican who is the longtime district attorney of Lehigh County, said in an interview that, after meeting with the lead investigator, he had ruled the shooting justified — a decision he called a “no-brainer.” He said he did not recall any claims that the gun had been taped to Mr. Rotkewicz.
Mr. Martin saw nothing wrong with allowing the police to investigate themselves.
“The Pennsylvania State Police is a troop of 4,500 very well-qualified police officers who do an excellent job, and their integrity, as far as I’m concerned, is beyond reproach,” he said.
A Different Choice
On a Saturday in May 2017, Anthony Ardo threatened to kill himself by blowing his head off with an explosive. Addicted to drugs for years, the 47-year-old was reeling after a breakup and being evicted by his mother, Jean Monaghan. After she called 911 seeking help for him, Trooper Splain and a junior trooper, Eddie Pagan, came to her family farm and persuaded her to lure him back.
Mr. Ardo pulled up but then appeared to reverse his Buick Reatta, according to the officers’ accounts. Rather than let him go, the troopers ran out the back door and got in their two patrol cars, hidden from view. They trapped the Buick between their cruisers, hopped out and drew their firearms, the troopers told police investigators.
Within seconds, the troopers began shooting, according to Ms. Monaghan. Lawyers for Ms. Monaghan said they believe that Trooper Splain, who fired nine times, killed Mr. Ardo with the last three bullets. The troopers later said they feared for their lives, according to court filings, as Mr. Ardo, sitting in the driver’s seat, appeared to be lighting something around his neck. That turned out to be a common aerial firework.
In an interview, the dead man’s mother wondered why the officers hadn’t tried to de-escalate the situation by stepping away. “They rushed him and didn’t even give him a chance,” said Ms. Monaghan, who said she watched the confrontation from her window and later filed a wrongful-death lawsuit. She added, “They were in no way in harm’s way if they would have just backed up and left him alone.”
The review by The Times of hundreds of killings of unarmed motorists by police found that mental health crises were a recurring theme. In at least 10 cases, callers asked the police to check on the welfare of people threatening suicide or struggling from mental illness. Instead, the responding officers shot the drivers and later claimed they feared that they or someone else would be run over.
Cpl. Miller said troopers use “their discretion to assess the current situation and resources available to them for every incident.” He said the agency couldn’t comment on pending litigation.
Within an hour of Mr. Ardo’s shooting, a state police lieutenant called John Morganelli, the district attorney in Northampton County and a Democrat, to ask how the prosecutor wanted to handle the investigation, according to a grand-jury report later made public. Mr. Morganelli decided his office would take the lead and assigned a county detective.
But the lieutenant soon told Mr. Morganelli that his higher-up bosses “would not yield the criminal investigation,” the report said.
Apparently because of that dispute, no one interviewed either trooper for about a month. During that time, the two men talked to each other and watched dash-camera videos of the shooting, they acknowledged later. Law enforcement experts warn that allowing officers to share information before interviews can lead them to align their stories.
Trooper Splain disclosed his earlier fatal shooting to Trooper Pagan, both men said in depositions. “Most of the conversations revolved around him giving me advice as to how to handle the stress,” Trooper Pagan said.
State police assigned an investigator from Troop M’s major case team to lead the inquiry. Superior officers later told the grand jury that they rely on investigating troopers to report any potential conflicts of interest.
Trooper Michael Everk, the lead investigator, declined to comment for this article. He had worked with Trooper Splain on a marijuana bust, state police newsletters show. While interviewing the troopers, Trooper Everk referred to Trooper Pagan as “Eddie” several times instead of speaking more formally, as he did in other interviews.
Mr. Morganelli brought the case to a grand jury, which concluded that the shooting was justified. But the jurors also issued a second, public report accusing state police leaders of a “somewhat arrogant view of superiority” over other law enforcement agencies. The panel also found investigators gave troopers “special treatment” that is “not generally afforded to others who are the subject of a criminal investigation.”
The next year, Trooper Splain was moved to Troop L in Lebanon County.
‘The Gravest of Situations’
Pier Hess Graf, the Lebanon County district attorney, hosts an annual fund-raiser, “Back the Blue,” for a Pennsylvania nonprofit that helps the families of slain officers. Her husband is a state police corporal.
Advocates of reform say such apparent conflicts of interest highlight the need for independent, arms-length criminal investigations into killings by the police. Some police departments now call in district attorneys from neighboring counties, others have independent units to investigate fatalities. In recent years, states including California, New Jersey, and New York shifted many of these investigations to the state attorney general’s office.
But last year, Ms. Graf oversaw an investigation into another fatal shooting involving Trooper Splain. At the time, her husband was based in the same barracks.
Early on March 16, 2020, Charity Thome, 42, who had mental illness and drug addiction, fled officers after she was caught trying to break into her former home, records show.
Officer Ryan Haase of the North Lebanon Police Department started pursuing her Honda Accord; he soon told dispatchers he was ending the chase because, with few cars on the road at that hour, the woman was not endangering the public.
But then Trooper Splain and a rookie, Trooper Matthew Haber, joined him. Ms. Thome led the police on a “lengthy high-speed chase,” Ms. Graf, the district attorney, said later, with “no regard for traffic lights, signs, police sirens, other vehicles on the roadway or the safety of the general public.”
Many police departments ban high-speed pursuits of nonviolent offenders, especially if officers know who they are and can find them later. Instead, records show, Trooper Splain performed a risky maneuver to force Ms. Thome to stop.
The Accord spun out into a field. Ms. Thome then drove into Officer Haase’s S.U.V. The two troopers jumped out of their vehicle, guns drawn. “Stop, stop, get out of the car, show me your hands,” Trooper Splain recalled shouting, according to a police interview quoted in a lawsuit filed by Ms. Thome’s family.
He fired first, followed by the rookie. Ms. Thome, hit seven times, died almost instantly, according to the lawsuit.
In an April 2020 press release describing the killing, Ms. Graf, the prosecutor, said Ms. Thome “accelerated forward and drove into” the officer’s vehicle. The release also described Troopers Splain and Haber as saying they feared multiple outcomes, including Ms. Thome reversing and running over officers or continuing “to ram” the S.U.V.
But Officer Haase estimated her speed to be five miles an hour, adding that he was more worried about damage to his vehicle than about his safety, according to his interviews with police included in the lawsuit. Neither vehicle’s airbags deployed, the lawsuit said; a photograph showed that the S.U.V. sustained minimal damage.
No police commands could be heard in a dash-camera video. Trooper Splain told police 30 seconds had elapsed between his leaving the car and shooting. The video, included in the lawsuit, shows it took only a few seconds.
“Their job was to talk her out of the vehicle and into safety,” said Thomas Kline, a lawyer for Ms. Thome’s family. “And instead, they did just the opposite, which was to fire multiple rounds of bullets into her pinned-down vehicle, leaving her defenseless and tragically dead.”
Agency policy says Pennsylvania state troopers should not shoot at moving vehicles unless the driver “poses an imminent danger of death or serious bodily injury,” or if shooting is the last resort to prevent a suspect in a violent felony from escaping.
In the release, Ms. Graf said she had assigned her detective bureau to oversee the investigation, which involved several agencies. It drew on the state police inquiry, which was led by an investigator based out of the same troop as Trooper Splain, The Times found.
Ms. Graf had determined that the shooting was justified after about a month — a relatively fast conclusion compared to similar inquiries reviewed by reporters. In response to questions from The Times, Ms. Graf didn’t address any potential conflict of interest and said she stood by her decisions.
“Law enforcement involved in this case committed the most serious human act — they took a life,” Ms. Graf said in the press release announcing her ruling. She added, “They did so knowing the use of deadly force is necessary in only the gravest of situations.”
The 4th Killing
Andy Dzwonchyk, a 40-year-old metal worker who had once been named “loudest laugh” and voted president of his high school class, was unraveling by November.
Amy Hastings, his girlfriend of 20 years, had left, weary of his drug use. She obtained a protection order after he badgered her to come back and talked of killing himself in front of their two sons if she did not return. “Andy never threatened me or the kids,” Ms. Hastings said in an interview.
At about 10:40 p.m. on Nov. 7, Ms. Hastings called 911 because Mr. Dzwonchyk kept texting, in violation of the order. Two troopers showed up, including Jay Splain.
While Ms. Hastings talked to them, Mr. Dzwonchyk, who was caring for their sons, texted again, saying he needed a thermometer for one boy, who was sick, Ms. Hastings recalled. She went inside because it was cold. Then Mr. Dzwonchyk, who lived down the road from where she was staying, drove up.
The troopers tried to arrest Mr. Dzwonchyk in his car, but a struggle ensued, according to a police spokesman at a press conference the next morning. Trooper David Beohm said one officer had gotten caught inside the vehicle, which advanced and reversed, dragging him, although he was not injured.
“It wasn’t like a real fast back-and-forth,” Trooper Beohm said.
Mr. Dzwonchyk’s 1999 Beetle was a stick-shift, making it difficult to go forward and backward quickly. Attempts to subdue Mr. Dzwonchyk with a Taser didn’t work, according to the spokesman. Only then, he said, did the other officer fire his weapon.
That was Trooper Splain.
HOW PAID EXPERTS HELP EXONERATE POLICE AFTER DEATHS IN CUSTODY
Inside the self-reinforcing ecosystem of people who advise, train and defend officers. Many accuse them of slanting science and perpetuating aggressive tactics.
By Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Mike McIntire, Rebecca R. Ruiz, Julie Tate and Michael H. Keller, The New York Times
An officer fired a Taser at Kevin Piskura’s chest for 11 seconds. He went into cardiac arrest and later died. A consultant working for Taser wrote:
Nov. 1, 2011 ... there is no support for speculations that the minimal amount of current and charge delivered into a human body by an X26 ECD discharge ... is likely, or even medically or scientifically possible, to directly cause clinically significant adverse effects ...
The family sued, and the case settled out of court.
Officers in Phoenix held Miguel Ruiz in a neck hold. Asked in court about the possible dangers of this type of restraint, a doctor testifying as an expert witness for the city said:
May 30, 2017 There are no short-term or long-term effects. It doesn't cause brain damage or brain injury.
A jury found in favor of the officers.
In 2019, deputies shocked Kevin Niedzialek twice with a stun gun and pushed him facedown into the ground. After he died, a doctor hired by the county wrote:
Jan. 18, 2021 ... we have found no scientific evidence ... that a restraint position in a prone, chest-down, or prone hobbled position causes or contributes to asphyxiation or associated death.
The family sued, and the case is ongoing.
When lawyers were preparing to defend against a lawsuit over a death in police custody in Fresno, Calif., they knew whom to call.
Over the past two decades, Dr. Gary Vilke has established himself as a leading expert witness by repeatedly asserting that police techniques such as facedown restraints, stun gun shocks and some neck holds did not kill people.
Officers in Fresno had handcuffed 41-year-old Joseph Perez and, holding him facedown on the ground, put a spinal board from an ambulance on his back as he cried out for help. One officer sat on the board as they strapped him to it. The county medical examiner ruled his death, in May 2017, a homicide by asphyxiation.
Dr. Vilke, who was hired by the ambulance provider, charged $500 an hour and provided a different determination. He wrote in a report filed with the court this past July that Mr. Perez had died from methamphetamine use, heart disease and the exertion of his struggle against the restraints.
Dr. Vilke, an emergency medicine doctor in San Diego, is an integral part of a small but influential cadre of scientists, lawyers, physicians and other police experts whose research and testimony is almost always used to absolve officers of blame for deaths, according to a review of hundreds of research papers and more than 25,000 pages of court documents, as well as interviews with nearly three dozen people with knowledge of the deaths or the research.
Their views infuriate many prosecutors, plaintiff lawyers, medical experts and relatives of the dead, who accuse them of slanting science, ignoring inconvenient facts and dangerously emboldening police officers to act aggressively. One of the researchers has suggested that police officers involved in the deaths are often unfairly blamed — like parents of babies who die of sudden infant death syndrome.
The experts also intersect with law-enforcement-friendly companies that train police officers, write police policies and lend authority to studies rebutting concerns about police use of force.
Together they form what often amounts to a cottage industry of exoneration. The dozen or so individuals and companies have collected millions of dollars over the past decade, much of it in fees that are largely underwritten by taxpayers, who cover the costs of police training and policies and the legal bills of accused officers.
Many of the experts also have ties to Axon, maker of the Taser: A lawyer for the company, for example, was an early sponsor of the Institute for the Prevention of In-Custody Deaths, a commercial undertaking that is among the police-friendly entities, and some of the experts have worked as consultants for Axon; another has served on Axon’s corporate board.
The New York Times identified more than 100 instances of in-custody deaths or life-threatening injuries from the past 15 years in which experts in the network were hired to defend the police. The cases were nearly all civil lawsuits, as the officers involved were rarely charged with crimes. About two-thirds of the cases were settled out of court; of the 28 decided by judges or juries, 16 had outcomes favoring the police. (A handful of cases are pending.)
Beyond the courtroom, the individuals and businesses have offered instruction to thousands of police officers and medical examiners, whose cause-of-death rulings often help determine legal culpability. Lexipol, a Texas-based business whose webinars and publications have included experts from the network, boasts that it helped write policy manuals for 6,300 police departments, sometimes suggesting standards for officers’ conduct that reduce legal liability. A company spokeswoman said it did not rely on the researchers in making its policies.
The self-reinforcing ecosystem underscores the difficulty of obtaining an impartial accounting of deaths in police custody, particularly in cases involving a struggle, where the cause of death is not immediately clear. The Times reported earlier this year that outside criminal investigations of such cases can be plagued with shortcuts and biases that favor the police, and that medical examiners sometimes tie the deaths to a biological trait that would rarely be deemed fatal in other circumstances.
Some researchers and doctors in this ecosystem who responded to questions from The Times said they did not assist law enforcement but provided unbiased results of scientific research and opinions based on the facts of each case. Several pointed to research demonstrating that police struggles overall have an exceedingly low risk of death. They also highlighted health issues that could cause deaths in such circumstances, including drug use, obesity, psychological disturbances and genetic mutations that may predispose people to heart problems.
Some also criticized research and medical opinions that found that police techniques might cause or contribute to deaths, suggesting these were flawed. They also pointed out that other academic papers have been written by people who testify against law enforcement in such cases.
Lawyers for Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer who was ultimately convicted in last year’s murder of George Floyd, also drew upon the same network of researchers and experts. In particular, they turned to the defense of prone restraint, a technique in which officers subdue subjects facedown, as happened to Mr. Floyd. The work of Dr. Kroll, who has a Ph.D in electrical engineering but no medical degree, was cited by the Chauvin defense as proof that putting body weight on someone facedown does not cause asphyxia.
Shaping the Science
The physicians, scientists and researchers who come to the defense of law enforcement officers often cite experiments conducted on volunteers. They shock them with Tasers, douse them with pepper spray or restrain them facedown on the ground.
Their published findings are usually the same: that there is no evidence that the actions have enough of an effect to cause death.
A Times analysis of more than 230 scientific papers in the National Library of Medicine database published since the 1980s showed those conclusions to be significantly different from those published by others, including studies about restraints, body position and excited delirium.
Nearly three-quarters of the studies that included at least one author in the network supported the idea that restraint techniques were safe or that the deaths of people who had been restrained were caused by health problems. Only about a quarter of the studies that did not involve anyone from the network backed that conclusion. More commonly, the other studies said some restraint techniques increased the risk of death, if only by a small amount.
The few studies by the group that found problems with police techniques focused on deaths in which Tasers ignited gas fumes or caused people to fall and hit their heads.
Papers by researchers outside the network were more frequently balanced — finding, for example, that some restraint positions are generally safe while others can cause statistically significant changes in breathing. Another recent paper used new computer imaging technology to measure lung function and found that it was affected during restraint.
One-Sided Track Record
The Times found that, with rare exceptions, when members of this network weigh in on a case in court, they side with the police.
In court documents and testimony, some of them have acknowledged their one-sided track record.
“That’s like trying to retain Columbus to testify that the Earth is flat,” Dr. Tom Neuman, a retired emergency medicine physician in San Diego, said in 2018 when asked if relatives of people who had died in police custody would ever hire him as an expert.
Assessing the effectiveness of the opinions exonerating the police is difficult because most cases settle or are decided without explanation.
But several cases reviewed by The Times suggest that the research has had far-reaching effects — influencing investigator decisions in death inquests and giving officers assurance that their methods are safe. Some of the experts’ legal statements and educational materials they have prepared for police called safety warnings by Taser and other law enforcement groups outdated or needlessly conservative.
In a deposition in April, the sheriff in Riverside County, Calif., cited studies backed by the law-enforcement-leaning experts to explain why his deputies held people facedown after handcuffing them. The sheriff, Chad Bianco, described the position as “the absolute safest place for any subject.”
Two years ago, deputies working for Sheriff Bianco found Kevin Niedzialek, 34, bleeding from a head wound and behaving strangely after taking methamphetamines. They shocked him twice with a Taser, and held him facedown.
When they rolled him onto his back, Mr. Niedzialek was unresponsive. He died the next day.
Inside the self-reinforcing ecosystem of people who advise, train and defend officers. Many accuse them of slanting science and perpetuating aggressive tactics.
By Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Mike McIntire, Rebecca R. Ruiz, Julie Tate and Michael H. Keller, The New York Times
An officer fired a Taser at Kevin Piskura’s chest for 11 seconds. He went into cardiac arrest and later died. A consultant working for Taser wrote:
Nov. 1, 2011 ... there is no support for speculations that the minimal amount of current and charge delivered into a human body by an X26 ECD discharge ... is likely, or even medically or scientifically possible, to directly cause clinically significant adverse effects ...
The family sued, and the case settled out of court.
Officers in Phoenix held Miguel Ruiz in a neck hold. Asked in court about the possible dangers of this type of restraint, a doctor testifying as an expert witness for the city said:
May 30, 2017 There are no short-term or long-term effects. It doesn't cause brain damage or brain injury.
A jury found in favor of the officers.
In 2019, deputies shocked Kevin Niedzialek twice with a stun gun and pushed him facedown into the ground. After he died, a doctor hired by the county wrote:
Jan. 18, 2021 ... we have found no scientific evidence ... that a restraint position in a prone, chest-down, or prone hobbled position causes or contributes to asphyxiation or associated death.
The family sued, and the case is ongoing.
When lawyers were preparing to defend against a lawsuit over a death in police custody in Fresno, Calif., they knew whom to call.
Over the past two decades, Dr. Gary Vilke has established himself as a leading expert witness by repeatedly asserting that police techniques such as facedown restraints, stun gun shocks and some neck holds did not kill people.
Officers in Fresno had handcuffed 41-year-old Joseph Perez and, holding him facedown on the ground, put a spinal board from an ambulance on his back as he cried out for help. One officer sat on the board as they strapped him to it. The county medical examiner ruled his death, in May 2017, a homicide by asphyxiation.
Dr. Vilke, who was hired by the ambulance provider, charged $500 an hour and provided a different determination. He wrote in a report filed with the court this past July that Mr. Perez had died from methamphetamine use, heart disease and the exertion of his struggle against the restraints.
Dr. Vilke, an emergency medicine doctor in San Diego, is an integral part of a small but influential cadre of scientists, lawyers, physicians and other police experts whose research and testimony is almost always used to absolve officers of blame for deaths, according to a review of hundreds of research papers and more than 25,000 pages of court documents, as well as interviews with nearly three dozen people with knowledge of the deaths or the research.
Their views infuriate many prosecutors, plaintiff lawyers, medical experts and relatives of the dead, who accuse them of slanting science, ignoring inconvenient facts and dangerously emboldening police officers to act aggressively. One of the researchers has suggested that police officers involved in the deaths are often unfairly blamed — like parents of babies who die of sudden infant death syndrome.
The experts also intersect with law-enforcement-friendly companies that train police officers, write police policies and lend authority to studies rebutting concerns about police use of force.
Together they form what often amounts to a cottage industry of exoneration. The dozen or so individuals and companies have collected millions of dollars over the past decade, much of it in fees that are largely underwritten by taxpayers, who cover the costs of police training and policies and the legal bills of accused officers.
Many of the experts also have ties to Axon, maker of the Taser: A lawyer for the company, for example, was an early sponsor of the Institute for the Prevention of In-Custody Deaths, a commercial undertaking that is among the police-friendly entities, and some of the experts have worked as consultants for Axon; another has served on Axon’s corporate board.
The New York Times identified more than 100 instances of in-custody deaths or life-threatening injuries from the past 15 years in which experts in the network were hired to defend the police. The cases were nearly all civil lawsuits, as the officers involved were rarely charged with crimes. About two-thirds of the cases were settled out of court; of the 28 decided by judges or juries, 16 had outcomes favoring the police. (A handful of cases are pending.)
Beyond the courtroom, the individuals and businesses have offered instruction to thousands of police officers and medical examiners, whose cause-of-death rulings often help determine legal culpability. Lexipol, a Texas-based business whose webinars and publications have included experts from the network, boasts that it helped write policy manuals for 6,300 police departments, sometimes suggesting standards for officers’ conduct that reduce legal liability. A company spokeswoman said it did not rely on the researchers in making its policies.
The self-reinforcing ecosystem underscores the difficulty of obtaining an impartial accounting of deaths in police custody, particularly in cases involving a struggle, where the cause of death is not immediately clear. The Times reported earlier this year that outside criminal investigations of such cases can be plagued with shortcuts and biases that favor the police, and that medical examiners sometimes tie the deaths to a biological trait that would rarely be deemed fatal in other circumstances.
Some researchers and doctors in this ecosystem who responded to questions from The Times said they did not assist law enforcement but provided unbiased results of scientific research and opinions based on the facts of each case. Several pointed to research demonstrating that police struggles overall have an exceedingly low risk of death. They also highlighted health issues that could cause deaths in such circumstances, including drug use, obesity, psychological disturbances and genetic mutations that may predispose people to heart problems.
Some also criticized research and medical opinions that found that police techniques might cause or contribute to deaths, suggesting these were flawed. They also pointed out that other academic papers have been written by people who testify against law enforcement in such cases.
Lawyers for Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer who was ultimately convicted in last year’s murder of George Floyd, also drew upon the same network of researchers and experts. In particular, they turned to the defense of prone restraint, a technique in which officers subdue subjects facedown, as happened to Mr. Floyd. The work of Dr. Kroll, who has a Ph.D in electrical engineering but no medical degree, was cited by the Chauvin defense as proof that putting body weight on someone facedown does not cause asphyxia.
Shaping the Science
The physicians, scientists and researchers who come to the defense of law enforcement officers often cite experiments conducted on volunteers. They shock them with Tasers, douse them with pepper spray or restrain them facedown on the ground.
Their published findings are usually the same: that there is no evidence that the actions have enough of an effect to cause death.
A Times analysis of more than 230 scientific papers in the National Library of Medicine database published since the 1980s showed those conclusions to be significantly different from those published by others, including studies about restraints, body position and excited delirium.
Nearly three-quarters of the studies that included at least one author in the network supported the idea that restraint techniques were safe or that the deaths of people who had been restrained were caused by health problems. Only about a quarter of the studies that did not involve anyone from the network backed that conclusion. More commonly, the other studies said some restraint techniques increased the risk of death, if only by a small amount.
The few studies by the group that found problems with police techniques focused on deaths in which Tasers ignited gas fumes or caused people to fall and hit their heads.
Papers by researchers outside the network were more frequently balanced — finding, for example, that some restraint positions are generally safe while others can cause statistically significant changes in breathing. Another recent paper used new computer imaging technology to measure lung function and found that it was affected during restraint.
One-Sided Track Record
The Times found that, with rare exceptions, when members of this network weigh in on a case in court, they side with the police.
In court documents and testimony, some of them have acknowledged their one-sided track record.
“That’s like trying to retain Columbus to testify that the Earth is flat,” Dr. Tom Neuman, a retired emergency medicine physician in San Diego, said in 2018 when asked if relatives of people who had died in police custody would ever hire him as an expert.
Assessing the effectiveness of the opinions exonerating the police is difficult because most cases settle or are decided without explanation.
But several cases reviewed by The Times suggest that the research has had far-reaching effects — influencing investigator decisions in death inquests and giving officers assurance that their methods are safe. Some of the experts’ legal statements and educational materials they have prepared for police called safety warnings by Taser and other law enforcement groups outdated or needlessly conservative.
In a deposition in April, the sheriff in Riverside County, Calif., cited studies backed by the law-enforcement-leaning experts to explain why his deputies held people facedown after handcuffing them. The sheriff, Chad Bianco, described the position as “the absolute safest place for any subject.”
Two years ago, deputies working for Sheriff Bianco found Kevin Niedzialek, 34, bleeding from a head wound and behaving strangely after taking methamphetamines. They shocked him twice with a Taser, and held him facedown.
When they rolled him onto his back, Mr. Niedzialek was unresponsive. He died the next day.
FIGHTING INFLATION MEANS TAKING ON CORPORATIONS
By Meg Jacobs
Dr. Jacobs teaches history and public affairs at Princeton and is the author of “Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America.”
Since the Carter administration, monetary policy has been the chief tool presidents use to curb inflation, which has been on the rise: The Consumer Price Index rose by 6.8 percent in the year through November — the fastest pace since 1982. The Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, has pivoted to a tighter monetary policy, announcing plans to taper the central bank’s bond purchases and raise interest rates next year.
Yet inflation doesn’t rise and ebb just because of monetary policy. It’s largely the result of choices businesses make. And history shows presidents have the power to stem inflation by taking on corporate power — if they choose.
While Franklin Roosevelt is best known for the New Deal expansion of the social safety net, he also protected Americans against wartime inflation. During World War II, his Office of Price Administration imposed price ceilings on three million businesses and more than eight million goods. The office also put caps on rents in 14 million dwellings occupied by 45 million residents and issued ration stamps for goods like meat to manage supply. According to Gallup polls, more than three-quarters of the public favored extending controls after the war.
When Harry Truman lost a bitter fight in Congress to do just that, there were consequences. When peace came, Americans eager to spend their stored-up savings ran headlong into a supply shortage: Manufacturers had yet to convert back from wartime production.
In the summer of 1946, without controls, the cost of living jumped. In July, meat prices doubled to 70 cents a pound. In the midterm elections that November, Democrats lost control of Congress for the first time since 1932.
In 1948, with inflation running at 7.7 percent, Truman condemned the “do-nothing” Republicans who placed blame for rising prices on newfound union power. In his re-election campaign that year, he promised to expand the New Deal and ran hard against corporate power. “The Republicans don’t want any price control for one simple reason: the higher prices go up, the bigger the profits for the corporations,” he said that year.
At a campaign stop in Kentucky on October 1948, he lashed out at the National Association of Manufacturers, a business lobbying group that opposed price controls, for engaging in a “conspiracy against the American consumer.” He called Congress into a special summer session to restore price controls, but that effort failed.
Democrats returned to the polls; automobile workers gave Truman 89 percent of their vote, helping him secure re-election in a close contest. One key to his success: doubling down on tough talk against inflation and support for liberal programs to raise living standards for ordinary Americans.
From the presidencies of Truman through Lyndon Johnson, Democrats stuck to the program. Like Truman, who went so far as to order a takeover of the nation’s steel mills when they announced a price hike, John F. Kennedy and Johnson also publicly reprimanded steel executives for price increases.
They all spoke out against efforts by William McChesney Martin, the Fed chairman, to raise interest rates. Martin famously asserted his independence and raised rates anyway; as he saw it, the job of the Federal Reserve was “to take away the punch bowl just as the party is getting good.” Truman called him a “traitor.”
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When inflation struck in the 1970s, Richard Nixon understood the expectations created by Roosevelt’s Office of Price Administration. As a World War II-era inspector for the agency, Nixon had been horrified at the thought of bureaucrats checking up on the pricing decisions of private business, and he quit. Yet once in the White House, he didn’t hesitate to slap on price controls in response to the soaring cost of beef and gas.
Milton Friedman, the free-market economist, and other conservatives denounced Nixon’s response as heavy-handed — a message that his successor Gerald Ford absorbed. Instead of price controls, Ford distributed “Whip Inflation Now” buttons and called for budgetary austerity.
As American economic thinking fell under Friedman’s influence, the Roosevelt-Truman tools lost favor. With inflation reaching double digits in 1979, President Jimmy Carter appointed Paul Volcker to the Federal Reserve to use monetary policy to fight inflation. When Ronald Reagan came into office, he endorsed Mr. Volcker’s muscular move to raise interest rates and drive the economy into recession to fight inflation. Subsequent presidents have largely stuck to this approach of controlling inflation.
Amid a pandemic, Mr. Biden has shown a willingness to lean hard on corporate America and embrace New Deal-style tools to lighten inflationary pressures. Through his supply chain task force, he is working to reverse offshoring and outsourcing, expand domestic production and help the ports in Los Angeles stay open round the clock to ease the cargo pileup. His infrastructure bill will allocate billions to construct and operate coastal ports and inland waterways, further easing prices.
Mr. Biden has also warned the big four meat processors against anticompetitive practices that probably contributed to spiking prices, including squeezing out competitors. His administration has pledged to take more aggressive action on illegal price fixing and antitrust, while working to bring more transparency to cattle markets. Higher meat prices are “not just the natural consequences of supply and demand in a free market — they are also the result of corporate decisions to take advantage of their market power in an uncompetitive market, to the detriment of consumers, farmers and ranchers, and our economy,” his economic advisers Brian Deese, Sameera Fazili and Bharat Ramamurti recently wrote.
Through the Federal Trade Commission, Mr. Biden has called for an investigation into the prices set by large oil and gas companies and authorized the release of 50 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to dampen OPEC’s ability to raise prices. He also met with the chief executives of Walmart, Mattel, Food Lion, Kroger and other companies to discuss their plans to overcome supply-chain problems and keep prices in check for the holidays.
In the coming weeks, Mr. Biden should use his bully pulpit to make clear to Americans that corporations are padding their profits while working families are struggling through the pandemic. Almost two-thirds of publicly traded companies had substantially larger profit margins this year compared to the same period in 2019, before the pandemic. In 2021, close to 100 of them saw their profit margins go up at least 50 percent relative to 2019, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Showing working Americans that he gets it will help Mr. Biden demonstrate that he cares, as the Democratic pollster Joel Benenson told me. “We’re not having an inflation problem,” he said. “We’re having a corporate greed problem. And the president should put the blame where it belongs.”
As Mr. Biden leans on big businesses to temper rising prices, he also needs to push hard for policies that have a much greater impact than fluctuations in gas or meat prices: His stalled Build Back Better legislation would go a long way to ease the burden of major expenses. Mr. Biden promised the bill would lower out-of-pocket costs for child care, care for the elderly, housing, college, health care and prescription drugs — some of the biggest costs that most families face.
Like his Democratic predecessors, Mr. Biden needs to get tough.
By Meg Jacobs
Dr. Jacobs teaches history and public affairs at Princeton and is the author of “Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America.”
Since the Carter administration, monetary policy has been the chief tool presidents use to curb inflation, which has been on the rise: The Consumer Price Index rose by 6.8 percent in the year through November — the fastest pace since 1982. The Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, has pivoted to a tighter monetary policy, announcing plans to taper the central bank’s bond purchases and raise interest rates next year.
Yet inflation doesn’t rise and ebb just because of monetary policy. It’s largely the result of choices businesses make. And history shows presidents have the power to stem inflation by taking on corporate power — if they choose.
While Franklin Roosevelt is best known for the New Deal expansion of the social safety net, he also protected Americans against wartime inflation. During World War II, his Office of Price Administration imposed price ceilings on three million businesses and more than eight million goods. The office also put caps on rents in 14 million dwellings occupied by 45 million residents and issued ration stamps for goods like meat to manage supply. According to Gallup polls, more than three-quarters of the public favored extending controls after the war.
When Harry Truman lost a bitter fight in Congress to do just that, there were consequences. When peace came, Americans eager to spend their stored-up savings ran headlong into a supply shortage: Manufacturers had yet to convert back from wartime production.
In the summer of 1946, without controls, the cost of living jumped. In July, meat prices doubled to 70 cents a pound. In the midterm elections that November, Democrats lost control of Congress for the first time since 1932.
In 1948, with inflation running at 7.7 percent, Truman condemned the “do-nothing” Republicans who placed blame for rising prices on newfound union power. In his re-election campaign that year, he promised to expand the New Deal and ran hard against corporate power. “The Republicans don’t want any price control for one simple reason: the higher prices go up, the bigger the profits for the corporations,” he said that year.
At a campaign stop in Kentucky on October 1948, he lashed out at the National Association of Manufacturers, a business lobbying group that opposed price controls, for engaging in a “conspiracy against the American consumer.” He called Congress into a special summer session to restore price controls, but that effort failed.
Democrats returned to the polls; automobile workers gave Truman 89 percent of their vote, helping him secure re-election in a close contest. One key to his success: doubling down on tough talk against inflation and support for liberal programs to raise living standards for ordinary Americans.
From the presidencies of Truman through Lyndon Johnson, Democrats stuck to the program. Like Truman, who went so far as to order a takeover of the nation’s steel mills when they announced a price hike, John F. Kennedy and Johnson also publicly reprimanded steel executives for price increases.
They all spoke out against efforts by William McChesney Martin, the Fed chairman, to raise interest rates. Martin famously asserted his independence and raised rates anyway; as he saw it, the job of the Federal Reserve was “to take away the punch bowl just as the party is getting good.” Truman called him a “traitor.”
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When inflation struck in the 1970s, Richard Nixon understood the expectations created by Roosevelt’s Office of Price Administration. As a World War II-era inspector for the agency, Nixon had been horrified at the thought of bureaucrats checking up on the pricing decisions of private business, and he quit. Yet once in the White House, he didn’t hesitate to slap on price controls in response to the soaring cost of beef and gas.
Milton Friedman, the free-market economist, and other conservatives denounced Nixon’s response as heavy-handed — a message that his successor Gerald Ford absorbed. Instead of price controls, Ford distributed “Whip Inflation Now” buttons and called for budgetary austerity.
As American economic thinking fell under Friedman’s influence, the Roosevelt-Truman tools lost favor. With inflation reaching double digits in 1979, President Jimmy Carter appointed Paul Volcker to the Federal Reserve to use monetary policy to fight inflation. When Ronald Reagan came into office, he endorsed Mr. Volcker’s muscular move to raise interest rates and drive the economy into recession to fight inflation. Subsequent presidents have largely stuck to this approach of controlling inflation.
Amid a pandemic, Mr. Biden has shown a willingness to lean hard on corporate America and embrace New Deal-style tools to lighten inflationary pressures. Through his supply chain task force, he is working to reverse offshoring and outsourcing, expand domestic production and help the ports in Los Angeles stay open round the clock to ease the cargo pileup. His infrastructure bill will allocate billions to construct and operate coastal ports and inland waterways, further easing prices.
Mr. Biden has also warned the big four meat processors against anticompetitive practices that probably contributed to spiking prices, including squeezing out competitors. His administration has pledged to take more aggressive action on illegal price fixing and antitrust, while working to bring more transparency to cattle markets. Higher meat prices are “not just the natural consequences of supply and demand in a free market — they are also the result of corporate decisions to take advantage of their market power in an uncompetitive market, to the detriment of consumers, farmers and ranchers, and our economy,” his economic advisers Brian Deese, Sameera Fazili and Bharat Ramamurti recently wrote.
Through the Federal Trade Commission, Mr. Biden has called for an investigation into the prices set by large oil and gas companies and authorized the release of 50 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to dampen OPEC’s ability to raise prices. He also met with the chief executives of Walmart, Mattel, Food Lion, Kroger and other companies to discuss their plans to overcome supply-chain problems and keep prices in check for the holidays.
In the coming weeks, Mr. Biden should use his bully pulpit to make clear to Americans that corporations are padding their profits while working families are struggling through the pandemic. Almost two-thirds of publicly traded companies had substantially larger profit margins this year compared to the same period in 2019, before the pandemic. In 2021, close to 100 of them saw their profit margins go up at least 50 percent relative to 2019, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Showing working Americans that he gets it will help Mr. Biden demonstrate that he cares, as the Democratic pollster Joel Benenson told me. “We’re not having an inflation problem,” he said. “We’re having a corporate greed problem. And the president should put the blame where it belongs.”
As Mr. Biden leans on big businesses to temper rising prices, he also needs to push hard for policies that have a much greater impact than fluctuations in gas or meat prices: His stalled Build Back Better legislation would go a long way to ease the burden of major expenses. Mr. Biden promised the bill would lower out-of-pocket costs for child care, care for the elderly, housing, college, health care and prescription drugs — some of the biggest costs that most families face.
Like his Democratic predecessors, Mr. Biden needs to get tough.
‘HER HEART WAS BEATING TOO’: THE WOMEN WHO DIED AFTER ABORTION BANS
By Sarah Wildman, The New York Times
In 2012, Savita Halappanavar, a 31-year-old married dentist, appeared at Ireland’s University Hospital Galway in pain. She was 17 weeks pregnant and miscarrying. According to Dr. Halappanavar’s husband, hospital staff said that there was no saving the pregnancy, but they refused to intercede because her fetus still had a heartbeat. She was told her only option was to wait.
Dr. Halappanavar became feverish. By the time the fetal heartbeat faded away, she was in organ failure. Two and a half days later she was dead.
Nearly three decades earlier, Ireland’s leaders created one of the world’s most restrictive abortion laws with an amendment to their nation’s Constitution, cementing Ireland’s near-total ban on abortions. After that, women who were able left the country for the procedure, while those who couldn’t lived with the consequences of the law. The amendment remained in place despite many stories of related brutality during that period, including a suicidal 14-year-old girl who was impregnated through rape. Her family had to plea to the highest court in the nation for her to even travel for a termination. She lost her case at first, but mass protest prompted the court to reconvene, and she was ultimately allowed to travel to Britain for an abortion.
Dr. Halappanavar’s story had an even greater impact. When she died, her husband stepped forward immediately and said Ireland’s restrictive abortion laws were to blame in her death. Her death created a surge of grief and anger that became a focal point of the abortion and women’s rights movement in Ireland, and contributed to the drive to overturn the country’s constitutional amendment.
“People would say, ‘This is for Savita,’ and she came to symbolize all women who had to struggle and suffer because of that ban,” an Irish abortion rights activist, Ailbhe Smyth, told me. In 2018 Irish voters finally overturned the amendment.
In the United States, with Roe v. Wade likely to be largely dismantled, if not overturned, next year, it is time to look again at the women whose lives — and deaths — changed how the public understands what’s at stake when we talk about banning abortion.
“The thing I worry about in the United States is that the rallying cry won’t happen until women die, and that’s so unnecessary and unfortunate,” said Kathryn Kolbert, who in 1992 argued the major abortion case Planned Parenthood v. Casey before the Supreme Court.
It should not take a high-profile death to expose just how much is at risk when medicine is hamstrung by politics, religion or culture. And yet, interviewed for The New York Times, women across Ireland described how learning about Savita Halappanavar’s story had woken them up to the reality that their very lives were on the line — not only if they found themselves facing an unwanted pregnancy, but also if a wanted pregnancy went wrong.
When you look at which stories have fueled abortion rights activism in other countries, Ms. Kolbert’s worry seems well founded. In September a 30-year-old mother identified in the press only as Izabela arrived at a Polish county hospital. According to a lawyer for her family, she was 22 weeks pregnant and the prognosis was poor: There was little or no amniotic fluid, and sonograms showed the fetus bore abnormalities. Still, a heartbeat remained.
Last year the Polish high court struck down a provision in the country’s already draconian abortion law that allowed for abortion in cases of fetal abnormality.
Izabela knew that her situation was grim. She sent a text message to her mother from the hospital: “The baby weighs 485 grams. For now, because of the abortion law, I have to lie down. They can’t do anything. They are going to wait until he dies or something else happens. Oh and also, I could die of septic shock.”
In time, the fetus died. Then Izabela died, too.
(“Doctors and midwives did everything in their power, they fought a difficult battle for the patient and her child,” the hospital said in a statement.)
Eventually, Izabela’s mother made her texts public. Days later, in early November, Polish protesters marched with signs that said, “Her heart was beating too” and “Not one more.” In apparent response to the protesters, Poland’s health ministry “clarified” the nation’s abortion law, insisting that the procedure remains available to save the life of the pregnant woman.
Storytelling, Ms. Kolbert pointed out, has always been a tool in the arsenal of the political movement to safeguard abortion rights, or to win them in the first place. In recent years, the focus among activists in the United States has shifted away from telling stories of dangerous back-alley abortions and become one of empowerment, focused on sharing stories that help remove the stigma and shame that still clings to the procedure.
But in the years before Roe, clergy, legislators, media and feminist activists hoped that telling women’s stories of victimization, humiliation and death could humanize the need for universal abortion access and bring about legalization. One such story began with a 1964 police photo of a woman’s bloodied, lifeless body, facedown on a motel carpet. The woman was Geraldine Santoro, known as Gerri, 28 and a mother of two. Ms. Santoro had been fearful of what her estranged and violent husband would do to her if he discovered she was pregnant with a lover’s child. Her boyfriend attempted to perform an abortion on Ms. Santoro, accidentally killing her in the process. (He fled and was later convicted of manslaughter.)
That photo of Ms. Santoro was published in Ms. magazine in 1973, under the words “Never Again.” The image was blown up on placards carried at abortion rights rallies, a visceral illustration of the risks of illegal abortion.
In recent years, the state of abortion rights in America has deteriorated, especially for poor women and women of color. But it may be harder to motivate protesters now, in an era where women of reproductive age have spent their entire lives with the protections of the Roe era. The back-alley abortions that motivated the movement in the past are largely someone else’s memory.
There are other fears now. Today, a person could be charged with a crime after miscarrying or could face legal consequences for ingesting abortion pills ordered on the internet. In states where abortion access has been whittled down, legal provisions promising to safeguard the life of the pregnant woman are left to interpretation by medical personnel. But this is a space without clear answers, and hospital staffs will inevitably factor their own legal and professional risk into what would otherwise be a decision about the patient’s best interest.
Texas’ law banning abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy has been in effect since September, and already, The Lily has reported, a woman in the state who experienced an ectopic pregnancy said she was turned away for care. Ectopic pregnancies, in which a fertilized egg implants outside the uterus, require immediate termination because they endanger the patient’s fertility or, worse, her life. In theory, terminating an ectopic pregnancy is not banned under the Texas law. But in this case, according to the National Abortion Federation’s hotline director, who spoke with The Lily, doctors were afraid to intercede, and the woman ended up driving at least 12 hours to New Mexico for the procedure.
The Texas woman with the ectopic pregnancy survived her ordeal. But as more states consider passing laws like Texas’, the next woman might not. What will happen then? Will we know her name? Will she become a rallying cry? Or will she and other women with tragic stories fade into obscurity, their families fearful of coming forward? No one wants to see this happen, but what are we doing to prevent it?
I called up Lynn Paltrow, the executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women (who happens to be my cousin by marriage), and asked her: Why does tremendous outcry over restrictive abortion laws come after a woman dies, rather than before? Ms. Paltrow was biting in her response. “The primary impact of the anti-abortion movement has not been to stop abortions, it is to dehumanize,” she said. “It is martyrdom and the visible suffering and death of a visible woman that reminds people of their humanity and their right to life.”
In Texas and elsewhere, Americans shouldn’t wait for another woman’s heart to stop beating before they demand change.
By Sarah Wildman, The New York Times
In 2012, Savita Halappanavar, a 31-year-old married dentist, appeared at Ireland’s University Hospital Galway in pain. She was 17 weeks pregnant and miscarrying. According to Dr. Halappanavar’s husband, hospital staff said that there was no saving the pregnancy, but they refused to intercede because her fetus still had a heartbeat. She was told her only option was to wait.
Dr. Halappanavar became feverish. By the time the fetal heartbeat faded away, she was in organ failure. Two and a half days later she was dead.
Nearly three decades earlier, Ireland’s leaders created one of the world’s most restrictive abortion laws with an amendment to their nation’s Constitution, cementing Ireland’s near-total ban on abortions. After that, women who were able left the country for the procedure, while those who couldn’t lived with the consequences of the law. The amendment remained in place despite many stories of related brutality during that period, including a suicidal 14-year-old girl who was impregnated through rape. Her family had to plea to the highest court in the nation for her to even travel for a termination. She lost her case at first, but mass protest prompted the court to reconvene, and she was ultimately allowed to travel to Britain for an abortion.
Dr. Halappanavar’s story had an even greater impact. When she died, her husband stepped forward immediately and said Ireland’s restrictive abortion laws were to blame in her death. Her death created a surge of grief and anger that became a focal point of the abortion and women’s rights movement in Ireland, and contributed to the drive to overturn the country’s constitutional amendment.
“People would say, ‘This is for Savita,’ and she came to symbolize all women who had to struggle and suffer because of that ban,” an Irish abortion rights activist, Ailbhe Smyth, told me. In 2018 Irish voters finally overturned the amendment.
In the United States, with Roe v. Wade likely to be largely dismantled, if not overturned, next year, it is time to look again at the women whose lives — and deaths — changed how the public understands what’s at stake when we talk about banning abortion.
“The thing I worry about in the United States is that the rallying cry won’t happen until women die, and that’s so unnecessary and unfortunate,” said Kathryn Kolbert, who in 1992 argued the major abortion case Planned Parenthood v. Casey before the Supreme Court.
It should not take a high-profile death to expose just how much is at risk when medicine is hamstrung by politics, religion or culture. And yet, interviewed for The New York Times, women across Ireland described how learning about Savita Halappanavar’s story had woken them up to the reality that their very lives were on the line — not only if they found themselves facing an unwanted pregnancy, but also if a wanted pregnancy went wrong.
When you look at which stories have fueled abortion rights activism in other countries, Ms. Kolbert’s worry seems well founded. In September a 30-year-old mother identified in the press only as Izabela arrived at a Polish county hospital. According to a lawyer for her family, she was 22 weeks pregnant and the prognosis was poor: There was little or no amniotic fluid, and sonograms showed the fetus bore abnormalities. Still, a heartbeat remained.
Last year the Polish high court struck down a provision in the country’s already draconian abortion law that allowed for abortion in cases of fetal abnormality.
Izabela knew that her situation was grim. She sent a text message to her mother from the hospital: “The baby weighs 485 grams. For now, because of the abortion law, I have to lie down. They can’t do anything. They are going to wait until he dies or something else happens. Oh and also, I could die of septic shock.”
In time, the fetus died. Then Izabela died, too.
(“Doctors and midwives did everything in their power, they fought a difficult battle for the patient and her child,” the hospital said in a statement.)
Eventually, Izabela’s mother made her texts public. Days later, in early November, Polish protesters marched with signs that said, “Her heart was beating too” and “Not one more.” In apparent response to the protesters, Poland’s health ministry “clarified” the nation’s abortion law, insisting that the procedure remains available to save the life of the pregnant woman.
Storytelling, Ms. Kolbert pointed out, has always been a tool in the arsenal of the political movement to safeguard abortion rights, or to win them in the first place. In recent years, the focus among activists in the United States has shifted away from telling stories of dangerous back-alley abortions and become one of empowerment, focused on sharing stories that help remove the stigma and shame that still clings to the procedure.
But in the years before Roe, clergy, legislators, media and feminist activists hoped that telling women’s stories of victimization, humiliation and death could humanize the need for universal abortion access and bring about legalization. One such story began with a 1964 police photo of a woman’s bloodied, lifeless body, facedown on a motel carpet. The woman was Geraldine Santoro, known as Gerri, 28 and a mother of two. Ms. Santoro had been fearful of what her estranged and violent husband would do to her if he discovered she was pregnant with a lover’s child. Her boyfriend attempted to perform an abortion on Ms. Santoro, accidentally killing her in the process. (He fled and was later convicted of manslaughter.)
That photo of Ms. Santoro was published in Ms. magazine in 1973, under the words “Never Again.” The image was blown up on placards carried at abortion rights rallies, a visceral illustration of the risks of illegal abortion.
In recent years, the state of abortion rights in America has deteriorated, especially for poor women and women of color. But it may be harder to motivate protesters now, in an era where women of reproductive age have spent their entire lives with the protections of the Roe era. The back-alley abortions that motivated the movement in the past are largely someone else’s memory.
There are other fears now. Today, a person could be charged with a crime after miscarrying or could face legal consequences for ingesting abortion pills ordered on the internet. In states where abortion access has been whittled down, legal provisions promising to safeguard the life of the pregnant woman are left to interpretation by medical personnel. But this is a space without clear answers, and hospital staffs will inevitably factor their own legal and professional risk into what would otherwise be a decision about the patient’s best interest.
Texas’ law banning abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy has been in effect since September, and already, The Lily has reported, a woman in the state who experienced an ectopic pregnancy said she was turned away for care. Ectopic pregnancies, in which a fertilized egg implants outside the uterus, require immediate termination because they endanger the patient’s fertility or, worse, her life. In theory, terminating an ectopic pregnancy is not banned under the Texas law. But in this case, according to the National Abortion Federation’s hotline director, who spoke with The Lily, doctors were afraid to intercede, and the woman ended up driving at least 12 hours to New Mexico for the procedure.
The Texas woman with the ectopic pregnancy survived her ordeal. But as more states consider passing laws like Texas’, the next woman might not. What will happen then? Will we know her name? Will she become a rallying cry? Or will she and other women with tragic stories fade into obscurity, their families fearful of coming forward? No one wants to see this happen, but what are we doing to prevent it?
I called up Lynn Paltrow, the executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women (who happens to be my cousin by marriage), and asked her: Why does tremendous outcry over restrictive abortion laws come after a woman dies, rather than before? Ms. Paltrow was biting in her response. “The primary impact of the anti-abortion movement has not been to stop abortions, it is to dehumanize,” she said. “It is martyrdom and the visible suffering and death of a visible woman that reminds people of their humanity and their right to life.”
In Texas and elsewhere, Americans shouldn’t wait for another woman’s heart to stop beating before they demand change.
PARENTS CLAIM THEY HAVE THE RIGHT TO SHAPE THEIR KIDS’ SCHOOL CURRICULUM. THEY DON’T.
By Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire, The Washington Post
In their search for issues that will deliver Congress in 2022, conservatives have begun to circle around the cause of “parents’ rights.” In Indiana, Republican Attorney General Todd Rokita recently introduced a Parents Bill of Rights, which asserts that “education policy and curriculum should accurately reflect the values of Indiana families.” In Florida, the legislature passed an even more comprehensive bill, assuring that the state and its public schools cannot infringe on the “fundamental rights” of parents. A growing number of states are allowing parents to sue districts that teach banned concepts. And in Virginia, Republican Glenn Youngkin has made parents’ rights a centerpiece of his campaign for governor, staging “parents matter” rallies and declaring, “I believe parents should be in charge of their kids’ education.”
Given this frenzy, one might reasonably conclude that radicals are out to curtail the established rights that Americans have over the educational sphere. Yet what’s actually radical here is the assertion of parental powers that have never previously existed. This is not to say that parents should have no influence over how their children are taught. But common law and case law in the United States have long supported the idea that education should prepare young people to think for themselves, even if that runs counter to the wishes of parents. In the words of legal scholar Jeff Shulman, “This effort may well divide child from parent, not because socialist educators want to indoctrinate children, but because learning to think for oneself is what children do.”
When do the interests of parents and children diverge? Generally, it occurs when a parent’s desire to inculcate a particular worldview denies the child exposure to other ideas and values that an independent young person might wish to embrace or at least entertain. To turn over all decisions to parents, then, would risk inhibiting the ability of young people to think independently. As the political scientist Rob Reich has argued, “Minimal autonomy requires, especially for its civic importance, that a child be able to examine his or her own political values and beliefs, and those of others, with a critical eye.” If we value that end, “the structure of schooling cannot simply replicate in every particularity the values and beliefs of a child’s home.”
The law has long reflected this. Consider home schooling. Although it is legal across the country, states still regulate its practice. Such regulations often aren’t enforced, but they are certainly on the books. Home-schooling parents can be required to establish minimal academic qualifications, to submit examples of student work to school district administrators or even to adopt a state-approved curriculum. As the Supreme Court noted in Wisconsin v. Yoder, a case that granted Amish parents the widest possible exemption from state control, “There is no doubt as to the power of a State, having a high responsibility for education of its citizens, to impose reasonable regulations for the control and duration of basic education.” And, as the court made clear in an earlier case, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the state concerns itself not just with the well-being of the child but also with what the justices broadly called “the public welfare.”
The sudden push for parental rights, then, isn’t a response to substantive changes in education or the law. It’s a political tactic.
Writing in the 1960s, historian Richard Hofstadter observed that conservatives felt that the country had been “taken away from them and their kind” and that timeworn American virtues had been “eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals.” In response, they took up what he called the “paranoid style” — an approach to politics characterized by “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.” Published more than half a century ago, his essay could have been penned yesterday.
The “paranoid style” of politics is particularly useful as a mechanism for organizing opposition. And the Republicans employing it right now have two particular targets in mind. The first is the public education system, which hard-liners have long sought to undermine. At an annual cost of nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars, tuition-free, open-enrollment education represents one of the nation’s most substantial commitments to the public good. But well before Ronald Reagan’s failed effort to introduce vouchers in the 1980s, conservatives were making the case for a privatized system — one in which families, not taxpayers, would bear the cost of education, and governance would happen through the free market rather than democratic politics. In recent years, this vision has come roaring back. Conservative legislatures across the United States have introduced bills creating education savings accounts, private-school tuition tax credits and other forms of neo-vouchers that package old ideological wine in new bottles.
But this play is much bigger than education. For years, the Republican Party has understood that the demographic tide is against it. Knowing that every vote matters, the GOP has increasingly relied on a strategy of voter suppression. Simultaneously, Republicans have worked to ensure that their base turns out in force by stoking White racial grievance. The recent firestorm over critical race theory is a perfect case in point. Never mind that this concept from legal scholarship isn’t actually taught in K-12 schools or that it isn’t what most protesters believe it to be. Republicans gain an electoral advantage by convincing their base that White children are being taught to hate themselves, their families and their country. Whether this supposed attack on the American way of life is being coordinated by Black Lives Matter activists, Marxist educators or antifa operatives, the point, as Hofstadter observed, is to generate an enemy “thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable.”
Courts have found that parents have great authority when it comes to deciding how to raise and educate their children. This right, however, does not mean that public schools must cater to parents’ individual ideas about education. Parents can opt out of the public system if they wish, and pay to send their children to private or religious schools. But even there, parental rights remain subject to state regulation and override.
In framing our public schools as extremist organizations that undermine the prerogatives of families, conservatives are bringing napalm to the fight. That may rally the base and tilt a few elections in their favor. But as with any scorched-earth campaign, the costs of this conflict will be borne long after the fighting stops. Parents may end up with a new set of “rights” only to discover that they have lost something even more fundamental in the process. Turned against their schools and their democracy, they may wake from their conspiratorial fantasies to find a pile of rubble and a heap of ashes.
By Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire, The Washington Post
In their search for issues that will deliver Congress in 2022, conservatives have begun to circle around the cause of “parents’ rights.” In Indiana, Republican Attorney General Todd Rokita recently introduced a Parents Bill of Rights, which asserts that “education policy and curriculum should accurately reflect the values of Indiana families.” In Florida, the legislature passed an even more comprehensive bill, assuring that the state and its public schools cannot infringe on the “fundamental rights” of parents. A growing number of states are allowing parents to sue districts that teach banned concepts. And in Virginia, Republican Glenn Youngkin has made parents’ rights a centerpiece of his campaign for governor, staging “parents matter” rallies and declaring, “I believe parents should be in charge of their kids’ education.”
Given this frenzy, one might reasonably conclude that radicals are out to curtail the established rights that Americans have over the educational sphere. Yet what’s actually radical here is the assertion of parental powers that have never previously existed. This is not to say that parents should have no influence over how their children are taught. But common law and case law in the United States have long supported the idea that education should prepare young people to think for themselves, even if that runs counter to the wishes of parents. In the words of legal scholar Jeff Shulman, “This effort may well divide child from parent, not because socialist educators want to indoctrinate children, but because learning to think for oneself is what children do.”
When do the interests of parents and children diverge? Generally, it occurs when a parent’s desire to inculcate a particular worldview denies the child exposure to other ideas and values that an independent young person might wish to embrace or at least entertain. To turn over all decisions to parents, then, would risk inhibiting the ability of young people to think independently. As the political scientist Rob Reich has argued, “Minimal autonomy requires, especially for its civic importance, that a child be able to examine his or her own political values and beliefs, and those of others, with a critical eye.” If we value that end, “the structure of schooling cannot simply replicate in every particularity the values and beliefs of a child’s home.”
The law has long reflected this. Consider home schooling. Although it is legal across the country, states still regulate its practice. Such regulations often aren’t enforced, but they are certainly on the books. Home-schooling parents can be required to establish minimal academic qualifications, to submit examples of student work to school district administrators or even to adopt a state-approved curriculum. As the Supreme Court noted in Wisconsin v. Yoder, a case that granted Amish parents the widest possible exemption from state control, “There is no doubt as to the power of a State, having a high responsibility for education of its citizens, to impose reasonable regulations for the control and duration of basic education.” And, as the court made clear in an earlier case, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the state concerns itself not just with the well-being of the child but also with what the justices broadly called “the public welfare.”
The sudden push for parental rights, then, isn’t a response to substantive changes in education or the law. It’s a political tactic.
Writing in the 1960s, historian Richard Hofstadter observed that conservatives felt that the country had been “taken away from them and their kind” and that timeworn American virtues had been “eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals.” In response, they took up what he called the “paranoid style” — an approach to politics characterized by “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.” Published more than half a century ago, his essay could have been penned yesterday.
The “paranoid style” of politics is particularly useful as a mechanism for organizing opposition. And the Republicans employing it right now have two particular targets in mind. The first is the public education system, which hard-liners have long sought to undermine. At an annual cost of nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars, tuition-free, open-enrollment education represents one of the nation’s most substantial commitments to the public good. But well before Ronald Reagan’s failed effort to introduce vouchers in the 1980s, conservatives were making the case for a privatized system — one in which families, not taxpayers, would bear the cost of education, and governance would happen through the free market rather than democratic politics. In recent years, this vision has come roaring back. Conservative legislatures across the United States have introduced bills creating education savings accounts, private-school tuition tax credits and other forms of neo-vouchers that package old ideological wine in new bottles.
But this play is much bigger than education. For years, the Republican Party has understood that the demographic tide is against it. Knowing that every vote matters, the GOP has increasingly relied on a strategy of voter suppression. Simultaneously, Republicans have worked to ensure that their base turns out in force by stoking White racial grievance. The recent firestorm over critical race theory is a perfect case in point. Never mind that this concept from legal scholarship isn’t actually taught in K-12 schools or that it isn’t what most protesters believe it to be. Republicans gain an electoral advantage by convincing their base that White children are being taught to hate themselves, their families and their country. Whether this supposed attack on the American way of life is being coordinated by Black Lives Matter activists, Marxist educators or antifa operatives, the point, as Hofstadter observed, is to generate an enemy “thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable.”
Courts have found that parents have great authority when it comes to deciding how to raise and educate their children. This right, however, does not mean that public schools must cater to parents’ individual ideas about education. Parents can opt out of the public system if they wish, and pay to send their children to private or religious schools. But even there, parental rights remain subject to state regulation and override.
In framing our public schools as extremist organizations that undermine the prerogatives of families, conservatives are bringing napalm to the fight. That may rally the base and tilt a few elections in their favor. But as with any scorched-earth campaign, the costs of this conflict will be borne long after the fighting stops. Parents may end up with a new set of “rights” only to discover that they have lost something even more fundamental in the process. Turned against their schools and their democracy, they may wake from their conspiratorial fantasies to find a pile of rubble and a heap of ashes.
THE GOP REBRANDS ITSELF AS THE PARTY OF TAX CHEATS
Opinion by Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
Once upon a time, Republicans portrayed themselves as the party of small government and family values. Recently, though, GOP leaders have been cobbling together a new coalition, welcoming insurrectionists, white-nationalist tiki-torchers and people who think Bill Gates is trying to microchip them.
The latest recruit to the Big Tent? Tax cheats.
Here’s the backstory. Each year, about $600 billion in taxes legally owed are not paid. For scale, that’s roughly equal to all federal income taxes paid by the lowest-earning 90 percent of taxpayers, according to Treasury Department data.
These unpaid taxes — often called the “tax gap” — are predominantly owed by wealthy individuals. The richest 1 percent alone duck an estimated $163 billion in income taxes each year.
To be clear, rank-and-file wage-earners are not necessarily more honest or patriotic. It’s just much harder for them to shortchange Uncle Sam.
Workplace grunts have taxes automatically withheld from their paychecks. And, critically, most labor-related income — as well as income from dividends, interest and other sources — gets reported to the Internal Revenue Service through W-2s, 1099s and other common tax documents.
So it’s difficult to sneak unpaid liabilities past the IRS.
There are some types of income, however, for which little or no third-party reporting exists. These income categories — including partnership, proprietorship and rental income — accrue disproportionately to high earners. The government has much less ability to tell when these filers are misreporting; as a result, they can more easily get away with cheating.
And some of them do.
This is evident from IRS data on “voluntary compliance,” or how accurately people report their income and tax liabilities without the government having to come after them. When it comes to ordinary wage and salary income, taxpayers are remarkably forthcoming, with noncompliance averaging only 1 percent; for those more “opaque” income sources, noncompliance is an estimated 55 percent.
Tax cheating is not a victimless crime. When (disproportionately high-income) people don’t pay their bills, everyone else must pay more to fill the shortfall.
One solution is to have the IRS conduct more audits. Audit rates for big corporations and high-income individuals should be higher, given that tax enforcement has plummeted as the IRS has been starved of resources.
But indiscriminately increasing audit rates alone is unlikely to solve the problem, and might irritate a lot of honest taxpayers in the process.
Not all high-income people (or people with rental or partnership or other “opaque” income) are cheating, of course. A more effective response would involve more of that third-party reporting so the IRS has greater visibility into who’s likely fudging their numbers. Then the agency could better target its audit decisions.
More reporting would also deter would-be tax cheats from fudging in the first place, because they’d know they’re more likely to get caught.
This solution is exactly what Democrats have proposed as part of their big budget bill.
Financial institutions already report certain information to the IRS about their clients’ accounts, such as interest income accrued over the year. Under Democrats’ latest proposal, banks would — once a year — also report the sums of all deposits and withdrawals for certain accounts. Not every transaction; just the year-end totals. Only accounts with flows of more than $10,000 not tied to wage income or exempted benefits would be affected — the idea being that the IRS already knows about the wage income anyway.
The reporting proposal is estimated to bring in $200 billion to $250 billion in revenue over the next decade, according to Treasury.
This is revenue that would be collected without having to raise a single tax rate, which you’d think Republicans would applaud. Instead, the GOP, backed by the bank lobby, has fought every version of the reporting policy tooth and nail.
Just as they did with Obamacare “death panels,” Republicans have megaphoned misinformation. They allege that Democrats would create a Marxist “surveillance program designed to target low- and middle-income earners” (false) in which the government would “monitor every single transaction you make” (false) with “no limits” (definitely false).
“Democrats want to track every penny you earn so they can then tax you and your family at the maximum possible amount,” fearmongered House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). This is an interesting euphemism for “rich people are going to pay the minimum amount of taxes the law already requires.”
The GOP seeks to exploit the confusion of honest, rank-and-file taxpayers. Their income is already quite well reported to the IRS: Three billion 1099 forms alone will be issued this year, and Americans haven’t considered this a “dragnet” or “infringement on personal privacy.” But suddenly it is — when similar reporting is proposed to ensure high-income people’s tax compliance, too.
Republicans also presumably have another shameful aim: communicating to tax cheats that, now and in the future, the GOP has their backs.
Opinion by Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
Once upon a time, Republicans portrayed themselves as the party of small government and family values. Recently, though, GOP leaders have been cobbling together a new coalition, welcoming insurrectionists, white-nationalist tiki-torchers and people who think Bill Gates is trying to microchip them.
The latest recruit to the Big Tent? Tax cheats.
Here’s the backstory. Each year, about $600 billion in taxes legally owed are not paid. For scale, that’s roughly equal to all federal income taxes paid by the lowest-earning 90 percent of taxpayers, according to Treasury Department data.
These unpaid taxes — often called the “tax gap” — are predominantly owed by wealthy individuals. The richest 1 percent alone duck an estimated $163 billion in income taxes each year.
To be clear, rank-and-file wage-earners are not necessarily more honest or patriotic. It’s just much harder for them to shortchange Uncle Sam.
Workplace grunts have taxes automatically withheld from their paychecks. And, critically, most labor-related income — as well as income from dividends, interest and other sources — gets reported to the Internal Revenue Service through W-2s, 1099s and other common tax documents.
So it’s difficult to sneak unpaid liabilities past the IRS.
There are some types of income, however, for which little or no third-party reporting exists. These income categories — including partnership, proprietorship and rental income — accrue disproportionately to high earners. The government has much less ability to tell when these filers are misreporting; as a result, they can more easily get away with cheating.
And some of them do.
This is evident from IRS data on “voluntary compliance,” or how accurately people report their income and tax liabilities without the government having to come after them. When it comes to ordinary wage and salary income, taxpayers are remarkably forthcoming, with noncompliance averaging only 1 percent; for those more “opaque” income sources, noncompliance is an estimated 55 percent.
Tax cheating is not a victimless crime. When (disproportionately high-income) people don’t pay their bills, everyone else must pay more to fill the shortfall.
One solution is to have the IRS conduct more audits. Audit rates for big corporations and high-income individuals should be higher, given that tax enforcement has plummeted as the IRS has been starved of resources.
But indiscriminately increasing audit rates alone is unlikely to solve the problem, and might irritate a lot of honest taxpayers in the process.
Not all high-income people (or people with rental or partnership or other “opaque” income) are cheating, of course. A more effective response would involve more of that third-party reporting so the IRS has greater visibility into who’s likely fudging their numbers. Then the agency could better target its audit decisions.
More reporting would also deter would-be tax cheats from fudging in the first place, because they’d know they’re more likely to get caught.
This solution is exactly what Democrats have proposed as part of their big budget bill.
Financial institutions already report certain information to the IRS about their clients’ accounts, such as interest income accrued over the year. Under Democrats’ latest proposal, banks would — once a year — also report the sums of all deposits and withdrawals for certain accounts. Not every transaction; just the year-end totals. Only accounts with flows of more than $10,000 not tied to wage income or exempted benefits would be affected — the idea being that the IRS already knows about the wage income anyway.
The reporting proposal is estimated to bring in $200 billion to $250 billion in revenue over the next decade, according to Treasury.
This is revenue that would be collected without having to raise a single tax rate, which you’d think Republicans would applaud. Instead, the GOP, backed by the bank lobby, has fought every version of the reporting policy tooth and nail.
Just as they did with Obamacare “death panels,” Republicans have megaphoned misinformation. They allege that Democrats would create a Marxist “surveillance program designed to target low- and middle-income earners” (false) in which the government would “monitor every single transaction you make” (false) with “no limits” (definitely false).
“Democrats want to track every penny you earn so they can then tax you and your family at the maximum possible amount,” fearmongered House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). This is an interesting euphemism for “rich people are going to pay the minimum amount of taxes the law already requires.”
The GOP seeks to exploit the confusion of honest, rank-and-file taxpayers. Their income is already quite well reported to the IRS: Three billion 1099 forms alone will be issued this year, and Americans haven’t considered this a “dragnet” or “infringement on personal privacy.” But suddenly it is — when similar reporting is proposed to ensure high-income people’s tax compliance, too.
Republicans also presumably have another shameful aim: communicating to tax cheats that, now and in the future, the GOP has their backs.
HOW REPUBLICANS SEEK TO MAKE IT EASIER TO CHALLENGE — AND EVEN OVERTURN — ELECTION RESULTS
By Aaron Blake, The Washington Post
The foiling of former president Donald Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 election is coming into sharper focus, and we laid out Wednesday just how close the scheme came to succeeding (or perhaps how far it came from succeeding). Essentially, the Justice Department and Vice President Mike Pence stood in the way, but even if they had fallen in line, there were significant obstacles.
But that leads to the next question: How much will those obstacles still be there next time?
Republicans across the country are proposing and passing legislation predicated on the idea of election security, even as we still have yet to see any proof of widespread or even significant fraud in 2020. But while much attention has been focused on new voting restrictions, there has been less analysis of the mechanisms by which it would become easier to overturn a result.
Let’s look at a few of them.
Sidelining unhelpful secretaries of state
In both Arizona and Georgia, lawmakers have responded to secretaries of state rebuking Trump’s voter-fraud claims by stripping them of power.
First came Georgia taking Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) off the state elections board and giving the GOP-controlled state legislature the power to appoint its chairman and a majority of members. Then came Arizona temporarily removing Secretary of State Katie Hobbs’s (D) power to defend the state in election lawsuits and transferring it to the state attorney general, who is a Republican (Mark Brnovich).
In case it wasn’t clear how punitive and political this last one was, the state only did so through 2022, after which we’ll have new people in both roles (Hobbs and Brnovich are running for higher office).
In Arizona, this means the Democrat won’t take part in election lawsuits that might arise out of the 2022 election. In Georgia, this means a board run by Republican appointees will handle claims of voter fraud and irregularities, potentially legitimizing them after Raffensperger steadfastly declined to do so.
Georgia’s move also allows Republican appointees on the board to exert greater control over local county election officials, and we’ve already seen the beginnings of a possible takeover in Atlanta-based Fulton County, the site of some of the Trump team’s biggest voter-fraud conspiracy theories.
Installing Trumpy secretaries of state
CNN’s Daniel Dale offered a must-read download on all of this last month.
Essentially, while Trump has endorsed many election truthers — it’s very much a litmus-test issue for him, it seems — he has taken a particular interest in trying to install them as secretaries of state in key states that he lost narrowly.
Trump’s Monday endorsement of state Rep. Mark Finchem for Arizona secretary of state is the latest in a series of announcements that has alarmed independent elections experts. Trump has now backed Republicans who supported his lies about the 2020 election for the job of top elections official in three crucial battlegrounds — Arizona, Michigan and Georgia — where the current elections chiefs opposed his efforts to reverse his 2020 defeat.
That trio of endorsees comprises a man who on Jan. 6 stated that the Capitol riot was “what happens when … Congress refuses to acknowledge rampant fraud”; a woman claimed it was a fact that votes were changed; and Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.), who baselessly suggested 1 in every 10 votes in Georgia was fraudulent.
These secretaries of state stood in Trump’s way in 2020, in large part because most of them in key states were Democrats — in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — while the other big one was Raffensperger. If Trump has his way, not only will those positions be filled by Republicans come 2024, but by Republicans who pushed the “big lie” more than most others in their party.
Eliminating roadblocks to overturning results
While Trump has lined up behind Finchem in Arizona, another GOP candidate for that job has moved to make it easier to overturn elections — explicitly.
State Rep. Shawnna Bolick proposed a bill earlier this year that would have allowed the state legislature to overrule a secretary of state’s certification of the election results and select the state’s presidential electors, potentially ignoring the statewide popular vote. This would effectively allow the GOP-run state legislature to overturn a result with a simple majority vote, at any point before the presidential inauguration. The bill has not been passed yet.
A somewhat similar effort in Texas also ran into trouble. GOP lawmakers there proposed reducing the threshold for challenging an election result from proving fraud beyond a reasonable doubt to “by a preponderance of the evidence” — a much lower standard.
The proposal, which was part of the voting bill that Democrats so strenuously objected to, also stated that “if the number of votes illegally cast in the election is equal to or greater than the number of votes necessary to change the outcome of an election, the court may declare the outcome of the election void without attempting to determine how individual voters voted.”
In other words, one wouldn’t even need to prove the fraud beyond a reasonable doubt or that it changed the result, just that it affected enough votes to potentially do so. Even the conservative National Review cried foul, and the proposal was abandoned in the final product — but not before it passed in the state Senate.
Creating more opportunities for wrongdoing
Part of overturning an election result is finding something to base it upon. Trump struggled mightily to do this, lodging massive conspiracy theories that were routinely rejected in court, and then trying and failing to get the Justice Department to legitimize his claims, by scraping the bottom of the voter-fraud-claim barrel.
But a subtle way in which the GOP is moving to change things is by creating new rules and increasing penalties for certain conduct by election administrations — changes that could logically turn small actions into fodder for larger claims of fraud.
As The Washington Post reported on a report from the group Voting Rights Lab last month, “five [states have] enacted laws threatening administrators with felony-level crimes or other penalties for breaking rules.” Some of these, the report noted, involve “creating misdemeanor penalties for even inadvertent, technical noncompliance with election rules.”
One example is, again, in Arizona, where it’s now a felony to mail someone an unrequested mail ballot if they aren’t on the permanent absentee voting list.
While there was no proven, significant fraud in 2020, government officials aren’t perfect. Imagine a situation in which one of them inadvertently sends unrequested mail ballots to a few people who aren’t on that permanent absentee list. Suddenly, there will be a felony to point to. And then imagine from there that a state legislature has the ability to overturn an election result based upon such things, regardless of whether they had a proven impact on the result.
Republicans say such laws are needed to prevent election officials from overreaching, as they contend they did with the expansions of mail balloting in 2020 (due to the pandemic).
Whatever one thinks of increasing safeguards against unauthorized actions by elections officials, though, Trump showed just how much such things can be blown out of proportion — and how much his base can be made to believe such allegations of massive fraud, especially in the absence of fact-based pushback from members of Trump’s own party. While those lawmakers often declined to subscribe to Trump’s actual voter-fraud theories, they instead opted for watered-down versions, including that elections officials violated the law by expanding mail balloting.
Creating avenues by which small actions can suddenly become criminal creates a scenario in which such bad-faith allegations would suddenly have more heft behind them. And that’s very much of-a-piece when it comes to the consequences — however intentional — of these laws and proposals.
By Aaron Blake, The Washington Post
The foiling of former president Donald Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 election is coming into sharper focus, and we laid out Wednesday just how close the scheme came to succeeding (or perhaps how far it came from succeeding). Essentially, the Justice Department and Vice President Mike Pence stood in the way, but even if they had fallen in line, there were significant obstacles.
But that leads to the next question: How much will those obstacles still be there next time?
Republicans across the country are proposing and passing legislation predicated on the idea of election security, even as we still have yet to see any proof of widespread or even significant fraud in 2020. But while much attention has been focused on new voting restrictions, there has been less analysis of the mechanisms by which it would become easier to overturn a result.
Let’s look at a few of them.
Sidelining unhelpful secretaries of state
In both Arizona and Georgia, lawmakers have responded to secretaries of state rebuking Trump’s voter-fraud claims by stripping them of power.
First came Georgia taking Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) off the state elections board and giving the GOP-controlled state legislature the power to appoint its chairman and a majority of members. Then came Arizona temporarily removing Secretary of State Katie Hobbs’s (D) power to defend the state in election lawsuits and transferring it to the state attorney general, who is a Republican (Mark Brnovich).
In case it wasn’t clear how punitive and political this last one was, the state only did so through 2022, after which we’ll have new people in both roles (Hobbs and Brnovich are running for higher office).
In Arizona, this means the Democrat won’t take part in election lawsuits that might arise out of the 2022 election. In Georgia, this means a board run by Republican appointees will handle claims of voter fraud and irregularities, potentially legitimizing them after Raffensperger steadfastly declined to do so.
Georgia’s move also allows Republican appointees on the board to exert greater control over local county election officials, and we’ve already seen the beginnings of a possible takeover in Atlanta-based Fulton County, the site of some of the Trump team’s biggest voter-fraud conspiracy theories.
Installing Trumpy secretaries of state
CNN’s Daniel Dale offered a must-read download on all of this last month.
Essentially, while Trump has endorsed many election truthers — it’s very much a litmus-test issue for him, it seems — he has taken a particular interest in trying to install them as secretaries of state in key states that he lost narrowly.
Trump’s Monday endorsement of state Rep. Mark Finchem for Arizona secretary of state is the latest in a series of announcements that has alarmed independent elections experts. Trump has now backed Republicans who supported his lies about the 2020 election for the job of top elections official in three crucial battlegrounds — Arizona, Michigan and Georgia — where the current elections chiefs opposed his efforts to reverse his 2020 defeat.
That trio of endorsees comprises a man who on Jan. 6 stated that the Capitol riot was “what happens when … Congress refuses to acknowledge rampant fraud”; a woman claimed it was a fact that votes were changed; and Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.), who baselessly suggested 1 in every 10 votes in Georgia was fraudulent.
These secretaries of state stood in Trump’s way in 2020, in large part because most of them in key states were Democrats — in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — while the other big one was Raffensperger. If Trump has his way, not only will those positions be filled by Republicans come 2024, but by Republicans who pushed the “big lie” more than most others in their party.
Eliminating roadblocks to overturning results
While Trump has lined up behind Finchem in Arizona, another GOP candidate for that job has moved to make it easier to overturn elections — explicitly.
State Rep. Shawnna Bolick proposed a bill earlier this year that would have allowed the state legislature to overrule a secretary of state’s certification of the election results and select the state’s presidential electors, potentially ignoring the statewide popular vote. This would effectively allow the GOP-run state legislature to overturn a result with a simple majority vote, at any point before the presidential inauguration. The bill has not been passed yet.
A somewhat similar effort in Texas also ran into trouble. GOP lawmakers there proposed reducing the threshold for challenging an election result from proving fraud beyond a reasonable doubt to “by a preponderance of the evidence” — a much lower standard.
The proposal, which was part of the voting bill that Democrats so strenuously objected to, also stated that “if the number of votes illegally cast in the election is equal to or greater than the number of votes necessary to change the outcome of an election, the court may declare the outcome of the election void without attempting to determine how individual voters voted.”
In other words, one wouldn’t even need to prove the fraud beyond a reasonable doubt or that it changed the result, just that it affected enough votes to potentially do so. Even the conservative National Review cried foul, and the proposal was abandoned in the final product — but not before it passed in the state Senate.
Creating more opportunities for wrongdoing
Part of overturning an election result is finding something to base it upon. Trump struggled mightily to do this, lodging massive conspiracy theories that were routinely rejected in court, and then trying and failing to get the Justice Department to legitimize his claims, by scraping the bottom of the voter-fraud-claim barrel.
But a subtle way in which the GOP is moving to change things is by creating new rules and increasing penalties for certain conduct by election administrations — changes that could logically turn small actions into fodder for larger claims of fraud.
As The Washington Post reported on a report from the group Voting Rights Lab last month, “five [states have] enacted laws threatening administrators with felony-level crimes or other penalties for breaking rules.” Some of these, the report noted, involve “creating misdemeanor penalties for even inadvertent, technical noncompliance with election rules.”
One example is, again, in Arizona, where it’s now a felony to mail someone an unrequested mail ballot if they aren’t on the permanent absentee voting list.
While there was no proven, significant fraud in 2020, government officials aren’t perfect. Imagine a situation in which one of them inadvertently sends unrequested mail ballots to a few people who aren’t on that permanent absentee list. Suddenly, there will be a felony to point to. And then imagine from there that a state legislature has the ability to overturn an election result based upon such things, regardless of whether they had a proven impact on the result.
Republicans say such laws are needed to prevent election officials from overreaching, as they contend they did with the expansions of mail balloting in 2020 (due to the pandemic).
Whatever one thinks of increasing safeguards against unauthorized actions by elections officials, though, Trump showed just how much such things can be blown out of proportion — and how much his base can be made to believe such allegations of massive fraud, especially in the absence of fact-based pushback from members of Trump’s own party. While those lawmakers often declined to subscribe to Trump’s actual voter-fraud theories, they instead opted for watered-down versions, including that elections officials violated the law by expanding mail balloting.
Creating avenues by which small actions can suddenly become criminal creates a scenario in which such bad-faith allegations would suddenly have more heft behind them. And that’s very much of-a-piece when it comes to the consequences — however intentional — of these laws and proposals.
NO FEDERAL TAXES FOR DOZENS OF BIG, PROFITABLE COMPANIES
FedEx and Nike are among those found to have avoided U.S. tax liability for three straight years.
By Patricia Cohen, The New York Times
Just as the Biden administration is pushing to raise taxes on corporations, a new study finds that at least 55 of America’s largest paid no taxes last year on billions of dollars in profits.
The sweeping tax bill passed in 2017 by a Republican Congress and signed into law by President Donald J. Trump reduced the corporate tax rate to 21 percent from 35 percent. But dozens of Fortune 500 companies were able to further shrink their tax bill — sometimes to zero — thanks to a range of legal deductions and exemptions that have become staples of the tax code, according to the analysis.
Salesforce, Archer-Daniels-Midland and Consolidated Edison were among those named in the report, which was done by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a left-leaning research group in Washington.
Twenty-six of the companies listed, including FedEx, Duke Energy and Nike, were able to avoid paying any federal income tax for the last three years even though they reported a combined income of $77 billion. Many also received millions of dollars in tax rebates.
Escaping 3 Years of Taxes
These are Fortune 500 companies with enough public information to show that they were profitable in 2018, 2019 and 2020 and had a total effective federal tax rate of zero or less over those three years, according to data compiled by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
Company 3-year income (in billions) Effective 3-year tax rate
Duke Energy $7.9 −15.5%
FedEx $6.9 −12.8%
Dish Network $6.6 −0.2%
American Electric Power $5.9 −3.0%
Kinder Morgan $4.9 −0.9%
Xcel Energy $4.4 −1.4%
Nike $4.1 −18.0%
Salesforce.com $4.1 −0.1%
DTE Energy $4.1 −11.0%
FirstEnergy $3.7 −1.2%
Williams $3.2 −4.8%
PPL $2.9 −1.3%
CMS Energy $2.5 −5.3%
Archer-Daniels-Midland $2.1 −0.1%
Evergy $2.1 −6.4%
Cabot Oil & Gas $1.8 −8.6%
Westlake Chemical $1.7 −1.7%
Advanced Micro Devices $1.7 −0.1%
Textron $1.5 −3.1%
Penske Automotive Group $1.3 −5.1%
UGI $1.1 −3.2%
Telephone & Data Systems $0.7 −22.8%
Mohawk Industries $0.6 −3.3%
Ball $0.6 −1.8%
Howmet Aerospace $0.4 −0.5%
Sanmina-SCI $0.3 −0.1%
Companies’ tax returns are private, but publicly traded corporations are required to file financial reports that include federal income tax expense. The institute used that data along with other information supplied by each company on its pretax income.
Catherine Butler, a spokeswoman for Duke Energy, responded in an email that the company “fully complies with federal and state tax laws as part of our efforts to make investments that will benefit our customers and communities.”
She pointed out that the bonus depreciation, intended to encourage investment in areas like renewable energy, “caused Duke’s cash tax obligations to be deferred to future periods, but it did not eliminate them.” According to a filing at the end of 2020, Duke has a deferred federal tax balance of $9 billion that will be paid in the future.
DTE Energy, a Detroit-based utility that was also found to have paid no federal taxes for three years, said major investments in modernizing aging infrastructure and new solar and wind technologies were the primary reasons last year. “For utilities, the benefit of these federal tax savings are passed on to utility customers in the form of lower utility bills,” it said in a statement.
A provision in the 2017 tax bill allowed businesses to immediately write off the cost of any new equipment and machinery.
The $2.2 trillion CARES Act, passed last year to help businesses and families survive the economic devastation wrought by the coronavirus, also contained a provision that temporarily allowed businesses to use losses in 2020 to offset profits earned in previous years, according to the institute.
DTE used that provision to get an accelerated refund of credits representing $220 million of previously paid alternative minimum taxes, the company said.
FedEx, too, took advantage of provisions in the CARES Act, using losses in 2020 to reduce tax bills from previous years when the tax rate was higher.
The report is the latest fodder in a debate over whether and how to revise the tax code. Policymakers, business leaders and tax experts argue that many deductions and credits are there for good reason — to encourage research and development, to promote expansion and to smooth the ups and downs of the business cycle, taking a longer view of profit and loss than can be calculated in a single year.
“The fact that a lot of companies aren’t paying taxes says there are a lot of provisions and preferences out there,” said Alan D. Viard, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research group. “It doesn’t tell you whether they’re good or bad or indifferent. At most it’s a starting point, certainly not an ending point.”
He pointed out that the Biden administration itself supported tax credits for green energy investments.
The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy has been issuing a form of its report on corporate taxes for decades. During the 2020 presidential campaign, its findings grabbed center stage, with Democratic candidates citing it to argue the tax code was deeply flawed.
Tax avoidance strategies include a mix of old standards and new innovations. Companies, for example, saved billions by allowing top executives to buy discounted stock options in the future and then deducting their value as a loss.
The Biden administration announced this week that it planned to increase the corporate tax rate to 28 percent, and establish a kind of minimum tax that would limit the number of zero-payers. The White House estimated that the revisions would raise $2 trillion over 15 years, which will be used to fund the president’s ambitious infrastructure plan.
Supporters say that in addition to yielding revenue, the rewrite would help make the tax code more equitable, requiring individuals and companies at the top of the income ladder to pay more. But Republicans have signaled that the tax increases in the Biden proposal — which Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, called “massive” — will preclude bipartisan support.
Referring to the proposed revisions, Matt Gardner, a senior fellow at the taxation institute, said, “If I were going to make a list of the things I would want the corporate tax reform to do, this outline tackles all these issues.”
Deductions and exemptions wouldn’t disappear, but other changes like the minimum tax would reduce their value, he said.
FedEx and Nike are among those found to have avoided U.S. tax liability for three straight years.
By Patricia Cohen, The New York Times
Just as the Biden administration is pushing to raise taxes on corporations, a new study finds that at least 55 of America’s largest paid no taxes last year on billions of dollars in profits.
The sweeping tax bill passed in 2017 by a Republican Congress and signed into law by President Donald J. Trump reduced the corporate tax rate to 21 percent from 35 percent. But dozens of Fortune 500 companies were able to further shrink their tax bill — sometimes to zero — thanks to a range of legal deductions and exemptions that have become staples of the tax code, according to the analysis.
Salesforce, Archer-Daniels-Midland and Consolidated Edison were among those named in the report, which was done by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a left-leaning research group in Washington.
Twenty-six of the companies listed, including FedEx, Duke Energy and Nike, were able to avoid paying any federal income tax for the last three years even though they reported a combined income of $77 billion. Many also received millions of dollars in tax rebates.
Escaping 3 Years of Taxes
These are Fortune 500 companies with enough public information to show that they were profitable in 2018, 2019 and 2020 and had a total effective federal tax rate of zero or less over those three years, according to data compiled by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
Company 3-year income (in billions) Effective 3-year tax rate
Duke Energy $7.9 −15.5%
FedEx $6.9 −12.8%
Dish Network $6.6 −0.2%
American Electric Power $5.9 −3.0%
Kinder Morgan $4.9 −0.9%
Xcel Energy $4.4 −1.4%
Nike $4.1 −18.0%
Salesforce.com $4.1 −0.1%
DTE Energy $4.1 −11.0%
FirstEnergy $3.7 −1.2%
Williams $3.2 −4.8%
PPL $2.9 −1.3%
CMS Energy $2.5 −5.3%
Archer-Daniels-Midland $2.1 −0.1%
Evergy $2.1 −6.4%
Cabot Oil & Gas $1.8 −8.6%
Westlake Chemical $1.7 −1.7%
Advanced Micro Devices $1.7 −0.1%
Textron $1.5 −3.1%
Penske Automotive Group $1.3 −5.1%
UGI $1.1 −3.2%
Telephone & Data Systems $0.7 −22.8%
Mohawk Industries $0.6 −3.3%
Ball $0.6 −1.8%
Howmet Aerospace $0.4 −0.5%
Sanmina-SCI $0.3 −0.1%
Companies’ tax returns are private, but publicly traded corporations are required to file financial reports that include federal income tax expense. The institute used that data along with other information supplied by each company on its pretax income.
Catherine Butler, a spokeswoman for Duke Energy, responded in an email that the company “fully complies with federal and state tax laws as part of our efforts to make investments that will benefit our customers and communities.”
She pointed out that the bonus depreciation, intended to encourage investment in areas like renewable energy, “caused Duke’s cash tax obligations to be deferred to future periods, but it did not eliminate them.” According to a filing at the end of 2020, Duke has a deferred federal tax balance of $9 billion that will be paid in the future.
DTE Energy, a Detroit-based utility that was also found to have paid no federal taxes for three years, said major investments in modernizing aging infrastructure and new solar and wind technologies were the primary reasons last year. “For utilities, the benefit of these federal tax savings are passed on to utility customers in the form of lower utility bills,” it said in a statement.
A provision in the 2017 tax bill allowed businesses to immediately write off the cost of any new equipment and machinery.
The $2.2 trillion CARES Act, passed last year to help businesses and families survive the economic devastation wrought by the coronavirus, also contained a provision that temporarily allowed businesses to use losses in 2020 to offset profits earned in previous years, according to the institute.
DTE used that provision to get an accelerated refund of credits representing $220 million of previously paid alternative minimum taxes, the company said.
FedEx, too, took advantage of provisions in the CARES Act, using losses in 2020 to reduce tax bills from previous years when the tax rate was higher.
The report is the latest fodder in a debate over whether and how to revise the tax code. Policymakers, business leaders and tax experts argue that many deductions and credits are there for good reason — to encourage research and development, to promote expansion and to smooth the ups and downs of the business cycle, taking a longer view of profit and loss than can be calculated in a single year.
“The fact that a lot of companies aren’t paying taxes says there are a lot of provisions and preferences out there,” said Alan D. Viard, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research group. “It doesn’t tell you whether they’re good or bad or indifferent. At most it’s a starting point, certainly not an ending point.”
He pointed out that the Biden administration itself supported tax credits for green energy investments.
The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy has been issuing a form of its report on corporate taxes for decades. During the 2020 presidential campaign, its findings grabbed center stage, with Democratic candidates citing it to argue the tax code was deeply flawed.
Tax avoidance strategies include a mix of old standards and new innovations. Companies, for example, saved billions by allowing top executives to buy discounted stock options in the future and then deducting their value as a loss.
The Biden administration announced this week that it planned to increase the corporate tax rate to 28 percent, and establish a kind of minimum tax that would limit the number of zero-payers. The White House estimated that the revisions would raise $2 trillion over 15 years, which will be used to fund the president’s ambitious infrastructure plan.
Supporters say that in addition to yielding revenue, the rewrite would help make the tax code more equitable, requiring individuals and companies at the top of the income ladder to pay more. But Republicans have signaled that the tax increases in the Biden proposal — which Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, called “massive” — will preclude bipartisan support.
Referring to the proposed revisions, Matt Gardner, a senior fellow at the taxation institute, said, “If I were going to make a list of the things I would want the corporate tax reform to do, this outline tackles all these issues.”
Deductions and exemptions wouldn’t disappear, but other changes like the minimum tax would reduce their value, he said.
REPUBLICANS’ BIG LIE ABOUT THE FILIBUSTER
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
The filibuster is not in the Constitution. Before the civil rights era, it was rarely used. It has been repeatedly modified, most dramatically by the creation of the reconciliation process. Huge spending bills chock full of policy shifts (e.g., a huge tax credit that halves child poverty) require only 51 votes; Supreme Court confirmations take only 50 votes.
The notion that the filibuster is somehow an inviolate part of protecting minority rights is crumbling. And that seems to have driven some Republicans around the bend.
Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell (Ky.), argued Tuesday that the Senate filibuster “has no racial history at all. None. There’s no dispute among historians about that.”
That’s false. Historians know the filibuster is closely intertwined with the nation’s racial past and present. To be sure, senators have filibustered issues other than civil rights over the Senate’s history. But it is impossible to write that history without recognizing the centrality of race.
Why is it so critical for Republicans to resort to such bald-faced lies? Probably the same reason Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) makes the ludicrous and entirely false claim that H.R. 1 would allow undocumented immigrants to vote. As the New York Times reports: “[Cruz] falsely claimed that the bill would register millions of undocumented immigrants to vote and accused Democrats of wanting the most violent criminals to cast ballots, too. In fact, it is illegal for noncitizens to vote, and the bill would do nothing to change that or a requirement that people registering to vote swear they are citizens.”
The current panic attack among Republicans stems from the prospect that much of the avalanche of anti-voting rollbacks in more than 40 states could be wiped out. That was precisely the reason Southern Dixiecrats engaged in filibusters during the 1950s and 1960s: In the name of “states’ rights,” they wanted to deny non-Whites access to the ballot. It is not simply that the filibuster is related to race, but that Republicans now intend to use it for essentially the same nefarious purpose.
Why changing the legislative filibuster isn't so simple.
In fact, the filibuster has been used time and again to perpetuate white supremacy. The Brennan Center for Justice explains that, in 1891, “a series of filibusters by Democrats threatened to derail legislation authorizing federal troops to supervise federal elections — an early use of the tool to block civil rights protections for Black Americans.”
The filibuster reached its zenith in the middle of the 20th century precisely because of efforts to subjugate Blacks. “Starting in the late 1950s, senators began to use the filibuster to thwart passage of civil rights legislation intended to address the deeply entrenched racism that affected so many areas of American life,” the Brennan Center recounts. “Anti-civil rights Dixiecrats obstructed anti-lynching bills; bills prohibiting poll taxes; and bills prohibiting discrimination in employment, housing, and voting. Most notable were their filibusters of the most significant civil rights bills in United States history: the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1964.” The filibuster against the 1964 Civil Rights Act went on for 74 days.
Maybe Democrats should call McConnell’s bluff. If budget bills and confirmation of federal judges get carve-outs from filibuster rules, why not issue a rule that prevents it from being used for bills that would address disenfranchisement and the denial of voting or other civil rights? If it is not about race, let’s institutionalize a rule that it cannot be used when the topic is race.
Indeed, such a rule would help implement Section 5 of the 14th Amendment, which states, “Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.” In other words, Congress would be acting in its essential role to enforce equal protection and due process under the Constitution. This intuitively makes sense. If the 14th Amendment, which serves to protect minority rights, can be thwarted by the filibuster, then it has no meaning.
Democrats, who have lived with the dizzying set of rules that govern reconciliation bill might want to come up with the McConnell rule: No filibustering to defeat civil rights legislation. Who could object to that?
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
The filibuster is not in the Constitution. Before the civil rights era, it was rarely used. It has been repeatedly modified, most dramatically by the creation of the reconciliation process. Huge spending bills chock full of policy shifts (e.g., a huge tax credit that halves child poverty) require only 51 votes; Supreme Court confirmations take only 50 votes.
The notion that the filibuster is somehow an inviolate part of protecting minority rights is crumbling. And that seems to have driven some Republicans around the bend.
Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell (Ky.), argued Tuesday that the Senate filibuster “has no racial history at all. None. There’s no dispute among historians about that.”
That’s false. Historians know the filibuster is closely intertwined with the nation’s racial past and present. To be sure, senators have filibustered issues other than civil rights over the Senate’s history. But it is impossible to write that history without recognizing the centrality of race.
Why is it so critical for Republicans to resort to such bald-faced lies? Probably the same reason Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) makes the ludicrous and entirely false claim that H.R. 1 would allow undocumented immigrants to vote. As the New York Times reports: “[Cruz] falsely claimed that the bill would register millions of undocumented immigrants to vote and accused Democrats of wanting the most violent criminals to cast ballots, too. In fact, it is illegal for noncitizens to vote, and the bill would do nothing to change that or a requirement that people registering to vote swear they are citizens.”
The current panic attack among Republicans stems from the prospect that much of the avalanche of anti-voting rollbacks in more than 40 states could be wiped out. That was precisely the reason Southern Dixiecrats engaged in filibusters during the 1950s and 1960s: In the name of “states’ rights,” they wanted to deny non-Whites access to the ballot. It is not simply that the filibuster is related to race, but that Republicans now intend to use it for essentially the same nefarious purpose.
Why changing the legislative filibuster isn't so simple.
In fact, the filibuster has been used time and again to perpetuate white supremacy. The Brennan Center for Justice explains that, in 1891, “a series of filibusters by Democrats threatened to derail legislation authorizing federal troops to supervise federal elections — an early use of the tool to block civil rights protections for Black Americans.”
The filibuster reached its zenith in the middle of the 20th century precisely because of efforts to subjugate Blacks. “Starting in the late 1950s, senators began to use the filibuster to thwart passage of civil rights legislation intended to address the deeply entrenched racism that affected so many areas of American life,” the Brennan Center recounts. “Anti-civil rights Dixiecrats obstructed anti-lynching bills; bills prohibiting poll taxes; and bills prohibiting discrimination in employment, housing, and voting. Most notable were their filibusters of the most significant civil rights bills in United States history: the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1964.” The filibuster against the 1964 Civil Rights Act went on for 74 days.
Maybe Democrats should call McConnell’s bluff. If budget bills and confirmation of federal judges get carve-outs from filibuster rules, why not issue a rule that prevents it from being used for bills that would address disenfranchisement and the denial of voting or other civil rights? If it is not about race, let’s institutionalize a rule that it cannot be used when the topic is race.
Indeed, such a rule would help implement Section 5 of the 14th Amendment, which states, “Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.” In other words, Congress would be acting in its essential role to enforce equal protection and due process under the Constitution. This intuitively makes sense. If the 14th Amendment, which serves to protect minority rights, can be thwarted by the filibuster, then it has no meaning.
Democrats, who have lived with the dizzying set of rules that govern reconciliation bill might want to come up with the McConnell rule: No filibustering to defeat civil rights legislation. Who could object to that?
HOW TO COLLECT $1.4 TRILLION IN UNPAID TAXES
Wealthy Americans are concealing large amounts of income from the I.R.S. There is a straightforward corrective.
By The New York Times Editorial Board
When the federal government started withholding income taxes from workers’ paychecks during World War II, the innovation was presented as a matter of fairness, a way to ensure that everyone paid. Irving Berlin wrote a song for the Treasury Department: “You see those bombers in the sky? Rockefeller helped to build them. So did I.”
The withholding system remains the cornerstone of income taxation, effectively preventing Americans from lying about wage income. Employers submit an annual W-2 report on the wages paid to each worker, making it hard to fudge the numbers.
But the burden of taxation is increasingly warped because the government has no comparable system for verifying income from businesses. The result is that most wage earners pay their fair share while many business owners engage in blatant fraud at public expense.
In a remarkable 2019 analysis, the Internal Revenue Service estimated that Americans report on their taxes less than half of all income that is not subject to some form of third-party verification like a W-2. Billions of dollars in business profits, rent and royalties are hidden from the government each year. By contrast, more than 95 percent of wage income is reported.
Unreported income is the single largest reason that unpaid federal income taxes may amount to more than $600 billion this year, and more than $7.5 trillion over the next decade. It is a truly staggering sum — more than half of the projected federal deficit over the same period.
The government has a basic obligation to enforce the law and to crack down on this epidemic of tax fraud. The failure to do so means that the burden of paying for public services falls more heavily on wage earners than on business owners, exacerbating economic inequality. The reality of widespread cheating also undermines the legitimacy of a tax system that still relies to a considerable extent on Americans’ good-faith participation.
Proposals to close this “tax gap” often focus on reversing the long-term decline in funding for the I.R.S., allowing the agency to hire more workers and to audit more wealthy taxpayers. But Charles Rossotti, who led the I.R.S. from 1997 to 2002, makes a compelling argument that such an approach is inadequate. Mr. Rossotti says that Congress needs to change the rules, by creating a third-party verification system for business income, too.
The core of Mr. Rossotti’s clever proposal is to obtain that information from banks. Under his plan, the government would require banks to produce an annual account statement totaling inflows and outflows, like the 1099 tax forms that investment firms must provide to their clients.
Individuals would then have the opportunity to reconcile what Mr. Rossotti dubs their “1099New” forms with their reported income on their individual tax returns. One might, for example, assert that a particular deposit was a tax-exempt gift.
Mr. Rossotti has proposed that the I.R.S. require the new forms only for people with taxable income above a generous threshold. A bill including Mr. Rossotti’s plan, introduced by Representative Ro Khanna of California, sets that threshold at $400,000, to minimize the burden on small business. The money is undoubtedly in chasing wealthy tax cheats, but equity argues that business income, like wage income, should be subject to a uniform reporting standard. Small businesses ought to pay their taxes, too.
The proposal would not increase the amount anyone owes in taxes. It would, instead, increase the amount paid in taxes by those who are currently cheating.
It would have the immediate benefit of scaring people into probity.
Consider what happened after Congress passed legislation in 1986 to require taxpayers to list a Social Security number for each person claimed as a dependent. The government could not easily crosscheck all of those claims then, but the requirement itself caused a sharp drop in fraud. The next year, seven million children abruptly disappeared from tax returns.
To realize the full benefit of the new data, however, Congress does need to make a significant investment in upgrading the I.R.S.’s outdated computer systems, and in hiring enough qualified workers to examine suspicious cases and to hold accountable those who cheat.
In 2008, for example, Congress passed a bill to require credit card processors to report payments processed on behalf of online retailers on an annual form called a 1099-K so the I.R.S. could verify the income reported by those retailers. But in December, the Treasury Department’s inspector general reported that “resource limitations” had prevented the I.R.S. from investigating more than 310,000 cases in which individuals and businesses failed to report more than $330 billion in income documented on 1099-Ks.
Congressional Republicans, unable to muster public support for reductions in federal spending, have pursued that goal indirectly by constraining federal revenue, in part by hacking away at the I.R.S.’s budget. The share of all tax returns subject to an audit declined by 46 percent from 2010 to 2018, according to the Congressional Budget Office. For millionaires, the decline in the audit rate was 61 percent. Today, the government employs fewer people to track down deadbeats than at any time since the 1950s.
The result is a parallel increase in federal debt and in tax fraud.
Mr. Rossotti, together with the Harvard economist Lawrence Summers and the University of Pennsylvania law professor Natasha Sarin, argued in an analysis published in November that investing $100 billion in the I.R.S. over the next decade, for technology and personnel, in combination with better data on business income, would allow the agency to collect up to $1.4 trillion in lawful tax revenue that otherwise would go uncollected.
The logic of such an investment is overwhelming. The government can crack down on crime, improve the equity of taxation — and raise some needed money in the bargain. There are many proposals to raise taxes on the rich. Let’s start by collecting what they already owe.
Wealthy Americans are concealing large amounts of income from the I.R.S. There is a straightforward corrective.
By The New York Times Editorial Board
When the federal government started withholding income taxes from workers’ paychecks during World War II, the innovation was presented as a matter of fairness, a way to ensure that everyone paid. Irving Berlin wrote a song for the Treasury Department: “You see those bombers in the sky? Rockefeller helped to build them. So did I.”
The withholding system remains the cornerstone of income taxation, effectively preventing Americans from lying about wage income. Employers submit an annual W-2 report on the wages paid to each worker, making it hard to fudge the numbers.
But the burden of taxation is increasingly warped because the government has no comparable system for verifying income from businesses. The result is that most wage earners pay their fair share while many business owners engage in blatant fraud at public expense.
In a remarkable 2019 analysis, the Internal Revenue Service estimated that Americans report on their taxes less than half of all income that is not subject to some form of third-party verification like a W-2. Billions of dollars in business profits, rent and royalties are hidden from the government each year. By contrast, more than 95 percent of wage income is reported.
Unreported income is the single largest reason that unpaid federal income taxes may amount to more than $600 billion this year, and more than $7.5 trillion over the next decade. It is a truly staggering sum — more than half of the projected federal deficit over the same period.
The government has a basic obligation to enforce the law and to crack down on this epidemic of tax fraud. The failure to do so means that the burden of paying for public services falls more heavily on wage earners than on business owners, exacerbating economic inequality. The reality of widespread cheating also undermines the legitimacy of a tax system that still relies to a considerable extent on Americans’ good-faith participation.
Proposals to close this “tax gap” often focus on reversing the long-term decline in funding for the I.R.S., allowing the agency to hire more workers and to audit more wealthy taxpayers. But Charles Rossotti, who led the I.R.S. from 1997 to 2002, makes a compelling argument that such an approach is inadequate. Mr. Rossotti says that Congress needs to change the rules, by creating a third-party verification system for business income, too.
The core of Mr. Rossotti’s clever proposal is to obtain that information from banks. Under his plan, the government would require banks to produce an annual account statement totaling inflows and outflows, like the 1099 tax forms that investment firms must provide to their clients.
Individuals would then have the opportunity to reconcile what Mr. Rossotti dubs their “1099New” forms with their reported income on their individual tax returns. One might, for example, assert that a particular deposit was a tax-exempt gift.
Mr. Rossotti has proposed that the I.R.S. require the new forms only for people with taxable income above a generous threshold. A bill including Mr. Rossotti’s plan, introduced by Representative Ro Khanna of California, sets that threshold at $400,000, to minimize the burden on small business. The money is undoubtedly in chasing wealthy tax cheats, but equity argues that business income, like wage income, should be subject to a uniform reporting standard. Small businesses ought to pay their taxes, too.
The proposal would not increase the amount anyone owes in taxes. It would, instead, increase the amount paid in taxes by those who are currently cheating.
It would have the immediate benefit of scaring people into probity.
Consider what happened after Congress passed legislation in 1986 to require taxpayers to list a Social Security number for each person claimed as a dependent. The government could not easily crosscheck all of those claims then, but the requirement itself caused a sharp drop in fraud. The next year, seven million children abruptly disappeared from tax returns.
To realize the full benefit of the new data, however, Congress does need to make a significant investment in upgrading the I.R.S.’s outdated computer systems, and in hiring enough qualified workers to examine suspicious cases and to hold accountable those who cheat.
In 2008, for example, Congress passed a bill to require credit card processors to report payments processed on behalf of online retailers on an annual form called a 1099-K so the I.R.S. could verify the income reported by those retailers. But in December, the Treasury Department’s inspector general reported that “resource limitations” had prevented the I.R.S. from investigating more than 310,000 cases in which individuals and businesses failed to report more than $330 billion in income documented on 1099-Ks.
Congressional Republicans, unable to muster public support for reductions in federal spending, have pursued that goal indirectly by constraining federal revenue, in part by hacking away at the I.R.S.’s budget. The share of all tax returns subject to an audit declined by 46 percent from 2010 to 2018, according to the Congressional Budget Office. For millionaires, the decline in the audit rate was 61 percent. Today, the government employs fewer people to track down deadbeats than at any time since the 1950s.
The result is a parallel increase in federal debt and in tax fraud.
Mr. Rossotti, together with the Harvard economist Lawrence Summers and the University of Pennsylvania law professor Natasha Sarin, argued in an analysis published in November that investing $100 billion in the I.R.S. over the next decade, for technology and personnel, in combination with better data on business income, would allow the agency to collect up to $1.4 trillion in lawful tax revenue that otherwise would go uncollected.
The logic of such an investment is overwhelming. The government can crack down on crime, improve the equity of taxation — and raise some needed money in the bargain. There are many proposals to raise taxes on the rich. Let’s start by collecting what they already owe.
THE ROADBLOCKS TO EQUAL RIGHTS FOR WOMEN, A CENTURY LATER
A House vote moves the Equal Rights Amendment closer to becoming part of the Constitution. But an uphill climb in the Senate remains.
By Alisha Haridasani Gupta
The House on Wednesday passed a bill that could clear the way for the nearly-century-old Equal Rights Amendment to be added to the Constitution, providing equal protection under the law regardless of sex.
The bill, which passed 222 to 204, almost entirely along party lines, is largely procedural — it removes a deadline for ratification that expired in the early 1980s. At the time, the amendment was not ratified by the constitutionally required 38 states, and it was left to linger for decades. But last year, on the heels of Nevada and Illinois, Virginia became the crucial 38th state to ratify it, reviving hopes among E.R.A. supporters that it could finally become part of the Constitution.
“It is time for us to stop with the excuses, it is time to do what’s right and make sure that women are in the Constitution,” Representative Jackie Speier, Democrat of California and the bill’s sponsor, said in a news conference after it passed in the House on Wednesday. She was flanked by other female House Democrats, all dressed in white — the color of the suffragists.
“Just make us equal under the law,” she added.
But the measure faces an uphill battle in the Senate, with backing from just a handful of Republicans. “I wish that I could tell you that we had more Republican support,” said Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, who is working to rally senators from her party around the measure.
“Hopefully we’ll be able to get some traction over here,” she added.
The country has been here before. Last year, the House extended the deadline, but the bill failed to move in the Senate, and today America remains one of the few countries in the world without any explicit guarantee of gender equality in its constitution. And several legal wrinkles — most importantly whether Congress even has the power to remove the ratification deadline — still make the amendment’s adoption far from guaranteed.
But what is different this time is a renewed appreciation of the amendment’s importance — and, of course, a Democratic controlled Senate may help. Advocates say the pandemic, the economic crisis and a right-leaning Supreme Court that may be a blocker for women’s rights have highlighted just how vulnerable American women are.
A whole generation of women thought they were protected and already equal, said Kate Kelly, a human rights lawyer and host of the podcast “Ordinary Equality.” But “Covid made visible inequities that to many were invisible before,” she added.
“Now that inequality is laid bare, they can see the desperate need for a fundamental, permanent solution.”
The text of the E.R.A., or what would be the 28th Amendment, is succinct: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”
If implemented, activists and legal scholars expect that its effects could be sweeping, clearing the way for Congress to guarantee equal pay, for example, or bolster measures to counter domestic violence and sexual harassment.
‘On Account of Sex’
The amendment was first introduced in Congress in 1923, just a few years after women secured the right to vote. Nearly 50 years later, in 1972, Congress passed a version of the measure, with broad bipartisan support.
At that point, Congress set a deadline in the amendment’s preamble, or introduction, for states to ratify it — originally 1979, which was later extended to 1982. Many states were quick to jump on board — Hawaii was the first, just 30 minutes after the Senate passed the amendment. And by the end of 1972, 21 other states had followed suit.
But the initial momentum tapered out, in large part because of the self-proclaimed anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly, who mounted a powerful opposition campaign that turned the bipartisan issue into a cultural lightning rod.
She argued that the E.R.A. would ruin traditional family structures, diminishing women’s roles as homemakers and child rearers, and strip women of privileges like sex-segregated bathrooms.
Later on, opponents also argued that the E.R.A. could invalidate state-level abortion restrictions.
By the 1982 deadline, 35 states had ratified the measure, leaving it three short of success.
To bridge the gap, a crop of pioneering lawyers — most prominent among them, the eventual Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — persuaded the Supreme Court, through a bevy of cases, to expand the 14th Amendment to cover sex discrimination, achieving in many ways what the E.R.A. would have done.
But that approach of tackling discriminatory laws one by one could go only so far. “The reason proponents wanted the E.R.A. was not only to get judges to strike down bad laws but also to empower Congress to write new laws that would address the inequalities that women face in society because of their sex,” said Julie Suk, author of “We the Women: The Unstoppable Mothers of the Equal Rights Amendment.”
An Unusual Step
In 1992, the 27th Amendment, an amendment pertaining to congressional pay, was added to the Constitution — 200 years after it was first introduced in Congress.
For E.R.A. supporters, it served as a eureka moment, planting a seed for the idea of simply removing the ratification deadline from the 28th Amendment. “There was a growing appreciation about, you know, what’s the deadline all about anyway? Why do we have to live by the deadline?” Ms. Speier said. “If Congress made the deadline, Congress can change the deadline.”
Several legal scholars agree. Since the deadline is in the preamble, it may not even be legally binding, said Katherine Franke, a law professor at Columbia and faculty director of its E.R.A. Project research initiative. She also noted that, in the past, the Supreme Court has ruled that Congress has full control over the process of finalizing a constitutional amendment, which is how Congress already extended the E.R.A. deadline once.
After years of campaigning and a reignited interest in the wake of President Donald J. Trump’s election and the #MeToo movement, Nevada ratified the amendment in 2017, then Illinois followed in 2018 and Virginia joined in 2020.
Republicans who oppose the measure argue that there is no precedent for retroactively changing a deadline — as the House bill does — and that doing so could be unconstitutional. The Justice Department also issued a memo last year echoing that line of reasoning.
Democrats are “trying to turn back the clock,” Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma, said on Tuesday of the bill. “This is a highly unusual step.”
Another potential twist is that, since 1982, five states have rescinded their ratification. The question of whether that is allowed is still unanswered, though there is some precedent. Three states rescinded their ratification of the 14th Amendment but were still counted in the yes column when the amendment was adopted in 1868.
Legal questions aside, the E.R.A. remains hugely popular among voters: Almost 80 percent of Americans supported adding it to the Constitution in a Pew Research Center poll last year, and activists believe it is not a question of if, but when.
“It’s, in many respects, an embarrassment that we don’t have express sex equality protections,” Ms. Franke said. “The E.R.A. provides an opportunity for a more modern approach to equality — I see it as a kind of modernizing tuneup of the Constitution that is way overdue.”
A House vote moves the Equal Rights Amendment closer to becoming part of the Constitution. But an uphill climb in the Senate remains.
By Alisha Haridasani Gupta
The House on Wednesday passed a bill that could clear the way for the nearly-century-old Equal Rights Amendment to be added to the Constitution, providing equal protection under the law regardless of sex.
The bill, which passed 222 to 204, almost entirely along party lines, is largely procedural — it removes a deadline for ratification that expired in the early 1980s. At the time, the amendment was not ratified by the constitutionally required 38 states, and it was left to linger for decades. But last year, on the heels of Nevada and Illinois, Virginia became the crucial 38th state to ratify it, reviving hopes among E.R.A. supporters that it could finally become part of the Constitution.
“It is time for us to stop with the excuses, it is time to do what’s right and make sure that women are in the Constitution,” Representative Jackie Speier, Democrat of California and the bill’s sponsor, said in a news conference after it passed in the House on Wednesday. She was flanked by other female House Democrats, all dressed in white — the color of the suffragists.
“Just make us equal under the law,” she added.
But the measure faces an uphill battle in the Senate, with backing from just a handful of Republicans. “I wish that I could tell you that we had more Republican support,” said Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, who is working to rally senators from her party around the measure.
“Hopefully we’ll be able to get some traction over here,” she added.
The country has been here before. Last year, the House extended the deadline, but the bill failed to move in the Senate, and today America remains one of the few countries in the world without any explicit guarantee of gender equality in its constitution. And several legal wrinkles — most importantly whether Congress even has the power to remove the ratification deadline — still make the amendment’s adoption far from guaranteed.
But what is different this time is a renewed appreciation of the amendment’s importance — and, of course, a Democratic controlled Senate may help. Advocates say the pandemic, the economic crisis and a right-leaning Supreme Court that may be a blocker for women’s rights have highlighted just how vulnerable American women are.
A whole generation of women thought they were protected and already equal, said Kate Kelly, a human rights lawyer and host of the podcast “Ordinary Equality.” But “Covid made visible inequities that to many were invisible before,” she added.
“Now that inequality is laid bare, they can see the desperate need for a fundamental, permanent solution.”
The text of the E.R.A., or what would be the 28th Amendment, is succinct: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”
If implemented, activists and legal scholars expect that its effects could be sweeping, clearing the way for Congress to guarantee equal pay, for example, or bolster measures to counter domestic violence and sexual harassment.
‘On Account of Sex’
The amendment was first introduced in Congress in 1923, just a few years after women secured the right to vote. Nearly 50 years later, in 1972, Congress passed a version of the measure, with broad bipartisan support.
At that point, Congress set a deadline in the amendment’s preamble, or introduction, for states to ratify it — originally 1979, which was later extended to 1982. Many states were quick to jump on board — Hawaii was the first, just 30 minutes after the Senate passed the amendment. And by the end of 1972, 21 other states had followed suit.
But the initial momentum tapered out, in large part because of the self-proclaimed anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly, who mounted a powerful opposition campaign that turned the bipartisan issue into a cultural lightning rod.
She argued that the E.R.A. would ruin traditional family structures, diminishing women’s roles as homemakers and child rearers, and strip women of privileges like sex-segregated bathrooms.
Later on, opponents also argued that the E.R.A. could invalidate state-level abortion restrictions.
By the 1982 deadline, 35 states had ratified the measure, leaving it three short of success.
To bridge the gap, a crop of pioneering lawyers — most prominent among them, the eventual Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — persuaded the Supreme Court, through a bevy of cases, to expand the 14th Amendment to cover sex discrimination, achieving in many ways what the E.R.A. would have done.
But that approach of tackling discriminatory laws one by one could go only so far. “The reason proponents wanted the E.R.A. was not only to get judges to strike down bad laws but also to empower Congress to write new laws that would address the inequalities that women face in society because of their sex,” said Julie Suk, author of “We the Women: The Unstoppable Mothers of the Equal Rights Amendment.”
An Unusual Step
In 1992, the 27th Amendment, an amendment pertaining to congressional pay, was added to the Constitution — 200 years after it was first introduced in Congress.
For E.R.A. supporters, it served as a eureka moment, planting a seed for the idea of simply removing the ratification deadline from the 28th Amendment. “There was a growing appreciation about, you know, what’s the deadline all about anyway? Why do we have to live by the deadline?” Ms. Speier said. “If Congress made the deadline, Congress can change the deadline.”
Several legal scholars agree. Since the deadline is in the preamble, it may not even be legally binding, said Katherine Franke, a law professor at Columbia and faculty director of its E.R.A. Project research initiative. She also noted that, in the past, the Supreme Court has ruled that Congress has full control over the process of finalizing a constitutional amendment, which is how Congress already extended the E.R.A. deadline once.
After years of campaigning and a reignited interest in the wake of President Donald J. Trump’s election and the #MeToo movement, Nevada ratified the amendment in 2017, then Illinois followed in 2018 and Virginia joined in 2020.
Republicans who oppose the measure argue that there is no precedent for retroactively changing a deadline — as the House bill does — and that doing so could be unconstitutional. The Justice Department also issued a memo last year echoing that line of reasoning.
Democrats are “trying to turn back the clock,” Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma, said on Tuesday of the bill. “This is a highly unusual step.”
Another potential twist is that, since 1982, five states have rescinded their ratification. The question of whether that is allowed is still unanswered, though there is some precedent. Three states rescinded their ratification of the 14th Amendment but were still counted in the yes column when the amendment was adopted in 1868.
Legal questions aside, the E.R.A. remains hugely popular among voters: Almost 80 percent of Americans supported adding it to the Constitution in a Pew Research Center poll last year, and activists believe it is not a question of if, but when.
“It’s, in many respects, an embarrassment that we don’t have express sex equality protections,” Ms. Franke said. “The E.R.A. provides an opportunity for a more modern approach to equality — I see it as a kind of modernizing tuneup of the Constitution that is way overdue.”
FOR DEMOCRACY TO STAY, THE FILIBUSTER MUST GO
What happens when the biggest election reform bill in half a century runs into one of the most formidable barriers to American governance?
By The New York Times Editorial Board
It is hard to imagine a more fitting job for Congress than for members to join together to pass a broadly popular law that makes democracy safer, stronger and more accessible to all Americans.
Last week, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 1. The bill, a similar version of which the House passed in 2019, is a comprehensive and desperately needed set of reforms that would strengthen voting rights and election security, ban partisan gerrymandering, reduce big money in politics and establish ethics codes for Supreme Court justices, the president and other executive branch officials.
The legislation has the support of at least 50 senators, plus the tiebreaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris. President Biden is on board and ready to sign it. So what’s the problem? Majority support in the Senate isn’t enough. In the upper chamber, a supermajority of 60 votes is required to pass even the most middling piece of legislation. That requirement is not found in the Constitution; it’s because of the filibuster, a centuries-old parliamentary tool that has been transformed into a weapon for strangling functional government.
This is a singular moment for American democracy, if Democrats are willing to seize it. Whatever grand principles have been used to sustain the filibuster over the years, it is clear as a matter of history, theory and practice that it vindicates none of them. If America is to be governed competently and fairly — if it is to be governed at all — the filibuster must go.
The most compelling reason to keep the filibuster is its proponents’ argument that the rule prevents a tyranny of the majority in the Senate. That’s the rationale of the two Democrats currently standing in the way of ending it, Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. They have been steadfast in defending the modern filibuster as part of what they assert is a longstanding Senate custom.
“It’s meant to protect what the Senate was designed to be,” Senator Sinema said. “Debate on bills should be a bipartisan process that takes into account the views of all Americans, not just those of one political party.”
(It’s unlikely that any Republican senator will support getting rid of the filibuster today, even knowing that it would make legislating easier for them in the future, but because the filibuster is a Senate-created rule, that can be accomplished by a simple majority vote.)
Bipartisan cooperation and debate should be at the heart of the legislative process, but there is little evidence that the filibuster facilitates either. The filibuster doesn’t require interparty compromise; it requires 60 votes. It says nothing about the diversity of the coalition required to pass legislation. It just substitutes 60 percent of the Senate for 51 percent as the threshold to pass most legislation. If the Senate was designed to be a place where both parties come together to deliberate and pass laws in the interest of the American people, the filibuster has turned it into the place where good legislation goes to die.
That’s one reason the framers of the Constitution didn’t include a supermajority requirement for the Senate to pass legislation. They had watched how such a requirement under the Articles of Confederation had prevented the government from doing almost anything. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist 22, “What at first sight may seem a remedy, is, in reality, a poison.” Supermajority requirements would serve “to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of the government, and to substitute the pleasure, caprice or artifices” of a minority to the “regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority.”
The filibuster arose only decades later. John C. Calhoun, a senator from South Carolina used it as a means to protect the interests of slavers like himself from a majority. From its beginnings through the middle of the 20th century, when segregationists like Senator Strom Thurmond, also of South Carolina, used the filibuster to try to kill multiple civil-rights bills, the pattern has been clear: It has been used regularly by those who reject inclusive democracy.
The relevance of the history is that the pattern continues today.
Finally, the filibuster is a redundancy in a system that already includes multiple veto points and countermajoritarian tools, including a bicameral legislature, a Supreme Court and a presidential veto. The Senate itself protects minorities in its very design, which gives small states the same representation as large ones.
Another common defense of the filibuster, as Ms. Sinema said, is that the filibuster is crucial for permitting full debate on a bill. Again, reality shows otherwise. The filibuster doesn’t only fail to ensure extended debate on a bill; today it curtails the opportunity for any debate at all. A single senator can signal he or she intends to filibuster by typing an email and hitting send. No need to stand on the Senate floor to make your impassioned case.
Reformers have suggested many ways to chip away at the filibuster without destroying it completely. One proposal would bar its use for legislation involving voting rights or other democratic expansions. Another would require the old-fashioned “talking” filibuster. A third would entail holding a series of cloture votes spaced three days apart, lowering the number of senators needed to end the filibuster each time. These are clever solutions, and Mr. Manchin has said he is open to at least one of them.
Even if there were a real debate on a bill, however, it should end at some point. That was clear more than a century ago, when the Senate had not yet established a rule to shut down a filibuster. As Henry Cabot Lodge, a Massachusetts senator, wrote, “If the courtesy of unlimited debate is granted it must carry with it the reciprocal courtesy of permitting a vote after due discussion. If this is not the case the system is impossible.”
If the political reforms in H.R. 1 are not undertaken at the federal level, Republican leaders will continue to entrench minority rule. That’s happening already in states like Wisconsin and North Carolina, where Republican-drawn maps give them large legislative majorities despite winning fewer votes statewide than Democrats. It’s happening in dozens of other states that have passed hundreds of voting restrictions and are pushing hundreds more, under the guise of protecting election security.
The Supreme Court should be blocking these measures and protecting the right to vote, but far too often under Chief Justice John Roberts, it’s done the opposite. In 2019 it refused to stop even the worst partisan gerrymanders, and in 2013 it struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act, opening the door to a wave of Republican voter-suppression laws that continues to crash. That’s why federal law is the only solution.
There have also already been many revisions to the filibuster. In the 1970s, Congress created a loophole for spending and revenue bills to avoid the filibuster, allowing such legislation to pass with a simple majority — a process known as reconciliation. More recently, in 2013, Democrats eliminated the filibuster for nominations of lower-court federal judges and executive-branch officials. Four years later, Republicans eliminated it for Supreme Court justices, which allowed President Donald Trump to fill one-third of the high court’s bench with his picks.
The perverse result of all this is that it is now easier to block a piece of legislation, which could be repealed in the next Congress, than it is to block a federal judge seeking a lifetime appointment. Any intellectual justification for the filibuster has been gutted by the fact that it doesn’t apply anymore to many important issues before the Senate.
The point of H.R. 1 is not to help Democrats. It is to rebuild and reinforce the crumbling foundations of American self-government and abolish voter restrictions erected for explicitly partisan gain — a federal law that would protect all voters. If the choice is between saving the filibuster and saving democracy, it should be an easy call.
What happens when the biggest election reform bill in half a century runs into one of the most formidable barriers to American governance?
By The New York Times Editorial Board
It is hard to imagine a more fitting job for Congress than for members to join together to pass a broadly popular law that makes democracy safer, stronger and more accessible to all Americans.
Last week, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 1. The bill, a similar version of which the House passed in 2019, is a comprehensive and desperately needed set of reforms that would strengthen voting rights and election security, ban partisan gerrymandering, reduce big money in politics and establish ethics codes for Supreme Court justices, the president and other executive branch officials.
The legislation has the support of at least 50 senators, plus the tiebreaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris. President Biden is on board and ready to sign it. So what’s the problem? Majority support in the Senate isn’t enough. In the upper chamber, a supermajority of 60 votes is required to pass even the most middling piece of legislation. That requirement is not found in the Constitution; it’s because of the filibuster, a centuries-old parliamentary tool that has been transformed into a weapon for strangling functional government.
This is a singular moment for American democracy, if Democrats are willing to seize it. Whatever grand principles have been used to sustain the filibuster over the years, it is clear as a matter of history, theory and practice that it vindicates none of them. If America is to be governed competently and fairly — if it is to be governed at all — the filibuster must go.
The most compelling reason to keep the filibuster is its proponents’ argument that the rule prevents a tyranny of the majority in the Senate. That’s the rationale of the two Democrats currently standing in the way of ending it, Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. They have been steadfast in defending the modern filibuster as part of what they assert is a longstanding Senate custom.
“It’s meant to protect what the Senate was designed to be,” Senator Sinema said. “Debate on bills should be a bipartisan process that takes into account the views of all Americans, not just those of one political party.”
(It’s unlikely that any Republican senator will support getting rid of the filibuster today, even knowing that it would make legislating easier for them in the future, but because the filibuster is a Senate-created rule, that can be accomplished by a simple majority vote.)
Bipartisan cooperation and debate should be at the heart of the legislative process, but there is little evidence that the filibuster facilitates either. The filibuster doesn’t require interparty compromise; it requires 60 votes. It says nothing about the diversity of the coalition required to pass legislation. It just substitutes 60 percent of the Senate for 51 percent as the threshold to pass most legislation. If the Senate was designed to be a place where both parties come together to deliberate and pass laws in the interest of the American people, the filibuster has turned it into the place where good legislation goes to die.
That’s one reason the framers of the Constitution didn’t include a supermajority requirement for the Senate to pass legislation. They had watched how such a requirement under the Articles of Confederation had prevented the government from doing almost anything. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist 22, “What at first sight may seem a remedy, is, in reality, a poison.” Supermajority requirements would serve “to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of the government, and to substitute the pleasure, caprice or artifices” of a minority to the “regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority.”
The filibuster arose only decades later. John C. Calhoun, a senator from South Carolina used it as a means to protect the interests of slavers like himself from a majority. From its beginnings through the middle of the 20th century, when segregationists like Senator Strom Thurmond, also of South Carolina, used the filibuster to try to kill multiple civil-rights bills, the pattern has been clear: It has been used regularly by those who reject inclusive democracy.
The relevance of the history is that the pattern continues today.
Finally, the filibuster is a redundancy in a system that already includes multiple veto points and countermajoritarian tools, including a bicameral legislature, a Supreme Court and a presidential veto. The Senate itself protects minorities in its very design, which gives small states the same representation as large ones.
Another common defense of the filibuster, as Ms. Sinema said, is that the filibuster is crucial for permitting full debate on a bill. Again, reality shows otherwise. The filibuster doesn’t only fail to ensure extended debate on a bill; today it curtails the opportunity for any debate at all. A single senator can signal he or she intends to filibuster by typing an email and hitting send. No need to stand on the Senate floor to make your impassioned case.
Reformers have suggested many ways to chip away at the filibuster without destroying it completely. One proposal would bar its use for legislation involving voting rights or other democratic expansions. Another would require the old-fashioned “talking” filibuster. A third would entail holding a series of cloture votes spaced three days apart, lowering the number of senators needed to end the filibuster each time. These are clever solutions, and Mr. Manchin has said he is open to at least one of them.
Even if there were a real debate on a bill, however, it should end at some point. That was clear more than a century ago, when the Senate had not yet established a rule to shut down a filibuster. As Henry Cabot Lodge, a Massachusetts senator, wrote, “If the courtesy of unlimited debate is granted it must carry with it the reciprocal courtesy of permitting a vote after due discussion. If this is not the case the system is impossible.”
If the political reforms in H.R. 1 are not undertaken at the federal level, Republican leaders will continue to entrench minority rule. That’s happening already in states like Wisconsin and North Carolina, where Republican-drawn maps give them large legislative majorities despite winning fewer votes statewide than Democrats. It’s happening in dozens of other states that have passed hundreds of voting restrictions and are pushing hundreds more, under the guise of protecting election security.
The Supreme Court should be blocking these measures and protecting the right to vote, but far too often under Chief Justice John Roberts, it’s done the opposite. In 2019 it refused to stop even the worst partisan gerrymanders, and in 2013 it struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act, opening the door to a wave of Republican voter-suppression laws that continues to crash. That’s why federal law is the only solution.
There have also already been many revisions to the filibuster. In the 1970s, Congress created a loophole for spending and revenue bills to avoid the filibuster, allowing such legislation to pass with a simple majority — a process known as reconciliation. More recently, in 2013, Democrats eliminated the filibuster for nominations of lower-court federal judges and executive-branch officials. Four years later, Republicans eliminated it for Supreme Court justices, which allowed President Donald Trump to fill one-third of the high court’s bench with his picks.
The perverse result of all this is that it is now easier to block a piece of legislation, which could be repealed in the next Congress, than it is to block a federal judge seeking a lifetime appointment. Any intellectual justification for the filibuster has been gutted by the fact that it doesn’t apply anymore to many important issues before the Senate.
The point of H.R. 1 is not to help Democrats. It is to rebuild and reinforce the crumbling foundations of American self-government and abolish voter restrictions erected for explicitly partisan gain — a federal law that would protect all voters. If the choice is between saving the filibuster and saving democracy, it should be an easy call.
THE GOP IS NOT A NORMAL PARTY
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
The few intellectually honest Republican officials recognize that the party is nothing more than a cult. Facing sanction from his state party for having the temerity to acknowledge reality and denounce racist insurrectionists, Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) responded in a video, “Let’s be clear about why this is happening. It’s because I still believe, as you used to, that politics isn’t about the weird worship of one guy.”
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) replied to her censure by her state party, “I think people all across Wyoming understand and recognize that our most important duty is to the Constitution. And as I’ve explained — and will continue to explain — to supporters all across the state and voters all across the state, the oath that I took to the Constitution compelled me to vote for impeachment.” She highlighted the insane views of her fellow party members. “They believe that BLM and antifa were behind what happened here at the Capitol. It’s just simply not the case. It’s not true,” she said. “And we’re going to have a lot of work we have to do. People have been lied to.”
The problem, of course, is that the party at large — elected members of Congress, state officials and a large portion of the base — believe or at least feign belief in the crackpottery of the former president, the QAnon congresswoman from Georgia (Marjorie Taylor Greene) and the conspiracies promulgated by cynical right-wing media moguls. Frankly, the ones feigning belief are the most reprehensible, because they willingly manipulate the base and undermine democracy for personal fame and power. (On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) correctly analyzed that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy “stands for nothing except the perpetuation of his own position. He has no values, and in my view cares about little except for hoping to be speaker one day. God forbid.”)
In what universe can the Republican Party recover some semblance of normalcy? Nearly 150 House Republicans voted to overturn the election results; 199 refused to strip Greene of her committee seats. All but 10 voted against impeachment to hold the former president accountable for insurrection. (And in case you thought Senate Republicans were any saner, Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi declared he is “not conceding that President Trump incited an insurrection.” He might check with Cheney and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — and the tens of millions of Americans who witnessed the events of Jan. 6.)
As if to confirm the looniness of his party, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), a prime spreader of Russian disinformation during the first impeachment, now leverages conspiracy theories against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: “We now know that 45 Republican senators believe it’s unconstitutional. Is this another diversionary operation? Is this meant to deflect away from potentially what the speaker knew and when she knew it? I don’t know, but I’m suspicious.” This is hogwash, but sadly par for the course for Johnson.
CNN’s John Harwood shared the reactions of some political scientists who see what too many in the media and political establishment refuse to acknowledge:
“The broad picture of the Republican Party is really ugly,” says Jack Pitney, a former national GOP official who now teaches political science at Claremont McKenna College in California. “A hot mess of nuts and cowards.”
Larry Sabato, the nonpartisan director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, has concluded after events of the past three months that America's two-party system now has one normally functioning entity and another that appears "insane."
“The Republican Party is unsalvageable as a center-right party,” says Sabato. “You can’t treat the situation as normal.”
We therefore need to readjust how we evaluate politics. It is not a failure of “bipartisanship” when President Biden cannot get support for his covid-19 package from the “hot mess of nuts and cowards”; it is to be expected. It would not be vindication of the former president if he is acquitted in the Senate. It would evidence of the cowardice of the Wickers and the rank dishonesty of Johnson and their peers. The conduct of the GOP suggests we follow a few simple rules going forward when considering policy debates and political events.
First, Republicans’ process arguments are invariably false. The law and the precedent for convicting a president impeached while in office is clear. Those voting to acquit simply cannot bring themselves to condemn him for instigating a violent insurrection.
Second, it behooves the mainstream media to point out that Republicans have no policy positions. As such they are not conducting themselves as a legitimate party in the battle of ideas. They spend their time whining about “censorship” (from the floor of the House and on the largest cable news outlet). It is noteworthy that other than 10 Republican senators, congressional Republicans have no proposals for attacking the covid-19 pandemic, reviving the economy or anything that would alleviate Americans’ immediate or long-term hardships.
Third, the individual and corporate donors, news outlets, think tanks and other political organizations that continue to treat the GOP as a normal political party are contributing to the erosion of our democracy and the elevation of authoritarian-minded racists and conspiracy-mongers. They too should be held accountable. Consumers, stockholders, legitimate scholars, real media and ordinary individuals should withdraw support from and recognition of the enablers. The twin powers of the purse and of public shunning are useful tools in knocking down the pillars that support a decrepit party.
Finally, there are normal Republicans — aside from the rump group in Congress. There are many mayors, governors and statewide officials (e.g., secretaries of state). When we want to know “what Republicans think,” we should go to them if we want an honest, fact-based response. Some of them (e.g., Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan) have made clear, for example, that federal covid aid is badly needed. Republican Govs. Phil Scott of Vermont and Charlie Baker of Massachusetts supported the first impeachment of Trump. In addition, Alabama’s Republican Gov. Kay Ivey “suggested Rep. Mo Brooks deserved a primary challenger for his role in riling up President Donald Trump’s supporters Wednesday before they barged into the Capitol Building,” the Daily Mail reported. If there is to be a sane alternative party to the Democrats, it will be made up of such figures. We should follow their actions and rhetoric, if we want to know what a normal center-right party would act like.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
The few intellectually honest Republican officials recognize that the party is nothing more than a cult. Facing sanction from his state party for having the temerity to acknowledge reality and denounce racist insurrectionists, Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) responded in a video, “Let’s be clear about why this is happening. It’s because I still believe, as you used to, that politics isn’t about the weird worship of one guy.”
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) replied to her censure by her state party, “I think people all across Wyoming understand and recognize that our most important duty is to the Constitution. And as I’ve explained — and will continue to explain — to supporters all across the state and voters all across the state, the oath that I took to the Constitution compelled me to vote for impeachment.” She highlighted the insane views of her fellow party members. “They believe that BLM and antifa were behind what happened here at the Capitol. It’s just simply not the case. It’s not true,” she said. “And we’re going to have a lot of work we have to do. People have been lied to.”
The problem, of course, is that the party at large — elected members of Congress, state officials and a large portion of the base — believe or at least feign belief in the crackpottery of the former president, the QAnon congresswoman from Georgia (Marjorie Taylor Greene) and the conspiracies promulgated by cynical right-wing media moguls. Frankly, the ones feigning belief are the most reprehensible, because they willingly manipulate the base and undermine democracy for personal fame and power. (On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) correctly analyzed that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy “stands for nothing except the perpetuation of his own position. He has no values, and in my view cares about little except for hoping to be speaker one day. God forbid.”)
In what universe can the Republican Party recover some semblance of normalcy? Nearly 150 House Republicans voted to overturn the election results; 199 refused to strip Greene of her committee seats. All but 10 voted against impeachment to hold the former president accountable for insurrection. (And in case you thought Senate Republicans were any saner, Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi declared he is “not conceding that President Trump incited an insurrection.” He might check with Cheney and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — and the tens of millions of Americans who witnessed the events of Jan. 6.)
As if to confirm the looniness of his party, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), a prime spreader of Russian disinformation during the first impeachment, now leverages conspiracy theories against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: “We now know that 45 Republican senators believe it’s unconstitutional. Is this another diversionary operation? Is this meant to deflect away from potentially what the speaker knew and when she knew it? I don’t know, but I’m suspicious.” This is hogwash, but sadly par for the course for Johnson.
CNN’s John Harwood shared the reactions of some political scientists who see what too many in the media and political establishment refuse to acknowledge:
“The broad picture of the Republican Party is really ugly,” says Jack Pitney, a former national GOP official who now teaches political science at Claremont McKenna College in California. “A hot mess of nuts and cowards.”
Larry Sabato, the nonpartisan director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, has concluded after events of the past three months that America's two-party system now has one normally functioning entity and another that appears "insane."
“The Republican Party is unsalvageable as a center-right party,” says Sabato. “You can’t treat the situation as normal.”
We therefore need to readjust how we evaluate politics. It is not a failure of “bipartisanship” when President Biden cannot get support for his covid-19 package from the “hot mess of nuts and cowards”; it is to be expected. It would not be vindication of the former president if he is acquitted in the Senate. It would evidence of the cowardice of the Wickers and the rank dishonesty of Johnson and their peers. The conduct of the GOP suggests we follow a few simple rules going forward when considering policy debates and political events.
First, Republicans’ process arguments are invariably false. The law and the precedent for convicting a president impeached while in office is clear. Those voting to acquit simply cannot bring themselves to condemn him for instigating a violent insurrection.
Second, it behooves the mainstream media to point out that Republicans have no policy positions. As such they are not conducting themselves as a legitimate party in the battle of ideas. They spend their time whining about “censorship” (from the floor of the House and on the largest cable news outlet). It is noteworthy that other than 10 Republican senators, congressional Republicans have no proposals for attacking the covid-19 pandemic, reviving the economy or anything that would alleviate Americans’ immediate or long-term hardships.
Third, the individual and corporate donors, news outlets, think tanks and other political organizations that continue to treat the GOP as a normal political party are contributing to the erosion of our democracy and the elevation of authoritarian-minded racists and conspiracy-mongers. They too should be held accountable. Consumers, stockholders, legitimate scholars, real media and ordinary individuals should withdraw support from and recognition of the enablers. The twin powers of the purse and of public shunning are useful tools in knocking down the pillars that support a decrepit party.
Finally, there are normal Republicans — aside from the rump group in Congress. There are many mayors, governors and statewide officials (e.g., secretaries of state). When we want to know “what Republicans think,” we should go to them if we want an honest, fact-based response. Some of them (e.g., Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan) have made clear, for example, that federal covid aid is badly needed. Republican Govs. Phil Scott of Vermont and Charlie Baker of Massachusetts supported the first impeachment of Trump. In addition, Alabama’s Republican Gov. Kay Ivey “suggested Rep. Mo Brooks deserved a primary challenger for his role in riling up President Donald Trump’s supporters Wednesday before they barged into the Capitol Building,” the Daily Mail reported. If there is to be a sane alternative party to the Democrats, it will be made up of such figures. We should follow their actions and rhetoric, if we want to know what a normal center-right party would act like.
TRUMP’S LIE THAT THE ELECTION WAS STOLEN HAS COST$519 MILLION(AND COUNTING) AS TAXPAYERS FUND ENHANCED SECURITY, LEGAL FEES, PROPERTY REPAIRS AND MORE
By Toluse Olorunnipa and Michelle Ye Hee Lee, The Washington Post
President Donald Trump’s onslaught of falsehoods about the November election misled millions of Americans, undermined faith in the electoral system, sparked a deadly riot — and has now left taxpayers with a large, and growing, bill.
The total so far: $519 million.
The costs have mounted daily as government agencies at all levels have been forced to devote public funds to respond to actions taken by Trump and his supporters, according to a Washington Post review of local, state and federal spending records, as well as interviews with government officials. The expenditures include legal fees prompted by dozens of fruitless lawsuits, enhanced security in response to death threats against poll workers, and costly repairs needed after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. That attack triggered the expensive massing of thousands of National Guard troops on the streets of Washington amid fears of additional extremist violence.
Although more than $480 million of the total is attributable to the military’s estimated expenses for the troop deployment through mid-March, the financial impact of the president’s refusal to concede the election is probably much higher than what has been documented thus far, and the true costs may never be known.
Many officials contacted by The Post said they were still trying to tally the cost of rapidly scaling up security to deal with the increased threat of violence from Trump supporters. Others have given up on trying to calculate their costs — perplexed over how to calculate the financial impact of a president’s injecting so much instability into the democratic system — opting instead to simply absorb them as the cost of doing business in the Trump era.
Costs identified by The Washington Post related to election misinformation
Category Cost
Costs associated with Jan. 6 insurrection and inauguration - At least $488,800,000
State costs associated with Jan. 6 and inauguration-related security - At least $28,310,464
State costs related to legal challenges and security for election officials - At least $2,217,905
Total - At least $519,328,369
Some officials have shifted their attention to making plans for additional security measures going forward in the threatening environment fostered by Trump’s conspiratorial brand of politics.
“I think anytime you see an event like we saw on January 6th, it changes your perspective going forward. You don’t take things for granted like we used to,” said Michael Rapich, superintendent of the Utah Highway Patrol, which spent $227,000 on Jan. 17 to deploy 300 troopers to the state’s Capitol after threats of an armed siege by Trump supporters ahead of the inauguration of President Biden. “It is an incredible amount of money to spend.”
Other states spent even more, and officials are beginning to draft new security budgets that suggest ongoing security costs will grow significantly in the future as a result of the Capitol breach.
The bill to the federal government continues to grow daily, as thousands of National Guard troops patrol Washington and lawmakers consider a supplemental spending proposal to bolster their security.
The 25,000 troops that were deployed to Washington traveled on military planes and stayed in local hotels — their presence aimed at restoring order in the nation’s capital after an attempted insurrection that overwhelmed Capitol police and ended in five deaths. The cost estimate of the troops, first reported by Bloomberg News, covers the troop presence at the Capitol through mid-March, according to Defense Department officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal figures. With an unprecedented show of force that included checkpoints and militarized zones in Washington, the troops succeeded in thwarting efforts to disrupt Biden’s swearing-in, which took place on the same platform stormed by Trump-supporting rioters two weeks earlier.
Costs associated with Jan. 6 insurrection and after, including inauguration
Entity Description Cost
National Guard - Cost of deploying as many as 25,000 troops to Washington through mid-March = At least $480,000,000
D.C. police - Cost for a week of added security at the Capitol, including surge of 850 officers on Jan. 6 = At least $8,800,000
Architect of the Capitol - Broken windows, busted doors, landscaping, graffiti and other damage to the Capitol = Unavailable
U.S. Park Police - Damage and cleanup of the National Mall = Unavailable
U.S. Capitol Police - Additional staffing at the Capitol, overtime, medical bills = Unavailable
Subtotal - At least $488,800,000
It is not clear whether the House Democrats managing Trump’s impeachment trial plan to bring up the financial costs borne by taxpayers as a result of what critics have called his “big lie.” The trial begins Tuesday, and Democrats have focused heavily on Trump’s speech to supporters shortly before the Capitol riot.
A spokeswoman for Trump’s presidential office did not respond to a request for comment. Trump’s defense lawyers have argued that he was within his rights to publicly question the election’s integrity and should not be held responsible for the actions of people who attacked the Capitol after his speech.
Several states are working to calculate the taxpayer costs for additional security and related expenses in the aftermath of the November election and the Jan. 6 protests.
In California, state officials estimated they spent about $19 million, deploying 1,000 National Guard troops and hundreds of state troopers from Jan. 14 to Jan. 21 to protect the state Capitol and other locations.
“That’s a lot of money, even by California standards, for one week’s worth of work,” California Department of Finance spokesman H.D. Palmer said in an interview. “But it was necessary work to make sure that we didn’t see the damage that could have occurred, had we had a crowd that was bent on doing damage to the building.”
In Ohio, taxpayers spent $1.2 million to deploy National Guard troops to the closed Statehouse building in Columbus. The New Mexico legislature increased its appropriation for Capitol security during the 60-day session by almost 40 percent this month, handing taxpayers a bill of $1.5 million for personnel, equipment and other expenses, officials said.
Taxpayers paid to deploy helicopters to monitor potential demonstrations in Texas and North Carolina, temporary fencing around the capitols in Lansing, Mich., and Olympia, Wash., and extra security details for state lawmakers attending legislative sessions.
D.C. police dispatched 850 officers to help defend the Capitol, spending more than $8.8 million during the week of Jan. 6, acting police chief Robert J. Contee III said in his opening statement before a closed session of the House Appropriations Committee on Jan. 26. Contee said the final tab will probably be much higher, and police and prosecutors will be “engaged for years” investigating and trying the rioters.
“The costs for this insurrection — both human and monetary — will be steep,” he said. “The immediate fiscal impact is still being calculated.”
For many states, the post-Jan. 6 costs added to a tab that has been growing since shortly after polls closed on Nov. 3. Trump’s false assertion that night that he had won the election and that it was being stolen in ballot-processing centers led to credible threats against poll workers and facilities where they were working. Between added legal fees to fend off conspiracy-theory-laced lawsuits from Trump and enhanced security for election officials, states’ costs resulting from the president’s central fabrication about the Nov. 3 vote have escalated rapidly.
States spent untold millions of dollars on election recounts not required by law but demanded by Trump and legal and state legislative hearings.
Protesters, some armed, amassed at ballot-processing centers in places such as Maricopa County, Ariz.; Detroit; and Las Vegas in the days after Nov. 3, echoing Trump’s rhetoric about a rigged election.
The added bill comes as many states are resource-strapped as a result of a pandemic that has wracked the economy and decimated state budgets.
State costs associated with Jan. 6 and pre-inauguration-related security
Location Description Cost
Arizona - Security by Maricopa County and Phoenix police for election-related protests = $826,999
California - National Guard and state forces after Jan. 6 rally in Sacramento and ahead of Inauguration Day = $19,000,000
Colorado - Security and fencing after 700 demonstrators gathered in Denver, and ahead of Inauguration Day = $62,775
Florida - Florida Department of Law Enforcement security ahead of Inauguration Day = $27,300
Georgia - National Guard activated, state SWAT team patrolled Capitol = Unavailable
Minnesota - National Guard and local forces mobilized after 500 demonstrators rallied at Capitol = Unavailable
New Mexico - Legislature appropriated additional funding for security during 60-day legislative session = $416,957
New York - Additional state police deployed to Capitol after protests = Unavailable
North Carolina - National Guard troops deployed to State Legislative Building = $605,251
Ohio - National Guard troops deployed to Statehouse after protests = $1,225,000
Oregon - National Guard troops mobilized to support state police after protests = Unavailable
Pennsylvania - National Guard troops and state police deployed to Capitol and elsewhere ahead of inauguration = $565,631
South Carolina - State troopers and Richland County sheriff’s deputies deployed to State House ahead of inauguration = $414,934
Texas - National Guard troops and state troopers mobilized to protect Capitol after protests and ahead of inauguration = Unavailable
Utah - National Guard troops and state troopers mobilized to Salt Lake City ahead of inauguration = $585,000
Washington - National Guard troops and state police mobilized to Capitol after protests = $3,987,617
Wisconsin - National Guard troops mobilized to Madison after protests = $593,000
Subtotal = at least $28,310,464
Chris Loftis, communications director for the Washington State Patrol, said the new “staggeringly high” costs for security and other expenses constituted “a wasteful distraction of essential and diminishing resources.”
Not included in the more than $4 million estimated security bill for Washington state taxpayers is the yet-to-be-determined cost of fixing a gate at the governor’s mansion broken by armed demonstrators on Jan. 6.
“Not only have our people, places and processes of democracy been attacked and damaged, but the continuing expense of this new security environment will take away from funds that could have been used for covid vaccines and treatment” and other critical expenses, Loftis said.
In Georgia, which faced a large share of Trump’s post-election fraud charges, officials conducted two recounts of the presidential vote. One was triggered by Biden’s narrow margin of victory over Trump, leading to a hand recount of all 5 million presidential ballots cast — the largest hand recount in U.S. history. The Trump campaign then requested another recount — this time, a machine rescan of those hand-recounted ballots. Both recounts reaffirmed Biden’s victory. They also added extra costs for staff time and the security of election administrators, who faced growing threats and, in some cases, required 24-hour police details.
In Fulton County, Georgia’s largest, taxpayers spent an estimated $500,000 on security alone for election officials, who faced harassment and threats fueled by conspiracy theories over the November election.
Other state and local officials spent funds to battle with Trump’s well-funded team of lawyers in court. Trump and his allies devoted more than $11 million to a failed legal effort that included dozens of lawsuits and repeated losses in court due to a lack of evidence. After the Nov. 3 election and through the end of December, Trump and the Republican Party paid at least 65 firms or lawyers on election-related legal challenges, according to federal campaign finance filings.
Costs related to state legal challenges and security for election officials
In Georgia, separate figures for the Trump-requested recount were not available as of deadline.
Location Description Cost
Arizona - Election lawsuits = At least $153,862
Georgia - Election-related security = At least $500,000
Michigan - Election lawsuits, security = Unavailable
Minnesota - Election lawsuits = $35,620
Nevada - Election lawsuits = Unavailable
New Mexico - Election lawsuits = Unavailable
Pennsylvania - Election lawsuits - $1,528,423
Texas - Election lawsuits = Unavailable
Wisconsin - Election lawsuits = Unavailable
Subtotal = At least $2,217,905
The state of Pennsylvania hired several private law firms to deal with the onslaught of election litigation, paying outside lawyers as much as $480 per hour to fight Trump’s claims of rigged voting.
How much taxpayers ultimately had to spend to beat back Trump’s efforts to delay certification or overturn the results remains unknown, because many state officials did not specifically track their legal expenses.
“Although difficult to quantify, many legal hours were invested by the secretary of state’s general counsel and attorneys with the New Mexico attorney general’s office in responding to the baseless lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign,” said Alex Curtas, a spokesman for the New Mexico secretary of state.
Many officials said that while they wished the cost incurred as a result of Trump’s baseless voter-fraud allegations could have gone to more productive purposes, they saw the expenses as necessary to defending democracy.
“Safety isn’t cheap. Preparedness isn’t cheap,” Loftis said. “But neither are the lives of the elected leaders and support staff that we have been protecting, the historic and symbolic buildings they work in or the processes of democracy they represent.”
Congress is also grappling with calculating the expected costs of cleaning up and shoring up the Capitol after rioters carrying Trump flags and wearing MAGA hats smashed windows, busted doors, destroyed light fixtures and sprayed graffiti. The hours-long clash between law enforcement and insurrectionists left the building with battle scars that could take months to assess and repair, officials said.
“Statues, murals, historic benches and original shutters all suffered varying degrees of damage — primarily from pepper spray accretions and residue from tear gas and fire extinguishers — that will require cleaning and conservation,” according to an initial assessment of the damage by the office of the architect of the Capitol, which is responsible for preserving and maintaining the Capitol complex.
An official estimate for repair and cleanup costs is still being compiled, said Laura Condeluci, a spokeswoman for the office.
Congressional officials are also trying to determine the costs for securing the Capitol going forward. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) requested a third-party review of security protocols for lawmakers and said she expected Congress to put forward a supplemental spending bill specifically for beefing up security for lawmakers. The $515 million annual budget of the Capitol Police is funded through congressional appropriations.
The agency, which did not respond to multiple requests for comment about how much the Jan. 6 riot cost, has placed many of its officers on 12-hour shifts and installed magnetometers and other additional security measures in recent weeks to deal with the increased threat of violence against lawmakers.
Acting Capitol Police chief Yogananda Pittman said in a Jan. 28 statement that “vast improvements” were needed for security in the future, including permanent fencing and backup forces in the vicinity of the Capitol complex.
The idea of creating a fence around the Capitol has received pushback from some congressional leaders and D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), but it could ultimately be an expensive prospect if approved. The recent project to replace and upgrade the fencing around the White House complex, for example, cost about $64 million.
In the meantime, members of Congress are taking additional security measures on their own, ranging from bulletproof vests to private security details and surveillance cameras. Taxpayers are ultimately footing the bill, as lawmakers increasingly use their publicly funded Members’ Representational Allowances, known as “MRAs,” to protect themselves.
Pelosi has suggested that she wants the supplemental spending bill to cover much of those costs, so members can use the MRAs for their original purpose of serving constituents.
Pelosi has also encouraged lawmakers to attend post-traumatic counseling sessions organized in response to the riot. A spokesman for Pelosi did not respond to questions seeking the cost of the third-party security review, the counseling sessions or other ancillary expenses in the aftermath of Jan. 6.
Whatever their costs, those and other measures are expected to only grow over time as lawmakers deal with what the Department of Homeland Security recently described in a bulletin as a “heightened threat environment” in which domestic extremists may act on “perceived grievances fueled by false narratives.”
Robert McCrie, who teaches security management at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, compared the circumstances to the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, which led to a range of permanent security measures and expenses that have continued for almost 20 years.
“There’s no going back,” he said. “Our institutions have to be protected. They’re symbolic, but more than that, they are centers of government, of our sense of having a stable society. So those funds have to be spent.”
Federal investigators have also devoted considerable time and resources to identifying, finding and prosecuting rioters who breached the Capitol and threatened lawmakers; an officer also died after suffering injuries in the attack, and dozens of others were wounded.
U.S. authorities have opened case files on more than 400 potential suspects and obtained more than 500 grand jury subpoenas and search warrants in the sprawling investigation, acting U.S. attorney Michael R. Sherwin told reporters Jan. 26.
A nationwide manhunt has already resulted in 135 arrests and 150 federal criminally charged cases, according to Sherwin, the top prosecutor in D.C.
More charges could follow.
Law enforcement officials have estimated that roughly 800 people entered the Capitol without authorization, The Post reported last month.
The FBI and Justice Department declined to comment on the costs of the prosecutions and investigations, but some inside the bureau have described the Capitol riot case as their biggest since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Loftis, the Washington State Patrol spokesman, has said he has the full backing of his agency’s leadership to speak out.
“The selfish madness that caused this national self-inflicted wound must be addressed, as it has heaped tragedy on top of tragedy,” he said. “If those of us in law enforcement don’t speak up in defense of democracy and public safety, then our silence becomes a dreadfully powerful statement in its own right.”
By Toluse Olorunnipa and Michelle Ye Hee Lee, The Washington Post
President Donald Trump’s onslaught of falsehoods about the November election misled millions of Americans, undermined faith in the electoral system, sparked a deadly riot — and has now left taxpayers with a large, and growing, bill.
The total so far: $519 million.
The costs have mounted daily as government agencies at all levels have been forced to devote public funds to respond to actions taken by Trump and his supporters, according to a Washington Post review of local, state and federal spending records, as well as interviews with government officials. The expenditures include legal fees prompted by dozens of fruitless lawsuits, enhanced security in response to death threats against poll workers, and costly repairs needed after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. That attack triggered the expensive massing of thousands of National Guard troops on the streets of Washington amid fears of additional extremist violence.
Although more than $480 million of the total is attributable to the military’s estimated expenses for the troop deployment through mid-March, the financial impact of the president’s refusal to concede the election is probably much higher than what has been documented thus far, and the true costs may never be known.
Many officials contacted by The Post said they were still trying to tally the cost of rapidly scaling up security to deal with the increased threat of violence from Trump supporters. Others have given up on trying to calculate their costs — perplexed over how to calculate the financial impact of a president’s injecting so much instability into the democratic system — opting instead to simply absorb them as the cost of doing business in the Trump era.
Costs identified by The Washington Post related to election misinformation
Category Cost
Costs associated with Jan. 6 insurrection and inauguration - At least $488,800,000
State costs associated with Jan. 6 and inauguration-related security - At least $28,310,464
State costs related to legal challenges and security for election officials - At least $2,217,905
Total - At least $519,328,369
Some officials have shifted their attention to making plans for additional security measures going forward in the threatening environment fostered by Trump’s conspiratorial brand of politics.
“I think anytime you see an event like we saw on January 6th, it changes your perspective going forward. You don’t take things for granted like we used to,” said Michael Rapich, superintendent of the Utah Highway Patrol, which spent $227,000 on Jan. 17 to deploy 300 troopers to the state’s Capitol after threats of an armed siege by Trump supporters ahead of the inauguration of President Biden. “It is an incredible amount of money to spend.”
Other states spent even more, and officials are beginning to draft new security budgets that suggest ongoing security costs will grow significantly in the future as a result of the Capitol breach.
The bill to the federal government continues to grow daily, as thousands of National Guard troops patrol Washington and lawmakers consider a supplemental spending proposal to bolster their security.
The 25,000 troops that were deployed to Washington traveled on military planes and stayed in local hotels — their presence aimed at restoring order in the nation’s capital after an attempted insurrection that overwhelmed Capitol police and ended in five deaths. The cost estimate of the troops, first reported by Bloomberg News, covers the troop presence at the Capitol through mid-March, according to Defense Department officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal figures. With an unprecedented show of force that included checkpoints and militarized zones in Washington, the troops succeeded in thwarting efforts to disrupt Biden’s swearing-in, which took place on the same platform stormed by Trump-supporting rioters two weeks earlier.
Costs associated with Jan. 6 insurrection and after, including inauguration
Entity Description Cost
National Guard - Cost of deploying as many as 25,000 troops to Washington through mid-March = At least $480,000,000
D.C. police - Cost for a week of added security at the Capitol, including surge of 850 officers on Jan. 6 = At least $8,800,000
Architect of the Capitol - Broken windows, busted doors, landscaping, graffiti and other damage to the Capitol = Unavailable
U.S. Park Police - Damage and cleanup of the National Mall = Unavailable
U.S. Capitol Police - Additional staffing at the Capitol, overtime, medical bills = Unavailable
Subtotal - At least $488,800,000
It is not clear whether the House Democrats managing Trump’s impeachment trial plan to bring up the financial costs borne by taxpayers as a result of what critics have called his “big lie.” The trial begins Tuesday, and Democrats have focused heavily on Trump’s speech to supporters shortly before the Capitol riot.
A spokeswoman for Trump’s presidential office did not respond to a request for comment. Trump’s defense lawyers have argued that he was within his rights to publicly question the election’s integrity and should not be held responsible for the actions of people who attacked the Capitol after his speech.
Several states are working to calculate the taxpayer costs for additional security and related expenses in the aftermath of the November election and the Jan. 6 protests.
In California, state officials estimated they spent about $19 million, deploying 1,000 National Guard troops and hundreds of state troopers from Jan. 14 to Jan. 21 to protect the state Capitol and other locations.
“That’s a lot of money, even by California standards, for one week’s worth of work,” California Department of Finance spokesman H.D. Palmer said in an interview. “But it was necessary work to make sure that we didn’t see the damage that could have occurred, had we had a crowd that was bent on doing damage to the building.”
In Ohio, taxpayers spent $1.2 million to deploy National Guard troops to the closed Statehouse building in Columbus. The New Mexico legislature increased its appropriation for Capitol security during the 60-day session by almost 40 percent this month, handing taxpayers a bill of $1.5 million for personnel, equipment and other expenses, officials said.
Taxpayers paid to deploy helicopters to monitor potential demonstrations in Texas and North Carolina, temporary fencing around the capitols in Lansing, Mich., and Olympia, Wash., and extra security details for state lawmakers attending legislative sessions.
D.C. police dispatched 850 officers to help defend the Capitol, spending more than $8.8 million during the week of Jan. 6, acting police chief Robert J. Contee III said in his opening statement before a closed session of the House Appropriations Committee on Jan. 26. Contee said the final tab will probably be much higher, and police and prosecutors will be “engaged for years” investigating and trying the rioters.
“The costs for this insurrection — both human and monetary — will be steep,” he said. “The immediate fiscal impact is still being calculated.”
For many states, the post-Jan. 6 costs added to a tab that has been growing since shortly after polls closed on Nov. 3. Trump’s false assertion that night that he had won the election and that it was being stolen in ballot-processing centers led to credible threats against poll workers and facilities where they were working. Between added legal fees to fend off conspiracy-theory-laced lawsuits from Trump and enhanced security for election officials, states’ costs resulting from the president’s central fabrication about the Nov. 3 vote have escalated rapidly.
States spent untold millions of dollars on election recounts not required by law but demanded by Trump and legal and state legislative hearings.
Protesters, some armed, amassed at ballot-processing centers in places such as Maricopa County, Ariz.; Detroit; and Las Vegas in the days after Nov. 3, echoing Trump’s rhetoric about a rigged election.
The added bill comes as many states are resource-strapped as a result of a pandemic that has wracked the economy and decimated state budgets.
State costs associated with Jan. 6 and pre-inauguration-related security
Location Description Cost
Arizona - Security by Maricopa County and Phoenix police for election-related protests = $826,999
California - National Guard and state forces after Jan. 6 rally in Sacramento and ahead of Inauguration Day = $19,000,000
Colorado - Security and fencing after 700 demonstrators gathered in Denver, and ahead of Inauguration Day = $62,775
Florida - Florida Department of Law Enforcement security ahead of Inauguration Day = $27,300
Georgia - National Guard activated, state SWAT team patrolled Capitol = Unavailable
Minnesota - National Guard and local forces mobilized after 500 demonstrators rallied at Capitol = Unavailable
New Mexico - Legislature appropriated additional funding for security during 60-day legislative session = $416,957
New York - Additional state police deployed to Capitol after protests = Unavailable
North Carolina - National Guard troops deployed to State Legislative Building = $605,251
Ohio - National Guard troops deployed to Statehouse after protests = $1,225,000
Oregon - National Guard troops mobilized to support state police after protests = Unavailable
Pennsylvania - National Guard troops and state police deployed to Capitol and elsewhere ahead of inauguration = $565,631
South Carolina - State troopers and Richland County sheriff’s deputies deployed to State House ahead of inauguration = $414,934
Texas - National Guard troops and state troopers mobilized to protect Capitol after protests and ahead of inauguration = Unavailable
Utah - National Guard troops and state troopers mobilized to Salt Lake City ahead of inauguration = $585,000
Washington - National Guard troops and state police mobilized to Capitol after protests = $3,987,617
Wisconsin - National Guard troops mobilized to Madison after protests = $593,000
Subtotal = at least $28,310,464
Chris Loftis, communications director for the Washington State Patrol, said the new “staggeringly high” costs for security and other expenses constituted “a wasteful distraction of essential and diminishing resources.”
Not included in the more than $4 million estimated security bill for Washington state taxpayers is the yet-to-be-determined cost of fixing a gate at the governor’s mansion broken by armed demonstrators on Jan. 6.
“Not only have our people, places and processes of democracy been attacked and damaged, but the continuing expense of this new security environment will take away from funds that could have been used for covid vaccines and treatment” and other critical expenses, Loftis said.
In Georgia, which faced a large share of Trump’s post-election fraud charges, officials conducted two recounts of the presidential vote. One was triggered by Biden’s narrow margin of victory over Trump, leading to a hand recount of all 5 million presidential ballots cast — the largest hand recount in U.S. history. The Trump campaign then requested another recount — this time, a machine rescan of those hand-recounted ballots. Both recounts reaffirmed Biden’s victory. They also added extra costs for staff time and the security of election administrators, who faced growing threats and, in some cases, required 24-hour police details.
In Fulton County, Georgia’s largest, taxpayers spent an estimated $500,000 on security alone for election officials, who faced harassment and threats fueled by conspiracy theories over the November election.
Other state and local officials spent funds to battle with Trump’s well-funded team of lawyers in court. Trump and his allies devoted more than $11 million to a failed legal effort that included dozens of lawsuits and repeated losses in court due to a lack of evidence. After the Nov. 3 election and through the end of December, Trump and the Republican Party paid at least 65 firms or lawyers on election-related legal challenges, according to federal campaign finance filings.
Costs related to state legal challenges and security for election officials
In Georgia, separate figures for the Trump-requested recount were not available as of deadline.
Location Description Cost
Arizona - Election lawsuits = At least $153,862
Georgia - Election-related security = At least $500,000
Michigan - Election lawsuits, security = Unavailable
Minnesota - Election lawsuits = $35,620
Nevada - Election lawsuits = Unavailable
New Mexico - Election lawsuits = Unavailable
Pennsylvania - Election lawsuits - $1,528,423
Texas - Election lawsuits = Unavailable
Wisconsin - Election lawsuits = Unavailable
Subtotal = At least $2,217,905
The state of Pennsylvania hired several private law firms to deal with the onslaught of election litigation, paying outside lawyers as much as $480 per hour to fight Trump’s claims of rigged voting.
How much taxpayers ultimately had to spend to beat back Trump’s efforts to delay certification or overturn the results remains unknown, because many state officials did not specifically track their legal expenses.
“Although difficult to quantify, many legal hours were invested by the secretary of state’s general counsel and attorneys with the New Mexico attorney general’s office in responding to the baseless lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign,” said Alex Curtas, a spokesman for the New Mexico secretary of state.
Many officials said that while they wished the cost incurred as a result of Trump’s baseless voter-fraud allegations could have gone to more productive purposes, they saw the expenses as necessary to defending democracy.
“Safety isn’t cheap. Preparedness isn’t cheap,” Loftis said. “But neither are the lives of the elected leaders and support staff that we have been protecting, the historic and symbolic buildings they work in or the processes of democracy they represent.”
Congress is also grappling with calculating the expected costs of cleaning up and shoring up the Capitol after rioters carrying Trump flags and wearing MAGA hats smashed windows, busted doors, destroyed light fixtures and sprayed graffiti. The hours-long clash between law enforcement and insurrectionists left the building with battle scars that could take months to assess and repair, officials said.
“Statues, murals, historic benches and original shutters all suffered varying degrees of damage — primarily from pepper spray accretions and residue from tear gas and fire extinguishers — that will require cleaning and conservation,” according to an initial assessment of the damage by the office of the architect of the Capitol, which is responsible for preserving and maintaining the Capitol complex.
An official estimate for repair and cleanup costs is still being compiled, said Laura Condeluci, a spokeswoman for the office.
Congressional officials are also trying to determine the costs for securing the Capitol going forward. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) requested a third-party review of security protocols for lawmakers and said she expected Congress to put forward a supplemental spending bill specifically for beefing up security for lawmakers. The $515 million annual budget of the Capitol Police is funded through congressional appropriations.
The agency, which did not respond to multiple requests for comment about how much the Jan. 6 riot cost, has placed many of its officers on 12-hour shifts and installed magnetometers and other additional security measures in recent weeks to deal with the increased threat of violence against lawmakers.
Acting Capitol Police chief Yogananda Pittman said in a Jan. 28 statement that “vast improvements” were needed for security in the future, including permanent fencing and backup forces in the vicinity of the Capitol complex.
The idea of creating a fence around the Capitol has received pushback from some congressional leaders and D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), but it could ultimately be an expensive prospect if approved. The recent project to replace and upgrade the fencing around the White House complex, for example, cost about $64 million.
In the meantime, members of Congress are taking additional security measures on their own, ranging from bulletproof vests to private security details and surveillance cameras. Taxpayers are ultimately footing the bill, as lawmakers increasingly use their publicly funded Members’ Representational Allowances, known as “MRAs,” to protect themselves.
Pelosi has suggested that she wants the supplemental spending bill to cover much of those costs, so members can use the MRAs for their original purpose of serving constituents.
Pelosi has also encouraged lawmakers to attend post-traumatic counseling sessions organized in response to the riot. A spokesman for Pelosi did not respond to questions seeking the cost of the third-party security review, the counseling sessions or other ancillary expenses in the aftermath of Jan. 6.
Whatever their costs, those and other measures are expected to only grow over time as lawmakers deal with what the Department of Homeland Security recently described in a bulletin as a “heightened threat environment” in which domestic extremists may act on “perceived grievances fueled by false narratives.”
Robert McCrie, who teaches security management at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, compared the circumstances to the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, which led to a range of permanent security measures and expenses that have continued for almost 20 years.
“There’s no going back,” he said. “Our institutions have to be protected. They’re symbolic, but more than that, they are centers of government, of our sense of having a stable society. So those funds have to be spent.”
Federal investigators have also devoted considerable time and resources to identifying, finding and prosecuting rioters who breached the Capitol and threatened lawmakers; an officer also died after suffering injuries in the attack, and dozens of others were wounded.
U.S. authorities have opened case files on more than 400 potential suspects and obtained more than 500 grand jury subpoenas and search warrants in the sprawling investigation, acting U.S. attorney Michael R. Sherwin told reporters Jan. 26.
A nationwide manhunt has already resulted in 135 arrests and 150 federal criminally charged cases, according to Sherwin, the top prosecutor in D.C.
More charges could follow.
Law enforcement officials have estimated that roughly 800 people entered the Capitol without authorization, The Post reported last month.
The FBI and Justice Department declined to comment on the costs of the prosecutions and investigations, but some inside the bureau have described the Capitol riot case as their biggest since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Loftis, the Washington State Patrol spokesman, has said he has the full backing of his agency’s leadership to speak out.
“The selfish madness that caused this national self-inflicted wound must be addressed, as it has heaped tragedy on top of tragedy,” he said. “If those of us in law enforcement don’t speak up in defense of democracy and public safety, then our silence becomes a dreadfully powerful statement in its own right.”
199 HOUSE REPUBLICANS HAVE EMBRACED ANTI-SEMITISM AND VIOLENCE
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
For more than five years, I begged Republicans to reject the creeping anti-Semitism Donald Trump brought to the party, noting on the eve of the 2016 election that “when a demagogue begins to identify scapegoats, the Jews are never far behind.”
But I never expected I would see in my lifetime, in the United States of America, what occurred on the floor of the House this week. One hundred ninety-nine Republican members of Congress rallied to the defense of a vile, unapologetic anti-Semite in their ranks who calls for assassination of her opponents.
This is more than a Republican problem; it’s an American problem. You don’t have to be a scholar of 20th-century Europe to know what happens when the elected leaders of a democracy condone violence as a political tool and blame the country’s ills on the Jews.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), who is quickly becoming the de facto face of the Republican Party, has suggested that the deadly neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, where white supremacists chanted “Jews will not replace us,” was actually an “inside job” to “further the agenda of the elites.”
She shared a video in which a Holocaust denier claimed that an “unholy alliance of leftists, capitalists and Zionist supremacists have schemed to promote immigration and miscegenation” with the purpose of “breeding us out of existence in our own homelands.”
She posed for campaign photos with a white-supremacist leader and then refused to renounce the man.
She approved of a claim that the Israeli intelligence service assassinated John F. Kennedy, and she speculated that wealthy Jewish interests — the Rothschilds, a target of anti-Semites since the 19th century — set forest fires in California using lasers from space.
This isn’t idle bigotry, for she “liked” a social media suggestion that “a bullet to the head would be quicker” to remove House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), who has committed “a crime punishable by death.” She posted on social media about hanging Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, approved of a suggestion that FBI agents be executed, and posted a photo of herself with an automatic weapon next to three Democratic members of Congress, calling herself their “worst nightmare.”
On the House floor this week, she offered no apology and no direct mention of her anti-Semitic and violent statements. Using Christ-on-the-cross imagery, she condemned those who would “crucify me in the public square for words that I said, and I regret, a few years ago.”
But she didn’t regret them. She had tweeted the night before: “We owe them no apologies. We will never back down.” She retweeted an article featuring another QAnon adherent attacking the Republican Jewish Coalition. And several Republican colleagues gave her a standing ovation Wednesday night when she delivered a private speech that Republicans said was similar to the unrepentant one she gave in public on Thursday.
House Republicans refused to sanction her for her outrages, and on Thursday, all but 11 House Republicans voted against a successful Democratic measure to remove her from House committees.
“Marjorie Taylor Greene will be remembered for breaking new ground for her wild anti-Semitism,” Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League, told me after the vote. Greenblatt, whose group has tracked all-time-high levels of anti-Jewish incidents during the Trump years, wrote three letters to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) about Greene since her nomination, and he urged McCarthy to remove her from committees. Greenblatt received no reply.
Greene’s ugly pronouncements about Muslims and Black people, and her harassment of school-shooting survivors and families of victims, are no less reprehensible. But the rallying around this unrepentant anti-Semite by Republicans is an ominous new frontier. The Republican Jewish Coalition said it is “offended and appalled by [Greene’s] comments and her actions.”
Yet on Thursday, House Republicans rushed to her defense. “We’ve all said things we regret,” said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), top Republican on the Judiciary Committee.
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) protested the proceedings by forcing a vote to adjourn. “We shouldn’t be wasting the time of this body attacking a member of this body,” he said.
Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) disowned Greene’s rhetoric, but what he really found “sad” and “unprecedented” was that Democrats weren’t giving her “due process.”
Rep. Ted Budd (R-N.C.) informed Democrats that “today is really about one party single-handedly canceling a member of the other party because of something said before that member was even elected.”
Republicans have used similar gaslighting in their response to impeachment. Trump helped organize a rally, incited his supporters to attack the Capitol and refused to call for an end to their murderous spree as they rampaged in search of elected officials in their hopes of overturning the election. But Democrats are the ones doing something “unconstitutional” by holding an impeachment trial after he left office?
Insurrection? Sedition? Assassination? Move on, the Republicans say. These actions and threats are mere “distractions” from the real issues.
Republicans defended Greene with absurd parallels. They attacked Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) for past anti-Semitic statements — omitting the crucial distinction that Omar, after Democrats roundly condemned her words, said, “Anti-Semitism is real and I am grateful for Jewish allies and colleagues who are educating me on the painful history of anti-Semitic tropes. … I unequivocally apologize.”
Greene, by contrast, remained unrepentant. On Friday, she held a celebratory news conference, again refusing to recant, or apologize for, her violent and anti-Jewish words and gestures.
Would she apologize for advocating the execution of Pelosi?
“I don’t have to,” she said, calling for the journalist to apologize instead.
Would she disavow her endorsement of putting “a bullet to the head” of Pelosi?
Accusing the questioner of lying, she replied: “That’s your problem and that’s how we end news conferences.” She walked away.
In retrospect, it’s clear Trump led us to this point. In his 2016 campaign, he singled out prominent Jews as part of a “global power structure” that doesn’t “have your good in mind.” He elevated white supremacists, spoke of “blood suckers,” told Jewish Republicans they wouldn’t support him “because I don’t want your money,” and shared an image of a Star of David atop a pile of cash.
As president, he spoke of the “very fine people” marching among the white supremacists in Charlottesville. Anti-Semitic violence increased significantly: pipe bombs sent to favorite Trump targets such as financier George Soros, and the synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh, the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history. Yet Trump continued, embracing the far-right, violent Proud Boys in a presidential debate.
As Thursday’s emotional debate drew to a close, Rep. Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), the House majority leader, displayed a poster taken from one of Greene’s social media posts showing her with an AR-15 next to photos of two Muslims and one Latina — Reps. Omar, Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) — and Greene’s caption: “Squad’s Worse Nightmare.”
“They’re not 'the Squad’,” Hoyer thundered. “They are people. They are our colleagues.”
He asked Republicans: “Imagine your faces on this poster. Imagine it’s a Democrat with an AR-15. Imagine what your response would be, and would you think that person ought to be held accountable?”
One hundred ninety-nine House Republicans looked at that invitation to assassination and voted to defend its author. God only knows what horrors they have unleashed.
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
For more than five years, I begged Republicans to reject the creeping anti-Semitism Donald Trump brought to the party, noting on the eve of the 2016 election that “when a demagogue begins to identify scapegoats, the Jews are never far behind.”
But I never expected I would see in my lifetime, in the United States of America, what occurred on the floor of the House this week. One hundred ninety-nine Republican members of Congress rallied to the defense of a vile, unapologetic anti-Semite in their ranks who calls for assassination of her opponents.
This is more than a Republican problem; it’s an American problem. You don’t have to be a scholar of 20th-century Europe to know what happens when the elected leaders of a democracy condone violence as a political tool and blame the country’s ills on the Jews.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), who is quickly becoming the de facto face of the Republican Party, has suggested that the deadly neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, where white supremacists chanted “Jews will not replace us,” was actually an “inside job” to “further the agenda of the elites.”
She shared a video in which a Holocaust denier claimed that an “unholy alliance of leftists, capitalists and Zionist supremacists have schemed to promote immigration and miscegenation” with the purpose of “breeding us out of existence in our own homelands.”
She posed for campaign photos with a white-supremacist leader and then refused to renounce the man.
She approved of a claim that the Israeli intelligence service assassinated John F. Kennedy, and she speculated that wealthy Jewish interests — the Rothschilds, a target of anti-Semites since the 19th century — set forest fires in California using lasers from space.
This isn’t idle bigotry, for she “liked” a social media suggestion that “a bullet to the head would be quicker” to remove House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), who has committed “a crime punishable by death.” She posted on social media about hanging Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, approved of a suggestion that FBI agents be executed, and posted a photo of herself with an automatic weapon next to three Democratic members of Congress, calling herself their “worst nightmare.”
On the House floor this week, she offered no apology and no direct mention of her anti-Semitic and violent statements. Using Christ-on-the-cross imagery, she condemned those who would “crucify me in the public square for words that I said, and I regret, a few years ago.”
But she didn’t regret them. She had tweeted the night before: “We owe them no apologies. We will never back down.” She retweeted an article featuring another QAnon adherent attacking the Republican Jewish Coalition. And several Republican colleagues gave her a standing ovation Wednesday night when she delivered a private speech that Republicans said was similar to the unrepentant one she gave in public on Thursday.
House Republicans refused to sanction her for her outrages, and on Thursday, all but 11 House Republicans voted against a successful Democratic measure to remove her from House committees.
“Marjorie Taylor Greene will be remembered for breaking new ground for her wild anti-Semitism,” Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League, told me after the vote. Greenblatt, whose group has tracked all-time-high levels of anti-Jewish incidents during the Trump years, wrote three letters to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) about Greene since her nomination, and he urged McCarthy to remove her from committees. Greenblatt received no reply.
Greene’s ugly pronouncements about Muslims and Black people, and her harassment of school-shooting survivors and families of victims, are no less reprehensible. But the rallying around this unrepentant anti-Semite by Republicans is an ominous new frontier. The Republican Jewish Coalition said it is “offended and appalled by [Greene’s] comments and her actions.”
Yet on Thursday, House Republicans rushed to her defense. “We’ve all said things we regret,” said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), top Republican on the Judiciary Committee.
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) protested the proceedings by forcing a vote to adjourn. “We shouldn’t be wasting the time of this body attacking a member of this body,” he said.
Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) disowned Greene’s rhetoric, but what he really found “sad” and “unprecedented” was that Democrats weren’t giving her “due process.”
Rep. Ted Budd (R-N.C.) informed Democrats that “today is really about one party single-handedly canceling a member of the other party because of something said before that member was even elected.”
Republicans have used similar gaslighting in their response to impeachment. Trump helped organize a rally, incited his supporters to attack the Capitol and refused to call for an end to their murderous spree as they rampaged in search of elected officials in their hopes of overturning the election. But Democrats are the ones doing something “unconstitutional” by holding an impeachment trial after he left office?
Insurrection? Sedition? Assassination? Move on, the Republicans say. These actions and threats are mere “distractions” from the real issues.
Republicans defended Greene with absurd parallels. They attacked Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) for past anti-Semitic statements — omitting the crucial distinction that Omar, after Democrats roundly condemned her words, said, “Anti-Semitism is real and I am grateful for Jewish allies and colleagues who are educating me on the painful history of anti-Semitic tropes. … I unequivocally apologize.”
Greene, by contrast, remained unrepentant. On Friday, she held a celebratory news conference, again refusing to recant, or apologize for, her violent and anti-Jewish words and gestures.
Would she apologize for advocating the execution of Pelosi?
“I don’t have to,” she said, calling for the journalist to apologize instead.
Would she disavow her endorsement of putting “a bullet to the head” of Pelosi?
Accusing the questioner of lying, she replied: “That’s your problem and that’s how we end news conferences.” She walked away.
In retrospect, it’s clear Trump led us to this point. In his 2016 campaign, he singled out prominent Jews as part of a “global power structure” that doesn’t “have your good in mind.” He elevated white supremacists, spoke of “blood suckers,” told Jewish Republicans they wouldn’t support him “because I don’t want your money,” and shared an image of a Star of David atop a pile of cash.
As president, he spoke of the “very fine people” marching among the white supremacists in Charlottesville. Anti-Semitic violence increased significantly: pipe bombs sent to favorite Trump targets such as financier George Soros, and the synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh, the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history. Yet Trump continued, embracing the far-right, violent Proud Boys in a presidential debate.
As Thursday’s emotional debate drew to a close, Rep. Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), the House majority leader, displayed a poster taken from one of Greene’s social media posts showing her with an AR-15 next to photos of two Muslims and one Latina — Reps. Omar, Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) — and Greene’s caption: “Squad’s Worse Nightmare.”
“They’re not 'the Squad’,” Hoyer thundered. “They are people. They are our colleagues.”
He asked Republicans: “Imagine your faces on this poster. Imagine it’s a Democrat with an AR-15. Imagine what your response would be, and would you think that person ought to be held accountable?”
One hundred ninety-nine House Republicans looked at that invitation to assassination and voted to defend its author. God only knows what horrors they have unleashed.
PRESIDENT TRUMP HAS COMMITTED TREASON
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
President Trump broke any number of laws and norms during his ruinous four-year reign. He just added one more on the way out: treason.
He lost the House in 2018. He lost the presidency in November. He lost the Senate on Tuesday. And on Wednesday, with nothing left to lose, he rallied a violent mob to attack the U.S. Capitol in hopes of pressuring lawmakers to toss out the election results, ignore the will of the people, and install him as president for another term.
Trump fomented a deadly insurrection against the U.S. Congress to prevent a duly-elected president from taking office. Treason is not a word to be used lightly, but that is its textbook definition.
“We will not take it anymore, and that’s what this is all about,” he told a sea of MAGA fans and Proud Boys on the Ellipse outside the White House at noon. From behind bulletproof glass, he told them: “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
Earlier, Trump ally Rudy Giuliani had proposed, to the same crowd, a “trial by combat” to resolve Trump’s election complaints. And Donald Trump Jr. delivered a political threat to lawmakers who don’t vote to reject the election results: “We’re coming for you.”
Trump, Republicans incite crowd before mob storms Capitol
The elder Trump worked the crowd into a frenzy with his claim that victory had been stolen from him by “explosions of bullshit.”
“Bullshit! Bullshit!” the mob chanted.
Trump instructed his supporters to march to the Capitol — “and I’ll be there with you” — to “demand that Congress do the right thing” and not count the electoral votes of swing states he lost. “You’ll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength and you have to be strong,” he admonished them, with CYA instructions to make themselves heard “peacefully and patriotically.”
Wink, wink.
“We’re going to the Capitol,” he told the mob.
With that, Trump snuck back into the safety of the White House fortress. But his supporters, thus riled, marched to the Capitol and breached the barricades. They overpowered Capitol Police, climbed scaffolding, scaled walls, shattered glass, busted into the Senate chamber and stood at the presiding officer’s desk, and broke into Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s hastily abandoned office. They marauded about the Rotunda and Statuary Hall wearing MAGA hats, carrying Confederate flags, posing for souvenir photos and scribbling graffiti (“Murder the Media”).
Police rushed legislative leaders to safety. They barricaded doors to the House chamber and drew guns to protect lawmakers sheltering inside. They fired tear gas at the attackers. Shots were fired inside the Capitol; a bloodied woman who was wheeled out later died. The District of Columbia declared a curfew. And even then it took Trump nearly three hours before he released a video telling those ransacking the Capitol to “go home” — even as he glorified the violence by saying “these are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots.”
Before he lost the election, Trump refused to commit to the peaceful transfer of power. During the campaign, he defended militia violence and told his violent white nationalist supporters to “stand by” — part of a well-documented pattern of encouraging violence since he launched his first campaign in 2015.
Yet, somehow, the men in the Capitol who enabled Trump for all those years were shocked that he would unleash a mob against Congress.
“What is unfolding is unacceptable and un-American,” declared House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who just hours earlier had announced he would support Trump’s effort to annul the electoral college count.
“Violence is always unacceptable,” tut-tutted Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who along with Josh Hawley of Missouri was leading the effort in the Senate to nullify the election results. Just moments before the MAGA mob burst into the chamber, Cruz gave a speech saying “democracy is in crisis” because many Americans think the election was “rigged” — in large part because Cruz et al. kept telling them so.
As Trump’s goons began taking over the Capitol, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who had called the attempt to set aside the electoral college tally an “egregious ploy,” yelled at Cruz and his co-conspirators: “This is what you’ve gotten, guys.” Romney later issued a statement saying: “What happened here today was an insurrection, incited by the president of the United States.” Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 House GOP leader, told Fox News: “The president formed the mob. The president incited the mob. The president addressed the mob. He lit the flame.”
Trump’s inept legal challenges amounted to a clownish coup attempt. The Cruz-Hawley scheme amounted to a bloodless coup attempt. And now, Trump has induced his MAGA mob to a violent coup attempt.
As it happens, moments before the barbarians busted into the Senate chamber, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, long among the most faithful Trump enablers, had denounced the effort to overturn the election.
“The voters, the courts and the states have all spoken,” an emotional McConnell said, in perhaps the finest speech of his long career. “If this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral.”
Or maybe the spiral has already begun.
Most Americans never imagined they would see such banana-republic images of violence from the seat of American democracy. But Wednesday’s mayhem and violence form a predictable coda to a presidency that has brought us far too much of both.
Republicans must now decide whether they are going to return to being the party of small government, individual liberties and national strength, or to continue being the Trump and Cruz party of violence, racism and authoritarianism.
Are they small-d democrats or are they fascists? After Wednesday’s terrible scene, they must choose.
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
President Trump broke any number of laws and norms during his ruinous four-year reign. He just added one more on the way out: treason.
He lost the House in 2018. He lost the presidency in November. He lost the Senate on Tuesday. And on Wednesday, with nothing left to lose, he rallied a violent mob to attack the U.S. Capitol in hopes of pressuring lawmakers to toss out the election results, ignore the will of the people, and install him as president for another term.
Trump fomented a deadly insurrection against the U.S. Congress to prevent a duly-elected president from taking office. Treason is not a word to be used lightly, but that is its textbook definition.
“We will not take it anymore, and that’s what this is all about,” he told a sea of MAGA fans and Proud Boys on the Ellipse outside the White House at noon. From behind bulletproof glass, he told them: “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
Earlier, Trump ally Rudy Giuliani had proposed, to the same crowd, a “trial by combat” to resolve Trump’s election complaints. And Donald Trump Jr. delivered a political threat to lawmakers who don’t vote to reject the election results: “We’re coming for you.”
Trump, Republicans incite crowd before mob storms Capitol
The elder Trump worked the crowd into a frenzy with his claim that victory had been stolen from him by “explosions of bullshit.”
“Bullshit! Bullshit!” the mob chanted.
Trump instructed his supporters to march to the Capitol — “and I’ll be there with you” — to “demand that Congress do the right thing” and not count the electoral votes of swing states he lost. “You’ll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength and you have to be strong,” he admonished them, with CYA instructions to make themselves heard “peacefully and patriotically.”
Wink, wink.
“We’re going to the Capitol,” he told the mob.
With that, Trump snuck back into the safety of the White House fortress. But his supporters, thus riled, marched to the Capitol and breached the barricades. They overpowered Capitol Police, climbed scaffolding, scaled walls, shattered glass, busted into the Senate chamber and stood at the presiding officer’s desk, and broke into Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s hastily abandoned office. They marauded about the Rotunda and Statuary Hall wearing MAGA hats, carrying Confederate flags, posing for souvenir photos and scribbling graffiti (“Murder the Media”).
Police rushed legislative leaders to safety. They barricaded doors to the House chamber and drew guns to protect lawmakers sheltering inside. They fired tear gas at the attackers. Shots were fired inside the Capitol; a bloodied woman who was wheeled out later died. The District of Columbia declared a curfew. And even then it took Trump nearly three hours before he released a video telling those ransacking the Capitol to “go home” — even as he glorified the violence by saying “these are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots.”
Before he lost the election, Trump refused to commit to the peaceful transfer of power. During the campaign, he defended militia violence and told his violent white nationalist supporters to “stand by” — part of a well-documented pattern of encouraging violence since he launched his first campaign in 2015.
Yet, somehow, the men in the Capitol who enabled Trump for all those years were shocked that he would unleash a mob against Congress.
“What is unfolding is unacceptable and un-American,” declared House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who just hours earlier had announced he would support Trump’s effort to annul the electoral college count.
“Violence is always unacceptable,” tut-tutted Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who along with Josh Hawley of Missouri was leading the effort in the Senate to nullify the election results. Just moments before the MAGA mob burst into the chamber, Cruz gave a speech saying “democracy is in crisis” because many Americans think the election was “rigged” — in large part because Cruz et al. kept telling them so.
As Trump’s goons began taking over the Capitol, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who had called the attempt to set aside the electoral college tally an “egregious ploy,” yelled at Cruz and his co-conspirators: “This is what you’ve gotten, guys.” Romney later issued a statement saying: “What happened here today was an insurrection, incited by the president of the United States.” Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 House GOP leader, told Fox News: “The president formed the mob. The president incited the mob. The president addressed the mob. He lit the flame.”
Trump’s inept legal challenges amounted to a clownish coup attempt. The Cruz-Hawley scheme amounted to a bloodless coup attempt. And now, Trump has induced his MAGA mob to a violent coup attempt.
As it happens, moments before the barbarians busted into the Senate chamber, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, long among the most faithful Trump enablers, had denounced the effort to overturn the election.
“The voters, the courts and the states have all spoken,” an emotional McConnell said, in perhaps the finest speech of his long career. “If this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral.”
Or maybe the spiral has already begun.
Most Americans never imagined they would see such banana-republic images of violence from the seat of American democracy. But Wednesday’s mayhem and violence form a predictable coda to a presidency that has brought us far too much of both.
Republicans must now decide whether they are going to return to being the party of small government, individual liberties and national strength, or to continue being the Trump and Cruz party of violence, racism and authoritarianism.
Are they small-d democrats or are they fascists? After Wednesday’s terrible scene, they must choose.
TRUMP IS TO BLAME FOR CAPITOL ATTACK
The president incited his followers to violence. There must be consequences.
By The New York Times Editorial Board
President Trump and his Republican enablers in Congress incited a violent attack Wednesday against the government they lead and the nation they profess to love. This cannot be allowed to stand.
Mr. Trump’s seditious rhetoric prompted a mob of thousands of people to storm the U.S. Capitol building, some breaking onto the House and Senate floors, where the nation’s elected representatives had gathered to perform their constitutional duty of counting electoral votes and confirming the election of Joe Biden as president.
It is fitting that some carried the Confederate flag as they attacked the seat of American government and forced the suspension of congressional debate. They shattered windows and broke doors, clashing with overwhelmed security forces as they shouted their support for Mr. Trump and their defiance of the lawful results of the 2020 election. One woman was killed. The nation’s leaders were sent scurrying for shelter.
Explosives were found in the Capitol and multiple locations around Washington. Pro-Trump protests also shut down statehouses around the country.
Mr. Trump sparked these assaults. He has railed for months against the verdict rendered by voters in November. He summoned his supporters to gather in Washington on this day, and encouraged them to march on the Capitol. He told them that the election was being stolen. He told them to fight. He told them he might join them and, even as they stormed the building, he declined for long hours to tell them to stop, to condemn their actions, to raise a finger in defense of the Constitution that he swore to preserve and protect. When he finally spoke, late in the day, he affirmed the protesters’ anger, telling them again that the election was stolen, but asking them to go home anyway. It was the performance of a man unwilling to fulfill his duties as president or to confront the consequences of his own behavior.
The president needs to be held accountable — through impeachment proceedings or criminal prosecution — and the same goes for his supporters who carried out the violence. In time, there should be an investigation of the failure of the Capitol Police to prepare for an attack that was announced and planned in public.
This is not just an attack on the results of the 2020 election. It is a precedent — a permission slip for similar opposition to the outcomes of future elections. It must be clearly rejected, and placed beyond the pale of permissible conduct.
The leaders of the Republican Party also bear a measure of responsibility for the attack on the Capitol.
Many in the G.O.P. have participated in the vigorous retailing of lies about the election. They have sought to undermine public confidence in democracy, questioning the legitimacy of Mr. Biden’s victory without providing any evidence for their claims. Their statements led some of those who trust them to conclude violence was necessary.
Few have been as explicit as Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, who earlier Wednesday suggested, “Let’s have trial by combat!” But even as extremists boiled up around the Capitol, lapping against the security barriers, Republicans in the House and the Senate were chipping away at democracy from the inside.
Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, invoked the 1877 commission that resolved the disputed presidential election of 1876 as a model for what he described as addressing reasonable doubts about the 2020 election. There is no factual basis for such doubts about the 2020 vote, but Mr. Cruz's choice of analogy is historically resonant. In the 1876 election, white Democrats used widespread political violence to prevent Black people from voting and then demanded the end of Reconstruction as the price of the survival of a compromised Republic — ushering in an era of racial terror and cementing the exclusion of Southern Blacks from participatory democracy.
The modern Republican Party, in its systematic efforts to suppress voting, and its refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of elections that it loses, is similarly seeking to maintain its political power on the basis of disenfranchisement. Wednesday’s insurrection is evidence of an alarming willingness to pursue that goal with violence.
It is clear that some Republican leaders are starting to fear the consequences of enabling Mr. Trump. Before the attack started, Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, decried efforts by his fellow Republicans to overturn the results of the election. But his eloquence was the very definition of a gesture both too little and too late. They who sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.
Other politicians have had firmer convictions. Former presidential candidate Mitt Romney tweeted, “What happened at the U.S. Capitol today was an insurrection, incited by the President of the United States."
The Constitution requires Congress to count and announce the results of a presidential election on Jan. 6 of the following year. While the mob was able to put that process on hold, it did not stop it entirely, and it will not prevent Mr. Biden’s inauguration in two weeks.
But the attack is a reminder of the fragility of self-government.
Jan. 6, 2021, will go down as a dark day. The question is whether, even as Mr. Trump’s time in office ends, America is at the beginning of a descent into an even darker and more divided epoch or the end of one. The danger is real, but the answer is not foreordained. Republican politicians have the power, and the responsibility, to chart a different course by ending their rhetorical assaults on American democracy and rising in defense of the nation they swore oaths to serve.
The president incited his followers to violence. There must be consequences.
By The New York Times Editorial Board
President Trump and his Republican enablers in Congress incited a violent attack Wednesday against the government they lead and the nation they profess to love. This cannot be allowed to stand.
Mr. Trump’s seditious rhetoric prompted a mob of thousands of people to storm the U.S. Capitol building, some breaking onto the House and Senate floors, where the nation’s elected representatives had gathered to perform their constitutional duty of counting electoral votes and confirming the election of Joe Biden as president.
It is fitting that some carried the Confederate flag as they attacked the seat of American government and forced the suspension of congressional debate. They shattered windows and broke doors, clashing with overwhelmed security forces as they shouted their support for Mr. Trump and their defiance of the lawful results of the 2020 election. One woman was killed. The nation’s leaders were sent scurrying for shelter.
Explosives were found in the Capitol and multiple locations around Washington. Pro-Trump protests also shut down statehouses around the country.
Mr. Trump sparked these assaults. He has railed for months against the verdict rendered by voters in November. He summoned his supporters to gather in Washington on this day, and encouraged them to march on the Capitol. He told them that the election was being stolen. He told them to fight. He told them he might join them and, even as they stormed the building, he declined for long hours to tell them to stop, to condemn their actions, to raise a finger in defense of the Constitution that he swore to preserve and protect. When he finally spoke, late in the day, he affirmed the protesters’ anger, telling them again that the election was stolen, but asking them to go home anyway. It was the performance of a man unwilling to fulfill his duties as president or to confront the consequences of his own behavior.
The president needs to be held accountable — through impeachment proceedings or criminal prosecution — and the same goes for his supporters who carried out the violence. In time, there should be an investigation of the failure of the Capitol Police to prepare for an attack that was announced and planned in public.
This is not just an attack on the results of the 2020 election. It is a precedent — a permission slip for similar opposition to the outcomes of future elections. It must be clearly rejected, and placed beyond the pale of permissible conduct.
The leaders of the Republican Party also bear a measure of responsibility for the attack on the Capitol.
Many in the G.O.P. have participated in the vigorous retailing of lies about the election. They have sought to undermine public confidence in democracy, questioning the legitimacy of Mr. Biden’s victory without providing any evidence for their claims. Their statements led some of those who trust them to conclude violence was necessary.
Few have been as explicit as Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, who earlier Wednesday suggested, “Let’s have trial by combat!” But even as extremists boiled up around the Capitol, lapping against the security barriers, Republicans in the House and the Senate were chipping away at democracy from the inside.
Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, invoked the 1877 commission that resolved the disputed presidential election of 1876 as a model for what he described as addressing reasonable doubts about the 2020 election. There is no factual basis for such doubts about the 2020 vote, but Mr. Cruz's choice of analogy is historically resonant. In the 1876 election, white Democrats used widespread political violence to prevent Black people from voting and then demanded the end of Reconstruction as the price of the survival of a compromised Republic — ushering in an era of racial terror and cementing the exclusion of Southern Blacks from participatory democracy.
The modern Republican Party, in its systematic efforts to suppress voting, and its refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of elections that it loses, is similarly seeking to maintain its political power on the basis of disenfranchisement. Wednesday’s insurrection is evidence of an alarming willingness to pursue that goal with violence.
It is clear that some Republican leaders are starting to fear the consequences of enabling Mr. Trump. Before the attack started, Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, decried efforts by his fellow Republicans to overturn the results of the election. But his eloquence was the very definition of a gesture both too little and too late. They who sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.
Other politicians have had firmer convictions. Former presidential candidate Mitt Romney tweeted, “What happened at the U.S. Capitol today was an insurrection, incited by the President of the United States."
The Constitution requires Congress to count and announce the results of a presidential election on Jan. 6 of the following year. While the mob was able to put that process on hold, it did not stop it entirely, and it will not prevent Mr. Biden’s inauguration in two weeks.
But the attack is a reminder of the fragility of self-government.
Jan. 6, 2021, will go down as a dark day. The question is whether, even as Mr. Trump’s time in office ends, America is at the beginning of a descent into an even darker and more divided epoch or the end of one. The danger is real, but the answer is not foreordained. Republican politicians have the power, and the responsibility, to chart a different course by ending their rhetorical assaults on American democracy and rising in defense of the nation they swore oaths to serve.
THE GOP’S MINORITY RULE CAUCUS REVEALS ITS CONTEMPT FOR DEMOCRACY
By E.J. Dionne Jr., The Washington Post
At least the Confederate secessionists acknowledged that Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election.
The 18 Republican state attorneys general and 126 Republican House members who asked the Supreme Court to throw out the results of the 2020 election may thus be more impudent than the Civil War seditionists in whose steps they followed.
Here is a translation of what they were telling a majority of the nation’s electorate and voters in states representing 62 of President-elect Joe Biden’s 306 electoral votes:
“We don’t like the president and vice president you chose so we simply won’t accept the result of a free election. We’ll deploy lies and phony statistics to justify imposing our will on the rest of the country. The heck with democracy. But we’ll continue to enjoy the Social Security checks, the farm subsidies and all the other money that states that voted for Biden send our way.”
Their lawsuit, flatly rejected by the court on Friday night, was originally brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (who happens to be under federal investigation for bribery and abuse of office and has been under indictment for felony securities fraud charges). It was joined by 17 of his Republican colleagues and backed by almost two-thirds of House Republicans. Its claims have been described as (you can look it up) clownish, comical, farcical, frivolous, ludicrous, insane and dumb. The court used none of those words, of course, but its terse dismissal said enough.
The lawsuit was all these things, but it was also profoundly dangerous, hypocritical and revealing. We should continue to take it very seriously as a sign that not only President Trump but also a majority of his party would rather tear our republic apart than accept electoral defeat. We went through this once before, and it led to a civil war.
Yes, that’s the moment we should be thinking about. Rush Limbaugh is certainly pondering it. The radio commentator — awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Trump — can always be counted on to reflect the dark fears and fervent hopes of large parts of the right. Limbaugh recently invoked the spirit of Fort Sumter, the attitude of those who saw the election of Lincoln and his opposition to the spread of slavery as reason to break up the union.
“I actually think that we’re trending toward secession,” Limbaugh told his listeners last Wednesday. “I see more and more people asking what in the world do we have in common with the people who live in, say, New York?”
He backpedaled the next day. “Now, I didn’t advocate for it. I never would advocate for secession. I’m simply repeating what I have heard.” But his initial statement illustrated the sentiment behind an insistence that the majority’s wishes should be ignored and that ballots cast in places such as Detroit, Philadelphia and Milwaukee be thrown away.
No matter how they dress things up, the Nullification wing of the Republican Party is obsessed with the fact that Trump lost key states in part because a lot of Black voters in big cities rejected him. Paxton’s initial court filing mentioned Wayne County, home of Detroit, 11 times,; Milwaukee seven; and Philadelphia six. “In Wayne County, Mr. Biden’s margin (322,925 votes) significantly exceeds his statewide lead,” the brief declared, almost as if this in itself were evidence of a crime.
The lawsuit was plain about its partisan purposes, complaining of how elections were run in “areas administered by local government under Democrat control and with populations with higher ratios of Democrat voters than other areas of Defendant States.” (Paxton lacked the grace to refer to the Democratic Party by its proper name.)
Notice something else: Those who claim to believe in “states’ rights” and “local decision-making” once again showed that their rhetoric is a bunch of hooey. This was true of the Confederates, too. Not only was slavery, not states’ rights, the cause of the Civil War, but slavery’s advocates embraced the Dred Scott decision, which, as Lincoln had argued, laid out the path to nationalizing slavery. Power and results were all that mattered.
So it is with the GOP’s Minority Rule Caucus. They believe Republican jurisdictions should be free to suppress votes. But areas under “Democrat control” must be blocked from making voting a little bit easier.
Those who promote this nonsense should put up or shut up. If those House Republicans think our nation’s democratic process is illegitimate, they can demonstrate their sincerity by resigning — especially the 19 from Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia who joined a lawsuit that would have annulled the votes of their states.
So, despite the Supreme Court’s ruling, we should remain alarmed that so many Republican politicians blithely walked away from democracy and sought to undermine the very institutions they took an oath to defend.
By E.J. Dionne Jr., The Washington Post
At least the Confederate secessionists acknowledged that Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election.
The 18 Republican state attorneys general and 126 Republican House members who asked the Supreme Court to throw out the results of the 2020 election may thus be more impudent than the Civil War seditionists in whose steps they followed.
Here is a translation of what they were telling a majority of the nation’s electorate and voters in states representing 62 of President-elect Joe Biden’s 306 electoral votes:
“We don’t like the president and vice president you chose so we simply won’t accept the result of a free election. We’ll deploy lies and phony statistics to justify imposing our will on the rest of the country. The heck with democracy. But we’ll continue to enjoy the Social Security checks, the farm subsidies and all the other money that states that voted for Biden send our way.”
Their lawsuit, flatly rejected by the court on Friday night, was originally brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (who happens to be under federal investigation for bribery and abuse of office and has been under indictment for felony securities fraud charges). It was joined by 17 of his Republican colleagues and backed by almost two-thirds of House Republicans. Its claims have been described as (you can look it up) clownish, comical, farcical, frivolous, ludicrous, insane and dumb. The court used none of those words, of course, but its terse dismissal said enough.
The lawsuit was all these things, but it was also profoundly dangerous, hypocritical and revealing. We should continue to take it very seriously as a sign that not only President Trump but also a majority of his party would rather tear our republic apart than accept electoral defeat. We went through this once before, and it led to a civil war.
Yes, that’s the moment we should be thinking about. Rush Limbaugh is certainly pondering it. The radio commentator — awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Trump — can always be counted on to reflect the dark fears and fervent hopes of large parts of the right. Limbaugh recently invoked the spirit of Fort Sumter, the attitude of those who saw the election of Lincoln and his opposition to the spread of slavery as reason to break up the union.
“I actually think that we’re trending toward secession,” Limbaugh told his listeners last Wednesday. “I see more and more people asking what in the world do we have in common with the people who live in, say, New York?”
He backpedaled the next day. “Now, I didn’t advocate for it. I never would advocate for secession. I’m simply repeating what I have heard.” But his initial statement illustrated the sentiment behind an insistence that the majority’s wishes should be ignored and that ballots cast in places such as Detroit, Philadelphia and Milwaukee be thrown away.
No matter how they dress things up, the Nullification wing of the Republican Party is obsessed with the fact that Trump lost key states in part because a lot of Black voters in big cities rejected him. Paxton’s initial court filing mentioned Wayne County, home of Detroit, 11 times,; Milwaukee seven; and Philadelphia six. “In Wayne County, Mr. Biden’s margin (322,925 votes) significantly exceeds his statewide lead,” the brief declared, almost as if this in itself were evidence of a crime.
The lawsuit was plain about its partisan purposes, complaining of how elections were run in “areas administered by local government under Democrat control and with populations with higher ratios of Democrat voters than other areas of Defendant States.” (Paxton lacked the grace to refer to the Democratic Party by its proper name.)
Notice something else: Those who claim to believe in “states’ rights” and “local decision-making” once again showed that their rhetoric is a bunch of hooey. This was true of the Confederates, too. Not only was slavery, not states’ rights, the cause of the Civil War, but slavery’s advocates embraced the Dred Scott decision, which, as Lincoln had argued, laid out the path to nationalizing slavery. Power and results were all that mattered.
So it is with the GOP’s Minority Rule Caucus. They believe Republican jurisdictions should be free to suppress votes. But areas under “Democrat control” must be blocked from making voting a little bit easier.
Those who promote this nonsense should put up or shut up. If those House Republicans think our nation’s democratic process is illegitimate, they can demonstrate their sincerity by resigning — especially the 19 from Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia who joined a lawsuit that would have annulled the votes of their states.
So, despite the Supreme Court’s ruling, we should remain alarmed that so many Republican politicians blithely walked away from democracy and sought to undermine the very institutions they took an oath to defend.
TRUMP HAS NEVER BELIEVED IN DEMOCRACY
He wants to wield power without winning it legitimately.
By Charles M. Blow, The New York Times
Donald Trump’s continued effort to overturn the result of the election — an effort buttressed by the support of many Republicans in Congress, it should be noted — is nothing short of an attempt at a bloodless coup.
The only way Trump could achieve his aim of denying Joe Biden his rightfully earned victory would be if some people or entities — state legislatures, judges or the Supreme Court — were to agree to throw out millions of legally cast and appropriate votes. (It is also worth noting that many of the jurisdictions being disputed are heavily Black.)
But a stinging defeat in the Supreme Court, packed with three justices of Trump’s own choosing, seems to have slammed the door on any legal path Trump might have had in his outrageous endeavor. The members of the Electoral College will meet on Monday and choose the next president. Barring any extraordinary and unprecedented developments, they will select Joe Biden, as the people already have.
And yet, on Saturday Trump continued to insist on Twitter that “I WON THE ELECTION IN A LANDSLIDE,” and that the Supreme Court ruling was incorrect: “This is a great and disgraceful miscarriage of justice. The people of the United States were cheated, and our Country disgraced. Never even given our day in Court!”
That same day, Trump flew over a “Stop the Steal” rally at Washington’s Freedom Plaza, where the Proud Boys were a prominent presence.
He keeps lying to his supporters, telling them — partly out of pride, partly out of a craven quest for power — that he was cheated and that he actually won the election. Many of them believe him. Right-wing media have aided him in his deception, as have Republican officials, either through their public pronouncements or through their silence.
On Sunday, the House minority whip, Steve Scalise of Louisiana, appeared on “Fox News Sunday” and said:
“If you want to restore trust by millions of people who are still very frustrated and angry about what happened, that’s why you got to have this whole system play out.”
On Politics with Lisa Lerer: A guiding hand through the political news cycle, telling you what you really need to know.
But of course this isn’t about restoring faith in our elections; rather, it is about allowing Trump to further degrade that faith. Scalise and many other Republicans are accomplices in this crime against our democracy. Trump is still trying to steal this election, and they are outside revving the engine of the getaway car.
That a majority of all Republicans in the House of Representatives expressed support for the frivolous Texas lawsuit signals to me that the difference between liberals and conservatives is no longer about values; it is now about a fundamental belief in democracy. Republicans appear to be saying that not all votes matter or should be counted. This is voter suppression on the grandest of scales, because it is an attempt at voter erasure, at eliminating votes that have already been cast and counted.
All the while, Trump has continued to use the division and deception he has created to raise money. He has now collected more than $200 million in donations in support of his bogus election recounts.
But, as The New York Times reported earlier this month:
“Mr. Trump’s campaign apparatus has continued to aggressively solicit donations under the guise of supporting his various legal challenges to the election of Joseph R. Biden Jr., but as of now 75 percent of donations goes to a new political action committee that Mr. Trump formed in mid-November, up to the PAC’s legal limit of $5,000. The other 25 percent goes to the Republican National Committee. Only if a donor gives more than $6,000 do any funds go to Mr. Trump’s formal ‘recount’ account.”
Trump has realized that trying to steal the presidency is more lucrative than actually being president, so he won’t stop. We are witnessing one of the greatest grifts in the history of the presidency.
The presidency gave Trump something he always craved but never possessed: constant attention and real, legitimate power. And, once tasted, power is craved forever.
Trump has never believed in American democracy. He was never a student of history. He was never really a patriot.
When he foreshadowed his current behavior in 2016 by refusing to say that he would accept the results of that election as legitimate if he didn’t win, we knew. When he cozied up to the world’s dictators and spurned our allies, we knew. When he winked at hate groups by refusing to immediately and fulsomely condemn them, we knew.
Trump wants to operate a dictatorship behind a veil of democracy. He wants to wield power without winning it legitimately. He wants to manipulate his mob and prioritize it above the masses who oppose him.
Yes, Trump is attempting a coup, whether or not you want to call it that. But, no matter what you choose to call something, it will still be what it is.
He wants to wield power without winning it legitimately.
By Charles M. Blow, The New York Times
Donald Trump’s continued effort to overturn the result of the election — an effort buttressed by the support of many Republicans in Congress, it should be noted — is nothing short of an attempt at a bloodless coup.
The only way Trump could achieve his aim of denying Joe Biden his rightfully earned victory would be if some people or entities — state legislatures, judges or the Supreme Court — were to agree to throw out millions of legally cast and appropriate votes. (It is also worth noting that many of the jurisdictions being disputed are heavily Black.)
But a stinging defeat in the Supreme Court, packed with three justices of Trump’s own choosing, seems to have slammed the door on any legal path Trump might have had in his outrageous endeavor. The members of the Electoral College will meet on Monday and choose the next president. Barring any extraordinary and unprecedented developments, they will select Joe Biden, as the people already have.
And yet, on Saturday Trump continued to insist on Twitter that “I WON THE ELECTION IN A LANDSLIDE,” and that the Supreme Court ruling was incorrect: “This is a great and disgraceful miscarriage of justice. The people of the United States were cheated, and our Country disgraced. Never even given our day in Court!”
That same day, Trump flew over a “Stop the Steal” rally at Washington’s Freedom Plaza, where the Proud Boys were a prominent presence.
He keeps lying to his supporters, telling them — partly out of pride, partly out of a craven quest for power — that he was cheated and that he actually won the election. Many of them believe him. Right-wing media have aided him in his deception, as have Republican officials, either through their public pronouncements or through their silence.
On Sunday, the House minority whip, Steve Scalise of Louisiana, appeared on “Fox News Sunday” and said:
“If you want to restore trust by millions of people who are still very frustrated and angry about what happened, that’s why you got to have this whole system play out.”
On Politics with Lisa Lerer: A guiding hand through the political news cycle, telling you what you really need to know.
But of course this isn’t about restoring faith in our elections; rather, it is about allowing Trump to further degrade that faith. Scalise and many other Republicans are accomplices in this crime against our democracy. Trump is still trying to steal this election, and they are outside revving the engine of the getaway car.
That a majority of all Republicans in the House of Representatives expressed support for the frivolous Texas lawsuit signals to me that the difference between liberals and conservatives is no longer about values; it is now about a fundamental belief in democracy. Republicans appear to be saying that not all votes matter or should be counted. This is voter suppression on the grandest of scales, because it is an attempt at voter erasure, at eliminating votes that have already been cast and counted.
All the while, Trump has continued to use the division and deception he has created to raise money. He has now collected more than $200 million in donations in support of his bogus election recounts.
But, as The New York Times reported earlier this month:
“Mr. Trump’s campaign apparatus has continued to aggressively solicit donations under the guise of supporting his various legal challenges to the election of Joseph R. Biden Jr., but as of now 75 percent of donations goes to a new political action committee that Mr. Trump formed in mid-November, up to the PAC’s legal limit of $5,000. The other 25 percent goes to the Republican National Committee. Only if a donor gives more than $6,000 do any funds go to Mr. Trump’s formal ‘recount’ account.”
Trump has realized that trying to steal the presidency is more lucrative than actually being president, so he won’t stop. We are witnessing one of the greatest grifts in the history of the presidency.
The presidency gave Trump something he always craved but never possessed: constant attention and real, legitimate power. And, once tasted, power is craved forever.
Trump has never believed in American democracy. He was never a student of history. He was never really a patriot.
When he foreshadowed his current behavior in 2016 by refusing to say that he would accept the results of that election as legitimate if he didn’t win, we knew. When he cozied up to the world’s dictators and spurned our allies, we knew. When he winked at hate groups by refusing to immediately and fulsomely condemn them, we knew.
Trump wants to operate a dictatorship behind a veil of democracy. He wants to wield power without winning it legitimately. He wants to manipulate his mob and prioritize it above the masses who oppose him.
Yes, Trump is attempting a coup, whether or not you want to call it that. But, no matter what you choose to call something, it will still be what it is.
WHAT REALLY SAVED THE REPUBLIC FROM TRUMP?
It wasn’t our constitutional system of checks and balances.
By Tim Wu, law professor at Columbia University.
Americans are taught that the main function of the U.S. Constitution is the control of executive power: curtailing presidents who might seek to become tyrants. Other republics have lapsed into dictatorships (the Roman Republic, the Weimar Republic, the Republic of China and so on), but our elaborate constitutional system of checks and balances, engineered largely by James Madison, protects us from despotism.
Or so we think. The presidency of Donald Trump, aggressive in its autocratic impulses but mostly thwarted from realizing them, should prompt a re-examination of that idea. For our system of checks and balances, in which the three branches of government are empowered to control or influence the actions of the others, played a disappointingly small role in stopping Mr. Trump from assuming the unlimited powers he seemed to want.
What really saved the Republic from Mr. Trump was a different set of limits on the executive: an informal and unofficial set of institutional norms upheld by federal prosecutors, military officers and state elections officials. You might call these values our “unwritten constitution.” Whatever you call them, they were the decisive factor.
It’s true that the courts at times provided a check on Mr. Trump’s tyrannical tendencies, as with their dismissal of his frivolous attacks on the election and their striking down of his effort to overturn the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program without appropriate process. But in other cases, such as his anti-Muslim travel ban, the courts have been too unwilling to look beyond form to ferret out unconstitutional motive. More generally, Mr. Trump has tended to move fast, while the courts are slow, and to operate by threat, which the courts cannot adjudicate.
The bigger and more important failure was Congress. Madison intended Congress to be the primary check on the president. Unfortunately, that design has a key flaw (as Madison himself realized). The flaw is vulnerability to party politics. It turns out that if a majority of members of at least one body of Congress exhibits a higher loyalty to its party than to Congress, Congress will not function as a reliable check on a president of that same party. This was what happened with Mr. Trump and the Republican-controlled Senate.
The problem is chronic, but over the last four years it became virulent. Confronted with a president who was heedless of rules, Senate Republicans, in ways large and small, let him do what he wanted. They allowed acting appointees to run the federal government. They allowed him to claim a right to attack Iran without congressional approval. The impeachment process was reduced to nothing but a party-line vote. The Senate became a rubber stamp for executive overreach.
Instead, the president’s worst impulses were neutralized by three pillars of the unwritten constitution. The first is the customary separation between the president and federal criminal prosecution (even though the Department of Justice is part of the executive branch). The second is the traditional political neutrality of the military (even though the president is the commander in chief of the armed forces). The third is the personal integrity of state elections officials.
If any of these informal “firewalls” had failed, President Trump might be on his way to a second and more autocratic term. But they held firm, for which the Republic should be grateful.
Consider the first firewall: prosecutorial independence. The prosecution function of the executive branch is not mentioned in the Constitution, and based on the text alone — “the executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States” — some might think (and some have even insisted) that the president has the power to order federal prosecutors to do his bidding. Mr. Trump claimed that power in 2017, saying “I have absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department.”
But an unwritten norm has long held that the president should not dictate law enforcement decisions in general, and criminal prosecutions in particular. That is why, throughout this fall, even as Mr. Trump urged his appointees in the Justice Department to openly announce a criminal investigation into the Biden family, they did not comply. None of Mr. Trump’s appointees was willing to openly investigate Joe Biden or his family members, let alone issue an indictment or civil complaint.
Imagine if the Justice Department had followed Mr. Trump’s lead. Imagine if in response to the provocations of Mr. Trump’s lawyer Rudolph Giuliani, a U.S. attorney had charged Mr. Biden with criminal fraud. Even if Mr. Biden ultimately prevailed in court, publicly fighting such charges during an election would be a political and logistical nightmare. The unwritten constitution blocked this line of attack on the electoral process.
Prosecutorial independence was not limited to refusing to indict Mr. Trump’s political adversaries; it also extended to indicting his allies. Over the past four years, seven of Mr. Trump’s close associates were indicted and six have been convicted, including his adviser Stephen Bannon, his campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his lawyer Michael Cohen. Such convictions would be unimaginable in a dictatorship.
None of this is to suggest that William Barr, Mr. Trump’s attorney general, has served as a model of nonpartisan behavior, or that the Justice Department has been scrupulously fair. What it does show is how powerful unwritten norms can be, even in a department run by a loyalist.
The second firewall of the unwritten constitution was the U.S. military’s longstanding custom against getting involved in domestic politics. It was invaluable in checking Mr. Trump’s militaristic instincts.
On June 1, as protests and counter-protests occasioned by the killing of George Floyd became violent and destructive of property, Mr. Trump appeared in the Rose Garden of the White House and denounced what he called “acts of domestic terror.” He said he would “deploy the United States military” if necessary to “defend the life and property” of U.S. citizens. In a subsequent photo op, he was flanked by Mr. Barr, Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was clad in military fatigues. Soon, active duty forces from the 82nd Airborne Division were positioned outside of Washington.
Mr. Trump’s plan had the written law on its side. Neither the Constitution nor any congressional statute would have prevented the president from directly ordering active duty military to suppress the protests. The Constitution makes the president the commander in chief of the armed forces and the Insurrection Act of 1807 allows the president to use the military or National Guard to suppress civil disorder, providing a broad exception to the general rule barring domestic use of the military.
It was an extraordinarily dangerous moment for the country. As the history of lapsed republics suggests, when the military becomes involved in domestic politics, it tends to stay involved. But two days after Mr. Trump’s speech, Mr. Esper publicly broke with the president, stressing that active duty forces should be used domestically only “as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations.” He concluded that “I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act.”
General Milley later issued a public apology for participating in Mr. Trump’s photo op. “My presence in that moment,” he said, “created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics.” He added, “I should not have been there.”
Mr. Trump’s plans ran afoul not of the law, but of an unwritten rule. In a few days, the active duty troops gathered around Washington were sent home. Though briefly tested, the norm had held.
The final firewall of the unwritten constitution has been the integrity of state elections officials. Corruption of the people and institutions that set election rules and count votes is an obvious threat to the democratic process. In Russia, for example, the neutrality of its Central Election Commission during President Vladimir Putin’s rule has been repeatedly questioned, especially given the tendency of that body to disqualify leading opposition figures and parties.
The story of Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state in Georgia and its top elections official, testifies to the potential threats to an election’s integrity during a heated campaign. Mr. Raffensperger, a Republican, was loosely in charge of the vote in a state that went narrowly for Mr. Biden. In that capacity, Mr. Raffensperger was attacked and disparaged by higher-ranking members of his own party. This included such prominent political figures as Georgia’s two senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler. Both demanded Mr. Raffensperger resign for no apparent reason other than his failure to prevent Mr. Biden from winning the state.
Despite the pressure, Mr. Raffensperger and the state’s governor, Brian Kemp, held steady, along with an overwhelming majority of state elections officials around the country. They have refused to “discover” voting fraud without good evidence of it. Party loyalty — at this point — seems not to have fatally corrupted the vote-counting process.
Might this welcome result be credited to constitutional design? Not really. The states are an important part of the Constitutional design, and the document does give them a central role to play in federal elections. But what seems to have mattered most, in terms of ensuring the integrity of the voting process, was less the constitutional structure and more the personal integrity of the state elections officials. Their professional commitment to a fair vote may have spared the Republic an existential crisis.
Madison famously wrote, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Cynical minds have read this line to mean that we should never trust people and should rely only on structural controls on government power.
The last four years suggest something different: Structural checks can be overrated. The survival of our Republic depends as much, if not more, on the virtue of those in government, particularly the upholding of norms by civil servants, prosecutors and military officials. We have grown too jaded about things like professionalism and institutions, and the idea of men and women who take their duties seriously. But as every major moral tradition teaches, no external constraint can fully substitute for the personal compulsion to do what is right.
It may sound naïve in our untrusting age to hope that people will care about ethics and professional duties. But Madison, too, saw the need for this trust. “There is a degree of depravity in mankind,” he wrote, but also “qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.” A working republican government, he argued, “presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.”
It is called civic virtue, and at the end of the day, there is no real alternative.
It wasn’t our constitutional system of checks and balances.
By Tim Wu, law professor at Columbia University.
Americans are taught that the main function of the U.S. Constitution is the control of executive power: curtailing presidents who might seek to become tyrants. Other republics have lapsed into dictatorships (the Roman Republic, the Weimar Republic, the Republic of China and so on), but our elaborate constitutional system of checks and balances, engineered largely by James Madison, protects us from despotism.
Or so we think. The presidency of Donald Trump, aggressive in its autocratic impulses but mostly thwarted from realizing them, should prompt a re-examination of that idea. For our system of checks and balances, in which the three branches of government are empowered to control or influence the actions of the others, played a disappointingly small role in stopping Mr. Trump from assuming the unlimited powers he seemed to want.
What really saved the Republic from Mr. Trump was a different set of limits on the executive: an informal and unofficial set of institutional norms upheld by federal prosecutors, military officers and state elections officials. You might call these values our “unwritten constitution.” Whatever you call them, they were the decisive factor.
It’s true that the courts at times provided a check on Mr. Trump’s tyrannical tendencies, as with their dismissal of his frivolous attacks on the election and their striking down of his effort to overturn the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program without appropriate process. But in other cases, such as his anti-Muslim travel ban, the courts have been too unwilling to look beyond form to ferret out unconstitutional motive. More generally, Mr. Trump has tended to move fast, while the courts are slow, and to operate by threat, which the courts cannot adjudicate.
The bigger and more important failure was Congress. Madison intended Congress to be the primary check on the president. Unfortunately, that design has a key flaw (as Madison himself realized). The flaw is vulnerability to party politics. It turns out that if a majority of members of at least one body of Congress exhibits a higher loyalty to its party than to Congress, Congress will not function as a reliable check on a president of that same party. This was what happened with Mr. Trump and the Republican-controlled Senate.
The problem is chronic, but over the last four years it became virulent. Confronted with a president who was heedless of rules, Senate Republicans, in ways large and small, let him do what he wanted. They allowed acting appointees to run the federal government. They allowed him to claim a right to attack Iran without congressional approval. The impeachment process was reduced to nothing but a party-line vote. The Senate became a rubber stamp for executive overreach.
Instead, the president’s worst impulses were neutralized by three pillars of the unwritten constitution. The first is the customary separation between the president and federal criminal prosecution (even though the Department of Justice is part of the executive branch). The second is the traditional political neutrality of the military (even though the president is the commander in chief of the armed forces). The third is the personal integrity of state elections officials.
If any of these informal “firewalls” had failed, President Trump might be on his way to a second and more autocratic term. But they held firm, for which the Republic should be grateful.
Consider the first firewall: prosecutorial independence. The prosecution function of the executive branch is not mentioned in the Constitution, and based on the text alone — “the executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States” — some might think (and some have even insisted) that the president has the power to order federal prosecutors to do his bidding. Mr. Trump claimed that power in 2017, saying “I have absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department.”
But an unwritten norm has long held that the president should not dictate law enforcement decisions in general, and criminal prosecutions in particular. That is why, throughout this fall, even as Mr. Trump urged his appointees in the Justice Department to openly announce a criminal investigation into the Biden family, they did not comply. None of Mr. Trump’s appointees was willing to openly investigate Joe Biden or his family members, let alone issue an indictment or civil complaint.
Imagine if the Justice Department had followed Mr. Trump’s lead. Imagine if in response to the provocations of Mr. Trump’s lawyer Rudolph Giuliani, a U.S. attorney had charged Mr. Biden with criminal fraud. Even if Mr. Biden ultimately prevailed in court, publicly fighting such charges during an election would be a political and logistical nightmare. The unwritten constitution blocked this line of attack on the electoral process.
Prosecutorial independence was not limited to refusing to indict Mr. Trump’s political adversaries; it also extended to indicting his allies. Over the past four years, seven of Mr. Trump’s close associates were indicted and six have been convicted, including his adviser Stephen Bannon, his campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his lawyer Michael Cohen. Such convictions would be unimaginable in a dictatorship.
None of this is to suggest that William Barr, Mr. Trump’s attorney general, has served as a model of nonpartisan behavior, or that the Justice Department has been scrupulously fair. What it does show is how powerful unwritten norms can be, even in a department run by a loyalist.
The second firewall of the unwritten constitution was the U.S. military’s longstanding custom against getting involved in domestic politics. It was invaluable in checking Mr. Trump’s militaristic instincts.
On June 1, as protests and counter-protests occasioned by the killing of George Floyd became violent and destructive of property, Mr. Trump appeared in the Rose Garden of the White House and denounced what he called “acts of domestic terror.” He said he would “deploy the United States military” if necessary to “defend the life and property” of U.S. citizens. In a subsequent photo op, he was flanked by Mr. Barr, Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was clad in military fatigues. Soon, active duty forces from the 82nd Airborne Division were positioned outside of Washington.
Mr. Trump’s plan had the written law on its side. Neither the Constitution nor any congressional statute would have prevented the president from directly ordering active duty military to suppress the protests. The Constitution makes the president the commander in chief of the armed forces and the Insurrection Act of 1807 allows the president to use the military or National Guard to suppress civil disorder, providing a broad exception to the general rule barring domestic use of the military.
It was an extraordinarily dangerous moment for the country. As the history of lapsed republics suggests, when the military becomes involved in domestic politics, it tends to stay involved. But two days after Mr. Trump’s speech, Mr. Esper publicly broke with the president, stressing that active duty forces should be used domestically only “as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations.” He concluded that “I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act.”
General Milley later issued a public apology for participating in Mr. Trump’s photo op. “My presence in that moment,” he said, “created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics.” He added, “I should not have been there.”
Mr. Trump’s plans ran afoul not of the law, but of an unwritten rule. In a few days, the active duty troops gathered around Washington were sent home. Though briefly tested, the norm had held.
The final firewall of the unwritten constitution has been the integrity of state elections officials. Corruption of the people and institutions that set election rules and count votes is an obvious threat to the democratic process. In Russia, for example, the neutrality of its Central Election Commission during President Vladimir Putin’s rule has been repeatedly questioned, especially given the tendency of that body to disqualify leading opposition figures and parties.
The story of Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state in Georgia and its top elections official, testifies to the potential threats to an election’s integrity during a heated campaign. Mr. Raffensperger, a Republican, was loosely in charge of the vote in a state that went narrowly for Mr. Biden. In that capacity, Mr. Raffensperger was attacked and disparaged by higher-ranking members of his own party. This included such prominent political figures as Georgia’s two senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler. Both demanded Mr. Raffensperger resign for no apparent reason other than his failure to prevent Mr. Biden from winning the state.
Despite the pressure, Mr. Raffensperger and the state’s governor, Brian Kemp, held steady, along with an overwhelming majority of state elections officials around the country. They have refused to “discover” voting fraud without good evidence of it. Party loyalty — at this point — seems not to have fatally corrupted the vote-counting process.
Might this welcome result be credited to constitutional design? Not really. The states are an important part of the Constitutional design, and the document does give them a central role to play in federal elections. But what seems to have mattered most, in terms of ensuring the integrity of the voting process, was less the constitutional structure and more the personal integrity of the state elections officials. Their professional commitment to a fair vote may have spared the Republic an existential crisis.
Madison famously wrote, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Cynical minds have read this line to mean that we should never trust people and should rely only on structural controls on government power.
The last four years suggest something different: Structural checks can be overrated. The survival of our Republic depends as much, if not more, on the virtue of those in government, particularly the upholding of norms by civil servants, prosecutors and military officials. We have grown too jaded about things like professionalism and institutions, and the idea of men and women who take their duties seriously. But as every major moral tradition teaches, no external constraint can fully substitute for the personal compulsion to do what is right.
It may sound naïve in our untrusting age to hope that people will care about ethics and professional duties. But Madison, too, saw the need for this trust. “There is a degree of depravity in mankind,” he wrote, but also “qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.” A working republican government, he argued, “presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.”
It is called civic virtue, and at the end of the day, there is no real alternative.
1918 GERMANY HAS A WARNING FOR AMERICA
Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” campaign recalls one of the most disastrous political lies of the 20th century.
By Jochen Bittner, The New York Times
HAMBURG, Germany — It may well be that Germans have a special inclination to panic at specters from the past, and I admit that this alarmism annoys me at times. Yet watching President Trump’s “Stop the Steal” campaign since Election Day, I can’t help but see a parallel to one of the most dreadful episodes from Germany’s history.
One hundred years ago, amid the implosions of Imperial Germany, powerful conservatives who led the country into war refused to accept that they had lost. Their denial gave birth to arguably the most potent and disastrous political lie of the 20th century — the Dolchstosslegende, or stab-in-the-back myth.
Its core claim was that Imperial Germany never lost World War I. Defeat, its proponents said, was declared but not warranted. It was a conspiracy, a con, a capitulation — a grave betrayal that forever stained the nation. That the claim was palpably false didn’t matter. Among a sizable number of Germans, it stirred resentment, humiliation and anger. And the one figure who knew best how to exploit their frustration was Adolf Hitler.
Don’t get me wrong: This is not about comparing Mr. Trump to Hitler, which would be absurd. But the Dolchstosslegende provides a warning. It’s tempting to dismiss Mr. Trump’s irrational claim that the election was “rigged” as a laughable last convulsion of his reign or a cynical bid to heighten the market value for the TV personality he might once again intend to become, especially as he appears to be giving up on his effort to overturn the election result.
But that would be a grave error. Instead, the campaign should be seen as what it is: an attempt to elevate “They stole it” to the level of legend, perhaps seeding for the future social polarization and division on a scale America has never seen.
In 1918, Germany was staring at defeat. The entry of the United States into the war the year before, and a sequence of successful counterattacks by British and French forces, left German forces demoralized. Navy sailors went on strike. They had no appetite to be butchered in the hopeless yet supposedly holy mission of Kaiser Wilhelm II and the loyal aristocrats who made up the Supreme Army Command.
A starving population joined the strikes and demands for a republic grew. On Nov. 9, 1918, Wilhelm abdicated, and two days later the army leaders signed the armistice. It was too much to bear for many: Military officers, monarchists and right-wingers spread the myth that if it had not been for political sabotage by Social Democrats and Jews back home, the army would never have had to give in.
The deceit found willing supporters. “Im Felde unbesiegt” — “undefeated on the battlefield” — was the slogan with which returning soldiers were greeted. Newspapers and postcards depicted German soldiers being stabbed in the back by either evil figures carrying the red flag of socialism or grossly caricatured Jews.
By the time of the Treaty of Versailles the following year, the myth was already well established. The harsh conditions imposed by the Allies, including painful reparation payments, burnished the sense of betrayal. It was especially incomprehensible that Germany, in just a couple of years, had gone from one of the world’s most respected nations to its biggest loser.
The startling aspect about the Dolchstosslegende is this: It did not grow weaker after 1918 but stronger. In the face of humiliation and unable or unwilling to cope with the truth, many Germans embarked on a disastrous self-delusion: The nation had been betrayed, but its honor and greatness could never be lost. And those without a sense of national duty and righteousness — the left and even the elected government of the new republic — could never be legitimate custodians of the country.
In this way, the myth was not just the sharp wedge that drove the Weimar Republic apart. It was also at the heart of Nazi propaganda, and instrumental in justifying violence against opponents. The key to Hitler’s success was that, by 1933, a considerable part of the German electorate had put the ideas embodied in the myth — honor, greatness, national pride — above democracy.
The Germans were so worn down by the lost war, unemployment and international humiliation that they fell prey to the promises of a “Führer” who cracked down hard on anyone perceived as “traitors,” leftists and Jews above all. The stab-in-the-back myth was central to it all. When Hitler became chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933, the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter wrote that “irrepressible pride goes through the millions” who fought so long to “undo the shame of 9 November 1918.”
Germany’s first democracy fell. Without a basic consensus built on a shared reality, society split into groups of ardent, uncompromising partisans. And in an atmosphere of mistrust and paranoia, the notion that dissenters were threats to the nation steadily took hold.
Alarmingly, that seems to be exactly what is happening in the United States today. According to the Pew Research Center, 89 percent of Trump supporters believe that a Joe Biden presidency would do “lasting harm to the U.S.,” while 90 percent of Biden supporters think the reverse. And while the question of which news media to trust has long split America, now even the largely unmoderated Twitter is regarded as partisan. Since the election, millions of Trump supporters have installed the alternative social media app Parler. Filter bubbles are turning into filter networks.
In such a landscape of social fragmentation, Mr. Trump’s baseless accusations about electoral fraud could do serious harm. A staggering 88 percent of Trump voters believe that the election result is illegitimate, according to a YouGov poll. A myth of betrayal and injustice is well underway.
It took another war and decades of reappraisal for the Dolchstosslegende to be exposed as a disastrous, fatal fallacy. If it has any worth today, it is in the lessons it can teach other nations. First among them: Beware the beginnings.
Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” campaign recalls one of the most disastrous political lies of the 20th century.
By Jochen Bittner, The New York Times
HAMBURG, Germany — It may well be that Germans have a special inclination to panic at specters from the past, and I admit that this alarmism annoys me at times. Yet watching President Trump’s “Stop the Steal” campaign since Election Day, I can’t help but see a parallel to one of the most dreadful episodes from Germany’s history.
One hundred years ago, amid the implosions of Imperial Germany, powerful conservatives who led the country into war refused to accept that they had lost. Their denial gave birth to arguably the most potent and disastrous political lie of the 20th century — the Dolchstosslegende, or stab-in-the-back myth.
Its core claim was that Imperial Germany never lost World War I. Defeat, its proponents said, was declared but not warranted. It was a conspiracy, a con, a capitulation — a grave betrayal that forever stained the nation. That the claim was palpably false didn’t matter. Among a sizable number of Germans, it stirred resentment, humiliation and anger. And the one figure who knew best how to exploit their frustration was Adolf Hitler.
Don’t get me wrong: This is not about comparing Mr. Trump to Hitler, which would be absurd. But the Dolchstosslegende provides a warning. It’s tempting to dismiss Mr. Trump’s irrational claim that the election was “rigged” as a laughable last convulsion of his reign or a cynical bid to heighten the market value for the TV personality he might once again intend to become, especially as he appears to be giving up on his effort to overturn the election result.
But that would be a grave error. Instead, the campaign should be seen as what it is: an attempt to elevate “They stole it” to the level of legend, perhaps seeding for the future social polarization and division on a scale America has never seen.
In 1918, Germany was staring at defeat. The entry of the United States into the war the year before, and a sequence of successful counterattacks by British and French forces, left German forces demoralized. Navy sailors went on strike. They had no appetite to be butchered in the hopeless yet supposedly holy mission of Kaiser Wilhelm II and the loyal aristocrats who made up the Supreme Army Command.
A starving population joined the strikes and demands for a republic grew. On Nov. 9, 1918, Wilhelm abdicated, and two days later the army leaders signed the armistice. It was too much to bear for many: Military officers, monarchists and right-wingers spread the myth that if it had not been for political sabotage by Social Democrats and Jews back home, the army would never have had to give in.
The deceit found willing supporters. “Im Felde unbesiegt” — “undefeated on the battlefield” — was the slogan with which returning soldiers were greeted. Newspapers and postcards depicted German soldiers being stabbed in the back by either evil figures carrying the red flag of socialism or grossly caricatured Jews.
By the time of the Treaty of Versailles the following year, the myth was already well established. The harsh conditions imposed by the Allies, including painful reparation payments, burnished the sense of betrayal. It was especially incomprehensible that Germany, in just a couple of years, had gone from one of the world’s most respected nations to its biggest loser.
The startling aspect about the Dolchstosslegende is this: It did not grow weaker after 1918 but stronger. In the face of humiliation and unable or unwilling to cope with the truth, many Germans embarked on a disastrous self-delusion: The nation had been betrayed, but its honor and greatness could never be lost. And those without a sense of national duty and righteousness — the left and even the elected government of the new republic — could never be legitimate custodians of the country.
In this way, the myth was not just the sharp wedge that drove the Weimar Republic apart. It was also at the heart of Nazi propaganda, and instrumental in justifying violence against opponents. The key to Hitler’s success was that, by 1933, a considerable part of the German electorate had put the ideas embodied in the myth — honor, greatness, national pride — above democracy.
The Germans were so worn down by the lost war, unemployment and international humiliation that they fell prey to the promises of a “Führer” who cracked down hard on anyone perceived as “traitors,” leftists and Jews above all. The stab-in-the-back myth was central to it all. When Hitler became chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933, the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter wrote that “irrepressible pride goes through the millions” who fought so long to “undo the shame of 9 November 1918.”
Germany’s first democracy fell. Without a basic consensus built on a shared reality, society split into groups of ardent, uncompromising partisans. And in an atmosphere of mistrust and paranoia, the notion that dissenters were threats to the nation steadily took hold.
Alarmingly, that seems to be exactly what is happening in the United States today. According to the Pew Research Center, 89 percent of Trump supporters believe that a Joe Biden presidency would do “lasting harm to the U.S.,” while 90 percent of Biden supporters think the reverse. And while the question of which news media to trust has long split America, now even the largely unmoderated Twitter is regarded as partisan. Since the election, millions of Trump supporters have installed the alternative social media app Parler. Filter bubbles are turning into filter networks.
In such a landscape of social fragmentation, Mr. Trump’s baseless accusations about electoral fraud could do serious harm. A staggering 88 percent of Trump voters believe that the election result is illegitimate, according to a YouGov poll. A myth of betrayal and injustice is well underway.
It took another war and decades of reappraisal for the Dolchstosslegende to be exposed as a disastrous, fatal fallacy. If it has any worth today, it is in the lessons it can teach other nations. First among them: Beware the beginnings.
LET’S TALK ABOUT HIGHER WAGES
The nation, and the Democratic Party, desperately needs a replacement for the tired story that tax cuts drive economic growth.
By The New York Times Editorial Board
One of the great successes of the Republican Party in recent decades is the relentless propagation of a simple formula for economic growth: tax cuts.
The formula doesn’t work, but that has not affected its popularity. In part, that’s because people like tax cuts. But it’s also because people like economic growth, and while the cult of tax cuts has attracted many critics, it lacks for obvious rivals.
Democratic politicians have tended to campaign on helping people left behind by economic growth, the difficulties caused by economic growth and the problems that cannot be addressed by economic growth. When Democrats do talk about encouraging economic growth, they often sound like Republicans with a few misgivings — the party of kinder, better tax cuts.
This is not just a political problem for Democrats; it is an economic problem for the United States. The nation needs a better story about the drivers of economic growth, to marshal support for better public policies. The painful lessons of recent decades, along with recent economic research, point to a promising candidate: higher wages.
Raising the wages of American workers ought to be the priority of economic policymakers and the measure of economic performance under the Biden administration. We’d all be better off paying less attention to quarterly updates on the growth of the nation’s gross domestic product and focusing instead on the growth of workers’ paychecks.
Set aside, for the moment, the familiar arguments for higher wages: fairness, equality of opportunity, ensuring Americans can provide for their families. The argument here is that higher wages can stoke the sputtering engine of economic growth.
Perhaps the most famous illustration of the benefits is the story of Henry Ford’s decision in 1914 to pay $5 a day to workers on his Model T assembly lines. He did it to increase production — he was paying a premium to maintain a reliable work force. The unexpected benefit was that Ford’s factory workers became Ford customers, too.
The same logic still holds: Consumption drives the American economy, and workers who are paid more can spend more. The rich spend a smaller share of what they earn, and though they lend to the poor, the overall result is still less spending and consumption.
For decades, mainstream economists insisted that it was impossible to order up a sustainable increase in wages because compensation levels reflected the unerring judgment of market forces. “People will get paid on how valuable they are to the enterprise,” in the apt summary of John Snow, the Treasury secretary under President George W. Bush.
The conventional wisdom held that productivity growth was the only route to higher wages. Through that lens, efforts to negotiate or require higher wages were counterproductive. Minimum-wage laws would raise unemployment because there was only so much money in the wage pool, and if some people got more, others would get none. Collective bargaining similarly was derided as a scheme by some workers to take money from others.
It was in the context of this worldview that it became popular to argue that tax cuts would drive prosperity. Rich people would invest, productivity would increase, wages would rise.
In the real world, things are more complicated. Wages are influenced by a tug of war between employers and workers, and employers have been winning. One clear piece of evidence is the yawning divergence between productivity growth and wage growth since roughly 1970. Productivity has more than doubled; wages have lagged far behind.
The point is not that economists were completely wrong. Productivity obviously plays a role in determining wages. McDonald’s cannot pay workers more money than it collects from its customers. But economists were partly and consequentially wrong. Power mattered, too.
The importance of rewriting our stories about the way that the economy works is that they frame our policy debates. Our beliefs about economics determine what seems viable and worthwhile — and whether new ideas can muster support.
Preaching the value of higher wages is a necessary first step toward concrete changes in public policy that can begin to shift economic power. It can help to build support for increasing the federal minimum wage — a policy that already has proved popular at the state level, including in conservative states like Arkansas, Florida and Missouri where voters in recent years have approved higher minimum wages in referendums.
A focus on higher wages is not a sufficient goal for economic policy. There is a genuine need for a stronger safety net to ensure a minimum quality of life. The pursuit of economic growth has to be balanced against other imperatives, notably environmental protection. Wage growth by itself is not a corrective for the accumulated effects of racism or other social ills.
But a focus on wage growth would provide a useful organizing principle for public policy — and an antidote to the attractive simplicity of the belief in the magical power of tax cuts.
The value of such stories extends beyond public policy. The government, too, has limited power to increase wages. The nation also could use some Ford-like executives who can see that the public interest — or at least their own self-interest — is served by raising wages.
That won’t be easy. The affluent live in growing isolation from other Americans, which makes it harder for them to imagine themselves as members of a broader community. Their companies derive a growing share of profits from other countries, which makes it easier to ignore the welfare of American consumers. The nation’s laws, social norms and patterns of daily life all have been revised in recent decades to facilitate the suppression of wage growth.
But we can begin by telling better stories about the way the economy works.
The nation, and the Democratic Party, desperately needs a replacement for the tired story that tax cuts drive economic growth.
By The New York Times Editorial Board
One of the great successes of the Republican Party in recent decades is the relentless propagation of a simple formula for economic growth: tax cuts.
The formula doesn’t work, but that has not affected its popularity. In part, that’s because people like tax cuts. But it’s also because people like economic growth, and while the cult of tax cuts has attracted many critics, it lacks for obvious rivals.
Democratic politicians have tended to campaign on helping people left behind by economic growth, the difficulties caused by economic growth and the problems that cannot be addressed by economic growth. When Democrats do talk about encouraging economic growth, they often sound like Republicans with a few misgivings — the party of kinder, better tax cuts.
This is not just a political problem for Democrats; it is an economic problem for the United States. The nation needs a better story about the drivers of economic growth, to marshal support for better public policies. The painful lessons of recent decades, along with recent economic research, point to a promising candidate: higher wages.
Raising the wages of American workers ought to be the priority of economic policymakers and the measure of economic performance under the Biden administration. We’d all be better off paying less attention to quarterly updates on the growth of the nation’s gross domestic product and focusing instead on the growth of workers’ paychecks.
Set aside, for the moment, the familiar arguments for higher wages: fairness, equality of opportunity, ensuring Americans can provide for their families. The argument here is that higher wages can stoke the sputtering engine of economic growth.
Perhaps the most famous illustration of the benefits is the story of Henry Ford’s decision in 1914 to pay $5 a day to workers on his Model T assembly lines. He did it to increase production — he was paying a premium to maintain a reliable work force. The unexpected benefit was that Ford’s factory workers became Ford customers, too.
The same logic still holds: Consumption drives the American economy, and workers who are paid more can spend more. The rich spend a smaller share of what they earn, and though they lend to the poor, the overall result is still less spending and consumption.
For decades, mainstream economists insisted that it was impossible to order up a sustainable increase in wages because compensation levels reflected the unerring judgment of market forces. “People will get paid on how valuable they are to the enterprise,” in the apt summary of John Snow, the Treasury secretary under President George W. Bush.
The conventional wisdom held that productivity growth was the only route to higher wages. Through that lens, efforts to negotiate or require higher wages were counterproductive. Minimum-wage laws would raise unemployment because there was only so much money in the wage pool, and if some people got more, others would get none. Collective bargaining similarly was derided as a scheme by some workers to take money from others.
It was in the context of this worldview that it became popular to argue that tax cuts would drive prosperity. Rich people would invest, productivity would increase, wages would rise.
In the real world, things are more complicated. Wages are influenced by a tug of war between employers and workers, and employers have been winning. One clear piece of evidence is the yawning divergence between productivity growth and wage growth since roughly 1970. Productivity has more than doubled; wages have lagged far behind.
The point is not that economists were completely wrong. Productivity obviously plays a role in determining wages. McDonald’s cannot pay workers more money than it collects from its customers. But economists were partly and consequentially wrong. Power mattered, too.
The importance of rewriting our stories about the way that the economy works is that they frame our policy debates. Our beliefs about economics determine what seems viable and worthwhile — and whether new ideas can muster support.
Preaching the value of higher wages is a necessary first step toward concrete changes in public policy that can begin to shift economic power. It can help to build support for increasing the federal minimum wage — a policy that already has proved popular at the state level, including in conservative states like Arkansas, Florida and Missouri where voters in recent years have approved higher minimum wages in referendums.
A focus on higher wages is not a sufficient goal for economic policy. There is a genuine need for a stronger safety net to ensure a minimum quality of life. The pursuit of economic growth has to be balanced against other imperatives, notably environmental protection. Wage growth by itself is not a corrective for the accumulated effects of racism or other social ills.
But a focus on wage growth would provide a useful organizing principle for public policy — and an antidote to the attractive simplicity of the belief in the magical power of tax cuts.
The value of such stories extends beyond public policy. The government, too, has limited power to increase wages. The nation also could use some Ford-like executives who can see that the public interest — or at least their own self-interest — is served by raising wages.
That won’t be easy. The affluent live in growing isolation from other Americans, which makes it harder for them to imagine themselves as members of a broader community. Their companies derive a growing share of profits from other countries, which makes it easier to ignore the welfare of American consumers. The nation’s laws, social norms and patterns of daily life all have been revised in recent decades to facilitate the suppression of wage growth.
But we can begin by telling better stories about the way the economy works.
TO STAMP OUT TRUMPISM, THE U.S. NEEDS TO DEAL WITH THESE SIX THINGS
By Ian Bassin and Justin Florence, The Los Angeles Times
The United States barely survived the most acute threat to its political system since the Civil War by averting a second Trump term. But Donald Trump was always just a carrier for a political virus that predated and will outlast him. As evidenced by the finding that 8 in 10 Trump voters do not think he should relinquish power, Trumpism as a political movement very much remains.
A return of Trumpism to the White House would mirror the second wave of COVID-19, which has been worse than the first. Trump 2.0 would have seen America’s openness to strongman rule — and likely be more competent at it.
To avoid that, the political virus that gave us Trump must be addressed. It is a disease with two strains, global and national.
The global strain is a wave of authoritarianism. Over the past 15 years, democracy has been in retreat around the world, with autocrats supplanting democratic governments in countries such as Turkey, Hungary, Venezuela and Poland. Across the globe, citizens are growing less committed to democracy and more open to alternatives. These trends are being driven by factors that transcend borders and include globalization, migration and new information technologies.
The United States has not been immune. Openness to the idea of military rule jumped from 1 in 16 Americans 30 years ago to 1 in 6 pre-Trump. And while some of the shift is likely attributable to global factors, this political virus also carries a uniquely American strain.
The country has become more polarized politically as liberals and conservatives segregate into different geographic areas and consume different media. Previously dominant groups who feel they are losing status in an ever-more diverse nation have captured the Republican Party, turning it into an instrument for holding power at all cost. That party, in turn, has taken advantage of unique structures of American democracy such as the electoral college and the Senate to give itself governmental powers that are out of proportion with the support the party has among voters. For example, Republicans have lost the popular vote in 7 of 8 presidential elections yet dominate the Supreme Court.
As a result of the global and national strains mixing, Trump was able to go a long way toward executing the modern autocrat’s playbook, which typically involves six things.
Spreading disinformation: Trump began doing this on Day One with petty efforts to doctor images to make his inauguration crowd seem bigger and continues this behavior today through his false claims of electoral victory.
Politicizing independent institutions: Trump sought to do this with the Department of Justice, the intelligence community, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and even the U.S. Postal Service.
Delegitimizing vulnerable populations: Trump tried to do this by falsely claiming he would have won the popular vote in 2016 but for millions of “illegal votes” from communities of color, and continued this with abusive immigration policies that separated families at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Aggrandizing executive power: Trump repeatedly did this in such forms as declaring a fake emergency to appropriate funds that Congress refused to authorize for a border wall as well as asserting “the right to do whatever I want” and that his “authority is total.”
Quashing dissent: Trump tried to do so by using regulatory powers to retaliate against critics in the media, stoking violence to silence opponents, even attempting to ban books.
Corrupting elections: Trump was impeached for trying to pressure Ukraine into corrupting the 2020 election. And to this day his baseless claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent are undermining public trust in our electoral system.
We came far too close to a full authoritarian takeover. Even absent Trump, anti-democratic toxins will remain in our body politic. To purge them, Trump-era abuses must be reckoned with — not as retribution, but to deter recurrence.
The U.S. government advises other countries that are emerging from authoritarian regimes to undertake a process of “transitional justice” to return to healthier footing. We should heed our own advice. That means establishing independent investigations to account for abuses that took place, prosecuting violations of law, and restoring ethical and professional norms through government and private-sector actions.
Immediate reform legislation should be passed to impose stronger guardrails against executive abuses. Congress should be re-empowered to have lead responsibility for making hard decisions on such matters as war powers, emergency powers and spending. And barriers to voting should be removed while better protecting our elections from foreign interference. There are already three bills before Congress that would accomplish this.
States need to fix some of the current system’s incentives for counterproductive political behavior. The primary system in many states rewards extreme candidates; uncontrolled gerrymandering enables minority parties to control state legislatures.
At the national level, President-elect Joe Biden should convene a diverse set of experts and citizens to make recommendations on how to address the representational deficiencies that are built into the Senate and the electoral college, including the way they have translated into an overly politicized federal judiciary.
Finally, we must reclaim our national identity as a country that derives its strength from its diversity. We’ve seen a skilled demagogue divide us and lead more Americans to see their political adversaries as worthy of violence. To reverse that trend, we need leaders across the political, cultural, religious, business and grass-roots spectrum to consistently tell a more unifying and uplifting story about America in the 21st century — a narrative about how we can become the first truly multiracial, pluralist democracy the world has seen. Then they need to take action to make that story a reality.
Voting Trump out of office was the treatment our critically ill government needed, but it’s this set of next steps that will be the vaccine.
By Ian Bassin and Justin Florence, The Los Angeles Times
The United States barely survived the most acute threat to its political system since the Civil War by averting a second Trump term. But Donald Trump was always just a carrier for a political virus that predated and will outlast him. As evidenced by the finding that 8 in 10 Trump voters do not think he should relinquish power, Trumpism as a political movement very much remains.
A return of Trumpism to the White House would mirror the second wave of COVID-19, which has been worse than the first. Trump 2.0 would have seen America’s openness to strongman rule — and likely be more competent at it.
To avoid that, the political virus that gave us Trump must be addressed. It is a disease with two strains, global and national.
The global strain is a wave of authoritarianism. Over the past 15 years, democracy has been in retreat around the world, with autocrats supplanting democratic governments in countries such as Turkey, Hungary, Venezuela and Poland. Across the globe, citizens are growing less committed to democracy and more open to alternatives. These trends are being driven by factors that transcend borders and include globalization, migration and new information technologies.
The United States has not been immune. Openness to the idea of military rule jumped from 1 in 16 Americans 30 years ago to 1 in 6 pre-Trump. And while some of the shift is likely attributable to global factors, this political virus also carries a uniquely American strain.
The country has become more polarized politically as liberals and conservatives segregate into different geographic areas and consume different media. Previously dominant groups who feel they are losing status in an ever-more diverse nation have captured the Republican Party, turning it into an instrument for holding power at all cost. That party, in turn, has taken advantage of unique structures of American democracy such as the electoral college and the Senate to give itself governmental powers that are out of proportion with the support the party has among voters. For example, Republicans have lost the popular vote in 7 of 8 presidential elections yet dominate the Supreme Court.
As a result of the global and national strains mixing, Trump was able to go a long way toward executing the modern autocrat’s playbook, which typically involves six things.
Spreading disinformation: Trump began doing this on Day One with petty efforts to doctor images to make his inauguration crowd seem bigger and continues this behavior today through his false claims of electoral victory.
Politicizing independent institutions: Trump sought to do this with the Department of Justice, the intelligence community, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and even the U.S. Postal Service.
Delegitimizing vulnerable populations: Trump tried to do this by falsely claiming he would have won the popular vote in 2016 but for millions of “illegal votes” from communities of color, and continued this with abusive immigration policies that separated families at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Aggrandizing executive power: Trump repeatedly did this in such forms as declaring a fake emergency to appropriate funds that Congress refused to authorize for a border wall as well as asserting “the right to do whatever I want” and that his “authority is total.”
Quashing dissent: Trump tried to do so by using regulatory powers to retaliate against critics in the media, stoking violence to silence opponents, even attempting to ban books.
Corrupting elections: Trump was impeached for trying to pressure Ukraine into corrupting the 2020 election. And to this day his baseless claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent are undermining public trust in our electoral system.
We came far too close to a full authoritarian takeover. Even absent Trump, anti-democratic toxins will remain in our body politic. To purge them, Trump-era abuses must be reckoned with — not as retribution, but to deter recurrence.
The U.S. government advises other countries that are emerging from authoritarian regimes to undertake a process of “transitional justice” to return to healthier footing. We should heed our own advice. That means establishing independent investigations to account for abuses that took place, prosecuting violations of law, and restoring ethical and professional norms through government and private-sector actions.
Immediate reform legislation should be passed to impose stronger guardrails against executive abuses. Congress should be re-empowered to have lead responsibility for making hard decisions on such matters as war powers, emergency powers and spending. And barriers to voting should be removed while better protecting our elections from foreign interference. There are already three bills before Congress that would accomplish this.
States need to fix some of the current system’s incentives for counterproductive political behavior. The primary system in many states rewards extreme candidates; uncontrolled gerrymandering enables minority parties to control state legislatures.
At the national level, President-elect Joe Biden should convene a diverse set of experts and citizens to make recommendations on how to address the representational deficiencies that are built into the Senate and the electoral college, including the way they have translated into an overly politicized federal judiciary.
Finally, we must reclaim our national identity as a country that derives its strength from its diversity. We’ve seen a skilled demagogue divide us and lead more Americans to see their political adversaries as worthy of violence. To reverse that trend, we need leaders across the political, cultural, religious, business and grass-roots spectrum to consistently tell a more unifying and uplifting story about America in the 21st century — a narrative about how we can become the first truly multiracial, pluralist democracy the world has seen. Then they need to take action to make that story a reality.
Voting Trump out of office was the treatment our critically ill government needed, but it’s this set of next steps that will be the vaccine.
WHAT MAKES TRUMP’S SUBVERSION EFFORTS SO ALARMING? HIS COLLABORATORS
The president has been trying to dismantle our shared beliefs about democracy. And now, his fellow Republicans are helping him.
By Henry J. Farrell and Bruce Schneier, professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins, and lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Last Thursday, Rudy Giuliani, a Trump campaign lawyer, alleged a widespread voting conspiracy involving Venezuela, Cuba and China. Another lawyer, Sidney Powell, argued that Mr. Trump won in a landslide, the entire election in swing states should be overturned and the legislatures should make sure that the electors are selected for the president.
The Republican National Committee swung in to support her false claim that Mr. Trump won in a landslide, while Michigan election officials have tried to stop the certification of the vote.
It is wildly unlikely that their efforts can block Joe Biden from becoming president. But they may still do lasting damage to American democracy for a shocking reason: The moves have come from trusted insiders.
American democracy’s vulnerability to disinformation has been very much in the news since the Russian disinformation campaign in 2016. The fear is that outsiders, whether they be foreign or domestic actors, will undermine our system by swaying popular opinion and election results.
This is half right. American democracy is an information system, in which the information isn’t bits and bytes but citizens’ beliefs. When peoples’ faith in the democratic system is undermined, democracy stops working. But as information security specialists know, outsider attacks are hard. Russian trolls, who don’t really understand how American politics works, have actually had a difficult time subverting it.
When you really need to worry is when insiders go bad. And that is precisely what is happening in the wake of the 2020 presidential election. In traditional information systems, the insiders are the people who have both detailed knowledge and high level access, allowing them to bypass security measures and more effectively subvert systems. In democracy, the insiders aren’t just the officials who manage voting but also the politicians who shape what people believe about politics. For four years, Donald Trump has been trying to dismantle our shared beliefs about democracy. And now, his fellow Republicans are helping him.
Democracy works when we all expect that votes will be fairly counted, and defeated candidates leave office. As the democratic theorist Adam Przeworski puts it, democracy is “a system in which parties lose elections.” These beliefs can break down when political insiders make bogus claims about general fraud, trying to cling to power when the election has gone against them.
The Interpreter: Original insights, commentary and discussions on the major news stories of the week.
It’s obvious how these kinds of claims damage Republican voters’ commitment to democracy. They will think that elections are rigged by the other side and will not accept the judgment of voters when it goes against their preferred candidate. Their belief that the Biden administration is illegitimate will justify all sorts of measures to prevent it from functioning.
It’s less obvious that these strategies affect Democratic voters’ faith in democracy, too. Democrats are paying attention to Republicans’ efforts to stop the votes of Democratic voters — and especially Black Democratic voters — from being counted. They, too, are likely to have less trust in elections going forward, and with good reason. They will expect that Republicans will try to rig the system against them. Mr. Trump is having a hard time winning unfairly, because he has lost in several states. But what if Mr. Biden’s margin of victory depended only on one state? What if something like that happens in the next election?
The real fear is that this will lead to a spiral of distrust and destruction. Republicans — who are increasingly committed to the notion that the Democrats are committing pervasive fraud — will do everything that they can to win power and to cling to power when they can get it. Democrats — seeing what Republicans are doing — will try to entrench themselves in turn. They suspect that if the Republicans really win power, they will not ever give it back. The claims of Republicans like Senator Mike Lee of Utah that America is not really a democracy might become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
More likely, this spiral will not directly lead to the death of American democracy. The U.S. federal system of government is complex and hard for any one actor or coalition to dominate completely. But it may turn American democracy into an unworkable confrontation between two hostile camps, each unwilling to make any concession to its adversary.
We know how to make voting itself more open and more secure; the literature is filled with vital and important suggestions. The more difficult problem is this. How do you shift the collective belief among Republicans that elections are rigged?
Political science suggests that partisans are more likely to be persuaded by fellow partisans, like Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state in Georgia, who said that election fraud wasn’t a big problem. But this would only be effective if other well known Republicans support him.
Public outrage, alternatively, can sometimes force officials to back down, as when people crowded in to denounce the Michigan Republican election officials who were trying to deny certification of their votes.
The fundamental problem, however, is Republican insiders who have convinced themselves that to keep and hold power, they need to trash the shared beliefs that hold American democracy together.
They may have long-term worries about the consequences, but they’re unlikely to do anything about those worries in the near-term unless voters, wealthy donors or others whom they depend on make them pay short-term costs.
The president has been trying to dismantle our shared beliefs about democracy. And now, his fellow Republicans are helping him.
By Henry J. Farrell and Bruce Schneier, professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins, and lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Last Thursday, Rudy Giuliani, a Trump campaign lawyer, alleged a widespread voting conspiracy involving Venezuela, Cuba and China. Another lawyer, Sidney Powell, argued that Mr. Trump won in a landslide, the entire election in swing states should be overturned and the legislatures should make sure that the electors are selected for the president.
The Republican National Committee swung in to support her false claim that Mr. Trump won in a landslide, while Michigan election officials have tried to stop the certification of the vote.
It is wildly unlikely that their efforts can block Joe Biden from becoming president. But they may still do lasting damage to American democracy for a shocking reason: The moves have come from trusted insiders.
American democracy’s vulnerability to disinformation has been very much in the news since the Russian disinformation campaign in 2016. The fear is that outsiders, whether they be foreign or domestic actors, will undermine our system by swaying popular opinion and election results.
This is half right. American democracy is an information system, in which the information isn’t bits and bytes but citizens’ beliefs. When peoples’ faith in the democratic system is undermined, democracy stops working. But as information security specialists know, outsider attacks are hard. Russian trolls, who don’t really understand how American politics works, have actually had a difficult time subverting it.
When you really need to worry is when insiders go bad. And that is precisely what is happening in the wake of the 2020 presidential election. In traditional information systems, the insiders are the people who have both detailed knowledge and high level access, allowing them to bypass security measures and more effectively subvert systems. In democracy, the insiders aren’t just the officials who manage voting but also the politicians who shape what people believe about politics. For four years, Donald Trump has been trying to dismantle our shared beliefs about democracy. And now, his fellow Republicans are helping him.
Democracy works when we all expect that votes will be fairly counted, and defeated candidates leave office. As the democratic theorist Adam Przeworski puts it, democracy is “a system in which parties lose elections.” These beliefs can break down when political insiders make bogus claims about general fraud, trying to cling to power when the election has gone against them.
The Interpreter: Original insights, commentary and discussions on the major news stories of the week.
It’s obvious how these kinds of claims damage Republican voters’ commitment to democracy. They will think that elections are rigged by the other side and will not accept the judgment of voters when it goes against their preferred candidate. Their belief that the Biden administration is illegitimate will justify all sorts of measures to prevent it from functioning.
It’s less obvious that these strategies affect Democratic voters’ faith in democracy, too. Democrats are paying attention to Republicans’ efforts to stop the votes of Democratic voters — and especially Black Democratic voters — from being counted. They, too, are likely to have less trust in elections going forward, and with good reason. They will expect that Republicans will try to rig the system against them. Mr. Trump is having a hard time winning unfairly, because he has lost in several states. But what if Mr. Biden’s margin of victory depended only on one state? What if something like that happens in the next election?
The real fear is that this will lead to a spiral of distrust and destruction. Republicans — who are increasingly committed to the notion that the Democrats are committing pervasive fraud — will do everything that they can to win power and to cling to power when they can get it. Democrats — seeing what Republicans are doing — will try to entrench themselves in turn. They suspect that if the Republicans really win power, they will not ever give it back. The claims of Republicans like Senator Mike Lee of Utah that America is not really a democracy might become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
More likely, this spiral will not directly lead to the death of American democracy. The U.S. federal system of government is complex and hard for any one actor or coalition to dominate completely. But it may turn American democracy into an unworkable confrontation between two hostile camps, each unwilling to make any concession to its adversary.
We know how to make voting itself more open and more secure; the literature is filled with vital and important suggestions. The more difficult problem is this. How do you shift the collective belief among Republicans that elections are rigged?
Political science suggests that partisans are more likely to be persuaded by fellow partisans, like Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state in Georgia, who said that election fraud wasn’t a big problem. But this would only be effective if other well known Republicans support him.
Public outrage, alternatively, can sometimes force officials to back down, as when people crowded in to denounce the Michigan Republican election officials who were trying to deny certification of their votes.
The fundamental problem, however, is Republican insiders who have convinced themselves that to keep and hold power, they need to trash the shared beliefs that hold American democracy together.
They may have long-term worries about the consequences, but they’re unlikely to do anything about those worries in the near-term unless voters, wealthy donors or others whom they depend on make them pay short-term costs.
TRUMP’S ATTEMPTS TO OVERTURN THE ELECTION ARE UNPARALLELED IN U.S. HISTORY
The president’s push to prevent states from certifying electors and get legislators to override voters’ will eclipses even the bitter 1876 election as an audacious use of brute political force.
By David E. Sanger, The New York Times
WASHINGTON — President Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election are unprecedented in American history and an even more audacious use of brute political force to gain the White House than when Congress gave Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency during Reconstruction.
Mr. Trump’s chances of succeeding are somewhere between remote and impossible, and a sign of his desperation after President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. won by nearly six million popular votes and counting, as well as a clear Electoral College margin. Yet the fact that Mr. Trump is even trying has set off widespread alarms, not least in Mr. Biden’s camp.
“I’m confident he knows he hasn’t won,” Mr. Biden said at a news conference in Wilmington, Del., on Thursday, before adding, “It’s just outrageous what he’s doing.” Although Mr. Biden dismissed Mr. Trump’s behavior as embarrassing, he acknowledged that “incredibly damaging messages are being sent to the rest of the world about how democracy functions.”
Mr. Trump has only weeks to make his last-ditch effort work: Most of the states he needs to strip Mr. Biden of votes are scheduled to certify their electors by the beginning of next week. The electors cast their ballots on Dec. 14, and Congress opens them in a joint session on Jan. 6.
Even if Mr. Trump somehow pulled off his electoral vote switch, there are other safeguards in place, assuming people in power do not simply bend to the president’s will.
The first test will be Michigan, where Mr. Trump is trying to get the State Legislature to overturn Mr. Biden’s 157,000-vote margin of victory. He has taken the extraordinary step of inviting a delegation of state Republican leaders to the White House, hoping to persuade them to ignore the popular vote outcome.
“That’s not going to happen,” Mike Shirkey, the Republican leader of the Michigan State Senate, said on Tuesday. “We are going to follow the law and follow the process.”
Beyond that, Michigan’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, could send Congress a competing electoral slate, based on the election vote, arguing that the proper procedures were ignored. That dispute would create just enough confusion, in Mr. Trump’s Hail Mary calculus, that the House and Senate together would have to resolve it in ways untested in modern times.
Federal law dating to 1887, passed in reaction to the Hayes election, provides the framework, but not specifics, of how it would be done. Edward B. Foley, a constitutional law and election law expert at Ohio State University, noted that the law only required Congress to consider all submissions “purporting to be the valid electoral votes.”
But Michigan alone would not be enough for Mr. Trump. He would also need at least two other states to fold to his pressure. The most likely candidates are Georgia and Arizona, which both went for Mr. Trump in 2016 and have Republican-controlled legislatures and Republican governors.
On Politics with Lisa Lerer: A guiding hand through the political news cycle, telling you what you really need to know.
Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona has said he will accept the state election results, although only after all the campaign lawsuits are resolved. Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, where a hand recount reaffirmed Mr. Biden’s victory on Thursday, has not publicly said one way or another who won his state.
Mr. Trump has said little in public apart from tweets endorsing wild conspiracy theories about how he was denied victory. Yet his strategy, if it can be called that, has become clear over two days of increasingly frenetic action by a president 62 days from losing power.
In just that time, Mr. Trump has fired the federal election official who has challenged his false claims of fraud, tried to halt the vote-certification process in Detroit to disenfranchise an overwhelmingly Black electorate that voted against him, and now is misusing the powers of his office in his effort to take Michigan’s 16 electoral votes away from Mr. Biden.
In many ways it is even more of an attempted power grab than the one in 1876. At the time, Hayes was governor of Ohio, not president of the United States. Ulysses S. Grant was, and when Hayes won — also by wrenching the vote around in three states — he became known as “His Fraudulency.”
“But this is far worse,” said Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian and author of “Presidents of War.” “In the case of Hayes, both sides agreed that the outcome in at least three states was in dispute. In this case, no serious person thinks enough votes are in dispute that Donald Trump could have been elected on Election Day.”
“This is a manufactured crisis. It is a president abusing his huge powers in order to stay in office after the voters clearly rejected him for re-election.”
He added: “This is what many of the founders dreaded.”
Mr. Trump telegraphed this strategy during the campaign. He told voters at a rally in Middletown, Pa., in September that he would win at the polls, or in the Supreme Court, or in the House — where, under the 12th Amendment, every state delegation gets one vote in choosing the president. (There are 26 delegations of 50 dominated by Republicans, even though the House is in the hands of the Democrats.)
“I don’t want to end up in the Supreme Court, and I don’t want to go back to Congress, even though we have an advantage if we go back to Congress,” he said then. “Does everyone understand that?”
Now that is clearly the Plan B, after the failure of Plan A, an improvisational legal strategy to overturn election results by invalidating ballots in key states. In state after state, the president’s lawyers have been laughed out of court, unable to provide evidence to back up his claims that mail-in ballots were falsified, or that glitches on voting machines with software from Dominion Voting Systems might, just might, have changed or deleted 2.7 million votes.
Those theories figured in a rambling news conference that Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, held with other members of his legal team on Thursday. The group threw out a series of disconnected arguments to try to make the case that Mr. Trump really won. The arguments included blaming mail-in ballots that they said were prone to fraud as well as Dominion, which they suggested was tied to former President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela (who died seven years ago), and had vague connections to the Clinton Foundation and George Soros, the philanthropist and billionaire Democratic fund-raiser.
“That press conference was the most dangerous 1hr 45 minutes of television in American history,” Christopher Krebs, who was fired Tuesday night by Mr. Trump as the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency of the Department of Homeland Security, tweeted Thursday afternoon.
“And possibly the craziest,” he went on. “If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re lucky.”
Mr. Krebs has often noted that the purpose of a reliable election system is to convince those who lost elections that they have, indeed, lost.
Even some of Mr. Trump’s onetime enthusiasts and former top aides have abandoned him on his claims, often with sarcastic derision. “Their basic argument is this was a conspiracy so vast and so successful that there’s no evidence of it,” said John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s third national security adviser, who was ousted last year.
“Now if that’s true, I really want to know who the people are who pulled this off,” he said on Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” “We need to hire them at the C.I.A.”
The president’s push to prevent states from certifying electors and get legislators to override voters’ will eclipses even the bitter 1876 election as an audacious use of brute political force.
By David E. Sanger, The New York Times
WASHINGTON — President Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election are unprecedented in American history and an even more audacious use of brute political force to gain the White House than when Congress gave Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency during Reconstruction.
Mr. Trump’s chances of succeeding are somewhere between remote and impossible, and a sign of his desperation after President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. won by nearly six million popular votes and counting, as well as a clear Electoral College margin. Yet the fact that Mr. Trump is even trying has set off widespread alarms, not least in Mr. Biden’s camp.
“I’m confident he knows he hasn’t won,” Mr. Biden said at a news conference in Wilmington, Del., on Thursday, before adding, “It’s just outrageous what he’s doing.” Although Mr. Biden dismissed Mr. Trump’s behavior as embarrassing, he acknowledged that “incredibly damaging messages are being sent to the rest of the world about how democracy functions.”
Mr. Trump has only weeks to make his last-ditch effort work: Most of the states he needs to strip Mr. Biden of votes are scheduled to certify their electors by the beginning of next week. The electors cast their ballots on Dec. 14, and Congress opens them in a joint session on Jan. 6.
Even if Mr. Trump somehow pulled off his electoral vote switch, there are other safeguards in place, assuming people in power do not simply bend to the president’s will.
The first test will be Michigan, where Mr. Trump is trying to get the State Legislature to overturn Mr. Biden’s 157,000-vote margin of victory. He has taken the extraordinary step of inviting a delegation of state Republican leaders to the White House, hoping to persuade them to ignore the popular vote outcome.
“That’s not going to happen,” Mike Shirkey, the Republican leader of the Michigan State Senate, said on Tuesday. “We are going to follow the law and follow the process.”
Beyond that, Michigan’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, could send Congress a competing electoral slate, based on the election vote, arguing that the proper procedures were ignored. That dispute would create just enough confusion, in Mr. Trump’s Hail Mary calculus, that the House and Senate together would have to resolve it in ways untested in modern times.
Federal law dating to 1887, passed in reaction to the Hayes election, provides the framework, but not specifics, of how it would be done. Edward B. Foley, a constitutional law and election law expert at Ohio State University, noted that the law only required Congress to consider all submissions “purporting to be the valid electoral votes.”
But Michigan alone would not be enough for Mr. Trump. He would also need at least two other states to fold to his pressure. The most likely candidates are Georgia and Arizona, which both went for Mr. Trump in 2016 and have Republican-controlled legislatures and Republican governors.
On Politics with Lisa Lerer: A guiding hand through the political news cycle, telling you what you really need to know.
Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona has said he will accept the state election results, although only after all the campaign lawsuits are resolved. Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, where a hand recount reaffirmed Mr. Biden’s victory on Thursday, has not publicly said one way or another who won his state.
Mr. Trump has said little in public apart from tweets endorsing wild conspiracy theories about how he was denied victory. Yet his strategy, if it can be called that, has become clear over two days of increasingly frenetic action by a president 62 days from losing power.
In just that time, Mr. Trump has fired the federal election official who has challenged his false claims of fraud, tried to halt the vote-certification process in Detroit to disenfranchise an overwhelmingly Black electorate that voted against him, and now is misusing the powers of his office in his effort to take Michigan’s 16 electoral votes away from Mr. Biden.
In many ways it is even more of an attempted power grab than the one in 1876. At the time, Hayes was governor of Ohio, not president of the United States. Ulysses S. Grant was, and when Hayes won — also by wrenching the vote around in three states — he became known as “His Fraudulency.”
“But this is far worse,” said Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian and author of “Presidents of War.” “In the case of Hayes, both sides agreed that the outcome in at least three states was in dispute. In this case, no serious person thinks enough votes are in dispute that Donald Trump could have been elected on Election Day.”
“This is a manufactured crisis. It is a president abusing his huge powers in order to stay in office after the voters clearly rejected him for re-election.”
He added: “This is what many of the founders dreaded.”
Mr. Trump telegraphed this strategy during the campaign. He told voters at a rally in Middletown, Pa., in September that he would win at the polls, or in the Supreme Court, or in the House — where, under the 12th Amendment, every state delegation gets one vote in choosing the president. (There are 26 delegations of 50 dominated by Republicans, even though the House is in the hands of the Democrats.)
“I don’t want to end up in the Supreme Court, and I don’t want to go back to Congress, even though we have an advantage if we go back to Congress,” he said then. “Does everyone understand that?”
Now that is clearly the Plan B, after the failure of Plan A, an improvisational legal strategy to overturn election results by invalidating ballots in key states. In state after state, the president’s lawyers have been laughed out of court, unable to provide evidence to back up his claims that mail-in ballots were falsified, or that glitches on voting machines with software from Dominion Voting Systems might, just might, have changed or deleted 2.7 million votes.
Those theories figured in a rambling news conference that Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, held with other members of his legal team on Thursday. The group threw out a series of disconnected arguments to try to make the case that Mr. Trump really won. The arguments included blaming mail-in ballots that they said were prone to fraud as well as Dominion, which they suggested was tied to former President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela (who died seven years ago), and had vague connections to the Clinton Foundation and George Soros, the philanthropist and billionaire Democratic fund-raiser.
“That press conference was the most dangerous 1hr 45 minutes of television in American history,” Christopher Krebs, who was fired Tuesday night by Mr. Trump as the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency of the Department of Homeland Security, tweeted Thursday afternoon.
“And possibly the craziest,” he went on. “If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re lucky.”
Mr. Krebs has often noted that the purpose of a reliable election system is to convince those who lost elections that they have, indeed, lost.
Even some of Mr. Trump’s onetime enthusiasts and former top aides have abandoned him on his claims, often with sarcastic derision. “Their basic argument is this was a conspiracy so vast and so successful that there’s no evidence of it,” said John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s third national security adviser, who was ousted last year.
“Now if that’s true, I really want to know who the people are who pulled this off,” he said on Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” “We need to hire them at the C.I.A.”
TRUMP OR NO TRUMP, RELIGIOUS AUTHORITARIANISM IS HERE TO STAY
Their unlikely ally may have lost the White House, but Christian nationalists still plan to win the war.
By Katherine Stewart, author of “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.”
Will President-elect Joe Biden’s victory force America’s Christian nationalists to rethink the unholy alliance that powered Donald Trump’s four-year tour as one of the nation’s most dangerous presidents? Don’t count on it.
The 2020 election is proof that religious authoritarianism is here to stay, and the early signs now indicate that the movement seems determined to reinterpret defeat at the top of the ticket as evidence of persecution and of its own righteousness. With or without Mr. Trump, they will remain committed to the illiberal politics that the president has so ably embodied.
As it did in 2016, the early analysis of the 2020 election results often circled around the racial, urban-rural, and income and education divides. But the religion divide tells an equally compelling story. According to preliminary exit polls from Edison Research (the data is necessarily rough at this stage), 28 percent of voters identified as either white evangelical or white born-again Christian, and of these, 76 percent voted for Mr. Trump. If these numbers hold (some other polls put the religious share at a lower number; others put the support for Mr. Trump at a higher number), these results indicate a continuation of support for Mr. Trump from this group.
The core of Mr. Trump’s voting bloc, to be clear, does not come from white evangelicals as such, but from an overlapping group of not necessarily evangelical, and not necessarily white, people who identify at least loosely with Christian nationalism: the idea that the United States is and ought to be a Christian nation governed under a reactionary understanding of Christian values. Unfortunately, data on that cohort is harder to find except in deeply researched work by sociologists like Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry.
Most pollsters shoehorn complex religious identities into necessarily broad labels, so they fail to separate out the different strands of Mr. Trump’s support. There are indications that the president in fact expanded his appeal among nonwhite evangelical and born-again Christians of color, particularly among Latinos. Mr. Biden, on the other hand, who made faith outreach a key feature of his campaign, appears to have done well among moderate and progressive voters of all faiths.
Conservative voters of faith “came in massive numbers, seven and a half million more above the 2016 baseline, which was itself a record,” Ralph Reed, head of the Faith and Freedom Coalition and a longtime religious right activist, said at a postelection press briefing. “We believe they’re the reason why Republicans are going to hold the Senate.”
In their responses to the election outcome, some prominent religious right leaders have enabled or remained true to the false Trumpian line of election fraud. Michele Bachmann, the former Minnesota congresswoman and 2012 presidential candidate, said, “Smash the delusion, Father, of Joe Biden is our president. He is not.” In Crisis Magazine, a conservative Catholic publication, Richard C. Antall likened media reporting on the Biden-Harris ticket’s victory to a “coup d’état.” Mat Staver, chairman and founder of Liberty Counsel, added, “What we are witnessing only happens in communist or repressive regimes. We must not allow this fraud to happen in America.”
Even as prominent Republican figures like George W. Bush and Mitt Romney slowly tried to nudge Mr. Trump toward the exit, leaders of the religious right continued to man the barricades. The conservative speaker and Falkirk Center fellow David Harris, Jr. put it this way:
If you’re a believer, and you believe God appointed Donald J. Trump to run this country, to lead this country, and you believe as I do that he will be re-elected the President of the United States, then friends, you’ve got to guard your heart, you’ve got to guard your peace. Right now we are at war.
Others stopped short of endorsing Mr. Trump’s wilder allegations of election fraud, but backed his right to challenge the results. Mr. Reed told the Religion News Service, “This election will be over when those recounts are complete and those legal challenges are resolved.” The Rev. Franklin Graham tweeted that the courts will “determine who wins the presidency.” The conservative pastor Robert Jeffress, who gave a sermon before Mr. Trump’s inaugural ceremony in 2017, noted that a Biden win was “the most likely outcome.”
After processing their disappointment, Christian nationalists may come around to the reality of Joe Biden’s victory. There is no indication, however, that this will temper their apocalyptic vision, according to which one side of the American political divide represents unmitigated evil. During a Nov. 11 virtual prayer gathering organized by the Family Research Council, one of the key speakers cast the election as the consequence of “the whole godless ideology that’s wanted to swallow our homes, destroy our marriages, throw our children into rivers of confusion.” Jim Garlow, an evangelical pastor whose Well Versed Ministry has as its stated goal, “Bringing biblical principles of governance to governmental leaders,” asserted that Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris are at the helm of an “ideology” that is “anti-Christ, anti-Biblical to its core.”
The comments pouring in from these and other figures may be forgotten when Mr. Biden takes office. But they are worth paying attention to now for what they say about the character of the movement. While many outsiders continue to think of Christian nationalism as a social movement that arises from the ground up, it in fact a political movement that operates mostly from the top down. The rank-and-file of the movement is diverse and comes to its churches with an infinite variety of motivations and concerns, but the leaders are far more unified.
They collaborate in a densely interconnected network of think-tanks, policy groups, activist organizations, legal advocacy groups and conservative pastoral networks. What holds them together is not any centralized command structure, but a radical political ideology that is profoundly hostile to democracy and pluralism, and a certain political style that seeks to provoke moral panic, rewards the paranoid and views every partisan conflict as a conflagration, the end of the world. Partisan politics is the lifeblood of their movement.
If one considers the movement from the perspective of its leaders, it is easier to see why it is unlikely to change in the new political circumstances we find ourselves in. The power of the leadership is the function of at least three underlying structural realities in America’s political and economic life, and those realities are not going to change anytime soon.
The first is the growing economic inequality that has produced spectacular fortunes for the few, while too many ordinary families struggle to get by. Leaders of the movement get much of the support for their well-funded operations from a cadre of super-wealthy individuals and extended families who are as committed to free-market fundamentalism as they are to reactionary religion. The donors in turn need the so-called values voters in order to lock down their economic agenda of low taxation for the wealthy and minimal regulation. These donors include, among many others, the Prince-DeVos family, the fracking billionaire Wilks brothers, and members of the Green family, whose Hobby Lobby fortune helped build the Museum of the Bible. The movement gets another big chunk of its funding from the large mass of people who are often in the middle rungs of the economic spectrum and whose arduously cultivated resentments toward those below them have been turned into a fund-raising bonanza.
The second structural reality to consider is that Christian nationalism is a creation of a uniquely isolated messaging sphere. Many members of the rank and file get their main political information not just from messaging platforms that keep their audiences in a world that is divorced from reality, but also from dedicated religious networks and reactionary faith leaders. The fact that Mr. Trump was able to hold on to a high percentage of the vote in the face of such overwhelming evidence of malfeasance is proof enough that the religious-nationalist end of the right-wing information bubble has gotten more, not less, resistant over time.
The third critical factor is a political system that gives disproportionate power to an immensely organized, engaged and loyal minority. One of the most reliable strategies for producing that unshakable cohort has been to get them to agree that abortion is the easy answer to every difficult political policy question. Recently, religious right leaders have shifted their focus more to a specious understanding of what they call “religious freedom” or “religious liberty,” but the underlying strategy is the same: make individuals see their partisan vote as the primary way to protect their cultural and religious identity.
Republicans have long known that the judiciary is one of the most effective instruments of minority rule. Mr. Trump’s success in packing the federal judiciary — as of this writing, 220 federal judges, including three Supreme Court justices — will be one of his most devastating legacies. The prospect of further entrenching minority rule in the coming years will keep the alliance between Republicans and the religious right alive.
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the Christian nationalist response to the 2020 election is that we’ve seen this movie before. The “stolen election” meme won’t bring Mr. Trump back into the Oval Office. But then, the birther narrative never took President Barack Obama out of office, either. The point of conspiratorial narratives and apocalyptic rhetoric is to lay the groundwork for a politics of total obstruction, in preparation for the return of a “legitimate” ruler. The best guess is that religious authoritarianism of the next four years will look a lot like it did in the last four years. We ignore the political implications for our democracy at our peril.
Their unlikely ally may have lost the White House, but Christian nationalists still plan to win the war.
By Katherine Stewart, author of “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.”
Will President-elect Joe Biden’s victory force America’s Christian nationalists to rethink the unholy alliance that powered Donald Trump’s four-year tour as one of the nation’s most dangerous presidents? Don’t count on it.
The 2020 election is proof that religious authoritarianism is here to stay, and the early signs now indicate that the movement seems determined to reinterpret defeat at the top of the ticket as evidence of persecution and of its own righteousness. With or without Mr. Trump, they will remain committed to the illiberal politics that the president has so ably embodied.
As it did in 2016, the early analysis of the 2020 election results often circled around the racial, urban-rural, and income and education divides. But the religion divide tells an equally compelling story. According to preliminary exit polls from Edison Research (the data is necessarily rough at this stage), 28 percent of voters identified as either white evangelical or white born-again Christian, and of these, 76 percent voted for Mr. Trump. If these numbers hold (some other polls put the religious share at a lower number; others put the support for Mr. Trump at a higher number), these results indicate a continuation of support for Mr. Trump from this group.
The core of Mr. Trump’s voting bloc, to be clear, does not come from white evangelicals as such, but from an overlapping group of not necessarily evangelical, and not necessarily white, people who identify at least loosely with Christian nationalism: the idea that the United States is and ought to be a Christian nation governed under a reactionary understanding of Christian values. Unfortunately, data on that cohort is harder to find except in deeply researched work by sociologists like Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry.
Most pollsters shoehorn complex religious identities into necessarily broad labels, so they fail to separate out the different strands of Mr. Trump’s support. There are indications that the president in fact expanded his appeal among nonwhite evangelical and born-again Christians of color, particularly among Latinos. Mr. Biden, on the other hand, who made faith outreach a key feature of his campaign, appears to have done well among moderate and progressive voters of all faiths.
Conservative voters of faith “came in massive numbers, seven and a half million more above the 2016 baseline, which was itself a record,” Ralph Reed, head of the Faith and Freedom Coalition and a longtime religious right activist, said at a postelection press briefing. “We believe they’re the reason why Republicans are going to hold the Senate.”
In their responses to the election outcome, some prominent religious right leaders have enabled or remained true to the false Trumpian line of election fraud. Michele Bachmann, the former Minnesota congresswoman and 2012 presidential candidate, said, “Smash the delusion, Father, of Joe Biden is our president. He is not.” In Crisis Magazine, a conservative Catholic publication, Richard C. Antall likened media reporting on the Biden-Harris ticket’s victory to a “coup d’état.” Mat Staver, chairman and founder of Liberty Counsel, added, “What we are witnessing only happens in communist or repressive regimes. We must not allow this fraud to happen in America.”
Even as prominent Republican figures like George W. Bush and Mitt Romney slowly tried to nudge Mr. Trump toward the exit, leaders of the religious right continued to man the barricades. The conservative speaker and Falkirk Center fellow David Harris, Jr. put it this way:
If you’re a believer, and you believe God appointed Donald J. Trump to run this country, to lead this country, and you believe as I do that he will be re-elected the President of the United States, then friends, you’ve got to guard your heart, you’ve got to guard your peace. Right now we are at war.
Others stopped short of endorsing Mr. Trump’s wilder allegations of election fraud, but backed his right to challenge the results. Mr. Reed told the Religion News Service, “This election will be over when those recounts are complete and those legal challenges are resolved.” The Rev. Franklin Graham tweeted that the courts will “determine who wins the presidency.” The conservative pastor Robert Jeffress, who gave a sermon before Mr. Trump’s inaugural ceremony in 2017, noted that a Biden win was “the most likely outcome.”
After processing their disappointment, Christian nationalists may come around to the reality of Joe Biden’s victory. There is no indication, however, that this will temper their apocalyptic vision, according to which one side of the American political divide represents unmitigated evil. During a Nov. 11 virtual prayer gathering organized by the Family Research Council, one of the key speakers cast the election as the consequence of “the whole godless ideology that’s wanted to swallow our homes, destroy our marriages, throw our children into rivers of confusion.” Jim Garlow, an evangelical pastor whose Well Versed Ministry has as its stated goal, “Bringing biblical principles of governance to governmental leaders,” asserted that Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris are at the helm of an “ideology” that is “anti-Christ, anti-Biblical to its core.”
The comments pouring in from these and other figures may be forgotten when Mr. Biden takes office. But they are worth paying attention to now for what they say about the character of the movement. While many outsiders continue to think of Christian nationalism as a social movement that arises from the ground up, it in fact a political movement that operates mostly from the top down. The rank-and-file of the movement is diverse and comes to its churches with an infinite variety of motivations and concerns, but the leaders are far more unified.
They collaborate in a densely interconnected network of think-tanks, policy groups, activist organizations, legal advocacy groups and conservative pastoral networks. What holds them together is not any centralized command structure, but a radical political ideology that is profoundly hostile to democracy and pluralism, and a certain political style that seeks to provoke moral panic, rewards the paranoid and views every partisan conflict as a conflagration, the end of the world. Partisan politics is the lifeblood of their movement.
If one considers the movement from the perspective of its leaders, it is easier to see why it is unlikely to change in the new political circumstances we find ourselves in. The power of the leadership is the function of at least three underlying structural realities in America’s political and economic life, and those realities are not going to change anytime soon.
The first is the growing economic inequality that has produced spectacular fortunes for the few, while too many ordinary families struggle to get by. Leaders of the movement get much of the support for their well-funded operations from a cadre of super-wealthy individuals and extended families who are as committed to free-market fundamentalism as they are to reactionary religion. The donors in turn need the so-called values voters in order to lock down their economic agenda of low taxation for the wealthy and minimal regulation. These donors include, among many others, the Prince-DeVos family, the fracking billionaire Wilks brothers, and members of the Green family, whose Hobby Lobby fortune helped build the Museum of the Bible. The movement gets another big chunk of its funding from the large mass of people who are often in the middle rungs of the economic spectrum and whose arduously cultivated resentments toward those below them have been turned into a fund-raising bonanza.
The second structural reality to consider is that Christian nationalism is a creation of a uniquely isolated messaging sphere. Many members of the rank and file get their main political information not just from messaging platforms that keep their audiences in a world that is divorced from reality, but also from dedicated religious networks and reactionary faith leaders. The fact that Mr. Trump was able to hold on to a high percentage of the vote in the face of such overwhelming evidence of malfeasance is proof enough that the religious-nationalist end of the right-wing information bubble has gotten more, not less, resistant over time.
The third critical factor is a political system that gives disproportionate power to an immensely organized, engaged and loyal minority. One of the most reliable strategies for producing that unshakable cohort has been to get them to agree that abortion is the easy answer to every difficult political policy question. Recently, religious right leaders have shifted their focus more to a specious understanding of what they call “religious freedom” or “religious liberty,” but the underlying strategy is the same: make individuals see their partisan vote as the primary way to protect their cultural and religious identity.
Republicans have long known that the judiciary is one of the most effective instruments of minority rule. Mr. Trump’s success in packing the federal judiciary — as of this writing, 220 federal judges, including three Supreme Court justices — will be one of his most devastating legacies. The prospect of further entrenching minority rule in the coming years will keep the alliance between Republicans and the religious right alive.
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the Christian nationalist response to the 2020 election is that we’ve seen this movie before. The “stolen election” meme won’t bring Mr. Trump back into the Oval Office. But then, the birther narrative never took President Barack Obama out of office, either. The point of conspiratorial narratives and apocalyptic rhetoric is to lay the groundwork for a politics of total obstruction, in preparation for the return of a “legitimate” ruler. The best guess is that religious authoritarianism of the next four years will look a lot like it did in the last four years. We ignore the political implications for our democracy at our peril.
ABOLISH THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE
Opinion by The Washington Post Editorial Board
OUR COLUMNIST Marc A. Thiessen noted last week that President Trump had come very close to winning reelection. “A flip of just some 73,700 votes in those three states [Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia] and Trump would be making plans for a second term — and we would all be taking about a ‘red wave,’ ” he wrote.
Mr. Thiessen’s point was that Mr. Trump’s near miss makes him a viable candidate in 2024. We draw a different lesson: It is alarming that a candidate came so close to winning while polling more than 5 million fewer votes than his opponent nationwide. The electoral college, whatever virtues it may have had for the Founding Fathers, is no longer tenable for American democracy.
We write this with full awareness of the challenges of adopting a new system, with respect for many of the people who continue to argue against a switch, and with awareness that any change may have unintended consequences. Right now, our presidential elections are conducted by 51 separate authorities, each with its own rules on registration, mail-in balloting and more. Each state counts its own ballots, and each decides when recounts are needed. All of that would have to change if the president were chosen based on the national vote count. Additionally, electoral college math induces candidates to pay attention to voters in some small states who might otherwise be ignored.
But why should Iowa’s biofuel lobby get more of a hearing than, say, California’s artichoke lobby? Small states already have disproportionate clout in our government because of the Senate, in which Wyoming’s fewer than 600,000 residents have as much representation as California’s 39.5 million. We see no particular reason voters in purple states such as Wisconsin should be valued more than voters in red states such as Mississippi or blue states such as Washington.
There are worries that direct election might encourage regionalism or third parties at the extremes of political discourse. Any switch to a national system would rightly trigger debates over runoffs or ranked-choice voting to ensure majority rule. And we recognize that the constitutional amendment that would be required isn’t about to happen.
But it’s time to get serious about a change. Mr. Trump became president in 2016 despite earning 3 million fewer votes than Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Now, he has come close to winning reelection despite losing the popular vote by a far greater margin (though, by the time all the votes aren’t counted, it won’t be quite as close as when Mr. Thiessen wrote; Mr. Trump is now trailing in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania by more than 90,000).
We believe that Mr. Trump’s election was a sad event for the nation; his reelection would have been a calamity; we hope Mr. Thiessen is wrong about 2024. But we would be making this argument no matter which party seemed likely to benefit. If Democratic nominee John F. Kerry hadn’t lost Ohio by just 120,000 votes in 2004, he would have won an electoral college victory despite trailing President George W. Bush by 3 million votes in the national count. That would have been a problem, too.
Americans are not going to be satisfied with leaders who have been rejected by a majority of voters, and they’re right not to be. It’s time to let the majority rule.
Opinion by The Washington Post Editorial Board
OUR COLUMNIST Marc A. Thiessen noted last week that President Trump had come very close to winning reelection. “A flip of just some 73,700 votes in those three states [Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia] and Trump would be making plans for a second term — and we would all be taking about a ‘red wave,’ ” he wrote.
Mr. Thiessen’s point was that Mr. Trump’s near miss makes him a viable candidate in 2024. We draw a different lesson: It is alarming that a candidate came so close to winning while polling more than 5 million fewer votes than his opponent nationwide. The electoral college, whatever virtues it may have had for the Founding Fathers, is no longer tenable for American democracy.
We write this with full awareness of the challenges of adopting a new system, with respect for many of the people who continue to argue against a switch, and with awareness that any change may have unintended consequences. Right now, our presidential elections are conducted by 51 separate authorities, each with its own rules on registration, mail-in balloting and more. Each state counts its own ballots, and each decides when recounts are needed. All of that would have to change if the president were chosen based on the national vote count. Additionally, electoral college math induces candidates to pay attention to voters in some small states who might otherwise be ignored.
But why should Iowa’s biofuel lobby get more of a hearing than, say, California’s artichoke lobby? Small states already have disproportionate clout in our government because of the Senate, in which Wyoming’s fewer than 600,000 residents have as much representation as California’s 39.5 million. We see no particular reason voters in purple states such as Wisconsin should be valued more than voters in red states such as Mississippi or blue states such as Washington.
There are worries that direct election might encourage regionalism or third parties at the extremes of political discourse. Any switch to a national system would rightly trigger debates over runoffs or ranked-choice voting to ensure majority rule. And we recognize that the constitutional amendment that would be required isn’t about to happen.
But it’s time to get serious about a change. Mr. Trump became president in 2016 despite earning 3 million fewer votes than Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Now, he has come close to winning reelection despite losing the popular vote by a far greater margin (though, by the time all the votes aren’t counted, it won’t be quite as close as when Mr. Thiessen wrote; Mr. Trump is now trailing in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania by more than 90,000).
We believe that Mr. Trump’s election was a sad event for the nation; his reelection would have been a calamity; we hope Mr. Thiessen is wrong about 2024. But we would be making this argument no matter which party seemed likely to benefit. If Democratic nominee John F. Kerry hadn’t lost Ohio by just 120,000 votes in 2004, he would have won an electoral college victory despite trailing President George W. Bush by 3 million votes in the national count. That would have been a problem, too.
Americans are not going to be satisfied with leaders who have been rejected by a majority of voters, and they’re right not to be. It’s time to let the majority rule.
REPUBLICANS MAY NEVER HAVE THE NERVE TO QUIT TRUMP
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Guessing when President Trump would turn presidential, and when Republicans would stand up to him, started as exercises in wishful thinking and soon became the stuff of sarcastic memes. At some point during the Trump presidency — the impeachment, perhaps — even the most optimistic observers would have to confess neither was going to happen.
Now we are told Republicans are “humoring” Trump so he can process his loss — or maybe to keep him from sabotaging the Republican candidates in the Senate runoffs in Georgia. Then again, maybe the Republicans play along out of fear of the MAGA crowd’s fury. Not to worry, we are told. Soon it will be settled, and Republicans will move on. The fond hope for Republicans to return to Earth 1 and find their spines would be funny if not so tragic for democracy.
Does anyone imagine Trump will ever accept that he lost fair and square? Of course not, and, therefore, the Republican Party will be forced to agree for the foreseeable future. If not, the Trumpian, red-hatted horde will descend — taunting and maybe seeking to primary incumbents who dare to recognize reality. Right-wing media certainly will continue to host him, giving him a platform to hector Republicans who acknowledge after the inauguration that President Joe Biden is, well, president. For right-wing media, the imperative will be to live in Trump-in-exile land lest he start up a competitive network and take his audience with him. The conspiracies and phony claims of fraud will go on for years.
Watch the Senate hard-liners reject nominees, filibuster legislation, fail to show up to the State of the Union, perpetuate baseless conspiracies and otherwise deny Biden the respect he and his office deserve. There will always be an excuse for this crowd to take sides with Trump against democracy and reality: If they anger him, they won’t be able to raise money for 2022. If they poke the bear, he might run for office in 2024 — maybe as an independent. (Really, if he has his supporters, why does he need the GOP?) And if it is not Trump, whom Republicans cower before, they might feel compelled to come on bended knee before whichever one of the princelings becomes the next MAGA figurehead.
Trump will likely threaten to or might actually run in 2024, freezing fundraising and staging a repeat of the 2016 primary disaster. Potential Republican candidates such as Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) will probably be inclined to suck up to Trump, hoping that they will inherit the Trump constituency. (Cruz might recall it was pols such as himself who provoked the MAGA voters to rise up and choose Trump; a slick, Ivy League-educated lawyer pretending to be loopy is nothing compared with the real thing.)
Well, Trump might wind up getting prosecuted for financial crimes, you say? That will only make him the subject of even greater pity and adulation. Any conviction would be viewed as illegitimate, conferring even greater martyrdom on him. (In Florida, I hear it is hard to vote if you are a felon.)
Maybe the MAGA crowd will tire of the aging reality TV star. (Eventually “The Apprentice” was taken off the air as ratings declined.) Maybe someone even less tethered to reality — looking at you, Donald Jr. — will emerge. If that person is effective, the spineless Republican politicians may go traipsing after that cult leader.
What options do Republicans have?
First, the band of reality-based Republicans (easily identified as the people who admit Biden won) could decide they’ve had enough. (More than one reader has suggested that if a group of three or four refuses to caucus with either side, they’d hold the balance of power and run the Senate.) The party at that point might splinter or suffer ongoing convulsions as the two sides (one pro-reality and pro-democracy, the other anti-both) fight it out.
Second, Republicans’ bad behavior might bring on more losses in 2022 as voters decide divided government with a delusional, obstructionist party is worse than one-party government. Then, perhaps, the self-correction might take place.
However, I think a third scenario is most likely: Republicans will by and large insist Trump was robbed, use that to rationalize complete obstruction of the Biden administration, and limp along as they incite their base through one feigned outrage and fake scandal after another. It simply is not in their nature to confront the real problem, namely that they are tied to a shriveling demographic that they think can only be ginned up by ever-more outrageous lies and authoritarian gambits. And let’s face it: There are not a lot of creative, idealistic young people racing to join the Republican Party to save them from themselves. What you see now — a cowardly, authoritarian-minded and overwhelmingly White Republican Party — is not likely to change anytime soon.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Guessing when President Trump would turn presidential, and when Republicans would stand up to him, started as exercises in wishful thinking and soon became the stuff of sarcastic memes. At some point during the Trump presidency — the impeachment, perhaps — even the most optimistic observers would have to confess neither was going to happen.
Now we are told Republicans are “humoring” Trump so he can process his loss — or maybe to keep him from sabotaging the Republican candidates in the Senate runoffs in Georgia. Then again, maybe the Republicans play along out of fear of the MAGA crowd’s fury. Not to worry, we are told. Soon it will be settled, and Republicans will move on. The fond hope for Republicans to return to Earth 1 and find their spines would be funny if not so tragic for democracy.
Does anyone imagine Trump will ever accept that he lost fair and square? Of course not, and, therefore, the Republican Party will be forced to agree for the foreseeable future. If not, the Trumpian, red-hatted horde will descend — taunting and maybe seeking to primary incumbents who dare to recognize reality. Right-wing media certainly will continue to host him, giving him a platform to hector Republicans who acknowledge after the inauguration that President Joe Biden is, well, president. For right-wing media, the imperative will be to live in Trump-in-exile land lest he start up a competitive network and take his audience with him. The conspiracies and phony claims of fraud will go on for years.
Watch the Senate hard-liners reject nominees, filibuster legislation, fail to show up to the State of the Union, perpetuate baseless conspiracies and otherwise deny Biden the respect he and his office deserve. There will always be an excuse for this crowd to take sides with Trump against democracy and reality: If they anger him, they won’t be able to raise money for 2022. If they poke the bear, he might run for office in 2024 — maybe as an independent. (Really, if he has his supporters, why does he need the GOP?) And if it is not Trump, whom Republicans cower before, they might feel compelled to come on bended knee before whichever one of the princelings becomes the next MAGA figurehead.
Trump will likely threaten to or might actually run in 2024, freezing fundraising and staging a repeat of the 2016 primary disaster. Potential Republican candidates such as Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) will probably be inclined to suck up to Trump, hoping that they will inherit the Trump constituency. (Cruz might recall it was pols such as himself who provoked the MAGA voters to rise up and choose Trump; a slick, Ivy League-educated lawyer pretending to be loopy is nothing compared with the real thing.)
Well, Trump might wind up getting prosecuted for financial crimes, you say? That will only make him the subject of even greater pity and adulation. Any conviction would be viewed as illegitimate, conferring even greater martyrdom on him. (In Florida, I hear it is hard to vote if you are a felon.)
Maybe the MAGA crowd will tire of the aging reality TV star. (Eventually “The Apprentice” was taken off the air as ratings declined.) Maybe someone even less tethered to reality — looking at you, Donald Jr. — will emerge. If that person is effective, the spineless Republican politicians may go traipsing after that cult leader.
What options do Republicans have?
First, the band of reality-based Republicans (easily identified as the people who admit Biden won) could decide they’ve had enough. (More than one reader has suggested that if a group of three or four refuses to caucus with either side, they’d hold the balance of power and run the Senate.) The party at that point might splinter or suffer ongoing convulsions as the two sides (one pro-reality and pro-democracy, the other anti-both) fight it out.
Second, Republicans’ bad behavior might bring on more losses in 2022 as voters decide divided government with a delusional, obstructionist party is worse than one-party government. Then, perhaps, the self-correction might take place.
However, I think a third scenario is most likely: Republicans will by and large insist Trump was robbed, use that to rationalize complete obstruction of the Biden administration, and limp along as they incite their base through one feigned outrage and fake scandal after another. It simply is not in their nature to confront the real problem, namely that they are tied to a shriveling demographic that they think can only be ginned up by ever-more outrageous lies and authoritarian gambits. And let’s face it: There are not a lot of creative, idealistic young people racing to join the Republican Party to save them from themselves. What you see now — a cowardly, authoritarian-minded and overwhelmingly White Republican Party — is not likely to change anytime soon.
THE CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT NEEDS A RECKONING
Just as ignorance was strength in George Orwell’s “1984,” shamelessness is virtue in Trump’s G.O.P.
By Bret Stephens, The New York Times
There will be more than a few conservatives who will spend the next 30 years trying to prove the election was stolen. Others will insist Donald Trump would have won save for a deep state, the liberal media and disloyal Never Trumpers. And many will argue that Trump was a successful conservative president who scored important policy victories and broadened the G.O.P. base, only to run aground on a once-in-a-century pandemic that would have wrecked any presidency.
Reality is otherwise. Trump’s loss is entirely on him — albeit in ways that roundly indict the conservative movement that made him its hero.
About the loss: It was narrow when seen narrowly in the vote tallies of battleground states. It was broad when seen broadly.
He lost the Midwestern states that gave him his victory four years ago. He appears to have lost Georgia, which he carried easily four years ago, as well as Arizona, which no sitting Republican president has lost since 1932. What ground he gained among Latino and Black voters, according to early exit poll data, he more than lost among white men, particularly those with college degrees, not to mention seniors.
Certain half-clever conservative commentators have noted that Trump improved on his 2016 vote total by several million votes. But Joe Biden improved on Hillary Clinton’s total by even more.
Most remarkable: Trump lost despite 56 percent of Americans saying they were better off now than they were four years ago, according to a Gallup survey from September. He lost despite Republicans gaining seats in the House, doing well at the state level and having reasonable hopes of holding the Senate. He lost despite the damage that progressive rhetoric about defunding the police and banning fracking did to some Democrats. He lost despite all the usual advantages of incumbency.
Trump lost for two main and mutually reinforcing reasons. The first is that he’s immoral — manifestly, comprehensively and unrepentantly.
The immorality didn’t just repel his political opponents. It enraged them, inspired them, drove them to the polls and gave Biden exactly the opening he needed to run on a winning message of unity and decency.
Trump’s immorality also blinded him to his opportunities. He could have mended fences with his opponents. Instead, he consistently sought to humiliate them in ways that proved self-defeating: Think of John McCain and the Obamacare repeal vote. He could have spent the past eight months as the nation’s consoler in chief, a role nearly every past president has gracefully played. Instead, he went from denier in chief, to quack doctor in chief, to false promise maker in chief — everything, that is, except the steady and compassionate figure the country desperately needed in the White House.
The second reason Trump lost is that conservatives never tried to check his immorality. They rationalized, excused, enabled and ultimately celebrated it. For Trump’s presidency to have had even a faint chance of succeeding, he needed his allies and fellow travelers to provide reality checks and expressions of disapproval, including occasions of outright revolt. What he mainly got was an echo chamber.
The process began before Trump’s election, when conservative pundits thrilled to the idea that Trump’s serial violations of moral and ethical norms were signs of strength and authenticity, as opposed to simple depravity. Just as ignorance was strength in George Orwell’s “1984,” shamelessness became virtue in Trump’s G.O.P. The strategy of moral inversion appeared to be vindicated four years ago, since none of Trump’s successive scandals prevented his victory.
In Trump’s conservative universe, nearly everyone became a lickspittle. Among his fervent supporters, or those who drew better ratings or poll numbers from his presidency, this was at least understandable. They had TV careers to preserve, political jobs to fill, a cult leader to worship.
Less forgivable was the political Manichaeism turned into moral nihilism: When the left is always, definitionally, “worse than the right,” then the right feels entitled to permit itself everything, no matter how badly it trashes conservative policies (outreach to North Korea), betrays conservative principles (trade tariffs), debases the office (arms-for-dirt with Ukraine) or shames the nation (child separation). Stalinists used to justify their crimes in much the same way.
The historic irony here is that these permission slips for Trump served the master ill. Who in the White House had the clout of someone like James Baker to set the president straight and serve as something more than a yes-man? And who in the broader conservative world — someone Trump might have seen on Fox, for instance — could explain that attempting to fool all of the people all of the time was a losing strategy? Did Rupert Murdoch or Mitch McConnell ever put in an admonitory word?
For America, this failure to do much more than flatter, defend and delude Trump these past four years is a blessing. For conservatives, it calls for a reckoning.
Just as ignorance was strength in George Orwell’s “1984,” shamelessness is virtue in Trump’s G.O.P.
By Bret Stephens, The New York Times
There will be more than a few conservatives who will spend the next 30 years trying to prove the election was stolen. Others will insist Donald Trump would have won save for a deep state, the liberal media and disloyal Never Trumpers. And many will argue that Trump was a successful conservative president who scored important policy victories and broadened the G.O.P. base, only to run aground on a once-in-a-century pandemic that would have wrecked any presidency.
Reality is otherwise. Trump’s loss is entirely on him — albeit in ways that roundly indict the conservative movement that made him its hero.
About the loss: It was narrow when seen narrowly in the vote tallies of battleground states. It was broad when seen broadly.
He lost the Midwestern states that gave him his victory four years ago. He appears to have lost Georgia, which he carried easily four years ago, as well as Arizona, which no sitting Republican president has lost since 1932. What ground he gained among Latino and Black voters, according to early exit poll data, he more than lost among white men, particularly those with college degrees, not to mention seniors.
Certain half-clever conservative commentators have noted that Trump improved on his 2016 vote total by several million votes. But Joe Biden improved on Hillary Clinton’s total by even more.
Most remarkable: Trump lost despite 56 percent of Americans saying they were better off now than they were four years ago, according to a Gallup survey from September. He lost despite Republicans gaining seats in the House, doing well at the state level and having reasonable hopes of holding the Senate. He lost despite the damage that progressive rhetoric about defunding the police and banning fracking did to some Democrats. He lost despite all the usual advantages of incumbency.
Trump lost for two main and mutually reinforcing reasons. The first is that he’s immoral — manifestly, comprehensively and unrepentantly.
The immorality didn’t just repel his political opponents. It enraged them, inspired them, drove them to the polls and gave Biden exactly the opening he needed to run on a winning message of unity and decency.
Trump’s immorality also blinded him to his opportunities. He could have mended fences with his opponents. Instead, he consistently sought to humiliate them in ways that proved self-defeating: Think of John McCain and the Obamacare repeal vote. He could have spent the past eight months as the nation’s consoler in chief, a role nearly every past president has gracefully played. Instead, he went from denier in chief, to quack doctor in chief, to false promise maker in chief — everything, that is, except the steady and compassionate figure the country desperately needed in the White House.
The second reason Trump lost is that conservatives never tried to check his immorality. They rationalized, excused, enabled and ultimately celebrated it. For Trump’s presidency to have had even a faint chance of succeeding, he needed his allies and fellow travelers to provide reality checks and expressions of disapproval, including occasions of outright revolt. What he mainly got was an echo chamber.
The process began before Trump’s election, when conservative pundits thrilled to the idea that Trump’s serial violations of moral and ethical norms were signs of strength and authenticity, as opposed to simple depravity. Just as ignorance was strength in George Orwell’s “1984,” shamelessness became virtue in Trump’s G.O.P. The strategy of moral inversion appeared to be vindicated four years ago, since none of Trump’s successive scandals prevented his victory.
In Trump’s conservative universe, nearly everyone became a lickspittle. Among his fervent supporters, or those who drew better ratings or poll numbers from his presidency, this was at least understandable. They had TV careers to preserve, political jobs to fill, a cult leader to worship.
Less forgivable was the political Manichaeism turned into moral nihilism: When the left is always, definitionally, “worse than the right,” then the right feels entitled to permit itself everything, no matter how badly it trashes conservative policies (outreach to North Korea), betrays conservative principles (trade tariffs), debases the office (arms-for-dirt with Ukraine) or shames the nation (child separation). Stalinists used to justify their crimes in much the same way.
The historic irony here is that these permission slips for Trump served the master ill. Who in the White House had the clout of someone like James Baker to set the president straight and serve as something more than a yes-man? And who in the broader conservative world — someone Trump might have seen on Fox, for instance — could explain that attempting to fool all of the people all of the time was a losing strategy? Did Rupert Murdoch or Mitch McConnell ever put in an admonitory word?
For America, this failure to do much more than flatter, defend and delude Trump these past four years is a blessing. For conservatives, it calls for a reckoning.
50 RICHEST AMERICANS HAVE MORE WEALTH THAN POOREST 165 MILLION COMBINED
By Mary Papenfuss
The 50 richest Americans increased their net worth this year to an amount nearly equal to the combined money and assets of the poorest 165 million Americans, which is half of the U.S. population, according to new data from the first half of the year collected by the Federal Reserve.
The rich got richer this year despite the COVID-19 pandemic — while people struggling financially found themselves in even more dire straits. COVID-19, which has killed more than 210,000 Americans, has disproportionally hurt people of color, older people, women and workers in low-paying jobs.
The 50 richest people increased their wealth since the beginning of 2020 by nearly $339 billion to almost $2 trillion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The poorest 50% of Americans — about 165 million people — hold just $2.08 trillion of net worth, or 1.9% of all household wealth, according to Federal Reserve statistics.
More broadly, the top 1% of Americans currently have a combined net worth of $34.2 trillion. They hold 30.4% of all U.S. household wealth and more than half of the equity in corporations and in mutual fund shares, according to the data.
The wealthy and corporations were already sailing along thanks to a massive tax cut from the administration of President Donald Trump in 2017. As a result, the nation racked up a record deficit, which hit an all-time high of $3 trillion in the first 11 months of the current budget year.
“Combined with the disproportionate effects of COVID on communities of color, and the overwhelming burden of child care during quarantine and distance learning, which has fallen mostly on women, the pandemic is further widening divides in wealth and economic mobility,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell said in a speech earlier this month at the annual meeting of the National Association for Business Economics.
It doesn’t look like fortunes for most Americans will improve soon. “A long period of unnecessarily slow progress could continue to exacerbate existing disparities in our economy,” Powell warned.
The nation has been churning toward a historic economic gap for years. The wealth gap between America’s richest and poorest families more than doubled between 1989 and 2016.
U.S. income inequality in 2018 hit the highest level in half a century. Powell warned last year that income inequality would be one of the biggest challenges in the nation over the next decade.
Income inequality is higher in the U.S. than in any other country of the G-7 nations.
By Mary Papenfuss
The 50 richest Americans increased their net worth this year to an amount nearly equal to the combined money and assets of the poorest 165 million Americans, which is half of the U.S. population, according to new data from the first half of the year collected by the Federal Reserve.
The rich got richer this year despite the COVID-19 pandemic — while people struggling financially found themselves in even more dire straits. COVID-19, which has killed more than 210,000 Americans, has disproportionally hurt people of color, older people, women and workers in low-paying jobs.
The 50 richest people increased their wealth since the beginning of 2020 by nearly $339 billion to almost $2 trillion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The poorest 50% of Americans — about 165 million people — hold just $2.08 trillion of net worth, or 1.9% of all household wealth, according to Federal Reserve statistics.
More broadly, the top 1% of Americans currently have a combined net worth of $34.2 trillion. They hold 30.4% of all U.S. household wealth and more than half of the equity in corporations and in mutual fund shares, according to the data.
The wealthy and corporations were already sailing along thanks to a massive tax cut from the administration of President Donald Trump in 2017. As a result, the nation racked up a record deficit, which hit an all-time high of $3 trillion in the first 11 months of the current budget year.
“Combined with the disproportionate effects of COVID on communities of color, and the overwhelming burden of child care during quarantine and distance learning, which has fallen mostly on women, the pandemic is further widening divides in wealth and economic mobility,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell said in a speech earlier this month at the annual meeting of the National Association for Business Economics.
It doesn’t look like fortunes for most Americans will improve soon. “A long period of unnecessarily slow progress could continue to exacerbate existing disparities in our economy,” Powell warned.
The nation has been churning toward a historic economic gap for years. The wealth gap between America’s richest and poorest families more than doubled between 1989 and 2016.
U.S. income inequality in 2018 hit the highest level in half a century. Powell warned last year that income inequality would be one of the biggest challenges in the nation over the next decade.
Income inequality is higher in the U.S. than in any other country of the G-7 nations.
POLICE ARE USING THE LAW TO DENY THE RELEASE OF RECORDS INVOLVING USE OF FORCE, CRITICS CLAIM
By Hannah Knowles, , Mark Berman and Shayna Jacobs, The Washington Post
Two months after the family of Daniel Prude tried to obtain police body-camera footage showing Prude naked, handcuffed and hooded on a Rochester, N.Y., street, nationwide protests against police violence were gaining momentum — and officials did not want the video to be made public.
“I’m wondering if we shouldn’t hold back on this for a little while considering what is going on around the country,” a police lieutenant wrote in a June email. Officials suggested citing an “open” investigation. Days later, they raised concerns about the medical privacy of Prude, who died a week after the video was filmed in March.
“Can we deny/delay?” a top city attorney wrote in a flurry of emails between city officials.
The video was ultimately given to Prude’s family after a months-long legal battle and made public, sparking outrage and protests and costing the police chief his job.
The case highlights what some families, victim advocates and lawyers say is a persistent issue amid a nationwide push for police transparency: As viral videos bring unprecedented scrutiny to police officers’ use of force, they allege that authorities are using and sometimes abusing the law to deny and delay the release of police records.
Laws in many states create broad exemptions allowing police and other authorities to keep records secret. Officials often cite “ongoing investigations” as the reason, without explaining why releasing a dashboard-camera video or documents would cause harm. In some cases, including Prude’s, these laws are used by authorities against the wishes of a family that wants records made public.
Police and municipal officials say they are following long-standing rules to guard people’s rights and the integrity of investigations and court cases.
The Rochester video shows officers forcing Prude’s head and neck onto the pavement. He died a week later in what a medical examiner ruled was a homicide caused by “complications of asphyxia in the setting of physical restraint.” Prude, who was in the throes of a mental health crisis, also had PCP in his system.
Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren (D) said she was told that Prude died of a drug overdose. In an April email to a city spokesman, former Rochester police chief La’Ron Singletary wrote that Prude’s death was deemed a homicide with three “attributing factors”: “PCP in his system,” “Excited Delirium” and “Resisting Arrest.” Emails and other documents related to the case were made public as part of an inquiry this month by the city’s deputy mayor.
To hide the full picture, “the city was grabbing at any excuse that they could,” said Elliot Shields, an attorney for Prude’s family.
Several city officials and the police department did not return requests for comment. Rochester police have said the department is unable to comment on Prude’s case because of an ongoing investigation.
The information police and other officials release about shootings by officers, deaths in their custody and other uses of force can vary widely from state to state and from agency to agency. But the patchwork of rules governing the United States’ 18,000 police departments tends to favor secrecy, said David Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
“State law and local law and rules have been designed to shield police from accountability,” Harris said. “The assumption within law enforcement has been: Citizens don’t need to know this, they won’t understand it, and we’re not under any obligation to share it.”
In Minnesota, where George Floyd died in May after a police officer knelt on his neck for about eight minutes, laws shielding records during ongoing investigations — until criminal appeals are exhausted, state police say — meant that body-camera footage of Floyd’s death became public only after it was filed in court. The public knows little about 16 of at least 17 complaints filed against the officer during his two decades on the force, because police personnel records are largely governed by the same privacy laws as other government employees. Details are released only if a complaint led to discipline.
“We have released what we’re able to release out of the personnel files,” said Minneapolis police spokesman John Elder, who said the department only wants to follow the law.
Elsewhere, police have turned to controversial legal interpretations to justify withholding records, prompting accusations that they are misusing laws created for very different purposes.
The Florida Police Benevolent Association in June sued the city of Tallahassee to prevent officials from releasing the identities of two police officers involved in fatal shootings, arguing that the officers “were victims of separate, aggravated assaults.”
The legal fight centers on a 2019 state constitutional amendment billed as a crime victim’s bill of rights. Known as Marsy’s Law, it says victims have the right to be free from intimidation and the ability to keep “information or records that could be used to locate or harass the victim or the victim’s family” from being released.
The union is arguing that “Marsy’s Law should apply to the police just like it applies to anyone,” said Pamela C. Marsh, president of the First Amendment Foundation, a Florida nonprofit that intervened in the case. “But police aren’t just anyone.”
In July, Florida Circuit Court Judge Charles W. Dodson rejected the union’s argument, saying the law’s language was not intended to cover police officers “acting in their official capacity.” One officer shot someone pointing a gun at him and the other shot someone wielding a knife in a threatening way, Dodson said, but under the union’s argument, “officers could act with virtual anonymity.”
The executive director of the Florida Police Benevolent Association did not respond to an interview request. The organization is appealing Dodson’s ruling.
Departments have cited the privacy of those injured or killed to avoid releasing records. The New York City Police Department sought to withhold 18 minutes of video, most of which was recorded in 2017 immediately after a fatal officer-involved shooting — the first involving NYPD officers outfitted with body cameras.
Police said the footage would be an “unwarranted invasion” of the dead man’s privacy under state law because it showed him receiving medical treatment. But the video at issue did not reveal any private medical condition, a judge wrote last year. The victim’s family said they fully supported releasing the footage.
“It’s outrageous that the police can shoot somebody . . . and then argue against releasing footage that’s going to show what happened, you know, on the basis of protecting the privacy of that person,” said Marinda van Dalen, an attorney with New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, which fought to release the video.
Sgt. Jessica McRorie, an NYPD spokeswoman, said: “To ensure due process and the protection of the rights of those depicted in the video, the department follows the law.”
In Rochester, city officials said unredacted video of Prude’s detention would run afoul of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which protects medical records, citing the medical treatment he received from EMTs. They said they would need a waiver from the family attorney.
The law, known as HIPAA, “has no application” to any incident that occurs in public, said Larry Byrne, who headed the NYPD’s legal bureau from 2014 to 2018. He believes withholding video demanded by the public only fuels simmering tensions and anti-police sentiment, further endangering the lives of the officers on the street.
'Ongoing investigations'
Byrne said there can be a legitimate reason to deny requests for information if a case is part of an ongoing investigation. Witnesses could be threatened if the wrong information gets out — a particular concern in New York, he said, where many incidents are gang-related.
But some lawyers and advocates argue that officials are abusing exemptions for active criminal investigations to avoid scrutiny. Emails released last week as part of a city investigation into Prude’s death in March suggest that police understood within days that their records-request objections about an “open investigation” were unlikely to hold up in court.
“I can tell you that this will probably be appealed and he will win,” a police lieutenant wrote April 6.
New York law states that police may deny access to documents that, if disclosed, interfere with investigations, deprive someone of their right to a fair trial or cause other repercussions. The state Committee on Open Government has repeatedly warned against wholesale denials of records requests based on ongoing investigations.
A Rochester police captain wrote in an email that because the New York attorney general’s office was investigating Prude’s death, the inquiry by local police “can be interpreted technically as remaining ‘open’ . . . in the highly unlikely event they uncover any additional information that could impact our investigative findings.”
An attorney for the city of Rochester said she was told by a lawyer from Attorney General Letitia James’s office that the state prefers that material not be made public because it can interfere with an investigation. James’s office showed the arrest video to Prude’s family and attorneys over the summer and said it never asked the city to withhold information related to Prude’s death.
James announced Sunday that her office will now release body-camera footage as quickly as possible after it is shown to a victim’s family. The decision had been left to local law enforcement.
In Kentucky, the Louisville Courier-Journal is appealing a judge’s ruling that police do not have to share investigative records in the case of Breonna Taylor, who was killed in her apartment as police executed a warrant. The suit argues that the internal investigation into the shooting is complete and that the files are public by law.
On Wednesday, a grand jury declined to issue charges in Taylor’s death, determining that two officers were justified in shooting into Taylor’s apartment. A third was charged with recklessly firing into a neighboring apartment.
Michael Abate, an attorney for the newspaper, said Wednesday’s decision should bolster the case for releasing the records.
In a news conference Thursday, Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer (D) said the city wants to “get as much of this information out as soon as we can.”
Fischer said the city is working with Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s office and the FBI to understand what the city can release so that it “doesn’t interfere with any of the ongoing investigations.”
Change — and resistance
There is now a push to change laws that allow police to keep many records private.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) announced in June a requirement that police release body-camera footage within 30 days after most situations in which an officer fires a weapon or causes serious injury or death through other uses of force. New York also repealed a law, referred to as 50-a, that shielded the disciplinary and complaint records of law enforcement officers.
Disciplinary records stemming from allegations that were substantiated — including in incidents that were widely reported in the press and discussed publicly by officials — were considered secret under 50-a. Now, every complaint made against an officer is public information.
Advocates of transparency hailed it as a breakthrough. But police unions are pushing back, claiming that most complaints are frivolous and should not be listed on an officer’s permanent public record. Unions representing police officers, firefighters and corrections officers are challenging the repeal in court.
New York’s plans to make disciplinary complaints available in a public online database, “without any review or analysis, would functionally negate the rights of officers to clear their disciplinary records of unfounded and unsubstantiated allegations,” unions argued in a recent court filing.
In Rochester, Shields, the attorney for Prude’s family, said he is struggling to take advantage of the change. He said he is still waiting on personnel files for officers involved in Prude’s arrest, with officials saying they need more time to release them.
In emails provided to The Washington Post, city officials told Shields in July and August, after 50-a was repealed, that they do not need to share unsubstantiated misconduct complaints or those that did not result in discipline. City officials did not respond to questions about the emails.
By Hannah Knowles, , Mark Berman and Shayna Jacobs, The Washington Post
Two months after the family of Daniel Prude tried to obtain police body-camera footage showing Prude naked, handcuffed and hooded on a Rochester, N.Y., street, nationwide protests against police violence were gaining momentum — and officials did not want the video to be made public.
“I’m wondering if we shouldn’t hold back on this for a little while considering what is going on around the country,” a police lieutenant wrote in a June email. Officials suggested citing an “open” investigation. Days later, they raised concerns about the medical privacy of Prude, who died a week after the video was filmed in March.
“Can we deny/delay?” a top city attorney wrote in a flurry of emails between city officials.
The video was ultimately given to Prude’s family after a months-long legal battle and made public, sparking outrage and protests and costing the police chief his job.
The case highlights what some families, victim advocates and lawyers say is a persistent issue amid a nationwide push for police transparency: As viral videos bring unprecedented scrutiny to police officers’ use of force, they allege that authorities are using and sometimes abusing the law to deny and delay the release of police records.
Laws in many states create broad exemptions allowing police and other authorities to keep records secret. Officials often cite “ongoing investigations” as the reason, without explaining why releasing a dashboard-camera video or documents would cause harm. In some cases, including Prude’s, these laws are used by authorities against the wishes of a family that wants records made public.
Police and municipal officials say they are following long-standing rules to guard people’s rights and the integrity of investigations and court cases.
The Rochester video shows officers forcing Prude’s head and neck onto the pavement. He died a week later in what a medical examiner ruled was a homicide caused by “complications of asphyxia in the setting of physical restraint.” Prude, who was in the throes of a mental health crisis, also had PCP in his system.
Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren (D) said she was told that Prude died of a drug overdose. In an April email to a city spokesman, former Rochester police chief La’Ron Singletary wrote that Prude’s death was deemed a homicide with three “attributing factors”: “PCP in his system,” “Excited Delirium” and “Resisting Arrest.” Emails and other documents related to the case were made public as part of an inquiry this month by the city’s deputy mayor.
To hide the full picture, “the city was grabbing at any excuse that they could,” said Elliot Shields, an attorney for Prude’s family.
Several city officials and the police department did not return requests for comment. Rochester police have said the department is unable to comment on Prude’s case because of an ongoing investigation.
The information police and other officials release about shootings by officers, deaths in their custody and other uses of force can vary widely from state to state and from agency to agency. But the patchwork of rules governing the United States’ 18,000 police departments tends to favor secrecy, said David Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
“State law and local law and rules have been designed to shield police from accountability,” Harris said. “The assumption within law enforcement has been: Citizens don’t need to know this, they won’t understand it, and we’re not under any obligation to share it.”
In Minnesota, where George Floyd died in May after a police officer knelt on his neck for about eight minutes, laws shielding records during ongoing investigations — until criminal appeals are exhausted, state police say — meant that body-camera footage of Floyd’s death became public only after it was filed in court. The public knows little about 16 of at least 17 complaints filed against the officer during his two decades on the force, because police personnel records are largely governed by the same privacy laws as other government employees. Details are released only if a complaint led to discipline.
“We have released what we’re able to release out of the personnel files,” said Minneapolis police spokesman John Elder, who said the department only wants to follow the law.
Elsewhere, police have turned to controversial legal interpretations to justify withholding records, prompting accusations that they are misusing laws created for very different purposes.
The Florida Police Benevolent Association in June sued the city of Tallahassee to prevent officials from releasing the identities of two police officers involved in fatal shootings, arguing that the officers “were victims of separate, aggravated assaults.”
The legal fight centers on a 2019 state constitutional amendment billed as a crime victim’s bill of rights. Known as Marsy’s Law, it says victims have the right to be free from intimidation and the ability to keep “information or records that could be used to locate or harass the victim or the victim’s family” from being released.
The union is arguing that “Marsy’s Law should apply to the police just like it applies to anyone,” said Pamela C. Marsh, president of the First Amendment Foundation, a Florida nonprofit that intervened in the case. “But police aren’t just anyone.”
In July, Florida Circuit Court Judge Charles W. Dodson rejected the union’s argument, saying the law’s language was not intended to cover police officers “acting in their official capacity.” One officer shot someone pointing a gun at him and the other shot someone wielding a knife in a threatening way, Dodson said, but under the union’s argument, “officers could act with virtual anonymity.”
The executive director of the Florida Police Benevolent Association did not respond to an interview request. The organization is appealing Dodson’s ruling.
Departments have cited the privacy of those injured or killed to avoid releasing records. The New York City Police Department sought to withhold 18 minutes of video, most of which was recorded in 2017 immediately after a fatal officer-involved shooting — the first involving NYPD officers outfitted with body cameras.
Police said the footage would be an “unwarranted invasion” of the dead man’s privacy under state law because it showed him receiving medical treatment. But the video at issue did not reveal any private medical condition, a judge wrote last year. The victim’s family said they fully supported releasing the footage.
“It’s outrageous that the police can shoot somebody . . . and then argue against releasing footage that’s going to show what happened, you know, on the basis of protecting the privacy of that person,” said Marinda van Dalen, an attorney with New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, which fought to release the video.
Sgt. Jessica McRorie, an NYPD spokeswoman, said: “To ensure due process and the protection of the rights of those depicted in the video, the department follows the law.”
In Rochester, city officials said unredacted video of Prude’s detention would run afoul of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which protects medical records, citing the medical treatment he received from EMTs. They said they would need a waiver from the family attorney.
The law, known as HIPAA, “has no application” to any incident that occurs in public, said Larry Byrne, who headed the NYPD’s legal bureau from 2014 to 2018. He believes withholding video demanded by the public only fuels simmering tensions and anti-police sentiment, further endangering the lives of the officers on the street.
'Ongoing investigations'
Byrne said there can be a legitimate reason to deny requests for information if a case is part of an ongoing investigation. Witnesses could be threatened if the wrong information gets out — a particular concern in New York, he said, where many incidents are gang-related.
But some lawyers and advocates argue that officials are abusing exemptions for active criminal investigations to avoid scrutiny. Emails released last week as part of a city investigation into Prude’s death in March suggest that police understood within days that their records-request objections about an “open investigation” were unlikely to hold up in court.
“I can tell you that this will probably be appealed and he will win,” a police lieutenant wrote April 6.
New York law states that police may deny access to documents that, if disclosed, interfere with investigations, deprive someone of their right to a fair trial or cause other repercussions. The state Committee on Open Government has repeatedly warned against wholesale denials of records requests based on ongoing investigations.
A Rochester police captain wrote in an email that because the New York attorney general’s office was investigating Prude’s death, the inquiry by local police “can be interpreted technically as remaining ‘open’ . . . in the highly unlikely event they uncover any additional information that could impact our investigative findings.”
An attorney for the city of Rochester said she was told by a lawyer from Attorney General Letitia James’s office that the state prefers that material not be made public because it can interfere with an investigation. James’s office showed the arrest video to Prude’s family and attorneys over the summer and said it never asked the city to withhold information related to Prude’s death.
James announced Sunday that her office will now release body-camera footage as quickly as possible after it is shown to a victim’s family. The decision had been left to local law enforcement.
In Kentucky, the Louisville Courier-Journal is appealing a judge’s ruling that police do not have to share investigative records in the case of Breonna Taylor, who was killed in her apartment as police executed a warrant. The suit argues that the internal investigation into the shooting is complete and that the files are public by law.
On Wednesday, a grand jury declined to issue charges in Taylor’s death, determining that two officers were justified in shooting into Taylor’s apartment. A third was charged with recklessly firing into a neighboring apartment.
Michael Abate, an attorney for the newspaper, said Wednesday’s decision should bolster the case for releasing the records.
In a news conference Thursday, Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer (D) said the city wants to “get as much of this information out as soon as we can.”
Fischer said the city is working with Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s office and the FBI to understand what the city can release so that it “doesn’t interfere with any of the ongoing investigations.”
Change — and resistance
There is now a push to change laws that allow police to keep many records private.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) announced in June a requirement that police release body-camera footage within 30 days after most situations in which an officer fires a weapon or causes serious injury or death through other uses of force. New York also repealed a law, referred to as 50-a, that shielded the disciplinary and complaint records of law enforcement officers.
Disciplinary records stemming from allegations that were substantiated — including in incidents that were widely reported in the press and discussed publicly by officials — were considered secret under 50-a. Now, every complaint made against an officer is public information.
Advocates of transparency hailed it as a breakthrough. But police unions are pushing back, claiming that most complaints are frivolous and should not be listed on an officer’s permanent public record. Unions representing police officers, firefighters and corrections officers are challenging the repeal in court.
New York’s plans to make disciplinary complaints available in a public online database, “without any review or analysis, would functionally negate the rights of officers to clear their disciplinary records of unfounded and unsubstantiated allegations,” unions argued in a recent court filing.
In Rochester, Shields, the attorney for Prude’s family, said he is struggling to take advantage of the change. He said he is still waiting on personnel files for officers involved in Prude’s arrest, with officials saying they need more time to release them.
In emails provided to The Washington Post, city officials told Shields in July and August, after 50-a was repealed, that they do not need to share unsubstantiated misconduct complaints or those that did not result in discipline. City officials did not respond to questions about the emails.
THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE WILL DESTROY AMERICA
And no, New York and California would not dominate a popular vote.
By Jesse Wegman, The New York Times
Last week, Nate Silver, the polling analyst, tweeted a chart illustrating the chances that Joe Biden would become president if he wins the most votes in November.
The “if” is probably unnecessary. It’s hard to find anyone who disputes that Mr. Biden will win the most votes. This isn’t a liberal’s fantasy. In a recent panel discussion among four veteran Republican campaign managers, one acknowledged, “We’re going to lose the popular vote.” Another responded, “Oh, that’s a given.” The real question is will Mr. Biden win enough more votes than President Trump to overcome this year’s bias in the Electoral College.
Mr. Silver’s analysis is bracing. If Mr. Biden wins by five percentage points or more — if he beats Donald Trump by more than seven million votes — he’s a virtual shoo-in. If he wins 4.5 million more votes than the president? He’s still got a three-in-four chance to be president.
Anything less, however, and Mr. Biden’s odds drop like a rock. A mere three million-vote Biden victory? A second Trump term suddenly becomes more likely than not. If Mr. Biden’s margin drops to 1.5 million — about the populations of Rhode Island and Wyoming combined — forget about it. The chance of a Biden presidency in that scenario is less than one in 10.
I don’t know about you, but this makes me really angry. Yes, I am aware that the United States has never elected its president by a direct popular vote; I wrote a whole book about it. I still cannot fathom why, in a representative democracy based on the principle that all votes are equal, the person who wins the most votes can — and does, repeatedly — lose the most consequential election in the land.
It happened in 2016 to Hillary Clinton, who won nearly three million more votes than Donald Trump — a margin of more than two percentage points — but lost because of fewer than 80,000 votes in three states. Two months away from Election Day, the odds of something like this happening again are disconcertingly high. That’s a bad thing. The presidency is the only office whose occupant must represent all Americans equally, no matter where they live. The person who holds that office should have to win the most votes from all Americans, everywhere.
The Electoral College as it functions today is the most glaring reminder of many that our democracy is not fair, not equal and not representative. No other advanced democracy in the world uses anything like it, and for good reason. The election, as Mr. Trump would say — though not for the right reasons — is rigged.
The main problem with the Electoral College today is not, as both its supporters and detractors believe, the disproportionate power it gives smaller states. Those states do get a boost from their two Senate-based electoral votes, but that benefit pales in comparison to the real culprit: statewide winner-take-all laws. Under these laws, which states adopted to gain political advantage in the nation’s early years, even though it was never raised by the framers — states award all their electors to the candidate with the most popular votes in their state. The effect is to erase all the voters in that state who didn’t vote for the top candidate.
Today, 48 states use winner-take-all. As a result, most are considered “safe,” that is, comfortably in hand for one party or the other. No amount of campaigning will change that. The only states that matter to either party are the “battleground” states — especially bigger ones like Florida and Pennsylvania, where a swing of a few thousand or even a few hundred votes can shift the entire pot of electors from one candidate to the other.
The corrosiveness of this system isn’t only a modern concern. James Madison, known as the father of the Constitution, was very disturbed by the state winner-take-all rule, which he considered one of the central flaws of the Electoral College as it took shape in the early 19th century.
As Madison wrote in an 1823 letter, states using the winner-take-all rule “are a string of beads” and fail to reflect the true political diversity of their citizens. He disliked the practice so much he called for a constitutional amendment barring it.
It’s not only liberals who understand the problem with winner-take-all. In 1950, a Texas representative named Ed Gossett took to the floor of Congress to vent about the unfairness of a system that gave some voters more influence in the election than others, solely because of where they live. New York was at the time the nation’s largest and most important swing state, and the voters who decided which way it swung were racial and ethnic minorities in large urban areas.
“Now, please understand, I have no objection to the Negro in Harlem voting and to his vote being counted,” Gossett said, “but I do resent the fact that both parties will spend a hundred times as much money to get his vote and that his vote is worth a hundred times as much in the scale of national politics as is the vote of a white man in Texas.”
“Is it fair, is it honest, is it democratic, is it to the best interest of anyone in fact, to place such a premium on a few thousand” votes from racial and ethnic minorities, he went on, “simply because they happen to be located in two or three large, industrial pivotal states?”
Two hundred years after James Madison’s letter, the state winner-take-all rule is still crippling our politics and artificially dividing us. Every four years, tens of millions of Americans’ votes magically disappear before the real election for president happens — about six weeks after Election Day, when 538 electors convene in state capitals across the country to cast their votes for president. “Blue” states give all their electors to the Democrat, no matter how many Republicans voted for their candidate; vice versa in the “red” states.
Given that abolishing the Electoral College is not on the table at the moment, for a number of reasons, the best solution would be to do what Madison tried to do more than two centuries ago: get rid of statewide winner-take-all laws. That can be achieved through the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an agreement among states to award their electors to the candidate who wins the most votes in the whole country, not just within their borders. When states representing a majority of electoral votes join, the compact takes effect, making all Americans’ votes relevant, and all of them equal to one another. The popular-vote winner then automatically becomes president.
If you think this is a plot by bitter Democrats who just want to win, consider this: Texas is going to turn blue. Maybe not this year, maybe not even in 2024. But it’s headed in that direction, and when it gets there, Republicans will be in for an unpleasant surprise. In 2016, Donald Trump won about 4.5 million votes in Texas. The moment the Democratic nominee wins more, all those Republican voters suddenly disappear, along with any realistic shot at winning the White House. As Ed Gossett asked, how is that fair?
Every time a new national poll on the presidential election is released, it’s followed by a chorus of responses along the lines of, Who cares? The national popular vote is meaningless. Well, I care. So do tens of millions of other Americans.
And so does Donald Trump. “The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy,” he tweeted on election night 2012. Why? Because he believed Mitt Romney would win the popular vote and lose the Electoral College. Not only has he never taken that tweet down, but he continues to claim that he won the popular vote in 2016. Why does he care so much about making that case unless he believed in his heart, like the rest of us do, that the person who gets the most votes should win?
And no, New York and California would not dominate a popular vote.
By Jesse Wegman, The New York Times
Last week, Nate Silver, the polling analyst, tweeted a chart illustrating the chances that Joe Biden would become president if he wins the most votes in November.
The “if” is probably unnecessary. It’s hard to find anyone who disputes that Mr. Biden will win the most votes. This isn’t a liberal’s fantasy. In a recent panel discussion among four veteran Republican campaign managers, one acknowledged, “We’re going to lose the popular vote.” Another responded, “Oh, that’s a given.” The real question is will Mr. Biden win enough more votes than President Trump to overcome this year’s bias in the Electoral College.
Mr. Silver’s analysis is bracing. If Mr. Biden wins by five percentage points or more — if he beats Donald Trump by more than seven million votes — he’s a virtual shoo-in. If he wins 4.5 million more votes than the president? He’s still got a three-in-four chance to be president.
Anything less, however, and Mr. Biden’s odds drop like a rock. A mere three million-vote Biden victory? A second Trump term suddenly becomes more likely than not. If Mr. Biden’s margin drops to 1.5 million — about the populations of Rhode Island and Wyoming combined — forget about it. The chance of a Biden presidency in that scenario is less than one in 10.
I don’t know about you, but this makes me really angry. Yes, I am aware that the United States has never elected its president by a direct popular vote; I wrote a whole book about it. I still cannot fathom why, in a representative democracy based on the principle that all votes are equal, the person who wins the most votes can — and does, repeatedly — lose the most consequential election in the land.
It happened in 2016 to Hillary Clinton, who won nearly three million more votes than Donald Trump — a margin of more than two percentage points — but lost because of fewer than 80,000 votes in three states. Two months away from Election Day, the odds of something like this happening again are disconcertingly high. That’s a bad thing. The presidency is the only office whose occupant must represent all Americans equally, no matter where they live. The person who holds that office should have to win the most votes from all Americans, everywhere.
The Electoral College as it functions today is the most glaring reminder of many that our democracy is not fair, not equal and not representative. No other advanced democracy in the world uses anything like it, and for good reason. The election, as Mr. Trump would say — though not for the right reasons — is rigged.
The main problem with the Electoral College today is not, as both its supporters and detractors believe, the disproportionate power it gives smaller states. Those states do get a boost from their two Senate-based electoral votes, but that benefit pales in comparison to the real culprit: statewide winner-take-all laws. Under these laws, which states adopted to gain political advantage in the nation’s early years, even though it was never raised by the framers — states award all their electors to the candidate with the most popular votes in their state. The effect is to erase all the voters in that state who didn’t vote for the top candidate.
Today, 48 states use winner-take-all. As a result, most are considered “safe,” that is, comfortably in hand for one party or the other. No amount of campaigning will change that. The only states that matter to either party are the “battleground” states — especially bigger ones like Florida and Pennsylvania, where a swing of a few thousand or even a few hundred votes can shift the entire pot of electors from one candidate to the other.
The corrosiveness of this system isn’t only a modern concern. James Madison, known as the father of the Constitution, was very disturbed by the state winner-take-all rule, which he considered one of the central flaws of the Electoral College as it took shape in the early 19th century.
As Madison wrote in an 1823 letter, states using the winner-take-all rule “are a string of beads” and fail to reflect the true political diversity of their citizens. He disliked the practice so much he called for a constitutional amendment barring it.
It’s not only liberals who understand the problem with winner-take-all. In 1950, a Texas representative named Ed Gossett took to the floor of Congress to vent about the unfairness of a system that gave some voters more influence in the election than others, solely because of where they live. New York was at the time the nation’s largest and most important swing state, and the voters who decided which way it swung were racial and ethnic minorities in large urban areas.
“Now, please understand, I have no objection to the Negro in Harlem voting and to his vote being counted,” Gossett said, “but I do resent the fact that both parties will spend a hundred times as much money to get his vote and that his vote is worth a hundred times as much in the scale of national politics as is the vote of a white man in Texas.”
“Is it fair, is it honest, is it democratic, is it to the best interest of anyone in fact, to place such a premium on a few thousand” votes from racial and ethnic minorities, he went on, “simply because they happen to be located in two or three large, industrial pivotal states?”
Two hundred years after James Madison’s letter, the state winner-take-all rule is still crippling our politics and artificially dividing us. Every four years, tens of millions of Americans’ votes magically disappear before the real election for president happens — about six weeks after Election Day, when 538 electors convene in state capitals across the country to cast their votes for president. “Blue” states give all their electors to the Democrat, no matter how many Republicans voted for their candidate; vice versa in the “red” states.
Given that abolishing the Electoral College is not on the table at the moment, for a number of reasons, the best solution would be to do what Madison tried to do more than two centuries ago: get rid of statewide winner-take-all laws. That can be achieved through the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an agreement among states to award their electors to the candidate who wins the most votes in the whole country, not just within their borders. When states representing a majority of electoral votes join, the compact takes effect, making all Americans’ votes relevant, and all of them equal to one another. The popular-vote winner then automatically becomes president.
If you think this is a plot by bitter Democrats who just want to win, consider this: Texas is going to turn blue. Maybe not this year, maybe not even in 2024. But it’s headed in that direction, and when it gets there, Republicans will be in for an unpleasant surprise. In 2016, Donald Trump won about 4.5 million votes in Texas. The moment the Democratic nominee wins more, all those Republican voters suddenly disappear, along with any realistic shot at winning the White House. As Ed Gossett asked, how is that fair?
Every time a new national poll on the presidential election is released, it’s followed by a chorus of responses along the lines of, Who cares? The national popular vote is meaningless. Well, I care. So do tens of millions of other Americans.
And so does Donald Trump. “The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy,” he tweeted on election night 2012. Why? Because he believed Mitt Romney would win the popular vote and lose the Electoral College. Not only has he never taken that tweet down, but he continues to claim that he won the popular vote in 2016. Why does he care so much about making that case unless he believed in his heart, like the rest of us do, that the person who gets the most votes should win?
THE FBI WARNED FOR YEARS THAT POLICE ARE COZY WITH THE FAR RIGHT. IS NO ONE LISTENING?
By Mike German, former FBI agent and a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program
For decades, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has routinely warned its agents that the white supremacist and far-right militant groups it investigates often have links to law enforcement. Yet the justice department has no national strategy designed to protect the communities policed by these dangerously compromised law enforcers. As our nation grapples with how to reimagine public safety in the wake of the protests following the police killing of George Floyd, it is time to confront and resolve the persistent problem of explicit racism in law enforcement.
I know about these routine warnings because I received them as a young FBI agent preparing to accept an undercover assignment against neo-Nazi groups in Los Angeles, California, in 1992. But you don’t have to take my word for it. A redacted version of a 2006 FBI intelligence assessment, White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement, alerted agents to “both strategic infiltration by organized groups and self-initiated infiltration by law enforcement personnel sympathetic to white supremacist causes”.
A leaked 2015 counter-terrorism policy guide made the case more directly, warning agents that FBI “domestic terrorism investigations focused on militia extremists, white supremacist extremists, and sovereign citizen extremists often have identified active links to law enforcement officers”.
If the government knew that al-Qaida or Isis had infiltrated American law enforcement agencies, it would undoubtedly initiate a nationwide effort to identify them and neutralize the threat they posed. Yet white supremacists and far-right militants have committed far more attacks and killed more people in the US over the last 10 years than any foreign terrorist movement. The FBI regards them as the most lethal domestic terror threat. The need for national action is even more critical.
In recent years, white supremacists have engaged in deadly rampages in Charleston, South Carolina, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and El Paso, Texas. More ominously, neo-Nazis obtained radiological materials to manufacture “dirty” bombs in separate cases in Maine in 2009 and Florida in 2017, which were only avoided through chance.
But in June 2019, when Congressman William Lacy Clay asked the FBI counter-terrorism chief, Michael McGarrity, whether the bureau remained concerned about white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement since the publication of its 2006 assessment, McGarrity indicated he had not read it. Asked more generally about this infiltration, McGarrity said he would be “suspect” of white supremacist police officers, but that their ideology was a first amendment–protected right.
The 2006 assessment addresses this concern, however, by summarizing supreme court precedent on the issue: “Although the First Amendment’s freedom of association provision protects an individual’s right to join white supremacist groups for the purposes of lawful activity, the government can limit the employment opportunities of group members who hold sensitive public sector jobs, including jobs within law enforcement, when their memberships would interfere with their duties.”
More importantly, the FBI’s 2015 counter-terrorism policy, which McGarrity was responsible for executing, indicates not just that members of law enforcement might hold white supremacist views, but that FBI domestic terrorism investigations have often identified “active links” between the subjects of these investigations and law enforcement officials. But its proposed remedy is stunningly inadequate. It simply instructs agents to protect their investigations by using the “silent hit” feature of the Terrorist Screening Center watchlist, so that police officers searching for themselves or their white supremacist associates could not ascertain whether they were under FBI scrutiny.
Of course, one doesn’t need access to secret FBI terrorism investigations to find evidence of explicit racism within law enforcement. Since 2000, law enforcement officials with alleged connections to white supremacist groups or far-right militant activities have been exposed in Alabama, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, Washington and West Virginia, among other states. Research organizations have uncovered hundreds of federal, state and local law enforcement officials participating in racist, nativist and sexist social media activity, which demonstrates that overt bias is far too common.
Law enforcement officials actively affiliating with white supremacist and far-right militant groups pose a serious threat to people of color, religious minorities, LGBTQ people and anti-racist activists. But the police response to nationwide protests that followed the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, includes a number of law enforcement officers across the country flaunting their affiliation with far-right militant groups.
A veteran sheriff’s deputy monitoring a Black Lives Matter protest in Orange county, California, wore patches with logos of the Three Percenters and the Oath Keepers – far-right militant groups that often challenge the federal government’s authority – affixed to his bullet-proof vest.
A 13-year veteran of the Chicago police department with a long history of misconduct complaints was investigated for wearing a face covering with a Three Percenters’ logo while on duty at a recent protest. A supervisor pictured with him at the scene apparently did not order him to remove it.
In Philadelphia, police officers failed to intervene when mostly white mobs armed with bats, clubs and long guns attacked journalists and protesters. The district attorney has vowed to investigate the matter. The following month, however, Philadelphia police officers openly socialized with several men wearing Proud Boys regalia and carrying the group’s flag at a “Back the Blue” party at the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge.
Prosecutors have an important role in protecting the integrity of the criminal justice system from the potential misconduct of explicitly racist officers
Police officers casually fraternizing with armed far-right militia groups at protests is confounding because many states, including California, Illinois and Pennsylvania, have laws barring unregulated paramilitary activities and far-right militants have often killed police officers. The overlap between militia members and the Boogaloo movement – whose adherents have been arrested for inciting a riot in South Carolina, and shooting, bombing and killing police officers in California – highlights the threat that police engagement with these groups poses to their law enforcement partners.
Law enforcement agencies must do more to strengthen their anti-discrimination policies, improve applicant and employee screening, establish reporting mechanisms, and protect and reward officers who report their colleagues’ racist misconduct.
Prosecutors also have an important role in protecting the integrity of the criminal justice system from the potential misconduct of explicitly racist officers. Prosecutors keep a register of law enforcement officers whose previous misconduct could reasonably undermine the reliability of their testimony and need to be disclosed to defense attorneys. This register is often referred to as a “Brady list”.
The Georgetown law professor Vida B Johnson has argued that evidence of a law enforcement officer’s explicitly racist behavior could reasonably be expected to impeach his or her testimony. Prosecutors should be required to include these officers on Brady lists to ensure defendants they testify against have access to the potentially exculpating evidence of their explicitly racist behavior.
My 1992 undercover investigation didn’t reveal any connections between the neo-Nazi bombmakers and weapons traffickers and law enforcement. In fact, the local law enforcement officers that worked with me on the investigation were consummate professionals who I literally trusted with my life. There are many more just like them.
But, however small, the presence of active white supremacists in law enforcement must be treated as a matter of urgent concern. As Professor Johnson has argued, the criminal justice system “can never achieve its purported goal of fairness while white supremacists continue to hide within police departments”.
By Mike German, former FBI agent and a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program
For decades, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has routinely warned its agents that the white supremacist and far-right militant groups it investigates often have links to law enforcement. Yet the justice department has no national strategy designed to protect the communities policed by these dangerously compromised law enforcers. As our nation grapples with how to reimagine public safety in the wake of the protests following the police killing of George Floyd, it is time to confront and resolve the persistent problem of explicit racism in law enforcement.
I know about these routine warnings because I received them as a young FBI agent preparing to accept an undercover assignment against neo-Nazi groups in Los Angeles, California, in 1992. But you don’t have to take my word for it. A redacted version of a 2006 FBI intelligence assessment, White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement, alerted agents to “both strategic infiltration by organized groups and self-initiated infiltration by law enforcement personnel sympathetic to white supremacist causes”.
A leaked 2015 counter-terrorism policy guide made the case more directly, warning agents that FBI “domestic terrorism investigations focused on militia extremists, white supremacist extremists, and sovereign citizen extremists often have identified active links to law enforcement officers”.
If the government knew that al-Qaida or Isis had infiltrated American law enforcement agencies, it would undoubtedly initiate a nationwide effort to identify them and neutralize the threat they posed. Yet white supremacists and far-right militants have committed far more attacks and killed more people in the US over the last 10 years than any foreign terrorist movement. The FBI regards them as the most lethal domestic terror threat. The need for national action is even more critical.
In recent years, white supremacists have engaged in deadly rampages in Charleston, South Carolina, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and El Paso, Texas. More ominously, neo-Nazis obtained radiological materials to manufacture “dirty” bombs in separate cases in Maine in 2009 and Florida in 2017, which were only avoided through chance.
But in June 2019, when Congressman William Lacy Clay asked the FBI counter-terrorism chief, Michael McGarrity, whether the bureau remained concerned about white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement since the publication of its 2006 assessment, McGarrity indicated he had not read it. Asked more generally about this infiltration, McGarrity said he would be “suspect” of white supremacist police officers, but that their ideology was a first amendment–protected right.
The 2006 assessment addresses this concern, however, by summarizing supreme court precedent on the issue: “Although the First Amendment’s freedom of association provision protects an individual’s right to join white supremacist groups for the purposes of lawful activity, the government can limit the employment opportunities of group members who hold sensitive public sector jobs, including jobs within law enforcement, when their memberships would interfere with their duties.”
More importantly, the FBI’s 2015 counter-terrorism policy, which McGarrity was responsible for executing, indicates not just that members of law enforcement might hold white supremacist views, but that FBI domestic terrorism investigations have often identified “active links” between the subjects of these investigations and law enforcement officials. But its proposed remedy is stunningly inadequate. It simply instructs agents to protect their investigations by using the “silent hit” feature of the Terrorist Screening Center watchlist, so that police officers searching for themselves or their white supremacist associates could not ascertain whether they were under FBI scrutiny.
Of course, one doesn’t need access to secret FBI terrorism investigations to find evidence of explicit racism within law enforcement. Since 2000, law enforcement officials with alleged connections to white supremacist groups or far-right militant activities have been exposed in Alabama, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, Washington and West Virginia, among other states. Research organizations have uncovered hundreds of federal, state and local law enforcement officials participating in racist, nativist and sexist social media activity, which demonstrates that overt bias is far too common.
Law enforcement officials actively affiliating with white supremacist and far-right militant groups pose a serious threat to people of color, religious minorities, LGBTQ people and anti-racist activists. But the police response to nationwide protests that followed the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, includes a number of law enforcement officers across the country flaunting their affiliation with far-right militant groups.
A veteran sheriff’s deputy monitoring a Black Lives Matter protest in Orange county, California, wore patches with logos of the Three Percenters and the Oath Keepers – far-right militant groups that often challenge the federal government’s authority – affixed to his bullet-proof vest.
A 13-year veteran of the Chicago police department with a long history of misconduct complaints was investigated for wearing a face covering with a Three Percenters’ logo while on duty at a recent protest. A supervisor pictured with him at the scene apparently did not order him to remove it.
In Philadelphia, police officers failed to intervene when mostly white mobs armed with bats, clubs and long guns attacked journalists and protesters. The district attorney has vowed to investigate the matter. The following month, however, Philadelphia police officers openly socialized with several men wearing Proud Boys regalia and carrying the group’s flag at a “Back the Blue” party at the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge.
Prosecutors have an important role in protecting the integrity of the criminal justice system from the potential misconduct of explicitly racist officers
Police officers casually fraternizing with armed far-right militia groups at protests is confounding because many states, including California, Illinois and Pennsylvania, have laws barring unregulated paramilitary activities and far-right militants have often killed police officers. The overlap between militia members and the Boogaloo movement – whose adherents have been arrested for inciting a riot in South Carolina, and shooting, bombing and killing police officers in California – highlights the threat that police engagement with these groups poses to their law enforcement partners.
Law enforcement agencies must do more to strengthen their anti-discrimination policies, improve applicant and employee screening, establish reporting mechanisms, and protect and reward officers who report their colleagues’ racist misconduct.
Prosecutors also have an important role in protecting the integrity of the criminal justice system from the potential misconduct of explicitly racist officers. Prosecutors keep a register of law enforcement officers whose previous misconduct could reasonably undermine the reliability of their testimony and need to be disclosed to defense attorneys. This register is often referred to as a “Brady list”.
The Georgetown law professor Vida B Johnson has argued that evidence of a law enforcement officer’s explicitly racist behavior could reasonably be expected to impeach his or her testimony. Prosecutors should be required to include these officers on Brady lists to ensure defendants they testify against have access to the potentially exculpating evidence of their explicitly racist behavior.
My 1992 undercover investigation didn’t reveal any connections between the neo-Nazi bombmakers and weapons traffickers and law enforcement. In fact, the local law enforcement officers that worked with me on the investigation were consummate professionals who I literally trusted with my life. There are many more just like them.
But, however small, the presence of active white supremacists in law enforcement must be treated as a matter of urgent concern. As Professor Johnson has argued, the criminal justice system “can never achieve its purported goal of fairness while white supremacists continue to hide within police departments”.
INSIDE THE COMPLETELY NUTSO UNIVERSE OF QANON
An explainer for the conspiracy theory that’s taking over the GOP.
By Will Sommer
The deranged QAnon conspiracy theory movement came close to a presidential endorsement this week when Donald Trump praised the group as “people that love our country,” while refusing to disavow their bizarre beliefs, which include a faith that he’ll eventually arrest and execute his political opponents.
Trump’s remarks were the latest, and perhaps most alarming, illustration of the gains QAnon adherents have made within the GOP even as the FBI warns that it’s a potential domestic terror movement.
But even as more people embrace QAnon—and as its believers are poised to win at least one congressional seat—much of the public remains unaware exactly what it means to believe in QAnon, why anyone should care about the movement, or what QAnon could mean for American politics.
The following is a helpful explanation of the rot taking hold in our political system.
What do QAnon supporters believe?
Nearly all QAnon believers sign on to one basic view: that the world has long been controlled by a sinister “cabal” responsible for a wide array of evils, from wars and famines to diseases, including the novel coronavirus pandemic. This cabal is believed to have tentacles in the top echelons of the Democratic Party, Hollywood, banking, and the government “deep state.”
QAnon believers baselessly think members of this cabal—including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and various Hollywood celebrities—torture and sexually abuse children in Satanic rituals. To stop this, in QAnon’s telling, the military recruited Donald Trump to win the presidency and dethrone the cabal.
Now QAnon believers are eagerly awaiting a day called the “Storm,” in which they believe Trump will order mass arrests of his political opponents and either ship them off to Guantanamo Bay or order them executed outright. QAnon believers think they themselves will play a small role in this purge by educating average citizens about QAnon ahead of the arrests as part of what they call the “Great Awakening.”
Why the hell would they believe this?
QAnon believers got all of these ideas from “Q,” an anonymous message board poster who started leaving messages on the anonymous, anarchic 4Chan message board, in October 2017 predicting Hillary Clinton’s arrest at the end of the month. That didn’t happen, of course, but QAnon grew anyway. Rather than decide that the failure of the Clinton arrest prediction meant QAnon had been discredited, supporters chose to believe that Q had to throw in disinformation into the clues to throw off the deep state—or convinced themselves that the real Hillary Clinton was in jail and the one we see in the news is a clone.
Over time, there have been more than 4,600 clues offered, on everything from imagined attempts to shoot down Air Force One to alleged CIA operations. QAnon fans call these clues “breadcrumbs” or “Q-Drops.”
QAnon believers think Q, whose name is thought to be a reference to a high-level Energy Department security clearance, is a mysterious Trump administration insider relaying encoded clues about the way the world really is. After initially posting on 4Chan, Q migrated to another message board, 8Chan. The most recent QAnon posts are made on 8Chan clone site 8kun, after 8Chan was shut down after hosting the El Paso mass shooter’s manifesto.
But degrees of QAnon belief derived from the clues can vary, ranging from people who have followed even the most twisted trails and now believe the idea that the government is run by reptilian aliens, to more moderate converts who are just convinced that the deep state is out to destroy Trump.
As a sort of mega-conspiracy theory, QAnon can encompass a wide array of other, often conflicting conspiratorial beliefs. Not every QAnon believer holds to the same tenets of QAnon, and the most committed are often engaged in furious online battles with each other over the exact meaning of a QAnon clue.
What does the term “QAnon” come from?
The “Q” in QAnon comes from “Q,” the mystery figure whose clues are closely studied by QAnon believes. Meanwhile, QAnon adherents or “researchers” call themselves “anons,” in a nod to their message-board anonymity. “QAnon” is a combination of “Q” and “Anon.”
So… Who is Q?
Almost nothing is publicly known about “Q.” It’s not even clear whether Q is one person or a group of people, or even whether control of the Q handle has changed hands since 2017. That last question has provoked plenty of schisms in the QAnon community, with various factions arguing over what constitutes a “real” QAnon clue.
QAnon believers, meanwhile, think Q could be anyone from former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to some other current or former administration official.
Just how big is QAnon?
It’s difficult to gauge how many people believe in QAnon, especially because degrees of belief vary—it’s hard to distinguish a hardcore QAnon “researcher” from someone who says they believe in QAnon because they think it just means ardently supporting Trump. Anecdotally, however, there is some evidence that QAnon has gained a significant, if still small, number of supporters.
QAnon believers with Q shirts and signs were visible at Trump rallies in 2018, until security imposed a ban on QAnon paraphernalia. QAnon videos have amassed millions of views, and a pro-QAnon book neared the top of Amazon’s bestseller chart.
Polls typically find that QAnon is unpopular nationally, but 5 percent of respondents in one 2019 poll said they believe in QAnon. While that’s far from a majority of the country, it’s a remarkably high number when you consider how bizarre QAnon believers’ ideas are.
Is QAnon actually dangerous?
The vast majority of QAnon believers will never be inspired to commit crimes or violence by the conspiracy theory. But a worrying fraction of them have, inspiring the FBI to label QAnon as a potential source of domestic terrorism.
In 2018, a QAnon believer with a gun and an improvised armored truck blocked a bridge near the Hoover Dam, demanding that Trump take steps to make a Q prediction “come true.” He ultimately pleaded guilty to one charge of making a terrorist threat, and faces a lengthy prison term. Two QAnon believers have been charged with murder, including the alleged killer of a reputed Mafia boss.
In a worrying sign of new organization among QAnon believers, The Daily Beast uncovered a network of QAnon believers preying on parents and convincing them that the deep state wanted to abduct their children. The network inspired two alleged child kidnapping plots, and appears to have harbored multiple fugitives wanted by law enforcement.
What do QAnon clues look like?
QAnon clues are deliberately cryptic, meaning that Q and their followers can have some plausible deniability when the events that QAnon predicts fail to come through. In one of the first clues, for example, Q wrote:
Where is HRC?
Why is the NG called up across 12 cities?
Trust in your President.
God bless, Patriots.
— Q
You might think it’s clear that “HRC” stands for Hillary Clinton, while “NG” presumably stands for “National Guard.” But these are the kinds of vagaries that QAnon followers can debate for days on their message boards or on Twitter.
Who is the typical QAnon follower?
For the first years of QAnon, the average QAnon follower at rallies looked a lot like the average Trump voter: older, white, Christian, and conservative.
More recently, though, QAnon has managed to diversify its audience, thanks in part to a growing public interest in conspiracy theories fueled by the pandemic and the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, which involves many of the same tenets: powerful people who actually are tied to child sex-trafficking.
QAnon fans also become better at hiding their more outlandish ideas. Using the popular #SaveTheChildren hashtag, for example, they can describe entry-level QAnon ideas as simply a movement against child sex-trafficking. In July, hundreds of people, many of them young and of color, turned out for a “Save The Children” march in Los Angeles carrying QAnon-related signs.
What have Trump and the GOP done about QAnon?
Rather than confront QAnon directly, Trump and many top Republicans have often winked at QAnon, or worse. Trump has frequently retweeted QAnon promoters and even invited some to the White House, while his son Eric Trump posted a QAnon meme on Instagram. Michael Flynn recorded himself in July taking the “QAnon oath,” which QAnon believers took as a powerful sign that their conspiracy theory is real.
QAnon believers have long fixated on the idea of someone asking Trump in a White House press briefing about whether QAnon is real—with the expectation that he would confirm it is. One QAnon believer even offered to infiltrate the White House press corps under a false name in 2018, alarming the Secret Service, according to government records obtained by The Daily Beast.
Trump’s remarks on Aug. 19 fell just short of a heartfelt QAnon endorsement. But Trump’s refusal to shoot down the obviously farcical conspiracy theory has strengthened QAnon believers’ convictions.
What have social networks done to stop QAnon?
While Q posts on anonymous message boards, QAnon relies on mainstream social networks to grow its message beyond the fringes of the internet. The message boards where the clues are published are difficult to use, but potential mainstream converts are used to using sites like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, or TikTok.
Reddit banned QAnon in 2018, sending QAnon followers scrambling to other platforms. Twitter announced a partial crackdown in July, banning 7,000 accounts that had already broken the site’s rules. Twitter also made it harder for QAnon followers to harass their targets or launch trending hashtags. This week, Facebook announced a crackdown of its own targeting QAnon accounts on Facebook and Instagram, including an algorithm ban meant to stop the sites from recommending QAnon content automatically—thereby accidentally sending users down the QAnon rabbit hole.
What’s up with the John F. Kennedy Jr. stuff?
A faction of QAnon believers are convinced that John F. Kennedy Jr. faked his death in a plane crash in 1999, either to become Q or team up with Trump in some other way.
They’re even convinced that one particular Trump supporter, a man named Vincent Fusca Jr., is Kennedy in disguise. Fusca declined to be interviewed, and hasn’t publicly disputed the claim.
While the JFK Jr. fans are controversial even within QAnon, they’re unquestionably enthusiastic. At the Trump-centric Fourth of July celebrations in Washington, D.C., in 2019, several JFK Jr. fans bearing images of him wearing a MAGA hat circulated in Trump’s hotel lobby. When I asked one woman what her JFK Jr. sign meant, she leaned in and whispered, “He’s alive!” before running off.
What is adrenochrome?
Many QAnon adherents believe that the deep-state cabal members aren’t just abusing children for Satanic rituals. Instead, they claim that the torture and abuse produces a blood-like substance called “adrenochrome,” which they claim cabal members and celebrities drink to stay young.
The idea of world elites drinking children’s blood is rife with anti-Semitic tropes— an aspect of QAnon that often isn’t clear when people are first introduced to it.
What do I do if someone close to me starts believing in QAnon?
Reddit forums like QAnon Casualties are filled with stories of anguished people whose relationships with QAnon believers have become strained or which have ended entirely. Conversely, QAnon believers often post themselves about how they have become alienated from their families because of their belief in QAnon.
In this telling, the world of Q research becomes their new “family.”
If you are concerned that someone you know is becoming a QAnon believer, it’s important to not immediately ridicule their new worldview or point out its many factual flaws, according to writer David Neiwert. The author of Red Pill, Blue Pill, an upcoming book on how people can deal on an individual level with conspiracy theories, Neiwert warns that directly attacking QAnon beliefs will convince the QAnon supporter that their friend or relative is a part of the conspiracy themselves.
“It’s really important to maintain the friendship or the relationship that you have with that person throughout,” Neiwert said.
Instead, Neiwert advises people to draw out what personal problems may be drawing someone to QAnon, and talk about how to address those.
“What you’ll find is that everyone who is drawn into this stuff has usually unaddressed grievances or issues,” Neiwert siad.
Unfortunately, there don’t appear to be any easy answers for how to convince a QAnon believer that it’s fake. And there aren’t really any prominent Q-defectors, whose stories could serve as a template for others to follow.
“It’s a long, slow, and frequently very painful process,” Neiwert said.
An explainer for the conspiracy theory that’s taking over the GOP.
By Will Sommer
The deranged QAnon conspiracy theory movement came close to a presidential endorsement this week when Donald Trump praised the group as “people that love our country,” while refusing to disavow their bizarre beliefs, which include a faith that he’ll eventually arrest and execute his political opponents.
Trump’s remarks were the latest, and perhaps most alarming, illustration of the gains QAnon adherents have made within the GOP even as the FBI warns that it’s a potential domestic terror movement.
But even as more people embrace QAnon—and as its believers are poised to win at least one congressional seat—much of the public remains unaware exactly what it means to believe in QAnon, why anyone should care about the movement, or what QAnon could mean for American politics.
The following is a helpful explanation of the rot taking hold in our political system.
What do QAnon supporters believe?
Nearly all QAnon believers sign on to one basic view: that the world has long been controlled by a sinister “cabal” responsible for a wide array of evils, from wars and famines to diseases, including the novel coronavirus pandemic. This cabal is believed to have tentacles in the top echelons of the Democratic Party, Hollywood, banking, and the government “deep state.”
QAnon believers baselessly think members of this cabal—including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and various Hollywood celebrities—torture and sexually abuse children in Satanic rituals. To stop this, in QAnon’s telling, the military recruited Donald Trump to win the presidency and dethrone the cabal.
Now QAnon believers are eagerly awaiting a day called the “Storm,” in which they believe Trump will order mass arrests of his political opponents and either ship them off to Guantanamo Bay or order them executed outright. QAnon believers think they themselves will play a small role in this purge by educating average citizens about QAnon ahead of the arrests as part of what they call the “Great Awakening.”
Why the hell would they believe this?
QAnon believers got all of these ideas from “Q,” an anonymous message board poster who started leaving messages on the anonymous, anarchic 4Chan message board, in October 2017 predicting Hillary Clinton’s arrest at the end of the month. That didn’t happen, of course, but QAnon grew anyway. Rather than decide that the failure of the Clinton arrest prediction meant QAnon had been discredited, supporters chose to believe that Q had to throw in disinformation into the clues to throw off the deep state—or convinced themselves that the real Hillary Clinton was in jail and the one we see in the news is a clone.
Over time, there have been more than 4,600 clues offered, on everything from imagined attempts to shoot down Air Force One to alleged CIA operations. QAnon fans call these clues “breadcrumbs” or “Q-Drops.”
QAnon believers think Q, whose name is thought to be a reference to a high-level Energy Department security clearance, is a mysterious Trump administration insider relaying encoded clues about the way the world really is. After initially posting on 4Chan, Q migrated to another message board, 8Chan. The most recent QAnon posts are made on 8Chan clone site 8kun, after 8Chan was shut down after hosting the El Paso mass shooter’s manifesto.
But degrees of QAnon belief derived from the clues can vary, ranging from people who have followed even the most twisted trails and now believe the idea that the government is run by reptilian aliens, to more moderate converts who are just convinced that the deep state is out to destroy Trump.
As a sort of mega-conspiracy theory, QAnon can encompass a wide array of other, often conflicting conspiratorial beliefs. Not every QAnon believer holds to the same tenets of QAnon, and the most committed are often engaged in furious online battles with each other over the exact meaning of a QAnon clue.
What does the term “QAnon” come from?
The “Q” in QAnon comes from “Q,” the mystery figure whose clues are closely studied by QAnon believes. Meanwhile, QAnon adherents or “researchers” call themselves “anons,” in a nod to their message-board anonymity. “QAnon” is a combination of “Q” and “Anon.”
So… Who is Q?
Almost nothing is publicly known about “Q.” It’s not even clear whether Q is one person or a group of people, or even whether control of the Q handle has changed hands since 2017. That last question has provoked plenty of schisms in the QAnon community, with various factions arguing over what constitutes a “real” QAnon clue.
QAnon believers, meanwhile, think Q could be anyone from former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to some other current or former administration official.
Just how big is QAnon?
It’s difficult to gauge how many people believe in QAnon, especially because degrees of belief vary—it’s hard to distinguish a hardcore QAnon “researcher” from someone who says they believe in QAnon because they think it just means ardently supporting Trump. Anecdotally, however, there is some evidence that QAnon has gained a significant, if still small, number of supporters.
QAnon believers with Q shirts and signs were visible at Trump rallies in 2018, until security imposed a ban on QAnon paraphernalia. QAnon videos have amassed millions of views, and a pro-QAnon book neared the top of Amazon’s bestseller chart.
Polls typically find that QAnon is unpopular nationally, but 5 percent of respondents in one 2019 poll said they believe in QAnon. While that’s far from a majority of the country, it’s a remarkably high number when you consider how bizarre QAnon believers’ ideas are.
Is QAnon actually dangerous?
The vast majority of QAnon believers will never be inspired to commit crimes or violence by the conspiracy theory. But a worrying fraction of them have, inspiring the FBI to label QAnon as a potential source of domestic terrorism.
In 2018, a QAnon believer with a gun and an improvised armored truck blocked a bridge near the Hoover Dam, demanding that Trump take steps to make a Q prediction “come true.” He ultimately pleaded guilty to one charge of making a terrorist threat, and faces a lengthy prison term. Two QAnon believers have been charged with murder, including the alleged killer of a reputed Mafia boss.
In a worrying sign of new organization among QAnon believers, The Daily Beast uncovered a network of QAnon believers preying on parents and convincing them that the deep state wanted to abduct their children. The network inspired two alleged child kidnapping plots, and appears to have harbored multiple fugitives wanted by law enforcement.
What do QAnon clues look like?
QAnon clues are deliberately cryptic, meaning that Q and their followers can have some plausible deniability when the events that QAnon predicts fail to come through. In one of the first clues, for example, Q wrote:
Where is HRC?
Why is the NG called up across 12 cities?
Trust in your President.
God bless, Patriots.
— Q
You might think it’s clear that “HRC” stands for Hillary Clinton, while “NG” presumably stands for “National Guard.” But these are the kinds of vagaries that QAnon followers can debate for days on their message boards or on Twitter.
Who is the typical QAnon follower?
For the first years of QAnon, the average QAnon follower at rallies looked a lot like the average Trump voter: older, white, Christian, and conservative.
More recently, though, QAnon has managed to diversify its audience, thanks in part to a growing public interest in conspiracy theories fueled by the pandemic and the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, which involves many of the same tenets: powerful people who actually are tied to child sex-trafficking.
QAnon fans also become better at hiding their more outlandish ideas. Using the popular #SaveTheChildren hashtag, for example, they can describe entry-level QAnon ideas as simply a movement against child sex-trafficking. In July, hundreds of people, many of them young and of color, turned out for a “Save The Children” march in Los Angeles carrying QAnon-related signs.
What have Trump and the GOP done about QAnon?
Rather than confront QAnon directly, Trump and many top Republicans have often winked at QAnon, or worse. Trump has frequently retweeted QAnon promoters and even invited some to the White House, while his son Eric Trump posted a QAnon meme on Instagram. Michael Flynn recorded himself in July taking the “QAnon oath,” which QAnon believers took as a powerful sign that their conspiracy theory is real.
QAnon believers have long fixated on the idea of someone asking Trump in a White House press briefing about whether QAnon is real—with the expectation that he would confirm it is. One QAnon believer even offered to infiltrate the White House press corps under a false name in 2018, alarming the Secret Service, according to government records obtained by The Daily Beast.
Trump’s remarks on Aug. 19 fell just short of a heartfelt QAnon endorsement. But Trump’s refusal to shoot down the obviously farcical conspiracy theory has strengthened QAnon believers’ convictions.
What have social networks done to stop QAnon?
While Q posts on anonymous message boards, QAnon relies on mainstream social networks to grow its message beyond the fringes of the internet. The message boards where the clues are published are difficult to use, but potential mainstream converts are used to using sites like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, or TikTok.
Reddit banned QAnon in 2018, sending QAnon followers scrambling to other platforms. Twitter announced a partial crackdown in July, banning 7,000 accounts that had already broken the site’s rules. Twitter also made it harder for QAnon followers to harass their targets or launch trending hashtags. This week, Facebook announced a crackdown of its own targeting QAnon accounts on Facebook and Instagram, including an algorithm ban meant to stop the sites from recommending QAnon content automatically—thereby accidentally sending users down the QAnon rabbit hole.
What’s up with the John F. Kennedy Jr. stuff?
A faction of QAnon believers are convinced that John F. Kennedy Jr. faked his death in a plane crash in 1999, either to become Q or team up with Trump in some other way.
They’re even convinced that one particular Trump supporter, a man named Vincent Fusca Jr., is Kennedy in disguise. Fusca declined to be interviewed, and hasn’t publicly disputed the claim.
While the JFK Jr. fans are controversial even within QAnon, they’re unquestionably enthusiastic. At the Trump-centric Fourth of July celebrations in Washington, D.C., in 2019, several JFK Jr. fans bearing images of him wearing a MAGA hat circulated in Trump’s hotel lobby. When I asked one woman what her JFK Jr. sign meant, she leaned in and whispered, “He’s alive!” before running off.
What is adrenochrome?
Many QAnon adherents believe that the deep-state cabal members aren’t just abusing children for Satanic rituals. Instead, they claim that the torture and abuse produces a blood-like substance called “adrenochrome,” which they claim cabal members and celebrities drink to stay young.
The idea of world elites drinking children’s blood is rife with anti-Semitic tropes— an aspect of QAnon that often isn’t clear when people are first introduced to it.
What do I do if someone close to me starts believing in QAnon?
Reddit forums like QAnon Casualties are filled with stories of anguished people whose relationships with QAnon believers have become strained or which have ended entirely. Conversely, QAnon believers often post themselves about how they have become alienated from their families because of their belief in QAnon.
In this telling, the world of Q research becomes their new “family.”
If you are concerned that someone you know is becoming a QAnon believer, it’s important to not immediately ridicule their new worldview or point out its many factual flaws, according to writer David Neiwert. The author of Red Pill, Blue Pill, an upcoming book on how people can deal on an individual level with conspiracy theories, Neiwert warns that directly attacking QAnon beliefs will convince the QAnon supporter that their friend or relative is a part of the conspiracy themselves.
“It’s really important to maintain the friendship or the relationship that you have with that person throughout,” Neiwert said.
Instead, Neiwert advises people to draw out what personal problems may be drawing someone to QAnon, and talk about how to address those.
“What you’ll find is that everyone who is drawn into this stuff has usually unaddressed grievances or issues,” Neiwert siad.
Unfortunately, there don’t appear to be any easy answers for how to convince a QAnon believer that it’s fake. And there aren’t really any prominent Q-defectors, whose stories could serve as a template for others to follow.
“It’s a long, slow, and frequently very painful process,” Neiwert said.
HOW HAS THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE SURVIVED FOR THIS LONG?
Resistance to eliminating it has long been connected to the idea of white supremacy.
By Alexander Keyssar, professor of history and social policy at Harvard.
As our revived national conversation on race has made clear, the legacies of slavery and white supremacy run wide and deep in American society and political life. One such legacy — which is particularly noteworthy in a presidential election season — has been the survival and preservation of the Electoral College, an institution that has been under fire for more than 200 years. Our complicated method of electing presidents has been the target of recurrent reform attempts since the early 19th century, and the politics of race and region have figured prominently in their defeat.
It is, of course, no secret that slavery played a role in the original design of our presidential election system — although historians disagree about the centrality of that role. The notorious formula that gave states representation in Congress for three-fifths of their slaves was carried over into the allocation of electoral votes; the number of electoral votes granted to each state was (and remains) equivalent to that state’s representation in both branches of Congress. This constitutional design gave white Southerners disproportionate influence in the choice of presidents, an edge that could and did affect the outcome of elections.
Not surprisingly, the slave states strenuously opposed any changes to the system that would diminish their advantage. In 1816, when a resolution calling for a national popular vote was introduced in Congress for the first time, it was derailed by the protestations of Southern senators. The slaveholding states “would lose the privilege the Constitution now allows them, of votes upon three-fifths of their population other than freemen,” objected William Wyatt Bibb of Georgia on the floor of the Senate. “It would be deeply injurious to them.”
What is far less known, or recognized, is that long after the abolition of slavery, Southern political leaders continued to resist any attempts to replace the Electoral College with a national popular vote. (They sometimes supported other reforms, like the proportional division of each state’s electoral votes, but those are different strands of a multifaceted tale.) The reasoning behind this opposition was straightforward, if disturbing. After Reconstruction, the white “Redeemer” governments that came to power in Southern states became the political beneficiaries of what amounted to a “five-fifths” clause: African-Americans counted fully toward representation (and thus electoral votes), but they were again disenfranchised — despite the formal protections outlined in the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, which stated that the right to vote could not be denied “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” White Southerners consequently derived an even greater benefit from the Electoral College than they had before the Civil War.
A national popular vote would have eliminated that benefit. As the region’s political leaders recognized, passage of a constitutional amendment instituting a national popular vote would have spawned strong legal and political pressures to enfranchise African-Americans. Even if those pressures could be resisted, an Alabama campaign pamphlet noted in 1914, “with the Negro half of our people not voting, our voice in the national elections, which is now based upon total population, would then be based solely on our voting population and, therefore reduced by half.” The political consequences of a national popular vote could simply not be countenanced.
By the 1940s, many Southerners also came to believe that their disproportionate weight in presidential elections, thanks to the Electoral College, was a critical bulwark against mounting Northern pressures to enlarge the civil and political rights of African-Americans. In 1947 Charles Collins’s “Whither Solid South?,” an influential states’ rights and segregationist treatise, implored Southerners to repel “any attempt to do away with the College because it alone can enable the Southern States to preserve their rights within the Union.” The book, which became must reading among the Dixiecrats who bolted from the Democratic Party in 1948, was highly praised and freely distributed by (among others) the Mississippi segregationist James Eastland, who served in the Senate from 1943 until 1978.
Driven by such convictions, the white supremacist regimes of the South stood as a roadblock in the path of a national popular vote from the latter decades of the 19th century into the 1960s, when the Voting Rights Act and other measures compelled the region to enfranchise African-Americans. There was, of course, resistance to the idea of a national vote elsewhere in the country, but it was the South’s well-known adamance — and the fact that Southern states alone could come close to blocking a constitutional amendment in Congress — that kept the idea on the outskirts of public debate for decades. Numerous political leaders who personally favored a national popular vote, like Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. of Massachusetts, a Republican, in the 1940s, concluded that such a reform had no realistic chance of success, and they shifted their advocacy to less sweeping measures.
The politics of race and region also figured prominently in the stinging defeat of a national popular vote amendment in the Senate in 1970 — the closest that the United States has come to transforming its presidential election system since 1821. Popular and elite support for the idea had mushroomed in the 1960s, leading in 1969 to the House of Representatives voting overwhelmingly in favor of a constitutional amendment that would have abolished the Electoral College. The proposal then got bogged down in the Senate during a year when regional tensions were high: two Southern nominees to the Supreme Court were rejected by the Senate, and the Voting Rights Act was renewed over the vocal opposition of Southern senators. Meanwhile, the national popular vote amendment was stalled in the Judiciary Committee, which was chaired by none other than Senator Eastland.
When the amendment resolution finally came to the floor of the Senate in September 1970, thanks to the prodigious efforts of an Indiana senator, Birch Bayh, it was greeted by a filibuster led by segregationists Sam Ervin and Strom Thurmond (with an assist from the Nebraska Republican Roman Hruska). Although things were changing in the South, its political leaders remained steeped in the values and perspectives that had informed their hostility to the civil rights movement and the Voting Rights Act. “The Electoral College,” wrote Senator James Allen of Alabama in 1969, “is one of the South’s few remaining political safeguards. Let’s keep it.”
The filibuster succeeded, dooming the proposal: attempts to invoke cloture — to end the debate and vote on the amendment itself — fell a few votes short of the two-thirds majority then needed to break a filibuster. The regional lineups in the crucial cloture votes (there were two) were starkly visible. More than 75 percent of Southern senators voted against cloture; a similar proportion of senators from outside the South voted favorably.
Southern political leaders, shaped by segregation and white supremacist beliefs, thus kept the idea of a national popular vote off the table for many decades and played a crucial role in blocking its passage through Congress at a historical juncture when change actually seemed possible. To be sure, electoral reform is almost always a complex, difficult process, with diverse actors competing to defend their ideas and interests. But had the politics of race been less salient, both in the 19th century and the 20th, the Electoral College would most likely have been relegated long ago to the status of a historical curiosity. We might want to keep that sobering fact in mind as we look ahead to an election whose outcome is in question only because of the peculiar manner in which we choose our presidents.
Resistance to eliminating it has long been connected to the idea of white supremacy.
By Alexander Keyssar, professor of history and social policy at Harvard.
As our revived national conversation on race has made clear, the legacies of slavery and white supremacy run wide and deep in American society and political life. One such legacy — which is particularly noteworthy in a presidential election season — has been the survival and preservation of the Electoral College, an institution that has been under fire for more than 200 years. Our complicated method of electing presidents has been the target of recurrent reform attempts since the early 19th century, and the politics of race and region have figured prominently in their defeat.
It is, of course, no secret that slavery played a role in the original design of our presidential election system — although historians disagree about the centrality of that role. The notorious formula that gave states representation in Congress for three-fifths of their slaves was carried over into the allocation of electoral votes; the number of electoral votes granted to each state was (and remains) equivalent to that state’s representation in both branches of Congress. This constitutional design gave white Southerners disproportionate influence in the choice of presidents, an edge that could and did affect the outcome of elections.
Not surprisingly, the slave states strenuously opposed any changes to the system that would diminish their advantage. In 1816, when a resolution calling for a national popular vote was introduced in Congress for the first time, it was derailed by the protestations of Southern senators. The slaveholding states “would lose the privilege the Constitution now allows them, of votes upon three-fifths of their population other than freemen,” objected William Wyatt Bibb of Georgia on the floor of the Senate. “It would be deeply injurious to them.”
What is far less known, or recognized, is that long after the abolition of slavery, Southern political leaders continued to resist any attempts to replace the Electoral College with a national popular vote. (They sometimes supported other reforms, like the proportional division of each state’s electoral votes, but those are different strands of a multifaceted tale.) The reasoning behind this opposition was straightforward, if disturbing. After Reconstruction, the white “Redeemer” governments that came to power in Southern states became the political beneficiaries of what amounted to a “five-fifths” clause: African-Americans counted fully toward representation (and thus electoral votes), but they were again disenfranchised — despite the formal protections outlined in the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, which stated that the right to vote could not be denied “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” White Southerners consequently derived an even greater benefit from the Electoral College than they had before the Civil War.
A national popular vote would have eliminated that benefit. As the region’s political leaders recognized, passage of a constitutional amendment instituting a national popular vote would have spawned strong legal and political pressures to enfranchise African-Americans. Even if those pressures could be resisted, an Alabama campaign pamphlet noted in 1914, “with the Negro half of our people not voting, our voice in the national elections, which is now based upon total population, would then be based solely on our voting population and, therefore reduced by half.” The political consequences of a national popular vote could simply not be countenanced.
By the 1940s, many Southerners also came to believe that their disproportionate weight in presidential elections, thanks to the Electoral College, was a critical bulwark against mounting Northern pressures to enlarge the civil and political rights of African-Americans. In 1947 Charles Collins’s “Whither Solid South?,” an influential states’ rights and segregationist treatise, implored Southerners to repel “any attempt to do away with the College because it alone can enable the Southern States to preserve their rights within the Union.” The book, which became must reading among the Dixiecrats who bolted from the Democratic Party in 1948, was highly praised and freely distributed by (among others) the Mississippi segregationist James Eastland, who served in the Senate from 1943 until 1978.
Driven by such convictions, the white supremacist regimes of the South stood as a roadblock in the path of a national popular vote from the latter decades of the 19th century into the 1960s, when the Voting Rights Act and other measures compelled the region to enfranchise African-Americans. There was, of course, resistance to the idea of a national vote elsewhere in the country, but it was the South’s well-known adamance — and the fact that Southern states alone could come close to blocking a constitutional amendment in Congress — that kept the idea on the outskirts of public debate for decades. Numerous political leaders who personally favored a national popular vote, like Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. of Massachusetts, a Republican, in the 1940s, concluded that such a reform had no realistic chance of success, and they shifted their advocacy to less sweeping measures.
The politics of race and region also figured prominently in the stinging defeat of a national popular vote amendment in the Senate in 1970 — the closest that the United States has come to transforming its presidential election system since 1821. Popular and elite support for the idea had mushroomed in the 1960s, leading in 1969 to the House of Representatives voting overwhelmingly in favor of a constitutional amendment that would have abolished the Electoral College. The proposal then got bogged down in the Senate during a year when regional tensions were high: two Southern nominees to the Supreme Court were rejected by the Senate, and the Voting Rights Act was renewed over the vocal opposition of Southern senators. Meanwhile, the national popular vote amendment was stalled in the Judiciary Committee, which was chaired by none other than Senator Eastland.
When the amendment resolution finally came to the floor of the Senate in September 1970, thanks to the prodigious efforts of an Indiana senator, Birch Bayh, it was greeted by a filibuster led by segregationists Sam Ervin and Strom Thurmond (with an assist from the Nebraska Republican Roman Hruska). Although things were changing in the South, its political leaders remained steeped in the values and perspectives that had informed their hostility to the civil rights movement and the Voting Rights Act. “The Electoral College,” wrote Senator James Allen of Alabama in 1969, “is one of the South’s few remaining political safeguards. Let’s keep it.”
The filibuster succeeded, dooming the proposal: attempts to invoke cloture — to end the debate and vote on the amendment itself — fell a few votes short of the two-thirds majority then needed to break a filibuster. The regional lineups in the crucial cloture votes (there were two) were starkly visible. More than 75 percent of Southern senators voted against cloture; a similar proportion of senators from outside the South voted favorably.
Southern political leaders, shaped by segregation and white supremacist beliefs, thus kept the idea of a national popular vote off the table for many decades and played a crucial role in blocking its passage through Congress at a historical juncture when change actually seemed possible. To be sure, electoral reform is almost always a complex, difficult process, with diverse actors competing to defend their ideas and interests. But had the politics of race been less salient, both in the 19th century and the 20th, the Electoral College would most likely have been relegated long ago to the status of a historical curiosity. We might want to keep that sobering fact in mind as we look ahead to an election whose outcome is in question only because of the peculiar manner in which we choose our presidents.
IT’S NEVER BEEN EASIER FOR THE RICH TO EVADE TAXES
By Gus Wezerek, The New York Times
The Internal Revenue Service is one of the few government agencies that make money. For every 33 cents in its budget, the I.R.S. collects $100. Its budget-to-revenue ratio ranks among the lowest for tax collection agencies in the world.
Yet the I.R.S. also lets hundreds of billions of dollars slip through its fingers each year. This “tax gap” — recent estimates pegged it at $381 billion a year between 2011 and 2013 — comes from people and businesses that underreport their income, pay less than what they owe or owe taxes but simply don’t file a return.
Most of the gap is owed by the wealthy, who can pay accountants to mask their income and lawyers to protect them if the taxman comes knocking.
The I.R.S. asked Congress for $900 million in additional funding to help recover some of the tax gap as part of its 2021 budget request. Clawing back even a quarter of the revenue could pay for proposals like tuition-free public college or an expanded border wall.
But over the past decade, Congress has starved the I.R.S. of badly needed resources. Budget cuts have whittled away at staffing levels and forced auditors to leave hundreds of thousands of identified tax violations on the shelf, essentially unchallenged.
The I.R.S. is facing historically low funding levels this year, even after a $500 million boost from a coronavirus relief bill. The agency’s enforcement budget, which funds tax audits, has been hit especially hard.
As a result of the budget cuts, the I.R.S. instituted a hiring freeze in 2011. Since then, the number of employees has dropped from 94,700 to 73,600 in 2019.
A relatively large share of the staffing losses has been among revenue agents, who take on the complicated, in-person examinations of high-income taxpayer cases.
As enforcement withered, so did the share of returns that were audited and the amount of unpaid taxes that auditors uncovered.
The wealthy have benefited the most from hobbled enforcement.Audits of people making more than $1 million and corporations worth more than $20 billion have plummeted.
All these cuts haven’t gone unnoticed by people looking to skirt the law.One of the few statistics that’s increased since 2010? The number of people who aren’t filing their taxes.
The pandemic has presented a special challenge for the I.R.S. So much unanswered mail flowed in while employees were sheltering at home that the agency rented trailers to store the backlog.
On top of the disruptions due to the coronavirus, the agency was asked to distribute more than 160 million payments as part of coronavirus relief efforts. Also on the agency’s docket: implementing last year’s Taxpayer First Act, which aims to improve the agency’s customer service efforts and expand electronic filing programs.
Add to that the continuing work of modernizing the department’s software (“We still have applications that were running when John F. Kennedy was president,” wrote John Koskinen in 2015, when he was the I.R.S. commissioner) and you have a picture of an agency stretched to its limit. The I.R.S. doesn’t have the resources to give high-income tax audits the attention they deserve.
“There’s no question that more lower-income people are being examined than upper-income people,” said J. Russell George, a Treasury Department inspector general who oversees tax administration, at a House appropriations meeting last year.
Asked to explain the disparities, Mr. George said that “the short answer is resources. A lot of the work that relates to poor people is the type of work that’s relatively simple for the I.R.S. to conduct, especially with the work of junior I.R.S. employees. The more sophisticated the income tax, the more involved it is and the longer it takes.”
When revenue agents do have time to pursue high-income audits, the returns are astounding.
In 2013, agents conducted more than 6,000 audits on taxpayers who made more than $5 million. Those audits resulted in about $880 million of recommended additional taxes. That works out to $4,545 for every hour each agent spent on those cases.
A report last week from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is one more reminder that investing in the I.R.S. pays off. The budget office conservatively estimated that adding $20 billion more to the I.R.S.’s coffers over the next 10 years would result in $61 billion more in revenue.
As the government looks for ways to keep Americans afloat during the recession, Congress can’t afford to keep the I.R.S.’s hands tied. Authorizing the agency’s 2021 budget request in full is the least the government can do to make sure every taxpayer — especially the rich ones — pay their fair share.
By Gus Wezerek, The New York Times
The Internal Revenue Service is one of the few government agencies that make money. For every 33 cents in its budget, the I.R.S. collects $100. Its budget-to-revenue ratio ranks among the lowest for tax collection agencies in the world.
Yet the I.R.S. also lets hundreds of billions of dollars slip through its fingers each year. This “tax gap” — recent estimates pegged it at $381 billion a year between 2011 and 2013 — comes from people and businesses that underreport their income, pay less than what they owe or owe taxes but simply don’t file a return.
Most of the gap is owed by the wealthy, who can pay accountants to mask their income and lawyers to protect them if the taxman comes knocking.
The I.R.S. asked Congress for $900 million in additional funding to help recover some of the tax gap as part of its 2021 budget request. Clawing back even a quarter of the revenue could pay for proposals like tuition-free public college or an expanded border wall.
But over the past decade, Congress has starved the I.R.S. of badly needed resources. Budget cuts have whittled away at staffing levels and forced auditors to leave hundreds of thousands of identified tax violations on the shelf, essentially unchallenged.
The I.R.S. is facing historically low funding levels this year, even after a $500 million boost from a coronavirus relief bill. The agency’s enforcement budget, which funds tax audits, has been hit especially hard.
As a result of the budget cuts, the I.R.S. instituted a hiring freeze in 2011. Since then, the number of employees has dropped from 94,700 to 73,600 in 2019.
A relatively large share of the staffing losses has been among revenue agents, who take on the complicated, in-person examinations of high-income taxpayer cases.
As enforcement withered, so did the share of returns that were audited and the amount of unpaid taxes that auditors uncovered.
The wealthy have benefited the most from hobbled enforcement.Audits of people making more than $1 million and corporations worth more than $20 billion have plummeted.
All these cuts haven’t gone unnoticed by people looking to skirt the law.One of the few statistics that’s increased since 2010? The number of people who aren’t filing their taxes.
The pandemic has presented a special challenge for the I.R.S. So much unanswered mail flowed in while employees were sheltering at home that the agency rented trailers to store the backlog.
On top of the disruptions due to the coronavirus, the agency was asked to distribute more than 160 million payments as part of coronavirus relief efforts. Also on the agency’s docket: implementing last year’s Taxpayer First Act, which aims to improve the agency’s customer service efforts and expand electronic filing programs.
Add to that the continuing work of modernizing the department’s software (“We still have applications that were running when John F. Kennedy was president,” wrote John Koskinen in 2015, when he was the I.R.S. commissioner) and you have a picture of an agency stretched to its limit. The I.R.S. doesn’t have the resources to give high-income tax audits the attention they deserve.
“There’s no question that more lower-income people are being examined than upper-income people,” said J. Russell George, a Treasury Department inspector general who oversees tax administration, at a House appropriations meeting last year.
Asked to explain the disparities, Mr. George said that “the short answer is resources. A lot of the work that relates to poor people is the type of work that’s relatively simple for the I.R.S. to conduct, especially with the work of junior I.R.S. employees. The more sophisticated the income tax, the more involved it is and the longer it takes.”
When revenue agents do have time to pursue high-income audits, the returns are astounding.
In 2013, agents conducted more than 6,000 audits on taxpayers who made more than $5 million. Those audits resulted in about $880 million of recommended additional taxes. That works out to $4,545 for every hour each agent spent on those cases.
A report last week from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is one more reminder that investing in the I.R.S. pays off. The budget office conservatively estimated that adding $20 billion more to the I.R.S.’s coffers over the next 10 years would result in $61 billion more in revenue.
As the government looks for ways to keep Americans afloat during the recession, Congress can’t afford to keep the I.R.S.’s hands tied. Authorizing the agency’s 2021 budget request in full is the least the government can do to make sure every taxpayer — especially the rich ones — pay their fair share.
THE REAL HORROR OF ‘JAWS’ ISN’T THE SHARK
It’s the leader who initially values capitalism over saving lives.
By Jennifer Weiner, The New York Times
I didn’t recall the real horror of the movie. Or maybe, the last time I saw it, I was too young to understand that the shark was simply doing what a shark is built to do, and that the true villain is not the coldblooded predator — it’s the warm-blooded mayor.
“All I’m saying is that Amity is a summer town — we need summer dollars,” Mayor Larry Vaughn argues after the first attack, when the chief of police wants to close the beaches. It was a phrase that could have been ripped off for a speech by one of the Republican officials who initially refused to shut down his state’s beaches or insisted on reopening the bars.
Even in the face of the gruesome evidence, Mayor Vaughn decides that the victim had been killed by a fishing boat. He tells the police chief that he’s being too hasty — “You yell ‘shark,’ we’ve got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July.”
The beaches stay open. The shark kills again, its victim, this time, a young boy.
On the dock, the boy’s grieving mother gives the chief of police — the one man who had been trying to do the right thing — a hard slap across his face. “You knew there was a shark out there,” she says. “You knew it was dangerous. But you let people go swimming anyway. You knew all those things. But still my boy is dead now.”
I found myself bracing for a Trumpian response — for the police chief to say that he didn’t take responsibility, or to talk up Amity’s great job numbers, or to point out that most swimmers will not get bitten by a shark, and that almost all young people who do get attacked make complete recoveries. I prepared for fringe theories or culture-war distractions, maybe a rant about how the hippies were the real threat to Amity’s way of life.
But the chief, Martin Brody, doesn’t bluster, doesn’t counterpunch or pass the buck or stage a photo op. When the mayor apologizes after the mother’s outburst, saying, “I’m sorry, Martin. She’s wrong,” Chief Brody responds, “No, she’s not.” His shoulders slump, as if he’s taken on the weight of the mother’s grief and sorrow, and he walks away without another word.
The chastened mayor releases funds for a shark hunt, and the police chief, in the company of a nerdy scientist and a grizzled old salt, goes off to vanquish the underwater enemy. There is tension. There’s tragedy. Finally, there is triumph. The police chief blows up the shark and dog-paddles home.
It was hard not to think about our real-life, real-time horror: a pandemic that continues to disproportionately affect the poor, Black people and Latinos (and that has taken the life of the actress who played that mourning mother in “Jaws”).
Masks have been politicized to the point that donning one is akin to sporting a “Biden for President” bumper sticker on your face. And instead of a leader who steps up to do the right thing, we’ve got a president who delights in divisiveness and wallows in woe-is-me, while too many of his fellow Republicans, loath to cross him, seem to care more about those summer dollars than dead citizens or grieving families. Instead of a boat on the water, we’ve got heads in the sand.
I imagined our country as the first girl to die in every horror movie, the pretty one who falls victim to the monster or the serial killer. The one who is blithely certain of her own invincibility, or maybe just bored with taking precautions. The one who goes down to the basement or up to the attic as the audience screams that she shouldn’t, knowing what will happen to her if she does.
This shouldn’t be so hard. It shouldn’t be so hard for the government to support workers. It shouldn’t be so hard for citizens to stay home as much as possible, to wear a cloth mask, to postpone birthday parties and barbecues. From the Ozarks to Fire Island to the Jersey Shore, we’ve all seen pictures of Americans who won’t deny themselves their summer pleasures, insisting they happen just as they always have.
But how can we be surprised? Our leader is standing knee-deep in the shallows, smiling and beckoning and telling us that the water’s fine.
It’s the leader who initially values capitalism over saving lives.
By Jennifer Weiner, The New York Times
I didn’t recall the real horror of the movie. Or maybe, the last time I saw it, I was too young to understand that the shark was simply doing what a shark is built to do, and that the true villain is not the coldblooded predator — it’s the warm-blooded mayor.
“All I’m saying is that Amity is a summer town — we need summer dollars,” Mayor Larry Vaughn argues after the first attack, when the chief of police wants to close the beaches. It was a phrase that could have been ripped off for a speech by one of the Republican officials who initially refused to shut down his state’s beaches or insisted on reopening the bars.
Even in the face of the gruesome evidence, Mayor Vaughn decides that the victim had been killed by a fishing boat. He tells the police chief that he’s being too hasty — “You yell ‘shark,’ we’ve got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July.”
The beaches stay open. The shark kills again, its victim, this time, a young boy.
On the dock, the boy’s grieving mother gives the chief of police — the one man who had been trying to do the right thing — a hard slap across his face. “You knew there was a shark out there,” she says. “You knew it was dangerous. But you let people go swimming anyway. You knew all those things. But still my boy is dead now.”
I found myself bracing for a Trumpian response — for the police chief to say that he didn’t take responsibility, or to talk up Amity’s great job numbers, or to point out that most swimmers will not get bitten by a shark, and that almost all young people who do get attacked make complete recoveries. I prepared for fringe theories or culture-war distractions, maybe a rant about how the hippies were the real threat to Amity’s way of life.
But the chief, Martin Brody, doesn’t bluster, doesn’t counterpunch or pass the buck or stage a photo op. When the mayor apologizes after the mother’s outburst, saying, “I’m sorry, Martin. She’s wrong,” Chief Brody responds, “No, she’s not.” His shoulders slump, as if he’s taken on the weight of the mother’s grief and sorrow, and he walks away without another word.
The chastened mayor releases funds for a shark hunt, and the police chief, in the company of a nerdy scientist and a grizzled old salt, goes off to vanquish the underwater enemy. There is tension. There’s tragedy. Finally, there is triumph. The police chief blows up the shark and dog-paddles home.
It was hard not to think about our real-life, real-time horror: a pandemic that continues to disproportionately affect the poor, Black people and Latinos (and that has taken the life of the actress who played that mourning mother in “Jaws”).
Masks have been politicized to the point that donning one is akin to sporting a “Biden for President” bumper sticker on your face. And instead of a leader who steps up to do the right thing, we’ve got a president who delights in divisiveness and wallows in woe-is-me, while too many of his fellow Republicans, loath to cross him, seem to care more about those summer dollars than dead citizens or grieving families. Instead of a boat on the water, we’ve got heads in the sand.
I imagined our country as the first girl to die in every horror movie, the pretty one who falls victim to the monster or the serial killer. The one who is blithely certain of her own invincibility, or maybe just bored with taking precautions. The one who goes down to the basement or up to the attic as the audience screams that she shouldn’t, knowing what will happen to her if she does.
This shouldn’t be so hard. It shouldn’t be so hard for the government to support workers. It shouldn’t be so hard for citizens to stay home as much as possible, to wear a cloth mask, to postpone birthday parties and barbecues. From the Ozarks to Fire Island to the Jersey Shore, we’ve all seen pictures of Americans who won’t deny themselves their summer pleasures, insisting they happen just as they always have.
But how can we be surprised? Our leader is standing knee-deep in the shallows, smiling and beckoning and telling us that the water’s fine.
WHAT IF WE TREATED CONFEDERATE SYMBOLS THE WAY WE TREATED THE DEFEATED NAZIS?
By John Semley
Earlier this month, amid America’s confrontation with its racist legacy – which has seen monuments to Jefferson Davis toppled, the Mississippi state flag lowered, Gone With the Wind pulled from HBO’s streaming service, and music groups such as Lady Antebellum and the Dixie Chicks rebranding in an effort to distance themselves from memory of the Confederacy – I came across a tweet that put these headline-grabbing goings-on, and the backlash to them, in perspective: “Trying to imagine a version of WW2 where the Nazis just get pushed into Bavaria and surrender, but keep the swastika on the state flag, slap it on their cars and say stuff like ‘The Third Reich is my heritage.’”
The tweet, by the popular history YouTuber Three Arrows, was tagged with “lol” – as if to drive home just how absurd it would be to see the grandkids of former Nazis puttering around Munich in VWs adorned with swastika bumper stickers, like something out of a pulpy alt-history novel. It’s an idea so sinister as to seem cartoonish, and laughable. But something similar goes on in America all of the time.
In Germany, you won’t hear debates about Nazi statues. As the moral philosopher Susan Neiman, author of Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, notes, there’s a good reason for that: there aren’t any Nazi statues. The program of denazification began almost immediately after the second world war, established as one of “Four Ds” (along with demilitarization, decentralization and democratization) outlined in the Potsdam agreement of 1945. An Allied order in 1946 declared illegal “any monument, memorial, poster, statue, edifice, street or highway name marker, emblem, tablet, or insignia which tends to preserve and keep alive the German military tradition, to revive militarism or to commemorate the Nazi Party”.
Known Nazi party members were sacked from their jobs, and forced into cinemas screening footage of concentration camps. To this day, section 86a of the German criminal code prohibits the “use of symbols of unconstitutional organizations”, the Nazi party chief among them.
America’s post-civil war treatment of the slave-owning Confederate states has proved, in a word, different. Although the Confederacy lost the war, it hasn’t always felt that way for Black southerners. After Union troops departed, Black Americans endured decades of terrorist violence perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan and other anti-Black paramilitary groups, plus segregation and humiliation under Jim Crow.
After their historic drubbing, white southerners waged skirmishes on new fronts, reframing Confederate troops as valiant heroes in the “War of Yankee Aggression”, and recasting chattel slavery not as an abject moral horror, but a matter of states’ rights. The Confederate battle flag was raised over government buildings, monuments to anti-abolitionists were erected in town squares, and popular entertainments such as Gone With the Wind posited the Confederacy as a noble “lost cause”.
The civil war was followed by more than a century of calculated misremembering, proving the French historian Ernest Renan’s maxim that forgetting is “a crucial factor in the creation of a nation”. This southern memorialization, which unfolded against the backdrop of southern segregation as a means of enshrining the legacy of white supremacy, is itself the sort of “erasure of history” that contemporary apologists drone on about when confronted with the righteous keeling of a statue, or the narrowing availability of an 80-year-old movie most people have already seen.
Drained of its historical context, the Confederacy came to stand for something like rebellion, or even something uncomplicatedly virtuous
This commemoration morphed, throughout the 20th century, into kitsch. Confederate iconography was embossed on to truck stop baseball caps, covers of Lynyrd Skynyrd albums, and the roofs of souped-up Dodge Chargers. Where neo-Nazism is rightly regarded as a detestable fringe concern, southern pride became a point of acceptable cultural affiliation, like rooting for a given sports team or preferring a certain brand of beer.
Deliberately drained of its historical context, the Confederacy came to stand for something like rebellion, or even something uncomplicatedly virtuous. In fact, the Confederacy was about upholding the institution of slavery in a nation that pretends to hold the equality of all as self-evident truth.
Looking to Germany for lessons on how to respond to historical crimes is incredibly valuable. As Neiman and others have argued, the process of denazification didn’t happen overnight. Many Germans resisted re-education. A 1952 poll showed two in five West Germans freely admitting they believed their nation would be better without Jews. It wasn’t enough to merely denazify. Germany, and Germans, had to be confronted with their horrors. A culture of remembrance (Erinnerungskultur) emerged to implicate citizens in, and engage them with, their terrible history. German police cadets, for example, are required to visit former death camps, in order to understand first-hand the atrocities of Nazi policing. In 1992, the artist Gunter Demnig began installing raised stones called Stolpersteine (or “stumbling blocks”) at the shops or last known residences of Nazism’s victims.
Changing public conceptions of historical memory is hard work. But the case of postwar Germany shows that a serious national self-reckoning is not only doable, but worth it. Perhaps, in time, the very idea of a truck ripping around the American south, proudly brandishing a Confederate bumper sticker, will seem so ludicrous as to be laughable.
By John Semley
Earlier this month, amid America’s confrontation with its racist legacy – which has seen monuments to Jefferson Davis toppled, the Mississippi state flag lowered, Gone With the Wind pulled from HBO’s streaming service, and music groups such as Lady Antebellum and the Dixie Chicks rebranding in an effort to distance themselves from memory of the Confederacy – I came across a tweet that put these headline-grabbing goings-on, and the backlash to them, in perspective: “Trying to imagine a version of WW2 where the Nazis just get pushed into Bavaria and surrender, but keep the swastika on the state flag, slap it on their cars and say stuff like ‘The Third Reich is my heritage.’”
The tweet, by the popular history YouTuber Three Arrows, was tagged with “lol” – as if to drive home just how absurd it would be to see the grandkids of former Nazis puttering around Munich in VWs adorned with swastika bumper stickers, like something out of a pulpy alt-history novel. It’s an idea so sinister as to seem cartoonish, and laughable. But something similar goes on in America all of the time.
In Germany, you won’t hear debates about Nazi statues. As the moral philosopher Susan Neiman, author of Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, notes, there’s a good reason for that: there aren’t any Nazi statues. The program of denazification began almost immediately after the second world war, established as one of “Four Ds” (along with demilitarization, decentralization and democratization) outlined in the Potsdam agreement of 1945. An Allied order in 1946 declared illegal “any monument, memorial, poster, statue, edifice, street or highway name marker, emblem, tablet, or insignia which tends to preserve and keep alive the German military tradition, to revive militarism or to commemorate the Nazi Party”.
Known Nazi party members were sacked from their jobs, and forced into cinemas screening footage of concentration camps. To this day, section 86a of the German criminal code prohibits the “use of symbols of unconstitutional organizations”, the Nazi party chief among them.
America’s post-civil war treatment of the slave-owning Confederate states has proved, in a word, different. Although the Confederacy lost the war, it hasn’t always felt that way for Black southerners. After Union troops departed, Black Americans endured decades of terrorist violence perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan and other anti-Black paramilitary groups, plus segregation and humiliation under Jim Crow.
After their historic drubbing, white southerners waged skirmishes on new fronts, reframing Confederate troops as valiant heroes in the “War of Yankee Aggression”, and recasting chattel slavery not as an abject moral horror, but a matter of states’ rights. The Confederate battle flag was raised over government buildings, monuments to anti-abolitionists were erected in town squares, and popular entertainments such as Gone With the Wind posited the Confederacy as a noble “lost cause”.
The civil war was followed by more than a century of calculated misremembering, proving the French historian Ernest Renan’s maxim that forgetting is “a crucial factor in the creation of a nation”. This southern memorialization, which unfolded against the backdrop of southern segregation as a means of enshrining the legacy of white supremacy, is itself the sort of “erasure of history” that contemporary apologists drone on about when confronted with the righteous keeling of a statue, or the narrowing availability of an 80-year-old movie most people have already seen.
Drained of its historical context, the Confederacy came to stand for something like rebellion, or even something uncomplicatedly virtuous
This commemoration morphed, throughout the 20th century, into kitsch. Confederate iconography was embossed on to truck stop baseball caps, covers of Lynyrd Skynyrd albums, and the roofs of souped-up Dodge Chargers. Where neo-Nazism is rightly regarded as a detestable fringe concern, southern pride became a point of acceptable cultural affiliation, like rooting for a given sports team or preferring a certain brand of beer.
Deliberately drained of its historical context, the Confederacy came to stand for something like rebellion, or even something uncomplicatedly virtuous. In fact, the Confederacy was about upholding the institution of slavery in a nation that pretends to hold the equality of all as self-evident truth.
Looking to Germany for lessons on how to respond to historical crimes is incredibly valuable. As Neiman and others have argued, the process of denazification didn’t happen overnight. Many Germans resisted re-education. A 1952 poll showed two in five West Germans freely admitting they believed their nation would be better without Jews. It wasn’t enough to merely denazify. Germany, and Germans, had to be confronted with their horrors. A culture of remembrance (Erinnerungskultur) emerged to implicate citizens in, and engage them with, their terrible history. German police cadets, for example, are required to visit former death camps, in order to understand first-hand the atrocities of Nazi policing. In 1992, the artist Gunter Demnig began installing raised stones called Stolpersteine (or “stumbling blocks”) at the shops or last known residences of Nazism’s victims.
Changing public conceptions of historical memory is hard work. But the case of postwar Germany shows that a serious national self-reckoning is not only doable, but worth it. Perhaps, in time, the very idea of a truck ripping around the American south, proudly brandishing a Confederate bumper sticker, will seem so ludicrous as to be laughable.
THE U.S. IS LAGGING BEHIND MANY RICH COUNTRIES. AVAILABLE INFORMATION SHOW WHY.
By David Leonhardt and Yaryna Serkez, The New York Times
The United States is different. In nearly every other high-income country, people have both become richer over the last three decades and been able to enjoy substantially longer lifespans.
But not in the United States. Even as average incomes have risen, much of the economic gains have gone to the affluent — and life expectancy has risen only three years since 1990. There is no other developed country that has suffered such a stark slowdown in lifespans.
Why has this happened? There are multiple causes. But one big one is a lack of political power among the bulk of the population.
Government policy and economic forces have combined to make corporations and the wealthy more powerful, and most workers and their families less powerful. These workers receive a smaller share of society’s resources than they once did and often have less control over their lives. Those lives are generally shorter and more likely to be affected by pollution and chronic health problems.
Here, we show you a series of measures — about power, living standards and more — for a variety of countries. Together, they portray the disturbing new version of American exceptionalism.
We’ll start with union membership.
People in labor unions make substantially more money than similar nonunionized workers, academic research shows. And the share of Americans in unions has plummeted from 35 percent in the mid-1950s to about 10 percent today. The rate is even lower — about 6.2 percent — for private-sector workers.
The decline has happened largely because employers have become more aggressive about keeping out unions and government policy has made it easier for them to do so.
Unionization rates in many other countries are higher:
The decline in unionization is one reason that the share of total national income flowing to corporate profits has risen — and the share going to worker pay has declined. The trend is starker in the U.S. than in Europe.
Share of the economy going to worker pay
Higher profits have helped make the United States an outlier on executive pay, too. Although executives’ salaries have risen in most countries, relative to those of workers, in recent decades, the trend is more extreme in the U.S.:
Government policy plays an important role: The minimum wage is higher in other countries than it is in much of the United States. Some states have set a minimum wage higher than the federal standard, but many states in the South — home to large Black populations — have not.
In addition to minimum wage, the United States has done less to combat rising corporate concentration. Large U.S. companies are better able to hold down the wages of workers, who don’t always have good employment options, and are also able to charge higher prices because of less competition.
One example: American consumers pay significantly more for cellphone service than people in many other countries.
Arguably the biggest outlier is the American health care system. Prices for drugs, medical procedures and doctors’ visits are all substantially higher in the United States than in other countries. The U.S. also suffers from bureaucratic inefficiency, because of a complex health care system that spans the private sector, state governments and the federal government.
In all, Americans pay almost twice as much on average for medical care as citizens of other rich countries. And as you may remember from the opening chart in this article, Americans are far from the world’s healthiest people.
Incarceration plays an important role, too. No other wealthy country puts as many people behind bars — and the prison population is disproportionately Black and Latino.
Time in prison casts a long shadow, leaving people with lingering health problems as well as permanently damaging their ability to find decent-paying work. Mass incarceration is a major reason that, even before the pandemic hit, about 30 percent of middle-aged Black men were not working in a typical week. Many of them do not count as unemployed because they are incarcerated or because they have stopped looking for work.
And a final example of how government policy exacerbates the unique inequality in the United States: tax policy.
In some other countries, like France, high-income households still pay more than half of their income in taxes on average. In the U.S., tax rates on the affluent are lower — and have fallen sharply in recent decades.
These trends have combined to increase economic inequality. The middle class and poor receive a smaller share of national income in the U.S. than in much of Europe, while the rich receive a greater share:
If anything, these statistics understate American exceptionalism on inequality, because Americans also work longer hours for their pay than workers in many other places:
The most common way to think about inequality is as an economic story. And it is that. But it is also a story about political power, quality of life and even the amount of time that members of different classes can expect to live.
By David Leonhardt and Yaryna Serkez, The New York Times
The United States is different. In nearly every other high-income country, people have both become richer over the last three decades and been able to enjoy substantially longer lifespans.
But not in the United States. Even as average incomes have risen, much of the economic gains have gone to the affluent — and life expectancy has risen only three years since 1990. There is no other developed country that has suffered such a stark slowdown in lifespans.
Why has this happened? There are multiple causes. But one big one is a lack of political power among the bulk of the population.
Government policy and economic forces have combined to make corporations and the wealthy more powerful, and most workers and their families less powerful. These workers receive a smaller share of society’s resources than they once did and often have less control over their lives. Those lives are generally shorter and more likely to be affected by pollution and chronic health problems.
Here, we show you a series of measures — about power, living standards and more — for a variety of countries. Together, they portray the disturbing new version of American exceptionalism.
We’ll start with union membership.
People in labor unions make substantially more money than similar nonunionized workers, academic research shows. And the share of Americans in unions has plummeted from 35 percent in the mid-1950s to about 10 percent today. The rate is even lower — about 6.2 percent — for private-sector workers.
The decline has happened largely because employers have become more aggressive about keeping out unions and government policy has made it easier for them to do so.
Unionization rates in many other countries are higher:
The decline in unionization is one reason that the share of total national income flowing to corporate profits has risen — and the share going to worker pay has declined. The trend is starker in the U.S. than in Europe.
Share of the economy going to worker pay
Higher profits have helped make the United States an outlier on executive pay, too. Although executives’ salaries have risen in most countries, relative to those of workers, in recent decades, the trend is more extreme in the U.S.:
Government policy plays an important role: The minimum wage is higher in other countries than it is in much of the United States. Some states have set a minimum wage higher than the federal standard, but many states in the South — home to large Black populations — have not.
In addition to minimum wage, the United States has done less to combat rising corporate concentration. Large U.S. companies are better able to hold down the wages of workers, who don’t always have good employment options, and are also able to charge higher prices because of less competition.
One example: American consumers pay significantly more for cellphone service than people in many other countries.
Arguably the biggest outlier is the American health care system. Prices for drugs, medical procedures and doctors’ visits are all substantially higher in the United States than in other countries. The U.S. also suffers from bureaucratic inefficiency, because of a complex health care system that spans the private sector, state governments and the federal government.
In all, Americans pay almost twice as much on average for medical care as citizens of other rich countries. And as you may remember from the opening chart in this article, Americans are far from the world’s healthiest people.
Incarceration plays an important role, too. No other wealthy country puts as many people behind bars — and the prison population is disproportionately Black and Latino.
Time in prison casts a long shadow, leaving people with lingering health problems as well as permanently damaging their ability to find decent-paying work. Mass incarceration is a major reason that, even before the pandemic hit, about 30 percent of middle-aged Black men were not working in a typical week. Many of them do not count as unemployed because they are incarcerated or because they have stopped looking for work.
And a final example of how government policy exacerbates the unique inequality in the United States: tax policy.
In some other countries, like France, high-income households still pay more than half of their income in taxes on average. In the U.S., tax rates on the affluent are lower — and have fallen sharply in recent decades.
These trends have combined to increase economic inequality. The middle class and poor receive a smaller share of national income in the U.S. than in much of Europe, while the rich receive a greater share:
If anything, these statistics understate American exceptionalism on inequality, because Americans also work longer hours for their pay than workers in many other places:
The most common way to think about inequality is as an economic story. And it is that. But it is also a story about political power, quality of life and even the amount of time that members of different classes can expect to live.
WHY DO THE RICH HAVE SO MUCH POWER?
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
America is, in principle, a democracy, in which every vote counts the same. It’s also a nation in which income inequality has soared, a development that hurts many more people than it helps. So if you didn’t know better, you might have expected to see a political backlash: demands for higher taxes on the rich, more spending on the working class and higher wages.
In reality, however, policy has mostly gone the other way. Tax rates on corporations and high incomes have gone down, unions have been crushed, the minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, is lower than it was in the 1960s. How is that possible?
The answer is that huge disparities in income and wealth translate into comparable disparities in political influence. To see how this works, let’s look at a fairly recent example: the budgetary Grand Bargain that almost happened in 2011.
At the time, Washington was firmly in the grip of deficit fever. Even though the federal government was able to borrow at historically low interest rates, everyone who mattered seemed to be saying that the budget deficit was the most important issue facing America and that it was essential to rein in spending on Social Security and Medicare.
So the Obama administration offered congressional Republicans a deal: cuts in Social Security and Medicare in return for slightly higher taxes on the wealthy. The deal foundered only because the party refused to accept even a small tax increase.
The question is, who wanted such a deal? Not the American public.
Voters in general weren’t all that worried about budget deficits. While most Americans believed that the deficit should be reduced — they always do — a CBS poll in early 2011 found only 6 percent of the public named the deficit as the most important issue, compared with 51 percent citing the economy and jobs.
Both the Obama administration and Republicans were staking out positions that flew in the face of public desires. A large majority has consistently wanted to see Social Security benefits expanded, not cut. A comparably large majority has consistently said that upper-income Americans pay too little, not too much, in taxes.
So whose interests were actually reflected in the 2011 budget fight? The wealthy.
A groundbreaking study of rich Americans’ policy preferences in 2011 found that the wealthy, unlike voters in general, did prioritize deficit reduction over everything else. They also, in stark contrast with the general public, favored cuts in Social Security and health spending.
And while a few high-profile billionaires like Warren Buffett have called for higher taxes on people like themselves, the reality is that most billionaires are obsessed with cutting taxes, like the estate tax, that only the rich pay.
In other words, in 2011 a Democratic administration went all-in on behalf of a policy concern that only the rich gave priority and failed to reach a deal only because Republicans didn’t want the rich to bear any burden at all.
Why do the wealthy have so much influence over politics?
Campaign contributions, historically dominated by the wealthy, are part of the story. A 2015 Times report found that at that point fewer than 400 families accounted for almost half the money raised in the 2016 presidential campaign. This matters both directly — politicians who propose big tax increases on the rich can’t expect to see much of their money — and indirectly: Wealthy donors have access to politicians in a way ordinary Americans don’t and play a disproportionate role in shaping policymakers’ worldview.
However, the influence of money on politics goes far beyond campaign contributions. Outright bribery probably isn’t much of a factor , but there are nonetheless major personal financial rewards for political figures who support the interests of the wealthy. Pro-plutocrat politicians who stumble, like Eric Cantor, the former House whip — who famously celebrated Labor Day by honoring business owners — quickly find lucrative positions in the private sector, jobs in right-wing media or well-paid sinecures at conservative think tanks. Do you think there’s a comparable safety net in place for the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ilhan Omar?
And even the issues that the news media discuss often reflect a rich person’s agenda. Advertising dollars explain some of this bias, but a lot of it probably reflects subtler factors, like the (often false) belief that people who’ve made a lot of money have special insight into how the nation as a whole can achieve prosperity.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the fixation on cutting benefits in the early 2010s was the extent to which it was treated not as a controversial position but as the undeniably right thing to do. As Ezra Klein pointed out in The Washington Post at the time: “For reasons I’ve never quite understood, the rules of reportorial neutrality don’t apply when it comes to the deficit. On this one issue, reporters are permitted to openly cheer a particular set of highly controversial policy solutions.”
In a variety of ways, then, America’s wealthy exert huge political influence. Our ideals say that all men are created equal, but in practice a small minority is far more equal than the rest of us.
You don’t want to be too cynical about this. No, America isn’t simply an oligarchy in which the rich always get what they want. In the end, President Barack Obama presided over both the Affordable Care Act, the biggest expansion in government benefits since the 1960s, and a substantial increase in federal taxes on the top 1 percent, to 34 percent from 28 percent.
And no, the parties aren’t equally in the wealthiest Americans’ pocket. Democrats have become increasingly progressive, while the rich dominate the Republican agenda. Donald Trump may have run as a populist, but once in office he reversed much of that Obama tax hike, while trying (but failing, so far) to take away health insurance from as many as 23 million Americans.
But while you shouldn’t be too much of a cynic, it remains true that America is less of a democracy and more of an oligarchy than we like to think. And to tackle inequality, we’ll have to confront unequal political power as well as unequal income and wealth.
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
America is, in principle, a democracy, in which every vote counts the same. It’s also a nation in which income inequality has soared, a development that hurts many more people than it helps. So if you didn’t know better, you might have expected to see a political backlash: demands for higher taxes on the rich, more spending on the working class and higher wages.
In reality, however, policy has mostly gone the other way. Tax rates on corporations and high incomes have gone down, unions have been crushed, the minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, is lower than it was in the 1960s. How is that possible?
The answer is that huge disparities in income and wealth translate into comparable disparities in political influence. To see how this works, let’s look at a fairly recent example: the budgetary Grand Bargain that almost happened in 2011.
At the time, Washington was firmly in the grip of deficit fever. Even though the federal government was able to borrow at historically low interest rates, everyone who mattered seemed to be saying that the budget deficit was the most important issue facing America and that it was essential to rein in spending on Social Security and Medicare.
So the Obama administration offered congressional Republicans a deal: cuts in Social Security and Medicare in return for slightly higher taxes on the wealthy. The deal foundered only because the party refused to accept even a small tax increase.
The question is, who wanted such a deal? Not the American public.
Voters in general weren’t all that worried about budget deficits. While most Americans believed that the deficit should be reduced — they always do — a CBS poll in early 2011 found only 6 percent of the public named the deficit as the most important issue, compared with 51 percent citing the economy and jobs.
Both the Obama administration and Republicans were staking out positions that flew in the face of public desires. A large majority has consistently wanted to see Social Security benefits expanded, not cut. A comparably large majority has consistently said that upper-income Americans pay too little, not too much, in taxes.
So whose interests were actually reflected in the 2011 budget fight? The wealthy.
A groundbreaking study of rich Americans’ policy preferences in 2011 found that the wealthy, unlike voters in general, did prioritize deficit reduction over everything else. They also, in stark contrast with the general public, favored cuts in Social Security and health spending.
And while a few high-profile billionaires like Warren Buffett have called for higher taxes on people like themselves, the reality is that most billionaires are obsessed with cutting taxes, like the estate tax, that only the rich pay.
In other words, in 2011 a Democratic administration went all-in on behalf of a policy concern that only the rich gave priority and failed to reach a deal only because Republicans didn’t want the rich to bear any burden at all.
Why do the wealthy have so much influence over politics?
Campaign contributions, historically dominated by the wealthy, are part of the story. A 2015 Times report found that at that point fewer than 400 families accounted for almost half the money raised in the 2016 presidential campaign. This matters both directly — politicians who propose big tax increases on the rich can’t expect to see much of their money — and indirectly: Wealthy donors have access to politicians in a way ordinary Americans don’t and play a disproportionate role in shaping policymakers’ worldview.
However, the influence of money on politics goes far beyond campaign contributions. Outright bribery probably isn’t much of a factor , but there are nonetheless major personal financial rewards for political figures who support the interests of the wealthy. Pro-plutocrat politicians who stumble, like Eric Cantor, the former House whip — who famously celebrated Labor Day by honoring business owners — quickly find lucrative positions in the private sector, jobs in right-wing media or well-paid sinecures at conservative think tanks. Do you think there’s a comparable safety net in place for the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ilhan Omar?
And even the issues that the news media discuss often reflect a rich person’s agenda. Advertising dollars explain some of this bias, but a lot of it probably reflects subtler factors, like the (often false) belief that people who’ve made a lot of money have special insight into how the nation as a whole can achieve prosperity.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the fixation on cutting benefits in the early 2010s was the extent to which it was treated not as a controversial position but as the undeniably right thing to do. As Ezra Klein pointed out in The Washington Post at the time: “For reasons I’ve never quite understood, the rules of reportorial neutrality don’t apply when it comes to the deficit. On this one issue, reporters are permitted to openly cheer a particular set of highly controversial policy solutions.”
In a variety of ways, then, America’s wealthy exert huge political influence. Our ideals say that all men are created equal, but in practice a small minority is far more equal than the rest of us.
You don’t want to be too cynical about this. No, America isn’t simply an oligarchy in which the rich always get what they want. In the end, President Barack Obama presided over both the Affordable Care Act, the biggest expansion in government benefits since the 1960s, and a substantial increase in federal taxes on the top 1 percent, to 34 percent from 28 percent.
And no, the parties aren’t equally in the wealthiest Americans’ pocket. Democrats have become increasingly progressive, while the rich dominate the Republican agenda. Donald Trump may have run as a populist, but once in office he reversed much of that Obama tax hike, while trying (but failing, so far) to take away health insurance from as many as 23 million Americans.
But while you shouldn’t be too much of a cynic, it remains true that America is less of a democracy and more of an oligarchy than we like to think. And to tackle inequality, we’ll have to confront unequal political power as well as unequal income and wealth.
TAX THE RICH AND THEIR HEIRS
How to tax inheritances more fairly.
By Lily Batchelder, professor at New York University School of Law.
A massive transfer of wealth is underway and will accelerate in the coming years. Baby boomers and the generation that preceded them currently own $84 trillion, or 81 percent of all U.S. household wealth — wealth that will before long be inherited by their children and other beneficiaries.
This extraordinary transfer of resources will further cement the economic inequality that plagues the United States because this wealth is tightly concentrated in the hands of a few. And it will be passed on as taxes on such transfers are at historic lows.
Among high-income countries, the United States has one of the lowest levels of intergenerational economic mobility, meaning a child’s economic future is heavily influenced by his or her parents’ income. We have the second-highest level of income inequality after taxes and government transfers, and the highest level of wealth inequality. These disparities are sharply skewed by race. Median black household wealth is only 9 percent that of white households, a racial wealth gap that is even larger than in 1968. New research suggests the pandemic will further increase wealth inequality, as the affluent save more and the poor earn less.
Effectively addressing these systemic inequalities will require many things. But increasing the taxation of inheritances is one vital component.
This year, Americans will inherit about $765 billion. People who were already rich will inherit a lot more than people who weren’t wealthy. So will white households; they are twice as likely as black households to receive an inheritance, and receiving an inheritance is associated with an increase in wealth that is 26 times larger for white families than for black families. (This accounting of inheritances includes gifts and bequests, other than those to spouses or to support minor children.)
Roughly 40 percent of all household wealth stems from inheritances. This means that 40 percent of why some Americans are extraordinarily well off has nothing to do with smarts, hard work, frugality, lucky gambles or entrepreneurial ingenuity. It is simply because they were born to rich parents.
Inheritances compound over generations, one reason societies often choose to tax them as a way to combat rising inequality and level the playing field. Our tax system has always been one of our most potent tools for expressing and acting upon our values. But in this area, it is failing and only getting worse.
Consider a wealthy couple who bequeaths $50 million to their son. The couple will probably not have paid income or payroll tax on a large share of the bequest, thanks to a provision called stepped-up basis, which exempts gains on bequeathed assets from tax. Their son can exclude the entire $50 million he receives from his income and payroll tax returns.
The estate tax was meant to partially correct for these omissions. Indeed, it is the only tax that will apply to the son’s inheritance. But over time Congress has hollowed out the estate tax and its cousins, most recently in the 2017 tax law. Today, the first $23 million that a couple transfers is entirely exempt from the estate tax. Amounts above that threshold are taxed only at a 40 percent rate.
As a result, the effective tax rate on this lucky heir’s $50 million inheritance will only be 21 percent. And that’s if his parents didn’t use any estate-tax planning techniques to reduce his tax burden. If they did, his tax rate could easily approach zero.
Some will argue that this example ignores any income and payroll tax the wealthy parents paid when they originally earned the $50 million. But if the couple paid their personal chef’s wages out of after-tax income, we wouldn’t think their personal chef should get credit for the taxes they paid. Similarly, we should ignore any income or payroll tax the couple paid when considering how much their son should contribute to the costs of government.
Combining the effects of estate, income and payroll taxes, the average federal tax rate on income in the form of inheritances is a minuscule one-seventh of the average tax rate on income from saving and good old-fashioned hard work.
A fairer tax system would tax inheritances at higher rates than income from working, not lower. Someone who inherits millions is better off than someone who had to work for their millions because, let’s face it, most of us would rather not work. Moreover, wealthy heirs are better off because typically they can earn much higher salaries if they do work, benefiting from the education, connections and safety net available to those from well-off families.
A large body of research also finds that wealth transfer taxes do relatively little to reduce the amount of work, saving and entrepreneurship by donors. Meanwhile, such taxes increase work by heirs and charitable giving. This research suggests that the optimal tax rate on very large inheritances is between 60 percent and 80 percent.
Americans agree that inheritances should be taxed relatively heavily. According to one study, they support taxing wealth from inheritances at almost four times the tax rate on wealth from savings.
There are plenty of sensible options for increasing taxes on inheritances. Returning the estate tax to its 2009 levels would raise $270 billion over the next decade. Further increasing the rate so that it rises to 65 percent on estates over $1 billion would raise an additional $100 billion.
An even better approach would be to replace the estate tax with an inheritance tax. Under an inheritance tax, heirs would simply pay income and payroll taxes on their inheritance above a large exemption, just as others do on their wages.
If an inheritance tax exempted the first $1 million received over one’s lifetime and applied the highest income and payroll tax rates to amounts above that threshold, it would raise $790 billion over the next decade. Representative Jan Schakowsky, Democrat of Illinois, is drafting a proposal along these lines, and some former presidential candidates including Julián Castro endorsed the idea. Under this type of plan, only 0.08 percent of households would owe the tax each year. The revenue could be used to invest in children who aren’t lucky enough to inherit millions, whether through universal pre-K, paid parental leave or a fully refundable child tax credit.
Regardless of whether we shift to an inheritance tax, we should tax accrued gains on large bequests. This would raise $450 billion when combined with other reforms. And we should reverse the deep cuts to the I.R.S. enforcement budget, which have resulted in a 61 percent decline in audits of millionaires since 2010.
Finally, we should reform the rules governing transfers through trusts and similar devices, which the wealthy exploit to slash their tax liability. In one strategy, people put easy-to-sell assets into a partnership to artificially deflate the assets’ value. According to the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation, these and similar strategies can reduce the value of transferred assets by 15 percent to 60 percent or more. The casino magnate Sheldon Adelson used a different strategy involving trusts to avoid $2.8 billion in estate and gift taxes between 2010 and 2013.
Others create trusts to benefit their descendants for centuries. The beneficiaries of such dynastic trusts should have to pay tax on their inheritances. While the total tax revenue at stake is unclear, trusts most likely hold trillions of dollars in assets.
President Franklin Roosevelt said “inherited economic power is as inconsistent with the ideals of this generation as inherited political power was inconsistent with the ideals of the generation which established our government.” The same is true today.
We know how to tax inheritances more fairly. We need to act before the massive wealth transfers on the horizon further entrench a hereditary economic elite.
How to tax inheritances more fairly.
By Lily Batchelder, professor at New York University School of Law.
A massive transfer of wealth is underway and will accelerate in the coming years. Baby boomers and the generation that preceded them currently own $84 trillion, or 81 percent of all U.S. household wealth — wealth that will before long be inherited by their children and other beneficiaries.
This extraordinary transfer of resources will further cement the economic inequality that plagues the United States because this wealth is tightly concentrated in the hands of a few. And it will be passed on as taxes on such transfers are at historic lows.
Among high-income countries, the United States has one of the lowest levels of intergenerational economic mobility, meaning a child’s economic future is heavily influenced by his or her parents’ income. We have the second-highest level of income inequality after taxes and government transfers, and the highest level of wealth inequality. These disparities are sharply skewed by race. Median black household wealth is only 9 percent that of white households, a racial wealth gap that is even larger than in 1968. New research suggests the pandemic will further increase wealth inequality, as the affluent save more and the poor earn less.
Effectively addressing these systemic inequalities will require many things. But increasing the taxation of inheritances is one vital component.
This year, Americans will inherit about $765 billion. People who were already rich will inherit a lot more than people who weren’t wealthy. So will white households; they are twice as likely as black households to receive an inheritance, and receiving an inheritance is associated with an increase in wealth that is 26 times larger for white families than for black families. (This accounting of inheritances includes gifts and bequests, other than those to spouses or to support minor children.)
Roughly 40 percent of all household wealth stems from inheritances. This means that 40 percent of why some Americans are extraordinarily well off has nothing to do with smarts, hard work, frugality, lucky gambles or entrepreneurial ingenuity. It is simply because they were born to rich parents.
Inheritances compound over generations, one reason societies often choose to tax them as a way to combat rising inequality and level the playing field. Our tax system has always been one of our most potent tools for expressing and acting upon our values. But in this area, it is failing and only getting worse.
Consider a wealthy couple who bequeaths $50 million to their son. The couple will probably not have paid income or payroll tax on a large share of the bequest, thanks to a provision called stepped-up basis, which exempts gains on bequeathed assets from tax. Their son can exclude the entire $50 million he receives from his income and payroll tax returns.
The estate tax was meant to partially correct for these omissions. Indeed, it is the only tax that will apply to the son’s inheritance. But over time Congress has hollowed out the estate tax and its cousins, most recently in the 2017 tax law. Today, the first $23 million that a couple transfers is entirely exempt from the estate tax. Amounts above that threshold are taxed only at a 40 percent rate.
As a result, the effective tax rate on this lucky heir’s $50 million inheritance will only be 21 percent. And that’s if his parents didn’t use any estate-tax planning techniques to reduce his tax burden. If they did, his tax rate could easily approach zero.
Some will argue that this example ignores any income and payroll tax the wealthy parents paid when they originally earned the $50 million. But if the couple paid their personal chef’s wages out of after-tax income, we wouldn’t think their personal chef should get credit for the taxes they paid. Similarly, we should ignore any income or payroll tax the couple paid when considering how much their son should contribute to the costs of government.
Combining the effects of estate, income and payroll taxes, the average federal tax rate on income in the form of inheritances is a minuscule one-seventh of the average tax rate on income from saving and good old-fashioned hard work.
A fairer tax system would tax inheritances at higher rates than income from working, not lower. Someone who inherits millions is better off than someone who had to work for their millions because, let’s face it, most of us would rather not work. Moreover, wealthy heirs are better off because typically they can earn much higher salaries if they do work, benefiting from the education, connections and safety net available to those from well-off families.
A large body of research also finds that wealth transfer taxes do relatively little to reduce the amount of work, saving and entrepreneurship by donors. Meanwhile, such taxes increase work by heirs and charitable giving. This research suggests that the optimal tax rate on very large inheritances is between 60 percent and 80 percent.
Americans agree that inheritances should be taxed relatively heavily. According to one study, they support taxing wealth from inheritances at almost four times the tax rate on wealth from savings.
There are plenty of sensible options for increasing taxes on inheritances. Returning the estate tax to its 2009 levels would raise $270 billion over the next decade. Further increasing the rate so that it rises to 65 percent on estates over $1 billion would raise an additional $100 billion.
An even better approach would be to replace the estate tax with an inheritance tax. Under an inheritance tax, heirs would simply pay income and payroll taxes on their inheritance above a large exemption, just as others do on their wages.
If an inheritance tax exempted the first $1 million received over one’s lifetime and applied the highest income and payroll tax rates to amounts above that threshold, it would raise $790 billion over the next decade. Representative Jan Schakowsky, Democrat of Illinois, is drafting a proposal along these lines, and some former presidential candidates including Julián Castro endorsed the idea. Under this type of plan, only 0.08 percent of households would owe the tax each year. The revenue could be used to invest in children who aren’t lucky enough to inherit millions, whether through universal pre-K, paid parental leave or a fully refundable child tax credit.
Regardless of whether we shift to an inheritance tax, we should tax accrued gains on large bequests. This would raise $450 billion when combined with other reforms. And we should reverse the deep cuts to the I.R.S. enforcement budget, which have resulted in a 61 percent decline in audits of millionaires since 2010.
Finally, we should reform the rules governing transfers through trusts and similar devices, which the wealthy exploit to slash their tax liability. In one strategy, people put easy-to-sell assets into a partnership to artificially deflate the assets’ value. According to the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation, these and similar strategies can reduce the value of transferred assets by 15 percent to 60 percent or more. The casino magnate Sheldon Adelson used a different strategy involving trusts to avoid $2.8 billion in estate and gift taxes between 2010 and 2013.
Others create trusts to benefit their descendants for centuries. The beneficiaries of such dynastic trusts should have to pay tax on their inheritances. While the total tax revenue at stake is unclear, trusts most likely hold trillions of dollars in assets.
President Franklin Roosevelt said “inherited economic power is as inconsistent with the ideals of this generation as inherited political power was inconsistent with the ideals of the generation which established our government.” The same is true today.
We know how to tax inheritances more fairly. We need to act before the massive wealth transfers on the horizon further entrench a hereditary economic elite.
THE JOBS WE NEED
By The New York Times Editorial Board
Over the past four decades, American workers have suffered a devastating loss of economic power, manifest in their wages, benefits and working conditions. The annual economic output of the United States has almost tripled, but, with the help of policymakers from both political parties, the wealthy hoarded the fruits.
In the nation’s slaughterhouses, the average worker in 1982 made $24 an hour in inflation-adjusted dollars, or $50,000 a year. Today the average meatpacker processes significantly more meat — and makes less than $14 an hour.
The hundreds of thousands of home health care aides, often female, often minorities, who care for a nation of aging baby boomers rarely receive paid time to care for their own families.
Even in the high-flying technology sector, companies have found ways to leave their workers behind. More than half of the people who work for Google do not actually work for Google. They are classified as contractors, which means they do not need to be treated as employees.
Picture the nation as a pirate crew: In recent decades, the owners of the ship have gradually claimed a larger share of booty at the expense of the crew. The annual sum that has shifted from workers to owners now tops $1 trillion.
Or consider the power shift from the perspective of an individual worker. If income had kept pace with overall economic growth since 1970, Americans in the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution would be making an extra $12,000 per year, on average. In effect, every American worker in the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution is sending an annual check for $12,000 to a richer person in the top 10 percent.
American workers need a raise. But it is not enough to transfer wealth from the rich to the desperate. In confronting the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood that a sustainable improvement in the quality of most American lives required an overhaul of the institutions of government.
“These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America,” Roosevelt said in 1936. “What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.”
Now as then, the profound inequities of American life are the result of laws written at the behest of the wealthy and public institutions managed in their interest. Now as then, the nation’s economic problems are rooted in political problems. And now as then, the revival of broad prosperity — and the stability of American democracy — require the imposition of limits on the political influence of the wealthy. It requires the government to serve the interests of the governed.
Americans especially need to confront the fact that minorities are disproportionately the victims of economic inequality — the people most often denied the dignity of a decent wage. That inequity is the result of historic and continuing racism, and it should be addressed with the same sense of fierce urgency that has motivated the wave of protests against overt displays of racism.
The Rev. Dr. William Barber II, a civil-rights leader who emphasizes the foundational importance of economic justice, has pointed to the constitution that North Carolina adopted after the Civil War. The document affirms the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But African-Americans were among the state’s legislators for the first time, and the former slaves got another principle enshrined as well: that workers are entitled to “the fruits of their own labor.” They understood that economic security makes other freedoms meaningful.
It is time to ensure that all Americans can share in the nation’s prosperity.
In February 1970, student protesters broke into a Bank of America branch near the University of California, Santa Barbara. They scattered the bank’s files and pushed a burning dumpster into the lobby, setting the building on fire.
One protester explained, “It was the biggest capitalist thing around.”
California’s governor, Ronald Reagan, condemning the protesters as “cowardly little bums,” sent in the National Guard. For Reagan and others, the bank fire was more than an isolated act of vandalism. Lewis F. Powell, a prominent corporate lawyer, described it as part of a larger assault on the business of America in a 1971 memo for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Powell listed threats including Ralph Nader’s campaign for consumer safety regulations, the rise of the environmental movement and the expansion of social welfare programs. Warning that “business and the enterprise system are in deep trouble, and the hour is late,” he urged businesses to fight.
Corporations began to invest in politics on an unprecedented scale. The beer magnate Joseph Coors said Powell’s memo prompted him to create the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that greatly influenced Reagan’s presidential policy agenda. The National Association of Manufacturers moved to Washington from New York. Blue chips including General Electric, Exxon and IBM funded a “boot camp” where economists lectured federal judges on free enterprise. By 1990, 40 percent of the judiciary had been re-educated.
Powell continued his corporate advocacy as a member of the Supreme Court, which he joined in 1972, writing important decisions removing restraints on corporate concentration and campaign spending.
The counterrevolutionaries embraced a radical view of the role of corporations: “The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits,” as the economist Milton Friedman wrote in an influential 1970 essay in The New York Times Magazine.
General Electric, the quintessential American industrial conglomerate, had boasted in a 1953 report that it paid a lot of money in federal taxes.
It also boasted about its payments to suppliers, its spending on wages and benefits and its investments in long-term research.
The report was explicit: The company’s income was shared among “those whose services of various kinds made this output possible.” GE understood its success as intertwined with the health of the government, the prosperity of its workforce and the growth of the U.S. economy.
Under Jack Welch, GE’s chairman from 1981 to 2001, the company’s primary objective shifted from making light bulbs to making money. There was no more boasting about paying taxes.
During the first three years of Mr. Welch’s tenure, G.E. recorded $6.5 billion in profits and didn’t pay the federal government a single penny in corporate income taxes. Instead of boasting about paying workers, Mr. Welch boasted about layoffs.
This unapologetic pursuit of profit reached new heights with the deregulation of financial markets.
Lending surged as the federal government lifted strict limits on interest rates and on foreign investment in the United States. Investors bought companies and squeezed them like lemons, while surviving firms scrambled to keep shareholders happy. In 1982, the Securities and Exchange Commission — led by a Wall Street banker for the first time since the Great Depression — provided a new way for corporations to shovel money to shareholders by voting to let companies buy back shares of their own stock.
Companies also began to compensate executives primarily with options to purchase stock. The chief executives of large American corporations made about 20 times more than the median worker at those companies in the mid-1960s. By 2018, the gap was some 278 times.
Meanwhile, the union movement declined, removing an important counterweight to corporate power. Unions lost traction partly under the weight of their own shortcomings, including endemic corruption and a focus on preserving employment in declining industries rather than expanding membership in growing industries.
Companies also became more militant in their opposition to unions. Kate Bronfenbrenner, a professor at Cornell University, surveyed workers who had participated in unionization drives between 1999 and 2003 and found 57 percent of their employers had threatened to close the business if a union was formed; 47 percent threatened to cut wages or benefits; and 34 percent fired workers who supported unionization.
To sustain the goals of the private sector at the expense of the public interest, corporations poured money into lobbying. They told policymakers that the decline in the fortunes of American workers was the tough-but-fair result of market forces.
“People will get paid on how valuable they are to the enterprise,” John Snow, an economist then serving as Treasury secretary under President George W. Bush, explained in 2006. On this theory, thanks to new technologies and increased foreign competition, most Americans just weren’t worth what they used to be.
Politicians didn’t pay much attention to the flaws in that logic: that U.S. workers have fared more poorly than those in other nations, and that wage growth also has lagged far behind the rising value of the average worker’s output. In a recent study, the Harvard economists Anna Stansbury and Lawrence Summers tied those trends to the shift in political power from workers to employers.
Wages are substantially determined by a tug of war between workers and employers and, with the help of government, employers have been winning. The hostility of the Republican Party was nothing new, but Democrats also parted ways with workers. As Americans moved from thinking of themselves primarily as workers to thinking of themselves primarily as consumers, the Democratic Party recast itself.
“I’d love the Teamsters to be worse off,” said Alfred Kahn, an economic adviser to President Jimmy Carter. “I’d love the automobile workers to be worse off.”
Kahn and other economists insisted that reducing union wages would benefit everyone else. And as unions faded, the government demurred from championing the rights of workers. The purchasing power of the federal minimum wage peaked in 1968; it’s been falling ever since. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that employers illegally deprive workers of more than $50 billion in wages each year by underpaying them or requiring unpaid work; violators are rarely punished.
Workers could track the loss of power in their paychecks: Weekly wages have stagnated since the late 1970s. Newer employers, like mobile phone companies, simply refused to treat workers in the same way as older employers like the landline telephone companies. And old-line companies that survived, like the heavy equipment maker Caterpillar, gradually forced workers to accept less compensation.
“Working on the railroad is a mentally taxing and challenging job; I would say it has gotten harder and the compensation is now less than it once was,” said Daniel Lyon, a 63-year-old locomotive engineer from Cheyenne, Wyo. “And the cost of everything has gone up all these years.”
Employers also took advantage of the growing number of women in the work force. As the share of female workers in a given industry increased, wages fell for employees of both sexes.
Over the past decade, as the gilded class enjoyed the longest period of uninterrupted economic growth in American history, many middle- and lower-income Americans borrowed to maintain their standard of living. Household debt as a share of the economy has roughly doubled since 1980. Many less affluent Americans effectively are paying wealthier Americans for the money that they once were paid in wages.
In recent months, the government has reinforced those patterns, responding to the coronavirus pandemic by pumping into the economy trillions of dollars aimed mostly at preserving wealth rather than jobs. The government has backstopped corporate borrowing while allowing companies to lay off millions of workers. As a result, stock prices have soared even as people stand in long lines at unemployment offices and food pantries.
And those who waited longest for new opportunities after the 2008 financial crisis have often been among the first to lose their jobs. Black people and women have been especially hard-hit. Astonishingly, just 54 percent of black men in America were employed in May, up slightly from a modern low of 53 percent in April.
The coronavirus recession has driven unemployment in America to the highest levels since the Great Depression. For many workers, for many years to come, the limits of the political horizon may seem to be defined by the bitter truth that a poorly paid job is better than none.
Yet this is the moment to insist that workers deserve more.
The nation has ample resources to ensure that every worker is paid enough to afford housing, food and other necessities of daily life. Anything less is intolerable. Yet in 2017, more than 17 million workers — disproportionately minorities and women — labored for wages too meager to lift their households above the federal poverty line.
Many workers similarly are deprived of benefits that federal law ought to guarantee. Millions lack affordable health insurance.
Many large employers, particularly in the restaurant and retail sectors, do not provide paid sick leave to all their workers, a refusal that is not only callous, but has endangered workers and customers during the pandemic.
The United States is the only developed democracy that does not require companies to provide paid time off for workers to care for a baby or a dying parent.
When people are deprived of means and opportunity, society is deprived of their potential contributions.
In June 1933, President Roosevelt called on employers to embrace an “industrial covenant” — a commitment to provide “living wages and sustained employment.” He argued this was greatly in the interest of industry, because well-paid workers would become customers, too.
Almost a century later, employers continue to resist that basic logic, seeking short-term savings at the expense of their own long-term prosperity.
Change is possible. A government more inclined to help workers would have ample opportunity. But as in the early 1930s, political change must proceed economic change. For the voices of workers to be heard, the influence of the wealthy must be curbed.
The power of the wealthy also has been amplified by the willingness of many Americans to accept cheap goods as a substitute for good jobs. A more equitable society requires a willingness to pay a little more for the burger or the bicycle — and for the welfare of the Americans who make and sell those products.
Americans need robust minimum standards for employee compensation and benefits, and the revitalization of institutions to safeguard those guarantees. The federal minimum wage needs to be raised to $15 an hour, with regular adjustments for inflation. Corporations have long warned that raising the minimum, now $7.25 an hour, will force companies to get rid of workers.
But a growing number of state and local governments have made the leap, with no evidence of dire consequences. If McDonald’s can turn a profit in Denmark, where even the most junior workers earn the equivalent of more than $20 an hour, it can turn a profit paying $15 an hour in America.
Lyndon Johnson fought for the creation of a federal minimum wage as a first-term congressman in 1938. Three decades later, as president, he signed an increase in the minimum wage to what remains the highest level on record, after adjusting for inflation.
The purpose, Johnson said, was “to bring a larger piece of this country’s prosperity, and a greater share of personal dignity, to millions of our workers, their wives and their children. And for me, frankly, that is what being president is all about.”
Americans also need the government to restrain the power of corporations. The dominance of a few large companies in a growing number of industries limits wage growth because workers have fewer alternatives, a problem that could be checked by a revival of antitrust enforcement. Companies also have made a mockery of legal protections for employees by classifying a growing share of workers as contractors, a farce embodied by Uber’s fierce insistence that Uber drivers are not Uber drivers.
The government can also make it easier for workers to switch jobs, which is often the best route upward. Ensuring that workers are not dependent on employers for affordable health insurance would make a big difference.
The government also should prohibit noncompete clauses, which impose contractual limitations on job-hopping. Once reserved for executives and other highly paid employees, the practice has become widespread, binding an estimated 30 million workers. One measure of the madness: A recent survey found 30 percent of the nation’s hair salons require noncompete clauses.
There are signs that some corporate leaders recognize the need for change. The Business Roundtable, a trade group for some of the nation’s largest companies, issued a new version of its mission statement last year acknowledging that corporations have responsibilities beyond making money. It is a purely symbolic gesture, but it points in the necessary direction.
Policymakers can encourage that new direction, for example by reversing the legalization of share buybacks and policing the classification of workers as independent contractors. And workers who want to join unions should be able to do so without the fear of reprisals.
The jobs that Americans do will continue to change as technology improves and tastes drift. But the need to work will not change, nor will the basic imperative to ensure that workers are compensated fairly and treated with dignity.
We live in an era of profits without broad prosperity, but the power to rewrite the rules of the market is in our hands. In 2016, Dr. Barber was arrested in Durham, N.C., while protesting for a $15 minimum wage. He said that he was pursuing the fulfillment of the language written into the state’s constitution by freed slaves more than 150 years ago.
The injustice remains. So does the opportunity.
By The New York Times Editorial Board
Over the past four decades, American workers have suffered a devastating loss of economic power, manifest in their wages, benefits and working conditions. The annual economic output of the United States has almost tripled, but, with the help of policymakers from both political parties, the wealthy hoarded the fruits.
In the nation’s slaughterhouses, the average worker in 1982 made $24 an hour in inflation-adjusted dollars, or $50,000 a year. Today the average meatpacker processes significantly more meat — and makes less than $14 an hour.
The hundreds of thousands of home health care aides, often female, often minorities, who care for a nation of aging baby boomers rarely receive paid time to care for their own families.
Even in the high-flying technology sector, companies have found ways to leave their workers behind. More than half of the people who work for Google do not actually work for Google. They are classified as contractors, which means they do not need to be treated as employees.
Picture the nation as a pirate crew: In recent decades, the owners of the ship have gradually claimed a larger share of booty at the expense of the crew. The annual sum that has shifted from workers to owners now tops $1 trillion.
Or consider the power shift from the perspective of an individual worker. If income had kept pace with overall economic growth since 1970, Americans in the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution would be making an extra $12,000 per year, on average. In effect, every American worker in the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution is sending an annual check for $12,000 to a richer person in the top 10 percent.
American workers need a raise. But it is not enough to transfer wealth from the rich to the desperate. In confronting the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood that a sustainable improvement in the quality of most American lives required an overhaul of the institutions of government.
“These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America,” Roosevelt said in 1936. “What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.”
Now as then, the profound inequities of American life are the result of laws written at the behest of the wealthy and public institutions managed in their interest. Now as then, the nation’s economic problems are rooted in political problems. And now as then, the revival of broad prosperity — and the stability of American democracy — require the imposition of limits on the political influence of the wealthy. It requires the government to serve the interests of the governed.
Americans especially need to confront the fact that minorities are disproportionately the victims of economic inequality — the people most often denied the dignity of a decent wage. That inequity is the result of historic and continuing racism, and it should be addressed with the same sense of fierce urgency that has motivated the wave of protests against overt displays of racism.
The Rev. Dr. William Barber II, a civil-rights leader who emphasizes the foundational importance of economic justice, has pointed to the constitution that North Carolina adopted after the Civil War. The document affirms the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But African-Americans were among the state’s legislators for the first time, and the former slaves got another principle enshrined as well: that workers are entitled to “the fruits of their own labor.” They understood that economic security makes other freedoms meaningful.
It is time to ensure that all Americans can share in the nation’s prosperity.
In February 1970, student protesters broke into a Bank of America branch near the University of California, Santa Barbara. They scattered the bank’s files and pushed a burning dumpster into the lobby, setting the building on fire.
One protester explained, “It was the biggest capitalist thing around.”
California’s governor, Ronald Reagan, condemning the protesters as “cowardly little bums,” sent in the National Guard. For Reagan and others, the bank fire was more than an isolated act of vandalism. Lewis F. Powell, a prominent corporate lawyer, described it as part of a larger assault on the business of America in a 1971 memo for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Powell listed threats including Ralph Nader’s campaign for consumer safety regulations, the rise of the environmental movement and the expansion of social welfare programs. Warning that “business and the enterprise system are in deep trouble, and the hour is late,” he urged businesses to fight.
Corporations began to invest in politics on an unprecedented scale. The beer magnate Joseph Coors said Powell’s memo prompted him to create the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that greatly influenced Reagan’s presidential policy agenda. The National Association of Manufacturers moved to Washington from New York. Blue chips including General Electric, Exxon and IBM funded a “boot camp” where economists lectured federal judges on free enterprise. By 1990, 40 percent of the judiciary had been re-educated.
Powell continued his corporate advocacy as a member of the Supreme Court, which he joined in 1972, writing important decisions removing restraints on corporate concentration and campaign spending.
The counterrevolutionaries embraced a radical view of the role of corporations: “The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits,” as the economist Milton Friedman wrote in an influential 1970 essay in The New York Times Magazine.
General Electric, the quintessential American industrial conglomerate, had boasted in a 1953 report that it paid a lot of money in federal taxes.
It also boasted about its payments to suppliers, its spending on wages and benefits and its investments in long-term research.
The report was explicit: The company’s income was shared among “those whose services of various kinds made this output possible.” GE understood its success as intertwined with the health of the government, the prosperity of its workforce and the growth of the U.S. economy.
Under Jack Welch, GE’s chairman from 1981 to 2001, the company’s primary objective shifted from making light bulbs to making money. There was no more boasting about paying taxes.
During the first three years of Mr. Welch’s tenure, G.E. recorded $6.5 billion in profits and didn’t pay the federal government a single penny in corporate income taxes. Instead of boasting about paying workers, Mr. Welch boasted about layoffs.
This unapologetic pursuit of profit reached new heights with the deregulation of financial markets.
Lending surged as the federal government lifted strict limits on interest rates and on foreign investment in the United States. Investors bought companies and squeezed them like lemons, while surviving firms scrambled to keep shareholders happy. In 1982, the Securities and Exchange Commission — led by a Wall Street banker for the first time since the Great Depression — provided a new way for corporations to shovel money to shareholders by voting to let companies buy back shares of their own stock.
Companies also began to compensate executives primarily with options to purchase stock. The chief executives of large American corporations made about 20 times more than the median worker at those companies in the mid-1960s. By 2018, the gap was some 278 times.
Meanwhile, the union movement declined, removing an important counterweight to corporate power. Unions lost traction partly under the weight of their own shortcomings, including endemic corruption and a focus on preserving employment in declining industries rather than expanding membership in growing industries.
Companies also became more militant in their opposition to unions. Kate Bronfenbrenner, a professor at Cornell University, surveyed workers who had participated in unionization drives between 1999 and 2003 and found 57 percent of their employers had threatened to close the business if a union was formed; 47 percent threatened to cut wages or benefits; and 34 percent fired workers who supported unionization.
To sustain the goals of the private sector at the expense of the public interest, corporations poured money into lobbying. They told policymakers that the decline in the fortunes of American workers was the tough-but-fair result of market forces.
“People will get paid on how valuable they are to the enterprise,” John Snow, an economist then serving as Treasury secretary under President George W. Bush, explained in 2006. On this theory, thanks to new technologies and increased foreign competition, most Americans just weren’t worth what they used to be.
Politicians didn’t pay much attention to the flaws in that logic: that U.S. workers have fared more poorly than those in other nations, and that wage growth also has lagged far behind the rising value of the average worker’s output. In a recent study, the Harvard economists Anna Stansbury and Lawrence Summers tied those trends to the shift in political power from workers to employers.
Wages are substantially determined by a tug of war between workers and employers and, with the help of government, employers have been winning. The hostility of the Republican Party was nothing new, but Democrats also parted ways with workers. As Americans moved from thinking of themselves primarily as workers to thinking of themselves primarily as consumers, the Democratic Party recast itself.
“I’d love the Teamsters to be worse off,” said Alfred Kahn, an economic adviser to President Jimmy Carter. “I’d love the automobile workers to be worse off.”
Kahn and other economists insisted that reducing union wages would benefit everyone else. And as unions faded, the government demurred from championing the rights of workers. The purchasing power of the federal minimum wage peaked in 1968; it’s been falling ever since. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that employers illegally deprive workers of more than $50 billion in wages each year by underpaying them or requiring unpaid work; violators are rarely punished.
Workers could track the loss of power in their paychecks: Weekly wages have stagnated since the late 1970s. Newer employers, like mobile phone companies, simply refused to treat workers in the same way as older employers like the landline telephone companies. And old-line companies that survived, like the heavy equipment maker Caterpillar, gradually forced workers to accept less compensation.
“Working on the railroad is a mentally taxing and challenging job; I would say it has gotten harder and the compensation is now less than it once was,” said Daniel Lyon, a 63-year-old locomotive engineer from Cheyenne, Wyo. “And the cost of everything has gone up all these years.”
Employers also took advantage of the growing number of women in the work force. As the share of female workers in a given industry increased, wages fell for employees of both sexes.
Over the past decade, as the gilded class enjoyed the longest period of uninterrupted economic growth in American history, many middle- and lower-income Americans borrowed to maintain their standard of living. Household debt as a share of the economy has roughly doubled since 1980. Many less affluent Americans effectively are paying wealthier Americans for the money that they once were paid in wages.
In recent months, the government has reinforced those patterns, responding to the coronavirus pandemic by pumping into the economy trillions of dollars aimed mostly at preserving wealth rather than jobs. The government has backstopped corporate borrowing while allowing companies to lay off millions of workers. As a result, stock prices have soared even as people stand in long lines at unemployment offices and food pantries.
And those who waited longest for new opportunities after the 2008 financial crisis have often been among the first to lose their jobs. Black people and women have been especially hard-hit. Astonishingly, just 54 percent of black men in America were employed in May, up slightly from a modern low of 53 percent in April.
The coronavirus recession has driven unemployment in America to the highest levels since the Great Depression. For many workers, for many years to come, the limits of the political horizon may seem to be defined by the bitter truth that a poorly paid job is better than none.
Yet this is the moment to insist that workers deserve more.
The nation has ample resources to ensure that every worker is paid enough to afford housing, food and other necessities of daily life. Anything less is intolerable. Yet in 2017, more than 17 million workers — disproportionately minorities and women — labored for wages too meager to lift their households above the federal poverty line.
Many workers similarly are deprived of benefits that federal law ought to guarantee. Millions lack affordable health insurance.
Many large employers, particularly in the restaurant and retail sectors, do not provide paid sick leave to all their workers, a refusal that is not only callous, but has endangered workers and customers during the pandemic.
The United States is the only developed democracy that does not require companies to provide paid time off for workers to care for a baby or a dying parent.
When people are deprived of means and opportunity, society is deprived of their potential contributions.
In June 1933, President Roosevelt called on employers to embrace an “industrial covenant” — a commitment to provide “living wages and sustained employment.” He argued this was greatly in the interest of industry, because well-paid workers would become customers, too.
Almost a century later, employers continue to resist that basic logic, seeking short-term savings at the expense of their own long-term prosperity.
Change is possible. A government more inclined to help workers would have ample opportunity. But as in the early 1930s, political change must proceed economic change. For the voices of workers to be heard, the influence of the wealthy must be curbed.
The power of the wealthy also has been amplified by the willingness of many Americans to accept cheap goods as a substitute for good jobs. A more equitable society requires a willingness to pay a little more for the burger or the bicycle — and for the welfare of the Americans who make and sell those products.
Americans need robust minimum standards for employee compensation and benefits, and the revitalization of institutions to safeguard those guarantees. The federal minimum wage needs to be raised to $15 an hour, with regular adjustments for inflation. Corporations have long warned that raising the minimum, now $7.25 an hour, will force companies to get rid of workers.
But a growing number of state and local governments have made the leap, with no evidence of dire consequences. If McDonald’s can turn a profit in Denmark, where even the most junior workers earn the equivalent of more than $20 an hour, it can turn a profit paying $15 an hour in America.
Lyndon Johnson fought for the creation of a federal minimum wage as a first-term congressman in 1938. Three decades later, as president, he signed an increase in the minimum wage to what remains the highest level on record, after adjusting for inflation.
The purpose, Johnson said, was “to bring a larger piece of this country’s prosperity, and a greater share of personal dignity, to millions of our workers, their wives and their children. And for me, frankly, that is what being president is all about.”
Americans also need the government to restrain the power of corporations. The dominance of a few large companies in a growing number of industries limits wage growth because workers have fewer alternatives, a problem that could be checked by a revival of antitrust enforcement. Companies also have made a mockery of legal protections for employees by classifying a growing share of workers as contractors, a farce embodied by Uber’s fierce insistence that Uber drivers are not Uber drivers.
The government can also make it easier for workers to switch jobs, which is often the best route upward. Ensuring that workers are not dependent on employers for affordable health insurance would make a big difference.
The government also should prohibit noncompete clauses, which impose contractual limitations on job-hopping. Once reserved for executives and other highly paid employees, the practice has become widespread, binding an estimated 30 million workers. One measure of the madness: A recent survey found 30 percent of the nation’s hair salons require noncompete clauses.
There are signs that some corporate leaders recognize the need for change. The Business Roundtable, a trade group for some of the nation’s largest companies, issued a new version of its mission statement last year acknowledging that corporations have responsibilities beyond making money. It is a purely symbolic gesture, but it points in the necessary direction.
Policymakers can encourage that new direction, for example by reversing the legalization of share buybacks and policing the classification of workers as independent contractors. And workers who want to join unions should be able to do so without the fear of reprisals.
The jobs that Americans do will continue to change as technology improves and tastes drift. But the need to work will not change, nor will the basic imperative to ensure that workers are compensated fairly and treated with dignity.
We live in an era of profits without broad prosperity, but the power to rewrite the rules of the market is in our hands. In 2016, Dr. Barber was arrested in Durham, N.C., while protesting for a $15 minimum wage. He said that he was pursuing the fulfillment of the language written into the state’s constitution by freed slaves more than 150 years ago.
The injustice remains. So does the opportunity.
THE IRS IS FAILING TO COLLECT BILLIONS IN BACK TAXES OWED BY SUPER RICH AMERICANS
By Janna Herron
The federal government is failing to go after rich Americans who’ve skipped paying their taxes for years, according to a new oversight report.
“In the past, the IRS has focused on the tax compliance of high-income individuals because their noncompliance can have a significant corrosive effect on tax administration,” the report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration stated. “Intentional non-filing of tax returns by those with significant financial resources and sophistication is a brazen form of noncompliance.”
Almost 880,000 high-income Americans owe $45.7 billion in overdue taxes from 2014 to 2016, the report found. The top 100 high-income non-filers during that time had estimated tax due totaling $9.9 billion.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) didn’t investigate 42% of those cases, representing $20.8 billion in lost tax revenue, because of lack of oversight and dwindling resources.
High-income non-filers owe $45.7 billion in back taxes from 2014 to 2016, according to a report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. (Screenshot from TIGTA report)
Of the outstanding 879,415 high-income tax cases, the IRS never investigated 369,180 of them, according to the report. The IRS never placed 326,579 cases in line to be further investigated after non-filers ignored a second delinquency notice. Another 42,601 cases were closed out without ever being investigated.
The remaining 510,235 cases, or an estimated $24.9 billion in taxes, are still waiting to be investigated but likely won’t because of a lack of resources at the agency, according to the report.
Additionally, the agency shelved 37,217 cases totaling $3.2 billion in estimated tax dollars. These will not likely be worked by the IRS, the report found.
Intentional failure to file federal tax returns is a crime and can also result in civil fraud penalties.
The non-filing of tax returns also makes up part of the tax gap, or the difference between the amount taxpayers are estimated to pay and the amount paid voluntarily on time. The report estimated that non-filers make up 9% of that gap.
By Janna Herron
The federal government is failing to go after rich Americans who’ve skipped paying their taxes for years, according to a new oversight report.
“In the past, the IRS has focused on the tax compliance of high-income individuals because their noncompliance can have a significant corrosive effect on tax administration,” the report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration stated. “Intentional non-filing of tax returns by those with significant financial resources and sophistication is a brazen form of noncompliance.”
Almost 880,000 high-income Americans owe $45.7 billion in overdue taxes from 2014 to 2016, the report found. The top 100 high-income non-filers during that time had estimated tax due totaling $9.9 billion.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) didn’t investigate 42% of those cases, representing $20.8 billion in lost tax revenue, because of lack of oversight and dwindling resources.
High-income non-filers owe $45.7 billion in back taxes from 2014 to 2016, according to a report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. (Screenshot from TIGTA report)
Of the outstanding 879,415 high-income tax cases, the IRS never investigated 369,180 of them, according to the report. The IRS never placed 326,579 cases in line to be further investigated after non-filers ignored a second delinquency notice. Another 42,601 cases were closed out without ever being investigated.
The remaining 510,235 cases, or an estimated $24.9 billion in taxes, are still waiting to be investigated but likely won’t because of a lack of resources at the agency, according to the report.
Additionally, the agency shelved 37,217 cases totaling $3.2 billion in estimated tax dollars. These will not likely be worked by the IRS, the report found.
Intentional failure to file federal tax returns is a crime and can also result in civil fraud penalties.
The non-filing of tax returns also makes up part of the tax gap, or the difference between the amount taxpayers are estimated to pay and the amount paid voluntarily on time. The report estimated that non-filers make up 9% of that gap.
WE DID THE MATH TO CALCULATE HOW MANY HOURS IT TAKES AMERICA'S TOP CEOS TO MAKE WHAT THEIR WORKERS EARN IN ONE YEAR
By Andy Kiersz
CEOs make a lot more than the workers they oversee. We took a look at just how big that gap is at some of America's biggest corporations.
One of the provisions of the post-financial-crisis Dodd-Frank reform bill requires corporations to disclose the ratio of their CEO's pay to that of the median employee at the company. Using those pay ratios, we calculated how long it would take the CEOs of big US companies to make what the median employee earned in a year.
So far, 19 of the 100 largest corporations in the S&P 500 as measured by their market capitalizations have filed their CEO compensation figures and pay ratios for the 2019 fiscal year. More companies will follow over the next several months.
The gap between what a CEO makes and what a typical employee makes varies widely from company to company. Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang had a total compensation 88 times larger than the typical employee at his company, meaning it took him a little over four days to earn the median employee's annual salary. Meanwhile, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon made 1,076 times what the typical Walmart worker made, and thus earned a median Walmart employee's annual salary in just eight hours.
As with any discussion of executive compensation, it's worth noting that pay for people at the top is a bit more complicated than just getting a biweekly direct deposit. Many CEOs receive the bulk of their compensation in the form of equity in the companies they run, and so they may not realize the full value of their pay as reported to the SEC for years.
Here's the full list, along with the CEOs' fiscal year 2019 compensation, median employee pay, and the CEO to median worker pay ratio:
19. Oracle co-CEO Safra Katz took 30 days and 10 hours to earn what a typical employee did in a year.
CEO compensation: $965,981 Typical employee salary: $83,813
Ratio: 12:1
18. Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang took 4 days and 4 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $13,642,838 Typical employee salary: $155,035
Ratio: 88:1
17. Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi took 3 days and 5 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $17,933,345 Typical employee salary: $157,232
Ratio: 114:1
16. Costco CEO W. Craig Jelinek took 2 days and 4 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $8,016,200 Typical employee salary: $47,312
Ratio: 169:1
15. Visa CEO Alfred F. Kelly Jr. took 2 days and 4 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $24,265,771 Typical employee salary: $142,494
Ratio: 170:1
14. Cisco Systems CEO Chuck Robbins took 2 days to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $25,829,833 Typical employee salary: $142,593
Ratio: 181:1
13. Salesforce co-CEO Marc Benioff took 1 day and 23 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $28,391,846 Typical employee salary: $151,955
Ratio: 187:1
Salesforce's other co-CEO Keith Block made $16,961,156 in 2019, meaning it took him 3 days, 6 hours to make what a typical employee did in a year.
12. Apple CEO Tim Cook took 1 day and 20 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $11,555,466 Typical employee salary: $57,596
Ratio: 201:1
11. Medtronic CEO Omar Ishrak took 1 day and 13 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $17,796,325 Typical employee salary: $74,206
Ratio: 240:1
10. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took 1 day and 11 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $42,910,21 Typical employee salary: $172,512
Ratio: 249:1
9. Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf took 1 day and 10 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $23,065,052 Typical employee salary: $90,259
Ratio: 256:1
8. ADP CEO Carlos Rodriguez took 1 day and 5 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $19,000,187 Typical employee salary: $63,225
Ratio: 301:1
7. Former Nike CEO Mark G. Parker took 15 hours and 56 minutes to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $13,968,022 Typical employee salary: $25,386
Ratio: 550:1
6. Estée Lauder CEO Fabrizio Freda took 12 hours and 34 minutes to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
Fabrizio Freda
CEO compensation: $21,435,428 Typical employee salary: $30,733
Ratio: 697:1
5. Former Accenture Interim CEO David P. Rowland took 10 hours and 43 minutes to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $15,031,875
Typical employee salary: $18,392
Ratio: 817:1
4. Disney CEO Bob Iger took 9 hours and 37 minutes to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $47,517,762 Typical employee salary: $52,184
Ratio: 911:1
3. Walmart CEO Doug McMillon took 8 hours and 8 minutes to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $23,618,233 Typical employee salary: $21,952
Ratio: 1,076:1
2. TJX CEO Ernie Herrman took 5 hours and 29 minutes to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $18,822,770 Typical employee salary: $11,791
Ratio: 1,596:1
1. Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson took 5 hours and 14 minutes to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $19,241,950 Typical employee salary: $11,489
Ratio: 1,675:1
By Andy Kiersz
CEOs make a lot more than the workers they oversee. We took a look at just how big that gap is at some of America's biggest corporations.
One of the provisions of the post-financial-crisis Dodd-Frank reform bill requires corporations to disclose the ratio of their CEO's pay to that of the median employee at the company. Using those pay ratios, we calculated how long it would take the CEOs of big US companies to make what the median employee earned in a year.
So far, 19 of the 100 largest corporations in the S&P 500 as measured by their market capitalizations have filed their CEO compensation figures and pay ratios for the 2019 fiscal year. More companies will follow over the next several months.
The gap between what a CEO makes and what a typical employee makes varies widely from company to company. Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang had a total compensation 88 times larger than the typical employee at his company, meaning it took him a little over four days to earn the median employee's annual salary. Meanwhile, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon made 1,076 times what the typical Walmart worker made, and thus earned a median Walmart employee's annual salary in just eight hours.
As with any discussion of executive compensation, it's worth noting that pay for people at the top is a bit more complicated than just getting a biweekly direct deposit. Many CEOs receive the bulk of their compensation in the form of equity in the companies they run, and so they may not realize the full value of their pay as reported to the SEC for years.
Here's the full list, along with the CEOs' fiscal year 2019 compensation, median employee pay, and the CEO to median worker pay ratio:
19. Oracle co-CEO Safra Katz took 30 days and 10 hours to earn what a typical employee did in a year.
CEO compensation: $965,981 Typical employee salary: $83,813
Ratio: 12:1
18. Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang took 4 days and 4 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $13,642,838 Typical employee salary: $155,035
Ratio: 88:1
17. Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi took 3 days and 5 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $17,933,345 Typical employee salary: $157,232
Ratio: 114:1
16. Costco CEO W. Craig Jelinek took 2 days and 4 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $8,016,200 Typical employee salary: $47,312
Ratio: 169:1
15. Visa CEO Alfred F. Kelly Jr. took 2 days and 4 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $24,265,771 Typical employee salary: $142,494
Ratio: 170:1
14. Cisco Systems CEO Chuck Robbins took 2 days to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $25,829,833 Typical employee salary: $142,593
Ratio: 181:1
13. Salesforce co-CEO Marc Benioff took 1 day and 23 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $28,391,846 Typical employee salary: $151,955
Ratio: 187:1
Salesforce's other co-CEO Keith Block made $16,961,156 in 2019, meaning it took him 3 days, 6 hours to make what a typical employee did in a year.
12. Apple CEO Tim Cook took 1 day and 20 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $11,555,466 Typical employee salary: $57,596
Ratio: 201:1
11. Medtronic CEO Omar Ishrak took 1 day and 13 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $17,796,325 Typical employee salary: $74,206
Ratio: 240:1
10. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took 1 day and 11 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $42,910,21 Typical employee salary: $172,512
Ratio: 249:1
9. Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf took 1 day and 10 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $23,065,052 Typical employee salary: $90,259
Ratio: 256:1
8. ADP CEO Carlos Rodriguez took 1 day and 5 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $19,000,187 Typical employee salary: $63,225
Ratio: 301:1
7. Former Nike CEO Mark G. Parker took 15 hours and 56 minutes to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $13,968,022 Typical employee salary: $25,386
Ratio: 550:1
6. Estée Lauder CEO Fabrizio Freda took 12 hours and 34 minutes to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
Fabrizio Freda
CEO compensation: $21,435,428 Typical employee salary: $30,733
Ratio: 697:1
5. Former Accenture Interim CEO David P. Rowland took 10 hours and 43 minutes to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $15,031,875
Typical employee salary: $18,392
Ratio: 817:1
4. Disney CEO Bob Iger took 9 hours and 37 minutes to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $47,517,762 Typical employee salary: $52,184
Ratio: 911:1
3. Walmart CEO Doug McMillon took 8 hours and 8 minutes to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $23,618,233 Typical employee salary: $21,952
Ratio: 1,076:1
2. TJX CEO Ernie Herrman took 5 hours and 29 minutes to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $18,822,770 Typical employee salary: $11,791
Ratio: 1,596:1
1. Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson took 5 hours and 14 minutes to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $19,241,950 Typical employee salary: $11,489
Ratio: 1,675:1
OBAMA WAS RIGHT, ALITO WAS WRONG: CITIZENS UNITED HAS CORRUPTED AMERICAN POLITICS
By Tiffany Muller
Ten years ago this week, a narrow majority of the Supreme Court overturned a century of campaign finance law, giving wealthy donors and corporations nearly unlimited ability to influence our elections. In his State of the Union address a week later, President Barack Obama said the controversial Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision “will open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections.” Justice Samuel Alito famously shook his head, mouthing “not true.”
A decade later, it’s clear that President Obama was right and Justice Alito was wrong. With its decision, the court threw out restrictions on corporate and union election spending, narrowed the legal definition of “corruption” and set the stage for an influx of undisclosed dark money spending on our elections.
The court’s naive view of our electoral process set the stage for 10 years of billions of dollars corrupting our politics and dictating national policy on everything from the cost of prescription drugs to climate change to gun violence.
For example, during the attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017, a Republican super PAC publicly withdrew its support of Rep. David Young of Iowa because he expressed opposition to the GOP health care bill. Young soon switched his position, voted for the bill, and millions from the super PAC flowed into his district to help him win.
Wealthy donors have a bullhorn
That is corruption pure and simple, and it happens all the time in American politics. It now happens so often that the Supreme Court’s naiveté begins to look more like willful ignorance.
Our campaign finance system was broken long before Citizens United, but it has given a bullhorn to wealthy donors, who already had the loudest voices in the room. The overwhelmingly white, male and older donor class has become even more homogeneous. This elite set of Americans has scored political power on a magnitude not seen since the Gilded Age. In fact, just 11 people gave $1 billion — or a fifth of all donations to super PACs — from 2010 to 2018.
We now have elections where the candidates themselves play secondary roles in their own campaigns. For example, in Pennsylvania’s 2016 U.S. Senate race, outside spending topped $123 million, while the candidates combined for less than $50 million. This arms race not only impacts who can run for and win political office, but it also changes policy debates.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and End Citizens United President Tiffany Muller (in gray) mark the 10th anniversary of the decision on Jan. 14, 2020, at the Capitol in Washington.
Climate change used to be a bipartisan issue, but that ended with Citizens United, even as global temperatures continued to rise. Meanwhile, since the decision, the energy sector has poured over $719 million into our federal elections, about a quarter of it in unlimited expenditures. The NRA has invested nearly $125 million in federal elections since the decision, nearly all of it in unlimited spending — helping to effectively block every attempt to pass universal background checks, though almost all Americans (75%-93% in recent polls) support that reform.
It’s not hyperbolic to state that the success of our democracy depends on our ability to restore guardrails that protect against the influence of big money and corruption in our elections. A constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United is a good place to start. That process isn’t quick, but it must be a priority.
In the short term, new laws could blunt the impact of the decision. Last year, the House passed the For the People Act (H.R. 1), the most sweeping package of anti-corruption reforms since Watergate. It has not even received consideration in the Senate. This bill would bring undisclosed “dark money” into the light, allow candidates to run for office on the strength of grassroots support by creating a small-donor matching program, and strengthen oversight over and accountability of federal officials.
We must also protect every eligible voters’ right to cast their ballot easily and free from discrimination. In addition to the major voter registration reforms included in H.R. 1, the House also passed the Voting Rights Advancement Act to prevent places with a history of discrimination from continuing to engage in voter suppression.
Red and blue states fight corruption
These are ambitious goals, but Americans have come together over the past decade to prove they are attainable. Twenty states and over 800 municipalities representing 141 million Americans have passed resolutions calling to overturn Citizens United, including former House Speaker Paul Ryan’s hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin.
We’ve seen new anti-corruption laws passed in red and blue states. In 2015, Montana’s Republican-led legislature passed a dark money disclosure law. In 2016, Missouri voters overwhelmingly approved contribution limits the same year they delivered 10 electoral votes to Donald Trump. In the past decade there have been new, innovative small-donor public financing programs passed or enacted across the country, from Seattle and Portland to Washington, D.C.
H.R. 1 is a direct result of this overwhelming public support for reform. The freshman class of House Democrats ran on a platform of ending corruption in Washington, and it was a key reason they retook the majority. All the 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls have sworn off corporate PAC money, and they have said that passing a bold democracy reform bill will be their first order of business or a top priority.
All of this is happening because voters are demanding change. They’re tired of corruption and big donors buying access and influence. They want to vote for leaders who’ll stand up and fight for them. Every candidate, from state houses to president, should take this anger seriously as they weigh whether they’ll be champions of reform or defenders of the broken status quo.
By Tiffany Muller
Ten years ago this week, a narrow majority of the Supreme Court overturned a century of campaign finance law, giving wealthy donors and corporations nearly unlimited ability to influence our elections. In his State of the Union address a week later, President Barack Obama said the controversial Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision “will open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections.” Justice Samuel Alito famously shook his head, mouthing “not true.”
A decade later, it’s clear that President Obama was right and Justice Alito was wrong. With its decision, the court threw out restrictions on corporate and union election spending, narrowed the legal definition of “corruption” and set the stage for an influx of undisclosed dark money spending on our elections.
The court’s naive view of our electoral process set the stage for 10 years of billions of dollars corrupting our politics and dictating national policy on everything from the cost of prescription drugs to climate change to gun violence.
For example, during the attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017, a Republican super PAC publicly withdrew its support of Rep. David Young of Iowa because he expressed opposition to the GOP health care bill. Young soon switched his position, voted for the bill, and millions from the super PAC flowed into his district to help him win.
Wealthy donors have a bullhorn
That is corruption pure and simple, and it happens all the time in American politics. It now happens so often that the Supreme Court’s naiveté begins to look more like willful ignorance.
Our campaign finance system was broken long before Citizens United, but it has given a bullhorn to wealthy donors, who already had the loudest voices in the room. The overwhelmingly white, male and older donor class has become even more homogeneous. This elite set of Americans has scored political power on a magnitude not seen since the Gilded Age. In fact, just 11 people gave $1 billion — or a fifth of all donations to super PACs — from 2010 to 2018.
We now have elections where the candidates themselves play secondary roles in their own campaigns. For example, in Pennsylvania’s 2016 U.S. Senate race, outside spending topped $123 million, while the candidates combined for less than $50 million. This arms race not only impacts who can run for and win political office, but it also changes policy debates.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and End Citizens United President Tiffany Muller (in gray) mark the 10th anniversary of the decision on Jan. 14, 2020, at the Capitol in Washington.
Climate change used to be a bipartisan issue, but that ended with Citizens United, even as global temperatures continued to rise. Meanwhile, since the decision, the energy sector has poured over $719 million into our federal elections, about a quarter of it in unlimited expenditures. The NRA has invested nearly $125 million in federal elections since the decision, nearly all of it in unlimited spending — helping to effectively block every attempt to pass universal background checks, though almost all Americans (75%-93% in recent polls) support that reform.
It’s not hyperbolic to state that the success of our democracy depends on our ability to restore guardrails that protect against the influence of big money and corruption in our elections. A constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United is a good place to start. That process isn’t quick, but it must be a priority.
In the short term, new laws could blunt the impact of the decision. Last year, the House passed the For the People Act (H.R. 1), the most sweeping package of anti-corruption reforms since Watergate. It has not even received consideration in the Senate. This bill would bring undisclosed “dark money” into the light, allow candidates to run for office on the strength of grassroots support by creating a small-donor matching program, and strengthen oversight over and accountability of federal officials.
We must also protect every eligible voters’ right to cast their ballot easily and free from discrimination. In addition to the major voter registration reforms included in H.R. 1, the House also passed the Voting Rights Advancement Act to prevent places with a history of discrimination from continuing to engage in voter suppression.
Red and blue states fight corruption
These are ambitious goals, but Americans have come together over the past decade to prove they are attainable. Twenty states and over 800 municipalities representing 141 million Americans have passed resolutions calling to overturn Citizens United, including former House Speaker Paul Ryan’s hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin.
We’ve seen new anti-corruption laws passed in red and blue states. In 2015, Montana’s Republican-led legislature passed a dark money disclosure law. In 2016, Missouri voters overwhelmingly approved contribution limits the same year they delivered 10 electoral votes to Donald Trump. In the past decade there have been new, innovative small-donor public financing programs passed or enacted across the country, from Seattle and Portland to Washington, D.C.
H.R. 1 is a direct result of this overwhelming public support for reform. The freshman class of House Democrats ran on a platform of ending corruption in Washington, and it was a key reason they retook the majority. All the 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls have sworn off corporate PAC money, and they have said that passing a bold democracy reform bill will be their first order of business or a top priority.
All of this is happening because voters are demanding change. They’re tired of corruption and big donors buying access and influence. They want to vote for leaders who’ll stand up and fight for them. Every candidate, from state houses to president, should take this anger seriously as they weigh whether they’ll be champions of reform or defenders of the broken status quo.
THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE’S RACIST ORIGINS
More than two centuries after it was designed to empower southern white voters, the system continues to do just that.
By Wilfred Codrington III, Fellow at NYU School of Law
Is a color-blind political system possible under our Constitution? If it is, the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 did little to help matters. While black people in America today are not experiencing 1950s levels of voter suppression, efforts to keep them and other citizens from participating in elections began within 24 hours of the Shelby County v. Holder ruling and have only increased since then.
In Shelby County’s oral argument, Justice Antonin Scalia cautioned, “Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get them out through the normal political processes.” Ironically enough, there is some truth to an otherwise frighteningly numb claim. American elections have an acute history of racial entitlements—only they don’t privilege black Americans.
For centuries, white votes have gotten undue weight, as a result of innovations such as poll taxes and voter-ID laws and outright violence to discourage racial minorities from voting. (The point was obvious to anyone paying attention: As William F. Buckley argued in his essay “Why the South Must Prevail,” white Americans are “entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally,” anywhere they are outnumbered because they are part of “the advanced race.”) But America’s institutions boosted white political power in less obvious ways, too, and the nation’s oldest structural racial entitlement program is one of its most consequential: the Electoral College.
Commentators today tend to downplay the extent to which race and slavery contributed to the Framers’ creation of the Electoral College, in effect whitewashing history: Of the considerations that factored into the Framers’ calculus, race and slavery were perhaps the foremost.
Of course, the Framers had a number of other reasons to engineer the Electoral College. Fearful that the president might fall victim to a host of civic vices—that he could become susceptible to corruption or cronyism, sow disunity, or exercise overreach—the men sought to constrain executive power consistent with constitutional principles such as federalism and checks and balances. The delegates to the Philadelphia convention had scant conception of the American presidency—the duties, powers, and limits of the office. But they did have a handful of ideas about the method for selecting the chief executive. When the idea of a popular vote was raised, they griped openly that it could result in too much democracy. With few objections, they quickly dispensed with the notion that the people might choose their leader.
But delegates from the slaveholding South had another rationale for opposing the direct election method, and they had no qualms about articulating it: Doing so would be to their disadvantage. Even James Madison, who professed a theoretical commitment to popular democracy, succumbed to the realities of the situation. The future president acknowledged that “the people at large was in his opinion the fittest” to select the chief executive. And yet, in the same breath, he captured the sentiment of the South in the most “diplomatic” terms:
There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.
Behind Madison’s statement were the stark facts: The populations in the North and South were approximately equal, but roughly one-third of those living in the South were held in bondage. Because of its considerable, nonvoting slave population, that region would have less clout under a popular-vote system. The ultimate solution was an indirect method of choosing the president, one that could leverage the three-fifths compromise, the Faustian bargain they’d already made to determine how congressional seats would be apportioned. With about 93 percent of the country’s slaves toiling in just five southern states, that region was the undoubted beneficiary of the compromise, increasing the size of the South’s congressional delegation by 42 percent. When the time came to agree on a system for choosing the president, it was all too easy for the delegates to resort to the three-fifths compromise as the foundation. The peculiar system that emerged was the Electoral College.
Right from the get-go, the Electoral College has produced no shortage of lessons about the impact of racial entitlement in selecting the president. History buffs and Hamilton fans are aware that in its first major failure, the Electoral College produced a tie between Thomas Jefferson and his putative running mate, Aaron Burr. What’s less known about the election of 1800 is the way the Electoral College succeeded, which is to say that it operated as one might have expected, based on its embrace of the three-fifths compromise. The South’s baked-in advantages—the bonus electoral votes it received for maintaining slaves, all while not allowing those slaves to vote—made the difference in the election outcome. It gave the slaveholder Jefferson an edge over his opponent, the incumbent president and abolitionist John Adams. To quote Yale Law’s Akhil Reed Amar, the third president “metaphorically rode into the executive mansion on the backs of slaves.” That election continued an almost uninterrupted trend of southern slaveholders and their doughfaced sympathizers winning the White House that lasted until Abraham Lincoln’s victory in 1860.
In 1803, the Twelfth Amendment modified the Electoral College to prevent another Jefferson-Burr–type debacle. Six decades later, the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery, thus ridding the South of its windfall electors. Nevertheless, the shoddy system continued to cleave the American democratic ideal along racial lines. In the 1876 presidential election, the Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular vote, but some electoral votes were in dispute, including those in—wait for it—Florida. An ad hoc commission of lawmakers and Supreme Court justices was empaneled to resolve the matter. Ultimately, they awarded the contested electoral votes to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, who had lost the popular vote. As a part of the agreement, known as the Compromise of 1877, the federal government removed the troops that were stationed in the South after the Civil War to maintain order and protect black voters.
The deal at once marked the end of the brief Reconstruction era, the redemption of the old South, and the birth of the Jim Crow regime. The decision to remove soldiers from the South led to the restoration of white supremacy in voting through the systematic disenfranchisement of black people, virtually accomplishing over the next eight decades what slavery had accomplished in the country’s first eight decades. And so the Electoral College’s misfire in 1876 helped ensure that Reconstruction would not remove the original stain of slavery so much as smear it onto the other parts of the Constitution’s fabric, and countenance the racialized patchwork democracy that endured until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
What’s clear is that, more than two centuries after it was designed to empower southern whites, the Electoral College continues to do just that. The current system has a distinct, adverse impact on black voters, diluting their political power. Because the concentration of black people is highest in the South, their preferred presidential candidate is virtually assured to lose their home states’ electoral votes. Despite black voting patterns to the contrary, five of the six states whose populations are 25 percent or more black have been reliably red in recent presidential elections. Three of those states have not voted for a Democrat in more than four decades. Under the Electoral College, black votes are submerged. It’s the precise reason for the success of the southern strategy. It’s precisely how, as Buckley might say, the South has prevailed.
Among the Electoral College’s supporters, the favorite rationalization is that without the advantage, politicians might disregard a large swath of the country’s voters, particularly those in small or geographically inconvenient states. Even if the claim were true, it’s hardly conceivable that switching to a popular-vote system would lead candidates to ignore more voters than they do under the current one. Three-quarters of Americans live in states where most of the major parties’ presidential candidates do not campaign.
More important, this “voters will be ignored” rationale is morally indefensible. Awarding a numerical few voting “enhancements” to decide for the many amounts to a tyranny of the minority. Under any other circumstances, we would call an electoral system that weights some votes more than others a farce—which the Supreme Court, more or less, did in a series of landmark cases. Can you imagine a world in which the votes of black people were weighted more heavily because presidential candidates would otherwise ignore them, or, for that matter, any other reason? No. That would be a racial entitlement. What’s easier to imagine is the racial burdens the Electoral College continues to wreak on them.
Critics of the Electoral College are right to denounce it for handing victory to the loser of the popular vote twice in the past two decades. They are also correct to point out that it distorts our politics, including by encouraging presidential campaigns to concentrate their efforts in a few states that are not representative of the country at large. But the disempowerment of black voters needs to be added to that list of concerns, because it is core to what the Electoral College is and what it always has been.
The race-consciousness establishment—and retention—of the Electoral College has supported an entitlement program that our 21st-century democracy cannot justify. If people truly want ours to be a race-blind politics, they can start by plucking that strange, low-hanging fruit from the Constitution.
More than two centuries after it was designed to empower southern white voters, the system continues to do just that.
By Wilfred Codrington III, Fellow at NYU School of Law
Is a color-blind political system possible under our Constitution? If it is, the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 did little to help matters. While black people in America today are not experiencing 1950s levels of voter suppression, efforts to keep them and other citizens from participating in elections began within 24 hours of the Shelby County v. Holder ruling and have only increased since then.
In Shelby County’s oral argument, Justice Antonin Scalia cautioned, “Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get them out through the normal political processes.” Ironically enough, there is some truth to an otherwise frighteningly numb claim. American elections have an acute history of racial entitlements—only they don’t privilege black Americans.
For centuries, white votes have gotten undue weight, as a result of innovations such as poll taxes and voter-ID laws and outright violence to discourage racial minorities from voting. (The point was obvious to anyone paying attention: As William F. Buckley argued in his essay “Why the South Must Prevail,” white Americans are “entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally,” anywhere they are outnumbered because they are part of “the advanced race.”) But America’s institutions boosted white political power in less obvious ways, too, and the nation’s oldest structural racial entitlement program is one of its most consequential: the Electoral College.
Commentators today tend to downplay the extent to which race and slavery contributed to the Framers’ creation of the Electoral College, in effect whitewashing history: Of the considerations that factored into the Framers’ calculus, race and slavery were perhaps the foremost.
Of course, the Framers had a number of other reasons to engineer the Electoral College. Fearful that the president might fall victim to a host of civic vices—that he could become susceptible to corruption or cronyism, sow disunity, or exercise overreach—the men sought to constrain executive power consistent with constitutional principles such as federalism and checks and balances. The delegates to the Philadelphia convention had scant conception of the American presidency—the duties, powers, and limits of the office. But they did have a handful of ideas about the method for selecting the chief executive. When the idea of a popular vote was raised, they griped openly that it could result in too much democracy. With few objections, they quickly dispensed with the notion that the people might choose their leader.
But delegates from the slaveholding South had another rationale for opposing the direct election method, and they had no qualms about articulating it: Doing so would be to their disadvantage. Even James Madison, who professed a theoretical commitment to popular democracy, succumbed to the realities of the situation. The future president acknowledged that “the people at large was in his opinion the fittest” to select the chief executive. And yet, in the same breath, he captured the sentiment of the South in the most “diplomatic” terms:
There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.
Behind Madison’s statement were the stark facts: The populations in the North and South were approximately equal, but roughly one-third of those living in the South were held in bondage. Because of its considerable, nonvoting slave population, that region would have less clout under a popular-vote system. The ultimate solution was an indirect method of choosing the president, one that could leverage the three-fifths compromise, the Faustian bargain they’d already made to determine how congressional seats would be apportioned. With about 93 percent of the country’s slaves toiling in just five southern states, that region was the undoubted beneficiary of the compromise, increasing the size of the South’s congressional delegation by 42 percent. When the time came to agree on a system for choosing the president, it was all too easy for the delegates to resort to the three-fifths compromise as the foundation. The peculiar system that emerged was the Electoral College.
Right from the get-go, the Electoral College has produced no shortage of lessons about the impact of racial entitlement in selecting the president. History buffs and Hamilton fans are aware that in its first major failure, the Electoral College produced a tie between Thomas Jefferson and his putative running mate, Aaron Burr. What’s less known about the election of 1800 is the way the Electoral College succeeded, which is to say that it operated as one might have expected, based on its embrace of the three-fifths compromise. The South’s baked-in advantages—the bonus electoral votes it received for maintaining slaves, all while not allowing those slaves to vote—made the difference in the election outcome. It gave the slaveholder Jefferson an edge over his opponent, the incumbent president and abolitionist John Adams. To quote Yale Law’s Akhil Reed Amar, the third president “metaphorically rode into the executive mansion on the backs of slaves.” That election continued an almost uninterrupted trend of southern slaveholders and their doughfaced sympathizers winning the White House that lasted until Abraham Lincoln’s victory in 1860.
In 1803, the Twelfth Amendment modified the Electoral College to prevent another Jefferson-Burr–type debacle. Six decades later, the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery, thus ridding the South of its windfall electors. Nevertheless, the shoddy system continued to cleave the American democratic ideal along racial lines. In the 1876 presidential election, the Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular vote, but some electoral votes were in dispute, including those in—wait for it—Florida. An ad hoc commission of lawmakers and Supreme Court justices was empaneled to resolve the matter. Ultimately, they awarded the contested electoral votes to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, who had lost the popular vote. As a part of the agreement, known as the Compromise of 1877, the federal government removed the troops that were stationed in the South after the Civil War to maintain order and protect black voters.
The deal at once marked the end of the brief Reconstruction era, the redemption of the old South, and the birth of the Jim Crow regime. The decision to remove soldiers from the South led to the restoration of white supremacy in voting through the systematic disenfranchisement of black people, virtually accomplishing over the next eight decades what slavery had accomplished in the country’s first eight decades. And so the Electoral College’s misfire in 1876 helped ensure that Reconstruction would not remove the original stain of slavery so much as smear it onto the other parts of the Constitution’s fabric, and countenance the racialized patchwork democracy that endured until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
What’s clear is that, more than two centuries after it was designed to empower southern whites, the Electoral College continues to do just that. The current system has a distinct, adverse impact on black voters, diluting their political power. Because the concentration of black people is highest in the South, their preferred presidential candidate is virtually assured to lose their home states’ electoral votes. Despite black voting patterns to the contrary, five of the six states whose populations are 25 percent or more black have been reliably red in recent presidential elections. Three of those states have not voted for a Democrat in more than four decades. Under the Electoral College, black votes are submerged. It’s the precise reason for the success of the southern strategy. It’s precisely how, as Buckley might say, the South has prevailed.
Among the Electoral College’s supporters, the favorite rationalization is that without the advantage, politicians might disregard a large swath of the country’s voters, particularly those in small or geographically inconvenient states. Even if the claim were true, it’s hardly conceivable that switching to a popular-vote system would lead candidates to ignore more voters than they do under the current one. Three-quarters of Americans live in states where most of the major parties’ presidential candidates do not campaign.
More important, this “voters will be ignored” rationale is morally indefensible. Awarding a numerical few voting “enhancements” to decide for the many amounts to a tyranny of the minority. Under any other circumstances, we would call an electoral system that weights some votes more than others a farce—which the Supreme Court, more or less, did in a series of landmark cases. Can you imagine a world in which the votes of black people were weighted more heavily because presidential candidates would otherwise ignore them, or, for that matter, any other reason? No. That would be a racial entitlement. What’s easier to imagine is the racial burdens the Electoral College continues to wreak on them.
Critics of the Electoral College are right to denounce it for handing victory to the loser of the popular vote twice in the past two decades. They are also correct to point out that it distorts our politics, including by encouraging presidential campaigns to concentrate their efforts in a few states that are not representative of the country at large. But the disempowerment of black voters needs to be added to that list of concerns, because it is core to what the Electoral College is and what it always has been.
The race-consciousness establishment—and retention—of the Electoral College has supported an entitlement program that our 21st-century democracy cannot justify. If people truly want ours to be a race-blind politics, they can start by plucking that strange, low-hanging fruit from the Constitution.
THE TERROR GAP: U.S. LAWS LET WHITE SUPREMACISTS OPERATE LIKE ISIS
By Rita Katz
The recent arrests of Jarrett William Smith, a former U.S. Army soldier who discussed plans to “bomb a major U.S. news network,” and Conor Climo, a Las Vegas man who plotted attacks on a synagogue and LGBT bar, give an inkling of the growing threat posed by far-right terrorists in the United States.
The problem of white supremacist violence is international. From the horrific attack on a mosque in Christ Church, New Zealand, to the assault on a synagogue in the German city of Halle, the movement often follows the same horrific script—live-streaming the carnage, disseminating a manifesto, comments full of tongue-in-cheek internet references—and governments are scrambling to counter this threat.
But U.S. laws have a special problem, what might be called a “terror gap” between “foreign” and “domestic” terror organizations.
While the arrests of Smith and Climo mark a new level of initiative by the federal government, there is still much more to be done. What allows far-right terrorist groups to thrive in the U.S. is a legal double standard that binds the hands of even the most proactive members of law enforcement.
This double standard is exemplified by groups like Atomwaffen, a neo-Nazi paramilitary group with major influence in the far-right online community. A video this past May shows people with Atomwaffen patches on their arms carrying out paramilitary drills with assault rifles. They then burn the flags of Israel, the United Nations, the Gadsden “Don’t Tread on Me” snake, the gay pride rainbow, Black Lives Matter, the police-supporting Thin Blue Line—designating any and all as enemies. If it weren’t for the Atomwaffen branding, you’d think you were watching footage of an ISIS training camp on American soil.
Now combine this militancy with a widely aimed recruitment operation. Messages on Telegram, the far-right’s current online hub, recruit on behalf of Atomwaffen, directing prospects to different email addresses of region-specific chapters across the US, Europe, South America, and Australia.
Minding its popularity, it’s not surprising to see that Atomwaffen has inspired other neo-Nazis to launch offshoot chapters or like-minded groups across the globe, such as Feuerkrieg Division, a growing neo-Nazi organization which both Climo and Smith were associated with.
Media by such groups often advocate for terrorism and praise far-right attackers, including the Halle shooter and Pittsburgh synagogue shooter Robert Bowers.
This type of propaganda is a major lifeblood to the far-right community, just as it is for any extremist group or movement—no terrorist organization can grow without it.
The world witnessed the power of media with the rise of ISIS, leading governments to counter propagandists with the same urgency as fighters or financiers.
That is precisely why last October, a 34-year-old man named Ashraf Al Safoo was arrested for his work with Khattab Media Foundation, a prominent ISIS-linked media group that issued scores of threats and incitements against elections, public events, and other targets. Safoo himself never killed or planned to kill anyone, but the media he created helped amplify ISIS’ dangerous message, making him no less guilty of aiding the group.
Taking note of Safoo’s story, you might ask yourself how groups like Atomwaffen or Feuerkrieg Division can run their threat propaganda machines—let alone carry out paramilitary drills with the objective of overthrowing the U.S. government—with little to no interference. The answer is simple: what they do is, for the most part, not illegal.
The reason the U.S. government can arrest ISIS recruiters or media workers like Safoo and others is because the groups they support are Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs), making their activities grounds for, in the language of court documents, “conspiracy to provide material support and resources to a foreign terrorist organization.” To support or be a member of an FTO in any capacity is a crime.
While actual acts of domestic terrorism—killing, assaulting, harassing—are obvious crimes, being a member of domestic terrorist organizations like Atomwaffen or Feuerkrieg Division in and of itself is not, despite their blatantly stated goals to spark collapse of the U.S. through terrorism.
The very phrase “domestic terrorist group” is in many ways legally meaningless. As assistant FBI Director Michael McGarrity explained before the House Homeland Security Committee in May: “A white supremacist organization is an ideology, it's a belief. But they're not designated as a terrorist organization.”
This lack of adequate domestic terror laws too often leaves far-right terrorist propaganda, incitement, and recruitment messages under the classification of hate speech, something protected under the First Amendment. A group like Atomwaffen, which bluntly and loudly states its goals for violence, is a perfect example of why this makes for a domestic security crisis.
Noting this problem, I’d like to echo the yet small but growing voices of legislators and others seeking to end this double standard in how we protect our nation from terrorism. The world has made immense progress against ISIS online and on the ground, in no small part due to the clear-cut laws against promoting it, whether financially, militarily, through its incitement propaganda machine.
That said, the U.S. legal system shouldn’t have to wait until the brink of an attack—or, as it too often does, the aftermath of one—to prosecute terrorists like Climo or Smith.
Membership of a group like Atomwaffen should bear all the same legal weight as ISIS, al Qaeda, or any other terrorist organization we don’t flinch at pursuing.
Any such list of designations should be regularly updated to address the rapidly changing landscape of groups that either form or, under pressure, dissolve only to reemerge under different names.
Such laws will make it immensely clearer to these far-right organizations and the platforms hosting them that they cannot remain online.
I don’t embrace such measures lightly. I’ve been very vocal throughout my counter-terrorism career speaking out against overreaching measures by the government, whether attempting to regulating encrypted messenger services or other ill-guided policies.
But the far-right community has grown dramatically in the last year, with new waves of attacks and uninterrupted online spaces that inspire them—a very similar condition to that of ISIS shortly before it established its so-called Caliphate. This is a critical moment for the U.S. government to prove if it is capable of learning from history. While terrorist legislation will not be a silver bullet to stop the threat of attacks by neo-Nazis and white supremacists, it would mark a major step in the right direction.
As it’s increasingly said these days, "Terrorism is terrorism.” So why perpetuate the legal double standard?
By Rita Katz
The recent arrests of Jarrett William Smith, a former U.S. Army soldier who discussed plans to “bomb a major U.S. news network,” and Conor Climo, a Las Vegas man who plotted attacks on a synagogue and LGBT bar, give an inkling of the growing threat posed by far-right terrorists in the United States.
The problem of white supremacist violence is international. From the horrific attack on a mosque in Christ Church, New Zealand, to the assault on a synagogue in the German city of Halle, the movement often follows the same horrific script—live-streaming the carnage, disseminating a manifesto, comments full of tongue-in-cheek internet references—and governments are scrambling to counter this threat.
But U.S. laws have a special problem, what might be called a “terror gap” between “foreign” and “domestic” terror organizations.
While the arrests of Smith and Climo mark a new level of initiative by the federal government, there is still much more to be done. What allows far-right terrorist groups to thrive in the U.S. is a legal double standard that binds the hands of even the most proactive members of law enforcement.
This double standard is exemplified by groups like Atomwaffen, a neo-Nazi paramilitary group with major influence in the far-right online community. A video this past May shows people with Atomwaffen patches on their arms carrying out paramilitary drills with assault rifles. They then burn the flags of Israel, the United Nations, the Gadsden “Don’t Tread on Me” snake, the gay pride rainbow, Black Lives Matter, the police-supporting Thin Blue Line—designating any and all as enemies. If it weren’t for the Atomwaffen branding, you’d think you were watching footage of an ISIS training camp on American soil.
Now combine this militancy with a widely aimed recruitment operation. Messages on Telegram, the far-right’s current online hub, recruit on behalf of Atomwaffen, directing prospects to different email addresses of region-specific chapters across the US, Europe, South America, and Australia.
Minding its popularity, it’s not surprising to see that Atomwaffen has inspired other neo-Nazis to launch offshoot chapters or like-minded groups across the globe, such as Feuerkrieg Division, a growing neo-Nazi organization which both Climo and Smith were associated with.
Media by such groups often advocate for terrorism and praise far-right attackers, including the Halle shooter and Pittsburgh synagogue shooter Robert Bowers.
This type of propaganda is a major lifeblood to the far-right community, just as it is for any extremist group or movement—no terrorist organization can grow without it.
The world witnessed the power of media with the rise of ISIS, leading governments to counter propagandists with the same urgency as fighters or financiers.
That is precisely why last October, a 34-year-old man named Ashraf Al Safoo was arrested for his work with Khattab Media Foundation, a prominent ISIS-linked media group that issued scores of threats and incitements against elections, public events, and other targets. Safoo himself never killed or planned to kill anyone, but the media he created helped amplify ISIS’ dangerous message, making him no less guilty of aiding the group.
Taking note of Safoo’s story, you might ask yourself how groups like Atomwaffen or Feuerkrieg Division can run their threat propaganda machines—let alone carry out paramilitary drills with the objective of overthrowing the U.S. government—with little to no interference. The answer is simple: what they do is, for the most part, not illegal.
The reason the U.S. government can arrest ISIS recruiters or media workers like Safoo and others is because the groups they support are Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs), making their activities grounds for, in the language of court documents, “conspiracy to provide material support and resources to a foreign terrorist organization.” To support or be a member of an FTO in any capacity is a crime.
While actual acts of domestic terrorism—killing, assaulting, harassing—are obvious crimes, being a member of domestic terrorist organizations like Atomwaffen or Feuerkrieg Division in and of itself is not, despite their blatantly stated goals to spark collapse of the U.S. through terrorism.
The very phrase “domestic terrorist group” is in many ways legally meaningless. As assistant FBI Director Michael McGarrity explained before the House Homeland Security Committee in May: “A white supremacist organization is an ideology, it's a belief. But they're not designated as a terrorist organization.”
This lack of adequate domestic terror laws too often leaves far-right terrorist propaganda, incitement, and recruitment messages under the classification of hate speech, something protected under the First Amendment. A group like Atomwaffen, which bluntly and loudly states its goals for violence, is a perfect example of why this makes for a domestic security crisis.
Noting this problem, I’d like to echo the yet small but growing voices of legislators and others seeking to end this double standard in how we protect our nation from terrorism. The world has made immense progress against ISIS online and on the ground, in no small part due to the clear-cut laws against promoting it, whether financially, militarily, through its incitement propaganda machine.
That said, the U.S. legal system shouldn’t have to wait until the brink of an attack—or, as it too often does, the aftermath of one—to prosecute terrorists like Climo or Smith.
Membership of a group like Atomwaffen should bear all the same legal weight as ISIS, al Qaeda, or any other terrorist organization we don’t flinch at pursuing.
Any such list of designations should be regularly updated to address the rapidly changing landscape of groups that either form or, under pressure, dissolve only to reemerge under different names.
Such laws will make it immensely clearer to these far-right organizations and the platforms hosting them that they cannot remain online.
I don’t embrace such measures lightly. I’ve been very vocal throughout my counter-terrorism career speaking out against overreaching measures by the government, whether attempting to regulating encrypted messenger services or other ill-guided policies.
But the far-right community has grown dramatically in the last year, with new waves of attacks and uninterrupted online spaces that inspire them—a very similar condition to that of ISIS shortly before it established its so-called Caliphate. This is a critical moment for the U.S. government to prove if it is capable of learning from history. While terrorist legislation will not be a silver bullet to stop the threat of attacks by neo-Nazis and white supremacists, it would mark a major step in the right direction.
As it’s increasingly said these days, "Terrorism is terrorism.” So why perpetuate the legal double standard?
HERE'S WHAT A HIGHER MINIMUM WAGE REALLY DOES TO JOB GROWTH
By Andy Serwer with Max Zahn
I’ve been seeing all kinds of blather lately that increasing pay — particularly a higher minimum wage — is killing job growth. Meaning that because employers have to pay more in salaries, they aren’t hiring, or are even firing workers.
My response to that?
Please.
In fact, what we’ve seen lately in the job market should finally put that old canard — higher pay leads to job losses — to rest.
Fact One: The effective minimum wage (I’ll spell this out below) has been soaring recently and is at an all-time high.
Fact Two: At 3.5%, the U.S. unemployment rate hasn’t been this low since December 1969, almost exactly half a century ago. Nixon was in the White House, Neil Armstrong was on the moon, and the hippies were at Woodstock. A long time ago.
That’s pretty much it, case closed, except for another fact. That is, I think employers, business owners, and CEOs sometimes use higher wages, particularly those mandated by the government (i.e. minimum wage hikes), as an excuse or cover for weak performance by their businesses — and/or for other reasons.
Further, if you see a business predicated on paying workers the current federal minimum wage of $7.25, you have to ask yourself what kind of a life is that company providing for its employees.
I’ll tell you what kind of life.
That $7.25 an hour works out to be $15,080 a year. Federal guidelines mandate that a salary of $21,330 or below for a family of three is at poverty level and is eligible for certain federal programs including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps. (Ok, sure, for an individual the poverty level is a salary of $12,490. Still.)
I’m not saying that pay hikes aren’t real money for an employer, particularly for a small business owner with a few employees. But the federal minimum wage hasn’t been raised since July 2009. If you haven’t factored in giving your workers a raise in, what, 123 months, I would submit you aren’t so hot in the planning department.
Or you’re taking advantage.
So if the federal minimum wage is $7.25, what do I mean by the effective minimum wage and why has that been climbing? First, understand that the federal minimum wage is binding only in 21 states, mostly in southern and western states. The other 29 have state minimum wages, all higher than the federal bar, and now some cities like New York City and Seattle are raising the bar, as well.
According to The New York Times, if you average all these minimums across the country, you get an effective national minimum wage of $11.80. That’s the number that I said has soared over the past decade — just as the unemployment rate was plummeting — and is at an all-time high.
Furthermore, it’s tough to make the case that the states with the low, federal minimum wage threshold have better economies.
And yet, businesses still complain. New York City raised its minimum wage to $15 an hour in December and there was predictable howling, with some restaurant owners complaining they had to shut their steak house or Mexican restaurant because of higher wages (even though there are thousands of similar, thriving places). In any event, these are in fact real costs and it’s a hot button issue — I understand that. But get beyond the emotion and look at the numbers and you see another picture.
Yannet Lathrop, a researcher with the National Employment Law Project, co-authored a report on NYC restaurants showing that after five years of minimum wage increases, New York City’s restaurant industry is thriving. “People do feel passionately about the minimum wage increase,” says Lathrop. “[But the] overwhelming body of evidence suggests minimum wages do what [they’re] supposed to do: increase wages for workers affected and no distinguishable effects on employment. You can go by what you feel about minimum wage personally, or by what data says.”
Greg Biryla, state director for the National Federation of Independent Business, a group that advocates for small businesses, disagrees, saying higher wages have been “a significant burden. It’s raised the cost of doing business, raised the cost of hiring, raised the cost of growth.”
He might be right. But on the other hand this ignores that higher wages have benefitted millions of Americans who need help the most. It’s the right kind of trade-off if you ask me, particularly in this era of high income and wealth inequality.
Sure, there are differences in the cost of living between, say, Seattle ($16.09 minimum wage) and Buffalo (most affordable city in the U.S.). But increasingly, states may be looking to differentiate themselves based on wages, leading to more disparity and leverage available to states, a trend I’ve noted recently.
One last question: Is all this state-wide minimum wage lifting causing overall wages to spike, maybe too much?
Doesn’t look like it.
The September jobs report showed wage growth of just 2.9%, the lowest rate since July 2018.
What it looks like to me is that working poor people are finally getting a boost. And companies with business models based on paying people poverty level wages that haven’t risen in 10 years (!) are getting squeezed a bit.
Gee.
By Andy Serwer with Max Zahn
I’ve been seeing all kinds of blather lately that increasing pay — particularly a higher minimum wage — is killing job growth. Meaning that because employers have to pay more in salaries, they aren’t hiring, or are even firing workers.
My response to that?
Please.
In fact, what we’ve seen lately in the job market should finally put that old canard — higher pay leads to job losses — to rest.
Fact One: The effective minimum wage (I’ll spell this out below) has been soaring recently and is at an all-time high.
Fact Two: At 3.5%, the U.S. unemployment rate hasn’t been this low since December 1969, almost exactly half a century ago. Nixon was in the White House, Neil Armstrong was on the moon, and the hippies were at Woodstock. A long time ago.
That’s pretty much it, case closed, except for another fact. That is, I think employers, business owners, and CEOs sometimes use higher wages, particularly those mandated by the government (i.e. minimum wage hikes), as an excuse or cover for weak performance by their businesses — and/or for other reasons.
Further, if you see a business predicated on paying workers the current federal minimum wage of $7.25, you have to ask yourself what kind of a life is that company providing for its employees.
I’ll tell you what kind of life.
That $7.25 an hour works out to be $15,080 a year. Federal guidelines mandate that a salary of $21,330 or below for a family of three is at poverty level and is eligible for certain federal programs including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps. (Ok, sure, for an individual the poverty level is a salary of $12,490. Still.)
I’m not saying that pay hikes aren’t real money for an employer, particularly for a small business owner with a few employees. But the federal minimum wage hasn’t been raised since July 2009. If you haven’t factored in giving your workers a raise in, what, 123 months, I would submit you aren’t so hot in the planning department.
Or you’re taking advantage.
So if the federal minimum wage is $7.25, what do I mean by the effective minimum wage and why has that been climbing? First, understand that the federal minimum wage is binding only in 21 states, mostly in southern and western states. The other 29 have state minimum wages, all higher than the federal bar, and now some cities like New York City and Seattle are raising the bar, as well.
According to The New York Times, if you average all these minimums across the country, you get an effective national minimum wage of $11.80. That’s the number that I said has soared over the past decade — just as the unemployment rate was plummeting — and is at an all-time high.
Furthermore, it’s tough to make the case that the states with the low, federal minimum wage threshold have better economies.
And yet, businesses still complain. New York City raised its minimum wage to $15 an hour in December and there was predictable howling, with some restaurant owners complaining they had to shut their steak house or Mexican restaurant because of higher wages (even though there are thousands of similar, thriving places). In any event, these are in fact real costs and it’s a hot button issue — I understand that. But get beyond the emotion and look at the numbers and you see another picture.
Yannet Lathrop, a researcher with the National Employment Law Project, co-authored a report on NYC restaurants showing that after five years of minimum wage increases, New York City’s restaurant industry is thriving. “People do feel passionately about the minimum wage increase,” says Lathrop. “[But the] overwhelming body of evidence suggests minimum wages do what [they’re] supposed to do: increase wages for workers affected and no distinguishable effects on employment. You can go by what you feel about minimum wage personally, or by what data says.”
Greg Biryla, state director for the National Federation of Independent Business, a group that advocates for small businesses, disagrees, saying higher wages have been “a significant burden. It’s raised the cost of doing business, raised the cost of hiring, raised the cost of growth.”
He might be right. But on the other hand this ignores that higher wages have benefitted millions of Americans who need help the most. It’s the right kind of trade-off if you ask me, particularly in this era of high income and wealth inequality.
Sure, there are differences in the cost of living between, say, Seattle ($16.09 minimum wage) and Buffalo (most affordable city in the U.S.). But increasingly, states may be looking to differentiate themselves based on wages, leading to more disparity and leverage available to states, a trend I’ve noted recently.
One last question: Is all this state-wide minimum wage lifting causing overall wages to spike, maybe too much?
Doesn’t look like it.
The September jobs report showed wage growth of just 2.9%, the lowest rate since July 2018.
What it looks like to me is that working poor people are finally getting a boost. And companies with business models based on paying people poverty level wages that haven’t risen in 10 years (!) are getting squeezed a bit.
Gee.
THE 'GLASS FLOOR' IS KEEPING AMERICA'S RICHEST IDIOTS AT THE TOP
By Michael Hobbes
In 2014, Zach Dell launched a dating app called Thread. It was nearly identical to Tinder: Users created a profile, uploaded photos and swiped through potential matches.
The only twist on the formula was that Thread was restricted to university students and explicitly designed to produce relationships rather than hookups. The app’s tagline was “Stay Classy.”
Zach Dell is the son of billionaire tech magnate Michael Dell. Though he told reporters that he wasn’t relying on family money, Thread’s early investors included a number of his father’s friends, including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.
The app failed almost instantly. Perhaps the number of monogamy-seeking students just wasn’t large enough, or capping users at 10 matches per day limited the app’s addictiveness. It could also have been the mismatch between Thread’s chaste motto and its user experience. Users got just 70 characters to describe themselves on their profiles. Most of them resorted to catchphrases like “Hook ’em” and “Netflix is life.”
After Thread went bust, Dell moved into philanthropy with a startup called Sqwatt, which promised to deliver “low-cost sanitation solutions for the developing world.” Aside from an empty website and a promotional video with fewer than 100 views, the effort seems to have disappeared.
And yet, despite helming two failed ventures and having little work experience beyond an internship at a financial services company created to manage his father’s fortune, things seem to be working out for Zach Dell. According to his LinkedIn profile, he is now an analyst for the private equity firm Blackstone. He is 22.
America has a social mobility problem. Children born in 1940 had a 90% chance of earning more than their parents. For children born in 1984, the odds were 50-50.
Most accounts of this trend focus on the breakdown of upward mobility: It’s getting harder for the poor to become rich. But equally important is the decline of downward mobility: The rich, regardless of their intelligence, are becoming more likely to stay that way.
“There’s a lot of talent being wasted because it’s not able to rise, but there’s also a lot of relatively untalented people who aren’t falling and end up occupying positions they shouldn’t,” said Richard Reeves, a Brookings Institution researcher and the author of “Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It.″
According to research carried out by Reeves and others, the likelihood of the rich passing their status down to their children — “stickiness,” in economist-speak — has surpassed the likelihood of poor children remaining poor.
“If we were becoming less of a class-bound society, stickiness at the top should have gone down,” Reeves said. “But the evidence shows that it’s gone up.”
This phenomenon — Reeves calls it “the glass floor” — has taken on a new political urgency. Over the last two years, Donald Trump has put his family members in charge of child care policy and Middle East peace. Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian board membership has highlighted how corporations and foreign governments seek to influence elected officials through their children.
And who can forget Koch nephew Wyatt and his line of $79 floral button-ups?
But billionaire heirs are only a tiny part of the problem. Over the last 30 years, nearly every institution of social mobility, from education to work to government spending, has been systematically tilted toward the wealthy. Rather than sending our most brilliant minds up the income ladder, America is ensuring that the wealthy, no matter their mediocrity, retain their grip on the highest rung.
“The sense that there’s a self-sustaining and self-dealing group at the top isn’t wrong,” Reeves said. “When you create a ‘meritocratic’ selection process where the production of merit is increasingly skewed by parental income, you end up with a hereditary meritocracy.”
The rich, in other words, are not sending their best. And the more institutions they control, the more of their kids will be running the country.
Elite Entrenchment Goes Far Beyond The Ivy League
Last month, a Duke University study revealed that 43% of white Harvard students were not admitted on merit. They were ALDCs: recruited athletes, legacies, students on the dean’s interest list, and children of faculty and staff. The “dean’s interest list” is a roster of applicants with ties to wealthy donors.
The study — and the racial discrimination lawsuit that forced Harvard to reveal its admissions data — demonstrated the extent to which elite universities concentrate the privilege of their already-privileged students. To pick just a few representative statistics, children from the top 1% of the income distribution are 77 times more likely to attend Ivy League schools than the poorest 20%. Harvard’s class of 2022 includes more legacy students than African American students.
Donald Trump Jr., right, graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 2000. Both joined the Trump Organization shortly after college. Donald Trump Jr., right, graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 2000. Both joined the Trump Organization shortly after college.
But when it comes to social mobility, the outsized scrutiny of the top-tier colleges conceals a much larger problem. Harvard, Stanford, Yale and Princeton admit only a tiny number of students each. In 2016, the University of Washington enrolled more low-income applicants than the entire student bodies of all four colleges combined. Among the nation’s top 10% of income earners, fewer than 1 in 20 attended the tiny number of “Ivy-plus” universities. Even if those elite schools enrolled low-income students exclusively, America’s abysmal social mobility statistics would barely budge.
The more important engine of elite entrenchment is the group of selective colleges that sit one rung lower in the rankings. More than half the children of the top .1% of income earners attend these schools, compared with fewer than 1 in 50 poor children.
Over the last 20 years, selective universities have become just as dominated by the wealthy as the elite colleges — while receiving a fraction of the attention. Notre Dame, the University of North Carolina and the University of Southern California, for example, admit higher percentages of legacy students than Princeton. Thirty-eight colleges — including upper-crust mainstays Colgate and Tufts — admit more students from the top 1% than from the bottom 60%. At Washington University in St. Louis, the worst offender, the ratio is three-to-one.
“These aren’t just elite institutions, they’re elitist institutions,” Reeves said. “They end up serving the children of today’s elite rather than preparing tomorrow’s elite.”
Public colleges are subject to the same trend. In 2017, University of Georgia students had a median family income of $129,800. Two-thirds of the students at the University of Michigan came from the richest fifth of the income distribution; just one in 30 came from the poorest fifth.
“This is what inherited wealth looks like for the top 20%,” Reeves said. “You don’t save your money and give it to your kids as a bequest. You spend it on your kids so they don’t need the bequest. It’s an upfront investment.”
But as universities tilt their admissions toward the wealthy, Reeves said, they aren’t just leaving talented low-income students behind. They’re also lifting mediocre rich students up. A 2005 study found that wealthy middle-schoolers with the lowest standardized test scores were more likely to graduate from college than poor middle-schoolers with the highest scores. Students with average SAT results are nearly six times more likely to be admitted to top-tier universities if their parents are alumni. One of Reeves’ studies found that 43% of the members of upper-class households had skills and intelligence that predicted lower incomes.
“Having a college degree is most beneficial to the kids who aren’t that smart,” Reeves said. Intelligent kids will have thousands of opportunities to demonstrate their skills. Less-talented kids, on the other hand, have to rely on credentials that make them seem intelligent — high SAT scores, top-tier diplomas and corporate internships.
As elites take over selective colleges, invest more in test-prep courses and reserve entry-level jobs for their peers, they will continue to monopolize these credentials for themselves.
By Michael Hobbes
In 2014, Zach Dell launched a dating app called Thread. It was nearly identical to Tinder: Users created a profile, uploaded photos and swiped through potential matches.
The only twist on the formula was that Thread was restricted to university students and explicitly designed to produce relationships rather than hookups. The app’s tagline was “Stay Classy.”
Zach Dell is the son of billionaire tech magnate Michael Dell. Though he told reporters that he wasn’t relying on family money, Thread’s early investors included a number of his father’s friends, including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.
The app failed almost instantly. Perhaps the number of monogamy-seeking students just wasn’t large enough, or capping users at 10 matches per day limited the app’s addictiveness. It could also have been the mismatch between Thread’s chaste motto and its user experience. Users got just 70 characters to describe themselves on their profiles. Most of them resorted to catchphrases like “Hook ’em” and “Netflix is life.”
After Thread went bust, Dell moved into philanthropy with a startup called Sqwatt, which promised to deliver “low-cost sanitation solutions for the developing world.” Aside from an empty website and a promotional video with fewer than 100 views, the effort seems to have disappeared.
And yet, despite helming two failed ventures and having little work experience beyond an internship at a financial services company created to manage his father’s fortune, things seem to be working out for Zach Dell. According to his LinkedIn profile, he is now an analyst for the private equity firm Blackstone. He is 22.
America has a social mobility problem. Children born in 1940 had a 90% chance of earning more than their parents. For children born in 1984, the odds were 50-50.
Most accounts of this trend focus on the breakdown of upward mobility: It’s getting harder for the poor to become rich. But equally important is the decline of downward mobility: The rich, regardless of their intelligence, are becoming more likely to stay that way.
“There’s a lot of talent being wasted because it’s not able to rise, but there’s also a lot of relatively untalented people who aren’t falling and end up occupying positions they shouldn’t,” said Richard Reeves, a Brookings Institution researcher and the author of “Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It.″
According to research carried out by Reeves and others, the likelihood of the rich passing their status down to their children — “stickiness,” in economist-speak — has surpassed the likelihood of poor children remaining poor.
“If we were becoming less of a class-bound society, stickiness at the top should have gone down,” Reeves said. “But the evidence shows that it’s gone up.”
This phenomenon — Reeves calls it “the glass floor” — has taken on a new political urgency. Over the last two years, Donald Trump has put his family members in charge of child care policy and Middle East peace. Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian board membership has highlighted how corporations and foreign governments seek to influence elected officials through their children.
And who can forget Koch nephew Wyatt and his line of $79 floral button-ups?
But billionaire heirs are only a tiny part of the problem. Over the last 30 years, nearly every institution of social mobility, from education to work to government spending, has been systematically tilted toward the wealthy. Rather than sending our most brilliant minds up the income ladder, America is ensuring that the wealthy, no matter their mediocrity, retain their grip on the highest rung.
“The sense that there’s a self-sustaining and self-dealing group at the top isn’t wrong,” Reeves said. “When you create a ‘meritocratic’ selection process where the production of merit is increasingly skewed by parental income, you end up with a hereditary meritocracy.”
The rich, in other words, are not sending their best. And the more institutions they control, the more of their kids will be running the country.
Elite Entrenchment Goes Far Beyond The Ivy League
Last month, a Duke University study revealed that 43% of white Harvard students were not admitted on merit. They were ALDCs: recruited athletes, legacies, students on the dean’s interest list, and children of faculty and staff. The “dean’s interest list” is a roster of applicants with ties to wealthy donors.
The study — and the racial discrimination lawsuit that forced Harvard to reveal its admissions data — demonstrated the extent to which elite universities concentrate the privilege of their already-privileged students. To pick just a few representative statistics, children from the top 1% of the income distribution are 77 times more likely to attend Ivy League schools than the poorest 20%. Harvard’s class of 2022 includes more legacy students than African American students.
Donald Trump Jr., right, graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 2000. Both joined the Trump Organization shortly after college. Donald Trump Jr., right, graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 2000. Both joined the Trump Organization shortly after college.
But when it comes to social mobility, the outsized scrutiny of the top-tier colleges conceals a much larger problem. Harvard, Stanford, Yale and Princeton admit only a tiny number of students each. In 2016, the University of Washington enrolled more low-income applicants than the entire student bodies of all four colleges combined. Among the nation’s top 10% of income earners, fewer than 1 in 20 attended the tiny number of “Ivy-plus” universities. Even if those elite schools enrolled low-income students exclusively, America’s abysmal social mobility statistics would barely budge.
The more important engine of elite entrenchment is the group of selective colleges that sit one rung lower in the rankings. More than half the children of the top .1% of income earners attend these schools, compared with fewer than 1 in 50 poor children.
Over the last 20 years, selective universities have become just as dominated by the wealthy as the elite colleges — while receiving a fraction of the attention. Notre Dame, the University of North Carolina and the University of Southern California, for example, admit higher percentages of legacy students than Princeton. Thirty-eight colleges — including upper-crust mainstays Colgate and Tufts — admit more students from the top 1% than from the bottom 60%. At Washington University in St. Louis, the worst offender, the ratio is three-to-one.
“These aren’t just elite institutions, they’re elitist institutions,” Reeves said. “They end up serving the children of today’s elite rather than preparing tomorrow’s elite.”
Public colleges are subject to the same trend. In 2017, University of Georgia students had a median family income of $129,800. Two-thirds of the students at the University of Michigan came from the richest fifth of the income distribution; just one in 30 came from the poorest fifth.
“This is what inherited wealth looks like for the top 20%,” Reeves said. “You don’t save your money and give it to your kids as a bequest. You spend it on your kids so they don’t need the bequest. It’s an upfront investment.”
But as universities tilt their admissions toward the wealthy, Reeves said, they aren’t just leaving talented low-income students behind. They’re also lifting mediocre rich students up. A 2005 study found that wealthy middle-schoolers with the lowest standardized test scores were more likely to graduate from college than poor middle-schoolers with the highest scores. Students with average SAT results are nearly six times more likely to be admitted to top-tier universities if their parents are alumni. One of Reeves’ studies found that 43% of the members of upper-class households had skills and intelligence that predicted lower incomes.
“Having a college degree is most beneficial to the kids who aren’t that smart,” Reeves said. Intelligent kids will have thousands of opportunities to demonstrate their skills. Less-talented kids, on the other hand, have to rely on credentials that make them seem intelligent — high SAT scores, top-tier diplomas and corporate internships.
As elites take over selective colleges, invest more in test-prep courses and reserve entry-level jobs for their peers, they will continue to monopolize these credentials for themselves.
WE NEED UNIONS FOR ALL. IT'S A BOLD AGENDA FOR HELPING EVERYONE GET AHEAD IN OUR ECONOMY.
By Mary Kay Henry, USA TODAY
America’s labor laws were established 84 years ago on the basis of a racist compromise. And these laws, which were incomplete when they were written, are now completely useless to millions of workers — black, brown and white — who are demanding a union on the job.
The landmark 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which among other things was meant to "encourage collective bargaining," was written for a different economy when manufacturing was the biggest industry. And to satisfy the demands of white supremacists in Congress, it excluded agricultural, domestic and various other service workers from the very start, as they were industries dominated by women and people of color.
In today's economy, millions of other Americans — including gig or app-based workers, so-called independent contractors and some public sector employees — are denied union rights under federal law.
Let gig, service workers join unions
Today, according to our research at the Service Employees International Union, a staggering share of all workers in the country — up to 45% — are legally excluded from the right to bargain collectively. It’s time to update our laws to fit an economy where most people work in service jobs.
That’s why members of our union — 2 million people who are janitors, health care workers and public service workers — are calling on all candidates for president to put forward serious plans to empower all workers to form unions, no matter what kind of job they do.
We are looking for more than lip service from political candidates and elected leaders about how much they support the broken laws we already have. Instead, we need big ideas about how to empower more people to join together in unions so everyone, no matter where they live or work, can negotiate for things like better pay, more affordable health care and more family-friendly schedules.
Demand for joining a union is at a four-decade high: Nearly half of all nonunion workers in the United States now say they would join a union if they could, according to a recent survey by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And a solid majority of all Americans today say they support unions.
More unions with more power
Workers across the country are demanding unions and fair contracts in a way I’ve never seen in my 40-year career in the labor movement. They include public school teachers from West Virginia, Oklahoma and Los Angeles. Amazon workers. Stop & Shop workers. Child care workers. Cooks and cashiers at McDonald’s and other companies across the $200 billion fast-food industry.
That’s why our endorsement in the 2020 election will be conditioned on support for “Unions for All,” a bold agenda to give working people more power in our society. Our demand for Unions for All is focused on four big changes.
First, we want the next president to use the power of the Oval Office to bring employers, workers and their unions together at industrywide bargaining tables to negotiate pay, benefits and working conditions nationwide, with government involvement, where necessary, to help close the huge income inequality gap.
Second, give states and cities the freedom to innovate and create new laws that empower workers to organize in a union more easily than federal law allows.
Unions can help transform economy
Third, government should use its spending power to require that any job funded by taxpayer dollars pays at least $15 an hour and allows workers to join together in a union for a bargaining process that can truly improve their lives.
Fourth, any major economic proposal — including plans for universal health care or the "Green New Deal" — must put good union jobs at the center.
Democrats are already taking notice. We've seen Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and former Rep. Beto O'Rourke of Texas propose bold solutions to unrig our economy and rewrite our labor laws, plans that are not just more of the same. We expect more 2020 presidential candidates to follow suit.
“Unions for All” is a demand we are making on behalf of working people who are fighting for their families, not just in our union but all across the country. Empowering more workers to join unions will give us the power to transform our economy into one where all of us can get ahead, no matter what our color or where we come from.
It’s a demand that will make the right to a union a reality not just for some, but for all.
By Mary Kay Henry, USA TODAY
America’s labor laws were established 84 years ago on the basis of a racist compromise. And these laws, which were incomplete when they were written, are now completely useless to millions of workers — black, brown and white — who are demanding a union on the job.
The landmark 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which among other things was meant to "encourage collective bargaining," was written for a different economy when manufacturing was the biggest industry. And to satisfy the demands of white supremacists in Congress, it excluded agricultural, domestic and various other service workers from the very start, as they were industries dominated by women and people of color.
In today's economy, millions of other Americans — including gig or app-based workers, so-called independent contractors and some public sector employees — are denied union rights under federal law.
Let gig, service workers join unions
Today, according to our research at the Service Employees International Union, a staggering share of all workers in the country — up to 45% — are legally excluded from the right to bargain collectively. It’s time to update our laws to fit an economy where most people work in service jobs.
That’s why members of our union — 2 million people who are janitors, health care workers and public service workers — are calling on all candidates for president to put forward serious plans to empower all workers to form unions, no matter what kind of job they do.
We are looking for more than lip service from political candidates and elected leaders about how much they support the broken laws we already have. Instead, we need big ideas about how to empower more people to join together in unions so everyone, no matter where they live or work, can negotiate for things like better pay, more affordable health care and more family-friendly schedules.
Demand for joining a union is at a four-decade high: Nearly half of all nonunion workers in the United States now say they would join a union if they could, according to a recent survey by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And a solid majority of all Americans today say they support unions.
More unions with more power
Workers across the country are demanding unions and fair contracts in a way I’ve never seen in my 40-year career in the labor movement. They include public school teachers from West Virginia, Oklahoma and Los Angeles. Amazon workers. Stop & Shop workers. Child care workers. Cooks and cashiers at McDonald’s and other companies across the $200 billion fast-food industry.
That’s why our endorsement in the 2020 election will be conditioned on support for “Unions for All,” a bold agenda to give working people more power in our society. Our demand for Unions for All is focused on four big changes.
First, we want the next president to use the power of the Oval Office to bring employers, workers and their unions together at industrywide bargaining tables to negotiate pay, benefits and working conditions nationwide, with government involvement, where necessary, to help close the huge income inequality gap.
Second, give states and cities the freedom to innovate and create new laws that empower workers to organize in a union more easily than federal law allows.
Unions can help transform economy
Third, government should use its spending power to require that any job funded by taxpayer dollars pays at least $15 an hour and allows workers to join together in a union for a bargaining process that can truly improve their lives.
Fourth, any major economic proposal — including plans for universal health care or the "Green New Deal" — must put good union jobs at the center.
Democrats are already taking notice. We've seen Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and former Rep. Beto O'Rourke of Texas propose bold solutions to unrig our economy and rewrite our labor laws, plans that are not just more of the same. We expect more 2020 presidential candidates to follow suit.
“Unions for All” is a demand we are making on behalf of working people who are fighting for their families, not just in our union but all across the country. Empowering more workers to join unions will give us the power to transform our economy into one where all of us can get ahead, no matter what our color or where we come from.
It’s a demand that will make the right to a union a reality not just for some, but for all.
MINIMUM WAGE HASN'T BEEN RAISED FOR THE LONGEST TIME IN HISTORY
By Kristin Myers
June 16 marked the 12th year that Congress hadn’t raised the federal minimum wage, the longest amount of time the minimum wage has remained unchanged since it was first established in 1938. The last time the U.S. government raised the minimum wage was in May 2007 — that decision increased wages to $7.25 an hour starting July 24, 2009.
Since the minimum wage was created in 1938, it has been irregularly increased at the will of Congress. According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), the minimum wage has received a boost nine times since 1938. In the last 81 years, the minimum wage has increased from 25 cents to $7.25.
A January poll found that 55% of registered voters said they would support raising the the minimum wage to $15 per hour, and another 27% said it should be increased but to a lesser amount.
But despite the popularity of raising the minimum wage, Congress hasn’t acted on any measures in over a decade. EPI’s Senior Economic Analyst David Cooper says there has been “no openness” to do so among Republicans in Congress.
Weaker purchasing power
Until 1980, Cooper says, Congress increased the minimum wage “relatively regularly — every five years or so.” But in the last 40 years, he explained, Republicans started to strongly oppose minimum wage increases.
“It wasn’t raised at all during the Reagan administration,” he said. “That’s when we saw nine, 10 years between increases.”
While inflation levels are holding steady the purchasing power of the current minimum wage has steadily eroded over the last decade. Since the minimum wage was raised to $7.25, its purchasing power has declined by 17%. That’s a loss of $3,000 in annual earnings for full-time minimum wage workers. Since reaching its buying power peak in 1968, the minimum wage has lost 31% in purchasing power. That means that effectively, minimum wage workers are “earning” more than $6,800 less than they would have in 1968 — when the minimum wage was only $1.60.
“Imagine if someone took 30% out of your paycheck,” Cooper said. “They can afford 31% less than their counterparts five decades ago. That’s huge.”
But he explains this also has negative impacts on the economy, because the lowest-paid workers tend to inject their extra money right back into the economy.
“On a macro level, it’s also damaging,” Cooper said. “Seventy percent of the economy is consumer spending. We are shooting ourselves in the foot from a growth perspective.”
Fight for 15
Raising the minimum wage has been a priority for many politicians, particularly as the 2020 elections draw nearer. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) recently attacked Amazon and its CEO Jeff Bezos for paying workers “starvation wages.” Amazon, which raised its minimum wage to all workers to $15 per hour, responded to the congresswoman, calling her allegations “just wrong.”
Presidential candidates Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke, Julian Castro and John Hickenlooper have all publicly declared to fight for a $15 minimum wage if they were to win the White House.
According to EPI’s analysis, raising the federal minimum wage to $15 would boost the pay for roughly 40 million workers — more than a quarter of the wage-earning workforce.
And with those boosted wages, Cooper says there would be a “modest stimulative effect” on the economy as consumer spending increased. But the real question is: Are businesses able to handle paying workers more without laying off employees?
“A fair reading on all the literature on this is that past increases of the minimum wage have had their intended effect,” he said. “If there is an impact on employment, it’s so small the benefits outweigh the negatives.”
There would also be knock-on effects to social welfare systems, already facing budget cuts.
“It definitely would reduce the number of people that rely on public assistance, without a doubt,” Cooper said. “This would save money in terms of social assistance savings.” While Cooper argues this money should be reinvested back into those programs, he admits that it would “free up dollars.”
Automatic increases
But the best way to solve the problem is by implementing an automatic annual minimum wage increase, also called indexing, Cooper said. It’s already in place in 18 states and the District of Columbia.
Earlier this year a federal bill was proposed to raise the minimum wage to $15 by 2024. Called the Raise the Wage Act of 2019, the bill would raise the minimum wage and then index wages in 2025 to median wage growth.
Currently, most states index wages by tying them to prices. This way, the minimum wage would increase by the same amount as inflation in the state. By indexing to median wage growth, the minimum wage adjusts automatically at the same rate as the growth in the median wage. According to EPI, the bill would also increase the minimum wage for tipped workers, “which has been fixed at $2.13 per hour since 1991, until it reaches parity with the regular minimum wage.”
By Kristin Myers
June 16 marked the 12th year that Congress hadn’t raised the federal minimum wage, the longest amount of time the minimum wage has remained unchanged since it was first established in 1938. The last time the U.S. government raised the minimum wage was in May 2007 — that decision increased wages to $7.25 an hour starting July 24, 2009.
Since the minimum wage was created in 1938, it has been irregularly increased at the will of Congress. According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), the minimum wage has received a boost nine times since 1938. In the last 81 years, the minimum wage has increased from 25 cents to $7.25.
A January poll found that 55% of registered voters said they would support raising the the minimum wage to $15 per hour, and another 27% said it should be increased but to a lesser amount.
But despite the popularity of raising the minimum wage, Congress hasn’t acted on any measures in over a decade. EPI’s Senior Economic Analyst David Cooper says there has been “no openness” to do so among Republicans in Congress.
Weaker purchasing power
Until 1980, Cooper says, Congress increased the minimum wage “relatively regularly — every five years or so.” But in the last 40 years, he explained, Republicans started to strongly oppose minimum wage increases.
“It wasn’t raised at all during the Reagan administration,” he said. “That’s when we saw nine, 10 years between increases.”
While inflation levels are holding steady the purchasing power of the current minimum wage has steadily eroded over the last decade. Since the minimum wage was raised to $7.25, its purchasing power has declined by 17%. That’s a loss of $3,000 in annual earnings for full-time minimum wage workers. Since reaching its buying power peak in 1968, the minimum wage has lost 31% in purchasing power. That means that effectively, minimum wage workers are “earning” more than $6,800 less than they would have in 1968 — when the minimum wage was only $1.60.
“Imagine if someone took 30% out of your paycheck,” Cooper said. “They can afford 31% less than their counterparts five decades ago. That’s huge.”
But he explains this also has negative impacts on the economy, because the lowest-paid workers tend to inject their extra money right back into the economy.
“On a macro level, it’s also damaging,” Cooper said. “Seventy percent of the economy is consumer spending. We are shooting ourselves in the foot from a growth perspective.”
Fight for 15
Raising the minimum wage has been a priority for many politicians, particularly as the 2020 elections draw nearer. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) recently attacked Amazon and its CEO Jeff Bezos for paying workers “starvation wages.” Amazon, which raised its minimum wage to all workers to $15 per hour, responded to the congresswoman, calling her allegations “just wrong.”
Presidential candidates Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke, Julian Castro and John Hickenlooper have all publicly declared to fight for a $15 minimum wage if they were to win the White House.
According to EPI’s analysis, raising the federal minimum wage to $15 would boost the pay for roughly 40 million workers — more than a quarter of the wage-earning workforce.
And with those boosted wages, Cooper says there would be a “modest stimulative effect” on the economy as consumer spending increased. But the real question is: Are businesses able to handle paying workers more without laying off employees?
“A fair reading on all the literature on this is that past increases of the minimum wage have had their intended effect,” he said. “If there is an impact on employment, it’s so small the benefits outweigh the negatives.”
There would also be knock-on effects to social welfare systems, already facing budget cuts.
“It definitely would reduce the number of people that rely on public assistance, without a doubt,” Cooper said. “This would save money in terms of social assistance savings.” While Cooper argues this money should be reinvested back into those programs, he admits that it would “free up dollars.”
Automatic increases
But the best way to solve the problem is by implementing an automatic annual minimum wage increase, also called indexing, Cooper said. It’s already in place in 18 states and the District of Columbia.
Earlier this year a federal bill was proposed to raise the minimum wage to $15 by 2024. Called the Raise the Wage Act of 2019, the bill would raise the minimum wage and then index wages in 2025 to median wage growth.
Currently, most states index wages by tying them to prices. This way, the minimum wage would increase by the same amount as inflation in the state. By indexing to median wage growth, the minimum wage adjusts automatically at the same rate as the growth in the median wage. According to EPI, the bill would also increase the minimum wage for tipped workers, “which has been fixed at $2.13 per hour since 1991, until it reaches parity with the regular minimum wage.”
U.S. PAID VACATION POLICY IS EMBARRASSING: CHART
By Aarthi Swaminathan
America: the land of the free, and the vacation deprived.
A recent study by D.C.-based think-tank Center for Economic and Policy Research found that out of the 21 richest countries in the world, the U.S. “continues to be the only advanced economy that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation.” The report added that “without a federal paid vacation policy, close to one in four Americans have no paid vacation… [and] no paid holidays.”
It also revealed a massive gap between full-time and part-time workers, that while 90% of full-timers got paid vacation and paid holidays, less than half of part-timers received the same benefits.
This chart from Deutsche Bank illustrates the point:
(Source: Deutsche Bank)
‘Significant disparity between the United States and the rest of the world’s rich countries’
The key reason why the U.S. lags so far behind is because it is the “only advanced economy that does not mandate any paid vacation time for workers,” the study explained.
The U.S. is also one of the only countries that did not require employers to offer paid annual leave. So while “most developed countries offer at least six paid holidays a year… the United States provides none,” the report stated.
And even if employees are getting paid days off, the average private sector worker is only likely to see about 10 paid vacation days and 6 paid holidays — which is “far less than in almost every advanced economy except Japan.”
In contrast, thanks to the European Union’s rules, European countries had at least four weeks — or 20 working days — of paid vacation for all workers who are employed in EU member countries.
Spain ranked as the most generous, offering workers 14 paid holidays, followed by Austria, Germany, and Portugal.
‘Distribution of those benefits is extremely unequal’ between full-time and part-time workers
The study also found a big gap between full-time and part-time employees and how they were granted time off.
In the U.S., while 90% of full-time private sector workers received paid vacation and holiday time, only 40% of part-timers received paid vacation, and 44% got paid holidays.
There was an income gap as well: The top 25% of income earners received paid annual vacation and paid holidays at 91% and 93% respectively, while the bottom 25% received 52% and 54% respectively.
“For U.S. employees who do receive paid vacation and holidays, the distribution of those benefits is extremely unequal,” the report found.
By Aarthi Swaminathan
America: the land of the free, and the vacation deprived.
A recent study by D.C.-based think-tank Center for Economic and Policy Research found that out of the 21 richest countries in the world, the U.S. “continues to be the only advanced economy that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation.” The report added that “without a federal paid vacation policy, close to one in four Americans have no paid vacation… [and] no paid holidays.”
It also revealed a massive gap between full-time and part-time workers, that while 90% of full-timers got paid vacation and paid holidays, less than half of part-timers received the same benefits.
This chart from Deutsche Bank illustrates the point:
(Source: Deutsche Bank)
‘Significant disparity between the United States and the rest of the world’s rich countries’
The key reason why the U.S. lags so far behind is because it is the “only advanced economy that does not mandate any paid vacation time for workers,” the study explained.
The U.S. is also one of the only countries that did not require employers to offer paid annual leave. So while “most developed countries offer at least six paid holidays a year… the United States provides none,” the report stated.
And even if employees are getting paid days off, the average private sector worker is only likely to see about 10 paid vacation days and 6 paid holidays — which is “far less than in almost every advanced economy except Japan.”
In contrast, thanks to the European Union’s rules, European countries had at least four weeks — or 20 working days — of paid vacation for all workers who are employed in EU member countries.
Spain ranked as the most generous, offering workers 14 paid holidays, followed by Austria, Germany, and Portugal.
‘Distribution of those benefits is extremely unequal’ between full-time and part-time workers
The study also found a big gap between full-time and part-time employees and how they were granted time off.
In the U.S., while 90% of full-time private sector workers received paid vacation and holiday time, only 40% of part-timers received paid vacation, and 44% got paid holidays.
There was an income gap as well: The top 25% of income earners received paid annual vacation and paid holidays at 91% and 93% respectively, while the bottom 25% received 52% and 54% respectively.
“For U.S. employees who do receive paid vacation and holidays, the distribution of those benefits is extremely unequal,” the report found.
A HAVEN FOR WHITE SUPREMACISTS
By Gabriel Pogrund · The Washington Post
ULYSSES, Pa. – The traffic sign that greets visitors on the south side of Ulysses, a tiny town in rural far north-central Pennsylvania, is suitably quaint – a silhouette of a horse-drawn cart reminding drivers that the Amish use the roads, too. But on the north side of town, along the main thoroughfare, is a far different display: a home dedicated to Adolf Hitler, where star-spangled banners and Nazi flags flutter side by side and wooden swastikas stand on poles.
White supremacy has had a continuous presence in Ulysses and surrounding Potter County since the Ku Klux Klan arrived a century ago, giving the town – with a population today of about 650 – improbable national significance. In the mid-2000s, it hosted the World Aryan Congress, a gathering of neo-Nazis, skinheads and Klan members.
This year, after a sting operation, federal prosecutors charged six members of an Aryan Strike Force cell with weapons and drug offenses, contending that they had plotted a suicide attack at an anti-racist protest. A terminally ill member was willing to hide a bomb in his oxygen tank and blow himself up, prosecutors said. The group had met and conducted weapons training in Ulysses.
Neo-Nazis and their opponents here say that white extremists have grown more confident – and confrontational – since the rise of Donald Trump. Two months before the 2016 presidential election, the KKK established a “24 hour Klan Line” and sent goody bags containing lollipops and fliers to hundreds of homes. “You can sleep tonight knowing the Klan is awake,” the message read. A regional newspaper ran Klan advertisements saying, “God bless the KKK.”
Local police said the group had not openly recruited in years.
Two weeks later, the area’s two neo-Nazi groups, the National Socialist Movement and Aryan Strike Force, held a “white unity meeting” in Ulysses to discuss their response to Trump and plan joint action. One organizer would not say when the groups had last met, simply commenting: “It’s just a good time.”
Potter County is staunchly Republican and has voted Democratic once since 1888; Trump received 80 percent of the vote, tying with Herbert Hoover for the highest percentage won.
“I can tell you with certainty that since November 2016, activity has doubled, whether it’s feet on the street or money orders or people helping out,” said Daniel Burnside, 43, a woodcarver who owns the Nazi-themed home and directs the state chapter of the National Socialist Movement, a far-right group that was founded in Detroit in the mid-1970s. It has a presence in many states, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist groups, and the NSM was among the groups taking part in the violent August 2017 rally in defense of Confederate statues in Charlottesville.
“We have meetings every 30 days,” he said. ” There’s more collaboration.”
Burnside, who declined to say how many local residents were involved in his group, was born in Ulysses and raised there by a grandfather who he said was a Nazi sympathizer who fought in the U.S. Army in Europe during World War II. Burnside said his beloved grandfather drank himself to death because of the war’s impact on him.
The younger Burnside said he joined NSM four years ago but has long harbored anti-Semitic views and is a practicing Odinist – the pagan religion Odinism is popular among some neo-Nazis. Burnside does not see Trump as a leader of the NSM cause but as a politician who amplified long-standing white-nationalist views at the right time.
“Personally, I don’t know about Trump,” he said. “You won’t necessarily see MAGA hats at an NSM meeting. We’re anti-Semitic. Something’s off about Trump with the Jews. That said, we’re strategically aligned. When Trump says something that aligns with us – close the borders, build the wall, look after your own – that’s good: We’ve been saying this for 25 years, but he has made it mainstream.”
“We’re still a white nation, and I respect that he supports that,’ Burnside added. “He’s also highlighted social problems. The kids who go to bed hungry, people who can’t pay their bills, the damage being done to society.”
Daniel Burnside is a woodcarver and a regional leader in the white-supremacist National Socialist Movement. Photo by Brett Carlsen for The Washington Post
Joe Leschner, 38, a white restaurant manager, fled the county this year because of what he said was abuse aimed at him and his wife, Sashena, who is black, after Trump’s election.
After he discovered a KKK leaflet outside their home, Leschner organized an anti-racism gathering in Ulysses. “And these guys drove by us and gave the gun signal, like they’re gonna shoot us,” he said.
One of those who Leschner said made a pistol gesture had previously been jailed for 10 years for an aggravated assault on a black man. This year he was convicted of possession of firearms he was not legally allowed to own and intent to sell drugs.
Photographs of the Leschners were circulated on VK, a Russian-run social media site, with users posting death threats, he said.
“A guy came up to us in a restaurant and said, ‘You have got to be kidding me.’ I wanted to say something, but just couldn’t. This was where I grew up, at the restaurant where I got my first job. My wife was almost in tears,” he recalled.
“We had to leave,” said Leschner, who now runs a restaurant in Frederick, Maryland. “Most people aren’t racist, but there are enough that are and enough who let it happen.”
Kathleen Blee, a University of Pittsburgh sociology professor and expert on white extremism, said Ulysses came to be a nexus of such thinking as like-minded residents gravitated to one another.
“Modern white extremism is different to the KKK in the 1920s or Nazi Germany in that it is exclusively produced through small networks. It is not a mass movement,” she said. “It’s just one person recruiting another. Somebody knowing somebody. . . . You get an extremist in an area, they attract other extremists.”
Ulysses’ most famous resident may have been August Kreis III, 63, a neo-Nazi from New Jersey who moved to town in the 1990s and left about 10 years ago. Kreis made Ulysses the national headquarters of the Aryan Nations group and organized events such as the Aryan World Congress. In 2015, he was sentenced to 50 years in prison on a child-molestation conviction.
Daniel Burnside signs his woodworks with a swastika carved into the bottom of each item he makes. Brett Carlsen For The Washington Post
Pennsylvania has 36 racial hate groups, more than Alabama, Arkansas or Kansas, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“This area is well known for white supremacy. It’s got a rich history and the right conditions to thrive,” said Heidi Beirich of the SPLC. “It’s as significant as many areas in the South usually associated with white supremacy.”
Rural Appalachia, which includes Ulysses’s Potter County, has a wary attitude to outside forces – especially the state – that is often cited as a reason that anti-government militia groups and white extremists have prospered here. “There is also an extreme mind-your-own business approach and a belief in individual rights,” Blee said.
Months before the Leschners fled the area, another controversy erupted after a sheriff’s deputy from a neighboring county entered Burnside’s front yard and confiscated a Nazi flag. Burnside called his local police force, demanding that the deputy return the flag and record a video apology. When that did not happen, he went to state police and pursued a theft case. The 23-year-old deputy was forced to return the flag and pay damages. Local police confirmed that he was suspended and left his position shortly after the trial’s conclusion.
Many locals suggested that they were more upset by the deputy’s actions than by the neo-Nazism. One man, an Army veteran who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of being branded a racist, said there was no comparison between World War II Nazis and Ulysses residents.
“World War II was a totally different time period. It’s part of history,” he said. “He can do what he wants. . . . Everyone has their own thing.”
One day recently, Burnside, accompanied by a reporter, drove around town dressed in a shirt featuring Hitler’s face as the main design. None of the locals he chatted with objected to his attire.
City council president Roy Hunt insisted that this reflected the town’s generous spirit.
“We’re a laid-back town, and we’re gonna be nice to everybody,” Hunt said. “I’ve known Danny for twenty years. If you were in town and you walked around with him, you’re right, he’ll be welcome in every store. . . . If you’re nice, people will be nice to you 98 percent of the time.”
“If he were to put something up that said kill all members of a race, in my opinion that would be crossing the line, but he doesn’t have that sign up,” Hunt said.
He added that the town’s Nazi presence had been exaggerated by the news media and opposing groups.
Burnside said he serves the community. “I do fundraisers for American Legion with my artwork. Boys and Girls Clubs, regardless of race or ethnicity, I do fundraisers. . . . The only way I can help white people is by helping everyone.”
Other residents disagree about the impact of the white supremacists’ presence. As he shopped among Burnside’s carved wooden bears and eagle sculptures, some of them signed with a swastika, Tom Lee, a road construction manager, said that he supports the First Amendment and that the Nazi presence “ain’t nothing to do with me. It’s a free country.”
“After a while, you’re not what you were anymore,” he added. “It is America out here, but not in the inner cities anymore.”
William Fish, a 72-year old carpenter, recalled as a child accompanying his mother as she delivered blankets and shoes to the shacks where black field workers lived.
“We’re not a racist town, but there are people who will turn a blind eye when they see racism happening. That’s why we have this history,” he said. “I think it has got worse since Trump, I honestly do. I also think our young people do not today share the same rotten values as older people.”
Belinda Empson, 59, said it pained her that veterans in the Memorial Day parade had to march past Nazi signs.
“My grandson is 8 years old and he’s already asking about the Nazi flags,” said Empson, a retired waitress. “And I don’t want to explain to my grandson what it means, what they’re about. We should have settled this stuff years ago.”
Empson said Ulysses had been divided since Trump’s victory: “I think Trump has opened the gate and said, ‘It’s OK.’ It was not a license, but a subtle, ‘It’s OK.’ I think we are seeing that now.”
“It bothers me,” she added, “because we have good people in this town.”
Wanda Shirk, 68, an English teacher who worked at a Potter County school for 28 years, joked that the town had become LGBT – “Liberty, Guns, Bible, Trump.”
“I don’t think everyone here is racist, but I think a lot are racially insensitive,” she said, “and Trump has allowed that to grow.”
By Gabriel Pogrund · The Washington Post
ULYSSES, Pa. – The traffic sign that greets visitors on the south side of Ulysses, a tiny town in rural far north-central Pennsylvania, is suitably quaint – a silhouette of a horse-drawn cart reminding drivers that the Amish use the roads, too. But on the north side of town, along the main thoroughfare, is a far different display: a home dedicated to Adolf Hitler, where star-spangled banners and Nazi flags flutter side by side and wooden swastikas stand on poles.
White supremacy has had a continuous presence in Ulysses and surrounding Potter County since the Ku Klux Klan arrived a century ago, giving the town – with a population today of about 650 – improbable national significance. In the mid-2000s, it hosted the World Aryan Congress, a gathering of neo-Nazis, skinheads and Klan members.
This year, after a sting operation, federal prosecutors charged six members of an Aryan Strike Force cell with weapons and drug offenses, contending that they had plotted a suicide attack at an anti-racist protest. A terminally ill member was willing to hide a bomb in his oxygen tank and blow himself up, prosecutors said. The group had met and conducted weapons training in Ulysses.
Neo-Nazis and their opponents here say that white extremists have grown more confident – and confrontational – since the rise of Donald Trump. Two months before the 2016 presidential election, the KKK established a “24 hour Klan Line” and sent goody bags containing lollipops and fliers to hundreds of homes. “You can sleep tonight knowing the Klan is awake,” the message read. A regional newspaper ran Klan advertisements saying, “God bless the KKK.”
Local police said the group had not openly recruited in years.
Two weeks later, the area’s two neo-Nazi groups, the National Socialist Movement and Aryan Strike Force, held a “white unity meeting” in Ulysses to discuss their response to Trump and plan joint action. One organizer would not say when the groups had last met, simply commenting: “It’s just a good time.”
Potter County is staunchly Republican and has voted Democratic once since 1888; Trump received 80 percent of the vote, tying with Herbert Hoover for the highest percentage won.
“I can tell you with certainty that since November 2016, activity has doubled, whether it’s feet on the street or money orders or people helping out,” said Daniel Burnside, 43, a woodcarver who owns the Nazi-themed home and directs the state chapter of the National Socialist Movement, a far-right group that was founded in Detroit in the mid-1970s. It has a presence in many states, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist groups, and the NSM was among the groups taking part in the violent August 2017 rally in defense of Confederate statues in Charlottesville.
“We have meetings every 30 days,” he said. ” There’s more collaboration.”
Burnside, who declined to say how many local residents were involved in his group, was born in Ulysses and raised there by a grandfather who he said was a Nazi sympathizer who fought in the U.S. Army in Europe during World War II. Burnside said his beloved grandfather drank himself to death because of the war’s impact on him.
The younger Burnside said he joined NSM four years ago but has long harbored anti-Semitic views and is a practicing Odinist – the pagan religion Odinism is popular among some neo-Nazis. Burnside does not see Trump as a leader of the NSM cause but as a politician who amplified long-standing white-nationalist views at the right time.
“Personally, I don’t know about Trump,” he said. “You won’t necessarily see MAGA hats at an NSM meeting. We’re anti-Semitic. Something’s off about Trump with the Jews. That said, we’re strategically aligned. When Trump says something that aligns with us – close the borders, build the wall, look after your own – that’s good: We’ve been saying this for 25 years, but he has made it mainstream.”
“We’re still a white nation, and I respect that he supports that,’ Burnside added. “He’s also highlighted social problems. The kids who go to bed hungry, people who can’t pay their bills, the damage being done to society.”
Daniel Burnside is a woodcarver and a regional leader in the white-supremacist National Socialist Movement. Photo by Brett Carlsen for The Washington Post
Joe Leschner, 38, a white restaurant manager, fled the county this year because of what he said was abuse aimed at him and his wife, Sashena, who is black, after Trump’s election.
After he discovered a KKK leaflet outside their home, Leschner organized an anti-racism gathering in Ulysses. “And these guys drove by us and gave the gun signal, like they’re gonna shoot us,” he said.
One of those who Leschner said made a pistol gesture had previously been jailed for 10 years for an aggravated assault on a black man. This year he was convicted of possession of firearms he was not legally allowed to own and intent to sell drugs.
Photographs of the Leschners were circulated on VK, a Russian-run social media site, with users posting death threats, he said.
“A guy came up to us in a restaurant and said, ‘You have got to be kidding me.’ I wanted to say something, but just couldn’t. This was where I grew up, at the restaurant where I got my first job. My wife was almost in tears,” he recalled.
“We had to leave,” said Leschner, who now runs a restaurant in Frederick, Maryland. “Most people aren’t racist, but there are enough that are and enough who let it happen.”
Kathleen Blee, a University of Pittsburgh sociology professor and expert on white extremism, said Ulysses came to be a nexus of such thinking as like-minded residents gravitated to one another.
“Modern white extremism is different to the KKK in the 1920s or Nazi Germany in that it is exclusively produced through small networks. It is not a mass movement,” she said. “It’s just one person recruiting another. Somebody knowing somebody. . . . You get an extremist in an area, they attract other extremists.”
Ulysses’ most famous resident may have been August Kreis III, 63, a neo-Nazi from New Jersey who moved to town in the 1990s and left about 10 years ago. Kreis made Ulysses the national headquarters of the Aryan Nations group and organized events such as the Aryan World Congress. In 2015, he was sentenced to 50 years in prison on a child-molestation conviction.
Daniel Burnside signs his woodworks with a swastika carved into the bottom of each item he makes. Brett Carlsen For The Washington Post
Pennsylvania has 36 racial hate groups, more than Alabama, Arkansas or Kansas, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“This area is well known for white supremacy. It’s got a rich history and the right conditions to thrive,” said Heidi Beirich of the SPLC. “It’s as significant as many areas in the South usually associated with white supremacy.”
Rural Appalachia, which includes Ulysses’s Potter County, has a wary attitude to outside forces – especially the state – that is often cited as a reason that anti-government militia groups and white extremists have prospered here. “There is also an extreme mind-your-own business approach and a belief in individual rights,” Blee said.
Months before the Leschners fled the area, another controversy erupted after a sheriff’s deputy from a neighboring county entered Burnside’s front yard and confiscated a Nazi flag. Burnside called his local police force, demanding that the deputy return the flag and record a video apology. When that did not happen, he went to state police and pursued a theft case. The 23-year-old deputy was forced to return the flag and pay damages. Local police confirmed that he was suspended and left his position shortly after the trial’s conclusion.
Many locals suggested that they were more upset by the deputy’s actions than by the neo-Nazism. One man, an Army veteran who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of being branded a racist, said there was no comparison between World War II Nazis and Ulysses residents.
“World War II was a totally different time period. It’s part of history,” he said. “He can do what he wants. . . . Everyone has their own thing.”
One day recently, Burnside, accompanied by a reporter, drove around town dressed in a shirt featuring Hitler’s face as the main design. None of the locals he chatted with objected to his attire.
City council president Roy Hunt insisted that this reflected the town’s generous spirit.
“We’re a laid-back town, and we’re gonna be nice to everybody,” Hunt said. “I’ve known Danny for twenty years. If you were in town and you walked around with him, you’re right, he’ll be welcome in every store. . . . If you’re nice, people will be nice to you 98 percent of the time.”
“If he were to put something up that said kill all members of a race, in my opinion that would be crossing the line, but he doesn’t have that sign up,” Hunt said.
He added that the town’s Nazi presence had been exaggerated by the news media and opposing groups.
Burnside said he serves the community. “I do fundraisers for American Legion with my artwork. Boys and Girls Clubs, regardless of race or ethnicity, I do fundraisers. . . . The only way I can help white people is by helping everyone.”
Other residents disagree about the impact of the white supremacists’ presence. As he shopped among Burnside’s carved wooden bears and eagle sculptures, some of them signed with a swastika, Tom Lee, a road construction manager, said that he supports the First Amendment and that the Nazi presence “ain’t nothing to do with me. It’s a free country.”
“After a while, you’re not what you were anymore,” he added. “It is America out here, but not in the inner cities anymore.”
William Fish, a 72-year old carpenter, recalled as a child accompanying his mother as she delivered blankets and shoes to the shacks where black field workers lived.
“We’re not a racist town, but there are people who will turn a blind eye when they see racism happening. That’s why we have this history,” he said. “I think it has got worse since Trump, I honestly do. I also think our young people do not today share the same rotten values as older people.”
Belinda Empson, 59, said it pained her that veterans in the Memorial Day parade had to march past Nazi signs.
“My grandson is 8 years old and he’s already asking about the Nazi flags,” said Empson, a retired waitress. “And I don’t want to explain to my grandson what it means, what they’re about. We should have settled this stuff years ago.”
Empson said Ulysses had been divided since Trump’s victory: “I think Trump has opened the gate and said, ‘It’s OK.’ It was not a license, but a subtle, ‘It’s OK.’ I think we are seeing that now.”
“It bothers me,” she added, “because we have good people in this town.”
Wanda Shirk, 68, an English teacher who worked at a Potter County school for 28 years, joked that the town had become LGBT – “Liberty, Guns, Bible, Trump.”
“I don’t think everyone here is racist, but I think a lot are racially insensitive,” she said, “and Trump has allowed that to grow.”
A MINIMUM-WAGE WORKER NEEDS 2.5 FULL-TIME JOBS TO AFFORD A ONE-BEDROOM APARTMENT IN MOST OF THE US
By Hillary Hoffower
What do you get when you combine minimum wage with increasing apartment rents? Many workers who can't afford a place to live.
The National Low Income Housing Coalition's (NLIHC) annual report recently took a look at the Housing Wage, an estimate of the hourly wage a full-time worker needs to earn to afford a rental home at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development's fair-market rent. That means spending no more than 30% of their income on housing costs — the typical rule of thumb when budgeting for housing.
NLIHC found that a worker needs to earn $17.90 an hour at a full-time job — 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year — to afford a modest one-bedroom apartment. That's over $10 more than the federal minimum wage of $7.25.
Let's look at the math: If a worker holds two full-time minimum wage jobs, they'd be earning $14.50 an hour total — still under the $17.90 needed to afford rent and have 70% of your income left over for non-housing related expenses. The worker would have to take on another, part-time, minimum-wage job to make up the difference. All things considered, that's a 99-hour work week, 52 weeks a year.
The map below shows the hourly wage needed to afford a fair-market rent, one-bedroom apartment by state, assuming a 40-hour work week, 52 weeks a year, as calculated by the NLIHC. This is also known as the "housing wage."
Only five states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington — have one-bedrooms affordable for minimum-wage workers across 22 counties.
All of these states have minimum wages higher than the federal minimum wage, but if you're looking for housing outside of the 22 counties, even these higher minimum wages aren't enough.
The housing wage for a one-bedroom apartment in Washington is $21.65. A worker would need income from two jobs at Washington's minimum wage of $11.50 (the highest of all five states) to afford a one-bedroom apartment.
Workers fare a little better in Arizona, where the minimum wage of $10.50 is actually the lowest of the five states. The housing wage for a one-bedroom apartment there is $14.64.
Even Arkansas, which has the most affordable housing in the country, according to NLIHC data, has a higher one-bedroom housing wage ($10.98) than minimum wage ($8.50).
Lastly, Hawaii, the state with the most expensive housing: The minimum wage there is $10.10, and the housing wage for a one-bedroom apartment is $27.44. If a worker held 2.5 full-time jobs, they would make $25.70 an hour — that's more than the national housing wage, yet still not enough for Hawaii's steep real estate market. A worker in Hawaii would have to work almost three full-time jobs just to afford a one-bedroom rental.
By Hillary Hoffower
What do you get when you combine minimum wage with increasing apartment rents? Many workers who can't afford a place to live.
The National Low Income Housing Coalition's (NLIHC) annual report recently took a look at the Housing Wage, an estimate of the hourly wage a full-time worker needs to earn to afford a rental home at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development's fair-market rent. That means spending no more than 30% of their income on housing costs — the typical rule of thumb when budgeting for housing.
NLIHC found that a worker needs to earn $17.90 an hour at a full-time job — 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year — to afford a modest one-bedroom apartment. That's over $10 more than the federal minimum wage of $7.25.
Let's look at the math: If a worker holds two full-time minimum wage jobs, they'd be earning $14.50 an hour total — still under the $17.90 needed to afford rent and have 70% of your income left over for non-housing related expenses. The worker would have to take on another, part-time, minimum-wage job to make up the difference. All things considered, that's a 99-hour work week, 52 weeks a year.
The map below shows the hourly wage needed to afford a fair-market rent, one-bedroom apartment by state, assuming a 40-hour work week, 52 weeks a year, as calculated by the NLIHC. This is also known as the "housing wage."
Only five states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington — have one-bedrooms affordable for minimum-wage workers across 22 counties.
All of these states have minimum wages higher than the federal minimum wage, but if you're looking for housing outside of the 22 counties, even these higher minimum wages aren't enough.
The housing wage for a one-bedroom apartment in Washington is $21.65. A worker would need income from two jobs at Washington's minimum wage of $11.50 (the highest of all five states) to afford a one-bedroom apartment.
Workers fare a little better in Arizona, where the minimum wage of $10.50 is actually the lowest of the five states. The housing wage for a one-bedroom apartment there is $14.64.
Even Arkansas, which has the most affordable housing in the country, according to NLIHC data, has a higher one-bedroom housing wage ($10.98) than minimum wage ($8.50).
Lastly, Hawaii, the state with the most expensive housing: The minimum wage there is $10.10, and the housing wage for a one-bedroom apartment is $27.44. If a worker held 2.5 full-time jobs, they would make $25.70 an hour — that's more than the national housing wage, yet still not enough for Hawaii's steep real estate market. A worker in Hawaii would have to work almost three full-time jobs just to afford a one-bedroom rental.
BACKGROUND CHECKS CAN’T PREVENT GUN VIOLENCE — BECAUSE THE NRA DESIGNED THEM TO FAIL
Gun control advocates hope to expand the background-check system.
But it’s a fake solution crafted by the NRA
By Ladd Everitt
Since America’s instant check system for gun buyers went online in November 1998, the gun control movement and its allies in Congress have made the expansion of the system their primary focus. The National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) was designed to be fast and easy. Licensed dealers call in a prospective gun buyer’s information to an FBI call center in Clarksburg, West Virginia, where checkers run the name through three separate computer databases of past criminal offenders and those adjudicated for mental illness. The process takes only a few minutes.
But the efficiency comes with a price. NICS has failed spectacularly in one high-profile shooting after another, allowing individuals with a history of violence and/or severe mental illness to legally purchase weapons later used in a slaughter.
By ignoring this problem with NICS, gun control advocates seem to be forgetting the history of the Brady Bill and the method by which computer background checks came into being. The NRA, not the gun control movement, was the creator of the FBI call-in system. The system was designed to fail from the start.
The deliberate mediocrity of our background checks has its roots in an era when stopping violent gun buyers was a hopeless exercise.
President Lyndon B. Johnson, the Great Persuader, lobbied hard for the Gun Control Act of 1968, which he said should prevent “hardened criminals, or alcoholics, or drug addicts or mentally unstable” citizens from buying guns. But Congress sent him a weak bill, which he reluctantly signed on Oct. 22, 1968, with an accompanying statement:
“This bill — as big as this bill is — still falls short, because we just could not get the Congress to carry out the requests we made of them. I asked for the national registration of all guns and the licensing of those who carry those guns. For the fact of life is that there are over 160 million guns in this country — more firearms than families. If guns are to be kept out of the hands of the criminal, out of the hands of the insane, and out of the hands of the irresponsible, then we just must have licensing. If the criminal with a gun is to be tracked down quickly, then we must have registration in this country. The voices that blocked these safeguards were not the voices of an aroused nation. They were the voices of a powerful lobby, a gun lobby, that has prevailed for the moment in an election year. But the key to effective crime control remains, in my judgment, effective gun control. And those of us who are really concerned about crime just must — somehow, someday — make our voices felt. We must continue to work for the day when Americans can get the full protection that every American citizen is entitled to and deserves — the kind of protection that most civilized nations have long ago adopted … We have made much progress — but not nearly enough.”
When Americans bought guns, they filled out a form with questions about their criminal and mental health history. The problem was that no one was tasked by the Gun Control Act with checking buyers’ answers for validity. Forget about licensing and registration. America’s strategy to keep dangerous people from getting guns was an honor system, and Johnson knew it.
Thirteen years later, on March 30, 1981, John Hinckley shot President Ronald Reagan, Press Secretary Jim Brady, and two law enforcement officers outside the Hilton Hotel in Washington. Reagan was hospitalized and nearly died. Brady was catastrophically injured and disabled for the rest of his life. The officers recovered.
Hinckley, a severely mentally ill college dropout, purchased his handgun from a Dallas pawnshop for $47.95. Americans were outraged that a man this deranged could legally arm himself without having any type of background check. Within weeks, legislation had been introduced in Congress to create a federal waiting period for handgun buyers while their criminal and mental health background would be checked by law enforcement.
The effort didn’t find traction, however, until Jim Brady and his wife Sarah began working with Handgun Control, Inc. in 1985 (HCI later became the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence). Two years later, the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, dubbed the “Brady Bill,” was introduced in Congress for the first time by Rep. Ed Feighan, D-Ohio. The bill proposed creating a waiting period of seven business days for gun purchases, during which time state and local law enforcement (the people who know their communities the best) would conduct background investigations to determine if buyers were prohibited purchasers. This thorough look into a gun buyer’s criminal and mental health background would include contacts with courts, psychiatric institutions, character witnesses, physicians and other law enforcement agencies.
The NRA opposed the Brady Bill outright, claiming it would “impose total, strict gun control on all America.” The bill, however, was overwhelmingly popular with the public and supported by a large coalition of police groups, the powerful Law Enforcement Steering Committee headed by Baltimore police chief Neil Behan.
Author Osha Gray Davidson writes that on one occasion, 120 uniformed officers walked through the U.S. Capitol building handing out buttons that read “Cops Know Seven Days Can Save a Life.” The push to check gun buyers’ background carried an air of inevitability about it. “There is a great deal of interest in Congress in having something positive to vote for,” NRA lobbyist Jim Baker bemoaned. The NRA needed a plan to mortally wound whatever background check bill eventually got across the finish line.
In September 1988, they got one. Rep. Bill McCollum, R-Fla., introduced an amendment as a substitute to the Brady Bill in the House of Representatives. McCollum’s substitute tasked the U.S. attorney general with studying the feasibility of creating a point-of-sale “instant check” hotline for licensed dealers to call to screen handgun purchasers. A buyer’s name and social security number would be checked against a list/database of all felons and fugitives in the United States in a matter of minutes -- theoretically -- to determine if the sale could go through.
To the layman, the idea might have seemed feasible, but the NRA knew it would never work as promised. Very few states had computerized felony records in 1988. Mental health records were all on paper. When McCollum’s legislative director, Don Morrissey, was asked point-blank if his boss’s amendment was designed to torpedo the Brady Bill, his response was, “I wouldn’t quibble with that assessment. I think the Brady Bill is silly. It won’t work.”
Nonetheless, the NRA’s bait-and-switch ploy worked. The House passed McCollum’s substitute and voted the tougher Brady Bill down. A mandate to study an instant-check study then became law as part of an omnibus crime bill shortly thereafter.
In November 1989, Attorney General Richard Thornburgh submitted DOJ’s findings on the viability of an instant check system to Congress. The study’s assessment was blunt: “A comprehensive, accurate system for identifying felons at the point of sale cannot be fully accomplished in the near term.” The same day the study was released, Jim Brady told a Senate subcommittee, “I had no choice to be here today because too many members of Congress have been gutless on this issue.”
An unexpected twist, however, changed Brady’s fortunes. On March 28, 1991, former president and conservative icon Ronald Reagan announced his support for the Brady Bill during a speech at George Washington University Medical Center. “You do know that I’m a member of the National Rifle Association,” Reagan told those in attendance. “But I want you to know something else, and I am going to say it in clear, unmistakable language: I support the Brady Bill and I urge the Congress to enact it without further delay.”
The following day, Reagan published an op-ed in the New York Times titled “Why I’m for the Brady Bill.” Referring to John Hinckley’s assassination attempt, he wrote, “This nightmare might never have happened if legislation that is before Congress now — the Brady bill — had been law back in 1981.”
The NRA still had its poison pill. On May 8, 1991, West Virginia Rep. Harley Staggers introduced an amendment to the Brady Bill which called for the immediate implementation of a nationwide “instant” criminal background check hotline. The amendment gave the Department of Justice (DOJ) just six months to put up the hotline — despite the agency’s assessment less than two years earlier that such a project could not be accomplished in the near term. An ensuing congressional study was even more pessimistic, estimating it would take five to 10 years.
The Staggers Amendment was defeated, and House Majority Leader George Mitchell, D-Maine, and Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole, R-Kan., forged a compromise on background checks that could pass both the House and Senate. The resulting legislation reduced the waiting period for handgun purchases from seven to five days, and called for the waiting period to be scrapped altogether once the instant check system was launched.
The NRA opposed even this modest plan. Meanwhile, HCI’s lone colleague in the gun control movement, the National Coalition to Ban Handguns (later to become the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence), was losing patience with this sausage-making process (at one point the Brady Bill was known as the Dole-Metzenbaum-Mitchell-Domenici-Kohl-Thurmand-Gore Modification of the Mitchell-Kohl-Gore-Metzenbaum Provision). "The Brady Bill is a nice, innocuous piece of legislation,” NCBH founder Mike Beard told author Osha Gray Davidson. “To us, it's a minor step forward."
The Mitchell/Dole compromise passed both the House and Senate, but the omnibus crime bill it was attached to died in the Senate after President George H.W. Bush threatened a veto. The NRA had survived to fight one more round.
In November 1993, the Brady Bill was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in a form similar to the Mitchell/Dole compromise. The FBI was tasked with setting up the NICS database to screen handgun buyers and long gun buyers (a win for gun control advocates) by November 1998. Gun dealers were authorized to proceed with sales if the FBI did not respond to a NICS query within 72 hours. Congress authorized $200 million to help states computerize their criminal records.
The NRA had pulled off a significant victory: Gun control advocates had originally hoped for a seven-day waiting period on handgun purchases during which time state and local law enforcement professionals would do real legwork to investigate the criminal and mental health background of buyers. But once NICS launched in a few short years, they’d be left with a single ping to a federal computer database; a background “investigation” with little or no human interaction that would be completed in about 90 seconds in most cases.
The NRA took to the courts to have the Brady Law (and their own instant check system) struck down. In 1994 and 1995, the organization funded lawsuits in Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, New Mexico, North Carolina, Texas, Vermont and Wyoming, using radical sheriffs like Richard Mack and Jay Printz as plaintiffs. The matter was eventually settled in the Supreme Court in 1997 in the case of Printz v. United States. In a 5-4 majority opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia (who would later disrupt longstanding Second Amendment jurisprudence in D.C. v. Heller), the Court refused to toss out the Brady Law, but agreed with the NRA on an important point: The federal government could not mandate that state and local law enforcement officials conduct background investigations on gun buyers during the Brady Law’s five-day waiting period because it violated the 10th Amendment. State and local officials could voluntarily conduct such investigations, however.
When the National Instant Criminal Background Check System was officially launched in November 1998, the database was missing millions of disqualifying records that the 50 states — bolstered by the ruling in Printz v. United States — had yet to submit to the FBI. The problem was so profound that today, 20 years later, gun control organizations are still lobbying for legislation to incentivize states (and even federal agencies) to get criminal, mental health and domestic violence records into NICS.
The NRA was certainly exaggerating in its assessment of the Brady Bill as “total, strict gun control.” But the gun control movement also exaggerated. The background check system was full of loopholes, projecting a dangerously misleading sense of potency.
*
The gun control movement’s obsession with expanding the NICS system crystallized after the mass shooting at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999. The two shooters obtained their firearms through unregulated private sellers because they were too young to pass the background check required by licensed gun dealers. Most Americans learned for the first time that individuals could legally sell firearms in off-the-books transactions.
The private sales loophole stemmed from the 1968 Gun Control Act, which allowed individuals not “engaged in the business” of dealing firearms to sell guns privately without conducting background checks on buyers or maintaining any records of sale. What did “engaged in the business” mean? The Gun Control Act was silent on this question.
Members of Congress felt intense pressure to respond to the Columbine shooting and nearly moved legislation to regulate private sales at gun shows to President Clinton’s desk for his signature. In August 1999, however, Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch was able to kill the legislation in conference committee at the last minute to the delight of NRA lobbyist James Baker, who remarked “nothing is better than anything.”
Since Columbine, there have been other examples of high-profile shooters who obtained their firearms through private sales, but they are few and far between. This is because many individuals with a history of violence are able to pass instant checks and legally purchase firearms. They don’t need to exploit the private sales loophole.
Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz is just one recent example. The roll call of killers who have defeated the instant check system is almost without end: James Holmes, Jared Loughner, Seung-Hui Cho, Omar Mateen, Aaron Alexis, Elliot Rodger, Wade Michael Page, Ian Stawicki, Steven Kazmierczak. All of them were approved by NICS despite displaying multiple red flags for unstable, violent behavior that were picked up by family, friends, classmates, law enforcement or the military. There should be ample doubt about the viability of instant screening.
Advocacy for expanded or universal background checks is not without merit, however. Our instant check system might be premised on completing sales as quickly as possible, but there’s no denying it has saved many lives. To date, NICS has stopped more than 1.5 million prohibited purchasers from buying guns through federally licensed dealers. This figure does not include denials by more than a dozen “point of contact” states that process their own background checks (and typically search additional state criminal databases). The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence says the total number of denied, prohibited purchasers exceeds 3 million. Some level of screening on a gun sale is obviously better than no screening at all. But why is the gun control movement so adamant on keeping an instant check system designed by the NRA in perpetuity when safer alternatives are available?
And why do we seem wed to prohibited categories for gun buyers that were drawn up a half-century ago, when the United States government described mentally ill Americans as “mental defectives”?
Breaking our obsession with NICS and stopping all violent individuals from buying guns requires fresh ideas. Here are three:
1) Institute a national licensing and registration system. President Johnson wasn’t tilting at windmills in 1968. Virtually every other democracy has a longstanding, national licensing process for gun owners and a registration requirement for their firearms. These systems are the primary reason why other democracies have dramatically lower rates of gun death (and overall homicide) than the United States.
The licensing process involves a waiting period and a background investigation by law enforcement, which is not limited to computer database queries (e.g., interviews with friends/family/co-workers, requests for letters from physicians, safety training requirements, etc). The registration process means gun owners are 100 percent responsible for their weapons. They have to report lost or stolen firearms to law enforcement promptly and are unable to sell or transfer a registered firearm to another party without verifying the buyer’s background and changing “title” (registration) on the weapon.
The Printz v. United States ruling wouldn’t be an impediment to such a system because it would be run by the federal government rather than state and local officials (although licensing/registration would certainly benefit from cooperation between the three parties).
2) Redraw the prohibited categories for gun buyers. Although New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg was able to enact an amendment into law in 1996 that added individuals under active restraining orders and those convicted of misdemeanor crimes of domestic violence to the list of prohibited purchasers in the Gun Control Act, there are still many categories of people at high risk for violent behavior who can legally buy guns today. This includes violent misdemeanor offenders, abusive dating partners, stalkers, and domestic abusers under temporary restraining orders. Redrawing the prohibited categories for gun buyers would allow us to use the best research available today to determine who is more likely to be violent in the future.
This wouldn’t necessarily mean just adding new categories to the prohibited list. It could also involve allowing some people who are currently prohibited because of disability to buy and own firearms again. For example, an individual who was involuntarily committed years ago, but who has improved with regular treatment and is now mentally healthy.
The process of redefining prohibited purchasers is already underway in piecemeal form. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., Rep. Dan Donovan, R-N.Y., Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., and other members of Congress have introduced legislation that would prohibit the following parties from buying/owning firearms: those under temporary restraining orders, individuals convicted of hate crimes, non-married partners under restraining orders and stalkers with misdemeanor convictions.
3) Reinstate a federal waiting period for gun sales. This could be a waiting period of seven days, like the original Brady Law, or some other duration. Because a federal mandate would be blocked by the Prinz v. United States ruling, local and state law enforcement officials would be incentivized to conduct background investigations on gun buyers (for the first time since 1994-1998) via a carrot-and-stick approach using federal grants. Gun dealers would be required to get a yes-or-no answer from state and local law enforcement before selling a firearm.
There is nothing inevitable about either the instant check system or our outdated, prohibited categories for gun buyers. If we want to have a system that consistently stops individuals with a history of violence from legally buying guns in the United States of America, we can — like every other free society.
Gun control advocates hope to expand the background-check system.
But it’s a fake solution crafted by the NRA
By Ladd Everitt
Since America’s instant check system for gun buyers went online in November 1998, the gun control movement and its allies in Congress have made the expansion of the system their primary focus. The National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) was designed to be fast and easy. Licensed dealers call in a prospective gun buyer’s information to an FBI call center in Clarksburg, West Virginia, where checkers run the name through three separate computer databases of past criminal offenders and those adjudicated for mental illness. The process takes only a few minutes.
But the efficiency comes with a price. NICS has failed spectacularly in one high-profile shooting after another, allowing individuals with a history of violence and/or severe mental illness to legally purchase weapons later used in a slaughter.
By ignoring this problem with NICS, gun control advocates seem to be forgetting the history of the Brady Bill and the method by which computer background checks came into being. The NRA, not the gun control movement, was the creator of the FBI call-in system. The system was designed to fail from the start.
The deliberate mediocrity of our background checks has its roots in an era when stopping violent gun buyers was a hopeless exercise.
President Lyndon B. Johnson, the Great Persuader, lobbied hard for the Gun Control Act of 1968, which he said should prevent “hardened criminals, or alcoholics, or drug addicts or mentally unstable” citizens from buying guns. But Congress sent him a weak bill, which he reluctantly signed on Oct. 22, 1968, with an accompanying statement:
“This bill — as big as this bill is — still falls short, because we just could not get the Congress to carry out the requests we made of them. I asked for the national registration of all guns and the licensing of those who carry those guns. For the fact of life is that there are over 160 million guns in this country — more firearms than families. If guns are to be kept out of the hands of the criminal, out of the hands of the insane, and out of the hands of the irresponsible, then we just must have licensing. If the criminal with a gun is to be tracked down quickly, then we must have registration in this country. The voices that blocked these safeguards were not the voices of an aroused nation. They were the voices of a powerful lobby, a gun lobby, that has prevailed for the moment in an election year. But the key to effective crime control remains, in my judgment, effective gun control. And those of us who are really concerned about crime just must — somehow, someday — make our voices felt. We must continue to work for the day when Americans can get the full protection that every American citizen is entitled to and deserves — the kind of protection that most civilized nations have long ago adopted … We have made much progress — but not nearly enough.”
When Americans bought guns, they filled out a form with questions about their criminal and mental health history. The problem was that no one was tasked by the Gun Control Act with checking buyers’ answers for validity. Forget about licensing and registration. America’s strategy to keep dangerous people from getting guns was an honor system, and Johnson knew it.
Thirteen years later, on March 30, 1981, John Hinckley shot President Ronald Reagan, Press Secretary Jim Brady, and two law enforcement officers outside the Hilton Hotel in Washington. Reagan was hospitalized and nearly died. Brady was catastrophically injured and disabled for the rest of his life. The officers recovered.
Hinckley, a severely mentally ill college dropout, purchased his handgun from a Dallas pawnshop for $47.95. Americans were outraged that a man this deranged could legally arm himself without having any type of background check. Within weeks, legislation had been introduced in Congress to create a federal waiting period for handgun buyers while their criminal and mental health background would be checked by law enforcement.
The effort didn’t find traction, however, until Jim Brady and his wife Sarah began working with Handgun Control, Inc. in 1985 (HCI later became the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence). Two years later, the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, dubbed the “Brady Bill,” was introduced in Congress for the first time by Rep. Ed Feighan, D-Ohio. The bill proposed creating a waiting period of seven business days for gun purchases, during which time state and local law enforcement (the people who know their communities the best) would conduct background investigations to determine if buyers were prohibited purchasers. This thorough look into a gun buyer’s criminal and mental health background would include contacts with courts, psychiatric institutions, character witnesses, physicians and other law enforcement agencies.
The NRA opposed the Brady Bill outright, claiming it would “impose total, strict gun control on all America.” The bill, however, was overwhelmingly popular with the public and supported by a large coalition of police groups, the powerful Law Enforcement Steering Committee headed by Baltimore police chief Neil Behan.
Author Osha Gray Davidson writes that on one occasion, 120 uniformed officers walked through the U.S. Capitol building handing out buttons that read “Cops Know Seven Days Can Save a Life.” The push to check gun buyers’ background carried an air of inevitability about it. “There is a great deal of interest in Congress in having something positive to vote for,” NRA lobbyist Jim Baker bemoaned. The NRA needed a plan to mortally wound whatever background check bill eventually got across the finish line.
In September 1988, they got one. Rep. Bill McCollum, R-Fla., introduced an amendment as a substitute to the Brady Bill in the House of Representatives. McCollum’s substitute tasked the U.S. attorney general with studying the feasibility of creating a point-of-sale “instant check” hotline for licensed dealers to call to screen handgun purchasers. A buyer’s name and social security number would be checked against a list/database of all felons and fugitives in the United States in a matter of minutes -- theoretically -- to determine if the sale could go through.
To the layman, the idea might have seemed feasible, but the NRA knew it would never work as promised. Very few states had computerized felony records in 1988. Mental health records were all on paper. When McCollum’s legislative director, Don Morrissey, was asked point-blank if his boss’s amendment was designed to torpedo the Brady Bill, his response was, “I wouldn’t quibble with that assessment. I think the Brady Bill is silly. It won’t work.”
Nonetheless, the NRA’s bait-and-switch ploy worked. The House passed McCollum’s substitute and voted the tougher Brady Bill down. A mandate to study an instant-check study then became law as part of an omnibus crime bill shortly thereafter.
In November 1989, Attorney General Richard Thornburgh submitted DOJ’s findings on the viability of an instant check system to Congress. The study’s assessment was blunt: “A comprehensive, accurate system for identifying felons at the point of sale cannot be fully accomplished in the near term.” The same day the study was released, Jim Brady told a Senate subcommittee, “I had no choice to be here today because too many members of Congress have been gutless on this issue.”
An unexpected twist, however, changed Brady’s fortunes. On March 28, 1991, former president and conservative icon Ronald Reagan announced his support for the Brady Bill during a speech at George Washington University Medical Center. “You do know that I’m a member of the National Rifle Association,” Reagan told those in attendance. “But I want you to know something else, and I am going to say it in clear, unmistakable language: I support the Brady Bill and I urge the Congress to enact it without further delay.”
The following day, Reagan published an op-ed in the New York Times titled “Why I’m for the Brady Bill.” Referring to John Hinckley’s assassination attempt, he wrote, “This nightmare might never have happened if legislation that is before Congress now — the Brady bill — had been law back in 1981.”
The NRA still had its poison pill. On May 8, 1991, West Virginia Rep. Harley Staggers introduced an amendment to the Brady Bill which called for the immediate implementation of a nationwide “instant” criminal background check hotline. The amendment gave the Department of Justice (DOJ) just six months to put up the hotline — despite the agency’s assessment less than two years earlier that such a project could not be accomplished in the near term. An ensuing congressional study was even more pessimistic, estimating it would take five to 10 years.
The Staggers Amendment was defeated, and House Majority Leader George Mitchell, D-Maine, and Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole, R-Kan., forged a compromise on background checks that could pass both the House and Senate. The resulting legislation reduced the waiting period for handgun purchases from seven to five days, and called for the waiting period to be scrapped altogether once the instant check system was launched.
The NRA opposed even this modest plan. Meanwhile, HCI’s lone colleague in the gun control movement, the National Coalition to Ban Handguns (later to become the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence), was losing patience with this sausage-making process (at one point the Brady Bill was known as the Dole-Metzenbaum-Mitchell-Domenici-Kohl-Thurmand-Gore Modification of the Mitchell-Kohl-Gore-Metzenbaum Provision). "The Brady Bill is a nice, innocuous piece of legislation,” NCBH founder Mike Beard told author Osha Gray Davidson. “To us, it's a minor step forward."
The Mitchell/Dole compromise passed both the House and Senate, but the omnibus crime bill it was attached to died in the Senate after President George H.W. Bush threatened a veto. The NRA had survived to fight one more round.
In November 1993, the Brady Bill was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in a form similar to the Mitchell/Dole compromise. The FBI was tasked with setting up the NICS database to screen handgun buyers and long gun buyers (a win for gun control advocates) by November 1998. Gun dealers were authorized to proceed with sales if the FBI did not respond to a NICS query within 72 hours. Congress authorized $200 million to help states computerize their criminal records.
The NRA had pulled off a significant victory: Gun control advocates had originally hoped for a seven-day waiting period on handgun purchases during which time state and local law enforcement professionals would do real legwork to investigate the criminal and mental health background of buyers. But once NICS launched in a few short years, they’d be left with a single ping to a federal computer database; a background “investigation” with little or no human interaction that would be completed in about 90 seconds in most cases.
The NRA took to the courts to have the Brady Law (and their own instant check system) struck down. In 1994 and 1995, the organization funded lawsuits in Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, New Mexico, North Carolina, Texas, Vermont and Wyoming, using radical sheriffs like Richard Mack and Jay Printz as plaintiffs. The matter was eventually settled in the Supreme Court in 1997 in the case of Printz v. United States. In a 5-4 majority opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia (who would later disrupt longstanding Second Amendment jurisprudence in D.C. v. Heller), the Court refused to toss out the Brady Law, but agreed with the NRA on an important point: The federal government could not mandate that state and local law enforcement officials conduct background investigations on gun buyers during the Brady Law’s five-day waiting period because it violated the 10th Amendment. State and local officials could voluntarily conduct such investigations, however.
When the National Instant Criminal Background Check System was officially launched in November 1998, the database was missing millions of disqualifying records that the 50 states — bolstered by the ruling in Printz v. United States — had yet to submit to the FBI. The problem was so profound that today, 20 years later, gun control organizations are still lobbying for legislation to incentivize states (and even federal agencies) to get criminal, mental health and domestic violence records into NICS.
The NRA was certainly exaggerating in its assessment of the Brady Bill as “total, strict gun control.” But the gun control movement also exaggerated. The background check system was full of loopholes, projecting a dangerously misleading sense of potency.
*
The gun control movement’s obsession with expanding the NICS system crystallized after the mass shooting at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999. The two shooters obtained their firearms through unregulated private sellers because they were too young to pass the background check required by licensed gun dealers. Most Americans learned for the first time that individuals could legally sell firearms in off-the-books transactions.
The private sales loophole stemmed from the 1968 Gun Control Act, which allowed individuals not “engaged in the business” of dealing firearms to sell guns privately without conducting background checks on buyers or maintaining any records of sale. What did “engaged in the business” mean? The Gun Control Act was silent on this question.
Members of Congress felt intense pressure to respond to the Columbine shooting and nearly moved legislation to regulate private sales at gun shows to President Clinton’s desk for his signature. In August 1999, however, Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch was able to kill the legislation in conference committee at the last minute to the delight of NRA lobbyist James Baker, who remarked “nothing is better than anything.”
Since Columbine, there have been other examples of high-profile shooters who obtained their firearms through private sales, but they are few and far between. This is because many individuals with a history of violence are able to pass instant checks and legally purchase firearms. They don’t need to exploit the private sales loophole.
Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz is just one recent example. The roll call of killers who have defeated the instant check system is almost without end: James Holmes, Jared Loughner, Seung-Hui Cho, Omar Mateen, Aaron Alexis, Elliot Rodger, Wade Michael Page, Ian Stawicki, Steven Kazmierczak. All of them were approved by NICS despite displaying multiple red flags for unstable, violent behavior that were picked up by family, friends, classmates, law enforcement or the military. There should be ample doubt about the viability of instant screening.
Advocacy for expanded or universal background checks is not without merit, however. Our instant check system might be premised on completing sales as quickly as possible, but there’s no denying it has saved many lives. To date, NICS has stopped more than 1.5 million prohibited purchasers from buying guns through federally licensed dealers. This figure does not include denials by more than a dozen “point of contact” states that process their own background checks (and typically search additional state criminal databases). The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence says the total number of denied, prohibited purchasers exceeds 3 million. Some level of screening on a gun sale is obviously better than no screening at all. But why is the gun control movement so adamant on keeping an instant check system designed by the NRA in perpetuity when safer alternatives are available?
And why do we seem wed to prohibited categories for gun buyers that were drawn up a half-century ago, when the United States government described mentally ill Americans as “mental defectives”?
Breaking our obsession with NICS and stopping all violent individuals from buying guns requires fresh ideas. Here are three:
1) Institute a national licensing and registration system. President Johnson wasn’t tilting at windmills in 1968. Virtually every other democracy has a longstanding, national licensing process for gun owners and a registration requirement for their firearms. These systems are the primary reason why other democracies have dramatically lower rates of gun death (and overall homicide) than the United States.
The licensing process involves a waiting period and a background investigation by law enforcement, which is not limited to computer database queries (e.g., interviews with friends/family/co-workers, requests for letters from physicians, safety training requirements, etc). The registration process means gun owners are 100 percent responsible for their weapons. They have to report lost or stolen firearms to law enforcement promptly and are unable to sell or transfer a registered firearm to another party without verifying the buyer’s background and changing “title” (registration) on the weapon.
The Printz v. United States ruling wouldn’t be an impediment to such a system because it would be run by the federal government rather than state and local officials (although licensing/registration would certainly benefit from cooperation between the three parties).
2) Redraw the prohibited categories for gun buyers. Although New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg was able to enact an amendment into law in 1996 that added individuals under active restraining orders and those convicted of misdemeanor crimes of domestic violence to the list of prohibited purchasers in the Gun Control Act, there are still many categories of people at high risk for violent behavior who can legally buy guns today. This includes violent misdemeanor offenders, abusive dating partners, stalkers, and domestic abusers under temporary restraining orders. Redrawing the prohibited categories for gun buyers would allow us to use the best research available today to determine who is more likely to be violent in the future.
This wouldn’t necessarily mean just adding new categories to the prohibited list. It could also involve allowing some people who are currently prohibited because of disability to buy and own firearms again. For example, an individual who was involuntarily committed years ago, but who has improved with regular treatment and is now mentally healthy.
The process of redefining prohibited purchasers is already underway in piecemeal form. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., Rep. Dan Donovan, R-N.Y., Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., and other members of Congress have introduced legislation that would prohibit the following parties from buying/owning firearms: those under temporary restraining orders, individuals convicted of hate crimes, non-married partners under restraining orders and stalkers with misdemeanor convictions.
3) Reinstate a federal waiting period for gun sales. This could be a waiting period of seven days, like the original Brady Law, or some other duration. Because a federal mandate would be blocked by the Prinz v. United States ruling, local and state law enforcement officials would be incentivized to conduct background investigations on gun buyers (for the first time since 1994-1998) via a carrot-and-stick approach using federal grants. Gun dealers would be required to get a yes-or-no answer from state and local law enforcement before selling a firearm.
There is nothing inevitable about either the instant check system or our outdated, prohibited categories for gun buyers. If we want to have a system that consistently stops individuals with a history of violence from legally buying guns in the United States of America, we can — like every other free society.
I’VE COVERED GUN VIOLENCE FOR YEARS. THE SOLUTIONS AREN’T A BIG MYSTERY.
America can prevent shootings. But it has to come to grips with the problem.
By German Lopez
It’s going to happen again. There will be another mass shooting in America.
It’s tragic to even write those words, but this is the clear pattern I’ve seen since I began covering mass shootings for Vox in 2014: A horrific tragedy happens. There are calls for action. Maybe something gets introduced in Congress. The debate goes back and forth for a bit. Then people move on — usually after less than a week or two. And so there’s eventually another shooting.
As a reporter, I have become eerily attuned to this horrible American ritual. I do the same thing every single time we get news of a mass shooting: verify reports, write a “what we know” article, and then begin to update our old pieces on guns. I do this almost instinctively at this point — and that terrifies me. No one should get used to this.
There are signs that the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, which killed at least 17 people and injured at least 14 others, could have a different outcome. There are protests already planned: the National School Walkout, the March for Our Lives, and more to come. Students with highly sympathetic stories are speaking up. The sense of outrage seems to be sustained in the week after the shooting.
“Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have ever been done to prevent this, we call BS,” Emma Gonzales, a student survivor, said in a speech at a gun control rally that went viral. “They say that tougher gun laws do not decrease gun violence. We call BS. They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun. We call BS. They say guns are just tools like knives and are as dangerous as cars. We call BS. … They say that no laws could have been able to prevent the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred. We call BS.”
But I remain skeptical. The federal government did nothing after 6- and 7-year-olds were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where a gunman killed 20 children, six adults, and himself in 2012. Since then, there have been more than 1,600 mass shootings, killing more than 1,800 people and wounding more than 6,400. Many of these events led to protests and calls for actions, but Congress refused to budge every time.
As I see it, the core issue is that America as a whole refuses to even admit it has a serious problem with guns and gun violence. And more than that, lawmakers continue acting like the solutions are some sort of mystery, as if there aren’t years of research and experiences in other countries that show restrictions on firearms can save lives.
Consider President Donald Trump’s speech responding to the Florida shooting: His only mention of guns was a vague reference to “gunfire” as he described what happened. He never even brought up gun control or anything related to that debate, instead vaguely promising to work “with state and local leaders to help secure our schools and tackle the difficult issue of mental health.”
This is America’s elected leader — and he essentially, based on his public response, ignored what the real problem is. And although the White House has in recent days come around to bipartisan proposals to very slightly improve background checks and ban bump stocks, the compromises amount to fairly small changes to America’s weak gun laws.
In my coverage of these shootings, I’ve always focused on solutions through studies and policy ideas that would tamp down on the number of shootings. The good news is there are real solutions out there.
But America can’t get to those solutions until it admits it has a gun problem and confronts the reality of what it would mean to seriously address it.
1) America has a unique gun violence problem.
The US is unique in two key — and related — ways when it comes to guns: It has way more gun deaths than other developed nations, and it has far more guns than any other country in the world.
The US has nearly six times the gun homicide rate of Canada, more than seven times that of Sweden, and nearly 16 times that of Germany, according to United Nations data compiled by the Guardian. (These gun deaths are a big reason America has a much higher overall homicide rate, which includes non-gun deaths, than other developed nations.)
Mass shootings actually make up a small fraction of America’s gun deaths, constituting less than 2 percent of such deaths in 2013. But America does see a lot of these horrific events: According to CNN, “The US makes up less than 5% of the world’s population, but holds 31% of global mass shooters.”
The US also has by far the highest number of privately owned guns in the world. Estimated in 2007, the number of civilian-owned firearms in the US was 88.8 guns per 100 people, meaning there was almost one privately owned gun per American and more than one per American adult. The world’s second-ranked country was Yemen, a quasi-failed state torn by civil war, where there were 54.8 guns per 100 people.
Another way of looking at that: Americans make up less than 5 percent of the world’s population yet own roughly 42 percent of all the world’s privately held firearms.
These two facts — on gun deaths and firearm ownership — are related. The research, compiled by the Harvard School of Public Health’s Injury Control Research Center, is pretty clear: After controlling for variables such as socioeconomic factors and other crime, places with more guns have more gun deaths.
“Within the United States, a wide array of empirical evidence indicates that more guns in a community leads to more homicide,” David Hemenway, the Injury Control Research Center’s director, wrote in Private Guns, Public Health.
This chart, from researcher Josh Tewksbury, shows the correlation between the number of guns and gun deaths among wealthier nations:
Guns are not the only contributor to violence. (Other factors include, for example, poverty, urbanization, and alcohol consumption.) But when researchers control for other confounding variables, they have found time and time again that America’s high levels of gun ownership are a major reason the US is so much worse in terms of gun violence than its developed peers.
2) The problem is guns, not mental illness.
Supporters of gun rights look at America’s high levels of gun violence and argue that guns are not the problem. They point to other issues, from violence in video games and movies to the breakdown of the traditional family.
Most recently, they’ve focused particularly on mental health. This is the only policy issue that Trump mentioned in his speech following the Florida shooting.
But as Dylan Matthews explained for Vox, people with mental illnesses are more likely to be victims, not perpetrators, of violence. And Michael Stone, a psychiatrist at Columbia University who maintains a database of mass shooters, wrote in a 2015 analysis that only 52 out of the 235 killers in the database, or about 22 percent, had mental illnesses. “The mentally ill should not bear the burden of being regarded as the ‘chief’ perpetrators of mass murder,” he concluded. Other research has backed this up.
The problem, instead, is guns — and America’s abundance of them.
As a breakthrough analysis by UC Berkeley’s Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins in 1999 found, it’s not even that the US has more crime than other developed countries. This chart, from Jeffrey Swanson at Duke University, shows that the US is not an outlier when it comes to overall crime:
Instead, the US appears to have more lethal violence — and that’s driven in large part by the prevalence of guns.
”A series of specific comparisons of the death rates from property crime and assault in New York City and London show how enormous differences in death risk can be explained even while general patterns are similar,” Zimring and Hawkins wrote. “A preference for crimes of personal force and the willingness and ability to use guns in robbery make similar levels of property crime 54 times as deadly in New York City as in London.”
This is in many ways intuitive: People of every country get into arguments and fights with friends, family, and peers. But in the US, it’s much more likely that someone will get angry at an argument and be able to pull out a gun and kill someone.
3) The research shows that gun control works The research also suggests that gun control can work. A 2016 review of 130 studies in 10 countries, published in Epidemiologic Reviews, found that new legal restrictions on owning and purchasing guns tended to be followed by a drop in gun violence — a strong indicator that restricting access to firearms can save lives.
Consider Australia’s example.
In 1996, a 28-year-old man walked into a cafe in Port Arthur, Australia, ate lunch, pulled a semiautomatic rifle out of his bag, and opened fire on the crowd, killing 35 people and wounding 23 more. It was the worst mass shooting in Australia’s history.
Australian lawmakers responded with legislation that, among other provisions, banned certain types of firearms, such as automatic and semiautomatic rifles and shotguns. The Australian government confiscated 650,000 of these guns through a gun buyback program, in which it purchased firearms from gun owners. It established a registry of all guns owned in the country and required a permit for all new firearm purchases. (This is much further than bills typically proposed in the US, which almost never make a serious attempt to immediately reduce the number of guns in the country.)
Australia’s firearm homicide rate dropped by about 42 percent in the seven years after the law passed, and its firearm suicide rate fell by 57 percent, according to a review of the evidence by Harvard researchers.
It’s difficult to know for sure how much of the drop in homicides and suicides was caused specifically by the gun buyback program. Australia’s gun deaths, for one, were already declining before the law passed. But researchers David Hemenway and Mary Vriniotis argue that the gun buyback program very likely played a role: “First, the drop in firearm deaths was largest among the type of firearms most affected by the buyback. Second, firearm deaths in states with higher buyback rates per capita fell proportionately more than in states with lower buyback rates.”
One study of the program, by Australian researchers, found that buying back 3,500 guns per 100,000 people correlated with up to a 50 percent drop in firearm homicides and a 74 percent drop in gun suicides. As Matthews explained, the drop in homicides wasn’t statistically significant because Australia already had a pretty low number of murders. But the drop in suicides most definitely was — and the results are striking.
One other fact, noted by Hemenway and Vriniotis in 2011: “While 13 gun massacres (the killing of 4 or more people at one time) occurred in Australia in the 18 years before the [Australia gun control law], resulting in more than one hundred deaths, in the 14 following years (and up to the present), there were no gun massacres.”
4) State and local actions are not enough A common counterpoint to the evidence on gun control: If it works so well, why does Chicago have so much gun violence despite having some of the strictest gun policies in the US?
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders made this argument after the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting: “I think if you look to Chicago, where you had over 4,000 victims of gun-related crimes last year, they have the strictest gun laws in the country. That certainly hasn’t helped there.”
It’s true that Chicago has fairly strict gun laws (although not the strictest). And it’s true that the city has fairly high levels of gun violence (although also not the worst in the US).
This doesn’t, however, expose the failure of gun control altogether, but rather the limit of leaving gun policies to a patchwork of local and state laws. The basic problem: If a city or state passes strict gun control measures, people can simply cross a border to buy guns in a jurisdiction with laxer laws.
Chicago, for example, requires a Firearm Owners Identification card, a background check, a three-day waiting period, and documentation for all firearm sales. But Indiana, across the border, doesn’t require any of this for purchases between two private individuals (including those at gun shows and those who meet through the internet), allowing even someone with a criminal record to buy a firearm without passing a background check or submitting paperwork recording the sale.
So someone from Chicago can drive across the border — to Indiana or to other places with lax gun laws — and buy a gun without any of the big legal hurdles he would face at home. Then that person can resell or give guns to others in Chicago or keep them, leaving no paper trail behind. (This is illegal trafficking under federal law, but Indiana’s lax laws and enforcement — particularly the lack of a paper trail — make it virtually impossible to catch someone until a gun is used in a crime.)
The result: According to a 2014 report from the Chicago Police Department, nearly 60 percent of the guns in crime scenes that were recovered and traced between 2009 and 2013 came from outside the state. About 19 percent came from Indiana — making it the most common state of origin for guns besides Illinois.
This isn’t exclusive to Chicago. A 2016 report from the New York State Office of the Attorney General found that 74 percent of guns used in crimes in New York between 2010 and 2015 came from states with lax gun laws. (The gun trafficking chain from Southern states with weak gun laws to New York is so well-known it even has a name: “the Iron Pipeline.”) And another 2016 report from the US Government Accountability Office found that most of the guns — as much as 70 percent — used in crimes in Mexico, which has strict gun laws, can be traced back to the US, which has generally weaker gun laws.
That doesn’t mean the stricter gun laws in Chicago, New York, or any other jurisdiction have no effect, but it does limit how far these local and state measures can go, since the root of the problem lies in other places’ laws. The only way the pipeline could be stopped would be if all states individually strengthened their gun laws at once — or, more realistically, if the federal government passed a law that enforces stricter rules across the US.
5) America probably needs to go further than anyone wants to admit America’s attention to gun control often focuses on a few specific measures: universal background checks, restrictions on people with mental illnesses buying firearms, and an assault weapons ban, for example. It is rare that American politicians, even on the left, go much further than that. Something like Australia’s law — which amounts to a confiscation program — is never seriously considered.
As Dylan Matthews previously explained, this is a big issue. The US’s gun problem is so dire that it arguably needs solutions that go way further than what we typically see in mainstream proposals — at least, if the US ever hopes to get down to European levels of gun violence.
If the fundamental problem is that America has far too many guns, then policies need to cut the number of guns in circulation right now to seriously reduce the number of gun deaths. Background checks and other restrictions on who can buy a gun can’t achieve that in the short term. What America likely needs, then, is something more like Australia’s mandatory buyback program — essentially, a gun confiscation scheme — paired with a serious ban on specific firearms (including, potentially, all semiautomatic weapons).
But no one in Congress is seriously
But no one in Congress is seriously proposing something that sweeping. The Manchin-Toomey bill, the only gun legislation in Congress after Sandy Hook that came close to becoming law, didn’t even establish universal background checks. Recent proposals have been even milder, taking small steps like banning bump stocks or slightly improving the existing system for background checks.
Part of the holdup is the Second Amendment. While there is reasonable scholarly debate about whether the Second Amendment actually protects all Americans’ individual right to bear arms and prohibits stricter forms of gun control, the reality is the Supreme Court and US lawmakers widely agree that the Second Amendment does put barriers on how far restrictions can go. That would likely rule out anything like the Australian policy response short of a court reinterpretation or a repeal of the Second Amendment, neither of which seems likely.
So the US, for political, cultural, and legal reasons, seems to be unable to take the action that it really needs.
None of that is to say that milder measures are useless. Connecticut’s law requiring gun purchasers to first obtain a license, for example, was followed by a 40 percent drop in gun homicides and a 15 percent reduction in suicides. Similar gains were seen in Missouri. It’s difficult to separate these improvements from long-term trends (since gun homicides have generally been on the decline for decades now), but some of the decreases are likely linked to new restrictions on guns — and that means these measures truly saved lives.
There are also some evidence-based policies that could help outside the realm of gun control, including more stringent regulations and taxes on alcohol, changes in policing, and behavioral intervention programs.
But if America wants to get to the levels of gun deaths that its European peers report, it will likely need to go much, much further on guns in particular.
America can prevent shootings. But it has to come to grips with the problem.
By German Lopez
It’s going to happen again. There will be another mass shooting in America.
It’s tragic to even write those words, but this is the clear pattern I’ve seen since I began covering mass shootings for Vox in 2014: A horrific tragedy happens. There are calls for action. Maybe something gets introduced in Congress. The debate goes back and forth for a bit. Then people move on — usually after less than a week or two. And so there’s eventually another shooting.
As a reporter, I have become eerily attuned to this horrible American ritual. I do the same thing every single time we get news of a mass shooting: verify reports, write a “what we know” article, and then begin to update our old pieces on guns. I do this almost instinctively at this point — and that terrifies me. No one should get used to this.
There are signs that the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, which killed at least 17 people and injured at least 14 others, could have a different outcome. There are protests already planned: the National School Walkout, the March for Our Lives, and more to come. Students with highly sympathetic stories are speaking up. The sense of outrage seems to be sustained in the week after the shooting.
“Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have ever been done to prevent this, we call BS,” Emma Gonzales, a student survivor, said in a speech at a gun control rally that went viral. “They say that tougher gun laws do not decrease gun violence. We call BS. They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun. We call BS. They say guns are just tools like knives and are as dangerous as cars. We call BS. … They say that no laws could have been able to prevent the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred. We call BS.”
But I remain skeptical. The federal government did nothing after 6- and 7-year-olds were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where a gunman killed 20 children, six adults, and himself in 2012. Since then, there have been more than 1,600 mass shootings, killing more than 1,800 people and wounding more than 6,400. Many of these events led to protests and calls for actions, but Congress refused to budge every time.
As I see it, the core issue is that America as a whole refuses to even admit it has a serious problem with guns and gun violence. And more than that, lawmakers continue acting like the solutions are some sort of mystery, as if there aren’t years of research and experiences in other countries that show restrictions on firearms can save lives.
Consider President Donald Trump’s speech responding to the Florida shooting: His only mention of guns was a vague reference to “gunfire” as he described what happened. He never even brought up gun control or anything related to that debate, instead vaguely promising to work “with state and local leaders to help secure our schools and tackle the difficult issue of mental health.”
This is America’s elected leader — and he essentially, based on his public response, ignored what the real problem is. And although the White House has in recent days come around to bipartisan proposals to very slightly improve background checks and ban bump stocks, the compromises amount to fairly small changes to America’s weak gun laws.
In my coverage of these shootings, I’ve always focused on solutions through studies and policy ideas that would tamp down on the number of shootings. The good news is there are real solutions out there.
But America can’t get to those solutions until it admits it has a gun problem and confronts the reality of what it would mean to seriously address it.
1) America has a unique gun violence problem.
The US is unique in two key — and related — ways when it comes to guns: It has way more gun deaths than other developed nations, and it has far more guns than any other country in the world.
The US has nearly six times the gun homicide rate of Canada, more than seven times that of Sweden, and nearly 16 times that of Germany, according to United Nations data compiled by the Guardian. (These gun deaths are a big reason America has a much higher overall homicide rate, which includes non-gun deaths, than other developed nations.)
Mass shootings actually make up a small fraction of America’s gun deaths, constituting less than 2 percent of such deaths in 2013. But America does see a lot of these horrific events: According to CNN, “The US makes up less than 5% of the world’s population, but holds 31% of global mass shooters.”
The US also has by far the highest number of privately owned guns in the world. Estimated in 2007, the number of civilian-owned firearms in the US was 88.8 guns per 100 people, meaning there was almost one privately owned gun per American and more than one per American adult. The world’s second-ranked country was Yemen, a quasi-failed state torn by civil war, where there were 54.8 guns per 100 people.
Another way of looking at that: Americans make up less than 5 percent of the world’s population yet own roughly 42 percent of all the world’s privately held firearms.
These two facts — on gun deaths and firearm ownership — are related. The research, compiled by the Harvard School of Public Health’s Injury Control Research Center, is pretty clear: After controlling for variables such as socioeconomic factors and other crime, places with more guns have more gun deaths.
“Within the United States, a wide array of empirical evidence indicates that more guns in a community leads to more homicide,” David Hemenway, the Injury Control Research Center’s director, wrote in Private Guns, Public Health.
This chart, from researcher Josh Tewksbury, shows the correlation between the number of guns and gun deaths among wealthier nations:
Guns are not the only contributor to violence. (Other factors include, for example, poverty, urbanization, and alcohol consumption.) But when researchers control for other confounding variables, they have found time and time again that America’s high levels of gun ownership are a major reason the US is so much worse in terms of gun violence than its developed peers.
2) The problem is guns, not mental illness.
Supporters of gun rights look at America’s high levels of gun violence and argue that guns are not the problem. They point to other issues, from violence in video games and movies to the breakdown of the traditional family.
Most recently, they’ve focused particularly on mental health. This is the only policy issue that Trump mentioned in his speech following the Florida shooting.
But as Dylan Matthews explained for Vox, people with mental illnesses are more likely to be victims, not perpetrators, of violence. And Michael Stone, a psychiatrist at Columbia University who maintains a database of mass shooters, wrote in a 2015 analysis that only 52 out of the 235 killers in the database, or about 22 percent, had mental illnesses. “The mentally ill should not bear the burden of being regarded as the ‘chief’ perpetrators of mass murder,” he concluded. Other research has backed this up.
The problem, instead, is guns — and America’s abundance of them.
As a breakthrough analysis by UC Berkeley’s Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins in 1999 found, it’s not even that the US has more crime than other developed countries. This chart, from Jeffrey Swanson at Duke University, shows that the US is not an outlier when it comes to overall crime:
Instead, the US appears to have more lethal violence — and that’s driven in large part by the prevalence of guns.
”A series of specific comparisons of the death rates from property crime and assault in New York City and London show how enormous differences in death risk can be explained even while general patterns are similar,” Zimring and Hawkins wrote. “A preference for crimes of personal force and the willingness and ability to use guns in robbery make similar levels of property crime 54 times as deadly in New York City as in London.”
This is in many ways intuitive: People of every country get into arguments and fights with friends, family, and peers. But in the US, it’s much more likely that someone will get angry at an argument and be able to pull out a gun and kill someone.
3) The research shows that gun control works The research also suggests that gun control can work. A 2016 review of 130 studies in 10 countries, published in Epidemiologic Reviews, found that new legal restrictions on owning and purchasing guns tended to be followed by a drop in gun violence — a strong indicator that restricting access to firearms can save lives.
Consider Australia’s example.
In 1996, a 28-year-old man walked into a cafe in Port Arthur, Australia, ate lunch, pulled a semiautomatic rifle out of his bag, and opened fire on the crowd, killing 35 people and wounding 23 more. It was the worst mass shooting in Australia’s history.
Australian lawmakers responded with legislation that, among other provisions, banned certain types of firearms, such as automatic and semiautomatic rifles and shotguns. The Australian government confiscated 650,000 of these guns through a gun buyback program, in which it purchased firearms from gun owners. It established a registry of all guns owned in the country and required a permit for all new firearm purchases. (This is much further than bills typically proposed in the US, which almost never make a serious attempt to immediately reduce the number of guns in the country.)
Australia’s firearm homicide rate dropped by about 42 percent in the seven years after the law passed, and its firearm suicide rate fell by 57 percent, according to a review of the evidence by Harvard researchers.
It’s difficult to know for sure how much of the drop in homicides and suicides was caused specifically by the gun buyback program. Australia’s gun deaths, for one, were already declining before the law passed. But researchers David Hemenway and Mary Vriniotis argue that the gun buyback program very likely played a role: “First, the drop in firearm deaths was largest among the type of firearms most affected by the buyback. Second, firearm deaths in states with higher buyback rates per capita fell proportionately more than in states with lower buyback rates.”
One study of the program, by Australian researchers, found that buying back 3,500 guns per 100,000 people correlated with up to a 50 percent drop in firearm homicides and a 74 percent drop in gun suicides. As Matthews explained, the drop in homicides wasn’t statistically significant because Australia already had a pretty low number of murders. But the drop in suicides most definitely was — and the results are striking.
One other fact, noted by Hemenway and Vriniotis in 2011: “While 13 gun massacres (the killing of 4 or more people at one time) occurred in Australia in the 18 years before the [Australia gun control law], resulting in more than one hundred deaths, in the 14 following years (and up to the present), there were no gun massacres.”
4) State and local actions are not enough A common counterpoint to the evidence on gun control: If it works so well, why does Chicago have so much gun violence despite having some of the strictest gun policies in the US?
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders made this argument after the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting: “I think if you look to Chicago, where you had over 4,000 victims of gun-related crimes last year, they have the strictest gun laws in the country. That certainly hasn’t helped there.”
It’s true that Chicago has fairly strict gun laws (although not the strictest). And it’s true that the city has fairly high levels of gun violence (although also not the worst in the US).
This doesn’t, however, expose the failure of gun control altogether, but rather the limit of leaving gun policies to a patchwork of local and state laws. The basic problem: If a city or state passes strict gun control measures, people can simply cross a border to buy guns in a jurisdiction with laxer laws.
Chicago, for example, requires a Firearm Owners Identification card, a background check, a three-day waiting period, and documentation for all firearm sales. But Indiana, across the border, doesn’t require any of this for purchases between two private individuals (including those at gun shows and those who meet through the internet), allowing even someone with a criminal record to buy a firearm without passing a background check or submitting paperwork recording the sale.
So someone from Chicago can drive across the border — to Indiana or to other places with lax gun laws — and buy a gun without any of the big legal hurdles he would face at home. Then that person can resell or give guns to others in Chicago or keep them, leaving no paper trail behind. (This is illegal trafficking under federal law, but Indiana’s lax laws and enforcement — particularly the lack of a paper trail — make it virtually impossible to catch someone until a gun is used in a crime.)
The result: According to a 2014 report from the Chicago Police Department, nearly 60 percent of the guns in crime scenes that were recovered and traced between 2009 and 2013 came from outside the state. About 19 percent came from Indiana — making it the most common state of origin for guns besides Illinois.
This isn’t exclusive to Chicago. A 2016 report from the New York State Office of the Attorney General found that 74 percent of guns used in crimes in New York between 2010 and 2015 came from states with lax gun laws. (The gun trafficking chain from Southern states with weak gun laws to New York is so well-known it even has a name: “the Iron Pipeline.”) And another 2016 report from the US Government Accountability Office found that most of the guns — as much as 70 percent — used in crimes in Mexico, which has strict gun laws, can be traced back to the US, which has generally weaker gun laws.
That doesn’t mean the stricter gun laws in Chicago, New York, or any other jurisdiction have no effect, but it does limit how far these local and state measures can go, since the root of the problem lies in other places’ laws. The only way the pipeline could be stopped would be if all states individually strengthened their gun laws at once — or, more realistically, if the federal government passed a law that enforces stricter rules across the US.
5) America probably needs to go further than anyone wants to admit America’s attention to gun control often focuses on a few specific measures: universal background checks, restrictions on people with mental illnesses buying firearms, and an assault weapons ban, for example. It is rare that American politicians, even on the left, go much further than that. Something like Australia’s law — which amounts to a confiscation program — is never seriously considered.
As Dylan Matthews previously explained, this is a big issue. The US’s gun problem is so dire that it arguably needs solutions that go way further than what we typically see in mainstream proposals — at least, if the US ever hopes to get down to European levels of gun violence.
If the fundamental problem is that America has far too many guns, then policies need to cut the number of guns in circulation right now to seriously reduce the number of gun deaths. Background checks and other restrictions on who can buy a gun can’t achieve that in the short term. What America likely needs, then, is something more like Australia’s mandatory buyback program — essentially, a gun confiscation scheme — paired with a serious ban on specific firearms (including, potentially, all semiautomatic weapons).
But no one in Congress is seriously
But no one in Congress is seriously proposing something that sweeping. The Manchin-Toomey bill, the only gun legislation in Congress after Sandy Hook that came close to becoming law, didn’t even establish universal background checks. Recent proposals have been even milder, taking small steps like banning bump stocks or slightly improving the existing system for background checks.
Part of the holdup is the Second Amendment. While there is reasonable scholarly debate about whether the Second Amendment actually protects all Americans’ individual right to bear arms and prohibits stricter forms of gun control, the reality is the Supreme Court and US lawmakers widely agree that the Second Amendment does put barriers on how far restrictions can go. That would likely rule out anything like the Australian policy response short of a court reinterpretation or a repeal of the Second Amendment, neither of which seems likely.
So the US, for political, cultural, and legal reasons, seems to be unable to take the action that it really needs.
None of that is to say that milder measures are useless. Connecticut’s law requiring gun purchasers to first obtain a license, for example, was followed by a 40 percent drop in gun homicides and a 15 percent reduction in suicides. Similar gains were seen in Missouri. It’s difficult to separate these improvements from long-term trends (since gun homicides have generally been on the decline for decades now), but some of the decreases are likely linked to new restrictions on guns — and that means these measures truly saved lives.
There are also some evidence-based policies that could help outside the realm of gun control, including more stringent regulations and taxes on alcohol, changes in policing, and behavioral intervention programs.
But if America wants to get to the levels of gun deaths that its European peers report, it will likely need to go much, much further on guns in particular.
HOW DO LAWS PREVENT MENTALLY ILL PEOPLE FROM BUYING GUNS?
By David Shortell, CNN
Washington (CNN)How could a young man whose lawyers say he has been "experiencing and enduring mental illness his entire life" purchase a semiautomatic rifle?
Perhaps, perfectly legally.
While people who knew Nikolas Cruz describe a complicated picture of the 19-year-old behind Wednesday's school shooting, questions of mental health and gun laws are beginning to occupy the top tiers of American government.
According to a US official briefed on the investigation, Cruz used an AR-15 style weapon that he had bought legally after passing a background check to kill 17 students and adults at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
"As you know, mental health is often a big problem underlying these tragedies," House Speaker Paul Ryan said at a news conference Thursday reacting to the shooting. "We have a system to prevent people who aren't supposed to get guns from getting guns, and if there are gaps there then we need to look at those gaps."
Here's how that system works, and how it could apply to the Parkland, Florida, shooter.
How is a person with mental illness blocked from buying a gun?
Under federal law, a person can be tallied in a database and barred from purchasing or possessing a firearm due to a mental illness under two conditions: if he is involuntarily committed to a mental hospital, or if a court or government body declares him mentally incompetent.
When is someone considered committed?
In many states, including Florida, law enforcement can take an individual to a mental hospital against his or her will for an initial evaluation. If after 72 hours the doctors observing the individual want to continue that treatment, then they can petition a court for permission, even against the patient's wishes.
That -- a court order allowing a person's continued involuntary institutionalization -- is one thing that should stop an individual from purchasing a firearm.
If the person was taken in for mental treatment involuntarily but was not requested to be held past 72 hours, he is not blocked from buying a gun.
In Florida, if the court chose to commit even an underage individual, he would fail a background check on that basis.
What does it mean to be adjudicated as mentally incompetent?
The other way to wind up in the database that could cause an individual to fail a background check for mental illness is if a court or government body were to rule that due to his mental health, a person is a danger to himself or others or is unable to manage his own affairs.
The issue commonly arises when a court or government agency is appointing a conservator or a guardian for an adult because of mental impairment.
How does the background check system work?
When either of those two things happens in Florida, the court or government body that made the decision on the individual's mental health is required to report that record to a state law enforcement agency or the FBI.
The records would be in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, a confidential database that houses the names and birth years of individuals ineligible to buy firearms.
A licensed gun dealer is required under federal law to run potential buyers through the criminal background check system. The process usually takes around 90 seconds, and, if all the records are in the right place, would prevent a purchaser who was previously involuntarily committed or adjudicated as mentally incompetent from getting the gun.
But federal law doesn't require states to make these mental health records part of background check system, and many fail to voluntarily report the records.
And licensed gun shops aren't the only places to buy a firearm.
"You could buy guns from someone from an online classified ad, people at a yard sale or on the street corner selling guns, or people who are at a gun show but not a retail dealer," all without having to pass a background check, according to Ari Freilich, a legal expert with the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a group that promotes gun control.
How has Trump interacted with the issue?
In a speech to the nation Thursday morning, President Donald Trump promised to "tackle the difficult issue of mental health." But so far, his administration has only loosened federal gun laws related to the issue.
Early into his first year in the White House, Trump signed a measure that got rid of a regulation aimed at keeping guns out of the hands of people who were either receiving full disability benefits because of mental illness and couldn't work or people who were unable to manage their own Social Security benefits and needed the help of third parties.
Using the Congressional Review Act, Republican majorities in the House and Senate voted to revoke the rule that former President Barack Obama issued as part of a series of efforts to curb gun violence after similar measures failed to pass through Congress.
Trump signed the bill in private, without his typical public signing ceremony meant to draw attention and fanfare.
He also rolled back an attempt by the Obama administration to clarify and broaden the statutory definitions of the terms that disable individuals who had been committed to mental institutions or adjudicated as mentally incompetent from buying guns.
The measure, proposed by Obama in 2014, had been making its way through the rule-making process but was stymied after the election by the new Trump administration, according to federal documents shared with CNN by the advocacy group Democracy Forward.
By David Shortell, CNN
Washington (CNN)How could a young man whose lawyers say he has been "experiencing and enduring mental illness his entire life" purchase a semiautomatic rifle?
Perhaps, perfectly legally.
While people who knew Nikolas Cruz describe a complicated picture of the 19-year-old behind Wednesday's school shooting, questions of mental health and gun laws are beginning to occupy the top tiers of American government.
According to a US official briefed on the investigation, Cruz used an AR-15 style weapon that he had bought legally after passing a background check to kill 17 students and adults at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
"As you know, mental health is often a big problem underlying these tragedies," House Speaker Paul Ryan said at a news conference Thursday reacting to the shooting. "We have a system to prevent people who aren't supposed to get guns from getting guns, and if there are gaps there then we need to look at those gaps."
Here's how that system works, and how it could apply to the Parkland, Florida, shooter.
How is a person with mental illness blocked from buying a gun?
Under federal law, a person can be tallied in a database and barred from purchasing or possessing a firearm due to a mental illness under two conditions: if he is involuntarily committed to a mental hospital, or if a court or government body declares him mentally incompetent.
When is someone considered committed?
In many states, including Florida, law enforcement can take an individual to a mental hospital against his or her will for an initial evaluation. If after 72 hours the doctors observing the individual want to continue that treatment, then they can petition a court for permission, even against the patient's wishes.
That -- a court order allowing a person's continued involuntary institutionalization -- is one thing that should stop an individual from purchasing a firearm.
If the person was taken in for mental treatment involuntarily but was not requested to be held past 72 hours, he is not blocked from buying a gun.
In Florida, if the court chose to commit even an underage individual, he would fail a background check on that basis.
What does it mean to be adjudicated as mentally incompetent?
The other way to wind up in the database that could cause an individual to fail a background check for mental illness is if a court or government body were to rule that due to his mental health, a person is a danger to himself or others or is unable to manage his own affairs.
The issue commonly arises when a court or government agency is appointing a conservator or a guardian for an adult because of mental impairment.
How does the background check system work?
When either of those two things happens in Florida, the court or government body that made the decision on the individual's mental health is required to report that record to a state law enforcement agency or the FBI.
The records would be in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, a confidential database that houses the names and birth years of individuals ineligible to buy firearms.
A licensed gun dealer is required under federal law to run potential buyers through the criminal background check system. The process usually takes around 90 seconds, and, if all the records are in the right place, would prevent a purchaser who was previously involuntarily committed or adjudicated as mentally incompetent from getting the gun.
But federal law doesn't require states to make these mental health records part of background check system, and many fail to voluntarily report the records.
And licensed gun shops aren't the only places to buy a firearm.
"You could buy guns from someone from an online classified ad, people at a yard sale or on the street corner selling guns, or people who are at a gun show but not a retail dealer," all without having to pass a background check, according to Ari Freilich, a legal expert with the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a group that promotes gun control.
How has Trump interacted with the issue?
In a speech to the nation Thursday morning, President Donald Trump promised to "tackle the difficult issue of mental health." But so far, his administration has only loosened federal gun laws related to the issue.
Early into his first year in the White House, Trump signed a measure that got rid of a regulation aimed at keeping guns out of the hands of people who were either receiving full disability benefits because of mental illness and couldn't work or people who were unable to manage their own Social Security benefits and needed the help of third parties.
Using the Congressional Review Act, Republican majorities in the House and Senate voted to revoke the rule that former President Barack Obama issued as part of a series of efforts to curb gun violence after similar measures failed to pass through Congress.
Trump signed the bill in private, without his typical public signing ceremony meant to draw attention and fanfare.
He also rolled back an attempt by the Obama administration to clarify and broaden the statutory definitions of the terms that disable individuals who had been committed to mental institutions or adjudicated as mentally incompetent from buying guns.
The measure, proposed by Obama in 2014, had been making its way through the rule-making process but was stymied after the election by the new Trump administration, according to federal documents shared with CNN by the advocacy group Democracy Forward.
AMERICA'S GUN PROBLEM, EXPLAINED
The public and research support gun control. Here's how it could help — and why it doesn't pass.
By German Lopez
On Sunday night, it happened again: a mass shooting in America. A shooter opened fire at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, reportedly killing and injuring multiple people.
The shooting has already led to discussions about gun control. Americans have heard these types of calls before: After every mass shooting, the debate over guns and gun violence sparks up once again. Maybe some bills get introduced. Critics respond with concerns that the government is trying to take away their guns. The debate stalls. So even as America continues experiencing levels of gun violence unrivaled in the rest of the developed world, nothing happens — no laws are passed by Congress, nothing significant is done to try to prevent the next horror.
It has become an American routine for the aftermath of a gun violence to play out this way.
So why is it that for all the outrage and mourning with every mass shooting, nothing seems to change? To understand that, it's important to grasp not just the stunning statistics about gun ownership and gun violence in the United States, but America's very unique relationship with guns — unlike that of any other developed country — and how it plays out in our politics to ensure, seemingly against all odds, that our culture and laws continue to drive the routine gun violence that marks American life.
1) America's gun problem is completely unique
No other developed country in the world has anywhere near the same rate of gun violence as America. The US has nearly six times the gun homicide rate as Canada, more than seven times as Sweden, and nearly 16 times as Germany, according to UN data compiled by the Guardian. (These gun deaths are a big reason America has a much higher overall homicide rate, which includes non-gun deaths, than other developed nations.)
The public and research support gun control. Here's how it could help — and why it doesn't pass.
By German Lopez
On Sunday night, it happened again: a mass shooting in America. A shooter opened fire at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, reportedly killing and injuring multiple people.
The shooting has already led to discussions about gun control. Americans have heard these types of calls before: After every mass shooting, the debate over guns and gun violence sparks up once again. Maybe some bills get introduced. Critics respond with concerns that the government is trying to take away their guns. The debate stalls. So even as America continues experiencing levels of gun violence unrivaled in the rest of the developed world, nothing happens — no laws are passed by Congress, nothing significant is done to try to prevent the next horror.
It has become an American routine for the aftermath of a gun violence to play out this way.
So why is it that for all the outrage and mourning with every mass shooting, nothing seems to change? To understand that, it's important to grasp not just the stunning statistics about gun ownership and gun violence in the United States, but America's very unique relationship with guns — unlike that of any other developed country — and how it plays out in our politics to ensure, seemingly against all odds, that our culture and laws continue to drive the routine gun violence that marks American life.
1) America's gun problem is completely unique
No other developed country in the world has anywhere near the same rate of gun violence as America. The US has nearly six times the gun homicide rate as Canada, more than seven times as Sweden, and nearly 16 times as Germany, according to UN data compiled by the Guardian. (These gun deaths are a big reason America has a much higher overall homicide rate, which includes non-gun deaths, than other developed nations.)
To understand why that is, there's another important statistic: The US has by far the highest number of privately owned guns in the world. Estimated in 2007, the number of civilian-owned firearms in the US was 88.8 guns per 100 people, meaning there was almost one privately owned gun per American and more than one per American adult. The world's second-ranked country was Yemen, a quasi-failed state torn by civil war, where there were 54.8 guns per 100 people.
Another way of looking at that: Americans make up about 4.43 percent of the world's population, yet own roughly 42 percent of all the world's privately held firearms.
Another way of looking at that: Americans make up about 4.43 percent of the world's population, yet own roughly 42 percent of all the world's privately held firearms.
These three basic facts demonstrate America's unique gun culture. There is a very strong correlation between gun ownership and gun violence — a relationship that researchers argue is at least partly causal. And American gun ownership is beyond anything else in the world. At the same time, these guns are concentrated among a passionate minority, who are typically the loudest critics against any form of gun control and who scare legislators into voting against such measures.
2) More guns mean more gun deaths. Period.
The research on this is overwhelmingly clear. No matter how you look at the data, more guns mean more gun deaths.
This is apparent when you look at state-by-state data within the United States, as this chart from Mother Jones demonstrates:
2) More guns mean more gun deaths. Period.
The research on this is overwhelmingly clear. No matter how you look at the data, more guns mean more gun deaths.
This is apparent when you look at state-by-state data within the United States, as this chart from Mother Jones demonstrates:
And it's clear when you look at the data across developed nations, as this other chart from researcher Josh Tewksbury shows:
Opponents of gun control tend to point to other factors to explain America's unusual gun violence: mental illness, for example. Jonathan Metzl, a mental health expert at Vanderbilt University, told me that this is just not the case. People with mental illnesses are more likely to be victims, not perpetrators, of violence. And while it's true that an extraordinary amount of mass shooters (up to 60 percent) have some kind of psychiatric or psychological symptoms, Metzl points out that other factors are much better predictors of gun violence in general: alcohol and drug misuse, poverty, history of violence, and, yes, access to guns.
Another argument you sometimes hear is that these shootings would happen less frequently if even more people had guns, thus enabling them to defend themselves from the shooting.
But, again, the data shows this is simply not true. High gun ownership rates do not reduce gun deaths, but rather tend to coincide with increases in gun deaths. While a few people in some cases may use a gun to successfully defend themselves or others, the proliferation of guns appears to cause far more violence than it prevents.
Multiple simulations have also demonstrated that most people, if placed in an active shooter situation while armed, will not be able to stop the situation, and may in fact do little more than get themselves killed in the process.
The relationship between gun ownership rates and gun violence rates is well established. Reviews of the evidence compiled by the Harvard School of Public Health's Injury Control Research Center have consistently found that when controlling for variables such as socioeconomic factors and other crime, places with more guns have more gun deaths.
"Within the United States, a wide array of empirical evidence indicates that more guns in a community leads to more homicide," David Hemenway, the Injury Control Research Center's director, wrote in Private Guns, Public Health.
Experts widely believe this is the consequence of America's relaxed laws and culture surrounding guns: Making more guns more accessible means more guns, and more guns mean more deaths. Researchers have found this is true not just with homicides, but also with suicides, domestic violence, and even violence against police. To deal with those problems, America will have to not only make guns less accessible, but likely reduce the number of guns in the US as well.
The research also speaks to this point: A 2016 review of 130 studies in 10 countries, published in Epidemiologic Reviews, found that new legal restrictions on owning and purchasing guns tended to be followed by a drop in gun violence — a strong indicator that restricting access to guns can save lives.
Guns are not the only factor that contribute to violence. (Other factors include, for example, poverty, urbanization, and alcohol consumption.) But when researchers control for other confounding variables, they have found time and time again that America's high levels of gun ownership are a major reason the US is so much worse in terms of gun violence than its developed peers.
"A series of specific comparisons of the death rates from property crime and assault in New York City and London show how enormous differences in death risk can be explained even while general patterns are similar," UC Berkeley's Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins wrote in a breakthrough analysis in 1999. "A preference for crimes of personal force and the willingness and ability to use guns in robbery make similar levels of property crime 54 times as deadly in New York City as in London."
But even with the outrage over gun massacres, the sense that enough is enough, and the clear evidence that the problem is America's high gun ownership rates, there hasn't been significant legislation to help solve the problem.
3) Americans tend to support measures to restrict guns, but that doesn't translate into laws
If you ask Americans how they feel about specific gun control measures, they will often say that they support them. According to Pew Research Center surveys, most people in the US support background checks, bans on assault-style weapons, bans on high-capacity ammunition clips, bans on online sales of ammunition, and a federal database to track gun sales.
So why don't these measures ever get turned into law? That's because they run into another political issue: Americans, increasingly in recent years, tend to support the abstract idea of the right to own guns.
This is part of how gun control opponents are able to kill even legislation that would introduce the most popular measures, such as background checks that include private sales (which have 85 percent support, according to Pew): They're able to portray the law as contrary to the right to own guns, and galvanize a backlash against it.
This kind of problem isn't unique to guns. For example, although many Americans say they don't like Obamacare, most of them do in fact like the specific policies in the health care law. The problem is these specific policies have been masked by rhetoric about a "government takeover of health care" and "death panels." Since most Americans don't have time to verify these claims, especially when they involve a massive bill with lots of moving parts, enough end up believing in the catchphrases and scary arguments to stop the legislation from moving forward.
Of course, it's also the case that some Americans simply oppose any gun control laws. And while this group is generally outnumbered by those who support gun control, the opponents tend to be much more passionate about the issue than the supporters — and they're backed by a very powerful political lobby.
4) The gun lobby as we know it is relatively recent but enormously powerful
The single most powerful political organization when it comes to guns is, undoubtedly, the National Rifle Association (NRA). The NRA has an enormous stranglehold over conservative politics in America, and that development is more recent than you might think.
The NRA was, for much of its early history, more of a sporting club than a serious political force against gun control, and even supported some gun restrictions. In 1934, NRA president Karl Frederick was quoted as saying, "I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses."
A 1977 revolt within the organization changed everything. As crime rose in the 1960s and '70s, calls for more gun control grew as well. NRA members worried new restrictions on guns would keep coming after the historic 1968 law — eventually ending, they feared, with the government's seizure of all firearms in America. So members mobilized, installing a hard-liner known as Harlon Carter in the leadership, forever changing the NRA into the gun lobby we know today.
This foundation story is crucial for understanding why the NRA is near-categorically opposed to the regulation of private firearms. It fears that popular and seemingly common-sense regulations, such as banning assault-style weapons or even a federal database of gun purchases, are not really about saving lives but are in fact a potential first step toward ending all private gun ownership in America, which the NRA views — wrongly, in the minds of some legal experts — as a violation of the Second Amendment of the US Constitution.
So any time there's an attempt to impose new forms of gun control, the NRA rallies gun owners and other opponents of gun control to kill these bills. These gun owners make up a minority of the population: anywhere from around 30 to around 40 percent of households, depending on which survey one uses. But that population is a large and active enough constituency, particularly within the Republican base, to make many legislators fear that a poor grade from the NRA will end their careers.
As a result, conservative media and politicians take the NRA's support — especially the coveted A-to-F ratings the organization gives out — very seriously. Politicians will go to sometimes absurd length to show their support for gun rights. In 2015, for example, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) starred in a video, from IJ Review, in which he cooked bacon with — this is not a joke — a machine gun.
Although several campaigns have popped up over the years to try to counteract the NRA, none have come close to capturing the kind of influential hold that the organization has. Some of the groups — such as StopTheNRA.com, in part funded by Democratic donor Ken Lerer — didn't even last a few years.
Kristin Goss, author of The Gun Debate: What Everyone Needs to Know, previously told me this might be changing. She argued that newer gun control groups like Everytown for Gun Safety and Americans for Responsible Solutions are much more organized, are better funded, and have more grassroots support than gun control groups have had in her 20 years covering this issue. As a result, Democrats at the state and federal levels seem much more willing to discuss gun control.
But supporters of gun control face a huge obstacle: far more passionate opponents. As Republican strategist Grover Norquist said in 2000, "The question is intensity versus preference. You can always get a certain percentage to say they are in favor of some gun controls. But are they going to vote on their 'control' position?" Probably not, Norquist suggested, "but for that 4-5 percent who care about guns, they will vote on this."
What's behind that passion? Goss, who's also a political scientist at Duke University, suggested that it's a sense of tangible loss — gun owners feel like the government is going to take their guns and rights. In comparison, gun control advocates are motivated by more abstract notions of reducing gun violence — although, Goss noted, the victims of mass shootings and their families have begun putting a face on these policies by engaging more actively in advocacy work, which could make the gun control movement feel more relatable.
There is an exception at the state level, where legislatures have passed laws imposing (and relaxing) restrictions on guns. In the past few years, for instance, Washington state and Oregon passed laws ensuring all guns have to go through background checks, including those sold between individuals. "There's a lot more going on than Congress," Goss said. "In blue states, gun laws are getting stricter. And in red states, in some cases, the gun laws are getting looser."
But state laws aren't enough. Since people can simply cross state lines to purchase guns, the weaker federal standards make it easy for someone to simply travel to a state with looser gun laws to obtain a firearm and ship it another state. This is such a common occurrence that the gun shipment route from the South, where gun laws are fairly loose, to New York, where gun laws are strict, has earned the name "the Iron Pipeline." But it also happens all across the country, from New York to Chicago to California. Only a federal law could address this issue — by setting a floor on how loose gun laws can be in every state. And until such a federal law is passed, there will always be a massive loophole to any state gun control law.
Yet the NRA's influence and its army of supporters push many of America's legislators, particularly at the federal level and red states, away from gun control measures — even though some countries that passed these policies have seen a lot of success with them.
5) Other developed countries have had huge successes with gun control
In 1996, a 28-year-old man walked into a cafe in Port Arthur, Australia, ate lunch, pulled a semi-automatic rifle out of his bag, and opened fire on the crowd, killing 35 people and wounding 23 more. It was the worst mass shooting in Australia's history.
Australian lawmakers responded with new legislation that, among other provisions, banned certain types of firearms, such as automatic and semi-automatic rifles and shotguns. The Australian government confiscated 650,000 of these guns through a gun buyback program, in which it purchased firearms from gun owners. It established a registry of all guns owned in the country and required a permit for all new firearm purchases. (This is much further than bills typically proposed in the US, which almost never make a serious attempt to immediately reduce the number of guns in the country.)
The result: Australia's firearm homicide rate dropped by about 42 percent in the seven years after the law passed, and its firearm suicide rate fell by 57 percent, according to one review of the evidence by Harvard researchers.
It's difficult to know for sure how much of the drop in homicides and suicides was caused specifically by the gun buyback program. Australia's gun deaths, for one, were already declining before the law passed. But researchers David Hemenway and Mary Vriniotis argue that the gun buyback program very likely played a role: "First, the drop in firearm deaths was largest among the type of firearms most affected by the buyback. Second, firearm deaths in states with higher buyback rates per capita fell proportionately more than in states with lower buyback rates."
One study of the program, by Australian researchers, found that buying back 3,500 guns per 100,000 people correlated with up to a 50 percent drop in firearm homicides, and a 74 percent drop in gun suicides. As Dylan Matthews noted for Vox, the drop in homicides wasn't statistically significant. But the drop in suicides most definitely was — and the results are striking.
One other fact, noted by Hemenway and Vriniotis in 2011: "While 13 gun massacres (the killing of 4 or more people at one time) occurred in Australia in the 18 years before the [Australia gun control law], resulting in more than one hundred deaths, in the 14 following years (and up to the present), there were no gun massacres."
6) Although they get a lot of focus, mass shootings are a small portion of all gun violence
Depending on which definition of mass shooting one uses, there are anywhere from a dozen to a few hundred mass shootings in the US each year. These events are, it goes without saying, devastating tragedies for the nation and, primarily, the victims and their families.
Yet other, less-covered kinds of gun violence kill far more Americans than even these mass shootings. Under the broadest definition of mass shooting, these incidents killed about 500 Americans in 2013. That represents just a fraction of total gun homicides: more than 11,200 that year. And firearm suicides killed even more: nearly 21,200 Americans.
Preventing suicides isn't something we typically include in discussions of gun control, but other countries' experiences show it can save lives. In Israel, where military service is mandatory for much of the population, policymakers realized that an alarming number of soldiers killed themselves when they went home over the weekend. So Israeli officials, as part of their solution, decided to try forcing the soldiers to keep their guns at the base when they went home. It worked: A study from Israeli researchers found that suicides among Israeli soldiers dropped by 40 percent.
So while politicians often lean on mass shootings to call for gun control, the problem goes far beyond those incidents. Though it's hard to fault them for trying; mass shootings, after all, force Americans to confront the toll of our gun laws and gun culture.
But it seems that we as a nation just aren't willing to look, or else don't sufficiently mind what we see, when these events occur. Even the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut — in which a gunman killed 20 young children, six school personnel, and himself — catalyzed no significant change at the federal level and most states. Since then, there have been, by some estimates, more than 1,300 mass shootings. And there is every reason to believe there will be more to come.
Another argument you sometimes hear is that these shootings would happen less frequently if even more people had guns, thus enabling them to defend themselves from the shooting.
But, again, the data shows this is simply not true. High gun ownership rates do not reduce gun deaths, but rather tend to coincide with increases in gun deaths. While a few people in some cases may use a gun to successfully defend themselves or others, the proliferation of guns appears to cause far more violence than it prevents.
Multiple simulations have also demonstrated that most people, if placed in an active shooter situation while armed, will not be able to stop the situation, and may in fact do little more than get themselves killed in the process.
The relationship between gun ownership rates and gun violence rates is well established. Reviews of the evidence compiled by the Harvard School of Public Health's Injury Control Research Center have consistently found that when controlling for variables such as socioeconomic factors and other crime, places with more guns have more gun deaths.
"Within the United States, a wide array of empirical evidence indicates that more guns in a community leads to more homicide," David Hemenway, the Injury Control Research Center's director, wrote in Private Guns, Public Health.
Experts widely believe this is the consequence of America's relaxed laws and culture surrounding guns: Making more guns more accessible means more guns, and more guns mean more deaths. Researchers have found this is true not just with homicides, but also with suicides, domestic violence, and even violence against police. To deal with those problems, America will have to not only make guns less accessible, but likely reduce the number of guns in the US as well.
The research also speaks to this point: A 2016 review of 130 studies in 10 countries, published in Epidemiologic Reviews, found that new legal restrictions on owning and purchasing guns tended to be followed by a drop in gun violence — a strong indicator that restricting access to guns can save lives.
Guns are not the only factor that contribute to violence. (Other factors include, for example, poverty, urbanization, and alcohol consumption.) But when researchers control for other confounding variables, they have found time and time again that America's high levels of gun ownership are a major reason the US is so much worse in terms of gun violence than its developed peers.
"A series of specific comparisons of the death rates from property crime and assault in New York City and London show how enormous differences in death risk can be explained even while general patterns are similar," UC Berkeley's Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins wrote in a breakthrough analysis in 1999. "A preference for crimes of personal force and the willingness and ability to use guns in robbery make similar levels of property crime 54 times as deadly in New York City as in London."
But even with the outrage over gun massacres, the sense that enough is enough, and the clear evidence that the problem is America's high gun ownership rates, there hasn't been significant legislation to help solve the problem.
3) Americans tend to support measures to restrict guns, but that doesn't translate into laws
If you ask Americans how they feel about specific gun control measures, they will often say that they support them. According to Pew Research Center surveys, most people in the US support background checks, bans on assault-style weapons, bans on high-capacity ammunition clips, bans on online sales of ammunition, and a federal database to track gun sales.
So why don't these measures ever get turned into law? That's because they run into another political issue: Americans, increasingly in recent years, tend to support the abstract idea of the right to own guns.
This is part of how gun control opponents are able to kill even legislation that would introduce the most popular measures, such as background checks that include private sales (which have 85 percent support, according to Pew): They're able to portray the law as contrary to the right to own guns, and galvanize a backlash against it.
This kind of problem isn't unique to guns. For example, although many Americans say they don't like Obamacare, most of them do in fact like the specific policies in the health care law. The problem is these specific policies have been masked by rhetoric about a "government takeover of health care" and "death panels." Since most Americans don't have time to verify these claims, especially when they involve a massive bill with lots of moving parts, enough end up believing in the catchphrases and scary arguments to stop the legislation from moving forward.
Of course, it's also the case that some Americans simply oppose any gun control laws. And while this group is generally outnumbered by those who support gun control, the opponents tend to be much more passionate about the issue than the supporters — and they're backed by a very powerful political lobby.
4) The gun lobby as we know it is relatively recent but enormously powerful
The single most powerful political organization when it comes to guns is, undoubtedly, the National Rifle Association (NRA). The NRA has an enormous stranglehold over conservative politics in America, and that development is more recent than you might think.
The NRA was, for much of its early history, more of a sporting club than a serious political force against gun control, and even supported some gun restrictions. In 1934, NRA president Karl Frederick was quoted as saying, "I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses."
A 1977 revolt within the organization changed everything. As crime rose in the 1960s and '70s, calls for more gun control grew as well. NRA members worried new restrictions on guns would keep coming after the historic 1968 law — eventually ending, they feared, with the government's seizure of all firearms in America. So members mobilized, installing a hard-liner known as Harlon Carter in the leadership, forever changing the NRA into the gun lobby we know today.
This foundation story is crucial for understanding why the NRA is near-categorically opposed to the regulation of private firearms. It fears that popular and seemingly common-sense regulations, such as banning assault-style weapons or even a federal database of gun purchases, are not really about saving lives but are in fact a potential first step toward ending all private gun ownership in America, which the NRA views — wrongly, in the minds of some legal experts — as a violation of the Second Amendment of the US Constitution.
So any time there's an attempt to impose new forms of gun control, the NRA rallies gun owners and other opponents of gun control to kill these bills. These gun owners make up a minority of the population: anywhere from around 30 to around 40 percent of households, depending on which survey one uses. But that population is a large and active enough constituency, particularly within the Republican base, to make many legislators fear that a poor grade from the NRA will end their careers.
As a result, conservative media and politicians take the NRA's support — especially the coveted A-to-F ratings the organization gives out — very seriously. Politicians will go to sometimes absurd length to show their support for gun rights. In 2015, for example, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) starred in a video, from IJ Review, in which he cooked bacon with — this is not a joke — a machine gun.
Although several campaigns have popped up over the years to try to counteract the NRA, none have come close to capturing the kind of influential hold that the organization has. Some of the groups — such as StopTheNRA.com, in part funded by Democratic donor Ken Lerer — didn't even last a few years.
Kristin Goss, author of The Gun Debate: What Everyone Needs to Know, previously told me this might be changing. She argued that newer gun control groups like Everytown for Gun Safety and Americans for Responsible Solutions are much more organized, are better funded, and have more grassroots support than gun control groups have had in her 20 years covering this issue. As a result, Democrats at the state and federal levels seem much more willing to discuss gun control.
But supporters of gun control face a huge obstacle: far more passionate opponents. As Republican strategist Grover Norquist said in 2000, "The question is intensity versus preference. You can always get a certain percentage to say they are in favor of some gun controls. But are they going to vote on their 'control' position?" Probably not, Norquist suggested, "but for that 4-5 percent who care about guns, they will vote on this."
What's behind that passion? Goss, who's also a political scientist at Duke University, suggested that it's a sense of tangible loss — gun owners feel like the government is going to take their guns and rights. In comparison, gun control advocates are motivated by more abstract notions of reducing gun violence — although, Goss noted, the victims of mass shootings and their families have begun putting a face on these policies by engaging more actively in advocacy work, which could make the gun control movement feel more relatable.
There is an exception at the state level, where legislatures have passed laws imposing (and relaxing) restrictions on guns. In the past few years, for instance, Washington state and Oregon passed laws ensuring all guns have to go through background checks, including those sold between individuals. "There's a lot more going on than Congress," Goss said. "In blue states, gun laws are getting stricter. And in red states, in some cases, the gun laws are getting looser."
But state laws aren't enough. Since people can simply cross state lines to purchase guns, the weaker federal standards make it easy for someone to simply travel to a state with looser gun laws to obtain a firearm and ship it another state. This is such a common occurrence that the gun shipment route from the South, where gun laws are fairly loose, to New York, where gun laws are strict, has earned the name "the Iron Pipeline." But it also happens all across the country, from New York to Chicago to California. Only a federal law could address this issue — by setting a floor on how loose gun laws can be in every state. And until such a federal law is passed, there will always be a massive loophole to any state gun control law.
Yet the NRA's influence and its army of supporters push many of America's legislators, particularly at the federal level and red states, away from gun control measures — even though some countries that passed these policies have seen a lot of success with them.
5) Other developed countries have had huge successes with gun control
In 1996, a 28-year-old man walked into a cafe in Port Arthur, Australia, ate lunch, pulled a semi-automatic rifle out of his bag, and opened fire on the crowd, killing 35 people and wounding 23 more. It was the worst mass shooting in Australia's history.
Australian lawmakers responded with new legislation that, among other provisions, banned certain types of firearms, such as automatic and semi-automatic rifles and shotguns. The Australian government confiscated 650,000 of these guns through a gun buyback program, in which it purchased firearms from gun owners. It established a registry of all guns owned in the country and required a permit for all new firearm purchases. (This is much further than bills typically proposed in the US, which almost never make a serious attempt to immediately reduce the number of guns in the country.)
The result: Australia's firearm homicide rate dropped by about 42 percent in the seven years after the law passed, and its firearm suicide rate fell by 57 percent, according to one review of the evidence by Harvard researchers.
It's difficult to know for sure how much of the drop in homicides and suicides was caused specifically by the gun buyback program. Australia's gun deaths, for one, were already declining before the law passed. But researchers David Hemenway and Mary Vriniotis argue that the gun buyback program very likely played a role: "First, the drop in firearm deaths was largest among the type of firearms most affected by the buyback. Second, firearm deaths in states with higher buyback rates per capita fell proportionately more than in states with lower buyback rates."
One study of the program, by Australian researchers, found that buying back 3,500 guns per 100,000 people correlated with up to a 50 percent drop in firearm homicides, and a 74 percent drop in gun suicides. As Dylan Matthews noted for Vox, the drop in homicides wasn't statistically significant. But the drop in suicides most definitely was — and the results are striking.
One other fact, noted by Hemenway and Vriniotis in 2011: "While 13 gun massacres (the killing of 4 or more people at one time) occurred in Australia in the 18 years before the [Australia gun control law], resulting in more than one hundred deaths, in the 14 following years (and up to the present), there were no gun massacres."
6) Although they get a lot of focus, mass shootings are a small portion of all gun violence
Depending on which definition of mass shooting one uses, there are anywhere from a dozen to a few hundred mass shootings in the US each year. These events are, it goes without saying, devastating tragedies for the nation and, primarily, the victims and their families.
Yet other, less-covered kinds of gun violence kill far more Americans than even these mass shootings. Under the broadest definition of mass shooting, these incidents killed about 500 Americans in 2013. That represents just a fraction of total gun homicides: more than 11,200 that year. And firearm suicides killed even more: nearly 21,200 Americans.
Preventing suicides isn't something we typically include in discussions of gun control, but other countries' experiences show it can save lives. In Israel, where military service is mandatory for much of the population, policymakers realized that an alarming number of soldiers killed themselves when they went home over the weekend. So Israeli officials, as part of their solution, decided to try forcing the soldiers to keep their guns at the base when they went home. It worked: A study from Israeli researchers found that suicides among Israeli soldiers dropped by 40 percent.
So while politicians often lean on mass shootings to call for gun control, the problem goes far beyond those incidents. Though it's hard to fault them for trying; mass shootings, after all, force Americans to confront the toll of our gun laws and gun culture.
But it seems that we as a nation just aren't willing to look, or else don't sufficiently mind what we see, when these events occur. Even the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut — in which a gunman killed 20 young children, six school personnel, and himself — catalyzed no significant change at the federal level and most states. Since then, there have been, by some estimates, more than 1,300 mass shootings. And there is every reason to believe there will be more to come.
IT’S TIME TO BAN CONGRESSIONAL GERRYMANDERING
The electing of congressional representatives is far from fair and square
By Jamie Margolin
In today’s (supposedly) free American democracy, you probably think that “we the people” choose our congressional representatives, right?
Well, you’d be wrong. You don’t choose your congressional representatives ― your representatives choose you.
In the United States, we vote for our congressmen and women to serve in the house of representatives by districts. The number of districts each state gets is determined by the population of the state. California for example would get more representatives than Delaware because it has a higher population. Seems fair, right? Well, the electing of congressional representatives is actually far from fair and square. And it’s because how these districts are drawn. Whichever party is in power can re-draw the congressional districts to their advantage, so they can swing elections in their favor. This redrawing of districts to pre-determine elections before a single vote has been cast is called Gerrymandering. It is how the party in power picks its voters, instead of the voters choosing their representatives. It’s how the majority party can keep a power-grab on congressional seats, even if most of the population votes for the other party. And drawing districts to a party’s advantage is completely legal. Congressional Gerrymandering should be banned in the United States because it goes against the American principles of a free democracy.
Gerrymandering takes power away from the voters. It makes it so the voters don’t really pick their representatives, but vice versa. Even if the voters overwhelmingly pick one party, with gerrymandering, the other party can still get in power. That is not democracy at all. Gerrymandering is how the Democrats won a majority of over 1 million more congressional votes than Republicans, in a recent election, but they still lost 33 congressional seats to the GOP. Gerrymandering is completely undemocratic. How can we call a system that completely bypasses the wishes of the voters, a democracy? A democracy is supposed to be a system where the citizens have power through their votes, and where leaders are selected solely by the people. Gerrymandering turns what democracy is supposed to be on its head. It takes power away from the voters and puts it into the hands of the powerful. It also corrodes the integrity of a democracy and paves the way for a very unpopular Congress and equally unpopular laws.
Whichever party is in power can re-draw the congressional districts to their advantage, so they can swing elections in their favor.
Gerrymandering leaves the voters dissatisfied and discouraged with their Congress, and American democracy as a whole. Because gerrymandering takes away power from voters, it leaves voters feeling disempowered, to the point where they don’t want to vote or engage in civic action anymore. And because it’s the powerful choosing their constituents, and not vice versa, often, constituents are not happy with who their representatives are. On average, between 10 and 15 percent of Americans approve of Congress – and polls also found that there is more public support for traffic jams and lice than Congress. When asked to choose which they preferred, 67% of people surveyed picked head lice over Congress. And yet, in the 2016 election, only eight congressional representatives were defeated when they ran for re-election.
As for the way gerrymandering disempowers, in 2010, many Tea Party activists wanted to have their voices heard. But they then realized that their own representatives were either Democrats in blue districts or Republicans in red districts. Those representatives would not listen to the Tea Party activists because the gerrymandered electoral map meant that they didn’t need to. Congress is extremely unpopular, thanks to gerrymandering, but because of gerrymandering, voters can’t choose new representatives. It’s a vicious cycle. Gerrymandering also leaves voters feeling powerless, because why bother lobbying or voting when the result is already predetermined? Congressional gerrymandering makes it so that Congress is unpopular, and voters feel powerless, but some people have argued that gerrymandering is a good thing.
Some people (usually the party that is in power and is using gerrymandering to its advantage) say that gerrymandering is fine, because both Democrats and Republicans gerrymander, so the playing field is equal. Because both sides are allowed to gerrymander, and are guilty of it, pro-gerrymandering people say that the system is fair and that there is no reason to ban gerrymandering. But actually, the playing field is not equal at all. Republicans have an overwhelming control of the Senate and Congress, with 247 seats in The House and 54 in the Senate, not because they win the most votes, but because they have gerrymandered the majority of the United States, which allows them to hold onto their power. But even if the tides turn and Democrats gain back power and gerrymander Republicans out of office, it’s still not fair. Gerrymandering is just undemocratic. In the long run, it ends up hurting both sides and our entire democracy. Polls confirm that an overwhelming majority of Americans of all sides of the political spectrum, oppose gerrymandering. Gerrymandering allows for the country to be even more consumed by partisan fighting, and it is eating away at our democracy.
Because it goes against the American principles of a free democracy, congressional Gerrymandering should be banned in the United States. It takes power away from the voters, makes congress unpopular, discourages voters from participating in their democracy, and even though a certain political party is benefiting from it at the moment, in the long run, gerrymandering ends up hurting everyone. Gerrymandering is essentially why American democracy is broken. Lynn Westmoreland, the Republican redistricting vice chair in the House, says that gerrymandering is “the nastiest form of politics that there is.” The longer we let our congressional districts be decided by partisans, either Democrat or Republican, the closer we are to the death of American democracy.
The electing of congressional representatives is far from fair and square
By Jamie Margolin
In today’s (supposedly) free American democracy, you probably think that “we the people” choose our congressional representatives, right?
Well, you’d be wrong. You don’t choose your congressional representatives ― your representatives choose you.
In the United States, we vote for our congressmen and women to serve in the house of representatives by districts. The number of districts each state gets is determined by the population of the state. California for example would get more representatives than Delaware because it has a higher population. Seems fair, right? Well, the electing of congressional representatives is actually far from fair and square. And it’s because how these districts are drawn. Whichever party is in power can re-draw the congressional districts to their advantage, so they can swing elections in their favor. This redrawing of districts to pre-determine elections before a single vote has been cast is called Gerrymandering. It is how the party in power picks its voters, instead of the voters choosing their representatives. It’s how the majority party can keep a power-grab on congressional seats, even if most of the population votes for the other party. And drawing districts to a party’s advantage is completely legal. Congressional Gerrymandering should be banned in the United States because it goes against the American principles of a free democracy.
Gerrymandering takes power away from the voters. It makes it so the voters don’t really pick their representatives, but vice versa. Even if the voters overwhelmingly pick one party, with gerrymandering, the other party can still get in power. That is not democracy at all. Gerrymandering is how the Democrats won a majority of over 1 million more congressional votes than Republicans, in a recent election, but they still lost 33 congressional seats to the GOP. Gerrymandering is completely undemocratic. How can we call a system that completely bypasses the wishes of the voters, a democracy? A democracy is supposed to be a system where the citizens have power through their votes, and where leaders are selected solely by the people. Gerrymandering turns what democracy is supposed to be on its head. It takes power away from the voters and puts it into the hands of the powerful. It also corrodes the integrity of a democracy and paves the way for a very unpopular Congress and equally unpopular laws.
Whichever party is in power can re-draw the congressional districts to their advantage, so they can swing elections in their favor.
Gerrymandering leaves the voters dissatisfied and discouraged with their Congress, and American democracy as a whole. Because gerrymandering takes away power from voters, it leaves voters feeling disempowered, to the point where they don’t want to vote or engage in civic action anymore. And because it’s the powerful choosing their constituents, and not vice versa, often, constituents are not happy with who their representatives are. On average, between 10 and 15 percent of Americans approve of Congress – and polls also found that there is more public support for traffic jams and lice than Congress. When asked to choose which they preferred, 67% of people surveyed picked head lice over Congress. And yet, in the 2016 election, only eight congressional representatives were defeated when they ran for re-election.
As for the way gerrymandering disempowers, in 2010, many Tea Party activists wanted to have their voices heard. But they then realized that their own representatives were either Democrats in blue districts or Republicans in red districts. Those representatives would not listen to the Tea Party activists because the gerrymandered electoral map meant that they didn’t need to. Congress is extremely unpopular, thanks to gerrymandering, but because of gerrymandering, voters can’t choose new representatives. It’s a vicious cycle. Gerrymandering also leaves voters feeling powerless, because why bother lobbying or voting when the result is already predetermined? Congressional gerrymandering makes it so that Congress is unpopular, and voters feel powerless, but some people have argued that gerrymandering is a good thing.
Some people (usually the party that is in power and is using gerrymandering to its advantage) say that gerrymandering is fine, because both Democrats and Republicans gerrymander, so the playing field is equal. Because both sides are allowed to gerrymander, and are guilty of it, pro-gerrymandering people say that the system is fair and that there is no reason to ban gerrymandering. But actually, the playing field is not equal at all. Republicans have an overwhelming control of the Senate and Congress, with 247 seats in The House and 54 in the Senate, not because they win the most votes, but because they have gerrymandered the majority of the United States, which allows them to hold onto their power. But even if the tides turn and Democrats gain back power and gerrymander Republicans out of office, it’s still not fair. Gerrymandering is just undemocratic. In the long run, it ends up hurting both sides and our entire democracy. Polls confirm that an overwhelming majority of Americans of all sides of the political spectrum, oppose gerrymandering. Gerrymandering allows for the country to be even more consumed by partisan fighting, and it is eating away at our democracy.
Because it goes against the American principles of a free democracy, congressional Gerrymandering should be banned in the United States. It takes power away from the voters, makes congress unpopular, discourages voters from participating in their democracy, and even though a certain political party is benefiting from it at the moment, in the long run, gerrymandering ends up hurting everyone. Gerrymandering is essentially why American democracy is broken. Lynn Westmoreland, the Republican redistricting vice chair in the House, says that gerrymandering is “the nastiest form of politics that there is.” The longer we let our congressional districts be decided by partisans, either Democrat or Republican, the closer we are to the death of American democracy.
TOP 10 REASONS SCHOOL CHOICE IS NO CHOICE By Steven Singer
On the surface of it, school choice sounds like a great idea.
Parents will get to shop for schools and pick the one that best suits their children.
Oh! Look, Honey! This one has an exceptional music program! That one excels in math and science! The drama program at this one is first in the state!
But that’s not at all what school choice actually is.
In reality, it’s just a scam to make private schools cheaper for rich people, further erode the public school system and allow for-profit corporations to gobble up education dollars meant to help children succeed.
Here’s why:
1) Voucher programs almost never provide students with full tuition.
Voucher programs are all the rage especially among conservatives. Legislation has been proposed throughout the country taking a portion of tax dollars that would normally go to a public school and allowing parents to put it toward tuition at a private or parochial school. However, the cost of going to these schools is much higher than going to public schools. So even with your tax dollars in hand, you don’t have the money to go to these schools. For the majority of impoverished students attending public schools, vouchers don’t help. Parents still have to find more money somewhere to make this happen. Poor folks just can’t afford it. But rich folks can so let’s reduce their bill!? They thank you for letting them buy another Ferrari with money that should have gone to give poor and middle class kids get an education.
2) Charter and voucher schools don’t have to accept everyone
When you choose to go to one of these schools, they don’t have to choose to accept you. In fact, the choice is really all up to them. Does your child make good grades? Is he or she well-behaved, in the special education program, learning disabled, etc.? If they don’t like your answers, they won’t accept you. They have all the power. It has nothing to do with providing a good education for your child. It’s all about whether your child will make them look good. By contrast, public schools take everyone and often achieve amazing results with the resources they have.
3) Charter Schools are notorious for kicking out hard to teach students
Charter schools like to tout how well they help kids learn. But they also like to brag that they accept diverse students. So they end up accepting lots of children with special needs at the beginning of the year and then giving them the boot before standardized test season. That way, these students’ low scores won’t count against the charter school’s record. They can keep bragging about their high test scores without actually having to expend all the time and energy of actually teaching difficult students. Only public schools take everyone and give everyone their all.
4) Voucher and charter schools actually give parents less choice than traditional public schools
Public schools are governed by different rules than charter and voucher schools. Most public schools are run by a school board made up of duly-elected members from the community. The school board is accountable to that community. Residents have the right to be present at votes and debates, have a right to access public documents about how tax money is being spent, etc. None of this is true at most charter or voucher schools. They are run by executive boards or committees that are not accountable to parents. If you don’t like what your public school is doing, you can organize, vote for new leadership or even take a leadership role, yourself. If you don’t like what your charter or voucher school is doing, your only choice is to withdraw your child. See ya.
5) Charter Schools do no better and often much worse than traditional public schools
Pundits and profiteers love to spout euphoric about how well charter schools teach kids. But there is zero evidence behind it. That is nothing but a marketing ploy. It’s like when you’re in a bad neighborhood and walk past a dive that claims to have the best cup of coffee in the city. Yuck. Surely, some charter schools do exceptionally well. However, most charters and almost all cyber charters do worse than their public school counterparts. Fact.
6) Charters and voucher schools increase segregation
Since the 1950s and ’60s, we used to understand there was no such thing as separate but equal education. Before then we had Cadillac schools for white kids and broken down schools for black kids. The Supreme Court ruled that unconstitutional. But today we have Cadillac schools for rich and middle class kids (most of whom are white) and broken down schools for the poor (most of whom are black or brown.) After making tremendous strides to integrate schools and provide an excellent education for everyone, our public schools have been resegregated. Charter and voucher schools only make this problem worse. They either aid in white flight or leach away minority students. This just makes it easier to give some kids a leg up while keeping others down.
7) Charter and voucher schools take away funding at traditional public schools
It costs almost the same amount of money to run a school building of a given size regardless of the number of kids in it. When students leave the public schools for charter or voucher schools, the public school loses valuable resources. It now has less revenue but the same overhead. So even if you found an excellent charter or voucher school to send your child, you would be hurting the chances of every other student in the public school of having their own excellent education. This is what happens when you make schools compete for resources. Someone ends up losing out on an education.
8) Properly funding parallel school systems would be incredibly wasteful and expensive
We could fix this problem by providing adequate funding for all levels of the school system – traditional public schools, charters, voucher schools, etc. However, this would be exorbitantly expensive. We don’t adequately fund our schools now. Adding additional layers like this would mean increasing national spending exponentially – maybe by three or four times the current level. And much of that money would go to waste. Why have three fully stocked school buildings in one community when one fully stocked building would do the job? I don’t imagine residents would relish the tax hike this would require.
9) School choice takes away attention from the real problems in our public schools – poverty and funding equity
We have real problems. More than half of public school students live below the poverty line. They are already several grade levels behind their non-impoverished peers before they even enter kindergarten. They need help – tutoring, counseling, wraparound services, nutrition, etc. The predicament is even more complicated by the way we fund our schools. Throughout the country, poor districts get less money than wealthy or middle class ones. The students who go to these schools are systematically being cheated out of resources and opportunities. And instead of helping them, we’re playing a shell game with charter and voucher schools. The problem isn’t that parents don’t have several excellent choices. If they’re poor, they often don’t have one.
10) School choice is not supported by a grass roots movement. It is supported by billionaires.
The proponents of school choice will tell you that they are only doing the will of the people. This is what parents want, they say. Baloney. While there are individuals who support school choice, the overwhelming majority of money behind this movement comes from conservative billionaires actively trying to dismantle the public education system. They want to steal the public system and replace it with a private one. They don’t care about your child. They just want to steal the hundreds of billions of tax dollars we pay to educate our children. This is not philanthropy. It is a business transaction meant to screw you and your child out of your rights.
If we really want to ensure every child in this country gets an excellent education, the answer isn’t school choice. Instead, we need to commit to supporting our public school system. We all need to be in this together. Yes, our schools should look at the needs of each child and tailor education to fit appropriately. But that shouldn’t be done in parallel school systems. It should be done under the same umbrella. That way, you can’t defund and defraud one without hurting all. It can’t just be about your child. It has to be about all children.
That’s the only choice worth making.
On the surface of it, school choice sounds like a great idea.
Parents will get to shop for schools and pick the one that best suits their children.
Oh! Look, Honey! This one has an exceptional music program! That one excels in math and science! The drama program at this one is first in the state!
But that’s not at all what school choice actually is.
In reality, it’s just a scam to make private schools cheaper for rich people, further erode the public school system and allow for-profit corporations to gobble up education dollars meant to help children succeed.
Here’s why:
1) Voucher programs almost never provide students with full tuition.
Voucher programs are all the rage especially among conservatives. Legislation has been proposed throughout the country taking a portion of tax dollars that would normally go to a public school and allowing parents to put it toward tuition at a private or parochial school. However, the cost of going to these schools is much higher than going to public schools. So even with your tax dollars in hand, you don’t have the money to go to these schools. For the majority of impoverished students attending public schools, vouchers don’t help. Parents still have to find more money somewhere to make this happen. Poor folks just can’t afford it. But rich folks can so let’s reduce their bill!? They thank you for letting them buy another Ferrari with money that should have gone to give poor and middle class kids get an education.
2) Charter and voucher schools don’t have to accept everyone
When you choose to go to one of these schools, they don’t have to choose to accept you. In fact, the choice is really all up to them. Does your child make good grades? Is he or she well-behaved, in the special education program, learning disabled, etc.? If they don’t like your answers, they won’t accept you. They have all the power. It has nothing to do with providing a good education for your child. It’s all about whether your child will make them look good. By contrast, public schools take everyone and often achieve amazing results with the resources they have.
3) Charter Schools are notorious for kicking out hard to teach students
Charter schools like to tout how well they help kids learn. But they also like to brag that they accept diverse students. So they end up accepting lots of children with special needs at the beginning of the year and then giving them the boot before standardized test season. That way, these students’ low scores won’t count against the charter school’s record. They can keep bragging about their high test scores without actually having to expend all the time and energy of actually teaching difficult students. Only public schools take everyone and give everyone their all.
4) Voucher and charter schools actually give parents less choice than traditional public schools
Public schools are governed by different rules than charter and voucher schools. Most public schools are run by a school board made up of duly-elected members from the community. The school board is accountable to that community. Residents have the right to be present at votes and debates, have a right to access public documents about how tax money is being spent, etc. None of this is true at most charter or voucher schools. They are run by executive boards or committees that are not accountable to parents. If you don’t like what your public school is doing, you can organize, vote for new leadership or even take a leadership role, yourself. If you don’t like what your charter or voucher school is doing, your only choice is to withdraw your child. See ya.
5) Charter Schools do no better and often much worse than traditional public schools
Pundits and profiteers love to spout euphoric about how well charter schools teach kids. But there is zero evidence behind it. That is nothing but a marketing ploy. It’s like when you’re in a bad neighborhood and walk past a dive that claims to have the best cup of coffee in the city. Yuck. Surely, some charter schools do exceptionally well. However, most charters and almost all cyber charters do worse than their public school counterparts. Fact.
6) Charters and voucher schools increase segregation
Since the 1950s and ’60s, we used to understand there was no such thing as separate but equal education. Before then we had Cadillac schools for white kids and broken down schools for black kids. The Supreme Court ruled that unconstitutional. But today we have Cadillac schools for rich and middle class kids (most of whom are white) and broken down schools for the poor (most of whom are black or brown.) After making tremendous strides to integrate schools and provide an excellent education for everyone, our public schools have been resegregated. Charter and voucher schools only make this problem worse. They either aid in white flight or leach away minority students. This just makes it easier to give some kids a leg up while keeping others down.
7) Charter and voucher schools take away funding at traditional public schools
It costs almost the same amount of money to run a school building of a given size regardless of the number of kids in it. When students leave the public schools for charter or voucher schools, the public school loses valuable resources. It now has less revenue but the same overhead. So even if you found an excellent charter or voucher school to send your child, you would be hurting the chances of every other student in the public school of having their own excellent education. This is what happens when you make schools compete for resources. Someone ends up losing out on an education.
8) Properly funding parallel school systems would be incredibly wasteful and expensive
We could fix this problem by providing adequate funding for all levels of the school system – traditional public schools, charters, voucher schools, etc. However, this would be exorbitantly expensive. We don’t adequately fund our schools now. Adding additional layers like this would mean increasing national spending exponentially – maybe by three or four times the current level. And much of that money would go to waste. Why have three fully stocked school buildings in one community when one fully stocked building would do the job? I don’t imagine residents would relish the tax hike this would require.
9) School choice takes away attention from the real problems in our public schools – poverty and funding equity
We have real problems. More than half of public school students live below the poverty line. They are already several grade levels behind their non-impoverished peers before they even enter kindergarten. They need help – tutoring, counseling, wraparound services, nutrition, etc. The predicament is even more complicated by the way we fund our schools. Throughout the country, poor districts get less money than wealthy or middle class ones. The students who go to these schools are systematically being cheated out of resources and opportunities. And instead of helping them, we’re playing a shell game with charter and voucher schools. The problem isn’t that parents don’t have several excellent choices. If they’re poor, they often don’t have one.
10) School choice is not supported by a grass roots movement. It is supported by billionaires.
The proponents of school choice will tell you that they are only doing the will of the people. This is what parents want, they say. Baloney. While there are individuals who support school choice, the overwhelming majority of money behind this movement comes from conservative billionaires actively trying to dismantle the public education system. They want to steal the public system and replace it with a private one. They don’t care about your child. They just want to steal the hundreds of billions of tax dollars we pay to educate our children. This is not philanthropy. It is a business transaction meant to screw you and your child out of your rights.
If we really want to ensure every child in this country gets an excellent education, the answer isn’t school choice. Instead, we need to commit to supporting our public school system. We all need to be in this together. Yes, our schools should look at the needs of each child and tailor education to fit appropriately. But that shouldn’t be done in parallel school systems. It should be done under the same umbrella. That way, you can’t defund and defraud one without hurting all. It can’t just be about your child. It has to be about all children.
That’s the only choice worth making.
EPA CHANGES ITS STAND ON FRACKING, SAYING IT CAN HARM DRINKING WATER IN ‘SOME CIRCUMSTANCES’ By Chelsea Harvey
A new report from the Environmental Protection Agency suggests that hydraulic fracturing does have the potential to affect drinking water resources in the U.S. The report represents a shift in the agency’s previous conclusions, published in a draft report in 2015, which suggested low impacts from fracking.
The final report, released Tuesday, relies on a review of more than 1,200 previously cited scientific sources, as well as new research conducted for the report and an independent peer review by the EPA’s science advisory board. The report finds a range of possible impacts from fracking, from temporary changes in water quality to the complete contamination of drinking water wells.
Drinking water can be affected at any stage of the fracking process, the report notes, from acquiring the water that will be used to injecting it into production wells and disposing of the wastewater afterward. Impacts are generally seen at sites close to production wells.
“The value of high-quality science has never been more important in helping to guide decisions around our nation’s fragile water resources,” said Thomas Burke, EPA’s science adviser and deputy assistant administrator of the Office of Research and Development, in a statement. “EPA’s assessment provides the scientific foundation for local decision-makers, industry, and communities that are looking to protect public health and drinking water resources and make more informed decisions about hydraulic fracturing activities.”
In 2015, a draft report found that fracking has caused isolated instances in which drinking water was affected, but did not bring about “widespread, systemic impacts” on drinking water. At the time, Burke added that “the number of documented impacts to drinking water resources is relatively low when compared to the number of fractured wells.”
The 2015 draft was met with criticism from environmental groups. And earlier this year, the EPA’s science advisory panel issued a critique challenging the report’s conclusions.
The final report includes a slightly stronger set of conclusions. It claims that fracking activities “can impact drinking water resources under some circumstances,” and notes that certain activities or conditions may make these impacts more severe. These include withdrawing water for fracking when water resources are already limited; injecting fluids directly into groundwater resources, or injecting them into wells that allow them to leak into the groundwater; failing to adequately treat wastewater before disposing of it, and dumping wastewater into unlined pits, where it can leak out.
However, the report also notes that “significant data gaps and uncertainties in the available data prevented us from calculating or estimating the national frequency of impacts on drinking water resources from activities in the hydraulic fracturing water cycle.” And it adds that these uncertainties prevented the report from including “a full characterization of the severity of impacts.”
In other words, the report still can’t make a detailed assessment of how often any given activity results harms water quality, or how serious the effects are on a broad scale. It also refrains from making direct policy recommendations from its scientific conclusions.
The report has already met with criticism from the oil and gas industry.
“It is beyond absurd for the administration to reverse course on its way out the door,” said Erik Milito, director of upstream and industry operations for the American Petroleum Institute, in a statement. “The agency has walked away from nearly a thousand sources of information from published papers, technical reports and peer reviewed scientific reports demonstrating that industry practices, industry trends, and regulatory programs protect water resources at every step of the hydraulic fracturing process.”
He added that the API “look[s] forward to working with the new administration in order to instill fact-based science back into the public policy process.”
While it’s unclear for now how the new report might influence public policy in the future, President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to scale back regulations that would hinder the expansion of oil and natural gas development. And his nominee to head the EPA, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, has fought against increased regulations on the oil and gas industry, notably joining a group of other state attorneys general suing the EPA over its proposal to curtail the methane emissions from the oil and gas sector.
But the new report has been praised by environmental groups that have long argued that fracking presents a threat to the nation’s drinking water.
“The EPA has confirmed what we’ve known all along: fracking can and does contaminate drinking water,” said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, in a statement. “We are pleased that the agency has acted on the recommendations of its Science Advisory Board and chosen be frank about the inherent harms and hazards of fracking.”
A new report from the Environmental Protection Agency suggests that hydraulic fracturing does have the potential to affect drinking water resources in the U.S. The report represents a shift in the agency’s previous conclusions, published in a draft report in 2015, which suggested low impacts from fracking.
The final report, released Tuesday, relies on a review of more than 1,200 previously cited scientific sources, as well as new research conducted for the report and an independent peer review by the EPA’s science advisory board. The report finds a range of possible impacts from fracking, from temporary changes in water quality to the complete contamination of drinking water wells.
Drinking water can be affected at any stage of the fracking process, the report notes, from acquiring the water that will be used to injecting it into production wells and disposing of the wastewater afterward. Impacts are generally seen at sites close to production wells.
“The value of high-quality science has never been more important in helping to guide decisions around our nation’s fragile water resources,” said Thomas Burke, EPA’s science adviser and deputy assistant administrator of the Office of Research and Development, in a statement. “EPA’s assessment provides the scientific foundation for local decision-makers, industry, and communities that are looking to protect public health and drinking water resources and make more informed decisions about hydraulic fracturing activities.”
In 2015, a draft report found that fracking has caused isolated instances in which drinking water was affected, but did not bring about “widespread, systemic impacts” on drinking water. At the time, Burke added that “the number of documented impacts to drinking water resources is relatively low when compared to the number of fractured wells.”
The 2015 draft was met with criticism from environmental groups. And earlier this year, the EPA’s science advisory panel issued a critique challenging the report’s conclusions.
The final report includes a slightly stronger set of conclusions. It claims that fracking activities “can impact drinking water resources under some circumstances,” and notes that certain activities or conditions may make these impacts more severe. These include withdrawing water for fracking when water resources are already limited; injecting fluids directly into groundwater resources, or injecting them into wells that allow them to leak into the groundwater; failing to adequately treat wastewater before disposing of it, and dumping wastewater into unlined pits, where it can leak out.
However, the report also notes that “significant data gaps and uncertainties in the available data prevented us from calculating or estimating the national frequency of impacts on drinking water resources from activities in the hydraulic fracturing water cycle.” And it adds that these uncertainties prevented the report from including “a full characterization of the severity of impacts.”
In other words, the report still can’t make a detailed assessment of how often any given activity results harms water quality, or how serious the effects are on a broad scale. It also refrains from making direct policy recommendations from its scientific conclusions.
The report has already met with criticism from the oil and gas industry.
“It is beyond absurd for the administration to reverse course on its way out the door,” said Erik Milito, director of upstream and industry operations for the American Petroleum Institute, in a statement. “The agency has walked away from nearly a thousand sources of information from published papers, technical reports and peer reviewed scientific reports demonstrating that industry practices, industry trends, and regulatory programs protect water resources at every step of the hydraulic fracturing process.”
He added that the API “look[s] forward to working with the new administration in order to instill fact-based science back into the public policy process.”
While it’s unclear for now how the new report might influence public policy in the future, President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to scale back regulations that would hinder the expansion of oil and natural gas development. And his nominee to head the EPA, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, has fought against increased regulations on the oil and gas industry, notably joining a group of other state attorneys general suing the EPA over its proposal to curtail the methane emissions from the oil and gas sector.
But the new report has been praised by environmental groups that have long argued that fracking presents a threat to the nation’s drinking water.
“The EPA has confirmed what we’ve known all along: fracking can and does contaminate drinking water,” said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, in a statement. “We are pleased that the agency has acted on the recommendations of its Science Advisory Board and chosen be frank about the inherent harms and hazards of fracking.”